Content area
Full Text
During the 1950s, dissatisfied with the state of both American culture and literature, Beat writers sought a cure for Western ills in Japanese philosophy (Zen Buddhism in particular) and poetry (haiku in particular). Among the prominent Beats to produce haiku are Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Cid Corman. However, perhaps the most interesting Beat haikuist is Jack Kerouac, far better known for his sprawling, often manic novels. While the 2003 publication of Book of Haikus sparked a renewed interest in the fivehundred-plus haiku Kerouac wrote, critics initially dismissed these three-line poems. Ann Charters and Gerald Nicosia, the major biographers, generally mention the haiku in passing, as something Kerouac did between his more important works. James T. Jones observes that, after the 1955 publication of Mexico City Blues, Kerouac's verse lost intensity and effectiveness, "and he concentrated more on haiku in his declining years" (12). Alison Kirby Record argues that Kerouac "occasionally achieved genuine haiku effects in his early experiments in the form," but "the majority of these efforts ... are flawed" because they rely too heavily on a too-thin understanding of Zen Buddhism and, consequently, fail to replicate the Japanese models (87). The aesthetic merits of these poems are, of course, debatable. What is more certain is that they function effectively as expressions of Kerouac's dissatisfaction: with consumerism, prevailing literary practices, and his own masculinity.
Understandably, critics have focused on the relationship between Kerouac's much-discussed discovery of Zen in early 1954 and his haiku, which he probably began writing at about this time and continued writing up to his death. Charters, the foremost Kerouac scholar, notes that the writer composed haiku on the typescript of Some of the Dharma, an unpublished treatise on Buddhism written between March 1954 and late Spring/early Summer 1955 (204; 210-11; 214). In various letters written in 1956, Kerouac either mentioned or included haiku. He also wrote a number of haiku while serving as a fire-lookout on Desolation Peak in the summer of 1956 (Charters 262), and he published three in the Berkeley Bussei in that same year. We know that he retained his interest in the form in 1959, as he wrote some haiku for Frank O'Hara (Charters 306-07) and collaborated with Albert Saijo and Lew Welch on...