The haiku contest is inspired by the Countess and I watching this video of Robin Palley, who the Countess worked with at newspapers in Philadelphia. Robin went on to be one of the early participants in WebMD during the late 1990s. She is currently quite active in the haiku movement.
The venue for this video is the edge of Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey. Back in the day, Camden was a prestigious location for rich people to be buried. Some of the Countess’s ancestors are buried there. Most relevant to the video is the fact that renowned poet Walt Whitman is buried there as well as haiku author Nick Virgilio
If you aren’t familiar with haikus, they are a poetry form from ancient Japan. In proper form, a haiku has three lines, with the middle line being longer than the first and third – typically 5-7-5 syllables. Somewhere, usually at the end of a line, there is a “cutting word” that connects two different mental images.
Here goes:
Late Night Radio
“Caller, what is your question?”
Larry King falls asleep
She loves you yeah yeah
The secret truth – John is dead
Girls weep silently
The needle vibrates
Fourty five times per minute
The record breaks hearts
Your turn.
The winner will receive 1 million Streaming Radio guide volunteer points.
One haiku for two
It started as BeOS
Now it boots ‘HAIKU’
HaiKu? HaiKu!
Don’t know why you say
HaiKu, BeOs!
Streaming Guide
Mega volunteer
Points are back!
The Parrott
CC, The Chairman
Brand75
Sporks, WordPress
Polls, trolls but sans Streams
And Fred Stone
Just to clarify, the subject matter should be radio, not this Guide
Okay, got it. Can we assume incorrect syllable counts will be disqualified? 😉
Well, the rules have not yet been finalized. There apparently is an entire industry of professors who teach the correct way to haiku
While My Hai
Ku Gently Weeps Ku
Ku Ka Chu
dogs bark in the dark
whirling round the antenna
radio today
We had brunch yesterday at a farm out in the rural area outside Salisbury. The host mentioned that one of the features of living in the rural area is having to deal with wolves and the occasional bobcat. In my mind, I can sense the impending death with wolves circling waiting to gorge on the corpse of radio
Radio Towers
Blinking softly in the night
Keep truckers awake
I really like this one Fred, excellent! Nice double entendre with ‘blinking softly’ linking the other two lines.
Yeah, it’s good. If blinking softly fails to keep them awake, the one about the Chupacabra will “west of the Rockies”.
If I didn’t have bad vision, I easily could have seen my life’s work being driving trucks in the middle of the night. My family didn’t have a car until the late 60s, so a lot of my youth was spent riding across America in the middle of the night riding Greyhound and trailways buses. That was a great gift from my father…
CB Radios
Silent Since the 70s
Analog static
No-load mutual funds
Football team scores a touchdown
Bob takes the next call
Chupacabra fright
Moon of mars will destroy the Earth
Desert Darkness fear
My “Radio” official entry:
Iggy Pop,
Pretenders, Florida-
Georgia Line.
I screwed that up and I should know better. The first part was actually part of a StreamingRadioGuide poll that I did a while back. It should not have been Iggy Pop but H. Nilsson as in Harry Nilsson, Son of Schmilson (and friend of the Beatles).
The idea was the sound tracks of a popular morning, noon and afternoon talk show (Chris Plante, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity). The corrected version is:
H. Nilsson,
Pretenders, Florida-
Georgia Line.
A triplet:
BEEP! Weather Alert!
Severe storm is imminent
Take precaution now
BEEP! Weather Alert!
Follow the yellow brick road
Tornado Warning
BEEP! Weather Alert!
To announce the storm has passed
There’s no place like home
I like that, having lived a decade in Oklahoma one year
I like it because I had worked in Topeka for a while…. and because it breaks the 3-5-3 rule. 😉
There was news last week that Twitter is doing a trial and allowing some users to tweet with 280 characters rather than 140. The trial excluded Japanese and other Asian languages because they found that most tweets in those languages didn’t even need the 140. With only 26 characters, English needs more characters per word that Japanese. (BTW, Spanish needs more characters than English.) I don’t know if that applies the same way when comparing spoken Japanese to spoken English, but until told otherwise, 3.5-3 seems a little bit tight.
German would need 640:
Laut den Kommentatoren des Cable News Network traf Donald Trump mit dem russischen Präsidenten Wladimir Putin zusammen, um in den E-Mail-Server der Präsidentschaftskandidatin Hillary Clinton einzudringen
Thanks, but as Fred indicated, the traditional pattern is 5-7-5.
Wow. You’re right. I see what I did. I had looked at one of the examples he gave and remembered that the middle line was 2 more than the first and the last line was equal to the first. I saw “Late Night Radio” (3) and 3-5-3 entered my head and I never looked back. Thank you for pointing out my error.
The concept is a bit muddled once you leave the Japanese culture. The Japanese language is based on characters rather than phonetic spelling with discrete syllables. That makes it hard to translate a haiku between languages, yet retain the exact format. Many of the Japanese ones are based on nuanced meanings of words and the subtlety of the Japanese culture.
The super advanced haiku writers try 3-5-3, but that requires serious effort.
O’er the streams we go
A neocon guest tonight
Calls from cellphone ring
Nighttime open sky
What fun it is to drone
Strong strong strong strong strong