Haiku in English


A haiku in English is an English language poem written in the Japanese poetry style known as haiku. The degree to which haiku in English resemble classic Japanese haiku varies, but many of these poems draw on short, concise wording and a reference to nature.
The first haiku written in English date from the late 19th century, influenced by English translations of traditional Japanese haiku. Many well-known English-language poets have written what they called "haiku", although definitions of the genre have remained disputable. Haiku has also proven popular in English-language schools as a way to encourage the appreciation and writing of poetry.

Typical characteristics

"Haiku" in English is a term sometimes loosely applied to any short, impressionistic poem, but there are certain characteristics that are commonly associated with the genre:
Some additional traits are especially associated with English-language haiku :
In Britain, the editors of The Academy announced the first known English-language haikai contest on April 8, 1899, shortly after William George Aston's pioneering History of Japanese Literature appeared. The contest, number 27 of the magazine's ongoing series, drew dozens of entries, and the prize was awarded to:
Australian editor Alfred Stephens was inspired by The Academy's contest to conduct a similar contest in the pages of The Bulletin. The prize for this haiku contest went to Robert Crawford.

American writers

In the United States, Yone Noguchi published "A Proposal to American Poets," in The Reader Magazine in February 1904, giving a brief outline of his own English hokku efforts and ending with the exhortation, "Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets! You say far too much, I should say."
Ezra Pound's influential haiku-influenced poem, "In a Station of the Metro", published in 1913, has been widely regarded as a watershed moment in the establishment of English-language haiku as a literary form.
During the Imagist period, a number of mainstream poets, including Pound, wrote what they called hokku, usually in a five-six-four syllable pattern. American poet Amy Lowell published several hokku in her book "What's O'Clock". Individualistic haiku-like verses by the innovative Buddhist poet and artist Paul Reps appeared in print as early as 1939. Inspired by R. H. Blyth's translations, other Westerners, including those of the Beat period, such as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright and James W. Hackett, wrote original haiku in English.
African-American novelist Richard Wright, in his final years, composed some 4,000 haiku, 817 of which are collected in the volume Haiku: This Other World. Wright conformed to a 5-7-5 syllabic structure for most of these pieces.
In 1966 Helen Stiles Chenoweth compiled Borrowed Water, an early anthology of American haiku featuring the work by the Los Altos Roundtable. The experimental work of Beat and minority haiku poets expanded the popularity of haiku in English. Despite claims that haiku has not had much impact on the literary scene, a number of mainstream poets, such as W. H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Etheridge Knight, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Ruth Stone, Sonia Sanchez, Billy Collins, and others have tried their hand at haiku.
In 1963 the journal American Haiku was founded in Platteville, Wisconsin, edited by the European-Americans James Bull and Donald Eulert. Among contributors to the first issue were poets James W. Hackett, O Mabson Southard, and Nick Virgilio. In the second issue of American Haiku Virgilio published his "lily" and "bass" haiku, which became models of brevity, breaking down the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic form, and pointing toward the leaner conception of haiku that would take hold in subsequent decades.
American Haiku ended publication in 1968 and was succeeded by Modern Haiku in 1969, which remains an important English-language haiku journal. Other early journals included Haiku Highlights, Eric Amann's Haiku, and Leroy Kanterman's Haiku West.
The first English-language haiku society in America, founded in 1956, was the Writers' Roundtable of Los Altos, California, under the direction of Helen Stiles Chenoweth. The Haiku Society of America was founded in 1968 and began publishing its journal Frogpond in 1978. Important resources for poets and scholars attempting to understand English-language haiku aesthetics and history include William J. Higginson's Haiku Handbook and Lee Gurga's Haiku: A Poet's Guide.
Significant contributors to American haiku include Hackett, Virgilio, Charles B. Dickson, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, Raymond Roseliep, Robert Spiess, John Wills, Anita Virgil, and Peggy Willis Lyles.
Other major figures still active in the American haiku community include Lee Gurga, Christopher Herold, Gary Hotham, Jim Kacian, Michael McClintock, Marlene Mountain, Marian Olson, Alan Pizzarelli, Alexis Rotella, John Stevenson, George Swede, vincent tripi, Michael Dylan Welch, and Ruth Yarrow. Examples:
Pioneering haiku poet Cor van den Heuvel has edited the standard Haiku Anthology. Since its most recent edition, another generation of American haiku poets has come to prominence. Among the most widely published and honored of these poets are John Barlow, Cherie Hunter Day, Carolyn Hall, paul m., John Martone, Chad Lee Robinson, Billie Wilson, and Peter Yovu. Newer poets exemplify divergent tendencies, from self-effacing nature-oriented haiku to Zen themes perpetuating the concepts of Blyth and Hackett, poignant haiku-senryū hybrids in the manner of Rotella and Swede, the use of subjective, surreal, and mythic elements, emergent social and political consciousness, and genre-bending structural and linguistic experimentation as well as "found haiku".
The first Haiku North America conference was held at Las Positas College in Livermore, California in 1991, and has been held every other year since then, directed by Garry Gay, Deborah P Kolodji, Paul Miller, and Michael Dylan Welch. Conferences have been Livermore, California, Toronto, Portland, Oregon, Evanston, Illinois, Boston, New York City, Port Townsend, Washington, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Ottawa, Seattle, Long Beach, California, Schenectady, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, Winston-Salem again, and Victoria, British Columbia.
The American Haiku Archives, the largest public archive of haiku-related material outside Japan, was founded in 1996. It is housed at the California State Library in Sacramento, California, and includes the official archives of the Haiku Society of America, along with significant donations from the libraries of Lorraine Ellis Harr, Jerry Kilbride, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, Francine Porad, Jane Reichhold, and many others.
In 2010, Michael Dylan Welch founded National Haiku Writing Month, also known as NaHaiWriMo. It has been held in February of each year, starting in 2011, with the objective to write at least one haiku per day all month long—"the shortest month of the year for the shortest genre of poetry," according to Welch.

