I have received a few more books in the last week that I purchased with holiday cash from amazon.com’s network of sellers.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard, 1999.
I recently read about this work, Benjamin’s notes and clippings for a book about arcades in 1880s Paris that he was never able to write due to his untimely death during World War II, and was immediately intrigued by it because of its obsessive nature. I also love books that somehow stretch the codex form, as this one does as a reproduction of a number of excerpts rather than a longer, single text. It was less than $30.00, which feels like a steal for such a massive (over 1,000 pages) volume.
Gurga, Lee, and Scott Metz, eds. Haiku 21. Lincoln: Modern Haiku, 2011.
Van Den Heuvel, Cor, ed. The Haiku Anthology. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1999.
As part of my continuing explorations of haiku I have been trying to read lots of anthologies to get a sense of the field. Van Den Heuvel’s is apparently the bastion of traditional haiku, whereas Gurga and Metz both advocate for a more innovative aesthetic. I lean toward the latter, but it is helpful to read examples of both, and Van Den Heuvel’s anthology of baseball haiku is what got me interested in the genre in the first place. From what I know so far, it seems like an essential aspect of the haiku spirit is to keep an open mind.
Daniel Shank Cruz 