Woofenberry Writers Club

Woofenberry Writers Club

Fun with form

The American Sentence

Ash Raymond James's avatar
Ash Raymond James
May 14, 2026
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The American Sentence is a poetry form invented by Allen Ginsberg in the eighties. It was designed as an alternative to Japanese haiku. Both forms share a total syllable count of seventeen, but a haiku is split over three lines, whereas the American Sentence, as the name suggests, does not contain any line breaks.

They share the same approach of focusing…

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