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. Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac recording Blues And Haikus with Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, 1959.
Famous for his innovative Beat Generation book On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also an expert in haiku, the seventeen-syllable, three-line Japanese poetry style. In the spirit of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac explored this ancient genre, moving past rigid syllable constraints to grasp what he perceived as the form’s true nature. He included his “American” haiku in novels, as well as in his letters, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings.