Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA masterful exposition of the world-wide blending of Eastern poetics and Western praxis. -- Lee Gurga, editor of Modern Haiku Press
This is a highly ambitious, groundbreaking study. Taking the poetics of haiku as a starting point, Jeffrey Johnson covers a vast terrain of haiku’s influences, adaptations, and transfigurations in Western literary modernisms. In the process haiku itself dazzlingly resurfaces as a modernist practice of visual analogy and synaesthetic correspondences. Its traces are everywhere: Pound and Lowell to the Beats, Eluard and Lorca, Tablada in Mexico and Xisto and de Campos in Brazil. Of particular interest is Johnson’s attention toward hispano- and lusophone avandgarde poets. Haiku as an art of brevity and abrupt juxtaposition of concrete images has thus become an indispensable, dynamic component of world poetics of the twentieth century and beyond. -- Keijiro Suga, Meji University
With his painstaking research alongside lyrical insights, Johnson reveals both a personal and academic relationship with haiku and its historical significance. * The Japan Times *
Table of ContentsPart I. Haiku and Avant-Garde Poetics Introduction: From Orthodox Japanese Haiku to Synaesthetic Poetry Chapter 1: Orthodox Haiku, Early Translation, Western Adaptation and Innovation Part II. Haiku in the Teens and Twenties Avant-Garde Chapter 2. Haiku in Imagism: From Lowell's Japonisme to Pound Juxtaposing Concrete Particulars Chapter 3. Haiku in France: From Couchoud to Eluard's Surrealism Chapter 4. Spanish Haikai: From Machado's Lyricism to de Torre's Visual Experiments Part III. Haiku and Bridging the Historical Avant-Garde to the Fifties and Beyond Chapter 5. Haiku and the Latin American Vanguard: From Tablada to Concretismo Chapter 6. Haiku and Beat Poetry: From the Faraway Orient to the Journey East Conclusion
