ELH, English-language haiku, has been a leopard changing its spots for a little over a century now (some might argue longer and cite a very few distant outliers). From what was arguably a fraught beginning, marred by facile and obtuse attempts to pedantically imitate Japanese haiku by doing what amounted to “bad remixes,” English- language haiku grew to find its own way of doing things, and in time it was truer to the spirit of Japanese haiku by accepting what could be carried over into English and rejecting what could not. This synthesis produced strong new voices rather than pallid echoes.
The past several decades have been an increasingly fertile period for English language- haiku, and several landmark anthologies have been published fairly recently. ELH has continued to mutate, and interesting new species (more surreal haiku, more L=A=N=G-inflected, multilingual, etc.) can be found every day now in the grasses of the open fields, grazing on the past but living very much in the present.
For explanations of why contemporary haiku is seldom written in the 5–7–5 syllabification you might have been taught in elementary school, a quick internet search will lead you to a broad choice of articles explaining the fundamental differences between Japanese and English, and how the differences in these languages militate against this. (Short answer: it leads to “clunky” haiku and the idea of a haiku as a “single breath” is stressed to its breaking point.)
I wanted to share a brief list of twenty-one books from my nascent haiku library. The titles listed here range from the classics to the contemporary. I am only a handful of years into my exploration of haiku, so this is not a list where omissions have been made from a place of felt omniscience. Glaring omissions could very well be charged to ignorance. This is simply a list of books I love and ones that I return to repeatedly. Perhaps you will find titles included here you wish to seek out. If so, the list will have served its simple and humble purpose.
There are so many other great titles in my collection (not included here) to which I return fairly constantly, but I wanted to limit the list to a manageable size. I believe many if not the majority of these titles are still in print. For the titles not in print, most are easy to find through the major online secondhand retailers for a very good price. A very few might be slightly more scarce, but they do pop up somewhat regularly on the same sites at very reasonable prices.
1. Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013).
“More than 800 poems originally written in English by over 200 poets.” Edited by Jim Kacian, Philip Rowland and Allan Burns. Introduction by Billy Collins.
A really gorgeous cross-section of a century of ELH. A landmark anthology.
Representative poems:
summer afternoon…
losing the superball
on the first bounce
— Stanford M. Forrester
the shadow in the folded napkin
— Cor van den Heuvel
so suddenly winter
baby teeth at the bottom
of the button jar
— Carolyn Hall
behind the camera
I face
my family
— Eve Luckring
I meet the twin she
never mentioned the mist
lit briefly by the sun
— Chris Gordon
2. Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku (Turtle Light Press, 2012).
Straight out of Camden, New Jersey, the legacy of Nick Virgilio is a cool shadow made of words that falls over the reader.
His dedication to the art form, and the memory of those he loved, including a brother who was killed in Vietnam, are remarkable. He died way too young, but the careful craftsmanship and deep feeling in the writing are what bring so many haiku lovers back to his work, time and again.
This collection is a free-form biography of the poet and includes roughly seventy pages of Virgilio’s poetry.
Snapshots in words by friends and actual photographic snapshots are included, so you feel you really get to know the man. I ended up coming away impressed with his nearly monastic devotion to his art. It’s clear he was very humble and grounded; the interview with him which is included makes you like him even more.
Representative poems:
taking my picture
with the cardboard president:
this Election Day
morning sun
on the foggy moor:
becoming a child
lily:
out of the water…
out of itself
3. Global Haiku: Twenty-Five Poets World-Wide (Mosaic Press, 2000).
George Swede, a widely-published haiku poet, created this slender anthology with a real literary heft. He chose a small sample of work by twenty-five poets from around the globe. The selections are memorable and the gestalt of the reading experience (so many different takes on what a haiku is) is fertilizing.
Also included is Swede’s essay, “Towards a Definition of the English Haiku,” which makes good, reasonable arguments and is a great introduction to ELH for someone seeking a perceant overview in a short form rather than a disquisition.
