In
1955, two years before he would wake up famous after the
publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac was in California,
where he met Gary Snyder for the first time and learned
about haiku. In The Dharma Bums (1958) he describes
that experience, calling Snyder Japhy Ryder.
Japhy has the four-volume collection of R.H. Blyths
translations of Japanese haiku on a shelf in his shack in
Berkeley.
Kerouac
read the Blyth books and was immediately taken with haiku.
He and Snyder already had a common interest in Buddhism.
Blyths relating haiku to Zen may have appealed to
Kerouac. Snyder had been into Buddhism for a longer time
and had been experimenting with haiku since as early as
1952, when he wrote some in his journal while firewatching
on Sourdough Mountain in the Cascades. He now became Kerouacs
sensei, or mentor, helping him to understand haiku and to
learn how to write his own. Their discussions and practice
of haiku went on even while they were climbing mountains
together in the High Sierras. Kerouac writes in The Dharma
Bums that while they were climbing, he tried to come
up with his own haiku spontaneously and was having little
luck.
Japhy
tells him, A real haikus gotta be as simple
as porridge and yet make you see the real thing.
He then quotes a Japanese haiku by Masaoka Shiki (18671902).
The haiku is a translation by Blyth (though neither Japhy
nor Kerouac say so):
The sparrow hops /Along the verandah, / With wet
feet.
You
see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind,
says Japhy, and yet in those few words you also
see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost
smell the wet pine needles.
Where
did the wet pine needles come from? This short passage in
The Dharma Bums is one of the best descriptions to
appear in English of how a haiku works. It vividly demonstrates
that much of what a haiku creates in a readers mind
may not even be mentioned in the poem. Haiku create through
the power of suggestionwith a simplicity so bare that
the unaware reader may think there is nothing there at all.
In Shikis haiku a reader like Snyder will see the
sparrows wet footprints so clearly that they will
materialize right in front of himalong with everything
around them. He will see and smell things that arent
actually named.
As
Regina Weinreich, editor of this generousperhaps too
generous, as I will discuss latercollection of Kerouacs
haiku, points out, after Kerouac learned about haiku he
continued to write and experiment with them until his death
fourteen years later. His haiku were often first jotted
down in the small notebooks he kept in the pocket of his
checkered lumbermans shirt, where they joined his
quick sketches in prose, notes he had long been in the habit
of writing to describe scenes and landscapes for later use
in his novels. Weinreich also found haiku in his letters,
novels, essays, journals, worksheets, and in small literary
magazines. They were often embedded in blocks of prose,
scribble, and even street addresses.
Weinreich
was one of the first scholars to recognize the true value
of Kerouacs writings, placing the novelist in his
rightful place as a major figure in our literary history
and demonstrating that his novels when gathered together,
created, as Kerouac intended, one vast work: The Legend
of Duluoz. In The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac:
A Study of the Fiction (1987), she presents a detailed
analysis and appraisal of the seminal novels in the series
and shows how they and the rest of his books fit into the
scheme of Kerouacs grand design. (It was recently
reissued by Thunders Mouth Press [2002] with a new
foreword and with a slight change in the title: Kerouacs
Spontaneous Poetics.)
In
her introduction to Book of Haikus, Weinreich shows
how Kerouac went on to outdo his teacher, Gary Snyder, to
become one of the pioneers of American haiku. (Snyder used
his knowledge of haiku to write a different kind of poetry
and to become one of Americas most important writers
on nature and environmental subjects.) She points out that
even before he knew about haiku, Kerouac had the sensibilities
of a haiku poet. In Visions of Cody (written in 1951
and 1952, partially published in 1959), Doctor Sax
(written in 1952, published in 1959), and October
in the Railroad Earth (1952), Kerouac evoke[s]
the haiku spirit.
In
the very first paragraph of Doctor Sax Kerouac tells
himself, and us, the way to get the details of this world
into words: Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk,
also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway
where Lousy and you and G.J.s always sittin and dont
stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think
of the picture betterand let your mind off yourself
in this work. This would be good advice to anyone
wanting to write haiku. Be aware of the thing, picture itdont
think about yourself or the wordsand the words will
come. Kerouac proves the success of this sketching approach
by the many sharp pictures he creates later in the same
book, which is all about his growing up in Lowell, Mass.
