If you ever read any haiku, you're familiar with the poetry of Matsuo Basho, the greatest Japanese master of the genre. If you've only read his haiku in isolation, though, you haven't really read them. Basho was just as much of a travel writer as he was a poet, and many of his haiku are embedded in his travel journals, giving them a context in which the poetry often has much more impact.

Basho was a wanderer by temperament (or possibly by profession- one of the more out-there theories about him is that he was secretly going out on ninja missions!), and he walked very long distances in an era when travel was both dangerous and complicated.

You can usually find all of his travel writing in a single volume, but the titles of the individual pieces are pretty striking on their own: “Record of a Weather-worn Skeleton,” “Narrow Road to the Deep North.” As Basho wandered along from place to place, he would compose a haiku whenever anything interesting happened, so the haiku are sprinkled all through the text like some kind of seasoning. Another way to think of it is that the haiku are like gems, and the travel journal is like the setting for the gems. It's a very interesting way to read poetry, as an integrated part of a complete story. I think this model could be used as a basis for a fascinating new genre in English-language literature- poetry embedded in everything from fiction to philosophy.