Representative poems:
on the second floor
corpse
with the night light on
— Margaret Chula
getting louder
the calf
the auctioneer
— LeRoy Gorman
empty silo —
spring wind pops the metal
in and out
— Michael Dylan Welch
a mayfly
taps the screen —
warm beets slip their skins
— Peggy Lyles
4. A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku (the series 1–11, followed by Echoes 1 and Echoes 2). (Red Moon Press, 1999-current day).
This is a really great, ongoing anthology series in which a number of poets (I think it’s seventeen in each volume) are represented by fifteen of their strongest haiku.
Echoes 1 and 2 were follow-up anthologies, seeing where the poets were in their writing process, years later.
I’m still in the process of collecting these as I find them online, and they never disappoint.
The samples below are from A New Resonance 2.
Representative Poems:
all day long
i feel its weight
the unworn necklace
— Roberta Beary
rain stopped
her silk blouse
on the chair
— paul m.
watching carp feed
the lovers
open up
— W.F. Owen
highway’s edge
deer carcass half eaten
by mirage
— Judson Evans
after chemo
wanting only to read
seed catalogs
— Pamela M. Ness
5. Weeding the Cosmos, John Brandi (La Alameda Press, 1994).
John Brandi has his own freewheeling take on the haiku/senryu. He calls his three-liners “twists.” I sense a strong affinity with the Beats’ take on the haiku in these poems.
Brandi can write ravishing haiku in the traditional sense when he wants. It’s just that he likes pushing the envelope too, and more is the delight for readers.
Representative poems:
(unfortunately site formatting here doesn’t allow me to space these exactly right)
Feet stop
but the mind
keeps walking
Autumn haze:
under her robe
a shrine in a clearing
Angry, I walk
through the spider’s web
instead of around
After everyone
is awake
the dog quits barking
6. The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku (White Pine Press, 2005).
This is a really lovely anthology edited by the above-mentioned John Brandi with Dennis Maloney.
Thirteen (yikes!) poets share their work here, and many of them also share (in prose introductions) stories of the path which led them to writing haiku.
I loved all aspects of this book, including the design.
I loved all the poets’ essays, but I was particularly smitten with Margaret Chula’s account of her life in rural Japan.
Representative poems:
winter afternoon
not one branch moves —
I listen to my bones
— Patricia Donegan
before sleep
he opens the window
to let in the rain
— Penny Harter
elevator silence
our eyes escape
into numbers
— Christopher Herold
the sound
of rain on the sound
of waves
— -Elizabeth Searle Lamb
7. Listen to Light, Raymond Roseliep (Alembic Press, 1980).
Confession: I don’t know much of this poet’s biography yet. I know he’s no longer with us. I just found his take on the haiku (and other short forms included here) refreshingly different.
Representative poems:
wind on the flesh,
what’s left
of the moon
autumn stillness:
the cracks
of your hand
on the night wind
I hear the silver pin
sing in your hip
8. Off the Beaten Track: A Year in Haiku (Boatwhistle Books, 2016).
This gets my vote for the most creative take on the haiku anthology I’ve seen, and perhaps it’s the one truest to the spirit of haiku as a seasonal literary form.
It’s also a very fun anthology with a streak of the perverse running up and down its spine.
The uncredited editor (Hamish Ironside) asked a dozen writers to produce a haiku each day for a particular month to which they had been assigned. Six of the writers were experienced haikuists; the remaining contributors were accomplished writers but relatively new to haiku. This made for a very wild mix. I think of one of those wildflower seed packets you pick up in spring. You have no idea what’s going to grow and that’s part of the fun.
You get a real range of takes on the haiku in this anthology. Momus is even in here. His funny, sometimes cavalier takes on the haiku can seem like wonky paper airplanes purposefully designed to crash as soon as they leave the launcher’s hand. But I think he was having fun with “haiku subversion.”
I’ve returned to this anthology dozens of times and my interest still shows no signs of flagging. I highly recommend this one, as it’s a destabilizing sort of anthology and I think destabilization is good if you’re looking for inspiration in your own writing.
Representative poems:
It’s over on the left,
making a noise like the sea.
Oh, it is the sea!
