Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

was dizzyingly fast—two weeks, including their copy editing,
which was, by the way, very good. So I didn’t have any time
for anything but the quickest final pass.
You know, Bashō himself might have been one of the first
to buy an iPad or Kindle. He was never without the books of
earlier Chinese and Japanese poets he loved, and I imagine
would have been happy to carry less weight in his knapsack.
He was, throughout his life, both practical and what’s now
called “an early adopter”—haiku anthologies were the first
broadly popular printed books in Japan, so Bashō, who published
in them and also brought one out himself, was participating
in the leading-edge technology of his time. One thing I
muse over in The Heart of Haiku is that Bashō, today, might
have been the first person to take You Tube videos and turn
them into a true art form. What he did feels comparable to
that, to me.
There are so many superb books on Bashō already, I’m not
sure the world needs another. That was always one of my hesitations
about turning this into a book. I do retain all the rights,
and will quite likely include this in my next book of essays.
That way it will reach more people who don’t already know
about haiku—which is what I first wrote it to do. And the
Kindle Single did do that—a truly startling number of people
have bought it so far, in only two months. I’m sure it helps
that it costs only 99 cents, and can be downloaded onto any
computer almost instantly. I hope some of them may continue
to pursue that curiosity further.
CE: I understand that this project began as a presentation for
the 2007 Branching Out series of poetry lectures held in public
libraries around the country, a program co-sponsored by
the Poetry Society of America and Poets’ House. How would
you characterize your initial audience? How much did you revise
the presentation before it was published by Amazon? For
instance, to what extent was this project originally conceived
of as a way to help people better understand and appreciate
haiku as readers or as casual writers of haiku-like poems?
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64 Haiku Society of America