Page 15 - The DCO Anthology of Haiku Booklet

Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki are referred to as “the Great Four” masters of haiku, and their work is often collected together in anthologies. Robert Aitken’s The River of Heaven and Sam Hamill’s The Sound of Water offer good samplings of work by the Great Four.
The first European known to have written haikus was Hendrik Doeff, an early 19th-century Dutch official at a Nagasaki trading post. The form began to be widely known in Europe and American in the early 20th century. Among the important early collections of haiku translated into English are Kenneth Yasuda’s Japanese Haiku and Harold Henderson’s Introduction to Haiku.
Joan Girous’s The Haiku Form looks at examples in Japanese and English, exploring the challenges and subtleties of the form; in How to Haiku, Bruce Ross offers lessons and advice for the poet wishing to take on the form.
Many American poets have written haikus. Two names you might not associate with the form are Richard Wright, whose haiku are collected in Haiku: This Other World, and Jack Kerouac, whose work can be found in Book of Haikus; Kerouac reads some of his own haiku on Blues and Haikus.
The brevity of the haiku, and the tightly restricted nature of the form at its most traditional, makes it a popular way to introduce children to the idea of poetic form. Deanna Caswell’s Guess Who, Haiku asks young children to identify the animals being described in its haiku; Bob Raczka’s Guyku is “a year of haiku for boys,” focused on the fun of being outdoors.
Source: LA Public Library online