Claire Hamner Matturro Interviews Jianqing Zheng

Claire Hamner Matturro: First off, congratulations Jianqing Zheng on your two new masterful poetry publications–Visual Chords, published by Broken Tribe Press in July 2025 and Dreaminations, from Madville Publishing in January 2026. Visual Chords is a collection of ekphrastic poems after photographs by Dorothea Lange, Bill Ferris, Leo Touchet and other modern and contemporary photographers with half the collection about the South. Dreaminations is a collection of prose poems in the Japanese haibun and tanka prose style that focus on life in the Mississippi Delta. I found myself deeply moved by these poems and the images you address, especially ones related to Lange’s famous photographs from the Great Depression. While I am familiar with ekphrastic poetry—poems that describe or react to visual art—I confess that haibun poetry is a new style or form to me. I wonder if you could discuss what haibun poetry is and a bit of its history.

Jianquing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng: Claire, I am deeply moved by your kind words about my two recently published poetry collections. The photographs about the Mississippi Delta by Dorothea Lange and Bill Ferris are especially important for my creative expression since I have lived in the Delta for three decades. Louisiana-based Leo Touchet’s photographs of jazz funerals in New Orleans and sand dunes always pluck a visual chord of my imagination. They are the wellspring for my ekphrastic poetry. Another fascination comes from Eudora Welty whose photographs have challenged me to write a collection of poetry. Writing ekphrastic poetry is a process of learning about history, culture, music, and American landscapes. In fact, I also coauthored with Bill and Leo respectively on two chapbooks with my poems accompanying their photographs. That was great experience.

As for haibun, Matsuo Basho seems to have gotten the credit as the first poet who wrote and popularized haibun, exemplified by his well-known travelogue The Narrow Road to the Interior crisscrossed with prose and haiku, but there should be other Japanese poets before him who had experimented this kind of writing. Haibun has flourished in English in the USA since the 1990s, though some poets tried their hands long before that time. Currently, there are several high-quality haibun magazines that publish excellent haibun and tanka prose in the world, like CHO Online, Cantos, Cattails, Drifting Sands, and Kokako. Two other excellent magazines, Failed Haiku and Haibun Today, have already ceased publishing. Editors of these magazines have sharp minds and keen eyes on haibun writing and editing, and many times they offer constructive feedback.

Some mainstream magazines also show interest in publishing haibun and tanka prose, like Poetry East, Arkansas Review, New World Writing, San Pedro River Review, and 2River. This is a plus for poets. But some magazines won’t consider poetry written in the Japanese poetic style.

Personally, I feel haibun/tanka prose, as a special type of prose poetry, is a bit more challenging than prose poetry we have been familiar with. If prose poetry is a straight road, haibun/tanka prose is a crossroads where the two parts (prose and haiku/tanka) meet and cross. This meeting point is the key that triggers a moment for mental comparison or juxtaposition and for getting the gist or the C-point of the poem, as shown in this formula: A (prose) + B (haiku/tanka) = C, the ultimate level to achieve. In other words, C can be the resonance or new meaning that comes from the juxtaposition of A and B.

Some may hold that the prose part of the haibun or tanka prose must focus on brevity or be as terse as haiku. There’s nothing wrong with that, but a creative writer should not be trapped in that mindset. To be creative, one should try different ways to “create” haibun or tanka prose. Years ago, at the critical moment I was tired of writing haibun/tanka prose that used one paragraph concluded with one haiku or tanka, I began to compose longer pieces, usually in several paragraphs with several haiku or tanka inserted them. I felt this desire for a change was a big jump in my effort to find different ways for creative expression. Since Basho wrote his long travel accounts in the haibun style, I feel I can use haibun for memoir writing someday.

Also, I have tried different forms of haibun writing. Sometimes, my haibun consists of a fib (Fibonacci) and a haiku; sometimes a sonnet or a free verse concluded with a haiku. To follow Ezra Pound’s steps of “making it new,” it’s fun to find different ways to break through in haibun writing. That’s also a way to maintain or refresh the interest in this form or to cook food with different flavors.

With this in consideration, my idea is that haibun/tanka prose is a kind of linked form. Prose and haiku or tanka are linked to complement each other through juxtaposition for a new sensibility, but they also stand independently with complete meanings of their own. They can be minimal with one short sentence and a haiku, as shown in “Waiting for Spring”, which appeared in A Way of Looking, my first collection of haibun/tanka prose which won the Gerald Cable Book Award in 2019:

Waiting for Spring

When life stops clicking, body—a mass of elements—can be turned to ashes, used as fertilizer for flowerbeds.

autumn dusk

a worn-out jacket

on the peg

Here’s a tanka prose from the same book:

         The Veteran

 

Lies in peace when death befalls. Your life stops fighting and your body returns to earth to be united with mom, but your soul—a nonphysical being—goes to the other world.

