Book of Haikus is a collection of haiku

Haiku in English

Haiku in English is a development of the Japanese haiku poetic form in the English language.Contemporary haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries....

 poetry by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

. It was first published in 2003 and edited by Regina Weinreich. It consists of some 500 poems selected from a corpus of nearly 1,000 haiku jotted down by Kerouac on small notebooks he could carry around.

Although most of the poetry in Book of Haikus is original, some haiku are paraphrased in Kerouac's prose works:

The top of Jack

Mountain—done in

By golden clouds

also recurs in The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...

. The collection also contains a handful of haiku published earlier, for instance in Scattered Poems

Scattered Poems

Scattered Poems is a collection of spontaneous poetry by Jack Kerouac. These poems were gathered from underground and ephemeral publications, as wells as from notebooks kept by the author. Some poems include: "San Francisco Blues," the variant texts of "Pull My Daisy," and American haikus....

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