Book of Hakius

The other Beat poets generally looked to him as a master, but Jack Kerouac’s general reputation will probably always be that of a novelist, albeit a mad one who did little prosaic and much prosodic. Even though he created significant swaths of poetry - within his famous prose and elsewhere, it is a small circle that considers him a poet.

But a new book of his poetry emerges, and its shows how far his poems would roam was no matter - he would not stray too far from the haiku form. This is known to readers of Scattered Poems and Pomes All Sizes, and jazz buffs familiar with his recordings with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims – but a better view of the amount of haiku Kerouac had within him is at hand.

A new collection of about 700 haikus now appears. Book of Haikus, Penguin Poets, 2003, includes works from several stages in Kerouac’s career and stands well with his other books of poems.

Edited and with an introduction by Regina Weinreich, Book of Haikus includes work Kerouac intended at one time to publish with Ferlinghetti  and City Lights as well as several years of notebook musings. The connections to his novels are usually not too far away as in:

Desolation, Desolation

 So hard

To come down off of

His approach to haiku form, like his approach to blues form, was creative. His first big step was to throw out the syllabic conventions. The classic syllable count of the Japanese form , he reasoned, worked for haiku poems in the Japanese language. English [and sometimes Breton], which he wrote in, would call for a different meter. Sometimes he called his haiku: “American Pops.”

While we are here in this ethereal state, where the sycamores bend and flyboys dissolve how about one more?

This July evening,

      A large frog

On my doorsill

For Kerouac, description was key. Encounter with object or experience was key. Something like “old tea head” Proust. Trusting vision, which for Kerouac was often a wigged-out wined-up view, was key. The picture was more important to him than the words. Smithing with words so much he became a great word master too – along with Great Rememberer and the Greatest American Existentialist. Words and pictures and vision is here in Book of Haikus.

[The above haikus are copyright the Kerouac estate.]

More on Book of Haikus at Amazon.com

Last update: 8/27/2003; 5:06:00 PM.