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Corey Wakeling reviews an extensive new collection of criticism and approaches to perhaps the most globally mobile Japanese poetic form.

James Shea and Grant Caldwell (eds), The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (Routledge, 2023), 344pp.

The Routledge Global Haiku Reader edited by Grant Caldwell and James Shea may be the most expansive academic guide to haiku currently available. As co-editor James Shea explains, the book aims “to fill a gap in Asian studies, creative writing studies, and literary studies by offering extensive, critical perspectives on the haiku form, a form often overlooked within interdisciplinary studies but one with more than its share of misunderstanding” (11). Divided into four sections – “I: Haiku in Transit,” “II: Haiku and Social Consciousness,” “III: Haiku and Experimentation,” and “IV: The Future of Global Haiku” – the Reader gathers a selection of the most influential essays on haiku as well as a number of important new perspectives. In so doing, the Routledge Global Haiku Reader provides a sound introduction to the global field of haiku production and cultural histories of the form, as well as helping to chart new directions and overlooked angles. What the volume leaves to be desired will be clear to some readers. But, as I will discuss later in this review, those shortcomings may belong to the existing discourse on haiku in English rather than problems of the Reader itself. As a major contribution to this key field of writing, the arrival of a sophisticated and diverse volume such as this inevitably brings with it some questions about the state of the art, and the state of the scholarship on the art.

The best essays on the evolution of the hokku appear in Shea and Caldwell’s Reader. Yoshinobu Hakutani’s “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” Yūki Itō’s “New Rising Haiku: The Evolution of Modern Japanese Haiku and the Haiku Persecution Incident,”  Haruo Shirane’s “Beyond the Haiku Moment; Bashō, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths,” and Jan Walsh Hokenson’s “Haiku as a Western Genre: Fellow-Traveler of Modernism,” among others, have been collected here. Similarly, some of the most enlightening essays about evolving questions concerning haiku’s form and cultural import are also reproduced: Philip Rowland’s “From Haiku to the Short Poem: Bridging the Divide,” Charles Trumbull’s “One Hundred Bridges, One Hundred Traditions in Haiku,” and excerpts from Hiroaki Sato’s On Haiku – collected as two separate essays. Most surprising to readers may well be the volume’s assembly of more discrete foci. Shea’s own rigorous analysis of English translations, especially their lineation, of works by Yosa Buson within a history of prominent examples in “Reading an Evening Breeze: Buson’s Hokku in Translation” is substantial, as is Judith Halebsky’s “Translations and Migrations of the Poetic Diary: Roy Kiyooka’s Wheels” on one example of Nisei transcultural revisioning and haiku, and Karen Jackson Ford on Native American poetics and the role of haiku in “Marking Time in Native America: Haiku, Elegy, Survival.” In this way, the polyvalency of haiku’s global reach undergoes an unprecedented degree of reconsideration within this critical reader. Brazilian and Russian contexts receive rigorous historical attention also.

However, there is a curious absence of a handful of prominent haiku commentators and their particular contributions to haiku history and practice that will standout to scholars of this field, especially given that many of those absences are the substance of the very debates found in the Reader. Janine Beichman on Masaoka Shiki, Jim Kacian’s practical guides to writing haiku, Jeffrey Johnson on haiku and Beat culture, Robert Hass and the contemporary poet-translator, or Bruce Ross and haiku form come to mind. These are more palpable absences than the ones flagged in the Introduction. Wright’s absence may be felt, as Shea alerts us on page 3, but a more substantial treatment of Shiki would have assisted with cross-referencing, while Tagore – as valuable as his place in transnational discussions of haiku might be – is less impactful on the overall scope of the Reader.

Perhaps the reason behind their absences was a desire to avoid repetitions or overlap. Richard Gilbert’s exhaustive “The Disjunctive Dragonfly,” for example, engages in a depth of analysis of form that renders less comprehensive accounts less essential, and essays by Grant Caldwell or Rowland that reveal how contemporary publishing contexts and trends govern the art today certainly threaten to make introductory essays by leading practitioners less relevant. On the other hand, aspects of haiku’s historical debates that were unnecessarily repeated across essays in the reader would indeed have benefited from granular studies of Shiki by Beichman or personalized commentary by Hass.

The inclusion of the polemical essay by the late Takeo Kuwabara, “A Second-Class Art: On Contemporary Haiku,” a critique of haiku from 1946 of much historical interest in Japanese studies, provides a helpful insight into the changing value of haiku and its practice within evolving attitudes towards traditional art practices in the cultural sine qua non of haiku: Japan. It is all too easy to assume that in the Japanese context, by virtue of sustaining the long history of hokku until the present in an expanding global field, that the evolution of haiku has simply been one of linear ascent. By the same token, one wonders why Kuwabara’s essay is the only posthumous essay in this critical reader. Much-cited works by Ueda Makoto or Kenneth Yasuda, for example, are so critical to some essays in this volume, one wonders why they were overlooked while the Kuwabara essay – only briefly the subject of cross-reference – was reproduced.

The largest gap in this otherwise impressively comprehensive collection on haiku is ironically the state of haiku in Japan. Arguably the best positioned to comment on the subject, Ban’ya Natsuishi, writes in his “Future of World Haiku” a short reflection on the subject of world haiku and the author’s own haiku Association. Meanwhile, the other studies in the volume of modern haiku barely glance at contemporary haiku in Japanese, not to mention Japanese haiku after the postwar period. Sato is one of the few to do so, and contemporary Japanese haiku is less his concern than twentieth-century examples. The lack of contemporary perspectives on leading Japanese-language haiku practitioners and critical voices on twenty-first century haiku innovation is a discernibly uncharted geography within the global view presented by this collection. This is a terribly ironic situation for haiku studies to find itself in, and the editors of the Routledge Reader are hardly responsible for this. I hope this volume rallies those of us engaged in this context to improve such a circumstance.

Of course, I am cognizant that the defense of this absence, among others, is that, as a volume about global haiku, the predominance of English-language examples is an inevitable result – one may ask how else the global is to be understood other than through its lingua franca. Indeed, as I foreshadowed at the beginning, I am aware that such an issue is less a problem with this volume than the field itself. Translations of postwar haiku and those that came after are few and far between. As a result, critical accounts of the space are even rarer. Nevertheless, I am struck by the curious situation of the field, where historicization of the evolution of haiku up until the postwar American Beat Generation has become extremely well cross-referenced by numerous commentators while the lively contexts of postwar and contemporary haiku from Japan are almost uncharted and seemingly inaccessible. The very concepts of the craft and culture of haiku after the Shinkō haiku undo (New Rising Haiku movement) have evolved, as have the relations between haiku and other modes of writing in Japan. For example, translation and discourse involving Japanese-language haijin from the second half of the twentieth century and later may change how readers understand the haiku mode completely. Familiarity with paradigm shifts within Japan since modernism can only enrich a future account of haiku’s globality.

The impressive Shea and Caldwell-edited Routledge Global Haiku Reader is likely to unsettle the many assumptions commonly brought to understand haiku and welcome new readers to its scope and possibility. The Global Haiku Reader is an excellent place to read some of the most influential essays about the mode, and a reliable source for a more critical appreciation of haiku’s diversity.

Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Since 2015, Corey has lived in Japan, where he is an associate professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University. Corey is the author of four poetry collections, his most recent, Uncle of Cats, appeared with Cordite Books in 2025.