He recreates both his boyish fantasies, sparked by movies,
the radio, and comic books, and the real world of the factory
town around him. It is these latter images that show his
proclivity for writing haiku: such as the vignette he sees
on a Lowell street one October night with lamp lights
waving and leaves flying and the light from a corner
store casting a glow across the sidewalk with its
few forlorn packing cases in front.
This
way of spontaneously putting down ones observations
may be a first step to haiku, but Kerouac realized that
to get a finished haiku one often needed to rewrite. In
contrast to his spontaneous poetics theories
about how to write prose and other kinds of poetry, Kerouac
in his Paris Review interview of 1968, said haiku
is best reworked and revised. . . . It has to be completely
economical, no foliage and flowers and language rhythm,
it has to be a simple little picture in three little lines.
He then points out that the great Japanese haiku masters
might spend months on one haiku and quotes a haiku by Shiki:
In the abandoned boat, / The hail / Bounces about.
Weinreich
comments: As lack of revision, or lack of writerly
control, has been consistently used to criticize Kerouacs
work, his insistence on revision for haiku should work against
the charge that his writing is mere mindless rebellion.
Kerouacs notebooks show haiku composition as a matter
of discipline, as difficult to achieve as spending time
in Zen meditation (xix).
Though Weinreich says Kerouac at times achieves a
depth and richness approaching that of his [Japanese] models,
she feels his real value to American haiku is his ability
to bring a new sensibility to the genre: a modern jazz and
blues orientation that helped him to phrase his descriptions
of both city life and natureand his on-the-road version
of the rite of passageinto a new vernacular with new
rhythms. Innovations that he already had at hand from his
experience writing novels. Careful readers of Kerouacs
prose, she writes, 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 (x). She emphasizes that besides
the hundreds of haiku he turned out, the novelist also wrote
a lot of other kinds of poetry. His Book of Blues,
the much praised Mexico City Blues, and the varied
forms he used effectively in the poems collected in Scattered
Poems and Pomes All Sizes attest to his ability
as a poet. Kerouac would sometimes adapt his haiku or other
poetry into prose for his novels. And parts of some of his
prose sketches were reworked into haiku. The different disciplines
complemented each other.
Starting by sketching vividly in prose, Kerouac was sometimes
able to refine the result into the concise suggestibility
necessary for haiku. (Masaoka Shiki also used sketching
in prose as a source for creating his haiku.) What
Kerouac got perhaps more than any other Beat
poet working in [haiku], writes Weinreich, was
the rendering of a subjects essence, and the shimmering,
ephemeral nature of its fleeting existence (xvi).
Keep the eye steadily on the object, for haiku,
Kerouac wrote in his notebook (xviii).
Many
of his best haiku appeared in the posthumous Scattered
Poems (City Lights, 1971) and on a recording, Blues
& Haikus, that he did in 1959 (he read his haiku
interspersed with short solo jazz comments by saxophonists
Al Cohn and Zoot Sims). Weinreich hears in the recording
a mix of Japanese and Western ideals. Quoting
American haiku poet and critic Tom Lynch, she says Kerouac
blended melancholy with the world-weariness of blues
tradition. Then she adds: overall, the 1959
recording responds to a different instinct from that of
the Japanese models. And yet, Crossing the football
field / coming home from work / The lonely business man
and The barn, swimming / in a sea / Of windblown leavesare
well attuned to both, a fusion of traditional haiku and
Western bluesy tones (xxiv).
Until
now, most readers had only the twenty-six haiku included
in Scattered Poems and the few Kerouac put in some
of his novels. If they were lucky enough to own a copy,
they could also listen to the several dozen he read on the
record. Now we can read these and hundreds more of his haiku
and haiku experiments, for a total of over six hundred and
fifty, in this new volume.
Most of Kerouacs finest haiku in this book are in
the title section Book of Haikus, a selection
that Kerouac had assembled himself for publication, demonstrating
that he had a pretty good idea of what were his best. He
was writing about this Book of Haikus to Lawrence
Ferlinghetti as early as November 1961 as a book you
might want and that If so, would collect all
my haikus from notebooks and put together for a book.
He even wrote an introduction for the projected book. It
was first published in his Scattered Poems to introduce
Some Western Haikus. In it Kerouac says that
in English you dont have to write haiku in seventeen
syllables. Above all, he writes, 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. He quotes a haiku by Matsuo
Bashô (16441694) as exemplifying what he means.
(It is in a translation by R.H. Blyth):
A
day of quiet gladness,
Mount Fuji is veiled
In misty rain.
