Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Poets and Poems: Julien Vocance and “One Hundred Visions of War”


I’ll be honest here. I thought I knew, or was at least aware of, the major poets, British or otherwise, of World War I. I was wrong. I’d never heard of the poet Julien Vocance. One black eye for me.  

He wasn’t just another war poet. Vocance did something that no one had done before. He used the haiku form of poetry to help him understand what he’d experienced in the Great War. And it was his work, collected as One Hundred Visions of War, that first popularized the writing of haiku.

 

Perhaps that’s two black eyes for me – one for not knowing Vocance, and one for not knowing how the haiku form moved into Western culture.


To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

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