Saturday Rave: the American Sentence.

As some of us are opening up our lives and economies, others of us are closing them down, so this series of short-form poetry still seems relevant.

So what is an American Sentence?

The idea came from Allen Ginsberg. He felt that the haiku didn't work all that well as an English form (though actually many, many examples prove him wrong) and so he proposed making poems where the only rule was that the thing had to have seventeen syllables in total.

Despite the name, an American Sentence doesn't have to have only one sentence, and the haiku line syllable-count (five, seven, five) isn't important, either. (The syllable count rule is actually a bit more complicated in the haiku's native Japanese, but never mind.)

The poem is written as a single line. You might say this means it can't be a poem, and I wouldn't like to have to argue with you. The subject of an American Sentence often includes a month or a date or a location.

Not convinced? Then how about this? It's by Allen Ginsberg himself:

That grey-haired man in business suit and black turtleneck thinks he's still young.

Well, it does all the poetry-stuff for me.


Word To Use Today: turtle. This word comes from the French tortue, and before that from the Latin tartaracha (or something similar) short for bestia tartarucha, which means beast of hell.

It got its name from its habit of rolling about in mud, and being short. 

A turtle in Britain is exclusively the kind that swims: the dry-land kind are called tortoises.