The Worker Writers School supports writers from one of New York City's most ubiquitous yet least-heard populations: low-wage workers. Mark Nowak, a writer and founding director of the school, presents a selection of haiku written by "frontline workers" during the Covid 19 crisis. The poets included here had already been studying examples of the form and its connection to political resistance from seventeenth-century Japan to the Black Arts Movement of the twentieth century, as well as its capacity to amplify voices of everyday life. These "coronavirus haiku" convey moments of protest, solace, wonder, certainty, love, and strife. The writers in this anthology hail from the school's worker center partners in New York City including Domestic Workers United, New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Street Vendor Project, and Retail Action Project: Thomas Barzey, Kerl Brooks, Estabon Chimilio, Nimfa Despabiladeras, Lorraine Garnett, Davidson Garrett, Seth Goldman, Christine Lewis, Doreen McGill, Alando McIntyre, Kelebohile Nkheranye, Alfreda Small, and Paloma Zapata.

Therapeutic haiku

The coronavirus pandemic. A time of social distancing. Isolation at home. Ever-climbing numbers of sick and dead. Economic collapse. Job losses. Protests. Incompetent government responses. Uncertainty. Toilet paper shortages. How can we possibly cope with all this bad news?Why, make fun of it of course!And what better way to make fun of a world-wide catastrophe than to do it using haiku. Remember haiku? The bane of your public-school English class - a three-line poem of five syllables, then seven syllables, then five syllables. It's perfect for these times.Take a break and read this collection of over one hundred verses designed to make you laugh, make you groan, and sometimes even say WTF?Remember, this collection uses profanity, and revels in it's use of immature themes. It may not be the best choice for the kids to read, but your dirty grandma will love it.

The Essential Haiku brings together Robert Hass's beautifully fresh translations of the three great masters of the Japanese haiku tradition: Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the ascetic and seeker, and the haiku poet most familiar to English readers; Yosa Buson (1716-83), the artist, a painter renowned for his visually expressive poetry; and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), the humanist, whose haiku are known for their poignant or ironic wit. Each haiku master's section of the book is prefaced with an eloquent and informative introduction by Robert Hass, followed by a selection of over 100 poems and then by other poetry or prose by the poet, including journals and nature writing. Opening with Hass's superb introductory essay on haiku, the book concludes with a section devoted to Basho's writings and conversations on poetry. The seventeen-syllable haiku form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Each haiku is a meditation, a centring, a crystalline moment of realisation. Reading them has a way of bringing about calm and peace within the reader. The symbolism of the seasons and the Japanese habit of mind blend together in these poems to create an alchemy of reflection that is unsurpassed in literature. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as well as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of post-war America and Britain. Universal in its appeal, Robert Hass's The Essential Haiku is the definitive introduction to haiku and its greatest poets, and has been a bestseller in America for twenty years. 'I know that for years I didn't see how deeply personal these poems were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavour - Basho might have said "the scent" - of particular human life, because I had been told and wanted to believe that haiku were never subjective. I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said the soul can get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place. Better to sink down through the level of these poems - their attention to the year, their ideas about it, the particular human consciousness the poems reflect, Basho's profound loneliness and sense of suffering, Buson's evenness of temper, his love for the materials of art and for the colour and shape of things, Issa's pathos and comedy and anger' - Robert Hass

A collection of haikus follows a Valentine's Day theme and combine an introduction to the poetic form with cartoon-style illustrations.

Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.