American Haiku

New Readings

Edited by Toru Kiuchi - Contributions by Randy Brooks; Yoshinobu Hakutani; Jim Kacian; Heejung Kim; Toshio Kimura; Toru Kiuchi; Ce Rosenow; Bruce Ross; Virginia Whatley Smith and John Zheng

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).

Lexington Books

Pages: 356 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-2717-0 • Hardback • November 2017 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-4985-2718-7 • eBook • November 2017 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry, Literary Criticism / American / Regional, Literary Criticism / Asian / Japanese

American Haiku

New Readings

Hardback

eBook

Summary

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).

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 356 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-2717-0 • Hardback • November 2017 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-4985-2718-7 • eBook • November 2017 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry, Literary Criticism / American / Regional, Literary Criticism / Asian / Japanese

Author

Toru Kiuchi is professor of English at Nihon University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Summaries of Essays

Part I: History
Chapter One: Yone Noguchi’s Invention of English-language Haiku
Toru Kiuchi
Chapter Two: Ezra Pound, Imagism, and Haiku
Yoshinobu Hakutani
Chapter Three: Mutual Influence between the American and the Japanese Haiku: The History of American Haiku
Toshio Kimura
Chapter Four: 100 Years of Haiku in the United States: An Overview
Jim Kacian
Chapter Five: Haiku in Higher Education: A Bibliography of Articles & Theses on Haiku
Concluding with a Model of Teaching Haiku as Performance Learning
Randy Brooks

Part II: Criticism
Chapter Six: Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African “Primal Outlook upon Life”
Yoshinobu Hakutani
Chapter Seven: Zen Buddhism in Richard Wright’s Haiku
Toru Kiuchi
Chapter Eight: African American Haiku and Aesthetic Attitude
John Zheng
Chapter Nine: Jack Kerouac’s Haiku and The Dharma Bums
Yoshinobu Hakutani
Chapter Ten: Sonia Sanchez’s Morning Haiku and the Blues
Heejung Kim
Chapter Eleven: Those “Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums”: Black Atlantic Captives Revisited in Cane and Parodied in Jazz from the Haiku King
Virginia W. Smith
Chapter Twelve: Creating African American Haiku Form: Lenard D. Moore’s Poetic Artistry
Toru Kiuchi
Chapter Thirteen: Cid Corman and Haiku: The Poetics of “Livingdying”
Ce Rosenow
Chapter Fourteen: Burnell Lippy’s Haiku in Relation to Zen
Bruce Ross

Contributors
Index

Reviews

A deep, exciting plunge into the frog pond of English language haiku. Professor Kiuchi gathers into one, must-read volume a comprehensive history of haiku in English, particularly of American haiku, along with penetrating analyses by top scholars in the field. The origin story of American haiku has never before been told in such dazzling detail.
— David G. Lanoue, Xavier University