{"product_id":"book-of-haikus-isbn-9780142002643","title":"Book of Haikus","description":"\u003cb\u003eA compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“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.”\u003c\/i\u003e—Jack Kerouac\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eRenowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel \u003ci\u003eOn the Road\u003c\/i\u003e, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBook of Haikus\u003c\/i\u003e, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJack Kerouac\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Town and the City\u003c\/i\u003e, appeared in 1950, but it was \u003ci\u003eOn the Road\u003c\/i\u003e, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them \u003ci\u003eThe Dharma Bums\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Subterraneans\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBig Sur\u003c\/i\u003e. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” \u003ci\u003eThe Duluoz Legend\u003c\/i\u003e. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRegina Weinreich\u003c\/b\u003e teaches in the Department of Humanities and Sciences at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has published widely in a range of periodicals. She is the author of Kerouac's \u003ci\u003eSpontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePENGUIN BOOKS\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBOOK OF HAIKUS\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Town and the City,\u003c\/i\u003e appeared in 1950, but it was \u003ci\u003eOn the Road,\u003c\/i\u003e first published in 1957, that made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them \u003ci\u003eThe Subterraneans, Big Sur,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Dharma Bums,\u003c\/i\u003e in which he describes his discovery of haiku. Kerouac’s books of poetry include \u003ci\u003eMexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, Pomes All Sizes, Heaven and Other Poems,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBook of Blues.\u003c\/i\u003e Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eREGINA WEINREICH teaches in the Department of Humanities and Sciences at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has published widely in periodicals including \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice,\u003c\/i\u003e and in the literary journals \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFive Points.\u003c\/i\u003e She is the author of \u003ci\u003eKerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction.\u003c\/i\u003e She was a writer on the documentary \u003ci\u003eThe Beat Generation: An American Dream\u003c\/i\u003e and a producer\/director of \u003ci\u003ePaul Bowles: The Complete Outsider.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eby Jack Kerouac\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe town and the city\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe scripture of the golden eternity\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esome of the dharma\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eold angel midnight\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003egood blonde and others\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epull my daisy\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003etrip trap\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epic\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe portable jack kerouac\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eselected letters: 1940–1956\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eselected letters: 1957–1969\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eatop an underwood\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eorpheus emerged\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePOETRY\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emexico city blues\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003escattered poems\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epomes all sizes\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eheaven and other poems\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebook of blues\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTHE DULUOZ LEGEND\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003evisions of gerard\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003edoctor sax\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emaggie cassidy\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003evanity of duluoz\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eon the road\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003evisions of cody\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe subterraneans\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003etristessa\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elonesome traveller\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003edesolation angels\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe dharma bums\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebook of dreams\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebig sur\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esatori in paris\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJack Kerouac\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBOOK\u003cbr\u003eOF\u003cbr\u003eHAIKUS\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eEdited and with an Introduction by\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRegina Weinreich\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen I’ll invent\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe American Haiku type:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe simple rhyming triolet:—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeventeen syllables?