Book of Haikus

<b>A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy</b><br><b> </b><br><i>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.</i>--Jack Kerouac <p/>Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel <i>On the Road</i> Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku the three-line seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following 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. <p/>In <i>Book of Haikus</i> 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haiku manuscript from Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku from both published and unpublished sources.