Met on the Road

Come along with Bill Higginson and Penny Harter on a haiku journey across the United States from Scotch Plains, New Jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico—and with Bill to the 1991 Haiku North America conference in California. With 75 poems by 48 different poets including 24 poems by Bill and Penny, this book is a unique haibun—part travel journal, part haiku anthology. It describes the land, the self, two special cats, and many poets who share a love of haiku—all met on the road.

the neighborhood

silent under streetlamps—

a thin mist

To order for $10.00 plus shipping, please contact Press Here.

1993, saddle-stapled, 36 pages, 5½ x 8½ inches, ISBN 978-1-878798-10-3

• “We are very grateful for both the opportunity to meet poets across the country and to share haiku and thoughts on haiku with them. This book is dedicated in that spirit of sharing to our friends, the haiku poets of North America and Japan.” —from the dedication

• Read more about William J. Higginson and his haiku legacy.

• Visit William J. Higginson’s honorary curator page on the American Haiku Archives website.

(book photo by Terri L. French)

William J. Higginson began his study of haiku while learning Japanese at Yale University and serving with the United States Air Force in Japan early in the 1960s. After returning from Japan he began writing seriously, and his translations, haiku, longer poems, fictions, and critical writings have appeared in magazines and anthologies from North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. He was a charter member of the Haiku Society of America at its founding in 1968, and served as its president in 1976. From 1971 to 1976 he edited Haiku Magazine, and he founded From Here Press in 1975. Since the early 1970s he has conducted workshops in writing and the teaching of writing as part of the National Endowment for the Arts Poets-in- the-Schools program. His The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1985, is now available from Kodansha International. Simon & Schuster recently published his anthology of haiku from around the world, Wind in the Long Grass, in an edition illustrated for children. He is currently working on a sequel to the Haiku Handbook and a number of translation projects. [The sequel book turned out to be two: The Haiku Seasons and Haiku World, both published in 1997.]

Penny Harter is a poet and fiction writer, author of several books, including White Flowers in the Snow (New Rivers Press), Hiking the Crevasse: Poems on the Way to Divorce (Warthog Press), Lovepoems (Old Plate Press), and The Monkey’s Face (From Here Press). Her work appears in magazines and anthologies published worldwide. She has also worked extensively in Poets-in-the-Schools, and is a past president of the Haiku Society of America. A new chapbook of her poems is forthcoming from Singular Speech Press, and her collection of poems and haiku reflecting on the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai, Stages and Views, will be published in 1993 in the “Reflections” series by Katydid Books. In 1994 Simon & Schuster will publish her collection Shadow Play: Night Haiku.

Bill and Penny are both members of P.E.N. International, and have visited Japan as guests of government agencies, corporations, and poetry organizations. They have appeared on Japanese television, have addressed audiences at the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo, and elsewhere in Japan, and have judged haiku contests for Japan Air Lines and the prefecture of Yamagata, among others.