Today's post is doing double-duty: I wanted to write up something about William Higginson's Handbook of Haiku before my Wednesday workshop (I reference his Handbook in the slidedeck of Haiku Features), and in the mail today I just received my copy of Higginson's beautiful illustrated haiku anthology, Wind in the Long Grass, so I can write about that too!
You can find not one but TWO copies of Higginson's Haiku Handbook at the Internet Archive, along with his Wind in the Long Grass and also his Haiku Seasons.
The Handbook's full title – The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku – reflects the wonderfully inviting and supportive community that has taken shape as a result of the global haiku movement. Higginson, along with so many other haiku writers and scholars then and now, is very keen to encourage people to create and share their haiku, contributing to a creative community of readers and writers where we are all teachers and learners together.
In particular, Higginson's Handbook provides the most user-friendly explanation I have read about the evolution of haiku in the context of Japanese literature and cultural life; see Chapter 8: Traditional Form in Japanese Poetry. In other basic haiku books that I read, when the authors started talking about Japanese literary forms I had never heard of by authors I didn't recognize in a cultural context that was unknown to me, my eyes would just glaze over. But Higginson somehow finds a way to make it not just easy to follow but also fascinating, showing us how these units of 5 measures and 7 measures began to take shape in the poetry of sixth-century Japan, and then how haiku as we know it today eventually emerged over the course of literally a thousand years of poetic experimentation. That was my favorite part of the book, but I enjoyed everything about it. Highly – highly – recommended!
The Haiku Handbook was first published 40 years ago — in 1985 — and a 25th-anniversary edition was published in 2010, shortly after Higginson's death in 2008. The global haiku movement was already well established when the book first came out, and that movement has just gotten stronger and stronger in the decades since. You can read more about Higginson's life and his contributions to haiku in this Wikipedia article. The 25th-anniversary edition of the Handbook is still in print (and it has an introduction by Jane Reichhold, a haiku writer and scholar whom I will have to blog about at some point!), plus you can find copies of both the original and anniversary editions at bookfinder.com (my go-to site for finding cheap used books).
I'll save Higginson's wonderful Haiku Seasons book for another post, but I did want to say something today also about Wind in the Long Grass since my copy just arrived: it's beautiful! This is a haiku book for both children and adults, with 40 pages of haiku poetry, organized by seasons and illustrated by Sandra Speidel. You can read the book at the Internet Archive, and here are some photos I took of my good-as-new used copy. A few words from Higginson's introduction, keeping things simple for all his readers and in the spirit of haiku:
The haiku and pictures in this book will all make you imagine that you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching something in a special way.
Yes! That's haiku!
(Note: the pagination is off at the Archive copy, so you cannot see the 2-page spreads properly; that happens sometimes at the Archive... but you can certainly take a look there and when you see the lovely poems and artwork, I'm sure you will want to get your own used copy; it's a wonderful book.)