The
title section appears first in the book. It contains a little
over 200 haiku, and includes most, if not all, of the haiku
used in Blues & Haikus and Scattered Poems.
The remaining 400 or more haiku in the other five sections
of Book of Haikus were taken from various periods
of Kerouacs writing life. Many of these are parodies
or jokes, playful, but often trivial, things he wrote while
he was drunk or just fooling around with his sisters
young kids. He called these, and other unserious haiku,
pops. (Though Kerouac used the word haikus,
he knew haiku in Japanese was its own plural. He and several
of the other Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, used haikus
to reflect that they were creating a Western adaptation
of the form.)
Among
the pops are such haiku atrocities as: Whyd
I open my eyes? / because / I wanted to and Blubbery
dubbery / the chipmunks / In the grass. He even
wrote some from the point of view of his cat, probably while
he was drunk: If I go out now, / my paws / will get
wet. Though the latter may be of psychological interest
to admirers of Kerouac, the first two along with a hundred
or more like them could have easily been dropped.
In
her acknowledgments Weinreich says that several American
haiku poets she consulted had advised her to delete more
of the failed experiments: these poets advised me,
best to throw away the clinkers. Even a superb haiku poet
will write hundreds before a single good one surfaces. Best
not to show Kerouac at his worst. She finally decided
to [choose] many against their sound counselthat
Kerouacs haiku are an invaluable record of his
language. Readers deserve to see them and like them as they
will.
The
biggest problem with doing that is that it gives ammunition
to Kerouacs detractors, who may jump on the clinkers
as representative of his haiku. If we judge him by the poems
he chose for his original Book of Haikus, we
find enough outstanding haiku to place Kerouac not only
among the pioneers of American haiku, but to give him an
honored place as the creator of some of the best American
haiku to have been written in the first half-century of
its existence. He would have been even greater if he had
had other haiku writers to test his experiments onto
get feedback on his attempts at haiku. Though he wrote a
blurb for a haiku collection by another pioneer of American
haiku, James Hackett, in 1968, there seems to have been
no further exchange between the two poets. Ginsberg tried
his hand at haiku occasionally, but he and Kerouac discussed
their work in that genre only rarely and probably not in
much detailthough whenever asked, Ginsberg had the
highest praise for Kerouacs haiku. Snyder, except
for his initial mentoring of Kerouac in the mid-fifties,
wentas mentioned abovein a different direction
with his poetry. When Kerouac did get together with others
and try to write haiku, as in Trip Trap (1959), the
results were less than impressive, largely because the emphasis
was on just joking around.
Kerouac
was not as isolated from other writers of haiku as another
famous haiku-writing novelist, Richard Wright, whose selected
haiku were published in 1998. The author of Native Son
and Black Boy, who died in 1960 while in exile in
France, wrote about four thousand haiku during the last
year and a half of his life. Wrights haiku do not
rise to the heights of Kerouacs best, largely because
he wrote them in a style imitative of the Japanese masters
and in three lines of seventeen syllables (five-seven-five).
Kerouac was more innovative, employing a more distinctly
American style and writing in three lines with no set syllable
count. The latter practice he took from Blyth whose three-line
translations are in a concise free verse. American haiku
are usually more successful when the poet lets the content
dictate the formwhile working to achieve simplicity
and concision. Thats how Kerouac approached the genre.
Kerouac may not have achieved the sustained mastery of haiku
that was later demonstrated by such major figures in American
haiku as Nick Virgilio, John Wills, Marlene Mountain, or
Alan Pizzarelli, but the unique style he brought to haiku
and his pioneering adaptation of the genre into English,
willalong with the several dozen fine to exceptional
haiku he did leave usassure him a prominent place
in American haikus hall of fame.
Among
his best haiku are such well-known pieces as the winter
fly in the medicine cabinet, the kick at the icebox door,
and the office girl unloosing her scarfall from Scattered
Poemsand from Blues & Haikus the already
quoted lonely businessman crossing the football field and
this salute to our national pastime:
Empty
baseball field
A robin,
Hops along the bench
In
this new collection we can add a good number of outstanding
haiku we have probably not had the chance to see or hear
before, including these two:
All
the wash
on the line
Advanced one foot
The
housecats, amazed
at something new,
Looking in the same direction
The
image of those cats, heads all turned in the same direction,
catches Kerouac, too, doing what he did best: noticing the
magical moments in our ordinary, everyday lives, and capturing
them in words.
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