Offensive Squid

also senryu. haibun too. am tempted to suggest doing a renku.

btw, I always forget how to spell those things.

rules for not annoying me when you tell someone to write haiku, strict 5/7/5? LAME. English is not Japanese. English is metrical, not syllabic (whatever that means, I used to know). 17 syllables or less, not a bad heuristic.

having a kigo (or however that is spelled) nice. picking a cultural signifier for your culture or region or genre idiom, nice.

Post edited 11:54 am – March 16, 2011 by sheila

No, there was no haiku buried in the above.

What brought haiku to mind was the verbal diarrhea in another post I made which would lead me to expect that a person who writes like that doesn't ever write little things.

Also it has been on my mind from the other day when Scalzi posted a haiku competition.

I've not written any lately. I have had haiku moments, but didn't feel the need to record them. There was one where I was riding in the el over one of the bridges and saw rain on water. That was a moment. And there is a seasonal aspect since there hasn't been any rain, given that it has been winter. that was the first time it warmed up enough for me to notice rain. and nice too, I liked how the rain fell in just the right way to make rings in the water. so it is a certain of rain, with a certain temperature, in a certain time of year….

so if I wanted to make a haiku from that I might be thinking:

rain dotting the chicago main branch. haven't seen that in a while

or

rain on water.

or

rain on the north branch.

and then work from there. "dotting" is bad. even if it does evoke the image I like. It's too obvious or cute or something I can't think of the word for.

to go back to the general topic. I like genre haiku. I used to do rpgs and had a sf one I was in where my character kept a journal, and she wrote

emerging from cryo

tear ducts dried from cold
— water drops condense
on face and eyes

which was after one of the teams first missions where a whole bunch of people died and the survivors were in cryo on the ship coming out of there.

edited to add a PS. that haiku is a bit contrived given that it was triggered by a comment in babylon 5, I think, that stuck in my head. the doctor mentions to someone that their tear ducts are dried from stasis or whatever it was in that universe. it would be better had I come up with all of the scene on my own.