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo, as I say, American Pops:—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSimple 3-line poems\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eReading Notes 1965\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIntroduction: The Haiku Poetics of Jack Kerouac\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe American writer Jack Kerouac is mostly known as a prose fiction stylist. He is famous for his bestselling novel \u003ci\u003eOn the Road\u003c\/i\u003e and for having spawned the Beat Generation. For some, images of rebellious hipsters come to mind, as well as a beat determination not to revise, first thought best thought. But careful readers of Kerouac’s prose recognize that within the ragged, circular, soulful cadences for which his writing is at once criticized, imitated and revered is the rhythmic phrasing of poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmong the literati who knew him best, Jack Kerouac was a poet supreme who worked in several poetry traditions, including sonnets, odes, psalms, and blues (which he based on blues and jazz idioms). He also successfully adapted haiku into English, his “American haikus.”1 “‘Haiku,’” he wrote, “was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision of life in three short lines.” Finding that Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the “fluid syllabillic Japanese,” he sought to redefine the genre:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I propose that the ‘Western Haiku’ simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. 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. Here is a great Japanese Haiku that is simpler and prettier than any Haiku I could ever write in any language:—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA day of quiet gladness,—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMount Fuji is veiled\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn misty rain.    (Bashō) (1644–1694)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThus, in this tradition, Kerouac wrote:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBirds singing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ein the dark\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRainy dawn\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKerouac composed this and hundreds more haiku in notebooks dated from 1956 to 1966. These small, bound notebooks—the kind he could press into his checkered lumberman’s shirt pocket and carry around anywhere for fresh and spontaneous entries—contain a huge cache of his three-line jottings, a mother lode, so to speak, from which he selected what would comprise his Book of Haikus, a collection he urged Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish in 1961. Five Working Notebooks dated 1961–1965 are another source of haiku, and more were embedded in novels, letters, or published in small literary magazines. Twenty-six, some chosen for a 1964 anthology of American verse edited by his Italian translator, Fernanda Pivano, were published posthumously in 1971 by City Lights in \u003ci\u003eScattered Poems.\u003c\/i\u003e A manuscript page (Berg Collection of the New York Public Library) indicates Kerouac’s intentions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJack Kerouac was not the first American poet to experiment in haiku aesthetics. Before him, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens all created haiku-inspired verse. It was not until after the Second World War that a “rigorous and informed attention to the genre”2 arose, with the first volume of R. H. Blyth’s four-volume \u003ci\u003eHaiku\u003c\/i\u003e appearing in 1949, bringing the classical traditions of haiku and Zen to the West.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice after his “road” period, from 1953 until 1956, in the lull between the writing of the seminal \u003ci\u003eOn the Road\u003c\/i\u003e in 1951,2 and its publication in 1957—that is, before fame changed everything. When he finished \u003ci\u003eThe Subterraneans\u003c\/i\u003e in the fall of 1953, fed up with the world after the failed love affair on which the book was based, he picked up Thoreau and fantasized a life separate from civilization. Then he happened upon Asvaghosha’s \u003ci\u003eThe Life of Buddha\u003c\/i\u003e and immersed himself in Zen study.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKerouac began his genre-defying book \u003ci\u003eSome of the Dharma\u003c\/i\u003e in 1953 as a collection of reader’s notes on Dwight Goddard’s \u003ci\u003eThe Buddhist Bible;\u003c\/i\u003e the endeavor grew into a massive compilation of spiritual material, meditations, prayers, and haiku, a study of his musings on the teaching of Buddha. By 1955, while living in North Carolina with his sister, he worked on two other Buddhist-related texts: \u003ci\u003eWake Up,\u003c\/i\u003e his own biography of the Buddha, and \u003ci\u003eBuddha Tells Us,\u003c\/i\u003e translations of “works done by great Rimbauvian Frenchmen at the Abbeys of Tibet,” what he refers to in his letters as “a full length Buddhist Handbook.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHaiku came to the West Coast poets through Gary Snyder. Inspired by D. T. Suzuki’s \u003ci\u003eEssays in Zen Buddhism\u003c\/i\u003e (1927) in the fall of 1951, Snyder spent the early ’50s traveling in Japan, studying and practicing Zen Buddhism. Philip Whalen and Lew Welch became avid haiku practitioners through his influence. