10 posts tagged “haiku”
Tonight is the night when the dead become living, when we face our darkest fears and confront them, when we ourselves become the things of which we are terrified.
Okay, it's also a night to drink too much and stuff yourselves with candy, but when isn't?
So here are a few Halloween blog treats for you:
If your favorite holidays are Halloween and Easter, just because of the candy... According to the Associated Press, researchers have shown that people who crave chocolate are more likely to have in their system high levels of a type of bacteria that thrives on chocolate. So, is it possible that the chocoholic bacteria is what makes you crave chocolate, thus relieving you of all guilt for eating that eighteenth tootsie roll in a row? No, as any statistician knows, correlation does not prove causation, and researchers are unsure if the bacteria make the people crave chocolate, or if it's just that people who eat more chocolate are creating a happy environment for the pro-chocolate bacteria to flourish.
Attack of the Killer Tomato. Scientists have created genetically engineered plants that actually consume toxins, according to the National Geographic News. This could be a boon for cleaning up areas that have ground soil contaminated by pollutants, but environmentalists are concerned about the unknown dangers of genetically engineered plants. If the genetically engineered plants were to "escape" and reproduce on their own, they may push out native, natural species, and mutate. Who knows what they could turn into. If they eat toxins, they'll probably think humans are downright tasty.
Scared of the Federal Government? Well, now, I don't go in for conspiracy theories, but this one has me worried. According to Slate.com, earlier this year President Shrub issued a National Security Presidential Directive, the 51st of it's kind, parts of which are so secret that not even congressional oversight committees in charge of national security are allowed to read them. The parts that aren't so scary that they can't be made public are terrifying. NSPD-51 is a declaration by the President giving himself the power to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure the "continuation of government" (presumably including the suspension of elections and the end of his term) in the event of a "catastrophic emergency." He gets to tell us what constitutes a "catastrophic emergency." Scared yet?
And, in honor of Halloween, I reprint here my favorite scary haiku:
Scrambling from fresh graves
Zombies go in search of brains.
Hell if they get mine!
We are not nerds. We're
Technic'lly inclined social
Rebels. Get it right.
After a power outage last night, here is another delayed post:
I woke up the next morning at 4:30 am, my head splitting. Although I did not get drunk at any point the day before, I had been drinking throughout the day, and apparently it was enough for a hangover. Despite my near-migraine, I awoke with my brain pumping out haiku. The Haiku slam-off was that day, and I had been hoping that I could come up with thirty haiku so that I could compete.
I went to the hotel's vending machine and found tylonol there, but it wouldn't take my dollar, so I went to the front desk and exchanged it for quarters, and it wouldn't take them either. I was a foot away from relief, and the machine was out of order. The clerk didn't have the key to the machine, so I went out to look for a convenience store.
We had found a CVS pharmacy the day before, but it turned out it wasn't twenty-four hours, and it was closed, so I just walked for a while. Finding nothing open that would have tylonol or excedrine on the menu, I made my way back to the hotel. Out front was an attractive, though slightly inebriated woman sitting on the stoop. I passed her without speaking at first, but my desperation for medication overtook me and I stopped and asked her if she had any tylenol I could buy from her. She said no, but she smiled dreamily and asked in turn if I had a hotel room she could crash in for a couple of hours. It hadn't occurred to me before this point that this woman could be a hooker, but in retrospect I think she was. I said, "No, sorry," and turned and walked the way I had been going, on past the hotel so she wouldn't know I had just lied to her.
I didn't think bringing a drunk probably-a-hooker to our room at five in the morning would do much for my marital status. This could only happen to me.
A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed my suspicion that she was following me, so I picked up my pace a little, and ended up doubling back behind a restaurant to lose her. ::sigh::
Finally, I got back to the room, sans Tylonol, and drank coffee instead. When seven o'clock rolled around, my sweet and loving wife went out to the CVS and got some Excedrin for me. While she was out I wrote the following haiku:
Only takes one bite
To turn man into a beast.
That, and a full moon.
Poets and liquor:
A deadly combination,
But quite effective.
On the bathroom floor,
We take the most solemn oath:
Never again, God.
Crispy tempura,
Scallion, wasabi, and rice.
