In preparing this keynote, I knew the twenty or so haiku I wanted to talk about but I was not sure of the most effective order to arrange them in. One of the things that reading haiku teaches us is that there are many ways, to borrow from Wallace Stevens, to look at a blackbird, or, in this case, haiku-not just a particular poem, but the form itself. That is, why was haiku able to inspire the solicitude and the loyalty of Shiki and his friends? What is it about the form and its traditions that fired them with such passion? Whatever it was, it is still there today. The how of haiku’s rebirth is pretty well mapped out-Shiki’s brilliant essays in defense of the form, which argued so compellingly for its right to be called literature in the modern sense, and the poetry of Shiki and his friends, which demonstrated persuasively that haiku could express the thoughts and feelings of modern people. Masaoka Shiki and his group of dedicated fellow poets revived it, as we know. Haiku is a “globe-trotting” form now, as the website for this symposium says, but a little more than a century ago it was moribund and about to die out. Keith Vincent, Chair WLL 9:00-9:30 KEYNOTE: Janine Beichman (Professor Emerita, Daitō Bunka University) Redstone Building / 765 Commonwealth Avenue / Boston MA 02215 ScheduleĬatherine Yeh, Director of the BU Center for the Study of Asia The Symposium took place on Octoon the Boston University Campus, at Barristers Hall / Sumner M. For a description of how the haiku-circle works, including some useful notes and resources on how to write haiku, see here. We met at the Pardee School 121 Bay State Road, from 11:00-1:00. We will also celebrate the recent digitization on the “Open BU” archive of 145 back issues of the Shiki kaishi : the journal of the Matsuyama Shiki Society, a treasure trove of original research on Shiki and his circle written by the Society’s members.īecause the best way to appreciate haiku is to write one yourself, we reconvened on Friday, October 13 for a Haiku Circle, led by Nanae Tamura of the Matsuyama Shiki Society. Scholars and poets working on haiku in Japanese, English, Persian, Chinese, and Spanish will share their work on Shiki and on the poetics of haiku in its global dimensions. Despite spending the last seven years of his short life immobilized by tuberculosis, Shiki contributed more than any other poet to the genre’s emergence as a globe-trotting literary form. This symposium marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Today millions of people write haiku in Japanese and dozens of other languages. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dense social networks of haiku poets crisscrossed the whole of Japan, and by the early twentieth century, haiku in its modern form had spread across the globe through the work of poets including Ezra Pound, Rabindrath Tagore, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Yu Ping Bo. Since the seventeenth century, when Matsuo Bashō wrote his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, haiku poets have embarked on countless figural and literal journeys, and they have taken the genre with them. Haiku is perhaps the best travelled of all world literary genres. BUCSA Asian Cultural Heritage Series Part I : The Art of Letters Haiku as World Literature A Celebration of the 150th Birthday of Haiku Poet Masaoka Shiki
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