fallen verses

via Poetry Hut Blog

Burger King Launches Canadian Online Poetry Contest (link)

…

Haiku is an ancient form of Japanese poetry consisting of a set number of syllables per line: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third. The website includes haiku samples and an easy-to-use haiku-writing application….

/boggle

I think this calls for bullet points:

• “Ancient” is a very fluffy word in this context. Language is so fluffy to begin with but then we take words that have meanings and we stretch those meanings and stretch them and stretch them and soon, they have holes big enough in their ears you could mini-putt through them! So, while this is true, it is only true in some meanings of the word. Regardless, I don’t think I would call the 17th century ancient.
• Syllables: well, Japanese does not have syllables, so it is, in fact, impossible for Japanese poetry to have a form based on them. Japanese is measured in on (which are moras), which are not syllables!!!!!
• Per line? Well, the line issue. The glaring 5-7-5 of grade school prosody. Haiku (as an independent form) were not three line poems. Often, they were written in one line. Or, when mixed with visual arts in haiga, were formed according to how they best fit with the image (something the poets at Postal Poetry are working with).
• 5-7-5… well, remember, not syllables in Japanese, but on. Haiku are not 5-7-5, not really. They employ (in their most formal sense) a kireji (cutting word) after the fifth or twelfth on. The kireji serving as a point of separation similar to colon, semicolon, dash, ellipses, something of that nature. A little math and you can see how 12/5 or 5/12 gets thought of as (5+7)/5 or 5/(7+5) to get the tripartite form we use in western haiku.
• “easy-to-use haiku-writing application”  ????? write text, count, edit text, recount. Notepad does this!!!!

Feel free to ignore the man behind the curtain wearing the gold paper crown.

And feel free to ignore whoever wrote that idiotic trade-journal article. I mean, fuck, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, WIKIPEDIA it! How about, mr. fast-food-writer-man*, you write about the new innovation in fryers and leave the poem-talk to people that know more about poetry than your average 4th grader!

*I say man, of course, meaning the non-gender specific referent for person while still conveying “The Man.” mr. fast-food-writer-person just wouldn’t have had the same edge to it.

About the author tom:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.