Sunday, September 30, 2018

American Sentences



At some point in the mid-1980s Allen Ginsberg announced the American Sentence -- a monostich based on the Japanese haiku (three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, respectively), but on a single line. Ginsberg said these poems could have titles, like this one from John Ashbery's "As We Know" (1979):

I HAD THOUGHT THINGS WERE GOING ALONG WELL

But I was mistaken.

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