Writing Prompt #2: Microforms

Here's a good small exercise to practice while you're drifting off to sleep at night or waiting at a red light.  Inspired by Jen's comment that she can't even write a haiku, I thought it might be useful to share Jack Kerouac's notion of the "American Haiku":

The American Haiku is not exactly the Japanese Haiku. The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined to seventeen syllables but since the language structure is different I don't think American Haikus (short three-line poems intended to be completely packed with Void of Whole) should worry about syllables because American speech is something again...bursting to pop.

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.

Thus, for Kerouac, the haiku becomes a sort of Zen snapshot, a momentary glimpse of one discreet moment in life's big hustle and bustle. You can read some examples of his work in this form here, or listen to a ten-minute selection with musical accompaniment by tenor saxmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims below:

The specificity, the vibrancy of image and/or idea that these tiny poems aim to achieve, is something that we want to be present in our work in general, and if you practice by working on these tiny little gems on their own, you'll be more capable of working a similarly powerful line or stanza or thought into your longer poems.  So write at least one for Thursday's class and bring a copy, because if we have time at the end of class, we'll do a quick round-robin reading.

Here are a few other examples of micro-poems:

• Ted Berrigan's "Remembered Poem" [link]
• John Ashbery's "The Cathedral Is" [link]
• Ron Padgett's "December" [link]
• Richard Brautigan's "Haiku Ambulance" [link]

Another possibility is to work a number of these fragmented pieces together into a longer collage piece, sometimes organized thematically, other times not.  Here are a few examples:

• Ted Berrigan's "Rusty Nails" [link]
• Kenneth Koch's "In Bed" (excerpt, scroll down) [link]