Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following in the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his ‘American’ haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this beautifully packaged volume, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haikus, from both published and unpublished sources. The result is a compact collection of more than five hundred poems that reveal a lesser known but important side of Jack Kerouac’s literary legacy.
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes. Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia and The Doors. In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.
Edição portuguesa: “Livro de haikus (Poemas escolhidos)” da Flâneur, Março 2023
Bebo o meu chá e digo Hm, hm
I drink my tea And say Hm hm
Não o diria de forma mais eloquente!
Jack Kerouac é um autor que não me desperta interesse, mas não resisto a uns belos haikus, sejam de que nacionalidade forem, e nestes “Poemas Escolhidos” há vários do meu agrado.
Ao sol as asas da borboleta Qual vitral de igreja
In the Sun the butterfly wings Like a church window
****************
A mosca, tão solitária quanto eu Nesta casa vazia
The fly, just as lonesome as I am In this empty house
*****************
Todo o dia a usar um chapéu que não estava Na minha cabeça
Remember the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial where two people collide? “You got peanut butter on my chocolate!” “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” And the rest is delicious magic? Well, that was me picking up Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus. I love haiku. And I love Kerouac. But I was skeptical about the combination. Fortunately, I ended up as pleasantly surprised as the clumsy snackers.
This volume includes the poems Kerouac selected for his Book of Haikus as well as poems gathered from his novels and notebooks. The poems from Book of Haikus are superior to the others, yet they make up less than half of the volume.
I have mixed feelings about the inclusion of so many poems from Kerouac’s novels and notebooks. On the one hand, I can see how they would be of interest to those studying the development of Kerouac’s art, but on the other hand, they lower the quality of the volume as a whole. Although I appreciate editor Regina Weinreich’s dedication to her project, I think she does Kerouac a disservice by padding the book with weaker poems.
That said, the poems Kerouac selected for Book of Haikus are impressive. I think Basho would be proud. Here are a few of my favorites.
“Quiet moonlit night— Neighbor boy studying By telescope; —‘Ooo!’ ” (16)
“In back of the supermarket in the parking lot weeds, Purple flowers” (18)
“Glow worm sleeping on this flower, Your light’s on! ” (27)
Kerouac’s three-line poems are not composed of seventeen syllables, but they are faithful to the spirit of Japanese haiku. A haiku has two elements: an observation of nature and a sudden perception. Moreover, Basho identified the aesthetic of haiku as one of Karumi, or lightness. I think Kerouac’s poems succeed in achieving both the form and the aesthetic of haiku.
Among the notebook poems, I found one that seems to be an earlier version of another one of my favorites. Here is the poem in Book of Haikus.
“Bee, why are you staring at me? I’m not a flower!” (15)
Here is the poem from the notebooks.
“Am I a flower bee, that you Stare at me?” (155)
Weinreich says that Kerouac revised his poems. This is not something that Kerouac did with his other writings. It seems likely to me that the poem from the notebook was revised into the poem included in Book of Haikus.
“Am I a flower” is moved from the first line to the third line where it becomes an exclamation instead of a question. The whole poem builds up to it. “I’m not a flower!”
The address to the bee is moved from the second line to the first line. This is simpler and more direct. In the earlier poem the address to the bee occurs in the middle of the question. This dilutes the effect of the question. The reader of the revised poem knows right from the start that the question is addressed to the bee.
Addressing the bee in the middle also makes the earlier poem a single complex sentence whereas the revised poem follows the traditional Japanese form of an observation of nature followed by a sudden perception with these two elements divided by a Kireji, or cutting word. In English, the function of the Kireji is often performed by a dash or other punctuation mark.
The first part of the revised poem ~“Bee, why are you/staring at me?” ~ is the question addressed to the bee and the second part of the poem ~ “I’m not a flower!” ~ is the sudden, surprising, and humorous reaction of the speaker.
This comparison between the notebook poem and the Book of Haikus poem is revealing. The poems from Book of Haikus ~ like the haiku of Basho ~ have the feeling of spontaneity, but they are instead carefully crafted poems. The appearance of spontaneity is evidence of the talent of the poet.
I am happy to shelve Kerouac’s Book of Haikus alongside my other volumes of haiku. Unless it better belongs with my Beat Generation books. Perhaps I should find out where the peanut butter cups are shelved in the supermarket—with the peanut butter or with the chocolate. But wherever I put Book of Haikus, it has turned out to be a serendipitous discovery for me.
