60 Fun Facts About Haiku

A traditional Japanese haiku is arranged in which sound pattern?

The 17 sound units are called on, and even classical masters such as Bashō sometimes broke the pattern.

How many sound units, or on, does a traditional haiku contain in total?

The Haiku Society of America reckons that about 12 English syllables approximate the duration of 17 Japanese on.

The word haibun has two English syllables but how many Japanese on?

It is counted ha-i-bu-n, because the elongated vowel and the final n each take a unit of their own.

What is a kigo?

Common examples are plum blossoms for spring, cicadas for summer and autumn wind for fall.

What is a kireji in a haiku?

It plays a role like a caesura in Western verse or the volta in a sonnet, and English poets often substitute a dash.

Which kireji appears in Bashō's famous 'old pond' haiku?

The same kireji appears in his poem on the wind of Mount Fuji; it emphasises the words that precede it.

Classical linked verse developed a tradition of how many kireji?

Among the most common are ka, kana, keri and ya; there is no exact English equivalent for any of them.

What is a saijiki?

Entries describe each kigo and give example poems; a similar list without sample poems is called a kiyose.

Modern saijiki are divided into the four seasons plus which extra section?

Some also add a section for seasonless topics, and each season is split into early, middle and late periods.

Haiku began as the opening stanza of which longer collaborative form?

Its opening verse set the tone for the whole linked poem, and Bashō prized his linking verses above his stand-alone ones.

What was the term for the opening verse of a linked poem, later renamed haiku?

Today the word is used chiefly in its original sense, for the first verse of a renku.

Which writer gave haiku its current name at the end of the 19th century?

He proposed haiku as an abbreviation of haikai no ku, though the word itself had existed for two centuries.

17-on poems that ignore the kigo and kireji rules are usually classed as what?

The form is named after the Edo-period poet Karai Senryū and tends to be about human foibles rather than nature.

Haibun combines haiku with what?

Bashō first used the term in a 1690 letter to his disciple Kyorai, and his travel diaries are the great examples.

Haiga is a style of Japanese art that pairs a haiku with what?

Buson is regarded as one of the greatest masters of the form; modern haiga artists also use photographs.

What is a kuhi?

Shiki's home city alone has more than two hundred of these poem monuments.

Which city has more than two hundred kuhi poem monuments?

It was Shiki's hometown, and its middle school once banned him from public speaking for his teenage radicalism.

In which century did Matsuo Bashō live?

He was born in 1644 and died in 1694, the most famous poet of the Edo period.

Bashō's pen name comes from which plant, given to him by his disciples?

They planted it beside his rustic hut in Fukagawa in 1680, giving him both a new name and his first permanent home.

Bashō was born into a family trained in which secretive martial tradition?

The Matsuo were a major ninja family of Iga Province, and he served a young lord as a servant in his late teens.

In which province, in modern Mie prefecture, was Bashō born?

The Haiseiden building was erected there in 1942 to mark the 300th anniversary of his birth.

Bashō's most famous haiku, composed in early 1686, features which creature?

It became instantly famous, and that April the poets of Edo held a linked-verse contest on the subject of frogs.

What is the English title of Bashō's masterwork Oku no Hosomichi?

It is also translated as The Narrow Road to the Interior; the other titles are earlier Bashō works.

Who accompanied Bashō on the 1689 journey behind Oku no Hosomichi?

Sora's own diary later showed how many artistic liberties Bashō took with the account.

Roughly how far did Bashō travel on the journey described in Oku no Hosomichi?

That is 600 ri, covered mostly on foot over about 150 days through the northeast of Honshū.

When was the first edition of Oku no Hosomichi published?

Bashō spent years reworking it and finished the final version in 1694; it was an immediate commercial success.

Which Chinese poet, revered by Bashō, influenced Oku no Hosomichi?

The work also references Confucius, the waka poet Saigyō and The Tale of the Heike.

Which principle of 'lightness' did Bashō adopt in his last years?

He embraced it after shutting his gate to visitors for a month in 1693, choosing to greet the mundane world rather than shun it.

In which city did Bashō die in 1694?

He fell ill with a stomach complaint on his last journey and died surrounded by his disciples.

Besides poetry, Yosa Buson was celebrated in which art?

His painterly eye shows in his haiku, and Shiki later held him up as the model for haiku as a sketch from life.

Buson took the name Yosa from what?

