28 Comments on “Still Reading Haiku”

1. Khaaaan!

2. No Haiku Winner
   A Silence On Whatever
   Making Me So Sad

3. Bravo, sir!

4. not to sway your choice
   but my budding genius may
   need encouragement

5. Are you indicating that anyone’s haiku could even compare with mine? Hello, I involved the nuclear mutation that is the unicorn Pegasus kitten. Of course that didn’t actually fit in the Haiku, but still the idea was there! I should get something!

6. to read too many

   haiku in one sitting, can

   all meaning remove

   Apologies for the touch of Yoda speak.

7. Your Haiku lacks a final line.

8. O, if Scalzi had thought
   His postponement to announce
   In haiku format

9. And now I realize that I (like, I suppose, Brian) missed the fact that the automatically generated “Posted by John Scalzi” is five syllables. Well played.

10. “Posted by John Scalzi” is 6 syllables. But the following works:

    Still Reading Haiku
    Harder to choose than I thought.
    Winners tomorrow.

    :)

11. I would think that after a while they would start to run together.

12. D’oh didn’t count the title…

13. hundreds of entries
    tomorrow’s future in rhyme
    decisions are hard

    ;-)

14. Still Reading Haiku
    Harder to choose than I thought.
    Winners tomorrow.

    clever sodd – I didn’t even see that!

15. Geez, just roll a d20 already.

16. “Tonight”, John teases,
    but he fails to deliver –
    Obscene last line dropped.

17. Done reading haiku.
    Unipegkit will decide.
    Wish this was simpler.

18. Haiku recursion,
    brain warp, compulsion, loathing;
    must check back later.

19. Pick several strong ones
    Let them breed, soon leading to
    Haiku overlords

20. Haiku overlords
    When bred with pegkittycorn
    Spawn Armageddon

21. I, for one, welcome
    Our new haiku overlords.
    Let Scalzi suffer.

22. I think we all should
    be glad that it was not a
    limerick contest

23. What hath Scalzi wrought?
    Zombie race, haiku their fate,
    brains eaten by verse.

24. Can’t resist:

    Enter haiku contest
    Scalzi decides the winner
    ? ? ? – profit!

    (Reading ? as one of the 4Ws and an H, not as “question”)

25. Next up: Internet meme haiku contest…

26. I think good haiku should look like normal posting. Then they’re doubly good.

27. Haiku, John Scalzi
    Writes about big tough green grunts
    And I don’t mean Shrek.

28. [Standard Disclaimer I Invented on the Fly]
    First, this isn’t a rant or flame, so please, everyone, don’t take it as such; I ask out of simple curiosity. At worst, please take it as constructive criticism (yes, I’ve both taken and taught fiction and poetry shops for many a year, so my hide has been sufficiently thickened by exposure to the slings and barbs, etc.) And I’m sure it’s an egregious social gaffe that I don’t include anything remotely haiku-ish (or even tanka-like), but my better half is crowding me to trek to the nearest State Liquor Store (yes, I’m located *there*–please don’t revile or chortle at me) to quest for adequately potable substance. And she’s red-headed.

    Okay, actual content. I’m very aware that it’s noticeably more difficult to write haiku in English than Japanese for various reasons, not that it’s easy to write *good* haiku in Japanese. That said, there’s more to even a *bad* one than seventeen syllables broken five, seven, five. There are many conventional images, expressions, and metaphors commonly used, a certain tone, usually a somewhat elegiac awareness of the passage of time, the “season word,” and frequent clever double (and higher cardinality) entendre achieved via the much higher occurrence of homophones in Japanese than English.

    If you had no intent to ask for something resembling haiku in the Japanese sense, but something more Twitter-like, then I apologize, and hope everyone decided to ignore this screed before leaping to the keys (or, more apropos, Dragon) to administer a right proper flaming.

    Anyway, that’s what came out of the feebly perturbed state cycle resulting from the strange attractor this thread inculcated in my “leetle gray cells” (no, no, the ones in my erstwhile wetware CPU).

    And, of course, love the novels, and just finished your book of blog compilations in a straight read. I laughed, I cried…and the book entertained me, as well. [insert rim shot suitable for bad pun]