ریویوی ۲۰۲۰ - بر اساس هایکوهای نسل بیت با ترجمهی علیرضا بهنام
بچههای نسل بیت هایکوی هفده سیلابی ژاپن را برداشتند و آمریکایی کردند. هرچه بیشتر از پیچیدگی و آرایهها پرهیز کردند و به توصیفِ خالصِ «حس» پرداختند؛ حس دیدن طبیعت، یا یک اتفاق روزمره. حالا این همه تلاش شاعران برای دوری از استعاره را در نظر بگیرید، و حرکت جناب شروین پاشایی را که آمده عکس مگس و پوتین و دیوار کشیده زیر شعرهایی دربارهی مگسها و ماهیها و قدم زدنها. لاالهالاالله.
*** ریویوی ۲۰۱۹ - بر اساس هایکوهای امریکایی با ترجمهی فرید قدمی
Eh, Kerouac as a poet. . . If you are interested in haiku, or in the ways Eastern poetic forms and sensibilities have been imported to the west, if I were you, I would read Gary Snyder, who helped import haiku to the beats and that generation in this country. Snyder is a serious poet and serious Buddhist, who inspired Kerouac and other beats, but none of them did work to match what Snyder did. Book of Haikus compiler and introducer Weinrich makes a case for this book as both serious poetry and irreverent (Kerouac called his American haiku "pops"), but I'm not convinced. There are some decent haiku in this large collection, collected attractively in a small book format, and if you are a Kerouac completist, (as I kinda am) you will want to own this, but for most readers interested in Kerouac and/or haiku, I would just read Kerouac's fiction.
Collection of short poems Kerouac wrote over several years. Most of them are three lines, a few are two liners. He doesn't build the poem on the 17 syllable construction, so I would call them micro poems rather than haiku. They were written at a time when he was taking a look at Buddhism. Most of them have the flavor of traditional Japanese haiku with reference to nature with reference to the moon and all that, but my favorites are a little more unique. The one about the fly in the medicine cabinet who died of old age and the one about the rain puddle cleaning the soles of his shoes were memorable. Kerouac was a hard core artist, who else would write little poems?
If you're interested in learning more about Kerouac, this little book is worth checking out of the library.
HAHAHA KEROUAC IS SO FUNNY I THOUGHT THIS WAS GONNA BE A SERIOUS BOOK BUT NOOOOOPE. although towards the end they do get more sombre after he succumbs to alcoholism. here r some of my favorites: some are really pretty "the top of jack / mountain - done in / by golden clouds" and some are terribly lonely "racing westward through / the clouds in the howling/ wind, the moon" some are weird and entertaining "the cow, taking a big / dreamy crap, turning / to look at me" some are so sassy "train tunnel, too dark/for me to write: that/ men are ignorant" some are endearingly quirky "i made raspberry fruit jello/ the color of rubies / in the setting sun" some are just endearing "if i go out now, / my paws / will get wet" (which is frm the pov of his cat!) and some are funny af "here comes / my dragon /- goodbye!"
The beauty of haiku--I suppose the beauty particularly of the haiku found in this volume, coming as it does from a prosaic Western perspective and being transmitted to a prosaic Western mind/reader--is that there is simultaneously a a degree of specificity and universality to the images (or, if you like, symbols) evoked. I have observed images so similar to some described in this book, that it is almost as though Kerouac's shade were what I'd mistaken for that cast by the tall birch in a park once sat beneath--him with with a ghostly notebook, scribbling my unconsciously dharmic doings unbeknownst to me.
Fantastic. Kerouac displays true mastership of this form of poetry. Intelligently avoiding the restricting rules of traditional, conventional Japanese haiku, Kerouac invents the form here which he calls 'pops' - short, concise three-line poems which are very effective. Where Kerouac does not follow the 'rules' syllabically, he does in terms of including seasonal words - the moon, the sun, leaves, noon - all symbolic of the season in which the haiku was written, even the 'winter fly' which ingeniously refers to the END of winter, i.e. the advent of Spring.
Out of all of Kerouac's poetry, I believe that this has to be some of his strongest work, right up there with the ingenious, the timeless Mexico City Blues. Many people wrote Jack off because of his beliefs about spontaneous prose and Truman Capote's old hack that he was just "typing" not "writing" - well, time has shown, with increasing evidence, that he was a significant writer in American society, who in the later half of the twentieth century was apparently told by God to "go moan for Man" and someone whose quality of writing has consistently shown that he deserves more attention and acclaim.
