THE AMERICAN SENTENCE

Discovering the American Sentence, I muse why now-- why not!

I bathe in the freedom to write small-- unrestrained by lines and limits.

One new sentence of wisdom and flashes of insight  mark this moment.

The American Sentence opens new writing frontiers and choices.


Each of these sentences represent my initial attempts at a form I have just discovered.

Invented by Allen Ginsberg, the American sentence offers us the beauty and brevity of haiku but removes the strict line limits usually imposed in English, making it a more fluid, flexible form.

The rules are simple.  A complete sentence 17 syllables long.

This form captures all that attracts in the haiku but seems better suited to English.

I have always loved haiku-- As I go about my daily life, small moments compose themselves into haiku.  Many times these are never written down, but simply serve as my special way of savoring a feeling,  an observation, or  a memorable moment.

I guess my natural instincts have been searching for this form for a long time.
I have always felt that  if I needed to add or subtract a syllable for the sake of sound, beauty, or meaning,  my Japanese writer-mentors would forgive me and nod in agreement.

Likewise, I teach my students, both children and adults, that poetic rules should not lead to rigid structuring that won't bend and wave.  Meaning is always first, while structure and form provide frames and containers to enhance that meaning.

In teaching haiku, ironically, one tip I usually provide is to begin with a sentence that holds your intended meaning, one that causes readers to notice a shift or juxtaposition, to pause----  only then play with sounds and syllables.

A discussion of haiku on Wikipedia includes the following:

The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru).This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji ("cutting word") between them, a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colors the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.

In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line containing seventeen Japanese characters, while haiku in English often appear in three lines to parallel the three phrases of Japanese haiku. 

That single vertical line seems to more closely resemble our linear sentence then the 3 lines of phrases that we have traditionally used to compose haiku in English.

Bob Holman & Margery Snyder write  that although Ginsberg is a staunch advocate of sparing words and condensed writing:

...(He) never went for the haiku. In talking with him, he spoke of how the 17 characters of this Japanese form just don’t cut it as 17 syllables of English, and that divvying them up in 5-7-5 syllable lines makes the whole thing an exercise in counting, not feeling, and too arbitrary to be poetry.

As with any new form that I want to explore, I  needed to read many American Sentences, allowing them to teach me how to write them.

I found many references and samples online

Paul Nelson has devoted several pages of his website to the American Sentence and, since his introduction to the form, has written one each day.

His article, American Sentences: Catching the Shadow of the Moment, includes samples of Ginsberg's earliest American Sentences:

American Sentences as a poetic form was Ginsberg’s effort to make American the haiku. If haiku is seventeen syllables going down in Japanese text, he would make American Sentences seventeen syllables going across, linear, like just about everything else in America. In Cosmopolitan Greetings, his 1994 book, he published two and a half pages of these nuggets, some of which had scene-setting preambles. For example:

Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y.Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella.
1987
Rainy night on Union square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till
I’m dead.
August 8, 1990, 3:30A.M.

According to Nelson, Ginsberg also reflected on the number 17--17 syllables like haiku in Japanese and like the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra in Buddhism: Gate, gate, paragate, parasam gate, bodhi svaha ( which translates loosely: Gone, gone, gone beyond altogether beyond, Awakening, fulfilled!-- He was interested in Buddhism in later life.)  He began to wonder about the recurrence of 17 and whether it had a universal property. 

Paul Nelson gives us some keys for getting  started with American Sentence

Here are more samples from Ginsberg and samples from other folks.

Steve Kowit, editor of Serving House Journal published American Sentences (#4, Fall 2011)  
and here are even more samples.

These books contain useful sections about the American Sentences.

See Chapter 8

See Chapters 4 and 5

          
















What do  American Sentences seem to have in common?
What isessential to this form--besides the 17 syllables and a complete sentence?

Will I abandon haiku, the form I have loved and embraced most of my life? Of course not! But I now have a new form to add to my writing toolbox. 


And I now have  a new decision to make when writing small--haiku or American sentence?

