Haiku has suffered its share of image problems. Let's just say this short form of poetry has been the butt of more jokes than J. Lo's love life.

Still, when the poems are written by Jack Kerouac, they're apt to be taken more seriously. And there's little doubt Book of Haikus (Penguin, $13) will find an audience beyond comedians looking for cheap shots.

This small-size paperback offers 181 pages of haikus written by the Beat legend and compiled by Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich. About half have never been published before.

Weinreich notes that Kerouac became interested in haiku in the mid-'50s, when he began studying Buddhism. Unlike Japanese haiku, which requires 17 syllables in three lines, Kerouac designed his own form: "I propose that the 'Western Haiku' simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language," he once wrote. For Kerouac, Weinreich notes, haiku was "a springboard he could dive from."

And dive he does: His tiny word pictures, though not always beyond reproach, often conjure feelings of amusement and despair, awe and surrender. With the requisite few lines, Kerouac spins stories.

Reading such poems, one could easily get swept away with the possibilities of haiku. But, alas, such reverie can't last. Just when this books editor begins to see the value in the form, another volume crosses my desk: Redneck Haiku.

Sigh.

It has inspired me to write a verse of my own: Another silly book taking up space in my drawer.