Most people only know of Jack Kerouac as the author of On the Road, but this book demonstrates that he has skills in other areas too. Kerouac’s haiku often stick to the traditional form of 5-7-5, but he does sometimes experiment too, and often with eastern forms that he discovered through his forays into Buddhism and other eastern religions.
I only have one real gripe with this book – the writing itself is pretty epic, and I really enjoy the way that Kerouac invokes nature and natural themes in to his writing, in the fine traditions of the oldest of the old haiku writers. That said, I’m pretty sure that the plural of ‘haiku’ is ‘haiku’, and so I do get kind of annoyed by that.
Overall, though, it’s a delightful little book, and one that you could fit in to your pocket fairly easily. What’s more, it’s the sort of book that you can dip in and out of, although I have to admit that I read it from cover to cover because that’s the kind of reader I am.
I remember Allen Ginsberg saying that Kerouac’s best writing was his haiku (or did I imagine that?). This book is somersaultingly fabulous, though many of the poems fail:
My friend standing in my bedroom – The spring rain
The ones that succeed, however, are as valuable as a purebred Samoyed:
Looking for my cat in the weeds, I found a butterfly
August in Salinas – Autumn leaves in Clothing store displays
A balloon caught in the tree – dusk In Central Park zoo
هایکو یه سبک شعری ژاپنیه؛ مثل شعر نوی فارسی. توی هایکو هجاها خیلی مهمن. البته که این هجاها توی زبان ژاپنی تعریف میشن و اگه کسی بخواد هایکوی فارسی، انگلیسی و... بگه، اون هجاهای ژاپنی کاربردی ندارن. جک کرواک اومده و هایکوی ژاپنی رو با زبان انگلیسی تطبیق داده و از دلش سبک شعری پیدا شده که هم با زبان انگلیسی همخوانی داره هم از نظر ادبی با نسخهی ژاپنیش فرق داره. موقع خوندن کتاب بیشتر از اینکه با شعری شرقی یا غربی مواجه باشیم، کلماتی غربی رو میخونیم که به شدت شیفتهی فرهنگ شرقن. حالت صورت کرواک رو میتونم موقع گفتن این هایکوها تصور کنم:)
Yllättävästi pidin kirjasta ja runoista, vaikken ihan kaikista pitänytkään mutta suurimmasta osasta kuitenkin ja jopa ymmärsin niitä. Yksinkertaista mutta erittäin kaunista ainakin suurimmaksi osaksi. Itse kirjailijasta oli mukava lukea enemmän ja siitä millaisessa tilanteessa tai minä vuonna haikut oli kirjoitettu. Ehkä ymmärsi niitäkin hieman paremmin kun tiesi kirjoittajan mielestä ja elämästä enemmän. Kannattaa lukea rauhassa ja ajan kanssa muutama sivu kerrallaan, että haikut jäävät mieleen. Itse luin alkuun hitaammin mutta loppua kohden tahti kiihtyi.
You can listen to a studio recording of Kerouac reciting poems from his series American Haikus, backed by the jazz saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims for their album Blues and Haikus
I don't particularly enjoy reading Haiku, both the Japanese and the so-called Western haiku (*), which Kerouac has re-named “American Pops”.(**) I find this form of poetry dull and dare I say boring (I wrote a long study on Haiku when I reviewed several Haiku collections and anthologies that I have read in Arabic and French). I enjoyed however reading Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
I wasn’t really impressed by Kerouac’s poems, they undoubtedly reveal a fertile imagination but some were dry and others felt shallow.. Kerouac’s haiku encapsulate an abrupt emotion or a mystical vision , an observation that is oftenly delivered with humour and sarcasm, a brief weird impression or a distillation of a scene or a fading memory. For Ginsberg his haiku poems are « the most “uncrafted stuff” in the world.[..] his craft is spontaneity [..] instantaneous recall of the unconscious [..] prefect executive conjunction of archetypal memorial images articulating present observation of detail and childhood epiphany fact.”
