Introduction

This volume brings together divergent studies on haiku, which range from a chapter about haiku poets in Japan who were imprisoned for their writing during the rise of militarism to an examination of politically engaged haiku by Native American poets and a chapter on the aesthetic kinship between haiku and short poems. Haiku’s elusiveness, its resistance to definition, is partly what keeps it so relevant today, and this book traces the many ways in which global haiku has evolved, sometimes in surprising ways. Haiku, or a version of it, is now written by poets worldwide, along with a proliferation of magazines and anthologies dedicated to the form. We aspire for this collection to fill a gap in Asian studies, cultural studies, creative writing studies, and literary studies by offering extensive, critical perspectives on the haiku form, a form often overlooked within interdisciplinary studies but one with more than its share of misunderstanding. With contributions by poets and scholars who span diverse regional traditions, the collection offers historically and culturally informed views that complicate commonly held assumptions. In short, this book lays the groundwork for new ways of seeing haiku.