Perl Haiku Poetry Contest

ActiveState writes "Tell us why you love Perl. ActiveState is pleased to announce the ActiveState Perl Haiku Poetry Contest. Do you love Perl as much as we do? Then prove it with your passion, creativity, and wit! Categories include Best Haiku Poem Written in Perl and Best Haiku Poem About Perl. All entries will be featured on our website. Winners will be selected by ActiveState's Perl development team. Prizes will be awarded for the top three entries in each category and include licenses for ASPN Perl featuring Komodo Professional Edition, and cool ActiveState gear. The deadline for entries is 12:00PM PST, February 8, 2004. Winners will be announced on February 10. Full contest rules are also online. Good luck!"

Comments

Re:Right, bring it on.

[Anonymous Coward]

The middle line has to be 7 syllables to be proper haiku.

All about Haiku

More like pseudo-Perl

[3-State Bit]

IIRC Perl poetry does not need to be valid Perl, let alone have an interesting effect, but merely interesting English that happens to use only Perl keywords.

Re:More like pseudo-Perl

[AndIWonderIfIWonder]

IIRC Perl poetry does not need to be valid Perl, let alone have an interesting effect, but merely interesting English that happens to use only Perl keywords.

Erm, apparently there are 2 catergories, one the Haiku must be a valid perl program, and the other is a Haiku about perl (doesn't actually have to contain any perl). There is no category where you must use perl keywords and it doesn't have to be a valid program.

Haiki rules

[Larry David]

I looked through their rules, and even on their entry form and it just says haiki in the 'traditional 3-line format'. But I see no rules over syllables. Many people mistakenly believe haiki should be a fixed number of syllables, i.e. 5, 7, and then 5 again. But this only applies to Japanese, where a syllable can punch a lot more weight than in English. 'Traditionally' haiki also feature an element of the weather.

Here's what the Oxford Dictionary folk have to say:

The Japanese haiku must include kigo (season word). This is a convention in the Japanese art of haiku. But English haiku has no such word. Moreover, composers of English haiku are not required to strictly observe the 17 syllable rule. The Japanese haiku is written in a single line, but the English haiku is divided into three lines.

It would have been nice if their rules could have had some tips for pedants like me. Do they demand 5/7/5? I am guessing not. If they wanted to get all traditional on our asses they could demand 17 kanji symbols, and I don't know how you can code:

$x = "sck sck fe dolr";
$x =~ s/sc/suc/g; $x =~ s/fe/5/g; $x =~ s/l/lla/;
$x .= "luv u " . localtime();

in Kanji.

Re:Right, bring it on.

[lambent]

actually, there are several forms of haiku. Aside from the slightly more wild 7-9-7 and 7-21-7 we studied in my long forgotten college writing seminars .... haiku is more about style than structure. Small miscalculations in syllable counts were overlooked by the ancient masters. Indeed, dialect changed so rapidly over distances that pronunciations often changed. (imagine aluminum vs aluminium) And indeed, if you need to judge poetry using algorithmic rules, you're truly missing the point. For more information, check out this sweet right up at: Haiku@E2

Re:fp.pl?

[adam arndt]

Only for people in Canada and the US. Hrrmmmfff. Also, all Haiku has to mention or allude to one of the 4 seasons. Ask Damien Conway.

Re:the real contest

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you want their ide, free alternative openperl (http://open-perl-ide.sourceforge.net/) is quite good.

Re:Does it also need to have a seasonal reference?

[kahei]

Yes, it should contain a kigo, a season-related word with specific connotations (the seasonal connection is often pretty obscure). This is the biggest problem with haiku in English -- there are no kigo. Some people have suggested that a strong word should be picked to fill the role of the kigo in an English haiku.

Actually, the kigo and the kiri -- a pause that comes usually but not always after the 5th or 13th beat -- are perhaps more characteristic of haiku than the 5-7-5, which is broken quite often even in the classics. Bashou-style haiku (the most classical) are also characterized by a rigid focus on direct experience -- NO metaphors, NO emotions. Other haiku poets (haijin) took haiku in other directions -- notably Issa, who wrote one of my favorites:

Useless clouds...
Piling up into a useless mountain
And then doing it _again_.

It seems to lose a bit in my (sucky) translation. There should be a contest.

And a transformation in the last line!

[Christian Engstrom]

As I understand it, another key element apart from the number of syllables etc. is that the first two lines should paint up a scene, which then gets radically transformed in the last line. In the article where I read it, the example used was somthing along the lines of

Seven black ducklings
Walking towards the water
Over the white ice

The point here being that after the first two lines the reader would have assumed that is was summer, and made a mental image in green and blue summer colors, but after the last line, he has to revise that picture radically. (My own sucky translation of my faulty recollection of the Swedish translation of the originally Japanese haiku, so please don't take the example as such too seriously, but it illustrates the point, anyway.)

In a way it works a bit like a joke: first you set something up, and then, at the end, you deliver the punch line.

And this of course makes it more interesting to try to write haikus, because no matter how you count your syllables, you really don't have an awful lot of them to achieve all of that.!

Re:the real contest

[Molt]

...very well, I shall correct you. Try this page. The page you pointed at was ActiveState's funky IDE thing, ActivePerl is availably for no cost (And is actually pretty much just normal Perl with a funky different package management system so it'll work sanely in Windows).

Re:My haiku actually does something

[Plutor]

When at end of block,
semicolon does not need
to be in the code.