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