— Hugo Williams (January)
the surgeon’s wink
just before
I’m under
— Hamish Ironside (February)
tricks of the light snow that tickles your nose
— Matthew Paul (March)
spring sun —
my shaver changes pitch
as I plug it in
— Michael Dylan Welch
alone on the lawn
with dandelions
in his hands
— Matthew Welton (May)
stretching
my imagination
Venus flytrap
— Christopher Herold (June)
The night is empty.
Birdsong fills it like water,
a shard of water.
— Sally Read (July)
My favorite in the entire collection is
meadow wildflowers
definitely cremation
— George Swede (August)
(sorry…can’t format that correctly on this site…supposed
to just be a few spaces between the first two words and the last two
on a single line).
no rain today
my wife’s blood thinner
than it used to be
— Bob Lucky (September)
A harpsichord might taste
Like an orange
If it was a citrus fruit.
— -Momus (October)
A finger puppet
Of the current president
On the bookshop floor.
— Fabian Ironside (November)
The smell of pine
through the house:
sap like flames
(Eireann Lorsung, December)
9. breathmarks, Gary Hotham (Canon Press, 1999)
This gorgeously-designed, small (6 x 4 inches) book includes eighty haiku and an astonishing number of them feel like instant classics the first time you read them.
Gary Hotham has a different sort of take on the haiku. He doesn’t go for loud color (many of his poems almost feel as though they’re in black and white) or garish effects.
Many of the haiku have an almost Shaker severity to them, but it almost always works in favor of the poems.
I return to this book quite often because I like the different sort of brain waves it helps me reach.
Representative poems:
night comes —
picking up your shoes
still warm
music two centuries old —
the color flows
out of the tea bag
one mirror for everyone
the rest stop
restroom
10. Haiku 21: An Anthology of Contemporary English-language Haiku (Modern Haiku Press, 2011).
Edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, this anthology is a bellwether. As the plasticity of the haiku form is explored, dividends are reaped.
Yet the anthology doesn’t have one whit of superciliousness about it; none of it is infected with the “We’re avant-garde and you’re not!” virus. Poems that could have been published in a traditional haiku anthology are also present. I think that statement endorsing coexistence adds a strength to the anthology. It shows an awareness of the healthiness of the continuum.
The only thing that makes something avant-garde, anyway, is a break with expectation. And great haiku (in any period) specialize in that breaking of expectation. So let’s agree great art is great art, and labels are just labels.
Representative poems:
plum blossoms
a specimen of my dream
sent to the lab
— Fay Aoyagi
child’s wake
the weight
of rain
— Francine Banwarth
three oceans
exported into orbit
in a small cocoon
— Richard Gilbert
later you realize it was actually a piece of your own body
— Chris Gordon
quiet graveyard
warm breeze and an end
to alphabetic order
— LeRoy Gorman
fog-bound road —
walking on the inside of
the inside world
— Caroline Gourlay
spring wind
water in the shape
of fire
— Jim Kacian
words
still pink
close to the bone
— Eve Luckring
into the afterlife red leaves
— Peggy Willis Lyles
sun on the horizon
who first
picked up a stone
— paul m.
lake — someone’s
swimming thru
yr blindness
— John Martone
how deer
materialize
twilight
— Scott Mason
it’s only february comes after it’s only january
— Marlene Mountain
morning after
the mountain comes
to the leaf
— Philip Rowland
three times I’ve said
“your husband…”
now we can just talk
— John Stevenson
a falcon dives
how completely
I surround my bones
— Peter Yovu
11. lakes & now wolves, Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press, 2012).
Scott Metz can write devastating haiku in the traditional mold, but also roves into new plasticities. I find all the sides of his icosahedron interesting.
Representative poems:
mountaintop —
she silently points to
a glass-bottom boat
without permission part of me begins to bloom
another god
built of words
moon tugging
fallen, trampled moss. the month then the year got away
falling
asleep
on the
bone
of her
edges
12. Haiku (Knopf, 2003).
Edited by Peter Washington, this is part of their Everyman’s Library of Pocket Poets.
