Japanese haiku is a a rare thing in the world of poetry: a world-famous, universally beloved verse form, practiced both by serious poets and schoolkids. Its present-day popularity is especially incredible given its ancient history. In Haiku Before Haiku, Steven Carter, a professor of Japanese literature at Stanford, charts the emergence of haiku as an art-form, and offers new translations of 320 poems from the period in which haiku was developing out of an earlier form called hokku.