[[During the last few weeks I have been 'leading' walking and writing
groups on various streets in North Beach, San Francisco. We gathered
upstairs in the Poetry Room of City Lights Bookshop at the corner of Kerouac
Alley and Columbus Street On this particular day, in response to someone who
asked to learn how to make a Haiku, I came up with an exercise in which the
idea was to be able to make a haiku from signage, voices and images along
our walk for the day. I did not define the haiku form in the convention of
17 syllables built across three lines. I read a few from Kenneth Rexroth's
translations from the Chinese (which were not conventional haiku either!) I
offered my own definition that a haiku was a poem in which the first two
lines set up an image(s) or construct in which there was some kind of
tension or expectation that led to a kind of "pop" in the third line - a
perceptual resolution in the form of an abrupt insight, a brimming, a flash
of awareness / consciousness. No, I really did not say that. I just
suggested that the haiku usually went:
pow
pow
punch (or bang).
As always, I took on 'the assignment' - and what follows is my own work for
the afternoon:
Walk: City Lights Bookshop across Columbus to east on Broadway, North up
Pollard, east on Fresno to Kearny, north on Kearny to east on Vallejo to
south on Montgomery:
*
³Whatıs liberal?²
Reckless Rites
³There goes my everything.²
*
Hot House Kids
*
END
JACK KEROUAC
(Adler)
*
The Inordinate Eye
Undercover Surrealism
High Times Hard Times
*
Wild Fire
Body Type
*
The Blue Note Years:
Book One
*
Trip-Trap
The Most Beautiful Woman In Town
The Tears of Eros
*
Terrors of The Table
Cradle of Violence
The Company of Demons
*
Evil Incarnate
Murder in the Model City
The Enemies of Global Turbulence
*
Inhuman Bondage
Ginseng, The Divine Root
Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy
Black Like You
Hello Americans
*
Scratching the Beat Surface:
The First Third
*
Wind Blown World
Danger on Peaks
*
³Cool out with somebody
hot on your lap.²
*
Tidy Catıs Scoop
For Multiple Cats
*
Pale pink Belladonna Trumpets:
Her father in Germany
Winter in-doors
*
Brake taillights
Red flickers in Montgomery Canyon:
The way you left me once, twice.
Stephen Vincent
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
Where currently is an account of
The Soundeye Poetry Festival
Cork, July 6 - 9/.
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