Variant forms

Although the majority of haiku published in English are three lines long, variants also occur.

One line

The most common variation from the three-line standard is one line, sometimes called a monoku. It emerged from being more than an occasional exception during the late 1970s. The one-line form, based on an analogy with the one-line vertical column in which Japanese haiku are often printed, was lent legitimacy principally by three people:
The single-line haiku usually contains fewer than seventeen syllables. A caesura may be appropriate, dictated by sense or speech rhythm, and usually little or no punctuation. This form was used by John Wills and, more recently, has been practiced by poets such as M. Kettner, Janice Bostok, Jim Kacian, Chris Gordon, Scott Metz, Stuart Quine, John Barlow, and many others.
As the last two examples in particular illustrate, the one-line form can create a variety of ambiguities involving the perceived placement of cuts and the grammatical status of individual words, thereby allowing for multiple readings of the same haiku. A variation of the format breaks the line at the caesura or pause.

One word

At its most minimal, a single word may occasionally be claimed to be a haiku:
The first was printed alone on an otherwise blank page and arguably only "works" in that context. The second example is an allusion to the first and also depends on its placement at the center of a haiku collection.

Four or more lines

Haiku of four lines or longer have been written, some of them "vertical haiku" with only a word or two per line. These poems mimic the vertical printed form of Japanese haiku.
The translator Nobuyuki Yuasa considered four lines more appropriate in his translations, being closest to the natural conversational rhythm of the colloquial language of haiku, also that three lines did not carry the weight of hokku and found it impossible to use 'three lines' consistently for his translations.
The contemporary poet John Martone has written a vast number of vertical haiku.

Circle

Haiku have also appeared in circular form whereby the poem has no fixed start or end point.

Fixed form

In the "zip" form developed by John Carley, a haiku of 15 syllables is presented over two lines, each of which contains one internal caesura represented by a double space.
A fixed-form 5-3-5 syllable haiku is sometimes known as a lune.

Publications in North America

The leading English-language haiku journals published in the U.S. include Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Mayfly, Acorn, Bottle Rockets, The Heron's Nest, and Tinywords. Some significant defunct publications include Brussels Sprout, Woodnotes, Hal Roth's Wind Chimes, Wisteria, and Moonset. The largest publisher of haiku books in North America is Jim Kacian's Red Moon Press. Other notable American publishers of haiku books include Press Here, Bottle Rockets Press, Brooks Books, and Turtle Light Press.

Publications in other English-speaking countries

In the United Kingdom, leading publications include Presence, which was edited for many years by Martin Lucas and is now edited by Ian Storr, and Blithe Spirit, published by the British Haiku Society and named in honor of Reginald Horace Blyth. In Ireland, twenty issues of Haiku Spirit edited by Jim Norton were published between 1995 and 2000. Shamrock, the online journal of the Irish Haiku Society edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, has been publishing international haiku in English since 2007. In Australia, twenty issues of Yellow Moon, a literary magazine for writers of haiku and other verse, were published between 1997 and 2006. Nowadays Paper Wasp is published in Australia, Kokako in New Zealand and Chrysanthemum in Germany and Austria. Two other online English-language haiku journals founded outside North America, A Hundred Gourds and Notes from the Gean, are now defunct. John Barlow's Snapshot Press is a notable UK-based publisher of haiku books. The World Haiku Club publishes The World Haiku Review.

Websites

International websites have developed for the publication of haiku in English including: The Living Haiku Anthology; The Living Senryu Anthology, Under the Basho, Failed Haiku, Wales Haiku Journal,. In addition, personal websites such as Michael Dylan Welch's Graceguts provide extensive haiku resources with essays, reviews, and poems.

Notable English-language haiku poets

Anthologies

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