Jack Kerouac & Haikus

We all remember haiku from back in public school. The teacher would try to instill in us a desire to read and/or create poetry and the haiku was a nice, easy way to do that. 5-7-5, that's it.

Here's five syllables.
Holy shit! Here's seven more!
Have another five.

Promptly after class, we'd gather together and make as many insulting or fucked-up haiku as possible.

You're such a douchebag.
With a fat ass and bad breath.
You eat your own poop.

After awhile, counting syllables would get pretty boring, and we'd just start trading insults. That was the extent of haiku for me back then.

However, a few years ago, I was reading about Jack Kerouac (pictured above with cat, of course) and his haiku. I found out that aside from the fascistic syllable count, a haiku was supposed to capture a mood of mystery, poverty, isolation, or impermanence. Haikus have a feeling of the "now" and are more suggestive of a moment than they are descriptive.

Kerouac suggested that sticking to a rigid syllable pattern wasn't necessary since our language is vastly different from that of the Japanese. Instead of focusing on 5-7-5, we should just use three short lines.

Here are four haiku by Kerouac:

Useless, useless
the heavy rain
Driving into the sea

Perfect moonlit night
marred
by family squabbles

Those birds sitting
out there on the fence
They're all going to die

In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
has died of old age

The video below is from a class project I did about 4 years ago where we had to make video haiku. The videos could've had text or not. They could've been haiku written by ourselves or others. I opted to take these four Kerouac haiku and marry them to video.

Finally, I've been inspired by French Toast Girl and her current project of producing a picture or significant progress on a picture for every day in May. While I came into May late, I'm going to attempt to create a haiku in the Kerouac style that follows the Japanese convention of catching a moment.

Here's the video: