In a recent lecture given at the Japan Information and Culture Center in Washington, D.C. University of Maryland professor Dr. Eleanor Kerkham discussed haiku, which she called the only Japanese literary form which has been so widely influential. Dr. Kerkham spoke as part of the Japan Faces West lecture series, which looks at Japans initial contacts with the West during the Meiji era and the crosscultural influences that took place because of Ws interaction. Tracing the development of haiku from its earliest days until the present, she called it the only poetic form which has gained such universal acceptance. Kerkham began her lecture by comparing haiku as a phenomenon equivalent in world literature only to the near universal adoption of the modern western realistic novel. She continued: The great difference is that with the novel it is often the best professional writers who have chosen to invest their creative energies in that particular genre, and with haiku it is occasionally more often ordinary individuals, writers and teachers worldwide who are drawn to it. They have been attracted to the haiku as an accessible and flexible poetic form which can serve many different artistic, educational, even social and psychological purposes. Indeed haiku versions, adaptations or imitations of it are being composed in virtually every major western country as well as several African, Asian, South American, and Middle Eastern nations.

Website: http://asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/countries/japan/haiku.html