This book examines the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and traces its impact on modernist poetics. This study shows that the most pervasive East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was in the reading and writing of haiku in the West. Hakutani roots Y.B Yeats symbolism in cross cultural visions; reveals Ezra Pound s imagism to have originated in haiku; and discusses some of the finest haiku written by Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel.

Haiku Poetics in Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Poetry is a multicultural, multilingual investigation into the most recognizable, and probably the single most broadly practiced, poetic form in the world today. This argument moves from theorizing the Buddhist poetics of a global haiku, to close critical readings of poems that examine allusions, themes, and images often taken from traditional Japanese predecessors or engaging other works of a shared haiku lineage.

Jack Kerouac and the Traditions of Classic and Modern Haiku is a reading of the haiku collected in Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus, edited by Regina Weinreich, (2003), one of the two largest collections of English haiku. "Above all," Kerouac wrote in his journal, "a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and makes a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella." Before trying his hand at composing haiku, Kerouac learned, as did Wright, the theory and technique of haiku from R. H. Blyth, the most influential haiku scholar and critic. Most of Kerouac's haiku reflect eastern philosophies―Confucianism, Buddhist ontology, and Zen―, as do classic haiku. A son of devout French Canadian Catholic parents, the young Kerouac was impressed with Christian doctrine, but later was inspired by Buddhism. In his haiku Kerouc conflates Christian doctrine of mercy with that of Buddhism. Classic haiku taught Kerouac that not only must human beings treat their fellow human beings with respect and compassion, but they must also treat nonhuman beings such as animals, insects, plants, and flowers as their equals. Many of Kerouac's haiku can be read as modern haiku for the technique of beat poetics he applied. All in all, Kerouac's haiku express the worldview that human beings are not at the center of the universe.

A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.

"This volume of seasonally-arranged poems is a guide to the appreciation and enjoyment of the great variety of modern Japanese haiku. From turn-of-the-century masters to poets of today, 300 of Japan's best modern haiku are introduced by OZAWA Minrou, a leading contemporary haiku poet and critic. Each of the poems, many of them scarcely known, is sensitively discussed together with the background of the poem and the relations between the poets. This volume includes poems from the end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century by the most important writers of modern haiku. they include the leading lights from grounds surrounding MASAOKA Shiki and his disciple TAKAHAMA Kyoshi as well as poets who experimented with new styles such as seasonless haiku, free form haiku, and multi-line haiku. Alongside these are works by well-known novelists and other cultural figures who were not professional haiku poets but for whom haiku was an important part of their lives, such as KUBOTA Mantarō, AKUTAGAWA Ryūnosuke, and NATSUME Sōseki. The book also features beautiful seasonal photographs at the beginning of each chapter, and an additional 20 haiku by the author." --

This collection of ten critical essays is the first scholarly criticism of haiku by Sonia Sanchez, who has exemplified herself for six decades as a major figure in the Black Arts Movement, a central activist in civil rights and women’s movements, and an internationally-known writer in American literature. Sanchez’s haiku, as an integral and prominent part of contemporary African American poetry, have expressed not only her ideas of nature, beauty, and harmony but also her aesthetic experience of music, culture, and love. Aesthetically, this experience reflects a poetic mind which has helped the poet to shape or reimage her poetic spirit.

Chiyo-Ni (1703-1775) is one of Japan's most unusual and renowned haiku poets, and this volume, the first major translation of her work in English, contains over 100 haiku, reproduced in Japanese script, Romaji, and in English. Chiyo-ni was one of the very few great female poets from an age when haiku was dominated by men. Her verses embody Zen-like simplicity and female sensuality, and reflect her life as a Buddhist nun, painter and poet who lived a life of supreme independence and aesthetic sensibility.

A collection of 108 haiku poems to heighten awareness and deepen our appreciation for the ordinary in everyday life Haiku, the Japanese form of poetry written in just three lines, can be miraculous in its power to articulate the profundity of the simplest moment—and for that reason haiku can be a useful tool for bringing us to a heightened awareness of our lives. Here, the poet Patricia Donegan shares her experience of the haiku form as a way of insight that anyone can use to slow down and uncover the beauty of ordinary moments. She presents 108 haiku poems—on themes such as honesty, transience, and compassion—and offers commentary on each as an impetus to meditation and as a key to unlocking the wonder in what we find right before us.

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound’s well-known haiku-like poem, “In A Station of the Metro,” published in 1913, is most influential on other Imagist and later American haiku poets. Since the end of World War II many Americans and Canadians tried their hands at writing haiku. Among them, Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku in the final eighteen months of his life in exile in France. His Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (1998), is a posthumous collection of 817 haiku Wright himself had selected. Jack Kerouac, a well-known American novelist like Richard Wright, also wrote numerous haiku. Kerouac’s Book of Haikus, ed. Regina Weinreich (Penguin, 2003), collects 667 haiku. In recent decades, many other American writers have written haiku: Lenard Moore, Sonia Sanchez, James A. Emanuel, Burnell Lippy, and Cid Corman. Sonia Sanchez has two collections of haiku: Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) and Morning Haiku (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). James A. Emanuel’s Jazz from the Haiku King (Broadside Press, 1999) is also a unique collection of haiku. Lenard Moore, author of his haiku collections The Open Eye (1985), has been writing and publishing haiku for over 20 years and became the first African American to be elected as President of the Haiku Society of America. Burnell Lippy’s haiku appears in the major American haiku journals, Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (2013).Cid Corman is well-known not only as a haiku poet but a translator of Japanese ancient and modern haiku poets: Santoka, Walking into the Wind (Cadmus Editions, 1994).

Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation • The electrifying collected works of “one of the most innovative and prominent avant-garde poets in early twentieth-century Japan” (The New Yorker). Translated by and with an introduction by Sawako Nakayasu An important and daringly experimental voice in Tokyo’s avant-garde poetry scene, Chika Sagawa broke with the gender-bound traditions of Japanese poetry. Growing up in isolated rural Japan, Sagawa moved to Tokyo at seventeen, and begin publishing her work at eighteen.She was immediately recognized as a leading light of the male-dominated Japanese literary scene; her work combines striking, unique imagery with Western influences. The results are short, sharp, surreal poems about human fragility and the beauty of nature from Japan’s first female Modernist poet. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance. AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE