Hi Folks

Calling all haiku fans. Checkout the daily topical haiku (senryuu?) competition on The Guardian website at http://books.guardian.co.uk/games/haiku/

One or 2 published online each day*, winner chosen each Monday wins £20 of Penguin classics. ( *NB They sometimes run a few days behind)

I'm in danger of becoming addicted having won a couple of weeks ago and with a couple on there recently under a few names ( they drop off the site after a fortnight or so.)

Good fun!


Meanwhile, any of these strike a chord?

The poet sits in
silence counting out haikus
on his fingertips.

Poets do it on
their own at their computers
for bloody hours.

The poet throws down
his pen shouting "**** this for
a game of soldiers!"

As the years pass by
I have grown sadly prone to
Running out of syl

Guardian haiku
away on its holidays
Oh what shall we do? :angry:

True to English form
We satirise them gently
Grauniad. Tee hee.

~

Last year I got involved in posting comments during the election run up in that rag. Now I have been in the writing game for a bit I have seen through the nonsense of editorials. Why should the opinion of hacks have any clout? The one before polling day was patronising in the extreme, written in the register of a primary school teacher talking to a 7 year old whose just about to go into big school.

Anyway here's one by Basho­. I so much prefer it in the original 17C Japanese, don't you?

Hatsu shigure saru mo komino wo hoshige nari

the first cold shower;
even the monkey seems to want
a little coat of straw

Gabriel Rosenstock holds a competition for haiku, and the first prize is a good few grand. He must be the only poet to ever win his own competition, the first time he had it a few years back, when he came in first and won all the dough.

~

Talking of the Gurdian last year, there was a party girl going under the monker of the "Tittle Tattle" girl, who had an online column whose tenor was aiming for the uber-cool persona of a hack who spends a tenner on a cuppa and 15 quid on a bag of chips, and who wears sunglasses by Dior cor feck of plebs, and she documented her shallower than thou existence of standing on pavements after work, getting bladdered outside overpriced boozers and being an all round classless London ladette. I wrote her this, the first in a sequence of three. It is part of an an extended series of hokku dealing with fictional narratives which come from a strand of vernacular within the satirical zone of my aural spectrum.

Yo

Cocktail Queen of the Kilburn High Road,
I saw you last night
in my dreams
tastefully sipping Laurent Bollinger
in the snug of the Goose 'n Granite.

You were dressed
in an Imitation of Christ
runway cling number
- fragile fawn -
like the colour of well cooked chips
left overnight to burnish and mottle
in a dry April breeze.

Your voice
your demeanor
dynamic
and innate fashion sense
fragrantly exuding the
tartnes of a pungent class
punched well above the weight
of all else gathered there.

And the chatter of travel
caravans, tarmacking
and bare knuckle bouts
momentarily ceased
in the aroma of shadows
and whispers left in the wake
of your passing spoor.

For your elan and breeding
where the talk of the lounge
long after you left
leaving a tang of the cloud
of a sweet smelling life
as your gift to the dying breed
of old Irish shovel men
at sup there.

And when I awoke
and the memory of you faded
like footprints
on a tide washed beach
- my dream exposed as purely fancy -
yes
my Cocktail Girl
longing increased
and I gained permission
from the Dr's to compose
communicate
my thoughts
as part of my ongoing occupational therapy.

So please
come
rescue me from this asylum in Highgate
and lets move to a bedsit
in Muswell Hill
where we can set up shop
as a comedy couple,
nutter and cut glass go getter
together
setting London astorm
by boozing and getting twisted
locked
and going nightly
on the lash,
gratis, free
all for the sake of the readers.

~

I have jacked in the fags and gone mad, only wanting to lash out indiscriminately. My mental state is like that of a ten year old who likes hurting cuddly puppies. I know this is self preservation, so forgive any loutish behaviour. I cannot help myself.

Tonight is the art gallery do. Already I've been past them, hanging about supping ale and talking arty nonsense. Some recent graduate has got an art exhibition opening, a skateboard artist. Last week it was some fella selling blow up photographs of naked men in wierd poses, with prosthetic knobs in disturbing shapes. 450 quid a pop. God knows what lunacy will be going on there tonight.

Another thing which has pissed me off is that my Mp3 was far from being in Germany getting the LCD screen fixed. It was in bubble wrap on a shelf whilst the dickhead who took it off me and gave me the spiel is sunning himself on holiday. And far from costing 40 quid, it can't be fixed and I have to buy a new one, so I am having to use it blind, which I have managed to suss out, so tonight I will be recording again. Hurrah.