Where are my chopsticks?
Hooker follows me
Four blocks in middle of night.
Hey, you, want a freebie?
You load sixteen tons,
What do you get? Yeah, that's right:
You get sixteen tons.
Veins throbbing out beat,
Sounds like Latin jazz on speed.
Give me Tylonol.
My headache was mostly gone by the time the next event rolled around, and I wasn't going to miss this one. I had hoped to get enough haiku together to participate, but you needed 30 pieces to do the Head to Head Haiku competition, and I was shy a few, so I just watched. It was a hell of a lot of fun.
Here's how it works: they started off with sixteen contestants, and they get paired off. When the two poets get on stage, they are randomly assigned a headband, red or not-red (white). Red goes first, and reads a haiku. Then he steps back, and not-red reads. Three judges then hold up either a red or white flag to show their preference. The poets then read again, best three out of five win. After the preliminaries, they brought the winners back up for semi-finals, best two out of three, and when it was down to just two poets, they brought them up for best five out of nine.
Unlike other slam events, at the Head to Head Haiku the audience is not allowed to make any noise until after the judges raise their flags, so as not to influence the judges. If you like a poem and can't wait to applaud, you are told to wave your hand in the air to make "the sound of one hand clapping."
I will definitely participate next year.
Another neat old building we saw after the competition.
We had a late lunch at McCormick and Schmicks, which is a chain restaurant, but it's one we don't have at home, and they have pretty good food. This one had Texified decorations, including these armadillo-shaped wall sconces. Only in Texas would people put up with restaurant decorations in the shape of an animal most commonly found as road-kill.
That night, we went to Ego's, which is a dank, dark, hygeinically-challenged bar. They also happen to be one of the regular slam spots for Slam Austin, and it was where Team Farmington was scheduled for our first bout.
The chairs in front were reserved for the judges. We sat at a table right behind them.
The person who acts as "team captain" is called the Slammaster. In our case, that's Zoey. Incidentally, what do you call a female Slammaster? Slammistress? Strix suggested Slaminatrix. I like that, but I digress...
Zoey informed me that on the way to Austin she had discussed the lineup with the other team members and they all agreed I should go first. Whether to give me a chance to get out there right away before I got too nervous or because they wanted to get through their weakest poet, first, I don't know. She also had me draw for the team order.
There's a strategy, if you can call random order a strategy, involved with team order. Judges usually start off more critical at the beginning of a bout, and score poets higher as the night goes on. Therefore, for the first round, you don't want to be first if you can avoid it. A member of each team gets to draw, and since there were five teams, we wanted number five. I drew a four, which was close enough to make my teammates happy.
Again, most of the pieces were very good. It was at this event that I made the following realization about slam poetry. It's not poetry. It has poetic elements, like rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and metaphor, but it's not poetry. Meter is lost in the delivery, so don't bother. The pieces that do best are delivered with high energy and feeling by poets that concentrate on the performance as much as, or possibly even more, than the content. Many of them are barely controlled rants. Some of them are very funny, which seems to score well with the judges but not as well as the "poignant" ones. It is a performance art much more than it is poetry, and all I had in my head were poems that I had written. My poetry lends itself to slamming because it's free-form and has lines in it that are designed to be emphasized for poignancy, but they are not slam pieces. If I make it back to NPS next year, I will definitely have some pieces that are designed specifically for slam.
So, three poets down, it was my turn. You'll be happy to know (unless you hate me), that I did not freeze up this time. You have three minutes to deliver your piece, or suffer a time penalty, but my piece is barely a minute forty-five, so I read it slowly and with emphasis. I fully expected to be lambasted by the judges, but I wasn't.
There are five judges, and they use Olympic-style judging. Different slammasters describe the scoring differently, but for my purposes here we'll say that 0.0 is for a poem that spontaneously causes your eyeballs to implode. 10.0 is for a poem that causes your molecules to shift into a higher plane of existence. Most judges deliver anywhere from a 6.0 to a 10.0 (if they really, really liked the poem). The top score and the bottom score are thrown out, and the poet's score becomes the middle three added together, for a total possible score of 30.0. I scored 25.7. I was a little disappointed at this, simply because I knew I needed better for my team, but personally I was pleased. That's a respectable score for a first-time performer at NPS.
