A funky little book of haiku by Sean Rima, dedicated to Texas, the Universe, God, and Siria.

This book assembles lectures and essays on literature (William Wordsworth, Walter Benjamin, Chinese mountain poetry, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Tao Te Ching), art (Paleolithic cave art, Vincent Van Gogh, American landscape painting), and Japanese poetry forms (haiku, haibun, tanka) that were originally presented and published between 2000 and 2007. The essays identify strategies to counter the so-called postmodern condition. Matters of will, ethics, and consciousness are examined in comparative contexts with the aim of formulizing models of enlightened states of being and their aesthetic expressions. This study focuses on Wordsworth's rainbow epiphany; Walter Benjamin's «aura» and «monad»; Chinese mountain poetry's cosmic emptiness; Nietzsche's Hyperborean; Paleolithic cave art's transpersonal expression; Van Gogh's «dizzy heights» of natural beauty; American landscape painters' depiction of the sublime; haiku's absolute metaphor epiphany; and tanka's connection between natural beauty and erotic feeling. The collection is a re-examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson's «fundamental unity» between humanity and nature, as well as an examination of often-unmediated affective experience and its expression in this context through literature and art.

Turn of a leaf is a collection of poetry written in styles which originated in oriental countries. Poetry from the east is often a snapshot of an image or images and set down to paper in a style to induce the same emotion or thoughts in the reader as witnessed by the poet. By turning each leaf you will find scenes of nature, often with an unusual perspective, lovers loved and lovers lost, children at play and even the everyday person about their daily routine.

Haiku, Other Arts, and Literary Disciplines investigates the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and determines the relationships between haiku and other arts, such as essay writing, painting, and music, as well as the backgrounds of haiku, such as literary movements, philosophies, and religions that underlie haiku composition. By analyzing the poets who played major roles in the development of haiku and its related genres, these essays illustrate how Japanese haiku poets, and American writers such as Emerson and Whitman, were inspired by nature, especially its beautiful scenes and seasonal changes. Western poets had a demonstrated affinity for Japanese haiku which bled over into other art mediums, as these chapters discuss.

The author, Pino Viscusi, witness of changes in culture and traditions of the 21st century, sees in haiku poems an important element for the integration and union among people. If art is universal in its nature, the exercise of writing haiku verses can affect the lives of all, from the youngest to the elderly, allowing us to rediscover the enchantment of nature and the love for small things.

While the rise of the charmingly simple, brilliantly evocative haiku is often associated with the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the form had already flourished for more than four hundred years before Basho even began to write. These early poems, known as hokku, are identical to haiku in syllable count and structure but function differently as a genre. Whereas each haiku is its own constellation of image and meaning, a hokku opens a series of linked, collaborative stanzas in a sequence called renga. Under the mastery of Basho, hokku first gained its modern independence. His talents contributed to the evolution of the style into the haiku beloved by so many poets around the world Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, and Billy Collins being notable devotees. Haiku Before Haiku presents 320 hokku composed between the thirteenth and early eighteenth centuries, from the poems of the courtier Nijo Yoshimoto to those of the genre's first "professional" master, Sogi, and his disciples. It features 20 masterpieces by Basho himself. Steven D. Carter introduces the history of haiku and its aesthetics, classifying these poems according to style and context. His rich commentary and notes on composition and setting illuminate each work, and he provides brief biographies of the poets, the original Japanese text in romanized form, and earlier, classical poems to which some of the hokku allude.