Also my computer is finally fixed, so I will be right back on it, type type typing all night long.

This is why I love you, Ovid. Priceless, utterly priceless. :D

Ancient Japanese
next Jane? Ovid dissolves hearts
to cherry blossom.

The monthly one is a lot more prestigious.

~

To hygienically stick your mental jizz in the bonces of the bores on that board, be skill-less and tick boxes in one of the numerous contemporary dot to dot career manuals lost minded rhyme-smiths and fully homogenized poets of the lyrically pedestrian unfunny line swear by, for inspirational instruction.

Randomly add a pick ‘n mix content of your colour-in influences, then order (un-mangled) a syntax by numbers in dum-de-dumbed down, dim mind-numbing "I am”s, whose relevance can be immediately read as an example of the school whose one compositional method produces oeuvres instantly appraised by the oolamhs we imitate in our poems, original and interesting or cack-handed crap.

~

I posted a recognisably simple fledgling piece to Vicki Feaver, flapped it in past the midnight deadline of July 31. Sent because I desired to swipe for myself her visible poetic gift, coolly exuding from a highly professional online portrait. From this picture I deciphered her crackable psychological code, which the remote power she yearns to encounter when scribing her speech, revealed to me through a working method Amergin supposedly spoke and wrote of over ten centuries ago when Celtic rhyming was a craft akin to quantum mechanics; harnessing electricity an ungraspable concept and television’s logic, a magic whose truth only extraterrestrial gods could blueprint.

Audience believe in this reading, see

the de rigueur smoulder of her stark, no-nonsense, full frontal mug-shot in natural black and white, like some still life sixties siren slipping into a post office on pension day. Gasp as the massively frozen ability behind her straight lipped chilled out stare overpowers you with OTT visual audacity and cold raw talent; oozing from her unashamedly age loving face, framed by a superbly creative hairdo, nestling next to what looks like leaves; themselves appearing to burst with vitality merely by basking in the nearness of such an unadulterated aura of pure “Vicki” vibe, fissured to nuke your post-modern mental motor when gawping at her poetess head-shot.

When my eyes first fell upon that light-generated representation of her physical form, I became instantly impelled to toss her a hand of thin-line free-verse, written last year during late spring when composing a draft idea for a bird sketch, as I stood waiting at the railings of Russell Square one Saturday morning in May, at 3am. A love god called Aonghus came and deposited a sustainable splodge of lingo jizz my mind then propagated to the finished poetic thought-flash of words my muttering mouth formed as a mechanical pencil wrought along the page doing its thing.

~

Two months ago I sent a ghost poem to Esther Morgan, whose inaccurate spelling accidentally lobotomised the hard-drive of her mind and re-configured her inner pen to automatically craft bland-on-demand dribble she’ll leak when asked to come ‘n hack for the rags.

As you may not know, I have an otherworldly nodal-implant harvesting the mental technology our scribble through time programmes, and was hoping to impress Esther with my universally unique state-of-the-art hardware, which has an unlimited capacity for telepathic upload.

I was serial-stalker keen for an online relationship to occur, but alas, her system allows only wrong-word psychological software now, as all the poetic bits from her brain were removed, which, due to an IQ down-grade in the subconscious section of her grey-matter-motherboard, I now possess.

Unfortunately, Esther is a black-hole of poesy at the mo and won’t be capable of running up goods from her gob for the foreseeable future. She is in desperate need of any verse-cells from those with a spare poetic intelligence, who can help correct the cock up via the medium of reading this text.

Make sure she’s topped up to her previous capacity by sending your unwanted language skill to her non working areas at the earliest opportunity. Until she’s re-booted, all her opinions remain obsolete and have been safely debunked by a knowing one at the edge of life’s barricade.
~

Feeling somewhat glum at my blunder which inadvertently deprived Morgan of her talent, I fell into a mild depression, significantly deepened when the net-negative benefit of her poetic transplant became apparent - and after drinking heavily for the several days I spent alone in the attic foolishly gazing at a 10 foot blow up of Esther’s face, extorted from a terrified trainee at Supersnaps - I came to mistakenly believe that the one constant my life lacked in the upswing of its manic state, was a textual relationship with Jane Duran.

