Book of Haikus

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. 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 book, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku. 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.