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Whalen spent time together in Berkeley in 1955 talking, drinking, and trading their own versions of Blyth’s haiku translations, which they were reading in all four volumes. Through Blyth’s translations and his extraordinary commentary on the Japanese works, Kerouac found emotive and aesthetic sympathies. Even though he attempted to meditate, wrote a sutra, “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity” (1956) at Gary Snyder’s behest, and thought of his entire oeuvre, his Legend of Duluoz, as a “Divine Comedy” based on Buddha,3 Buddhism stayed a literary concern for him, not a meditative or spiritual practice, as it was for Snyder and Whalen. Later, when he told Ted Berrigan in his 1968 \u003ci\u003eParis Review\u003c\/i\u003e interview he was a serious Buddhist, but not a Zen Buddhist, the distinction was to separate his interest from the prevalent scholarly study of dogma in favor of Buddhist essence.4 The practice of haiku, however, persisted throughout his life, becoming an important medium for rendering the Beat ideal of “shapely mind,” and for crafting an American Mysticism in the manner of Thoreau. For a new generation of poets, Kerouac ended up breaking ground at a pioneering stage of an American haiku movement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinding these haiku was a bit like extracting gold from baser metals, so embedded were many of them (nearly 1,000) in blocks of prose, scribble, and even street addresses. Many reappear throughout his work, because Kerouac recycled his haiku, using them in different ways.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTraditional haiku collections are organized by season or subject, but that did not seem an appropriate way to present Kerouac’s haiku. Part I of this volume is comprised of haiku he selected himself. The chronological organization of the haiku in Part II seemed the best way to give a sense of the evolution of the work, as well as to see each poem in its own light. Handy for this approach, Kerouac, in a 1963 journal, divided up his life according to the seasonal haiku reference, and so, following his idea, I have taken Spring and Summer as the period before the publication of \u003ci\u003eOn the Road,\u003c\/i\u003e Autumn and Winter as after, in his later years.5\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book endeavors to include examples of the entire range of Kerouac’s haiku—those which he selected for publication (The Book of Haikus found in a black folder so named) and poems in those subcategories by which he experimented in haiku possibilities: the philosophical “pops” as well as the angry, emotionally blunt “beat generation haikus.” As with all of Kerouac’s work in prose and poetry, process is key to his search for more refined language.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAllen Ginsberg spoke perhaps hyperbolically of Kerouac as the “only \u003ci\u003emaster\u003c\/i\u003e of the haiku: He’s the only one in the United States who knows how to write haiku . . . [he] talks that way, thinks that way.”6 What Kerouac “got” perhaps more than any other Beat poet working in this genre was the rendering of a subject’s essence, and the shimmering, ephemeral nature of its fleeting existence. This sensitivity to impermanence appears again and again in his work, from \u003ci\u003eThe Town and the City,\u003c\/i\u003e constructed around the death of the father, through \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Dreams,\u003c\/i\u003e which evokes the frail individual beset with a harsh, indifferent society, at times succumbing, defeated.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of Kerouac’s classic haiku images is of a sole animate entity in a wide, cavernous expanse:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe windmills of\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOklahoma look\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn every direction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd, from a 1960 notebook:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne flower\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eon the cliffside\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNodding at the canyon\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat isolated being—here “look[ing]” or “nodding”—is the quintessential Kerouacean persona seen again and again in his Legend of Duluoz.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeeking visual possibilities in language, Kerouac combined his spontaneous prose with sketching, a technique suggested to him by Ed White, a friend during his Columbia University days in the late ’40s: Why don’t you sketch in the streets like a painter but with words?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“‘Keep the eye STEADILY on the object,’ for haiku,” he exhorted himself in his notebooks. “WRITE HAIKUS THEN PAINT THE SCENE DESCRIBING THEM!” He also likened good haiku to good painting. The best haiku gave him “the sensation I get looking at a great painting by Van Gogh, it’s there \u0026amp; nothing you can say or do about it, except \u003ci\u003elook\u003c\/i\u003e in dismay at the power of looking.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKerouac also recognized the purposeful caesura or cut of Japanese haiku as key to its sound and sense. Quoting Shakespeare in a 1963 Notebook, Kerouac wrote: “birds sit brooding in the snow’ (combining the thought as well as the sound of the ellipse of a JAP \u003ci\u003ehaiku\u003c\/i\u003e) always wondered where did he get that sound? \u0026amp; always think, that’s what I like about S, where he revels in the great world night.” The extraordinary juxtapositions often noted in Kerouac’s sketched prose—in \u003ci\u003eVisions of Cody\u003c\/i\u003e (written in 1951 and 1952, a portion published in 1959 as \u003ci\u003eVisions of Neal\u003c\/i\u003e), \u003ci\u003eDoctor Sax\u003c\/i\u003e (written in July 1952, published in 1959), and “October in the Railroad Earth,” (1952)—especially evoke haiku spirit, even before he was fully immersed in composing haiku.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300593881317,"sku":"NP9780142002643","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780142002643.jpg?v=1767722938","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/book-of-haikus-isbn-9780142002643","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}