Seriously!?

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Re: Seriously!?

Post by benhall.1 »

Nanohedron wrote:
benhall.1 wrote:
Nanohedron wrote:Of course. I too have a grateful look when they stop beating me.
Anyway, I'm now treating her to track after track from early Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.
Sadist.
:twisted:
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by Nanohedron »

Nightfall, chill and damp
When out of another room:
Shimmer of steel drums
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Tribal musician
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by benhall.1 »

Home, to less ceiling
The builders removed more house
The stove fills with warmth

A grand hallway now
Next week the tilers are here
Anon the plumber

Hot water tank in
Finally seeing progress
Hope for Christmas now
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by AaronFW »

benhall.1 wrote:Home, to less ceiling
The builders removed more house
The stove fills with warmth

A grand hallway now
Next week the tilers are here
Anon the plumber

Hot water tank in
Finally seeing progress
Hope for Christmas now
Why have haiku been the thing on Chiff and Fipple and not limericks? Is it because haiku tend to be cleaner?

I'm not great with the feet and meter but....

--
I'm on Chiff & Fipple when I cannot sleep,
I look and yearn to read something deep,
Nothing is here,
Nothing is there,
Only Nano and Ben with poems they weep.
--

Eh.
Maybe I need to go back to bed.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by walrii »

Nanohedron wrote:There's no such thing as summer or winter clothing any more. You just wear what you need to, regardless of what they're calling "seasons" these days.
It is ever thus in Texas. We have four seasons: yesterday, today, tomorrow and 4pm this afternoon.
The Walrus

What would a wild walrus whistle if a walrus could whistle wild?

The second mouse may get the cheese but the presentation leaves a lot to be desired.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by benhall.1 »

AaronFW wrote:Why have haiku been the thing on Chiff and Fipple and not limericks? Is it because haiku tend to be cleaner?

I'm not great with the feet and meter but....

--
I'm on Chiff & Fipple when I cannot sleep,
I look and yearn to read something deep,
Nothing is here,
Nothing is there,
Only Nano and Ben with poems they weep.
--

Eh.
Maybe I need to go back to bed.
This is the Pub. There's some information, but typically not too much directly about music, because that's in the music forums. I come to the pub for entertainment and a natter. Sorry you don't find my contributions entertaining or worth engaging with.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by AaronFW »

benhall.1 wrote:
AaronFW wrote:Why have haiku been the thing on Chiff and Fipple and not limericks? Is it because haiku tend to be cleaner?

I'm not great with the feet and meter but....

--
I'm on Chiff & Fipple when I cannot sleep,
I look and yearn to read something deep,
Nothing is here,
Nothing is there,
Only Nano and Ben with poems they weep.
--

Eh.
Maybe I need to go back to bed.
This is the Pub. There's some information, but typically not too much directly about music, because that's in the music forums. I come to the pub for entertainment and a natter. Sorry you don't find my contributions entertaining or worth engaging with.
Sorry, I did not mean to offend. I apologize I was really too tired and should not have been posting.
I do enjoy your contributions and did read all your Dental haiku as well.

Also, it sounds like your house renovation is great; I lack the haiku skills to say it in haiku.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by AaronFW »

Since I've mostly been watching from the background and reading posts, rather than posting. In doing so, I feel a bit more familiar with you guys than I really am but I haven't made myself known to you guys either and as a result my joking failed.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by Nanohedron »

AaronFW wrote:Why have haiku been the thing on Chiff and Fipple and not limericks? Is it because haiku tend to be cleaner?
You know, I never even thought about it until you asked.

