This chapter explores Kerouac’s poetic output, arguing that he should be considered an important twentieth-century poet and poetic innovator. In particular, this chapter explores Kerouac’s book-length poetic masterwork, Mexico City Blues, and his development of an American form of haiku, as found in Book of Haikus and elsewhere. The poetic forms of Mexico City Blues and Book of Haikus are very different, and yet taken together, they demonstrate Kerouac’s range as a poet. With these major works as its focus, this chapter aims to reassess Kerouac’s poetry by reading its formal and thematic preoccupations in terms of the advent of the mid-century “New American Poetry,” which rebuked the norms of the reigning poetic establishment centered in universities and their associated anthologies and quarterlies.

Wright wrote and published poetry throughout his career, culminating in the remarkable collection of “projections in the haiku manner” which he composed in the last years of his life. This analysis contextualizes Wright’s late turn to haiku in relation to his larger body of work; his reading of scholarship on haiku and Japanese Buddhism; his involvement with the Partisan Review during the 1930s; his revisionary engagement with modernist poetry, including Ezra Pound’s haiku-inspired imagism as well as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; and his affirmation of Emersonian pragmatism. I conclude by exploring the transmission of Wright’s legacy to contemporary African American poets such as Sonia Sanchez, whose liberating experiments with haiku have resulted in new expressive possibilities.

This chapter reports on a poetic inquiry with English language learners in the Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university context. It focuses on the use of haiku – a Japanese poem containing seventeen syllables in a three-line 5–7–5 syllable pattern with the usage of a seasonal reference and a cutting word – and analyses features of spoken language in a corpus of English language haiku poetry written by Japanese second language (L2) learners. The chapter begins by reviewing previous studies of the use of haiku in L2 contexts. It then describes a quantitative, corpus-based study which involved the analysis of textual and linguistic features of English language haiku writing. The data, consisting of a total of 2,017 haiku poems written by 204 first-year engineering students at a Japanese public university, were submitted to statistical analyses. The results illustrate some specific features of English language haiku produced by Japanese L2 writers: haiku poetry is a short, descriptive text which presents each writer’s emotional reactions to his or her daily life, and it also includes such spoken language features as the twelve verbs most frequently used in spoken discourse (Biber and Conrad ), evaluative and emotive adjectives, contractions and vague language. This study suggests that the task of composing haiku in English can play an important role in L2 learning in terms of raising learners’ awareness of typical spoken forms in the target language.

Pound’s relationship with Japanese literature can be broadly divided into three areas: the influence of ‘hokku’ on his work, his interest in ‘Noh’ drama, and his own impact on Japanese literature. The first of these has, until recently, dominated in English-language Pound scholarship about Japan.