Widely known as the bestselling author of On the Road, Jack Kerouac was the heart and pulse of the beat generation, but he was more than a novelist, he was also a huge fan of the haiku.
Tightly structured, haikus are made up of only three lines, five, seven, and five, totalling seventeen syllables in all. Kerouac’s cheeky playful attempts with the form – which he renamed “Pop” are largely considered American Haiku, given the loose use of the syllable– are very much zen-like in prose, humorous, and deeply thought-provoking.
Jack Kerouac explains the Haiku “The American Haiku is not exactly the Japanese Haiku. The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined to seventeen syllables but since the language structure is different I don’t think American Haikus (short three-line poems intended to be completely packed with Void of Whole) should worry about syllables because American speech is something again…bursting to pop. Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.”
In an interview with Allen Ginsberg for The Paris Review in 1966 – the two were pen pals and friends, Ginsberg says of Kerouac’s poetry – “He’s the only one in the United States who knows how to write haikus… Kerouac thinks in haikus, every time he writes anything—talks that way and thinks that way. So it’s just natural for him… He’s the only master of the haiku.”
Here are twenty of our fav Kerouac American haikus.
The little worm
lowers itself from the roof
By a self shat thread
A raindrop from
the roof
Fell in my beer
Train on the horizon –
my window
rattles
The sound of silence
is all the instruction
You’ll get
The windmills
of Oklahoma look
in every direction
The bottom of my shoes
are clean
from walking in the rain
Useless, useless,
the heavy rain
Driving into the sea
Nightfall,
boy smashing dandelions
with a stick
Missing a kick
at the icebox door
It closed anyway
Snap your finger
stop the world –
rain falls harder
Early morning yellow flowers,
thinking about
the drunkards of Mexico
Glow worm
sleeping on this flower –
your light’s on
Nightfall,
too dark to read the page
too cold
No telegram today
only more leaves
Fell
Holding up my
purring cat to the moon
I sighed
Drunk as a hoot owl,
writing letters
by thunderstorm
Empty baseball field
a robin
hops along the bench
All day long
wearing a hat
that wasn’t on my head
Crossing the football field
coming home from work –
the lonely businessman
In the sun
the butterfly wings
Like a church window
