Description: Haiku Poetics in Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Poetry is a multicultural, multilingual investigation into the most recognizable, and probably the single most broadly practiced, poetic form in the world today. This argument moves from theorizing the Buddhist poetics of a global...
Brief description: Douglas Slaymaker is associate professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky.
Review Quotes:
"A 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 "Jeffrey Johnson's Haiku Poetics in Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Poetry provides a valuable resource to poetry scholars. For the first time, a full-length study demonstrates the intertextual relationship between haiku and twentieth-century avant-garde poetry." --Juxta