NEWSWORTHY
'On Haiku': A lifetime's consideration of the genre, distilled
In his latest book, "On Haiku," Japanese translator and poet Hiroaki Sato ruminates on the history of the genre and its defining features as well as its remarkable acculturation within American literary life.
'The Penguin Book of Haiku': Morsels of poetry from the mountaintop to the gutter
According to author and translator Adam L. Kern, there's a pervasive myth that haiku is only nature poetry, that it is always serious and connected to Zen, that there are hardly any women haiku poets. But haiku covers far greater ground.
Lifetime devoted to haiku nets Scottish poet prestigious honor
Haiku poet and novelist Alan Spence was honored with an Order of the Rising Sun for "contributions to developing haiku poetry in the United Kingdom and promoting mutual understanding between Japan and the United Kingdom."
Japanese researchers work to create AI capable of generating haiku from images
The development of artificial intelligence software that can write haiku based just on images is underway, with researchers hoping the project will improve how technology understands human emotion. A team of researchers and software developers led by Hidenori Kawamura, a 44-year-old professor at Hokkaido University's ...
British schoolgirl 13th non-Japanese to bag Ito En haiku contest, trip to Japan
A British schoolgirl has become the 13th foreign winner of a Japanese tea company's poetry competition with her ode to a newly cut lawn in autumn. Gracie Starkey, a 14-year old student at Wycliffe College, Gloucestershire, submitted the poem in the English-language category with the ...
'Fractures': Putting together the pieces of a story told in verse
"Fractures" is a slip of a book featuring 27 haiku-inspired poems from author and Japan Times contributor Iain Maloney. It is of course possible to blitz through quickly, but consider this: While each poem can stand independently, taken together, they cover both an emotional and ...
'Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet': Unpacking ancient poetry wars
Teika lived from 1162 to 1241, and was a highly influential Japanese poet. Paul S. Atkins' new study of his work aims to reintroduce him to a non-native audience and to analyze why his verse had such a large impact on the trajectory of ...
Black Illumination: Zen and the poetry of death
On a winter morning in 1360, Zen master Kozan Ichikyo gathered together his pupils. Kozan, 77, told them that, upon his death, they should bury his body, perform no ceremony and hold no services in his memory. Sitting in the traditional Zen posture, he ...
Conjuring haiku on the trail from Hiroshima to Matsuyama
Riding the shinkansen from Tokyo to Hiroshima, I am glued to my iPhone when Stephen Gill tells me to look outside the window. The countryside — rolling hills and rice paddies — is shrouded in mist. Perhaps inspired by the scene, he begins reciting ...
Takuboku Ishikawa: engaged observer
The society of Takuboku Ishikawa's era was in dramatic political flux, and its complex issues became his personal obsessions. After his death, Takuboku's preoccupations came to be seen as a symbol of the social and emotional upheavals of his times. The key word in the ...
Stephen Gill: 'Don't believe everything you hear or read'
University lecturer Stephen gill on haiku, hiking barefoot and Kyoto ice-cream
Subtle humor of haiku's cousin senryū is on a roll
"Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit," philosophizes the long-winded Polonius in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." That's also a fitting description of senryū — a form of short poetry defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "a three-line unrhymed Japanese poem structurally similar to haiku, but ...
