Re: Haiku instructions from Jack Kerouac..!

Will Dockery wrote:

 Zod wrote:

>

Haiku instructions from Jack Kerouac...

>

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4260/the-art-of-fiction-no-41-jack-kerouac

>

"Haiku? You want to hear haiku? You see you got to compress into

three short

lines a great big story. First you start with a haiku situation--so

you see a

leaf, as I told her the other night, falling on the back of a

sparrow during

a great big October wind storm. A big leaf falls on the back of a

little

sparrow. How you going to compress that into three lines? Now in

Japanese

you got to compress it into seventeen syllables. We don't have to do

that in

American--or English--because we don't have the same syllabic

bullshit that

your Japanese language has. So you say: "Little sparrow"--you don't

have to

say little--everybody knows a sparrow is little because they fall so

you

say'..." -Jack Kerouac