Hey,
I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about a dude named Jack Kerouac. I should probably be writing this post tomorrow, since that would be the 40th anniversary of his death, but I just found that out a minute ago, so it doesn't matter. Besides, I have something special and Kerouac-esque to do tomorrow, so it kind of fits?
Anyways, in case you don't know, Jack Kerouac was an american writer of the Beat generation. What does this mean, you ask. It means he did a lot of drugs, got a lot of drunk, travelled a lot, wrote a lot, and just dug everything. He also didn't believe in editing or rewriting. That's what I want to focus on. I write a lot of poetry, I focussed on it through out high school, and am taking a course on it now that I probably think about more than any other course. The thing about poetry, though, is that it's a necessity to be a perfectionist, and to tighten every single word and every single line until it's shiny. There is no room for mistakes in poetry, there is no room for accidents. This annoys me, this isn't how I want to work. I want to be kind of Pollockian, if you know what I mean, though I don't know what I mean when I say that. Actually, I do, so never mind. The way I see Jackson Pollock's work is that the whole painting is one big mistake, but the process of making the mistake and the painting invokes a message as it is. That the mistakes made on it were preordained by the subconscious or the soul or whatever, and were there to invoke greater truth than it could before. And this is how I want to work, this is how I want to write. I do my best when I write what's off the top of my head, and don't worry about how it works or the structure or anything. I'm not saying that editing destroys the soul of a piece, but many times, editing gets rid of the original intent, because the original intent is in the original words, and could not be in any other words.
So that's how I feel about editing. But even Kerouac edited and tightened his words, because Kerouac is the only american master of haiku. Even though he mostly wrote senryu, a similar but distinct form that concentrates on people rather than nature, Kerouac basically invented the american haiku. Kerouac looked at the classic haiku, and he decided, not without good reason, that the traditional 5-7-5 haiku bullshit could not work in the west. The original intent of a haiku is to displace a tiny snapshot of a tiny scene. Most traditional haiku have what my prof calls a "haiku moment", a moment when the entire theme of the poem is flipped on its head. A friend of mine wrote the following haiku, which is really more of a senryu, but whatever: "A little girl in/ a white dress plays with a kitten/ - flips his upside down." This has the "haiku moment", but I don't really agree with the "haiku moment". One of the things about haiku is that it's free of irony and poetic trickery, and the "haiku moment" is poetic trickery and irony. It's dishonest. Anyways, Jack Kerouac's haikus are everything a haiku should be. They are small, concise, and beautifully written.
Another inspiration for a long time for me has been webcomics. There is one webcomic called pictures for sad children, which is the saddest and funniest thing in the world. The creator, John Campbell, is a genius, and every year, for a month he does hourly comics. Meaning every hour he will draw a little cartoon about what he did. I was looking at these today, and bemoaning the fact that I am not an artist, and I in fact have very little talent that way. Or not very little, but little. I can, however, write.
If you can't see what I'm doing here, I revoke your deduction license.
I am going to, starting tomorrow, do hourly haikus. It'll be posted on this site, and hopefully they turn out ok. I'm not sure how I'm going to do this, maybe do one week straight every month, or do one day a week, or something, who knows.
My main reason for doing this, however, is not for the hourly comics tradition. It is because Kerouac's magnum opus, On The Road, is a brutally frank and upfront, unedited book of his travels, that doesn't exclude anything. At the same time, Kerouac's haikus represent his best work, and a poetic eye not always present in On The Road. I am hoping to combine these two aspects of Kerouac's writing.
Wish me luck.
-Lee