It’s a decent little anthology and very easy to find. Before I read them, I feared the translations of the Japanese classics (Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki, etc.) copyrighted by R.H. Blyth back in 1952 might be interpretations which hadn’t aged so well. Yet most of them impressed me. They felt like genuine captures.
Those translations from the Japanese are the bulk of this book. But there is a smaller selection of “Western Haiku,” both traditional, which are mostly “haiku” the editor saw and imaginatively excerpted from lyric poems by poets like Keats, Shelley and Tennyson, and modern, which are more contemporary haikuists like Kerouac, Virgilio and even a few living writers.
This anthology isn’t going to bring you very strongly into a larger sense of the contemporary English language haiku, but it could give you a decent grounding in the history of the art form.
Representative poems:
In the market-place,
The smell of something or other —
The summer moon
— Boncho
A stray cat
Asleep on the roof
In the spring rain
— Taigi
Do not kill the fly!
See how it wrings its hands,
Its feet!
— Issa
a phoebe’s cry…
the blue shadow
on the dinner plates
— Anita Virgil
13. favor of crows, Gerald Vizenor (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).
First, let me specify that I’m not going to be able to format Vizenor’s haiku properly, because of the site formatting here. He has the three lines centered in his haiku. So just imagine that slight shift.
Vizenor writes what I think of as traditional haiku and does it very well.
At first, I thought maybe this collection was too traditional, too staid. And then the silences in the poems began to grow on me and in me. And he does have a playful side. I ended up returning to the book frequently.
maple leaves
frozen in the river ice
come ashore
every footprint
erased by the gentle waves
tease of creation
party moths
danced last night in a lantern
sunrise stories
cold rain
old woman walks a mongrel
scent of cedar
14. Haiku: Poetry Ancient & Modern (Tuttle Publishing, 2002).
The anthologist here, Jackie Hardy, came up with a great organizing principle for this thick, smaller-sized collection. The five sections of the book are the ancient elements of Taoism: earth, air, fire, water and wood.
Hardy doesn’t allow herself to be tied-down by too-literal a construction of the elements. For example, fire might be the dying sun on the surface of a lake, or embers rather than fire itself. Or it might be fireflies. And so on, throughout the book. You feel the general abidingness of these elements, how they are still the substances by which we live and die. And it’s a great way to connect contemporary haiku to classical forbears. These are things we share with those who lived in distant times. Traditional haiku focuses on just such timeless elements of nature.
The collection includes some stellar Japanese art from centuries past and the design work that went into this volume is substantial. It’s a real looker of a book. But the literature chosen is the real reason to purchase the book. The selections are memorable. The editor’s selections include both classical and contemporary haiku. Basho rubs shoulders with living poets. It’s a great swirl of time.
Representative poems:
WOOD
morning sneeze
the guitar in the corner
resonates
— Dee Evetts
smoothing paper
on my fingertips
the roughness of words
— Jackie Hardy
FIRE
midnight heat
fireflies travel
in the river’s echo
— Humberto Gatica
thirteenth century glass
catches fire
late afternoon
— Katherine Gallagher
EARTH
the cold night
comes out of the stones
all morning
— Jim Kacian
first snow
the neglected yard
now perfect
— Elizabeth Searle Lamb
METAL
loose now
on her knuckle
the thin gold
— Susan Rowley
framing the space
where she once was —
my mother’s ring
— Don McLeod
WATER
on the rock
waves don’t reach
fresh snow
— Tantan
third year of drought
lake’s slow retreat
into itself
— Jean Jorgensen
15. haiku mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart (Shambhala, 2008).
Poet Patricia Donegan collects some of her favorite poems in this volume, and gives brief meditations and readings of each poem after the presentation. This format works very well and her selections are sublime.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this book included on many syllabi, since it has great structure and generous explication going for it. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a sequel, since I believe this book has enjoyed a wide popularity.
Donegan is very conversant in the history of Japanese haiku, but also very aware of contemporary Japanese haiku. So there is a respectful inclusion of a significant number of writers from Japan, living and dead. I really liked that about this anthology.
