Haiku as World Literature Conference

Haiku is perhaps the best travelled of all world literary genres. Since the seventeenth century, when Matsuo Bashō wrote his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, haiku poets have embarked on countless figural and literal journeys, and they have taken the genre with them. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dense social networks of haiku poets crisscrossed the whole of Japan, and by the early twentieth century, haiku in its modern form had spread across the globe through the work of poets including Ezra Pound, Rabindrath Tagore, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Yu Ping Bo. Today millions of people write haiku in Japanese and dozens of other languages. This symposium marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Despite spending the last seven years of his life immobilized by tuberculosis, Shiki contributed more than any other poet to the genre’s emergence as a globe-trotting literary form. Scholars and poets working on haiku in Japanese, English, Persian, Chinese, and Spanish will share their work on Shiki and on the poetics of haiku in its global dimensions.