Kerouac is no doubt capable of crafting stunning images. His haiku show the influence of the imagists, mainly Ezra Pound. We can also perceive in these haiku the major influence of the Zen Buddhism, as a religion and a culture. Dissatisfied with the state of the western culture, Kerouac sought a cure in the Japanese philosophy. He has also embraced it in his life as an alternative to the socialist and secular convictions, to which he was fiercely opposed, adopted by his comrades of the Beat generation.. Ginsberg asserted that the method of spontaneous composition is connected to the practice of Zen Buddhism and the fact that in Japanese calligraphic painting, people are literally able to capture one phrase in one image. However, according to many critics, Kerouac's approach to Buddhism in these poems indicate a superficial understanding of its philosophy.(***),
Many of the Haiku in this collection tell a wisdom through metaphors. Short and concise, they are moreover similar to ancient Eastern spiritual proverbs :
Walking on water wasn't Built in a day
The sound of silence Is all the instruction You'll get ** What is a rainbow, Lord? – a hoop For the lowly ** The Golden Gate creaks With sunset rust **
(*) the American or the Western Haikus depict Haikus written by western poets and to which the basic rules of the Japanese Haiku don’t apply. They even vary in line-length. This review explores Kerouac's innovative and personalized Haikus. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/op...
(**) He wrote: Then I’ll invent The American Haiku type: The simple rhyming triolet:-- Seventeen syllables? No, as I say, American Pops:-- Simple 3-line poems. [from Jack Foley’s article “Beat Haikus” https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/fol... ]
(***)I recommend this helpful and informative brief article: it defines the elements of the Zen haiku, explains its essential techniques and highlights the rules of the haiku crafting http://www.mercy-center.org/PDFs/EW/H...
The introduction alone in this book is worth the read. It's a great little book (that fits in your back pocket. Yes, your back pocket.) that is fun to pick up anytime you are bored/in chapel. Kerouac basically gave birth to the Western Haiku. Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry, typically plotted by the seasons. While Kerouac adheres to the seasonal content occasionally, he focuses on everyday happenstance. In addition, as Japanese Haiku is writ in 5-7-5 (syllable count per line), Kerouac's invintion of the Western Haiku has no fixed syllable count, but is condensed to 3 line stanzas with compacted lines. Here are some favorites:
A raindrop from the roof Fell in my beer
I said a joke under the stars -no laughter
When the moon sinks down to the power line, I'll go in
Dusk - boy smashing dandelions with a stick
The cow taking a big dreamy crap, turning To look at me
Book of Haikus contains some very good haiku and many that are more average than good, but all reveal much about Jack Kerouac. He doesn't restrict himself to the traditional 5/7/5 syllable count, believing that it didn't fit English as well as it did Japanese. Many of the poems do not abide by other haiku norms, but Kerouac was trying to create his own, American or Western version of the art form. It's clear though, that he was a serious student of haiku and understood the form (a minute to learn, a lifetime to understand). Occasionally they are a bit more earthy than one usually sees. Much like Issa we see much of the author here, and I believe it was Issa who advised rewriting a haiku to find the one that works best, and at times we see Kerouac doing that here, reworking a poem in variations to see what comes through. In addition to the biographical nature of the haiku (recommended for all Kerouac fans), his experiments make this volume especially intriguing.
Hoje é o centenário do Jack Kerouac, estava guardando o Livro de Haicais, edição bilíngue que saiu pela L&PM com tradução do grande Claudio Willer, para essa ocasião. Tudo que Proust me influenciou no início dos meus vinte anos nos 2000, Kerouac fez o mesmo a partir de meados da mesma década, The Dharma Bums foi uma virada no meu modo de pensar a vida e a partir daí comecei a me interessar por budismo. Os koans zen tem muita influência na escrita de Kerouac, mas é sobretudo nos haicais clássicos e nos senryu que o autor tira sua energia poética seja nas poesias propriamente ditas seja na sua prosa a partir das experiências narradas no Vagabundos do Dharma. Aparentemente essa edição não comporta os rascunhos mais ruinzinhos de sua coleção de haicais, o que torna o livro bom de cabo a rabo, mas que empobrece nossa visão da evolução poética de Kerouac. Mas o que importa mesmo é a grande quantidade de haicais sobre gatos, nenhum grande ailurófilo estaria completo sem odes poéticas aos bichanos.
Not bad but I don't think the sparseness of the haiku form and its precise demands really play to Kerouac's strengths-- to me what I want from Kerouac, and what I feel he does best, is the more freewheeling, improvisational writing whose effect is intended to evoke or outright mimic the quality of a jazz horn player blowing on and riffing on a theme; consequently the "choruses" of Mexico City Blues (IMO his masterpiece as a poet) and many of those in Book of Blues are much more successful, I think, than what we get from him in this volume. Certainly worth a read for Kerouac enthusiasts and maybe for those interested in Western approaches to the traditional Japanese poetic form, but not essential.
Ape, perché continui a fissarmi? Non sono un fiore!
