Book of Haikus - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904634001 ISBN 13: 9781904634003

Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.' Jack Kerouac. Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel "On the Road", Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following in 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.In this edition, 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haiku manuscript from Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. The result is a compact collection of more than five hundred poems that reveal a lesser known but important side of Jack Kerouac's literary legacy.

About this title

About the Author:

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, 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 The Subterraneans, Big Sur and The Dharma Bums, in which he describes his discovery of haiku. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

About this edition

• Publisher: Enitharmon Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1904634001
• ISBN 13: 9781904634003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Weinrich Regina