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A Call for the Elimination of Joke Haiku Production on the Internet (2001)
- r24y 11y agoThis article, I do declare, Makes a point that's as plain as it's fair. Let's all call a truce And end haiku use Or else I might strangle a bear. --------------- Now that that's out of the way... I didn't agree with this, until it got to the limerick part. I don't have quite as much against haikus as the author, but in most (if not all) situations a limerick would get the job done so much better.
- coldpie 11y agoWhile I don't feel strongly about trivializing Haiku's grand traditions, I did find myself in the same shoes as the author. What always struck me about joke-haikus is that they're nothing more than a sentence with a couple line-breaks in it. A haiku should use minimal words to convey a story or invoke a shared memory or trigger your senses. The form is a part of the art: where and how you place the breaks is meaningful and should contribute to the feeling you want to convey. Instead, people think up a seventeen(-ish) syllable sentence and place the line-breaks as appropriate. Ugh.
- celticninja 11y agomainly because a limerick is much more difficult to form correctly. A less than infinite number of monkeys could turn out a haiku in quick succession, a limerick on the other hand.
- mcguire 11y agoTweet! Illegal use of limrick in haiku thread. Penalty offset by reference to bear. Play ball!
- gpvos 11y agoI ate your web page. Forgive me. It was juicy and tart on my tongue. (An HTTP 404 message on mit.edu from the early days of the web.)
- waqf 11y agoI have eaten the webpage that was on the server and which you were probably hoping to retrieve Forgive me it was juicy and tart on my tongue. Similarly, I wish people would stop writing third-rate parodies. Swapping a few words out from a famous song or poem to make it relate to your chosen subject is also not a great artistic achievement.
- leoc 11y ago> Swapping a few words out from a famous poems or song to make it relate to your chosen subject is also not a great artistic achievement. It certainly can be, if the re-imagining and the juxtaposition created are creative and surprising enough. But of course usually they aren't. Sturgeon squared.
- clentaminator 11y agoI agree. The double dactyl verse form (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl) has far greater potential for comedy value.
- gjm11 11y agoMetrical-schmetrical Internet commenters Think writing haiku is All fun and games. Seventeen syllables, Cutless and seasonless? Pseudopoetical -- Let's call them names!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cantagi 11y agoI apologize, for writing joke Senryus, on the internet.
- knodi123 11y agoI fail to see how it's not a perfect analogy to say that this is just like a guy whining for an end to all internet meme images on the basis that photography has a long artistic tradition and should not be debased. I get it that "joke haiku" are low-effort imitations of a noble and ancient art. So what? There's a place for low-effort dumb humor. That's okay. Your noble and ancient haiku are still there, unharmed. There is no poetry currency which is being devalued when cheap product floods the market.
- mcguire 11y agoTweet! Failure of reply to take form of haiku. 12-yard penalty. Second down.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoTraditional Haiku must evoke a season. Most 'haiku-form' prose doesn't meet the bar. Maybe we need another name?
- wonkaWonka 11y agoHow about "17 syllable zingers" or something like that, no?
- gpvos 11y agoSenryu. (It's in the article.)
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoCool!
- jstanley 11y ago"Joke Haiku are used by Pseudo-Intellectual Poseurs to imbue Banal and Uninspired Quips with Undeserved Cachet." The irony here clearly lost on the author.
- wenham 11y agoThis boils down to: "Stop doing this, you're not enjoying it right!".
- TorKlingberg 11y agoI am surprised to see the word "hipster" in an article from 2001. It didn't become a popular word until at least a few years later.
- 6502nerdface 11y agoHuh? I'm pretty sure "hipster" took off as a term back in the 1960s, associated with the whole countercultural movement going on then. Google's n-gram viewer agrees -- it starts appearing in books in the 1950s, has some ups and downs, but was as popular as ever in 2000. [1] [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hipster&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Chipster%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bhipster%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BHipster%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BHIPSTER%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hipster&case_i...
- TorKlingberg 11y agoSure, the word as existed since the 1940s, but was related to jazz and different from the modern usage.
- pound 11y agohttp://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2015/01/26/meet-the-first-hipster-in-san-francisco-history/ http://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2015/01/26/meet-the-first...
- logfromblammo 11y agoImagine my distress, when I find that this is a lie: This is a haiku, Because this line has seven, And this line has five. So now I must update it: Senryu is three lines, Seventeen syllables max, And knows no season. You know, in barely related news, Dwarf Fortress now supports the invention and spread of poetic forms in the world generator. I'm sure that any one of those procedurally-generated forms would be acceptable for passing jokey-jokes around the Internet.
- pipoca 11y agoIn fact, that isn't a senryu either. Haiku and senryu count morae, not syllables. The mora is a unit of timing; a short syllable is one mora and a long one is two morae. So 'tokyo', which is two syllables, is counted as 4 morae since both 'o's are long. Similarly, 'Nippon' is counted as 4 morae - 'ni-p-po-n'. Confusion about this is why English haiku tend to be so long: compare furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto to wind catches lily scatt'ring petals to the wind: segmentation fault
- logfromblammo 11y ago~I am shocked--simply shocked--that poetic forms don't transfer cleanly across languages.~ Iamb-out to declare that none of this really matters, trochee? Anapest-ilence upon the poetic purists!
- AshFurrow 11y agoDon't tell me what to do – I can write poetry and jokes however I want. Stop pearl-clutching, ya nerd.