He adopted it after settling in Kyoto at 42; his original family name was Taniguchi.

The pen name Issa means what?

Kobayashi Issa was a farmer's son from what is now Nagano Prefecture whose mother died when he was three.

Roughly how many haiku did Issa write?

Bashō, by contrast, left only about 2,000 verses.

Issa wrote about 230 haiku on which creature?

He also wrote 54 on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs and over 100 on fleas.

Issa's 'dewdrop world' haiku was written after the death of whom?

Satoyo died before she was two and a half; a third child died in 1820 and his wife Kiku in 1823.

Which sect of Buddhism was Issa devoted to?

That devotion, along with his poverty and miserable childhood, is evident throughout his poetry.

Shiki's pen name refers to which bird?

In Japanese conceit this bird coughs blood as it sings, which suited a poet who had begun coughing blood from tuberculosis.

Shiki was inducted into which unlikely institution in 2002?

He played the game as a teenager and a group of his 1898 tanka mention it.

Which future novelist did Shiki befriend as a student in Tokyo?

Shiki later convalesced in Sōseki's home while promoting haiku drawn from personal experience of nature.

What term did Shiki use for his 'sketch from life' approach to haiku?

He borrowed the idea from European plein-air artists and favoured Buson's pictorial style.

Shiki's disciples founded which haiku magazine, alluding to his pen name, in 1897?

Takahama Kyoshi took it over and widened its scope beyond poetry.

The earliest Westerner known to have written haiku was of which nationality?

Hendrik Doeff was commissioner at the Dejima trading post in Nagasaki in the early 19th century.

Whose four-volume Haiku, begun in 1949, introduced the form to post-war English readers?

The Englishman lived in Japan and later worked for the Imperial Household; the Beats studied his volumes closely.

Which 1913 Ezra Pound poem is called the first fully realized haiku in English?

Pound cut a 30-line poem about faces in the Paris underground down to a single sentence over two years.

Which American novelist wrote some 4,000 haiku in 1959-60 during an illness?

He cut them to 817 for a collection, This Other World, finally published in 1998.

Which Beat writer said a haiku 'must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery'?

He came to haiku through his study of Zen and Mahayana Buddhism while writing The Dharma Bums.

In which year was the Haiku Society of America founded?

Its journal Frogpond followed a decade later; the magazine American Haiku had launched in Wisconsin in 1963.

Which former European Council president is a published haiku poet nicknamed for the form?

He published a book of haiku in April 2010.

Which Nobel laureate composed haiku in Bengali in the early 20th century?

Miłosz, another laureate, published a volume of translated haiku in Polish in 1992.

Which Mexican poet popularised haiku in his country with collections in 1919 and 1922?

Un dia and El jarro de flores were composed entirely of haiku; Octavio Paz followed decades later.

Where is the American Haiku Archives, the largest such collection outside Japan, housed?

Founded in 1996 in Sacramento, it holds the official archives of the Haiku Society of America.

Traditional Japanese haiku are usually printed in how many lines?

The three-line layout familiar to English readers is a Western convention.

Which Dutch commissioner at Dejima was the earliest known Westerner to write haiku?

Doeff (1764-1837) ran the Nagasaki trading post in the early 19th century.

Who introduced haiku to France around 1906?

His French articles reached the proto-Imagist Poets' Club in London via F. S. Flint, and on to Ezra Pound.

Which Japanese poet urged 'Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!' in a 1904 magazine?

His A Proposal to American Poets appeared in the Reader magazine in February 1904.

Which Japanese poet led the free-form haiku movement that abandoned the 17-on tradition?

His gendai-haiku minority also moved away from nature as the required subject.

Which Japanese-Italian translator brought haiku to Italy in the 1920s via the magazine Sakura?

His 1919 novella La guerra italiana vista da un giapponese included a haiku by feminist poet Yosano Akiko.

Which Argentine writer included haiku in his 1981 collection La cifra?

Octavio Paz had earlier put many haiku into Piedras Sueltas in 1955.

What did Richard Wright title the 1959-60 poetry manuscript that publisher William Targ rejected?

He submitted it to William Targ of World Publishing, who turned it down; scholars call him the first noteworthy American minority writer of haiku.

Which two early Western scholars were mostly dismissive of hokku's poetic value?

Basil Hall Chamberlain and William George Aston were pioneering Japanologists but poor advocates for the form.