Three Demons

  September 24, 2024poetry | pb | 128 pgs.5.5" x 8.5"978-1-960385-27-7   Sanki Saitō (1900-1962), born in Tsuyama, Japan as Keichoku Saitō, was a short story writer and poet best known for his, at the time, controversial modern haiku (shinkō haiku)—works which became emblematic of the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s. Where the traditionalists insisted on the inclusion of traditional “season words” and wanted haiku that were based on close observation of the world, the New Rising Haiku poets moved away from the former and in place of the latter, opening the door to imagined experience. As his reputation as a literary maverick spread, Sanki (a pen name meaning “Three Demons”) was imprisoned in 1940 during the Japanese government’s WWII crackdown on radical artists, and was officially forbidden to write and publish. At the end of the war, Sanki began writing and publishing again, eventually publishing three more collections of verse before his death in 1962. The haiku in Three Demo