Word: haiku
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ephemeral publishing ventures, subject to sudden collapse; Poetry, largest (5,500 subscribers) of about ten U.S. poetry magazines, must beg constantly to stay alive. In book circles, the sale of 5,000 copies of a volume of poetry is considered unusually brisk. Yet by last week An Introduction to Haiku, a book on one form of Japanese poetry released two months ago by Doubleday, had sold 9,500 copies and was still going strong...
This publishing success would not impress the Japanese. Each month 680 poetry magazines with a combined circulation of 240,000 are printed in Japan. Toyo Keizai, a sort of Japanese Wall Street Journal, runs a haiku assortment every week. Hototogisu (Cuckoo), a haiku magazine founded in 1897, claims a substantial though private monthly circulation of 20,000. Japan's 500,000 practicing poets can win prize money from most of the metropolitan newspapers and from the Emperor himself. They write in all the classic forms, but the simple 17-syllable haiku, usually arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern...
...verse form so old that its origin vanishes in the mists of antiquity, the haiku is distinctly Japanese, like the no drama, where crossed planks do for a shogun's litter. No occasion passes, among haiku composers, without hundreds of commemorative haiku, frequently written on the spot. A thief, about to be hanged for his crime, couched his last words in the haiku form: "As for the end -/ that I'll hear in the next world./ cuckoo, my friend." For the lower-brows there are even earthy haiku, called senryu in honor of their creator, who died more...