ABSTRACT
The Routledge Global Haiku Reader provides a historical overview and comprehensive examination of haiku across the world in numerous languages, poetic movements, and cultural contexts. Offering an extensive critical perspective, this volume provides leading essays by poets and scholars who explore haiku’s various global developments, demonstrating the form’s complex and sometimes contradictory manifestations from the twentieth century to the present.
The sixteen chapters are carefully organized into categories that reflect the salient areas of practice and study: Haiku in Transit, Haiku and Social Consciousness, Haiku and Experimentation, The Future of Global Haiku. An insightful introduction surveys haiku’s influence beyond Japan and frames the collection historically and culturally, questioning commonly held assumptions about haiku and laying the groundwork for new ways of seeing the form. Haiku’s elusiveness, its resistance to definition, is partly what keeps it so relevant today, and this book traces the many ways in which this global verse form has evolved.
The Routledge Global Haiku Reader ushers haiku into the twenty-first century in a critically minded and historically informed manner for a new generation of readers and writers and will appeal to students and researchers in literary studies, Asian studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and creative writing.
Introduction
I. Haiku in Transit
Chapter 1: Beyond the Haiku Moment: Bashō, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths
Chapter 2: Hearn, Bickerton, Hubbell: Translation and Definition
Chapter 3: Reading an Evening Breeze: Buson’s Hokku in Translation
II. Haiku and Social Consciousness
Chapter 4: The Secondary Art of Modern Haiku
Chapter 5: From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bombs: Haiku During the Asia- Pacific War
Chapter 6: New Rising Haiku: The Evolution of Modern Japanese Haiku and the Haiku Persecution Incident
Chapter 7: Translations and Migrations of the Poetic Diary: Roy Kiyooka's Wheels
III. Haiku and Experimentation
Chapter 8: Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism
Chapter 9: Haiku as a Western Genre: Fellow Traveler of Modernism
Chapter 10: Marking Time in Native America: Haiku, Elegy, Survival
Chapter 11: The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A Study of Disjunctive Method and Definitions in Contemporary English-language Haiku
IV. The Future of Global Haiku
Chapter 12: Non-Japanese Haiku Today
Chapter 13: One Hundred Bridges, One Hundred Traditions in Haiku
Chapter 14: In the Shade of the Cherry Blossoms: The Reception of Haiku in Post-Soviet Russia
Chapter 15: From Haiku to the Short Poem: Bridging the Divide
Chapter 16: Future of World Haiku
V. Afterword
Afterword