 

after funeral

a long walk

into sunset—

voice of dad’s

WWII story

However, haibun and tanka prose may also be function like short-shorts or nonfictional prose, as shown in Dreaminations.

Claire Matturro

CHM: Thank you for that education and examples of haibun prose poetry. That helps me understand and further appreciate Dreaminations. Might you also please discuss what inspired you or enticed you to write a collection of more than 60 poems in this style in Dreaminations?

JZ: My inspiration is to try something new. My first haibun was published in 2003 in American Haibun and Haiga edited by Jim Kacian. But I didn’t keep going the haibun way because of a job change. Working eight hours per day would drain my energy with no capacity to dream. However, I managed to return to it in 2011, and my enthusiasm erupted with the intention to publish more haibun for a collection.

Later, my fervor led me to tanka prose in 2016. So far, I have published around two hundred haibun and tanka prose poems. It’s like dating a girlfriend you are so fond of. That inspiration guarantees a regular frequency in writing them, revising them, and publishing them.

CHM: The title Dreaminations is unique, and I wonder if you could explain the origin or meaning of the title.

JZ: Thank you, Claire, for this interesting question. This coined word means imagination in dream or magic imagination. When I submitted the manuscript to the press, my title was Not in Vain. You know, everything will get a certain result, so not everything will be in vain. I had an excellent editor who worked diligently with me on my manuscript. Her name is Linda Parsons, a poet laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She suggested changing the title to Dreaminations since I used the word a couple of times in the manuscript. I liked her suggestion, and the book came out as Dreaminations. I hope each poem offers a moment for dreamination.

CHM: Many of the poems appear to be about the poet’s—or your—journey in life, including thirty-some years in China and the next thirty-some in Mississippi as mentioned in your poem “Where Are You From?” Though there’s always a risk in assuming poetry is autobiographical, still I wonder if you are comfortable addressing whether these poems in Dreaminations are—in whole or at least mostly—autobiographical.

JZ: We write out of our experiences, so my poems reflect that experience that engages my senses, my imagination, or my dreamination. Some may avoid using the first-person speaker, but that use may bring up the immediacy. Yes, my life is divided into two halves, like two hemispheres. As a Mississippi transplant, a question that haunts me is no longer where you are from but whether you have lived a rich life intellectually or creatively. That’s why I keep writing and publishing.

About Dreaminations, the first part mainly focuses on personal life, meanings found in simple yard views, or ideas about being a Mississippi transplant, or purely out of imagination, like “A Retired Man’s World” or about my “parents” who brought me to the USA and gave me a new life, as related in my memories of them in “Missing” and “Memory of Mom’s Cat.”

The second part presents my views of the Mississippi Delta and other places in Mississippi where I have lived since 1991. I used to drive around in the Delta on numerous weekends, taking pictures for photoessays on black hospitals and clinics, the Lower Mississippi River, the rural churches, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and a few others. Probably around 2015, I found some fun making haiga (haiku + picture) to enrich my creative life. I don’t like the term haiga because ga in Japanese means painting. I prefer the term photoku. An ideal photo is like bait to lure me to bite for a haiku that fits it for a photoku. Also, my reason for making the Delta photoku is simple: There are so many great photographers who have produced wonderful photo volumes about the Delta. So, to retain an individual and distinct view, I think photoku is the ideal way for me to make road folk art. It’s like writing an ekphrastic haiku. Like haibun writing, haiku added to the photo should not repeat what the image already shows. Instead, they should work together to complement each other through a juxtaposition for an extended meaning.

Sorry for going off topic. Let me come back to the third part. This part is a group of poems related to jobs, teaching, witness, something funny or ironic that catches the poetic eye or triggers pure imagination. You know, a poet always uses senses to find raw materials for poetry writing. Yes, a few poems in this part, like “Mapping the Self” and “Dream Song to the Comps,” are autobiographical, but creative as well.

As for the fourth part, it contains anecdotes about travel. I like to travel, mostly go for cross-country American road trips. So, readers will be invited to sightsee poetically in Hawaii, Smoky Mountains, and National Parks. Sometimes, a trip may challenge me to write two poems to show a paradox of seeing at the right or wrong time, like “In the Right Place at the Right Time” and “In the Right Place at the Wrong Time,” which are about a trip to Georgia’s Cloudland Canyon State Park.

CHM: Thank you for opening my eyes to these new, wonderful styles and forms of poetry and for sharing your time with Southern Literary Review. All the best to you and your poetry.

JZ: It was truly my pleasure. Thank you so very much for the opportunity and for sharing my work with the readers of Southern Literary Review. All the best to you and the journal!