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 woodcuts illustrating them.

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 fiftieth anniversary of the poems’ printing by Herms in 1967 and the formation of his LOVE Press.

Haiku includes reproductions of di Prima’s thirty-two short poems and Herms’s thirty-six woodcuts from the 1967 edition as well as an essay by curator Sarah C. Bancroft, On Making Haiku.