Re: TRANS: a haiku

FFlores wrote:

> I've decided to try my hand at haiku, so here is one
> sample. It lacks finesse, I'm afraid, but it's only a
> start.
> Comments?
Well, just a little nitpicking:

Haikus are, indeed, poems of exactly 17 syllables, with a
5-7-5 break down, but technically, a haiku must have syntactic*
breaks between each line. One should not, in other words, just
take a sentence or phrase of 17 syllables and then, graphically,
force it into the 5-7-5 form (I think that's called senryukuu).  I don't
remember any Bashoo poems offhand, but there were some great
(and humorous) examples from an email I once got where computer
error messages are given as haikus:

         Three things are certain:
         Death, taxes, and lost data.
         Guess which has occurred.

         The ten thousand things
         How long do any persist?
         Netscape, too, has gone.

         Server's poor response
         Not quick enough for browser.
         Timed out, plum blossom.

        Wind catches lily
         Scatt'ring petals to the wind:
         Segmentation fault

         ABORTED effort:
         Close all that you have.
         You ask way too much.

         Hal, open the file
         Hal, open the damn file, Hal
         open the file, please Hal

         No keyboard present
         Hit F1 to continue
         Zen engineering?

* (I am not sure, however, whether the rule is just against enjambment or
against continuous sentences in general.  If just the former, then the following
are also possible:

         To have no errors
         Would be life without meaning
         No struggle, no joy

         Out of memory.
         We wish to hold the whole sky,
         But we never will.

         Having been erased,
         The document you're seeking
         Must now be retyped.

======================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
======================================