About

It’s an art form. It’s therapy. It’s both!

This site started because I have a miserable commute.

One of the ways I pass the time and stay sane traveling 4.5 hours a day squeezed on a bus next to rude, obnoxious, noisy, horrible people is to write angry Twitter messages about them. One of my favorite recurring characters is a large older woman who smells of bleach and feta cheese. I called her Ethyl McCheddarSnatch, and anyone who follows me on Twitter for a while has heard of her.

One day, I decided to make the extra effort to put all of my venom in haiku form, using the 5-7-5 syllable pattern loosely based on traditional Japanese haiku.

Haiku is an art form that works perfectly within the micro-blogging platform, since Twitter users only have 140 characters per “tweet”.

This all started with my cranky commute - and quickly spilled over into the rest of my life. Being that I’m a big geek, this seemed a natural place to go with it.

I discovered that although my non-structured angry rants were cathartic in a way, the haiku versions were even better at diffusing my anger.

I think the reason for this is likely because I have to take the time to think through the phrasing in order to make it fit within the haiku format, and once I’m done, I get a sense of pleasure or pride from my carefully crafted rant. I enjoy seeing the responses from people, and knowing that I’ve been able to make my Twitter followers laugh. It’s my way of turning something miserable into something… well, less miserable.

It is my hope that this site can serve as a constructive outlet for you, in an environment where others can relate to – and maybe even get a chuckle out of – the way you’re channeling your own feelings of anger and frustration.

A minor technical note

The haiku here are not technically haiku. They’re more like faux-ku. Besides the 5-7-5 pattern (which doesn’t exactly match our version of 5-7-5, since in Japanese, some sounds count as more than one “on”, or sound unit, but only count as one syllable in English – traditional Japanese haiku will also generally make a metaphoric reference to nature or a season. Unless I’m bitching about commuting in the dead of Winter, most of the haiku here won’t follow the traditional rules.

If they fit into any classification, it would be most accurate to call these tiny works of art “senryū”, a poem that is written in a similar form and emphasizes irony, satire, humor, and human foibles rather than seasons.

With that said, we extend our apologies to any actual haiku artists that may stumble across this site.  We genuinely mean no offense or affront to what you do.

To learn more about real haiku, check out the Wikipedia article.

Additional note: Some of the haiku we’ve stumbled across did not have an author credited. We make every effort to appropriately credit whenever possible, and if you have a lead on specific authors, please do let us know. Some of the older ones posted came from a haiku contest from Salon.Com back from 1998. Although Salon.Com doesn’t seem to have them archived, it looks like Snopes.Com does, as an example of a chain email that was supposedly real error messages in Japan. Again, no specific authors cited, unfortunately.

And if you think this is fun, check out ThinkGeek.Com’s monthly haiku contest – you could win $50! If you submit it here, you’re welcome to submit it there – the haiku you submit on this site remain your property, and we can’t offer you $50, but we can make your poetry famous by posting it on teh intarwebz.