Mini-Prompt: American Sentences

Ginsberg  via Flickr

If you're looking for some more inspiration this month, I always suggest taking a look at Paull Szlosek's Poetry Playground blog. There are many forms and examples, both traditional and invented forms.

One of those is the American Sentence, a poetry form that was invented by Allen Ginsberg and popularized by Paul E. Nelson as a variation on traditional haiku. 

American Sentences also consist of 17 syllables, but the 3-line format and 5-7-5 breaks are dropped. The 17 syllables are written as a single line or sentence. They may have a title. 

Is it one complete grammatical sentence? Sometimes, but feel free to do several short sentences or even phrases., while others have written them as two, three, or four or even just as series of phrases. 

There are some other slightly haiku-ish conderations. Nelson feels they should focus on concrete images. Ginsberg said you should mention either a time or place (or both) and the use of articles such as “a” and “the” should be avoided. But neither adhered to their own suggestions all the time.

I have also seen poets write multi-line poems composed entirely of American Sentences which gives the poem a kind of Japanese-American "meter."

Here are four of the original American Sentences by Ginsberg:

Nov 1991 N.Y.

Put my tie on in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate

 

Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y.

Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella

On Hearing the Muezzin Cry Allah Akbar While Visiting the Pythian Oracle at Didyma Toward the End of the Second Millennium

At sunset Apollo’s columns echo with the bawl of the One God

 

Approaching Seoul by Bus in Heavy Rain

Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you got to get out!

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American Sentences

American Sentences is a poetry form that was Allen Ginsberg's effort to make American the haiku. If haiku is seventeen syllables going down in Japanese text, he would make American Sentences seventeen syllables going across, linear, like just about everything else in America. One-liners.

In Cosmopolitan Greetings, his 1994 book, he published two and a half pages of these nuggets, some of which had scene-setting preambles. For example:

Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella.

Rainy night on Union square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till
I'm dead.

AmericanSentences.com is a site to present and foster this poetic form of haiku-length poems that Allen suggested be limited to 17 syllables, like haiku in Japanese, and like the Heart Sutra in Buddhism.

The website is done by Paul Everett Nelson. He is self-described as a poet, father, teacher, and broadcaster, and founder of the non-profit Global Voices Radio and co-founder of the Northwest SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!).

Paul says:

I have written one of these sentences every day since January 1, 2001. I find it
an amazing way to sharpen my perception and learn how to eliminate unnecessary
syllables. It aids in a sort of pre-editing that supports my spontaneous writing
practice.

Paul's collection is American Sentences: One Sentence, Every Day, Twenty Years. 

This is not a writing prompt, but feel free to post your efforts in the comments below.

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