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The Penguin Book of Haiku

 

Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, usually running three lines long in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations by Adam L. Kern, this anthology offers an illuminating introduction to this widely celebrated, if misunderstood, art form.

 

Adam L. Kern (editor, translator) studied Japanese literature at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations before joining the faculty for nearly a decade. In Japan, he has been affiliated with the University of Kyoto, the University of Tokyo, and the National Institute of Japanese Literature, and worked as a staff reporter for the Kyoto Shimbun. Kern teaches Japanese literature and visual culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

 

Praise for The Penguin Book of Haiku

"A revelation" The Sunday Times, Books of the Year 2018
 

“Adam L. Kern's authoritative new anthology challenges the myth of haiku as a monkish meditation on the natural world . . . What we get is a cultural history of Japan up to the end of the 19th century condensed into verse . . . This feast-like anthology reminds us that poets excelled at social media long before the ‘floating world’ of the internet.”
Jeremy Noel-Todd, The Times of London (May 2018)

 

 “This is the tome on haiku that enthusiasts have awaited! Adam Kern has written the definitive book on haiku. His introduction is at the cutting edge of scholarship, enabling English-language readers to penetrate some of the arcana that only Japanese scholarship had been dealing with. The book is written in Kern’s inimitable and refreshingly fluid style. I doubt a work of this caliber will emerge on the subject for decades.”

John Solt, Independent Scholar (July 2018)

 

“This collection will appeal to the general reader as well as the academic. Kern’s impressive research and copious annotations will give the scholar plenty to digest, but the lay reader can equally delight in a collection that truly revolutionizes the schoolbook image of haiku . . . With this new collection, haiku stands poised and ready for its reintroduction to the world of literature.”
Kris Kosaka, The Japan Times (August 2018)

 

“The Japanese haiku is well known for its brevity and zen-like observations about the world. More surprising, perhaps, are the silly, satirical and sometimes rather crude verses presented in the Penguin Book of Haiku. Editor and translator Adam L. Kern has collected over a thousand examples from the 16th to 19th centuries, proving that there is more to haiku than cherry blossoms and frog ponds…”

The Idler magazine, Book of the Week (September 2018)

 

"an eye-opening introduction to haiku’s traditional (mostly) and traditionalist modern forms. Adam L. Kern’s translations, commentaries and unabashed selections bring fresh insight to the old “game” of haiku, a collaborative poetic form distinct from the standalone “haiku” the world knows today … Bringing the denigrated, bowdlerized, lost-to-modernization elements of haiku back into circulation is what the Penguin Book of Haiku is all about. In reasserting the relevance of haiku in all its incarnations variously serious, crude and comic, Kern does the haiku-loving world a great service and gives us all a good laugh at the same time.

—Alex Hendy, The Japan Journal (September 2018)

 

 “This is not your grandma’s haiku book. It is bound to ruffle many feathers with its insistence on distinguishing between pre-modern haiku as a communal art of linked comic verse and the modern invention of ‘haiku’ as a Zen-inspired minimalist stand-alone poem of seventeen syllables. In his often startling introduction, Kern tells us that Bashō, ‘the undisputed patron saint of haiku, never, strictly speaking, wrote a single haiku in his life’ (p. xxv). After word of this book gets out, the English-language practice and study of haiku will never be the same.”

Jay Rubin, Professor Emeritus Harvard University, for GQ (December 2018)

 

“Poetry is often thought of as a lonely art, but some of the best anthologies and collections this year affirmed its power to bring people together. The Penguin Book of Haiku (Penguin £9.99), edited by Adam L Kern, was a revelation. Kern shows how the crystalline 17-syllable Japanese form emerged from an older tradition of ‘witty linked verses’, composed competitively. From haiku masters to anonymous wags, Kern translates 1,000 examples in a single chain of association, weaving a folk tapestry of lyrical, bawdy and proverbial verse.”

The Sunday Times of London, Books of the Year 2018 (December 2018)

 

The Penguin Book of Haiku is an amazing collection of haiku and senryu and related verse. This collection spans the entire range of poetry from the bawdy to the sublime, giving this book more diversity than any other book of haiku I have read. Commentary is included for most of the approximately one thousand haiku in this collection which further enhances one’s understanding of these poems.”

Michael Ketchek, Frogpond: The Journal of the Haiku Society of America (vol. 41, no. 3, fall 2018)

 

“If you’re looking for poignant poems about autumn moons and spring flowers, you’ll certainly find them in this definitive collection of more than one thousand haiku. But there are also many mischievous surprises on these pages, and this, Adam L. Kern explains, is due to haiku’s surprising history… examples that display the diversity of poems in this very fine collection.”

Andrea Miller, Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time (January 2019)

“[O]ne of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had lately, and now readers can see what haiku really was like and what it can do. Kern is a marvellous translator overall; I read every page of this book without getting bored, I smiled and sometimes laughed out loud. The illustrations further add to the enjoyment. It’s a book that should be in the library of anyone who loves Japanese literature, and congratulations to Adam Kern for turning our notions of haiku on their heads.”

—John Butler, Asian Review of Books (January 19, 2019)

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