Poetic Form: American Sentence

Following my most recent attempt at working with an American Haiku form equivalent, I returned to the traditional 5-7-5 haiku.

Now a few weeks removed, and after researching some potential poetic forms to work with my 11th grade AP students, I happened upon another Western haiku variant "invented" by Allen Ginsberg, the American Sentence.

While still adhering to the 17 syllable standard of the traditional haiku, the imagery included in the sentence is presented in a linear fashion reflective of the left-to-right reading of English as opposed o the top-to-bottom approach in Japanese haiku.Take 10 minutes to slow down, look around. Write one well developed sentences consisting of 17 syllables in which you make a direct observation of what is around you. In explaining to my students how to write an AS, I suggested that an exemplary product would include at least one of the following:

clear concrete images, juxtaposition (The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development.), found poetry (a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines, and consequently meaning), reflect a degree of "mindfulness," be "compressed" (condensed) for maximum information, minimum number of syllables, and/or demotic speech (of or pertaining to the ordinary, everyday, current form of a language; vernacular).

As a ways of making the from "collaborative," I asked students to write chains of sentences, by first writing an AS, then asking four others to add their own sentence, before finally contributing their own sixth line. We did one in each class, resulting in three poems of thirty lines apiece.

Here is a condensed version I organized using lines form class:

A Day in AP

Block 1
A broken record is playing with the morning bell as the day begins.
Dampened light slithers through the shades filling the room with a morning glow.
Blank faces stare into an abyss while a single voice breaks the silence.
These literary elements, stalking, hanging over my low head.
Chairs sit, stacked like floors in a building, suffocating one another.
“Rare uncommon words and phrases, engraved within these asylum walls.”
Scritch-scratch, pencils moving under bowed heads attempting the school work.

Block 2
A multi-colored juice box bag stuffed to bursting with last night’s work.
Trapped inside four square walls, feeling like the time will never move forward.
Learning another poetic form as the air conditioner hums.
Hushed whispering throughout the sunlit room surrounded by books.
Poems scattered about, books line the walls desiring to be read.
Heads studiously bent with focus as strong as the thick concrete walls.

Block 4
Why is school chalk only yellow or white when sidewalk chalks is colors?
Boxes and words on the board—thin and scrawled, like ink about to run out.
The blackboard reveals all of life’s mysteries and its chaotic dreams.
The budding tree snatches my attention; the sun throws shadows on the grass.
Students ponder their surroundings while awaiting school’s final bell.
Stop—don’t say it! “My poem stinks” does not exist in this dojo!

Thoughts?

Stay Poetic!