Coming Soon
The American Masters Series
Red Moon Press presents a new series: a wholesale re-evaluation of the haiku tradition in English through individual volumes dedicated to those poets whose work has informed and directed the genre for the past fifty years and more. Each volume will include a biographical timeline, a critical analysis of the work, and the very best poems of the poet’s career. By making such work available, readers will be able to appreciate the accomplishments of each poet within their own context, and have at hand all the poems which have created their lasting impression on current practice, and that to come.
The Wide Way West: Proto- to Polymodern Haiku in English
In 1999 Hiro Sato wrote “Today it may be possible to describe haiku but not to define it.” Thirty years prior, Harold G. Henderson had averred: “What kind of poems [haiku] will eventually turn out to be will depend on the poets who write them. It seems obvious that they cannot be exactly the same as Japanese haiku—if only because of the differences in language. At the same time, they cannot differ too much and still be haiku.”
The question, then and now, is how much “difference” is too much? These two statements, so nearly the same in meaning and yet so very far apart in implication, are the antipodes which fix this volume. Edited by Jim Kacian, Richard Gilbert and Philip Rowland, this volume seeks not only to explore the many threads which have woven into contemporary haiku, but to justify their ways as viable current form, and to suggest which of them are most promising for the haiku of the future. Four years in the making, this volume is full of challenging and exciting poems and ideas sure to change the discourse in haiku for years to come.