CP? you tell me perhaps it's anti-CP?

[Mitch]

Hear ye Hear ye!

The Oz Whistles Webstore has transformed (verily)!

Oz Whistles is no longer retailing per se.

The work of Mitch can now be viewed there and help for other worthy makers as opportunity allows.

The holy war rages, and yet the jehad of Oz Whistles now rests completed.
The battle was won, yet the tin leprechaun marches on!

Oz Whistles still stands, if not an army, but a banner still.

There are no riches in whistles that can be traded - only a path that can be walked. No money enters heaven, and a whistle is the small gate so often overlooked.

A shop is a roadsign, and a roadsign cannot move on. The pilgrim cannot be a shop. The destination is never in a transaction, except that feet pass there transacting with the good earth ... step on step.

We are pleased that more walk than before. Others seemingly claim to fly, but only in their heads.

No more Gens, No more Feadogs, no more Susatos, and all the rest. Only friends.

The craftsman will bring the little angels to workshops at festivals, and no longer ride them like mules. They were never apt.

...

Damn - that's the first gig I've had in months!!!

Not exactly a photo shoot, but it's nice to try my hand (twig?) at the theatrical arts!

Hope I get paid for it!

(Edited as a note to the editor: "Horatio! My horse!!" .. I KNOW it's not in the script . but it adds drama DAMNIT!!)

[talasiga]

there is no sin in pruning
coz the focus
is in the growth to come .....

[dspmusik]

was that a haiku?

[Steve Bliven]

No, he just likes prunes....

Best wishes.

Steve

[talasiga]

was that a haiku?

No, there are many rules to classical haiku and 17 syllables in three lines criterion is just too simplistic to characterise true haiku. In fact, haikus are strictly speaking pretty impossible in English.

I mean, just looking at the 17 syllable thing for a moment - English is not a monosyllabic language, unlike Japanese. The idea in haiku is that each of the syllables carries a discrete meaning. Monosyllabic languages are those where every syllable has a stand alone meaning. In English (and many other languages) not every syllable is like this. Of course it is possible to make up a verse with 17 "word syllables" in English but then that is only the first step.

There are other necessaries for a haiku. If I remember correctly each of the 3 lines must carry a stand alone meaning or image. Then the flavour of a season must inform the haiku. And so on and so forth.

I try to make up for all these things by arranging my 17 syllable three liners so that they have
some internal rhythm ( I have forgotten the poetry term for this), some alliteration (and, very rarely rhyme - I don't particularly like rhyme which is something that is almost automatic in my birth language of Hindi - - too common for me). I like to acheive some mesmeric or hynotic feel in these quips so that one is encouraged to play around with them in the mouth, to swish it around and savour many unintended and intended meanings from them. That notwithstanding, they are not strictly haiku. In any case I don't try too hard - mostly its a stream of consciousness thing that is lightly finessed here or there. I often post these things spontaneously.

Of course, if people, aren't attracted to what I have written, its not a big deal - they can just ignore. Its only 17 syllables and hardly an insurmountable distraction. Stick, on the other hand, can indulge hisself more loquaciously because he is a great whistle maker and people here should be a lot more tolerant of his lenghthy verbose escapades.

I, myself, do not need to be tolerant because I like him. I know that he has heard the currawongs calling.

[talasiga]

.....savour many unintended and intended meanings ........

However in the case of this one, it is, I think pretty direct, with not too many deep laterals or obliques

there is no sin in pruning
coz the focus
is in the growth to come .....

I am simply giving Stick some encouragement and support thru these times of change for him. He has downsized his retail to retain only Oz and Syn whistles and so I wanted to work in those words (or, at least their phonetics) in the post and there they are, as you can see, in the words "sin" and "coz". This explains why I didn't write the usual "cos".

Other than that the pruning of his retail is almost corrollary to (our soon to be) southern winter which is best season for pruning in preparation for the spring growth. This is particularly relevant to the Blue Mountains, which, as you know, is where Stick lives. It is one of the minority of regions on our continent that experiences the 4 distinct temperate seasons that most of you in the North Atlantic are familiar with.

So I wanted to say all this succinctly and yet in a riddly diddly way of the ITM bards and elves and the like.

I can't say this with authority because I am not trained in scansion but I would like to suggest that any mesmeric effect of the post may be due to
1. the three "in" in the first line, followed by
2. the alliterative triad of co, cu and co in lines 2 and 3
3. the sibilant triad si, oz and us (lines 1 and 2)
4. the rhythm of the whole thing (yet to be described)

[killthemessenger]

When the poet
Turns to explanation
The game's up.

[talasiga]

well I don't mind sacrificing any wannabe profile as a poet in the interests of interacting with a sincere question from a fellow board member. The name of the "game" is communication, rather than a style or a schtick.

[JTC111]

English is not a monosyllabic language, unlike Japanese....Monosyllabic languages are those where every syllable has a stand alone meaning.

I'm confused by this. I only know a small amount of Japanese language but what I know seems to me polysyllabic. I searched around the internet and the most I found to back up that first line I quoted was that Japanese was a mixture of monosyllabic and polysyllabic ...an argument that could be made for more than a few languages. The only example I could find of a polysyllabic language still used today is Vietnamese, although there may be some little known tribal people still using monosyllabic language.