Representative poems:
shaking
the packet of seeds
asking, are you still alive?
— Kiyoko Tokutomi
disgusting —
people arguing over
the price of orchids
— Shiki
moonlight —
through thin clothes
to naked skin
— Hisajo Sugita
16. Feathers from the Hill, W.S. Merwin (included in Flower & Hand, Copper Canyon Press, 1997).
America just lost one of its greatest poets with the recent death of Merwin. Arguably “our Neruda,” albeit just a bit darker, his poetry had real range, and the collection of haiku he published in 1978 with Windhover Press, Feathers from the Hill, is an underated classic (well, underrated when it’s not missed entirely, as it usually is).
I list the Copper Canyon compilation volume which includes this book above, since that book is much easier to find and much more affordable than the scarce first appearance of the title.
Merwin is still Merwin in these poems, but he wisely respects the subtractions haiku asks of us, in order to get to the piths of nature and consciousness. That’s why this large collection of haiku works so well.
Representative poems:
Solitary wasp writes
white eggs
up south window
Even among spoons
favorites emerge
days rising through water
The landlord’s children
lock up their dog
and shout at it
Towards the sea
wings of flies
flash with sunset
When it says
good-bye
say thank you
In the samples from the book above, I would cite numbers two and five as Merwinized haiku. The other three I would consider closer to pure haiku. I enjoy feeling that tension in the book between the desire for Merwin to be Merwin and the desire for Merwin to let the haiku completely take over.
17. Book of Haikus, Jack Kerouac (Penguin, 2003).
Kerouac went his own way with pretty much everything he did in writing, and aren’t you glad he did? Right down to the incorrect but oh-so-him plural of haiku.
I love haiku books that are the size of a slice of bread and this is one of those.
Kerouac is generally considered an important shaper of the contemporary haiku. He had his own agenda, his own conception of Buddhism, and his own love of freedom. Probably the last of the three turned out to be the most felicitous part of his arsenal when it came to writing haiku. I don’t think people read Kerouac’s haiku today for the Buddhism (although I could be wrong). I think probably most people read his haiku for the pleasure and the shifts in consciousness it can engender.
He was clearly a natural, an adept. But he did a lot of growing too, probably helped by his careful study of his own process.
I love that the editor of this collection, Regina Weinreich, decided to throw everything, even the kitchen sink haiku, in here. She was going to make a selective cut of Kerouac’s haiku, but then decided against it. I’m glad she did. It’s nice to be able to make up our own minds.
Kerouac sometimes wrote traditional haiku, and some of those hang with the best of them. But he also wrote very Kerouac haiku that hang in space also, and are very nervy and alive.
In brief, it’s the stuff.
Representative poems:
New neighbors
— — light
in the old house
All that ocean of blue
soon as these clouds
pass away
Train tunnel, too dark
for me to write that
“Men are ignorant”
All day long wearing
a hat that wasn’t
on my head
The birds
surprise me
On all sides
18. Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho (Knopf, 2018)
Probably everyone literate realizes by now what a great translator David Young is.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to reckon it, these Basho translations are your chance.
The respect Young accords previous translators, and especially the late Jane Reichold, is rather touching. He even includes an appendix in which you can cross-reference his translations to hers (from 2008).
I was really moved to see the warm reception given Basho with this new set of translations. The book has been roundly appreciated. Pick it up and you’ll see why.
Representative poems:
(apologies again for format disrespect as the site won’t allow me to present these in the terraced form Young presents them in his book)
Octopus in a jar
briefer dreams
summer moon
Loving this
snow aroma
singing wind
First rain of winter
today’s a day
people get older
Everyone in this house
has gray hair, walks with a cane,
visits the graveyard
Sight of that mountain
makes me forget
I’m getting old
19. The Haiku Anthology (Norton, 1999 version).
If you’re only going to buy a very small handful of haiku anthologies, this should definitely be one of them.
This anthology went through several re-edits in its decades-long evolution. It was first published in 1974. The version I have was published in 1999. That’s the third manifestation of the anthology. It’s now more than three hundred pages. I wouldn’t want to cut anything. It’s a vade mecum.
