Last week we held a contest for the best zombie-themed haiku. It was very hard choosing a favorite, because most of them were really good!
The winning entry was penned by vekuum:
You lopped off my arms!Vekuum wins the game of Plants vs. Zombies, plus a copy of Ryan Mecum's book Zombie Haiku (shown above).
Thanks, now I can squeeze through your
Windows at night. Yum!
Here are the runners-up (sorry, no prize):
Gray rain falling down
Neighbors becoming Zombies
in cold October-- billstewart
Brains are like candy,
sweet grey matter slips through lips,
My arm just fell off.-- slida
The radio told
me that I would be safe here
Crowded Stadium-- apocalypticbeef
Though dead, it lives on.
Zombie? Brain-eating corpse? No:
General Motors.-- andyhavens
Budget for plastic
guns, pasta guts, Wilhelm scream,
is budget enough.-- bookninja
crunching through his brain
I realized I no longer cared
whether he loved me-- victriviaqueen
Within the coffin
the cry came from a dead man
reanimated-- BCJ
Groaning getting loudThanks to everyone for playing!
Barricades won't hold for long
Nice knowing you all-- necorium
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Thanks Mark.
That was fun.
My kids submitted some haiku's for this contest, and then for days they've been writing silly haikus for everything. Thanks for starting the fun!
How did I miss this? Oh well. My too late entry:
Naked, pale, black lips,
the goth girl limps forth. I speak:
"You had me at 'BRAINS!' "
This isn't sour grapes or whining; I didn't enter. I'm just wondering- what's the point of the 5/7/5 structure of a haiku?
I mean, you can't just write 17 syllables and add two line breaks, can you? I thought the line breaks indicated pauses. So "squeeze through your/Windows at night" sounds weird. Why capitalize Windows? Unless you're starting a sentence or referring to a popular OS, it seems like cheating.
I mean, congrats to the winner, it was good, but all of the runners-up read more naturally (except the line "plastic/guns").
Haiku doesn't just mean 17 syllables arranged into a square! :-)
There were four of us
Then you got too close to them
There were three of us
@KNODI
The Haiku is a Japanese form that, while fun to write in English, doesn't really translate well between languages. As opposed to English that has letters based on individual phonemes (I think I have the right word), Japanese is based on syllables. Mix in the fact that in general Japanese has the same stress on each syllable of a word, so our poetries really don't translate incredibly well. Japanese forms tend to be structured along syllabic patterns, which English poetry tends to be based on stressed and unstressed syllables.
So, what's the point of the poetic form? In general, it's just a fun exercise to squeeze meaning into a limited space.
As an aside, in modern poetry, the line end DOES NOT indicate a pause. This is usually what gets people in trouble reading Shakespeare. You should read from punctuation mark to punctuation mark. Also generally speaking, the technique of enjambment (breaking sentences between lines) usually leads to the sentence being read more quickly through the line breaks.
Finally, most English poetry uses the standard of capitalizing the first word in each line, although modern poetry often throws that convention out the Window (sic).
(And, yay for 4 graduating with an English degree!)
there is a writing contest happening now on 7x7.com, you can write haikus about your neighborhood.
http://7x7.com/neighborhoods-issue-your-san-francisco
5 / 7 / 5 is the old school pattern. 3 / 5 / 3 stanza's are technically closer to the original intent.
Yes, Knodi, there is more to a haiku than just 17 syllables, or at least there is supposed to be. Wikipedia has has more to say on it. Some of the structure of a haiku doesn't translate from Japanese to English very well. The haiku should somehow evoke an image of a natural season while also related it to something more personal, perhaps by using the natural reference as a metaphor (at least my favorites do). There is also a requirement (in that strict Japanese way), that one of the words serves as a "cutting" word at the end of one of the three parts. I don't think that translates well to English...
Haiku is a Japanese form so the syllabic structure is lost somewhat in English.
The structure is intended to provide two lines to 'set up' the third, which is supposed to lead the reader into a more profound or unexpected understanding of the imagery.
Like Matsuo Bashô's frog haiku:
Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
Translations here:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
The aim behind much of Japanese haiku is to eliminate any sense of the observer or even human essence, leaving only the imprint of nature. (Or zombies.)
@IllLich, your goth girl haiku is awesome.
Go read the original article for lots of great zombie haiku's that came in after the deadline (pun intended).
what if this thread refused to die? Suppose it just kept coming back, zombie haiku scratching at the windows?
There is a v. interesting essay called 'Prosody and Reconciliation' by a man called Keston Sutherland in a lil magazine called The Gig, if you can get hold of it.
http://www.ndorward.com/poetry/magazines/gig16.htm
Sutherland's view of zombies owes something I think by Karl Marx's, who more or less sees the gelatinized labour that goes into the factors of production as the main means by which the dead takes hold of the living
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_composition_of_capital
Oh, well, okay, if it's a Japanese thing. I'm definitely not well versed in the conventions of written poetry; most of my poetic education has been from verbal sources, and it mostly involves men from Nantucket.
