It’s time for another secondhand haiku. This one is from Dave, an old friend who was kind enough to draft his haiku over coffee. He even flaunted the 5-7-5 conventions to which most of my haiku are bound. Not that I mind — I’ve been hoping for a few more contributors not intimidated by haiku format issues.

Please feel free to check out the entire secondhand collection so far, and if you might be inspired to add to it, you can click here to find out how.

read more

Back in April, when I started posting longhand haiku and poetry here, I decided to host the images on Flickr. It was done to spare my web server in the unlikely (yet entirely welcome) event of a gargantuan traffic spike.

Such a spike has yet to occur, but the decision seems to have had another benefit. It’s helped make the material accessible to folks not prone to visiting indie sites like this one. Thanks to the ease of modern photo sharing on Flickr, a dozen or so of my longhand images are floating around on literally hundreds of Tumblr, Livejournal and Blogger sites. While only a tiny fraction of people who view my Flickr-based images ever come to this actual site, it’s pretty gratifying to know people are seeing and enjoying my output — it’s only a little bittersweet that most of them seem to be teenage girls.

My inner capitalist would love to convert the increased exposure into cold, hard cash (or at least a few more book sales?). Unfortunately, I have no inner marketing genius to figure out how.

Meanwhile, my inner teenager wants to know why I didn’t write more poetry for girls to see when I was actually a teenager. If only I’d had the internets and social networking back then…

read more

The topic of this website came up in a recent conversation. Upon being asked what my site was about, I stumbled a bit, unsure how to describe it. I mentioned the handwritten haiku, poems and such, but I had no capsulized answer.

Later in the same discussion, someone else mentioned the old saying about dancing being a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. I smiled, admitting the quote was an old favorite of mine. My friend smiled and informed me it was a Sting quote, though I’m fairly certain it was George Bernard Shaw.

While I replayed that conversation in my head later, I managed to mangle the saying and come up with the title of this post. If you’re familiar with various quirks of dyslexia, I probably don’t need to tell you mangling phrases and substituting the wrong words sometimes comes with the territory. It’s one of the reasons I was such a quiet child. Over time I’ve found ways to help minimize the spoken gaffes, but the words still get crossed in my mind fairly often.

That said, sometimes even crossed signals produce useful results. This particular mangling seems to have answered the earlier question about the website. I suppose posting my creative efforts online always fell into the category of expressing non-digital impulses digitally, but given the increase in handwritten content it seems even more apropos.

Just an idle haiku I jotted down while at a local coffee place. The young woman at the counter seems to be there every time I go in, despite the fact she’s carrying 17 college credits. I’m not sure I could do that — even though I did work while going to school, I rarely went above 15 credits in any semester.

read more

The secondhand collection continues with its youngest writer yet, the lovely Emma Rose Martino. Emma is still awaiting her fourth birthday, but that didn’t stop her from composing the above haiku with a little logistical help from her mom and dad.

The haiku sprouted from Emma responding to her father’s explanation of what a poem is. And while she relied on her mother for a bit of spelling guidance, Emma conceived the words and wrote every letter herself. Promising work for a three year old :)

(Update: Karl has posted a great explanation of this haiku’s creation — I recommend reading that as well.)

As always, you can see the rest of the secondhand collection here. If you are so inclined, you can send a haiku or short poem of your own.

read more

read more