Softcover, 94 pages
8 1/2 x 11 inches
Illustrations by George Herms
2019
Diane di Prima
X Artists' Books

Haiku originated in New York City in 1964, when Beat Generation poet Diane di Prima gave West Coast assemblage artist George Herms a series of seasonal poems that would lead him to create a suite of illustrating woodcuts.

can't sleep: inside my head a new poem
is starting to kick at night

— Diane di Prima, Haiku, Spring

This, the first bound book of Haiku, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the poems’ printing by Herms in 1967 and the formation of his LOVƎ Press.

Haiku includes reproductions of di Prima’s 32 short poems and Herms’s 36 woodcuts from the 1967 edition, as well as an essay by curator Sarah C. Bancroft, “On Making Haiku.”

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Diane di Prima is a poet whose writing and activism helped define the Beat Generation.

George Herms is an artist/alchemist whose work finding the beautiful in found and discarded objects has led to his being known as one of the founders of the West Coast “assemblage” movement.