This was because I misconstrued the instruction of my Devine Emanation Council operative who oversees the recruitment of human beings, like me, who work for their various business organizations, trading and trailing a blaze in telepathic communication markets throughout the galaxy. My psychotic state, coupled with the chemically altered parameters of my consciousness, meant I imagined Alan - a middle-ages Moorish instructor who bashed out Yeats’s wife's automatic blather - instructed me to jerk some hip ‘n savvy electric text her way. But I mistook the message when under the influence of a 2 litre torpedo of 9% ABV scrumpy, and his actual advice was -

"Don’t bother. You've no chance of scoring. She needs a full re-bore which may fail and render her an unworkable write-off."

~

Such is the state of my mind, it is constantly hallucinating a group of composite Guardian poets having continual inconsequential coma-thons; the most immortally minded egos engaged in terminally dull intercourse with a cultural void and textually insatiable artist who was the banal verbal star of a spectacularly unexciting group borgey at “Dim Slob” Loink Oxley’s funless depression festival in a North London cellar last November.

Gushing forth from lip ‘n nib that forgettable winter night, was Jean MacMillan, boring all within earshot to slumber with her pointless genius for putting people to sleep whilst extemporising nursery rhymes and simultaneously remaining cognizant of seven different conversations, occurring in the filthy and fully equipped dungeon hot tub during that comatose night of non-stop torpor.

As Jean held court in the centre of the whirlpool she told the ghost of Edward Hughes to remove a jester’s hat from Laurence, Hardy, Hemmingway or Auden’s oeuvre, for her to wear in the joke-free Jacuzzi. A hat, of course, was semblanced from Pam Ayres’ daft heyday and Jeans plainly crafted art and Barnsley wit regaled us unconscious once again until we woke and weirdly found she’d morphed into a fascinating she-male character whose talk no longer bored us but explored the boundaries of earthly existence.

S/he said telepathy’s just mental adventuring into the unknown, and as s/he told us of what comes when we dare surrender blindly to the word by instinctively stepping into a circle of faith reserved for us alone, an unknown poet in the corner conjured up Ogma, a word-deity meaning “the good god” none there had heard of till that night, who enlightened us with the hardcore uncut logic of creation as s/he fell silent and Ogma spoke -



"Oh all ye genuine thinkers who flap language revealing the methods your muse revels in during the joy gushing forth speech, come surf to my one stop language shack stocking genres from Langpo to metrical verse. On offer - verbal compatriots - is free and safe lunacy top ups with every fibre spent believing…" -

~

….it will be fun to compose as many poems on this board as we can when the next Guardian bore appears offering us their insights into and examples of poems.

Basically have a group writing session where we e mail our efforts to whichever personality poet's mug-shot is pasted up on the least wanted page; not written with a view to submit them, but to generate material we may send in subject to our desire to gift in stuff anytime up till the deadline. I will send my efforts in to whoever's picture pops up next.
It's just a thought I want to warm you with, as this place could do with a bit of group action and effort for the mutual poetic benefit of all who will chance to give online writing exercises a go. The concept of failure or loss is factored out, I sincerely believe, when groups genuinely engage in a joint artistic enterprise of this nature.

I sent the poem below in with I LOVE YOU VICKI in the subject field and this pre-amble

Hi Vicki

Please forgive me for being late with my work, but I was seized last night by several drunken transvestites who wanted to dress me up and shoot me in an outfit which may have meant I've made it onto page seven of the Big Issue. Out of fashion section. A pastel number which really accentuates the line of my arms and waist, in such a way which doesn't draw attention to the fact that I am 27 stone of sheer flab.

I was also high on heroin and crack cocaine after being abducted at straw-point by a number of christian milkshake enthusiasts who got a bit carried away when they saw me waving me Wotsits at two very well known nonentities I will not mention here, but who have been saying untalented things about online dominoes.


This confident dice I currently seer falls favourably. It is steered by an accurate eye and makes straight aimed throws cast at the intellect’s bullseye in a tossed offering adhering to the creature ethos of your online poetry workshop. Verse-truth pervades where words lie folding in dreams blown real by breaths of imaginary air Vicki


LATE MAY DAY

A fluttering
above
in the skin
soft slither thin
leaves of a
beech tree

alerts her to
a bird in the
branches
over-hanging
an oak bench.

A grey
feathered fledgling
awkwardly flaps
falling to the pitted
tarmac and nestles

its downy breast
against a coping
stone border of
the oval green. A
cricket match ends

as the birds first
flight from its nest
into the unknown
traffic of a new
world view

begins. The creature
takes its bearings
from earth level

and looking into
the depths and
complexity of
existence

anchors an
eyeline securely
on the confusion
life's nexus of
glimpses distills

across the freshly
stretched backdrop
of a silent dumb sky

offering no
foothold of slender
wood poles with
which she can measure
her ascent through
understanding

up to God's hand.