Mao Tse-tung si è preso troppi Funghi Magici Siberiani quest’autunno
Una tartaruga s’arrampica sopra una trave, A testa alta
La vacca si fa una grande favolosa cacata, e si volta A guardarmi
La mia farfalla è venuta a posarsi sul mio fiore, Me Signore
Il sogno di Dio, È soltanto Un sogno
ma soprattutto questa
Gengis Khan guarda fiero verso est, con occhi rossi, Bramando la vendetta d’autunno
quando leggo nelle note, da un taccuino di Kerouac del 1965: "Una sequenza su Gengis Khan deve cominciare con lui che vaga per la steppa solo e ubriaco, e quando giunge all’accampamento mongolo entra in una tenda e si siede – poi scopre che è la sua tenda (Le guardie e le guide l’hanno seguito per tutta la notte sul suo pony ubriaco)"
لقد حث كيرواك نفسه على كتابة الهايكو، ممتلئًا بالطرق التقليدية له.
مع تنوع أنواع الشعر التي قام بكتابتها جاك كيرواك، والتي لم يكن بينها رابط معين سوى فكرة الكتابة الشعرية الخالية من التكلف إلى درجة كبيرة، لربما أفقدتها المعنى أحيانًا!
ولكنّ هناك رقة يمكن العثور عليها من حين إلى آخر، كلمات جذلة مدفونةٌ في عمق المعنى واختلاف "النوتة الموسيقية" التي لم نعتدها لربما نحن القراء العرب، ورغم هذا وذاك استطعت أن أتلصص على خبايا هذا المعنى، أو لربما ما ظننته معنى؛ ما أشعرني بشيء ما، شعور صاف، مريح ومختلف وأعتقد أنها وظيفة الشعر.
رافقتني هذه المادة الشعرية لشهور طوال، وهذا ما أعامل به الشعر عادةً.
I was only familiar with some of Kerouac's poetry before, but never knew he was so adept at writing haiku until discovering this book.
The haiku here are written in Kerouac's own inimitable style - that is to say he bends the traditional rules just a tad, ha. But what a result, or should I say results.
What this book offers is a treasure of vividly sketched vignettes of nature and life, more emotionally arresting than they first seem. In the past few weeks since I got this book, I've carried it with me while traveling (it's almost pocket-size) as a kind of Zen handbook, each individual haiku offering a sip of meditative revelation. I enjoyed them immensely; more so than ordinary haiku which I always find get a bit boring after a few. But Kerouac's style of writing is so infused with energy and free-spiritism that it's hard not to feel affected by them. I just love how these haiku (or haikus as Jack liked to say) seem so casual and off-the-cuff, but as we see from some images of Kerouac's notebooks in the introduction, are actually a result of self-imposed strict editing.
I should also add that there is a great introduction to this book by an enthusiastic Kerouac scholar, which was very insightful and really added to the collection.
Yep it's safe to say that this collection makes me love Kerouac even more than ever. Just some of my favourites include:
The sky is still empty, the rose is still on the typewriter
One flower on the cliffside nodding at the canyon
Quietly pouring coffee in the afternoon How pleasant!
Straining at the padlock the garage doors at noon
The other man, just as lonesome as I am In this empty universe
The tree looks like a dog barking at Heaven
But there are so many more! If you are a fan of Kerouac's prose then you have to try his poetry side. It's, as to be expected, pretty darn cool.
In the past few years, I have grown increasingly enamored with short poetry and the art of the haiku. Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus is an enjoyable and inspirational read to which I will often return in days to come.
Gary Snyder actually brought haiku to the West Coast poets, having spent the early 50's traveling in Japan and practicing Zen Buddhism. Kerouac studied the works of Basho, Buson, Shiki and Issa - among others - and pioneered the American haiku movement. He also turned to Buddhist study and practice after his "on the road" period from 1953-1956, and I think his writing haiku complemented his spiritual practice.
This collection of poems, edited by Regina Weinreich, includes examples of Kerouac's entire range of haiku, to include "Book of Haikus" (which Kerouac supposedly organized for publication), "Dharma Pops" (haiku in action and as they appear in several of his books) and haiku from his notebooks from 1956 thru 1966. Following are only a few of my favorites:
From "Book of Haikus":
The tree looks like a dog Barking at heaven
Frozen in the birdbath, A leaf
November the seventh The last Faint cricket
In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age
From "Dharma Pops"
In the sun the butterfly wings Like a church window
Swinging on delicate hinges the Autumn leaf Almost off the stem
Haiku, schmaiku, I can't understand the intention Of reality