kerouacarticle

“WRITE HAIKUS THEN PAINT THE SCENE DESCRIBING THEM!” Kerouac wrote ecstatically in his little breast-pocket notebooks. The poet, more well known for his novels chronicling the Beat Generation, than for his employment of these tiny Japanese forms was in fact tremendously important in the popularization of this form within the idiom of contemporary American literature. A collection of Kerouac’s haiku had originally been planned for publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books shortly before Jack’s death, but that manuscript never saw the light of the printing house and it was not until recently (April 2003) that these works have finally been collected and printed by Penguin as Book of Haikus.

Historically speaking, Haikus have been three line poems made up of seventeen onji or syllables usually broken up into lines of five-seven-five syllables respectively. Kerouac was quite knowledgeable of conventions and variations of the original forms which are generally applied to haiku in English, but also well aware of the moderns and the tradition of the avant-garde and an ecstatic newness in the Arts that was sweeping through the west. Never a formalist, Kerouac rejected set syllable counts and instead sought to create a haiku that was set essentially in free verse. His statement of poetics regarding the Western Haiku is quite important to our understanding of his work. He writes:

In this statement, Kerouac cites an example of a traditional Japanese haiku that is “prettier than any…I could ever write in any language” (xi). This example set to the left is by Basho (16440-1696), and for comparison set right is Kerouac’s:

These poems are interesting when read together because the English translation of Basho’s poem does not comply with the seventeen syllable convention of haiku, but like Kerouac’s it certainly “says a lot” in the three lines. Both poems could be seen in terms of a quick moment from life, a snapshot, one silent moment recorded and preserved by the poet; but there is something more than quick imagery. If we dig just below the surface, we see two poems greatly intertwined with deeper metaphysical concerns and questions. In Basho’s poem there is a sense of great mystery when the poet is confronted with the sublime. He is filled with the highest levels of contentment simply from being able to bear witness to the grandeur of nature. The same amazement and unbridled ecstasy is present in Kerouac’s poem, except in this case his image is working in a microcosm of a single event which extends its meaning outward into the macrocosm of man’s greatest spiritual questions. The leaf that is being preserved in the birdbath is clearly dead as it has fallen from the tree. It also operates on the level of a metaphor for the human soul, leading the reader to question the nature of their own. That is to say, if there is such a thing as a soul, what becomes of it when death overtakes the body? Does the soul continue on in Heaven, do we attain Nirvana or is it held in some type of limbo like the leaf in the frozen birdbath?

Kerouac’s own spiritual beliefs were a bastardized hybrid of Catholicism and various Buddhist and eastern religious traditions. Clearly many of Kerouac’s haiku were composed during his various meditations and studies of Zen Buddhism. He composed several Buddhist texts in his career including Scripture of the Golden Eternity, the Diamond Sutra and his Buddhist manual masterwork Some of the Dharma. Several critics including Weinreich have likened these haikus to Zen “pops”. In many Zen monasteries, children are admitted when they are very young and taught to meditate; often monks would walk around with a cane or reed and “pop” these children on the heads, an action thought to cause spontaneous enlightenment, and thus instant Buddha-hood. Kerouac himself wrote, “POP…usually a Buddhist connotation, aiming toward

enlightenment” (Weinreich 59). Here are two haikus that can be read in relation to the “pop”, the first begins with the ‘Buddhist connotation’, but enlightenment is deferred when the sense and awareness of the body enters Kerouac’s mind. The second becomes quite literally the pop itself.

Later in his life he denounced his mystic/ascetic Buddhist self and returned to the more stringent and pious Catholicism of his childhood. I would like to argue that these haiku can be read in the context of the Zen “pop”, but it should not be overlooked that they have something in common with the Catholic epiphany, a sudden realization or manifestation of the presence of God and the glory of Christ. Kerouac writes:

The first haiku finds a man in the midst of a spiritual dilemma--should he kill the fly even though God says not to kill? It seems that the sudden movement of the fly triggers feelings of compassion for his fellow creature, and an awareness of its sentience. The second Haiku is more mysterious, but we do receive a direct reference to Christ, and a manifestation of his human suffering juxtaposed with his mother’s human concerns of missing her porridge. However, this is also the moment of spiritual transition, Christ’s martyrdom—the ultimate act of compassion toward humanity. It can be inferred that Kerouac not only had a deep belief in Catholicism, but in fact wished to live his life more in accord to Christ’s actions. Perhaps in contemplation his own life compared to Christ’s he wrote:

This Haiku is quite witty and also notable because it represents a trend in modern haiku toward poems that do not conform to the “three line rule”.

There is still critical debate as to whether Kerouac actually wrote haiku, or was instead working within some variation of the form or perhaps another related form. However, it seems that these disagreements are moot as Kerouac made his own literary statements on the “Western Haiku” and was clearly not limiting himself to the strict formal rules and conventions of the traditional Japanese. Instead, he was exploring an interesting little form that clearly allowed him to explore his widening spiritual concerns and philosophies. Aside from Pound, and R.H. Blythe (whose early 20^th century translations of haiku were indispensable to Jack), Kerouac is most often cited by modern purveyors of the form as an influence, if not the source of their earliest awareness of the haiku. Although there are a fair amount of haiku presented in Book of Haikus that are of sub-par standard, there remain at least half in the collection that are outstanding and allow us a glimpse into Kerouac’s larger work, as well as traceable links to the modern haiku in both the east and the west.

Kerouac, Jack. Book of Haikus. New York: Penguin. 2003. pp 5, 62, 64, 109, 196, 173.

“Pop! The Jack Kerouac Haiku Page”. Amy’s Hodgepodge. 29 Nov. 2002. 6 Jul. 2003.

Weinreich, Regina. “Introduction: The Haiku Poetics of Jack Kerouac.” Introduction.

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