Lenard D Moore And African American Haiku

Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions identifies Moore as a primary figure in the American Haiku Movement as well as a significant contributor to the field of African American haiku. Ce Rosenow analyzes the ways in which Moore combines haiku with a variety of other traditions: African American storytelling, jazz poetry, ekphrasis, and elegies. An examination of Moore’s haibun, a Japanese form combining prose and haiku, reveals the further development of the African American aesthetic created in his individual poems. Ultimately, the author argues that Moore’s decades-long engagement with haiku and his prolific publication history solidify haiku as an established form in African American poetry.

"This unique and indispensable collection contains a brilliant array of haiku by five members of the Carolina African American Writers Collective"--Dustjacket.

Lenard D. Moore's Long Rain is a book of elemental tanka poems (similar to haiku) in four sections (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water), each of which is introduced by a short prose haibun. Yes, these poems capture a series of detailed moments, primarily set in the American South, but they also employ an unsettled fragmentary language (no full sentences) to express the flow of experience in a way that gives the book a surprising energy and sense of movement. "Lenard Moore is a Japanese poet who lives in North Carolina, or a North Carolina poet who lives in an imaginary medieval Japan. He has been a farmer, an American soldier in Germany, a schoolteacher; his ancestors came from Africa in chains. He seems, to the world's eye, to be as representative a husband, father, and citizen as any sociologist might point to as a statistically ordinary well-behaved American. And the sociologist would be wrong, for Lenard Moore is a poet, and all good poets are extraordinary, and very good ones are unique." -from the introduction by Guy Davenport.

A fundamental collection of sixteen interviews with the esteemed writer and former president of the Haiku Society of America

The first study solely dedicated to exploring the power of African American haiku

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound’s well-known haiku-like poem, “In A Station of the Metro,” published in 1913, is most influential on other Imagist and later American haiku poets. Since the end of World War II many Americans and Canadians tried their hands at writing haiku. Among them, Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku in the final eighteen months of his life in exile in France. His Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (1998), is a posthumous collection of 817 haiku Wright himself had selected. Jack Kerouac, a well-known American novelist like Richard Wright, also wrote numerous haiku. Kerouac’s Book of Haikus, ed. Regina Weinreich (Penguin, 2003), collects 667 haiku. In recent decades, many other American writers have written haiku: Lenard Moore, Sonia Sanchez, James A. Emanuel, Burnell Lippy, and Cid Corman. Sonia Sanchez has two collections of haiku: Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) and Morning Haiku (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). James A. Emanuel’s Jazz from the Haiku King (Broadside Press, 1999) is also a unique collection of haiku. Lenard Moore, author of his haiku collections The Open Eye (1985), has been writing and publishing haiku for over 20 years and became the first African American to be elected as President of the Haiku Society of America. Burnell Lippy’s haiku appears in the major American haiku journals, Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (2013).Cid Corman is well-known not only as a haiku poet but a translator of Japanese ancient and modern haiku poets: Santoka, Walking into the Wind (Cadmus Editions, 1994).

A poetry collection by internationally acclaimed poet Lenard D. Moore focusing on jazz music as an experience and an inspiration. In The Geography of Jazz, Moore celebrates jazz music and jazz musicians. Some of the poems address specific events. Others honor individual artists. Many do both. While the poems may not initially signal the rhythms of jazz in their presentation on the page, they convey jazz rhythms through Moore's deft handling of the poetic line and his use of formal techniques including but not limited to assonance, onomatopoeia, and repetition. This collection also includes a new poetic form, jazzku, an innovation that recalls Japanese haiku and tanka.

The Routledge Global Haiku Reader provides a historical overview and comprehensive examination of haiku across the world in numerous languages, poetic movements, and cultural contexts. Offering an extensive critical perspective, this volume provides leading essays by poets and scholars who explore haiku’s various global developments, demonstrating the form’s complex and sometimes contradictory manifestations from the twentieth century to the present. The sixteen chapters are carefully organized into categories that reflect the salient areas of practice and study: Haiku in Transit, Haiku and Social Consciousness, Haiku and Experimentation, and The Future of Global Haiku. An insightful introduction surveys haiku’s influence beyond Japan and frames the collection historically and culturally, questioning commonly held assumptions about haiku and laying the groundwork for new ways of seeing the form. Haiku’s elusiveness, its resistance to definition, is partly what keeps it so relevant today, and this book traces the many ways in which this global verse form has evolved. The Routledge Global Haiku Reader ushers haiku into the twenty-first century in a critically minded and historically informed manner for a new generation of readers and writers and will appeal to students and researchers in Asian studies, literary studies, comparative literature, creative writing, and cultural studies