Previous Posts Related to Short Poetry

Haiku Meditations
Oulipian Exercises and Text Transformations
Book Spine Poetry
Conversations in Poetry

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

The American Sentence is a short poetic form created by Allen Ginsberg.

Read samples of American Sentences using the links in this post.

Write several American Sentences marking moments you wish to savor or explore.

Remember to use 17 syllables, if possible.

Can you write a poem or short prose piece composed entirely of American Sentences?

HAIKU MEDITATIONS

I just discovered Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons a wonderful new children's book (an all-people's book) of haiku.



Here are my own haiku inspired by this find.
I
Watching the spring rain
bring life to the presumed dead--
tears watering growth.
II
Summer winds catch our breath
tossing us into the blazing  sun.
Light dispels darkness.
III
Falling like crisp leaves
we blanket the earth and ourselves
for the coming sleep.
IV
Cold and white and soft
the earth has disappeared --hidden
under a hush of quiet.

***
Haiku celebrates nature
and the turning of seasons
and the turning of our lives
in short bursts of images
which shift and turn
causing us to rotate
the captured moment
around and over
displaying new angles
surprised by unexpected truths
gasping at recognition.


***

I love haiku.
I love a variety of short poetic forms.
But of them all, Haiku is my favorite.

I think because I talk so much, it is an exercise in both discipline and creativity for me to think small-- in short forms, in few words, in limiting structures.

In the traditional Japanese form, haiku was originally  hokku  and  did not appear as an independent form, but was an integrated verse or section of other traditional forms like Renga or Tanka or Haibun.

From the time of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), one of the most well-known Japanese poets, however the hokku form began to appear as stand-alone poems and  was renamed haiku by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902).

    

In Japanese, haiku is written in a vertical line.

In English, we write haiku in three lines with a suggested number of syllables for each -- five for the first and third, and seven for the second lines. The content of traditional haiku is usually nature and highlights a shift in perspective, focus or thinking.  The first two lines carry one idea with the shift usually occurring in the third line.

I believe the limits of the structure free us to be creative in ways we may not have considered otherwise.

When I teach and encourage haiku, we look at many models from both Japanese (translated) and English.  In translation, the Japanese haiku rarely fit the 5-7-5 restrictions, so it becomes easy to make my point--- dont' let the limits bind you like barbed-wire.

Read samples of  Basho's haiku translated by three different editors/translators.

Additional haiku written by Basho can be read here.

Read samples of  haiku by Masaoka Shiki here.

For more haiku you may want to visit the Haiku Poet's Hut.

***

I have been surprised and delighted to discover haiku in unlikely places.

  Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son, wrote numerous haiku in the last year of his life, which his family gathered and published after his death. Family members indicate he was never without his haiku notebook.

His short earthy everyday thoughts present a modern twist on this ancient Japanese from.  Several  are included below:




1 
I am nobody
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

17
 In a misty rain
 A butterfly is riding
 The tail of a cow.

22
With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk


 Likewise a recent volume by Sonia Sanchez, Morning Haiku, celebrates life, mourns beloved writers, artists and others, analyzes our life together  and experiments with this ancient form. She dedicates series of linked haiku to people remembered (such as drummer Max Roach, and singer Odetta), as well as events we still ponder, such as 9/11


These two verses below are excerpted from 21 Haiku, her series for Odetta

4
dilated
by politics
you dared to love

7
your music asked:
has your song a father
or a mother?

***

Finally, I think about our younger writers.  Children love haiku--both reading the short forms and trying their hand at writing it as well.

In addition to  Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons, I offer several excellent books that will delight student writers on the  first and second, tenth and twelfth readings-- and then serve as perfect mentor texts as they write their own small verses.

 

***
When a moment is big
or emotions uncontainable
haiku stretches to hold it all

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

 Look out your window.

 What do you see?

What captures your attention?

Write about a small moment you observe.

Reflect on an important event, person or situation in you life.

Compose a haiku or series of haiku to capture that moment.

Here are sample haiku that I wrote sitting on my deck last August and September.
They may spark your own ideas.