A poetic journal is a literary genre combining aspects of poetry with the daily, or near daily, "takes" of journal writing. Born of twin impulses: to track change in daily life and to memorialize experience, poetic journals owe allegiances to Asian writing — particularly the Japanese haibun of Matsuo Bashō, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, and the poetic diaries of Masaoka Shiki — as well as Objectivist poets and others associated with Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Unlike traditional diaries or journals that focus primarily on recounting a day's experience, poetic journals emphasize the act of writing itself in collaboration with the day's account. Taking its cue from post-Jack Kerouac writers, like Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, the poetic journal aims to be all inclusive as well as timely and attentive. To quote Tyler Doherty in his introduction to For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals, " doesn't try to tell us what the world is, so much as remind us that the world is."