I managed to get on today with one under the name of my alter-ego Harriet Beck:

A Muslim, a Sikh
bowl us to victory; who's
passed the cricket test?

(reference to Tebbit's fatuous waffle about immigrants needing to pass a cricket "loyalty test" to be seen as British).

So - 3 minutes work to knock up a haiku about cricket and I get published on the website of a national newspaper. Probably at least a week's work in total on 5 poems and they get rejected by a magazine with a circulation the same size as the local parish newsletter. But hey - that's what this game is all about.... :D

Saw that one Alan.
It knocked me for six. Bowled me
over skilfully!


Owzat?

Congratulations.
Luck-red ball in our blue sky:
charmed fruit. Champion!

I appreciate
fulsome felicitations;
the lapwing cries soft

(last line is total b*****ks - just in case you hadn't noticed)

Let the mask slip and
see your word gods in the mind's
mirror reflecting

~

Written rules of life
in true poems no eye can
dismiss or reject

~

Just like the sequin fella with coulouring felts who uses public consciousness as a canvas to re-draft and re-draft until the instinctively mathmatical backwash is freed from wrong computation and the last post radically different, in syntax, smoothed to an ungrabbable ergonomic.

Is that a word? Have a butchers. Lets talk of the afterlife and those navel gazers caressing the seeds of time free druid pawns and playthings of love-mating irregularities under the thumb of t'other half, tell of in tales of Tony at chequers and Marlon starring in a Hotton pub.

What plots and intriques on the dark bank of Acheron when we cross with our oblos eagerly thrust to the boatman.

Shall we talk of the dead?

~

Sunset strips filter through window slats
edging across a bone white wall

and beech wood floor with mole knots
dotting the faded grain.

As dusk draws darkness in
peeling back the pith of light

opaque forms appear in pale shadows
and cast a chill spell in the night air.

A ghostly clan seeping from the
otherworld through pictures on brick
visit the room

filling the hours before dawn with an aroma
of spirits, spectres and long silent ancestors.

Their fuse of flesh life lit and left as
a pyramid of past we’ve no cognisance of

is the human history of reality chaining our
existence to an unfathomable entity.

A void of unconsciousness
no man or woman will speak of until they
speak no more.

~

Love you all for ever in the otherworld.

I saw the sequin fella reading at the poetry cafe, he stayed upstairs while the others were reading in order to do a big rock'n'roll entrance when it was his turn. After the show he stayed behind and picked all his sequins off the floor.

The sixties poets
throw sequins, but punks
prefer drawing pins.



Overweight punker,
dives from the bass cab, no-one
there to catch him. Splat.

My sincerest apologies to Basho.

Hi

I'm entering this nearly every day now - sad I know!

It's a bit frustrating currently - the site seems to be running in summer mode. They're only updating once or twice a week and only choosing one per day in place of 2 or 3 some days normally.

Good fun though -give it a bash. http://books.guardian.co.uk/games/haiku/ Winning entries stay on the site for a week or two.

Anyway, I've won the weekly prize for the 2nd time today with this little ditty written the day Harrods wheeled out its Xmas stock - in August!

'Tis the season to
eat lollies! Fa la la la
la, Fayed la, la!

by Pa Humbug

It was warm the day I wrote it. Unusually for Manchester, it's cold and raining today! We're having a good summer though - rain much warmer than usual!

Cheers
http://www.applesandsnakes.org/artists.php?contact_ref=37408

Well done, Eskimo!

Whee! "Anon" of 16th is me - I was just a little dim and did not read the instructions as to how to be credited. The battle is on, young Eskimo, you know where I'm to be found :D

That be fightin' talk round these parts, boy! :) You're on! Anyone else playing??

We might as well post any failed efforts here so they don't go to waste. I've not been keeping notes, but from memory, recently I've tried:

Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be will be.
Late with Wem-ber-lee.

(by) Kay Sera-Sera

John Lennon airport.
"Imagine all the people
living life in peace."

And yesterday:

Nazi uniforms
and now breast fondling? Bet
he feels a right t*t!

All of which fell on stony ground!

On a more serious note, today's effort was:

Victims not cowards-
pardon them. But their leaders?
Unforgivable!