The emphasis (if you could really call it that) probably started with the founder, Dale. Ever since I joined up, haiku's been kind of a signature thing around here, part of the local color or ethos or whatever you want to call it. C&F used to have a home page that doesn't exist any more; in it, there was some pretty humorous stuff that Dale came up with, such as the farcical Martha Stewart's Guide to Session Etiquette, and the Tao Te Chiff (which actually succeeded, for the most part, in being a close parody of the original). There was also a haiku page, IIRC (also mostly humorous), and that would probably be the original momentum for the whole haiku thing that still continues here. But it's not a matter of being anti-limerick or anything like that; in the end, at C&F creativity's the point, and that's all. The Pub is particularly here for that. So if it's limericks for you, then give us limericks. If it's free verse, give us free verse. If it's in you to do so - and I hope it is - give us something of yourself, whatever it is. Your garden. Your emus. Pictures of your latest welding sculpture. Your pet peeve. It's all great. While she was living, I wrote a series of installments about my cat's latest weirdnesses, for she had plenty of them, and they just kept on coming. So, make it anything (well, if you're a photographer of the Mapplethorpean school, it's best not to share the gnarlier aspects of that here, thank you). :)

Dale does have a keen interest in poetry among other things, to the point that in addition to C&F, he also has a poetry website, Right Hand Pointing, that publishes the works of its contributors.

If you were to ask, "Why haiku as opposed to limericks?", only he could answer that. Maybe he just likes them. Maybe all this has nothing to do with him and it's just a reflection of their popularity at large. If we need deeper reasons, I wouldn't say it was for the sake of mere cleanness, though. Were I to venture a guess, I would say that on one end, even those of us who are modest at it can still participate in this mode of creativity because haiku are short and thus inviting. So there's a practical, democratic aspect, and it's probably the main and best reason. On the other end, if we want to really roll up our sleeves and bear down on it, we can still do so, since the haiku form has a unique capacity for depth of expression (mystery, poigniancy, surprise, etc.) compressed in a snapshot, as it were. The ideal haiku is a glimpse, an ineffable moment in time. It is right here, right now. It hints, rather than laying it all out. The poet doesn't hold your hand through a haiku; you're supposed to take that little kernel and expand it from there, yourself. It's a packet you unwrap. If you get something beyond the wrapping, you're probably looking at a good haiku, particularly if that something hits you. But again, not all of us are concerned with arriving at such pinpoint subtlety, so we use the form in other ways, to other ends. And that's fine, too. I think insisting on rigorousness is best left to classes or one's personal bent in one's own work. Now, the limerick is a different critter. Because of the meter, rhyme scheme and bounciness, limericks chiefly tend to lend themselves best to humor and wryness. I personally could never write of loss with a limerick. I could write of joy with a limerick - maybe - but if you think about it, it couldn't really be taken nearly as seriously as with a well-done haiku or other poetic form. Limericks are purpose-built to entertain, not plumb. If someone could touch my heart and bring a tear to my eye with a limerick, I would call that person a true genius of unexpected proportions. So I think it's haiku because with haiku, you get the whole package without having to resort to bigger forms such as sonnets and such.

Despite that, haiku composition is challenging precisely because of the brevity and metric requirements involved. Crafting a good one in the best sense is not really the easiest thing to do, so we mere mortals just do the best we can. Haiku in languages other than Japanese have out of necessity done a lot of relaxing of the 5-7-5 syllabic parameters, so such changes have become acceptable. But I still personally prefer to at least stick to the original syllabic form while including seasonal references (most of the time), just for the challenge of keeping things "classic", at least outwardly. And one can also use punctuation to approximate some things that can only otherwise be done in Japanese. Maybe someday I'll ease up on all that, but not just yet. :)

Oh, what the hell:

Fruit flies. Fruit flies. Fruit
Flies. Fruit flies. Fruit flies. Fruit flies.
God damned bananas...

See? I skipped the seasonal reference. :wink:
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by Nanohedron »

walrii wrote:
Nanohedron wrote:There's no such thing as summer or winter clothing any more. You just wear what you need to, regardless of what they're calling "seasons" these days.
It is ever thus in Texas. We have four seasons: yesterday, today, tomorrow and 4pm this afternoon.
In Minnesota we say we have two: Winter, and road construction.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by AaronFW »

Nanohedron wrote:
AaronFW wrote:Why have haiku been the thing on Chiff and Fipple and not limericks? Is it because haiku tend to be cleaner?
You know, I never even thought about it until you asked.

The emphasis (if you could really call it that) probably started with the founder, Dale. ...
Thanks for the thorough explanation, that was the information I had been looking for.

