Although the tradition of ‘haiku’ poetry was already well established in Japan by the birth of Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644, it was this specific poet who would reinvigorate the form. Changing his name to Bashō after the nickname given him by his disciples, the word for a banana tree with big soft leaves, his evolution of the haiku already took it beyond the originally prescriptive seventeen syllable count (Stryk 1985).  Bashō took a throughgoing approach to poetry, seeing it as a way of life, connecting a disavowal of possessions with a vow of poverty and incessant travel to the writing of poems which sought to allow the objecthood of things to speak for themselves. The brevity and curtness of the haiku form was perfectly suited to this task, avoiding ostentatious verbal or conceptual complexity. This aesthetic and existential vision for Bashō was grounded in a philosophy or religion of Zen Buddhism: ‘like other haiku poets of his time, Bashō considered himself a Zennist, indeed was thought to be a Zen monk’ (Stryk 1985: 15). 

This Zen philosophy carried certain values with it which founded the poetic practice. First of all, a ‘lightness’ (karumi) which indicated a detachment or commitment to non-attachment which allowed for the poem to be free of weightiness. Second, this lightness went in hand with solitariness or sabi, from people and from worldly goods, which allows for the freedom of the wandering poet (Bashō travelled extensively). Finally, wabi or the ‘spirit of poverty’ enabled Bashō to live simply and frugally, in an infamous ‘hut’, a dwelling of peace. Although traditional in following these tenets of the Zen Buddhist framework, Bashō experimented with the syllable count to break with the prescriptive aspects and also wrote prose, taking the form of haibun (prose followed by haiku), which was concrete and imagistic (Stryk 1985: 15).

Bashō’s own haiku poems seek to capture each of these elements in the most simple and sparse of forms, a three-line count. Two of his haikus here show this form at its most succinct yet expressive, capturing also the connection between minor events and the reference to the macrocosm or the wider ‘timeless and universal spirit’.

On the dead limb

squats a crow –

autumn night.

Spring air –

woven moon

and plum scent.

(Bashō 1985: 11)

We here see the shift between the micro- and the macro-, the specific and the universal, and these two elements of the haiku form (the condition/situation and then the sudden perception) are divided by a break (kireji, or ‘cutting word’, ‘best rendered in English by emphatic punctuation’ (Stryk 1985: 11)).      

Bashō’s own adherence to the tradition while simultaneously breaking with it is instructive in coming to explore the emergence of Jack Kerouac’s interpretation of the possibilities of the poetic form. In many respects, the Beat sensibility and aesthetic vision (with Kerouac as a paradigm figure) represents a continuation of specific tenets of the Japanese strain of writing whilst applied to a very different culture of mid-twentieth century America.   

Whereas the classical concept of haiku is the three-line, seventeen syllable Japanese poetic form, Kerouac experimented with this genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. This American haiku (so called) was then incorporated into his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks and readings, further blurring the lines between poetry, prose and spoken word. He even embeds haikus in lists of street addresses. It is this looser, more dexterous, haiku form which I have sought to deploy in my own recent poems (it is part of a larger, current work-in-poetic-progress, initially conceived as a Chapbook, some specific examples included at the end of this essay). Although the word haiku is singular and plural, Kerouac uses the word ‘haikus’, which is unusual (no doubt indicating thereby his more differentiated and pluralist vision for the genre). I follow Kerouac in this usage.   

Despite this differentiated conception, Kerouac’s definition of the renewed haiku is simple enough (quoted Weinreich 2004: x): ‘I propose that the “Western Haiku” simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. 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’.         

Traditional haiku collections are organized by season or by subject. In taking the classical form beyond the classical Japanese categorisation, Kerouac’s own vision for the genre is multi-layered. Specific sub-forms emerge in his deployment of the genre. What he calls ‘pops’ are philosophical short poems while ‘beat generation haikus’ are more angry and emotionally blunt renditions. His usage of the form is directed towards capturing a subject’s essence while paradoxically denoting the ephemeral nature of fleeting existence and what Weinreich refers to as the ‘sensitivity to impermanence’. This is rendered powerfully in the image (which is also part of the traditional haiku vision) of an isolated figure in a broader landscape, ‘One flower/on the cliffside/nodding at the canyon’ (quoted Weinreich 2004: xvii), this isolation being a kind of quintessential Kerouacean (as well as outsider American) persona.

