![]() “This is not your grandma’s haiku book,” Jay Rubin, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, wrote for GQ magazine. Kern’s scholarship, and book, can come as a shock to even dedicated haiku aficionados. “It was always written collaboratively, in groups.”ĭuring Japan’s Edo and Meiji periods, 12, respectively, poets partook in “linked-verse” practices, taking a writer’s last stanza and using wit, wordplay or a pun to launch into a brand-new haiku. ![]() ![]() “Haiku was never individualized poetry until the 20th century,” Kern says. Nearly half were women, Kern says, and very few poets, female or male, were writing in seclusion. And some were what I call dirty sexy haiku.”Įven the poets working in the heyday of haiku, from the 16th to 19th centuries in Japan, are not who we commonly think of today. “I wanted to reclaim haiku from what it has become but wasn’t in its own day,” he says. In The Penguin Book of Haiku, published last year by Penguin Classics, Kern included more than a thousand examples of haiku, to show that the poems can be political, crude, mischievous and funny. There are so many misconceptions about haiku, a poetry form with a long and fascinating history, that Kern wrote a myth-busting book about it. “But it turns out, that only accounts for a small portion of what was actually written.” “We tend to think of haiku as Zen nature poetry,” says Kern.
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