A celebration of ON HAIKU with Hiroaki Sato & Jeffrey Yang
Tuesday, November 6th, 7:00pm
On Haiku (New Directions, 2018)
Nonfiction by Hiroaki Sato
Who doesn’t love haiku? It is not only America’s most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, and loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as for its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere—Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku? Where does the form come from?