Friday 5 October – Wednesday 20 April 2011
Basho's Smirk - the Game of Haiku
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
This afternoon seminar will look at how haiku has become a global pastime with a competitive edge.
Haiku’s origins lie in the linked-verse parties and tournaments popular in Basho’s time (1644-1694). Later, Western-influenced writers like Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902), who saw literature as a calling, frowned upon such literary games. Today, for most Japanese, haiku has returned to its playful roots. There are national competitions, with prizes offered by the major newspapers and poetry institutions, and a plethora of haiku tours. With millions of people participating, the foremost professional poets effectively run big businesses, part of a haiku industry.
Meanwhile, poets in the West have come to ape and even outdo the Japanese in their daring experimentation with form and content. The internet has helped to spread a glorious confusion about what exactly haiku is. Is it really a game that all can play? Or is it, after all, truly one of the world’s great forms of poetry?
About the contributors
Stephen Henry Gill
Stephen Henry Gill is a writer and university lecturer. He has a long-standing interest in haiku which began in the early 1970s when, influenced by Nobuyuki Yuasa’s Basho translations, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he began writing haiku in English under the name ‘Tito’. He co-organised (with Andrew Gerstle) a Basho tercentenary conference at SOAS, University of London, the papers from which were subsequently published as Rediscovering Basho (Global Oriental, 1999). He has written a number of radio programmes, the first of which, Insect Musicians, won a Sony Prize; his most recent, Cherry Women, Cherry Men, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on New Year’s Eve last year. Until recently he was lecturing at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where he still lives and leads the Kansai-based Hailstone Haiku Circle.
Professor Andrew Gerstle
Andrew Gerstle (chair) is Professor of Japanese Studies at SOAS, University of London. His most recent book is Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage: 1780-1830, which was the catalogue for an exhibition at the British Museum in 2005 which also travelled to two museums in Japan. He published Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays in 2001. His current project is on Japanese erotic art. His transcription and translation of the 18th century erotic book Onna shimegawa oeshi-bumi was published in Japan in August 2007.