“In the chair / I decided to call Haiku / By the name of Pop”

I like Jack Kerouac’s approach to haiku.

As everyone knows, haiku means a poem of seventeen syllables. But Kerouac didn’t think the syllable restriction worked well in English, so instead suggested “Western Haiku” should mean any poem that says “a lot in three short lines.”

Regina Weinreich, in her introduction to a collection of Kerouac’s haikus, gives some examples from him. One of my favourites is there: “One flower / on the cliffside / Nodding at the canyon.”

Weinreich points out that Kerouac’s approach to haiku refutes the criticism, often made of him, that he was undisciplined as a writer, that his work is careless and lacking evidence of “writerly control.” He said: “Haiku is best reworked and revised.” And Weinreich tells us that “Kerouac’s notebooks show haiku composition as a matter of discipline, as difficult to achieve as spending time in Zen meditation.”

Sometimes when my own writing is going badly, as it almost always is, I think about Kerouac and his haikus and remember that sometimes the best way to move forward is to slow down. It’s only when you stop and focus on the details that you really discover what words can do. And if you really want to write a book where every sentence “pops” you’d better take care to get the most out of every word.

(I’ve been reading Regina Weinreich’s introduction to Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus.)