Bashō Meets Luther,
Issa Meets Moby Dick

Post date: May 28, 2013 2:59:48 AM

I love collecting poems about haiku—or in this case, haiku that are somewhat about haiku. Two new additions in the “Poems About Haiku” section of the Poems by Others page are “Luther’s Narrow Road” and “Issa on the Pequod,” both by Ron Starr, from his book A Map by a Dim Lamp (Seattle: Ravenna Press, 2006). He writes that the first sequence “uses some of Bashō’s haiku as templates into which I’ve inserted words from one of Luther’s essays,” and that the second sequence “uses some of Issa’s haiku as templates into which I’ve inserted vocabulary from Moby Dick.” He’s also got an unpublished sequence on Buson’s haiku, which I hope to add in due course, and I hope he’ll write one on Shiki, too. In the meantime, take a look!