New Yorker in Haiku

September 17, 2006 1:02 PM

New Yorker in Haiku. Every week.
posted by mabelstreet (18 comments total)

oh my.

Haikus, awesome. You can totally distill the new yorker down to 17 syllables.
posted by shownomercy at 1:08 PM on September 17, 2006

You can totally distill the new yorker down to 17 syllables

I can name that tune distill it into four syllables.
posted by pdb at 1:17 PM on September 17, 2006

or five, depending on how you pronounce the last word.
posted by pdb at 1:22 PM on September 17, 2006

what other way can you pronounce "asshole"?
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:42 PM on September 17, 2006

Sometimes the hole is silent.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 1:45 PM on September 17, 2006

what other way can you pronounce "asshole"?

Had a long night last night. Can't count to five. Tried to cover mistake with cleverness.

/*slinks back to couch and big bottle of ibuprofen
posted by pdb at 1:51 PM on September 17, 2006

Fun, useful as well:
sometimes I can't be bothered
to read every piece!
posted by languagehat at 2:35 PM on September 17, 2006 [1 favorite]

Where are the umlauts?
Nipples of punctuation,
how can I suckle

from you if this guy
hides you away like mole-eyes?
(There’s the nature part,

you lardy purists.)
Get on the ball, cocksnatcher;
I want the umlauts.
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 3:21 PM on September 17, 2006

They are not umlauts—
they are just diaereses.
Nomenclature, please!
posted by languagehat at 3:47 PM on September 17, 2006

I had five minutes,
dude, no way diaresis
was getting in there.

"No diareses?"
would have worked, bookended by
"More diareses,"

but I was lazy,
and "umlauts" was funnier,
so I said fuck it--

that's why there's a link
to your own lardy statements
on that guy's website.

FIN
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 4:26 PM on September 17, 2006

Gotham, the only
city that, comes the deluge,
makes its own gravy.

P.S. Buddha, Steve Martin once found a four-syllable way (3rd quote).
posted by rob511 at 5:05 PM on September 17, 2006

so, i read the post title and got all excited thinking the new yorker was going to be available in haiku.
posted by nearo at 10:10 PM on September 17, 2006

Humans are running out of shit to do, I fear. It's global boring.
posted by pracowity at 12:16 AM on September 18, 2006

Is it just me who thinks that the reason haiku is so popular is that it has a frisson of cleverness but (in most non-Japanse instances) apparently requires no thought beyond the ability to count syllables?

Obviously, if I was a real smartypants I'd have condensed this thought down to a haiku. But somehow I just can't be bothered.
posted by rhymer at 12:40 AM on September 18, 2006

Is it just me...

Yes, haiku as it is usually written is poetry* by and for non-poets. Any "frisson of cleverness" usually comes of compressing standard loose prose until the inessentials are squeezed out and the remaining text begins to sound oracular on the fortune cookie level. With luck, though, the junk monkeys stuff into haiku molds quite prettily.
posted by pracowity at 3:37 AM on September 18, 2006

This is not haiku.
Haiku are in Japanese.
But it's fun to do!
posted by languagehat at 5:22 AM on September 18, 2006

There are also the non-Japanese (adapted) haiku form and senryu form.
posted by zennie at 8:12 AM on September 18, 2006

*goosebumps*
posted by chemchic at 9:49 AM on September 18, 2006