I'm probably going to keep thinking about your description of haikus before commenting too much more about it. I hadn't thought about it before in the ways you explained and I want to think on it.
Nanohedron wrote:Fruit flies. Fruit flies. Fruit
Flies. Fruit flies. Fruit flies. Fruit flies.
God damned bananas...

See? I skipped the seasonal reference. :wink:
Construction is here.
Men and women breaking ground.
Blocking roads all day.

Based on the original post, it sounds like winter is here, but I wanted to write a haiku that included your Minnesota construction season.
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by Nanohedron »

Okay, not bad for starters, and as a sympathy offering (or so I take it), much appreciated. Actually things aren't snowy where I live yet, but it's coming, and I like to complain. :wink:

Because haiku's so short, though, in order to get the best out of it you need that sense of it being a snapshot, or more accurately, a Harry Potter-style snapshot where the figures in it move. My fruit fly one above was really intended as a bit of a joke, but it still conveys that immediacy of experience required of the ideal of haiku. Haiku can be humorous, but in any case it should be a snapshot of how a moment in time hits you, yourself, if you're really going for the brass ring with this form. There should be something arresting about it; it's about something that grabbed your attention, after all, but it's often something small, as is so often the case with life. The haiku should bring the reader into it with its imagery, so the result is like a mini-movie in your head. It's not just description, and there's a limit to how much you can rely on imagination for the imagery. It's better to convey what you yourself are experiencing, right at this moment. At its best, it's about the marvels you see in the mundane. But it takes practice. :)

An old clock ticking:
The fleeting minutes mark time
As winter comes on

This is an example of what I mean about the ideal of immediacy in haiku. It's something that's happening and you just noticed it.

Revisiting the idea of haiku being a packet that you open: If you open this one, the images of time and winter bring us to a bigger landscape where we are reminded of impermanence, impending age, and mortality. Also, in that landscape, the old clock is the writer (the hard line is that, as the writer, it must be about what you see, no matter that the image and inner message are universal. If you're not having the actual experience yourself as the writer and are just making it up, it's not really authentic, or at least not as authentic as it could be. YMMV). Yes, the moment is simply nothing more than the sounds at my desk and the weather outside my window, but as you see, in this case there's more to it. As I said, haiku hints; it doesn't lay it all out on the table. All the same, I don't think meeting those goals necessarily makes my haiku a good one; that's why I said "probably", earlier. Here the end product seems to me to be a bit crude, somehow, but it's at the point where I must leave it as it is.

Haiku doesn't always have to have such deeper implications, though; sometimes the moment itself is miraculous enough (even if it's fruit flies), and in this case the clock and the turn of seasons can be enough to stand all on their own, too, simply conveying a moment that speaks to you out of the home's quiet. One can appreciate the packaging for its own sake and leave it at that, so that's why composition is key: In addition to word order and use of rhythm, in this case there is also alliteration (mostly scattered), and the third line is a contrast to the first two; a contrasting line, no matter where it's placed, is used a lot.

Once you have your basic image, the greater part of the work is in the wording of it. You can often find yourself going through a number of revisions until you're satisfied with the end result.

"What's this, you? War wounds?
Did a squirrel beat the cat?"
Puss is embarrassed.

True story, and more than one owner of a roving cat will have a story just like it. I would have spoken more or less similarly at the time; word-for-word accuracy is unnecessary to the spirit of it. For me there's really nothing more to it than what you see here, other than the quotemarks conveying that I'm actually talking to him out loud - but again, the moment's the thing: it's simply about how I register my discovery and curiosity, and the charm of a cat being embarrassed. It's so minimally descriptive that it almost isn't descriptive at all. No need for more. That's the packet you open, here: you envision the moment as if you're there. The haiku tries to stimulate that, to be a springboard for it. One image might be that you hold up the cat, inspecting and talking to him while he's clearly uncomfortable with the scrutiny and attention he would otherwise normally welcome. Another might be that he walks by sheepishly, preferring not to engage, and goes off to sulk somewhere. There might be other images, too; that's the reader's part, to flesh out the haiku with what it makes you see before you. In my case, it actually happened as in the first image, but it's not my intent, nor my place, to force that on the reader. The haiku's spare structure sees to that: The less you try outwardly to say more, the more you can say.

