American Sentences is a form of poetry created by Allen Ginsberg, modeled after the Japanese Haiku and consisting of 17 syllables, usually in one line. The best examples of this form, like haiku, are imagistic. In Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994), he published two and a half pages of these poems, some of which had scene-setting preambles. For example:

"Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella" (1987)

"Rainy night on Union square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead (August 8, 1990, 3:30 A.M.)

"Bearded robots drink from Uranium coffee cups on Saturn's ring." (May 1990)

"Crescent moon, girls chatter at twilight on the bus ride to Ankara." (June 1990)

"Put on my tie in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate." (November 1991)

"That grey-haired man in business suit and black turtleneck thinks he's still young." (December 19, 1992)

"Taxi ghosts at dusk pass Monoprix in Paris 20 years ago."

In a 2001 interview with Anne Waldman, Andrew Schelling said Allen’s idea for American Sentences: "…was based on haiku. He was also very interested in Buddhism for the second half of his life, and probably the central mantra or wisdom phrase of Buddhism comes from the Heart Sutra. It runs: “ Gate Gate Paragate, Para Sam Gate Bodhi Swaha.” And Allen discovered that has seventeen syllables also. And so he felt that maybe seventeen syllables had a more universal..." (Anne: "healing properties") "…a more universal application. It was not just located in Japan or old India, and so this is a way of him playing with that possibility." Anne: "And well also, the Japanese line, ... is one line down, the characters running down the page. It’s not broken up into these three neat lines, as you see in translated haiku. So, the sense of that one, and also the running together of the thoughts that has the energy of the way the mind works. That actually you are putting these things together, though they seem tripartite and in the traditional view of the haiku Heaven/Earth/Man:

In the medicine cabinet

the winter fly

has died of old age."

(Jack Kerouac’s haiku.) Andrew continues: "And if you think of Allen’s maxim, “maximum information, minimum number of syllables,” seventeen is a small number of syllables. So how to make a poem that really carries the weight of a poem and I think that fascinated him and should become a form that is used regularly in workshops."

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