An American sentence:
Four bank tellers sit, busy not serving customers with appointments.
What’s an ‘American Sentence’?
Allen Ginsberg, inventor of the American Sentence, felt that the haiku didn’t work as well in English. Ginsberg decided to remove the line structure of the haiku, maintaining the requirement of 17 syllables total. He felt that removing the line count freed the American Sentence up for the idiosyncrasies of English phonemes.
The requirements:
- Composed in one line;
- Syllabic, 17 syllables;
- Condensed, written with no unnecessary words or articles;
- Complete sentence or sentences;
- Includes a turn or enlightenment.
Let’s write poetry together!
When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone – it’s possible. But creatively, it’s more like painting: you can’t just use the same colours in every painting. It’s just not an option. You can’t take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
–Ben Harper (b. 1969)
Would you like to create poetry with me and have a completed poem of yours featured here at the Skeptic’s Kaddish? I am very excited to have launched the ‘Poetry Partners’ initiative and am looking forward to meeting and creating with you… Check it out!
The Skeptic's Kaddish 🇮🇱 
Haha! This one hits home hard. The annoying truth. 🙂
🤗 Terveen 🤗
[…] recently stumbled across The Skeptic’s Kaddish blog. He experiments with different forms of poetry, including an explanation of the form and its […]
🥰 Nancy 🥰
Ah, the underpaid customer service agents of the world…
❤ Tina ❤ – you're very empathetic!
-David
nice… nothing makes me madder 😡
💛 Cindy 💛
My grandmother often referred to money as ‘filthy lucre’ and wished she could get her hands dirty! It would be boring to sit at a bank and not have anything to do… with all the online banking and ATMs the tellers are at loose ends…
🤎 Muri 🤎
I was a bank teller early in my working life. In my bank we served customers all day, but of course that was well before cash machines. If you are speaking of the (mostly) men in suits who are supposed to help you with other banking matters…(sigh) (k)
🥰 Kerfe 🥰
At the bank this morning, three of the four were women…
-David
Still mostly men here…but the tellers are more mixed now–then it was all women. Not that there are many tellers left.
Accurate one! So true.
😘 Filipa 😘
Yeah… some people just sit around idling, not doing their job. But don’t the employers catch them?
I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
That’s a great American Sentence
But I’d like to understand the sadly true.
Is it a slant at people-unfriendly banking sector
Or is there a riddle hidden in the American haiku?
I think that was in reference to the title of the poem.
Thank you
Bear with me, sometimes I take a little longer to grasp☹️☺
Sadly true.
yup.