A Celebration of Haiku

This special event, hosted by Lean Frog & Mother’s Hen Publications, will both inform and entertain you about the birth of the San Francisco Bay Area haiku movement of the 1950s. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and others, through their avid interest in Zen Buddhism, adapted this unique Japanese form to the new free-verse of the American poetic voice. Jack Kerouac would call them “Western Haiku” in his Scattered Poems, published by City Lights Books.

Featuring:

an invocation by Wes “Scoop” Nisker
MC Louis Cuneo
Bob Booker
Tobey Kaplan
Jeanne Lupton
Clive Matson
Florence Miller
Amos White

and other special guests w/ music by Lucho on sax and Toku Woo on guitar
Lean Frog was founded by Louis Cuneo in 1978 as a monthly newsletter to encourage others in the haiku spirit, and to write their own haiku by forming an understanding of Zen Buddhism and “The Way” through informal workshops conducted by Lean Frog in Oakland and Berkeley, California.

This will also be a book release party and book signing for Haiku Revisited, Volume 2.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in reviewing the original Haiku Revisited in 1975, said “They are true haiku worth revisiting over and over…”