But specifics are necessary too: I used "you" in the first line to ensure that the reader would know right away that I was talking to the subject directly and not asking someone else about him. Talking to the cat is not only what actually happened, it's better theater than the alternative. Fights being dramatic things, "War" likewise makes for better theater than "Fight" in this case, and it lends a more wryly epic sense that I think works. Plus the alliteration is nice. In this case "Puss" is better than "He" because it is again more specific, reinforcing that it's a cat that I've been talking to, and it provides in the line a much better sense of tone that the other would lack. The moment here is intimate, so I tried to convey that by choosing my wording accordingly and with what precision I could.

I can be specific about the squirrel part, because upon inspection (and inspection is implicit in this haiku's seed-image), our hero had a nice, square chunk out of his ear that only a set of chisel incisors could deliver, and the overall scale of the job on his face was in the ballpark of being squirrel-sized. Plus our squirrels, at least, have a nasty reputation when they're cornered; I haven't yet heard of a cat that's come away unscathed, even if by chance it still came out on top. Squirrels evade whenever they can, but when they're caught, to say they're tough customers is putting it mildly. So that would hold up in court. Less certain to argue for it, because it's anecdotal, is that - and I and others had seen it many a time - by temperament he wasn't a fighter; he had the goods, all right, but preferred instead to make friends and play with other cats, and incredibly, dogs, too, if they were into it. But he was mad to get those squirrels, and he hunted like a Fury, so it was only a matter of time.

The choices of "a" and "the" in the second line were deliberate, so as to refer to the cat's self-image of power and invincibility, for although he was a relentlessly friendly guy, trust me: he also had in spades a very outstanding opinion of himself. Again, I would have spoken similarly, not necessarily saying "you"; saying "the cat" is almost as if it's been capitalized "The Cat", suggesting something in my tone as I speak to him directly about the irony in a top predator having his ass handed to to him by the prey. But I'm not just pointing out ironies; in it, I am also concerned, but there's only so much room to work with in a haiku, so I'm left to hope the reader might infer this from my asking question after question, and so enrich the picture further. No real seasonal reference, here, although the squirrels are more in force when the weather's fine.

As you can see, ideally haiku are actually highly compressed, not impoverished. :)
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by chas »

Nanohedron wrote:
walrii wrote:
Nanohedron wrote:There's no such thing as summer or winter clothing any more. You just wear what you need to, regardless of what they're calling "seasons" these days.
It is ever thus in Texas. We have four seasons: yesterday, today, tomorrow and 4pm this afternoon.
In Minnesota we say we have two: Winter, and road construction.
Do you not have mud season? That's a large chunk of the year in northern New England. Maybe you don't have it in Minnesota because you don't have hills?
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by Nanohedron »

chas wrote:Do you not have mud season? That's a large chunk of the year in northern New England. Maybe you don't have it in Minnesota because you don't have hills?
Oh, yes. We have mud season, all right. We conventionally call it Spring.

Don't know where you got the idea that Minnesota is flat. It depends on where you are. We've got 3 biomes, with about half of it all being forested (at least at one time) and a lot of that is hilly. The flat part's mostly to the south and west, where the Great Plains start.

http://www.exploreminnesota.com/pedal-m ... -was-flat/

The seasons play out a bit differently from region to region, but in the Minnesota River Valley where I live, here are the Four Seasons as I know them:

- Winter: icy death.
- Spring: mud and thawing dogsh*t.
- Summer: sweaty, gasping, bug-eaten death.
- Fall: finally, perfection. But so, so short, dammit.
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Tribal musician
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Re: Seriously!?

Post by s1m0n »

AaronFW wrote:Since I've mostly been watching from the background and reading posts, rather than posting. In doing so, I feel a bit more familiar with you guys than I really am but I haven't made myself known to you guys either and as a result my joking failed.
It didn't fail everywhere.
And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis
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