The poets who made their name after that date (1999) are obviously not going to be included here. But there’s so much strong work collected here.
Editor Cor van den Heuvel did a fantastic job of creating a sense of the haiku as a vehicle for the metaphysical. Or that’s my reading of this anthology, anyway, because so many of the haiku selected seem to be reckoning the quantum world-view which was replacing the prior paradigm.
Representative poems:
inside
the hailstone
ripples on a pond
— Carl Patrick
morning surf
a dog fills the sky
with seagulls
— Jim Boyd
I hear her sew
I hear the rain
I turn back a page
— LeRoy Gorman
Half of the minnows
within this sunlit shallow
are not really there.
— J.W. Hackett
the haiku
completely gone
by the time I’ve dried my hands
— Karen Sohne
Darkening
the cat’s eyes:
a small chirp
— Anita Virgil
20. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa (Ecco, 1994).
I’m a fan of Robert Hass’s poetry and I like having a number of different translations of classical haiku to compare.
I think sometimes Hass is a little wordier with his translations for the sake of drawing clearer pictures of what he believes to be happening in the poems. Sometimes vagueness in haiku is a friend. But sometimes a Hass translation finds something in the original text you didn’t see in the other translations. And many of the translations are memorable and stick with one, probably because of the poet’s strong ear.
This volume contains some great ancillary features on each of the major poets translated here, excerpts from Issa’s journals and Basho’s diaries and from Buson’s New Flower Picking. So that’s all the more reason to add this fine collection to your library.
Representative poems:
Even in Kyoto
hearing the cuckoo’s cry —
I long for Kyoto
— Basho
A gust of wind
whitens
the water birds
— Buson
The pheasant cries
as if it just noticed
the moutain
— Issa
21. The Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1993).
I very much admire this anthology edited by Bruce Ross.
It’s over three hundred pages of haiku, largely in the traditional sense. The consistency of the editorial choices makes one realize that an anthology composed pretty much entirely of haiku written as they were written centuries ago in Japan can still be a very impressive thing, a significant aesthetic and spiritual experience for the reader.
It’s not that the poems in the anthology shun features found in the modern landscape that would not have been present in the past. There are images of such things in some of the poems included here. It’s that even when such things are present in the haiku, they are still functioning in the manner of images in poems written several centuries ago in Japan. The traditional haiku poem has a sort of ancient math it does. The juxtaposition at the heart of the traditional haiku, that shifting at the point of its sudden turn, is a sort of equation and inequality at once. Well-written haiku sometimes almost give me a sense of deju vu, the feeling that my life has been lived before and elsewhere. We know that, in a way, our life has been lived before. But not quite. It’s that little bit of “not quite” that is the spiritual backbone of the haiku. The poems in this anthology mine that “not quite” so well. This is how tradition that follows the rules may continue without becoming boring. This is not a boring anthology. But it is a traditional one.
I return to this anthology when I feel I might be losing focus and getting too far afield of the haiku’s origin. I find it helpfully clarifying and inspiring at those times.
Representative poems:
no two falling
the same way
cherry petals
the same way
cherry petals
— Brent Partridge
utterly still
the bluejay cries
utterly what i am
the bluejay cries
utterly what i am
— Bob Boldman
it’s a wonder
the wind doesn’t take it
the cat’s shadow…
the wind doesn’t take it
the cat’s shadow…
— -June Moreau
march winds…
the mailbox
also moans
the mailbox
also moans
Elizabeth St. Jacques
cool morning
colors slide
up and down the spider’s thread
colors slide
up and down the spider’s thread
— Peter Yovu
Post-script: If you have any recommendations for haiku anthologies you think are indispensable, feel free to leave a comment below. I realize there are thousands of books and chapbooks by individual haiku poets I have yet to reckon, but I figure anthologies are fewer in number, and a great shortcut to figure out whose work you want to seek out and read more in depth. I am always looking to grow my collection. I am ever grateful for all the free pdfs of books available for perusal at the website of the Haiku Foundation. I would recommend that site.