Bring it on! :-)

Faded into obscurity already. Twelve nanoseconds of my duly requisitioned fifteen minutes of fame splashed wastefully at the feet of faintly puzzled onlookers.

Yesterday's offering:

"Fuel price jumps again
Oh when will we see the light?
It's a gas, gas, gas."

failed to trouble the scorers. Maybe it's just the haikuka equivalent of difficult-second-album-syndrome... but this does not leave me feeling less crushed. As a young Robert Williams once said - "You gotta get high before you taste the lows. Let me entertain you."

Stick in there Uncle Z.

My stab yesterday, when the A level results came out was:

Maths tests too easy?
Seventy percent agree.
Forty percent don't!

Results not online yet.

Not inspired today and away now for a couple of weeks -have fun.

:)

Kate Bingham is the Guardian bore doing August's poetry workshop, with the theme of repetition. She wants us to have a go at doing a sestina, even though no-one but Dylan Thomas has written a successful one in the recent past. The sestina is like the film studies degree of poesy. The only people who write them (like those on film studies degrees) are the people who should be working in an office number crunching and dreaming of getting home in time for Emmerdale.

But we don't have to do a sestina, as long as its got a lot of repition Kate will be happy to take her moolah and waffle.

Any ideas?

Ah well, looks like I was wrong. Won with Wednesday's "Anon" offering and got screened as Uncle_Z on Thurs. Honor is satisfied :ph43r:

Hi

Anyone still keeping an eye on the Guardian topical haiku page? I had a lean spell for a while but have squeezed a couple on recently - usually not my personal favourites but, hey, what do I know! Very impressed with one Ken Porter who gets on very regularly now - some great stuff. Anyone know him?

http://books.guardian.co.uk/games/haiku/

Still disappointing that they're not updating the site daily -leaving it for up to a week by which time you've forgotten what the "topical" news item was. I thought it might get better after the summer. Seems to be updated as an afterthought about 5pm a couple of times a week with the weekly winner not having been a daily winner sometimes. Ho hum!

Off to have a stab at today's entry.

(Congrats on the book Jane and good luck with it!)

Hi

Anyone still playing this?

I've managed to sneak another couple on lately:

Re: Creationism being taught in UK schools:

Creationism?
Would you Adam and Eve it?
Lose faith in faith schools!


Re: Spiralling costs of the London Olympics


Olympic spending:
Is someone for the high jump?
Cor Blimey, guv'nor!

Cheers

I've had a go.

Fiji's coup, nothing
new. Bainimarama got
in without drama.

Very good, I like that. ;)

Hi

I've had a good couple of weeks at this :-) I've got 3 on the site at the moment until they drop off one by one:

Trading carbon emissions quotas:

"That Global Warming?"
"It's not the end of the world!"
Quota, unquota.


The debate about GM potatoes:

GM potatoes?
Good for Mankind? Great Mashed? Or
Gigantic Mistake?

and the creationism one posted above.

Today's efforts are about the Native Americans buying Hard Rock Cafe:

Casinos and Burgers?
Dancing with Wolves to Hard Rock.
There's money in chips!

and the possible ban of gambling websites sponsoring football shirts:

Beautiful gaming?
Ad ban for footie shirts, eh?
I wouldn't bet on it!

Fingers crossed for a weekly win again soon.

Cheers

After ever-lengthening delays between selecting supposedly daily winners, the Guardian seems to have called a day on this competition, promising something new in its place.

I think they should publish the best in the actual paper - some of the winners have crammed an incredible amount of wit and wisdom into 17 syllables.

Shame :(

I've never chanced on this haiku competition, but a few weeks ago was led to the blog and saw it had been impressively pimped up and is the natural next place in which to warble and war with the armies of enemy talent. The posters there represent the cream of amatuer and pro, who deposit their waffle and engage in a literary form analogous to that of the ancient Irish extemporised "call and return" which is when two poets go head to head like rappers, with bragging rights going to the most creative responses, often insults.

Ever since I was refused re-entry from my other - and first - cyber-office last October, I have missed the cut and thrust of daily bitching, duelling and space in which to explore one's intellect and ideas, but the Guardian blog expansion means their vixens and foxes are very much closer to hand, and with a much busier atmosphere than most poetry sites, which offers the committed bore a place ot train, publish and learn, in this healthy competitive arena at the UK's most arty virtual rag.

Are there any other online newspapers which have blogs along the Guardian lines please, would anyone know?

I would be very grateful for any pointers.