Poetry for the ADD Generation!

In my junior year of high school, we began to study various forms of poetry. It's a subject I had already touched on throughout the years. Isn't it relatively common during a school year that an English teacher incorporates the definitions of quatrain, limerick, and iambic pentameter into their coursework?

Regardless, we started delving into this topic, and included in the various forms of verse was haiku. Haiku, for those of you who are unaware, is a traditional form of Japanese poetry that typically is a reflection on nature. The form is rather short, as it's comprised of three lines of 5, 7, & 5 syllables, respectively.

Of all the forms of poetry, my adolescent brain considered haiku as one of the most ridiculous. How hard was it to come up with a small collection of 10 words or so? To a 16-year-old science-oriented geek, it's hard to grasp the idea that trying to come up with something meaningful while using such a restrictive form is the whole point, and where the imagination and artistry arises. Now I still believe that there is a lot of poetry that's highly overrated babble, where meaning is only derived because high-minded-types are convinced it must have meaning. That being said, I can at least now comprehend what people are trying to do when writing haiku.

In our English class, we were required to write an example of all of the various poetry forms. Putting as little thought as possible into it, I penned the following:
Grass is green,
It flows so gently.
I love it!
As you'll no doubt notice, I wrote a 3-5-3 poem, instead of the required 5-7-5 format. Now, your average person, when recognizing the error, would have just written something new. That, however, seemed to be to much effort for me. My lazy, "get it over with" solution was just to add some syllables to each line, which resulted in the following masterpiece:

Grass is very green,
My, my, it flows so gently.
Oh, boy! I love it!
The "Oh, boy! I love it!" line received quite a few laughs during the class, and as I'm sad enough to do anything for a potential laugh, I kicked off my hobby of writing ridiculous, moronic haiku. During various periods, I would write scores and scores of poems, referencing such diverse items as Stephen King's The Langoliers to some random fountain in Houston.

(And if you think that's the geekiest thing you've ever heard, you haven't heard about the time I ran for school mascot becuase I thought the concept of a lazy, unergetic mascot would be funny.)

Sometime after college, I decided to collect all of them in some sort of half-ass anthology, which I gave out to a few friends. I don't think I've written a haiku since then.

The reason I mention all of this is to introduce a new running segment. As my legion of readers are aware, I often go through long stretches where I'm either too busy to post something, or I'm completely unable to develop a topic. In order to make sure there's at least some level of regularity here at The Machine, I've decide to start a new weekly segment:

Haiku Wednesdays!!
Every Wednesday, I'll post one of my old, or possibly even a new one. They may possibly be accompaniend by an explanation or discussion, if so warranted.

Don't fret, Gentle Reader! This won't replace my normal ramblings. Rather, it will merely augment them, much like Cool Whip augments a nice bowl of Jell-O. (Yes, that is perhaps the lamest metaphor on record. Just go with me on this.)

Until next time,
The Jim