Tagged: haiku

Snowball is an eight letter word

After last month’s haiku spree, I was intrigued to discover - via BoingBoing – the Chaterism, a form of constrained poetry thusly defined:

Snowball (also called a Chaterism): A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. One of the constrained writing techniques utilised by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature).

This, I thought, makes haiku seem trite.

I 
am  
the  
only  
idiot  
trying  
hardest  
flailing  
oblivious  
gesundheit

Well, maybe in difficulty. It starts off with not many choices beside I and A, perhaps O if you’re feeling lyrical, or some other letter if that’s what the poem is about. Then it gets easier for a bit then really really hard.

You could up the ante and go geometric, at least for a while but the options in 32-letter words are scant outside of scientific compounds. If you’re bored with starting with “I” you might borrow a constant.

π
to
math 
geometer 
counterbalancing

A Fibbonacci series of lengths (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) lets you get Walt Whitmanesque

O
I
am
the
earth
sunburnt
onomatopoetic

OK, I had to get some help to finish that one. Too much, or not enough? I think a decent computer program could write better snowballs than I can. I’ll stick with my imperfect English haiku attempts at evoking the seasons.

Be true to your haiku

Via Jen 8 Lee for
national poetry month,
NY Times Haiku.

I learned via professor N‘s instant message that the estimable Jennifer 8 Lee tweeted a piece about the New York Times’ creation of a Haiku bot.  I like that the Nieman Lab article felt compelled to state up front that this was not an April Fools item.  The NY Times bot somehow pulls out 5-7-5 syllable chunks of articles and presents them as haiku.  Some are quite apt, even touching. And April is National Poetry Month, go figure.

You may have noticed that I’m on a haiku kick this month (and have been before, notably in April of 2009) but I have to claim total ignorance until just now of both the NY Times bot and National Poetry Month.

What I can’t claim ignorance of is that many of my haiku (and most likely all of the NYT bot’s) are not really haiku in the fullest sense, and not only because they are not in Japanese. Most people think that an English haiku is a three-line poem with 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively. Actually, many practitioners of English haiku are not so orthodox about the syllable count. More importantly, as the NYT haiku bot’s author notes,

A proper haiku should also contain a word that indicates the season, or “kigo,” as well as a juxtaposition of verbal imagery, known as “kireji.”

So, most of my little poems are hack-ku at best. I like the challenge and creativity you get with constraints, and I’ll have to up my game by trying to adhere to these additional rules. Happy National Poetry month everybody!

Five Seven Five don’t
make your poem a haiku;
rain don’t make it April