Halloween Haunts: Learning About Dark Poetry, and a Burning Haibun for Halloween
Halloween Haunts: Learning About Dark Poetry, and a Burning Haibun for Halloween
By Stacie Herrington
Hello, Halloween people!
First off, I would like to thank HWA member and amazing poet Stephanie M. Wytovich along with all the contributors to Writing Poetry in the Dark, which I am reading now and highly recommend. Thanks to the ideas, creativity, and experimentation with form encouraged in this book, I have been writing every day. As a result, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole about form, and learned about a form called the burning haibun.
A Haibun, if you have not heard of it (and I learned about it literally yesterday at the time of this writing), is a combination of a prose poem and a haiku. The burning haibun was invented by torrin a. greathouse, and it combines the form of haibun with the technique of erasure. You start with the prose segment of the haibun, and you “burn it down” twice (with erasure) to reveal a shorter text, and, finally, a haiku. Here is a great Poetry Foundation article all about it.
Because I associate Halloween with all kinds of fire (bonfires, hearth fires, jack o’lantern flames, spooky candelabra, hellfire), I thought a burning haibun for Halloween would be apropos. You can read what I came up with below.
If you are interested in learning more about horror or other speculative poetry, I highly recommend Writing Poetry in the Dark, as well as the upcoming HWA Poetry Showcase XI (to which I am thrilled to have been accepted as a contributor this year) edited by Maxwell I. Gold. As the XI implies, there are also X other volumes of this anthology from years past, so I encourage you to check those out, as well.
Happy Halloween month!
Burning Halloween Haibun
Stacie Herrington
Everyone knows Halloween was born of flame. Everyone knows Halloween was begotten by harvest, by the pagan feast of Samhain, when bonfires would ward off evil spirits. Everyone knows Halloween was baptized Christian as All Hallows’ Eve, a vigil for saints long forgotten. The dead are remembered with hollowed pumpkins (turnips if you’re Irish) carried by children guised as souls lost in the fog. Everyone knows Halloween was invented by Harper’s Magazine. Everyone knows Halloween is Satan’s birthday. Bobbing for apples is a traditional Halloween game. Bobbing for apples is divination, which is communing with the Devil. Neither works if you eat the apples first. Church bells ring. Final girls scream. Streets sing with lost souls. The lost souls might be your children. The lost souls might eat your children, for all you know. Light a candle for the children. Light a candle for the saints. Light a candle because you like candles. Light a fire for your fear, or for the pagans, or because you’re cold. May the flames burn brightly. May you remember the dead. May you scare the dead away. The dead are terrifying. Death is terrifying. Children are terrifying. We should eat more apples.
Halloween was born of Samhain. Bonfires ward off spirits. The dead are lost. Everyone is communing with the Devil. The apples might be lost souls for all you know. Light a fire. May you scare away the terrifying children. Eat more apples.
Halloween was born
of apples terrifying
children. Eat apples.
Bio
Stacie Herrington is an American poet and novelist. As a child, she frequently got in trouble for sneaking horror books into the house; once, she was grounded for trying to buy a how-to book on witchcraft. She survived into adulthood despite those difficulties, and now enjoys writing feminist/intersectional horror fiction (debut novel in progress), as well as dark lyric and prose poetry. She spends most of her time brooding, programming computers, and getting the absolute worst songs stuck in her head for weeks on end. You can find Stacie at stacieherrington.com and on Instagram at @herringtonstacie should you like to say hello, see some occasional updates from a fledgling writing career, or share pictures of your cats, dogs, or bookshelves.
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