April is National Poetry Month. We take the opportunity to celebrate one of the most popular poetic forms, the haiku.
The haiku originated in Japan more than 300 years ago, and has been adapted into English and other languages since the early 20th century. In English, a haiku is traditionally made up of three lines, of five, seven, and five syllables. The poem features a juxtaposition of two distinct images or thoughts, and in its purest form, should include a seasonal reference to nature. Imagery is usually dominant over direct statement of ideas; the reader is expected to make their own connections between the poem's images
The haiku derives from an even older form of Japanese poetry called renga. A renga is a collaboratively written poem, with participating poets taking turns adding a new stanza to the poem. Each stanza of a renga is in what we now think of as haiku form, and the opening stanza of the poem is called the hokku. Steven D. Carter's Haiku Before Haiku (e-book) looks at the pre-haiku history of the renga.
In the late 17th century, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) began to publish his hokku independently of the renga to which they were attached, beginning the transition from the hokku as part of a longer work to the haiku as a work complete in itself. Bashō is regarded as the first great master of haiku, and his work continues to be read today.
Other early masters of the form include Yosa Buson (1716-1783), who was a master of the art from known as haiga, in which hokku stanzas are combined with an accompanying painting; and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), a devoted Buddhist who wrote more than 20,000 haiku.
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) was the first poet to formally separate his haiku poems from the context of a larger renga, and the first to call them haiku, an abbreviated form of the Japanese phrase for "stanza of a renga." Most of the haiku from before Shiki's era were still formally hokku, first stanzas of longer rengas, but were rarely referred to as such after the word "haiku" was adopted.
Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki are referred to as "the Great Four" masters of haiku, and their work is often collected together in anthologies. Robert Aitken's The River of Heaven (e-book) and Sam Hamill's The Sound of Water (e-book) offer good samplings of work by the Great Four.
The first European known to have written haiku was Hendrik Doeff, an early 19th-century Dutch official at a Nagasaki trading post. The form began to be widely known in Europe and American in the early 20th century. Among the important early collections of haiku translated into English are Kenneth Yasuda's Japanese Haiku (e-book | print) and Harold Henderson's Introduction to Haiku (print).
Joan Girous's The Haiku Form (e-book) looks at examples in Japanese and English, exploring the challenges and subtleties of the form; in How to Haiku (e-book | print), Bruce Ross offers lessons and advice for the poet wishing to take on the form.
Many American poets have written haiku. Two names you might not associate with the form are Richard Wright, whose haiku are collected in Haiku: This Other World (print), and Jack Kerouac, whose work can be found in Book of Haikus (print); Kerouac reads some of his own haiku on Blues and Haikus (e-audio).
The brevity of the haiku, and the tightly restricted nature of the form at its most traditional, makes it a popular way to introduce children to the idea of poetic form. Deanna Caswell's Guess Who, Haiku (e-book, print) asks young children to identify the animals being described in its haiku; Bob Raczka's Guyku (e-book, print) is "a year of haiku for boys," focused on the fun of being outdoors.
Also This Week
April 15, 1938
Claudia Cardinale was born. Cardinale was one of the world's most popular actresses in the 1960s and 1970s. She spent only a short part of her career in Hollywood – her films from that period include The Pink Panther and Once Upon a Time in the West -- and is better known for her work in French and Italian cinema. Cardinale is one of the stars of Federico Fellini's 1963 classic 8½ (streaming | DVD).
April 10, 1971
Nine members of the United States table tennis team began a week-long visit to China as guests of the Chinese team, whom they had met at the world table tennis championships in Japan the previous week. This visit was the beginning of a thaw in the relationship between the two countries, which had had no formal diplomatic relations for 20 years, and helped lay groundwork for President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. In Ping-Pong Diplomacy (e-book | print), Nicholas Griffin tells the story of the team's week in China.
April 12 is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day
The combination of melted cheese on hot bread has existed for as long as cheese and bread have been known. The grilled cheese sandwich in its modern form became popular during the Great Depression. Heidi Gibson and Nate Pollak offer 39 variations on the sandwich in Grilled Cheese Kitchen (e-book | print).
April 16 is World Voice Day
On this day, attention is drawn to the importance of the voice in communication, the challenges of repairing the damaged voice, and the ways in which the voice can be trained for music or oratory. The voice plays an important role in a wide range of professions, including music, speech pathology, linguistics, and medicine. Elena Passarello's Let Me Clear My Throat (e-book | print) is a collection of essays on the sounds made by the voices of politicians, singers, Marlon Brando impersonators, telephone operators, stuntmen, and more.