[Pipe Bender]

It's always amazing to hear the unknown interests/gifts of Forum members

[talasiga]

English is not a monosyllabic language, unlike Japanese....Monosyllabic languages are those where every syllable has a stand alone meaning.

I'm confused by this. I only know a small amount of Japanese language but what I know seems to me polysyllabic. I searched around the internet and the most I found to back up that first line I quoted was that Japanese was a mixture of monosyllabic and polysyllabic ...an argument that could be made for more than a few languages. The only example I could find of a polysyllabic language still used today is Vietnamese, although there may be some little known tribal people still using monosyllabic language.

I already explained what I meant by monosyllabic language. Its in your quote of me right there. I have explained it as I understand it.

It doesn't mean that you can't have a word with more than one syllable but, rather, every syllable in a word has to have a stand alone meaning. Lets look at the word "womanly" in English. We split it into three syllables and the last syllable definitely doesn't have any semantic value (meaning) in a stand alone way. This doesn't happen in monosyllabic languages no matter how many syllables ther are in the word.

If you find this confusing, dont worry about it - just move on because my elucidation earlier doesn't need to rely on an argument about monosyllabic. Basically what I said is that a haiku needs every syllbale to have its stand alone meaning. This occurs in Japanese because every syllable has its own stand alone meaning but it is not the case in English.

For example, taking my three line post above (and taking the words as they sound when uttered) the follwoing syllables do not qualify as having stand alone meaning:

ing, the, fo, cus

In effect, in trad. haiku requirement, this renders my 3 line , 17 syllable post a 3 line 12 syllable post and already disqualifies it as a proper haiku at the first and most superficial threshold criterion.

[JTC111]

If you find this confusing, dont worry about it - just move on because my elucidation earlier doesn't need to rely on an argument about monosyllabic.

I really wasn't looking for an argument.
It sounded like you knew something I didn't and I was wondering what it was ...but we can leave it alone.

[Nanohedron]

I can't.

I already explained what I meant by monosyllabic language. Its in your quote of me right there. I have explained it as I understand it.

It doesn't mean that you can't have a word with more than one syllable but, rather, every syllable in a word has to have a stand alone meaning. Lets look at the word "womanly" in English. We split it into three syllables and the last syllable definitely doesn't have any semantic value (meaning) in a stand alone way. This doesn't happen in monosyllabic languages no matter how many syllables ther are in the word.

Japanese is definitely NOT a monosyllabic language. Once one is adequately accustomed, one notes a passing degree of quasi-monosyllabic character in compounds based entirely on Chinese loanwords, but native Japanese is as polysyllabic as they come. For example, the Sino-Japanese word for "pungent" or "hard" is "shin". The native word for the same is "karai". The syllables that form the word "karai" (actually not syllables but mora, properly), ka, ra, and i, do NOT break down into three discrete and intelligible meanings, for they have none apart from their combination in this context. And you might be interested to know that the Japanese hear "shin" as actually two syllables (or, again, mora): shi, and n. Here's another Sino-Japanese loanword: "retsu" (a row or line, in this example). It is the result of an historic attempt to render the monosyllabic modern Chinese word "liè" according to how it was percieved as being pronounced by Chinese long ago. But it's definitely not monosyllabic, and re and tsu in this case have no meaning apart from each other, either. Here's a great example: "shi", and "kokoromiru". Both mean "try". Guess which one is native Japanese?

If you had said that Chinese were a monosyllabic language, I would find no need to speak up.

[talasiga]

Thanks for that Nano. I will talk to my Japanese friends about thier language later this month.
Much of your post relies on the consideration of mora and I note that
here it is clarified that mora count is critical and not syllable count (as has been the old fashioned and wrong idea about haiku). This would make it it even more difficult to render haiku in English.

However I note the section in the above link about haiku in the English language and I will try to see if I can haiku according to these more relaxed requirements (given that it is part of a popular non Japanese tradition now).

[talasiga]

Today, haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries and in the Balkans.[citation needed]

It is impossible to single out any current style or format or subject matter as definitive. Some of the more common practices in English are:

Use of three (or fewer) lines of 17 or fewer syllables;
Use of a season word (kigo);
Use of a cut (sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) paralleling the Japanese use of kireji, to implicitly contrast and compare two events, images, or situations.
While the traditional Japanese haiku has focused on nature and the place of humans in it, some modern haiku poets, both in Japan and the West, consider a broader range of subject matter suitable, including urban contexts. While pre-modern haiku avoided certain topics such as sex and overt violence[citation needed], contemporary haiku sometimes deal with such themes.

The loosening of traditional standards has resulted in the term "haiku" being applied to brief English-language poems such as "mathemaku" and other kinds of pseudohaiku. Some sources claim that this is justified by the blurring of definitional boundaries in Japan.

Therefore, getting back to dspmusik's question about whether my post was a haiku, I think I meet the criteria for English language haiku except for the "kireji" factor. I am not sure how this could be demonstrated.