The rest of the night I got to relax and enjoy the show, as much as you can relax in an overcrowded bar so dark you can't see the floor (for which I am grateful). The order of the second and third rounds are determined by score order - whoever scored the highest in the last round goes first - and Tish and Zoey performed for our team in those two rounds.
And now I have to go. More later, everyone.
This is Pip, who emceed the last poetry slam of the season, apparently gesticulating too quickly for my camera phone to capture.
Okay, the really bizarre news is that I'm on the team! If you had told me a year ago that I was going to be on a team going to National Poetry Slam 2007, I would have said you were insane. Considering I had never participated in a slam before, it seemed very unlikely. And yet, I go to a poetry slam in little Northwest New Mexico just to try it, and I make it into the finals. I go to the finals, and now I'm on the team going to National. Just like that.
It will be in August in Austin, Texas. I'll post more when I get the details.
These are the poems I read tonight:
Also, I came prepared with a new haiku tonight. They had said that in the event of a tie, there would be a haiku death-match. There wasn't a tie, so I didn't get to use it, but I wanted to. I've been having dreams about zombies a lot lately. I'm not sure why, but I have been. Here's my zombified haiku:
Scrambling from fresh graves,
Zombies go in search of brains.
Hell if they get mine!
[Edit: A picture of me reading from Strix's Flickr page:]
This blog is running a contest for best haiku about computer font. Yes, that's right, the little letters on your screen. Here's my entry:
Times Roman marches
Ever on while Ariel
Stands at attention.
Early morning sun
Dances on swirling dust motes.
Who needs alarm clock?
It is like a drug
The desire to be admired.
Hope for [this is good].
So many vox blogs,
So little time to read them.
I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Explore page is goal
That many seek and few reach.
Hint: write about food.
Know more about you
Than I know about myself:
Blogging TMI.
On every page,
Mandatory cat pictures
Grace the voxosphere.
The Haiku 575 group has posted a challenge to write Oscars-related haiku. Read the following at your own risk. It should be noted that I didn't actually see the Oscars this year.
Forest Whitaker
Takes home the golden statue.
Lazy eye my ass.
Crotchety old coot
Seems to work for some actors.
Alan Arkin wins.
Hopeless out of touch
Which actress should win the gold?
Didn't see a one.
Abigail Breslin
Didn't win Sunshine pageant,
Lost the Oscar, too.
Tap dancing penguins
Herald the coming of doom
And acceptance speech.
He held on to life
Awaiting this one moment.
Scorsese can die.
Al Gore doesn't dance
But he does dress like penguin.
And talks global doom.
Red carpet posing
Flash bulbs sparkle and dazzle
Blinding all of us.
Celebs dress like freaks
It is expected of them.
More money than sense.
The limo pulls up.
Who is behind the dark glass?
And now we're all fans.
Okay, some of these are fairly lame, but I think I successfully met the challenge.
Haiku-Who-Done-It
So many poisons,
So little time to spike drinks.
Guess I'll just shoot him.
Detective looks dour,
Shows me his fingerprint brush,
Says, “You should wear gloves.”
“Heart attack?” she says.
Potted foxglove missing leaves.
“So sorry for you.”
“You may be wond’ring
Why I have called you all here.”
Sleuth looks so damned smug.
Dark and stormy night.
A shot rings out, maybe two.
The butler did it.
Paxton Daryl Branson
The Haiku Version:
Black birds inhabit
The winter-shorn tree, looking
Like budding dark leaves.
The longer version:
Migration
Black birds inhabit the winter-shorn tree,
Looking like dark leaves budding for an early Spring.
Birds of a feather, taking up squatters' rights
In the temporarily dead cottonwood
Before heading back north.
Didn't head quite far enough south,
Did ya, smart guys?
Feeling a little chilly, I suspect,
As it dips down in the single digits
Even here in the desert.
I know the feeling.
Maybe if I move just one more time,
I'll find a place where I can be
Comfortable in my own skin
Happy to be me.
But my ennui has to do
With neither time nor place,
Independent of the physical world
And no amount of migration will allow me
To escape its icy wind.
