Less Bad Haiku of 2018, Part 1
I wrote 218+ haiku in 2018 as part of birthday card project. A haiku is a Japanese poetical form often but not always rendered in English as three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. Technically, it's also supposed to include a seasonal reference and a "cutting word" that at the end of the first or second line, which means I probably wrote a lot of senryu, but let's leave that aside. For purposes of this post, the question is whether or not any of those haiku I wrote were actually any good. I'm not looking for burning immortal prose here, just something that sounds good to me three years later.
To be perfectly honest, even in 2018 some of the haiku I wrote did not satisfy me. My card system had me writing all the haiku for a given week ten days out. If the numbers had balanced out perfectly throughout the year that would only have been 4 per week, which would have been very doable, but of course birthdays are somewhat more random in nature and there were some weeks where I only needed to write one and others where I wrote 10+ haiku. As you can imagine, in those latter weeks I didn't always have a lot of time for rewrites.
Between my only inclinations and time constraints, a pretty substantial number of the haiku I wrote were about haiku. I didn't keep exact count but it might have been as a high as 25% of them. Let me tell you, there is very little about meta poetry (or at least MY meta poetry) that is enjoyable. A few rose as high as "clever" but most didn't get even that far. So if there's a moral from this textual analysis, it's "don't write meta poetry as a standard default. In fact, of all the the meta haiku I wrote, the only one I really enjoyed after the fact was more of a commentary about poetic expectations than about haiku.
There once was a boy
from Nantucket, who preferred
the haiku format
Since most of us have enjoyed a dirty limerick along the way, I found that this delightfully subverts that expectation. It's a terrible haiku in terms of formal definition though.
Another haiku that I found enjoyable also references another poem in that it sort of feels to me a tiny bit like the famous This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams:
Ice cream is quite hard
To attach to a post card
So I ate it all
One other haiku I wrote is really just doggerel that happens to have fit in 5-7-5, but I think it's very entertaining because it fails to rhyme in the expected way.
Pinot, cab, merlot
Drink all you want, it still does
Not rhyme like it ought!
Of course, it only really works if you aren't reading it aloud, because if you read it out loud with correct pronunciation the joke is much harder to see.
This post covered the unthemed haiku (or maybe that should be "haiku") I still liked three years on. The next two posts will cover the two main thematic areas that somehow each multiple haiku that didn't suck.
To be perfectly honest, even in 2018 some of the haiku I wrote did not satisfy me. My card system had me writing all the haiku for a given week ten days out. If the numbers had balanced out perfectly throughout the year that would only have been 4 per week, which would have been very doable, but of course birthdays are somewhat more random in nature and there were some weeks where I only needed to write one and others where I wrote 10+ haiku. As you can imagine, in those latter weeks I didn't always have a lot of time for rewrites.
Between my only inclinations and time constraints, a pretty substantial number of the haiku I wrote were about haiku. I didn't keep exact count but it might have been as a high as 25% of them. Let me tell you, there is very little about meta poetry (or at least MY meta poetry) that is enjoyable. A few rose as high as "clever" but most didn't get even that far. So if there's a moral from this textual analysis, it's "don't write meta poetry as a standard default. In fact, of all the the meta haiku I wrote, the only one I really enjoyed after the fact was more of a commentary about poetic expectations than about haiku.
There once was a boy
from Nantucket, who preferred
the haiku format
Since most of us have enjoyed a dirty limerick along the way, I found that this delightfully subverts that expectation. It's a terrible haiku in terms of formal definition though.
Another haiku that I found enjoyable also references another poem in that it sort of feels to me a tiny bit like the famous This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams:
Ice cream is quite hard
To attach to a post card
So I ate it all
One other haiku I wrote is really just doggerel that happens to have fit in 5-7-5, but I think it's very entertaining because it fails to rhyme in the expected way.
Pinot, cab, merlot
Drink all you want, it still does
Not rhyme like it ought!
Of course, it only really works if you aren't reading it aloud, because if you read it out loud with correct pronunciation the joke is much harder to see.
This post covered the unthemed haiku (or maybe that should be "haiku") I still liked three years on. The next two posts will cover the two main thematic areas that somehow each multiple haiku that didn't suck.