Other significant features of this version of ‘American Haikus’ are the visual possibilities of poetry, which were connected to Kerouac’s own use of spontaneous or automatic prose, as well as his habit of sketching drawings alongside his writings. Of course, there is also a paradox to this link to automatism, as these short poems are extra-disciplined and it is clear that Kerouac often rewrote and revised them over a long period of time. The same can be said more generally about his writing, including the mythic prose (On the Road etc.), which were hardly automatic works in the one sitting as mythologised but often prose works created over significant periods of temporal revision. One often finds these new fangled ‘haikus’ embedded in the longer works (including in On The Road), complicating the relation between the prose and the poetry. 

With regard to the visual aspect as such, we are exhorted to ‘WRITE HAIKUS THEN PAINT THE SCENE DESCRIBING THEM’. Here, there is an interesting emergence of the distinction between describing and ‘looking’, where haikus may be more like paintings than other genres of poems in being more to do with ‘looking’ than ‘describing’. There is also the sense that haikus can themselves be ‘looked at’, that is the haiku may itself be akin to a painting or a visual object (sometimes, first and foremost before we read it or seek to understand its semantic meaning). Moreover, there is a kind of ‘purposeful cut’ (or ‘caesura’) characteristic of this form of writing, both in its classical and more ‘American’ form and this is often linked to incongruous juxtapositions which rather than being spontaneous, need to be ‘best reworked and revised’ (quoted Weinreich 2004: xix). 

This emphasis on revision and on discipline with regard to this renewed form of poetics also has a spiritual dimension. This is hardly surprising in that the original Japanese form is linked intrinsically to meditation and to Zen Buddhism, as we saw with Bashō. Haiku composition is a matter of discipline, as difficult to achieve as spending time in Zen meditation (this also links to Kerouac’s own interest in Buddhism which was more literary than religious, as it was in the latter understanding for other related American poets of the time such as Gary Snyder). Kerouac here found aesthetic and emotive sympathies rather than anything metaphysical: ‘Buddhism stayed a literary concern for him, not a meditative or spiritual practice as it was for Snyder and Whalen’ (Weinreich 2004: xiv). Moreover, wasn’t this reconstruction of the overarching and fundamental vision also intrinsic to his successful transformation of the ‘haiku’ (Buddhist, Japanese, classical etc.) into his own, original version of the all-new ‘American haikus’? This is also a connecting bridge between Kerouac and other avant-garde poetic schools which were emerging or which would further emerge in the next decade. For example, it brings Kerouac closer to the Black Mountain School than his Beat contemporaries as well as proximate in spirit to the (American) urbanity of New York School poets such as Frank O’Hara, whose urbane poems nonetheless evoked also (often in their succinctness and deceptive simplicity, above all else) the conception of ‘American haikus’, which Kerouac originally envisioned.   

Hail Jack Keroauc then, originator of effectively a new and very dexterous poetic form, with classical connections and inspiration but with a contemporary edge, bridging and hybridizing rural and urban, individual and collective, humorous irony and painful seriousness. And here, we might argue this vision can be of inspiration again to us budding philosophical-poet types. And we also continue to break its inherent rules and extend it a little, as a genre and a form – why not, dear reader? Here I include a short selection of my own American haikus (or is there an Irish specific sub-category of such?), the first which obeys the seasonal or nature reference , the second which takes up Kerouac’s ‘pops’ or personal-philosophical thematics, the third the more emotionally blunt ‘beat generation haiku’ concept, the fourth which comes from a series of ‘Coventry haikus’ (connecting to Ska music)  and the last which plays with a naughty extension of the classic 3 line limit, if nothing else (‘Dublin City Blues’):

*****

Fresh Pure Lake Haiku 

By God this lake

Is a haiku

Japhy in his swim shorts 

Deleuze Haiku 

According to Gilles

Kerouac was a Crack Up

Dharma Bum Asylum

Beat Generation Haiku 

I found a crushed snake

On a Spanish walk

Who’s soul baulked?

Coventry Haiku

Midlands David Lynch

Isabella Rossellini phone 

Calling Terry Hall

Dublin City Blues

After Jack Kerouac

Got up & dressed up

        & went out & got paid

Then came home & got laid

        in a mauve suit in the garden

Man – 

         we feign perfection

Because we are empty 

Because feigning is a 

        kind of emptiness

Because it is a kind of perfection 

(Irwin 2024)