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.

"This book traces the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and its history as one of the most popular East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchanges in modern and postmodern times"--

American Haiku, Eastern Philosophies, and Modernist Poetics traces the genesis and development of haiku in Japan as it transformed over the years and eventually made its way to the Western world. Yoshinobu Hakutani analyzes the prominent Eastern philosophies expressed through haiku, such as Confucianism and Zen, and the aesthetic principles of yugen, sabi, and wabi. Hakutani discusses several reinventions of haiku, from Matsuo Basho’s transformation of the classic haiku, to Masaoka Shiki’s modernist perspectives expressing subjective thoughts and feelings, and eventually to Yone Noguchi’s introduction of haiku to the Western world through W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Hakutani argues that the adoption and transformation of haiku is one of the most popular East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchanges to have taken place in modern and postmodern times.

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).

This style has been getting popular in various colleges throughout theUnited States.Modern Haiku consists of less than the 5-7-5 traditionalJapanese style poetry and has been and is being published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines throughout the world.

A Stanford University Press classic.