The Meandering Road: Memory, Inheritance, and the Distinctive Voice of European Haiku

Despite the international expansion of haiku as a global poetry genre, comparative studies distinguishing European from North American haiku remain scarce. This article borrows from Roman Jakobson’s theory of the dominant to address this gap, observing foregrounding tendencies in the English-language European haiku published between 2015 and 2025, analyzed in comparison with the North American baseline from the leading journals of the genre. Drawing on Haruo Shirane's distinction between the horizontal and vertical axes of haiku composition, and on Richard Gilbert's taxonomy of disjunctive techniques, the study identifies two main dominants in European haiku: an orientation toward collective history and cultural memory, and an allusive depth rooted in shared literary inheritance, rather than in the phenomenological perception central to the North American framework. Close reading of selected poems is supported by practitioner and institutional discourse from both continents. The findings are offered as a theoretical framework rather than a statistical contribution, designed to provide analytical direction for future empirical studies of international haiku across regional identifications.