Book of Haikus

Rating:
Summary: Must have
Review: A great little book with a collection of haikus. Visual presentation is not the very best, but to me it is the contents that counts. IMHO there hardly is a better way to reflect the feelings of a moment than in a haiku, so one can get an intimate impression about the authors feelings comparable to a collection of snapshots. This haiku book certainly is a must have for every Jack Kerouac fan.

Rating:
Summary: Low rating for Penguin, not Kerouac
Review: I want to give a strong second to the previous reviewers comments about the sloppy printing and cheap production values of this and other Kerouac books by Penguin. It's a shame that they have control of so many of Kerouac's most important works. Kerouac's literary executor really ought to rethink the contract. Grove Press does a beautiful job on the Kerouac volumes that they publish and uses paper that will last a lifetime, not this less than newprint junk that Penguin uses. You guys should be ashamed.

Rating:
Summary: Low rating for Penguin, not Kerouac
Review: I want to give a strong second to the previous reviewers comments about the sloppy printing and cheap production values of this and other Kerouac books by Penguin. It's a shame that they have control of so many of Kerouac's most important works. Kerouac's literary executor really ought to rethink the contract. Grove Press does a beautiful job on the Kerouac volumes that they publish and uses paper that will last a lifetime, not this less than newprint junk that Penguin uses. You guys should be ashamed.

Rating:
Summary: A little book of gems
Review: I wanted to say that I disagree with the comment about the poor production values of this book. Even though the paper could certainly have been of higher quality, the book itself is beautifully designed and printed. I fell in love with it, and already gave a copy to a friend who loves Beat poetry but doesn't know much about Kerouac's verse.

Rating:
Summary: Finding Haiku
Review: i was shocked to see this book with a three star rating, and more shocked that this was the rusult of one reader's dissatisfaction with the cover. i like the cover, but i love the book. just read it, and let the important pictures be the ones it conjures in your mind. i wish i could seven stars to this book - so that the average would equal the 5 it justifies.

Rating:
Summary: don't judge a book by its cover
Review: i was shocked to see this book with a three star rating, and more shocked that this was the rusult of one reader's dissatisfaction with the cover. i like the cover, but i love the book. just read it, and let the important pictures be the ones it conjures in your mind. i wish i could seven stars to this book - so that the average would equal the 5 it justifies.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Collection: Terrible Presentation
Review: I'm giving this book three stars, though Kerouac rightly deserves 5, and Regina Weinreich just as many for her wonderful introduction and efforts to gather nearly all of JK's known Haiku-based poems. My low rating is for the book's design, presentation, and production--not insignificant matters for our eventual interest and overall impression of a work of writing. Design is not separate from our enjoyment of the work, and here we see how design can sabotage the wonderful and various occasions condensed into Kerouac's "short and sweet sudden jump[s] of thought." As a reader I am shocked when I turn from a beautiful grouping of words like "Blowing in an afternoon wind, /on a white fence,/ A cobweb," close the book in order to look out the window at the world just described, and then look down to see: A Clown, a scrawled caricature of a man, and one dashed off in all haste and without any insight into the character of the writer; the funny little beatnik letters, and disgustingly wallpaperish patterns on the back cover. Everything about the book cover screams for me to run away. Not to mention that every copy in the bookstore was manufactured badly--so that the printing on every page slants, as if falling into the binding. The cover portrait is a terrible way of pandering to image recognition rather than the quiet lyric intensity of the poems. Penguin's design office should be ashamed for reintroducing stereotypes which distance us from this generation of great artists and writers, writers who helped to wake up America from its general somnolence. Kerouac's memory, and American Poetry deserve a better face than this.

Rating:
Summary: Finding Haiku
Review: Jack Kerouac is truly an American icon. His writing has become legendary- and I think for good reason. His style of writing brought about a revolution in the way to construct a novel and his unique insight into his characters gave us, the reader, a new way of understanding both them, and ourselves. However, as far as a Haiku poet, his greatest gift was one of exploration. This book is less a book of great Haiku, and more of an experiment in Haiku. Most of his poems fall dreadfully short of what a real Haiku poem can do. I highly recommend "Take a Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace" by Sylvia Forges-Ryan to those who are really interested in understanding the deep and fragile art of Haiku. The poetry of Sylvia Forges-Ryan rings true both to the traditions of the form and often, to the depths of our souls.

Rating:
Summary: Haiku finds American form - Beat!
Review: The other Beat poets generally looked to him as a master, but Jack Kerouac's general reputation will probably always be that of a novelist, albeit a mad one who did little prosaic and much prosodic. Even though he created significant swaths of poetry - within his famous prose and elsewhere, it is a small circle that considers him a poet.

Anyone in that group would like this book.

It shows how far his poems would roam yet stay with a form, the haiku form. This is known to readers of Scattered Poems and Poems All Sizes, and buffs familiar with his recordings with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims - but a better view of the amount of haiku Kerouac had within him is at hand.

A new collectipon of about 700 haikus now appears. Book of Haikus, includes works from several stages in Kerouac's career, and stands well with his other books of poems.

His approach to haiku form, like his approach to blues form, was creative. His first big step was to throw out the syllabic conventions. The classic syllable count of the Japanese form, he reasoned, worked for haiku poems in the Japanese language, but not for English maybe.

For Kerouac, description was key. Encounter with object or experience was key. It is here in Book of Haikus. In haiku bulk.