Thinking in Tristichs

About the Book

In Japan, Thomas Wolfe’s long narrative novels frequently inspired his readers to write a great number of haiku poems. However, Martin Wasserman, this book’s author, discovered that it was not in Wolfe’s novels but in his short stories where one could find endless inspiration. Moreover, in Professor Wasserman’s case, it was not the writing of haiku that eventually resulted from the perusing of Wolfe’s shorter works but a different type of three-line poem known as the tristich. Fortunately, as the late Greek poet Yannis Ritsos pointed out, tristichs, just like haikus, are capable of delivering sweet and poignant little pictures that often stay with the reader over a lifetime.

About the Author

Martin Wasserman, the creator of this book, is a Professor Emeritus at SUNY Adirondack, a college in the State University of New York system where he taught for thirty-six years. During his career he published over thirty journal articles and three books. One of those works, Kafka Kaleidoscope, was chosen as a “Best Book” by the Small Press Review in 1999. Professor Wasserman’s two most recent works are an original poetry piece entitled Kafka, Rilke, Nadel: Three German Writers Pulling Me Toward the East and a poetry translation called What There Is, As It Is: The Epigrammatic Poems of Ludwig Feuerbach.