On that note, how about a zombie limerick contest? ;-)
there was a young corpse from Nantucket...
... and they thought he had kicked the bucket...
(andyhaven's should win on topicality alone)
said he with a grin
..."you're much too thin"...
@knodi and others
Strictly speaking, almost all of the entries would be more properly classed as Senryuu. It uses the same 5/7/5 count, but the acceptable topics are a lot broader. Senryuu is generally considered lower class than haiku.
Zombie so sexy
Remember to use muzzle
Necrophilia
The haiku contest
goes to deserving winner
I am still flattered. :)
@ daemon: precisely. Haiku have to have some stuff about nature or seasons. That said, the winner's haiku far inferior to the haiku of "billstewart". You can't have a sentence split up into two lines. That's cheating.
@14: "...On that note, how about a zombie limerick contest? ;-)"
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
It's the American thing to do!
We dig our way out of our grave
Who can sleep when it's brains that you crave?
We climb out of a hole
Bereft of a soul
"Baby it's me! Now be brave!"
C'mon, Mark! Mark Mark! C'mon! Limerick contest, Mark! Much funnier, Daddy, please! Please Please! Daddy! Please!
[I have it on good terms that that is very effective on him.]
All my life I never could rest,
Til zombies ate my heart from my chest.
Now I wander the street,
Groaning after your meat,
Singing "Heart good, brain best! Brain best!"
But hand me a bone, and I'll suck it.
Clap! Clap! Clap!
See, Mark? Collaboration! They're forming into groups... a mob... demanding! "Zobie Limerick Contest!" The peasants are revolting!
(I have a surplus of exclamation marks; they're crowding out the dashes, so I dumped some here. Is that so wrong??)
Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains!
Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains!
Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains!
(Silly. I know.)
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Really? And you say this took place in Nantucket?
Congrats to the winners! And thanks to Mark for starting the contest. The thread was a joy to read.
You can keep your limericks though. I demand a Zombie Villanelle Contest! Or how about a "Three zombies walked into a bar..." joke contest?
How about an entire zombie tale written in anapestic tetrameter, à la Dr. Seuss?
I could totally go for the joke one.
Three zombies walk into a bar... swung by MF'ing Ving Rhames!
I think victrivia's is the best.
Most of this is terrible Haiku. Taking a sentence and adding line breaks at the appropriate point does not a haiku make.
It saddens me that such horrible examples of the form could be chosen as winners or runners up and that it isn't until you get to the third one that you find one that does it even remotely correctly (ignoring the bad punctuation).
Masukomi,
Of course most of it is horrible. It is about zombies, after all, the unnatural, as opposed to visions of nature. I, for one, had not been exposed to Haiku before.
My personal interpretation of art is attempting to commute feelings to others. I suspect that that is what Haiku is all about. But like the face painting of the Amazon Mud People, cultural art traditions don't always translate to other societies. The bulk of us here in BoingTown are just jerkwads trying to amuse each other. Especially me.
zombie haiku -
reading these will
eat your brain
-rytis
I REALLY loved this one:
crunching through his brain
I realized I no longer cared
whether he loved me
And Takuan, your line about zombie haiku scratching at the windows is sheer poetry.
most of my art evokes rot
That's rot she said!
I said I'd love her for eternity.
A love to break the barriers of time.
She told me that our love would never see
an end, nor taste death's bitter, choking wine.
So when the grey cadaver ate my brain
it wasn't hunger sped me to her bed.
I sought to keep the promises I'd made
and be with her, though now I'm mostly dead.
Cupid's arrow strikes with killing speed,
though what it slays is want of any touch
besides that of the one our heart doth need
more than air to breath or food to munch.
Your brain I will not take. I won your heart.
But, if you insist... hold still... BRGGLGARBARRT!
#6 is wrong when he says that all Japanese words place the same stress on each syllable of a word. An example of this is the word "ame." Stressed one way it means "rain" and stressed another it means "candy." There are tons of examples like this.
Anyway, cool contest. I liked several of the runners up haikus.
Maybe the haiku form was a little bit linguistically prickly for some. I agree with the comments about unnatural line breaks, even though there is such a thing as poetic license, and who can say what the author's intent was (other than entering a contest)? I don't know anything about Japanese, really, so me evaluating a zombie haiku is kind of like a fish evaluating an art deco radiator.
Perhaps we should have a go at a form more amenable to the caprices of the English language. A zombie limerick contest is a fine idea, but I think it would be more interesting to have a zombie sonnet contest (Shakespearean, not Petrarchan)--or zombie meditation a la Donne. That's a contest I'd enter, and not mind losing.
Kingdom of the slugs
now bliss no salt in hands of
Dead man shufflin' past.
brains taste good with toast,
many have had brains with egg;
I prefer ketchup.
Man, I wish I had known about this contest!
-Nat'n Xplosion
I thought the last one was the very best.