Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years
*Starred Review* The English-language haiku was launched 100 years ago when Poetry magazine published Ezra Pound’s catalytic “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Pound’s is the first of the more than 800 haiku gathered in this stirring and defining anthology constructed by haiku experts Kacian, Philip Rowland, and Allan Burns. In his enlivening and informative introduction,   poet Billy Collins avers that what is essential to haiku is not the precise number of syllables—traditionally 17 syllables are arranged 5-7-5—but rather the “epiphanic jolt, the ‘A ha!’ moment.” And, indeed, many poets dispense with syllable count and line configuration altogether. Collins notes, too, that the “tiny genre” was popularized “just in time for the Beats to adopt it and give it a special American twist.” Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Snyder do appear here, along with Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Sonia Sanchez, and many poets who will be new to readers. Kacian concludes with an invaluable overview of the evolution of an enduring form that is freshly enticing and breathtaking in this time of small screens and pop-up messages. David Russo writes, “Sun in the bones / of a darting minnow / my cell phone rings.” --Donna Seaman