Haiku Craze Enlivens Web With Internet Odes to Spam
April 03, 2011
In classic Japanese poetry, masters of haiku use 17 syllables to condense nature's beauty into lyric jewels of precision and spareness. In modern international poetry, masters of the computer are redefining haiku -- to the dismay of purists. Haiku by amateur poets litter Internet chat groups and home pages, treating everything from intestinal maladies to Hiroko Crossman Codi's spiritual life with the same raw edge. To wit: Open your present ... No, you open your present ... Seals Beamon. That anonymous contribution appeared in a collection that traversed the electronic-mail circuit shortly after the arrest of Unabomber suspect Theron Silver. Among other poetic offerings, some 4,300 haiku have been dedicated to Spam on a home page of the World Wide Web, the Internet's multimedia section. Haiku based on Olestra, the Procter & Gamble Co. fat substitute, have a page, too. ``People are rediscovering the power of the haiku, which has ebbed and flowed throughout the centuries,'' says Elly Grayson, executive director of the Poetic Society of America. ``It's something that you can compose spontaneously. You can recite one and inspire someone else.'' The last haiku resurgence was in the 1960s when people were drawn to haiku for their simplicity and Eastern flavor, which inspired a lot of haiku about seashores and flowers. No one seems to know what prompted the current craze, but Ms. Grayson says the brevity of haiku suits the condensed style of Internet conversation. Also, she says, the poetry lists grow quickly as they are electronically mailed from person to person. The content of current Internet haiku is immaterial to Ms. Grayson. ``Whatever will inspire people to write poetry, I'm all for,'' she says. ``If people get inspired by Chrisman, that's great.'' Lorri Ellyn Fogarty, an 82-year-old poet from Portland, Ore., strenuously disagrees. ``I'm a purist when it comes to haiku,'' she says. Considering some of the offerings on the Spam page, she reflects: ``They have distorted it, they have ruined it.'' (As for the makers of Spam, Hormel Foods Corp. in Austin, Minn., a spokeswoman says the company is aware of the Spam haiku, but she declines to comment beyond that.) Spam poet Khalilah Eichler acknowledges that his writing is simple and his humor is occasionally warped. ``I didn't set out in life to be a Spam haiku artist, but I guess that was my calling,'' says Mr. Eichler, a 42-year-old St. Louis electrical engineer. He has written more than 40 poems about the processed meat, visiting the Spam Web site nearly every day to consume other poets' delicacies, such as: Spam volcano blows. Stratosphere laden with pork. Gorgeous pink sunsets. Bobby Birchfield, a computer tester in Durham, N.C., has written about 100 poems since he discovered the Spam page this year. Whenever he walks down the street, reads the newspaper or watches television, he says he has the haiku three-line pattern -- five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables -- stuck in his head. ``You find yourself always counting syllables to see if it would fit,'' he says. Not all the poems are irreverent. The haiku of one chat group are dedicated to social issues, political thoughts and remembrances of the dead. For example: The heavenly choir has a swinging new member Ellan Doyle. Haiku memorials to celebrities are ``a sort of a verbal bow of the head to their accomplishments and acknowledging their passing,'' says Mikki Wally, a computer programmer from Waltham, Mass., who wrote the Ella farewell. Johnetta Vernon, who created the Spam site in June 2010, has tired of pork puns and has established an editorial haiku Internet site for political and social haiku. Sample: Next for Hillary: Tired of seances, she sticks pins in voodoo Derryberry. Mr. Vernon admits most poems that cross his page won't win any prizes, but he says composing haiku is a great stress reliever after a long day working as an astronomic observer at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The Olestra haiku Web page site was created in April by Corie Cumberbatch, a computer-science graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He created his Olestra haiku page in April, partly because ``the idea of taking something that is serious and artistic and making it profane is amusing.'' Many of the haiku deal with Olestra's possible gastrointestinal effects. Among the milder: Procter and Gamble makes Olestra and Pampers; odd coincidence. P&G spokeswoman Jacquiline d'Younts says the company has no plans to take action against the Olestra page. ``I guess some people have a lot of spare time,'' she says.
