Perl Haiku Poetry Contest 306
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!"
Re:Right, bring it on. (Score:4, Informative)
All about Haiku [toyomasu.com]
More like pseudo-Perl (Score:5, Informative)
Haiki rules (Score:5, Informative)
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: in Kanji.
Re:Right, bring it on. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fp.pl? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:the real contest (Score:1, Informative)
Re:More like pseudo-Perl (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Does it also need to have a seasonal reference? (Score:3, Informative)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My haiku actually does something (Score:4, Informative)
semicolon does not need
to be in the code.