Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus Week #1
Hello, Poetry Fanatics!
Today we’re talking about our first Beat poet, Jack Kerouac. I first encountered Beat Generation ideas through reruns of the old sitcom, The Many Loves ofDobie Gillis. This sitcom originally ran from 1959-1963, long before my time. But, I discovered it when it ran in the late evenings as a Nickolodian experiment called, Nick at Night in the late 1980s.
A pre-Gilligan’s Island Bob Denver played a comical version of a Beatnik. And even though Denver’s character, Maynard G. Krebs, was played for laughs and written to lampoon young idealism, I was fascinated with the version of the culture presented there.
That fascination would lead me to the real Beatniks and their poet laureate, Jack Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, and died on October 21, 1969. While he is most well known for his, in many cases lightly fictionalized, novels like On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur, Kerouac also wrote a lot of poetry.
Book of Haikus, collects hundreds of poems Kerouac wrote in his notebooks, many of which were unpublished prior to this edition. Kerouac is largely responsible for the English language haiku renaissance that began in the 1950s and 1960s, though his approach is now largely abandoned by modern haiku poets.
While Richard Wright always used a 17-syllable, three-line structure for his haiku, Kerouac abandoned that formality for shorter, pithier poems.
Jack Kerouac chose to pluralize haiku in a manner consistent with standard English language protocols by adding an “s”, I choose to use “haiku” as both the singular and the plural, consistent with how the word is used in Japanese. Just like the plural of Pokemon is Pokemon, in Japanese, the plural of haiku is haiku. The context of the sentence tells you whether the word is singular or plural.
I used to be quite strident about this point, but now see that it does not really matter. In English, we import a lot of words from other languages and. we are consistently inconsistent about how we pluralize words. Sometimes we add an “s” to the end, sometimes we use the pluralization convention of the source language, and sometimes we use a convention from a language other than English or the source language.
In the style guide for Weirdo Poetry, I use haiku as the plural, but I hope you will feel free to pluralize the word however makes the most sense to you.
In Japanese, a haiku must meet several requirements:
(For a more detailed look at the requirements of haiku, see my post, Putting the Right Words in the Right Spaces.)
One line of 17 syllables, divided into three parts, with the first and third parts being five syllables long, and the second line being seven syllables.
The poem must be able to be read aloud in a single breath
The subject of the poem should be from the natural world.
Each poem should contain an approved kigo, or season word.
Each poem should evoke a sense of wabi-sabi.
Each poem should contain a cutting word or line (sometimes also called the turn)
Each poem should be written in the present tense.
Poetic “trickery” such as rhymes, alliteration, similes, and metaphors should be avoided.
However, when you write a haiku in English, you cannot manage all of these features. You inevitably must leave something out. Writers of formal haiku, like Richard Wright, choose to forego the single-breath idea. In typical Beat poet fashion, Kerouac chooses brevity over formal syllable structure and writes something I call free-verse haiku.
Almost all English-language haiku poets also view the concepts of nature, season words, wabi-sabi, and cutting lines with less formality than traditional Japanese haiku poets.
All this is to say that English-language haiku is its own poetic form, inspired by, but independent of, Japanese haiku.
Jack Kerouac’s haiku are worth studying because he packs so much meaning in so few words. Almost all of his haiku do have the sense of the beauty of impermanence (wabi-sabi) and cutting words or lines.
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