I coo for Haiku

[andrewducker]

I've ended up writing a couple of haikus in different places recently. In one post ozarque asked for haiku about linguistics. I particularly like 2,3 and 6 (and will admit to a certain guilty pleasure in 4).

The map is not the
territory. Nor does the
menu taste like food.

===

Dictionary fun.
I trace meanings to their source.
Infinite Regress.

===

My speech is impure
Words plundered from everywhere
This gives it power

===

Someone says "Linguist".
My inner twelve-year-old asks
"But are they cunning?"

===

Precision's an end
Generality another
You can pull both ways

===

Verbing is, like, so
last week our verbal patterns
were drawn in the sand

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And a while back, hirez was talking about poststructuralism when easterbunny asked for an explanation of the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism in the form of a haiku. And how can one resist a challenge like that?

No space for authors
now, in this, our winter of
Infinite Regress

alternatively:

Modernism falls
like the outdated leaves of
discarded meaning

Comments

[fannymagnate.livejournal.com]

Haiku are measured in morae, not syllables:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)

Which pretty much means you have to write them in Japanese. Anything else is just a three line poem.

[andrewducker]

If you want to be ultra-traditionist, then yes. But as they've been written in English since the 1920s, Bengali, Urdu, Gujurati, etc.

Admittedly, most "Haiku" tend to be Senryu (gosh, I learn something every day, it seems), but such is life.