This haiku is lost.
So lost that it went in the
comments section. Whoa!

LMAO

i REALLY dont get whats so fun or interesting about haikus.
its literally just some random words separated by weird ass line breaks and they usually tell me nothing, spark no lyrical feeling in me or transport any ideas.
just thinking about the concept of haikus already bores me to death and i cant stand reading them because it feels like i read some 7yo trying to write some deep shit as homework and fails.

dont get me wrong, this isnt a criticism on the battle series or any entry submitted to it. its not like you came up with the writing style or did a bad job on following it. i just needed a place to drop my opinion on this most stupid form of lyrical writing i have ever seen. even my cat could come up with a haiku and i think that shows how stupid and annoying they are.

meow meow meow meow meow
meow meow meow meow meow meow meow
meow meow meow meow meow

there you go

i find haikus beautiful for the same reason you find channel F beautiful.

limitations breed creativity they said

channel f is cool
its crispy crunchy dirty
but haikus are not

this is a haiku,
a version of poetry,
fifty six botbuh.

56 is nice
56 is fantastic
it's the best number

ok that first comment was an exercise in terseness - like a haiku - but really i'd like to say more.

the thing with channel F is that it's the most feature-lacking of all the chips that you can still use to make music that you'd actually go out of your way to listen to. i guess i presumed that was what you found compelling about composing for it, but maybe i was wrong. to me at least, channel F is like the "minimum viable chip" and by the same token the haiku is the "minimum viable poetic form". obviously taste can't be argued with, but let me at least try to explain what i find compelling about composing haikus and you might see why i enjoy it.

i hope it doesn't seem self-aggrandising to use my own entry as an example, it's just that the writing process is still fresh in my mind, so i'm well placed to lay out the amount of thought that actually goes into one of these little things - and it did win, so it can't be so terrible!

the key principle of writing in such a minimal form is that you must evoke far more than you can actually say in 17 syllables. ideally every phrase should be pulling at least double-duty.

with this entry i was chasing the feeling of longing to return to a cherished innocent memory. the original inspiration was a childhood friend who had an apple tree in his garden. the laziest version of this idea would be something like:

my best friend and i
ate apples under his tree.
how i miss those days!

but that is fucking BORING. i hope you can see why it's boring. it just tells you the thing, but i don't want to tell you the thing! i want you to feel it! so a different, subtler strategy is in order.

the first thing to consider is framing. the opening line is like a prologue, setting the scene. by making those words "do you remember" the relationship between the reader and the poem is developed right from the start - the reader becomes a participant. it's no longer me telling you about my memory, it's telling you about our memory, and hopefully this primes you to interpret the following lines with a sense of nostalgia that you generate for yourself rather than just hearing about second-hand.

you said its literally just some random words separated by weird ass line breaks but i must protest that it's not random or weird at all - the wording of each phrase is carefully chosen to ensure a like break falls at an appropriate moment of tension. ending the line at this point in the sentence is effective because at the end of that line you should be thinking: "do i remember... what?". it invites you to continue to the next line.

the next important edit is changing eating apples from my friend's own tree to stealing them. now i don't know how true this is in other countries but in england scrumping is a classic trope of childhood mischief. and so while the revelation of misbehaviour should undercut the innocence, it paradoxically makes it feel even more innocent precisely because it's such a minor, childish transgression that will probably go unnoticed by anyone (as opposed to the crimes we commit as adults, which much more often hurt other people deeply).

splitting the middle line in two was also an important decision. it could easily have been stealing apples in summer? but ending that sentence earlier instead and starting a new one on the same line lets me use the line break to my advantage again. another feature of the haiku form is that every line is an odd number of syllables, meaning if you do split a line in half, there will always be a longer and shorter side. this lends the haiku a lilting rhythm which i find pleasant to read and interesting to write.

the second half of this line also flips the first on its head, because instead of a delicious prize, me & my friend clearly stole unripe apples! it's almost like a karmic punishment that we have to eat hard, sour apples, but a suitably minor one for our minor crime. that's the childhood innocence again.

at this point i first submitted the poem in this state:

do you remember
stealing apples? small and green
and rock-hard. i do.

but you'll see i resubmitted because i wasn't happy with it - i was convinced i could wring more meaning out of it. for a start rock-hard is a bit of a cliche little idiom that didn't sit well with me. and i do is redundant - of course i remember it, that's already implied by the fact that i'm talking about it in the first place! that won't do for a poetic form all about economy of meaning.

so and rock-hard became rocks, which plays a dual purpose. first, it turns the cliche adjectival phrase into a metaphor - i'm not saying they're like rocks, i'm literally calling them rocks. you can almost hear these fruit clacking like pebbles in your bag because you picked them so early. second, it frees up the rest of the line for something more substantial.

i now get to capitalise on the fact that the fruit would seem so disappointing - i turn it around and call them a "feast", implying me and my friend happily devoured them anyway and enjoyed it too, so ecstatic were we at getting away with our heist. then, after the grandiosity of the word "feast", evoking some huge banquet hall, "...for two" brings the intimacy right back to finish on a final note of nostalgia.

do you remember
stealing apples? small, green, sour
rocks. a feast for two.

if you did go to the trouble of reading all that, i hope it wasn't boring. i also hope that you can see now that although that poem is short, a lot of thought went into it. whether it's "lyrical" or "tells" you something, well, that part is totally up to you, but it's certainly not just random words separated by weird ass line breaks, not transporting any ideas.

with these thoughts in mind, perhaps you could have a look at some other entries in this series and see them with fresh eyes. maybe see what people say they like about each entry during slugs, too.

perhaps you could even try your hand at writing a haiku tomorrow! you might come to enjoy working with such a challenging form.

here's my own haiku about channel F

with each step's cold crunch
thin, twitching, serrated threads
catch, tangle, and sing.

I feel like German language would lend well to poetry centered around syllable management :)

This is cool roz.That made sense to me, but you have a good perspective about poetry that I haven’t really given time to think about quite in this way.

Kleeder, there’s no problem with not getting or enjoying a particular form of art, but why go hate on it in a thread for people participating in battles celebrating it?

I don’t expect everybody to appreciate all forms of art (as I don’t) but I just don’t get the intent here.

thanks kilowatt, that made my night. it's those times when, against the odds, you touch minds with another person a thousand miles away that this whole world wide web malarkey feels worth it.

i get what you mean
thank you for explaining it
but i was joking