Current mood:	amused
Current music:	"Hank" by Some Velvet Sidewalk

accidental haiku

At the risk of getting a little derivative, I wanted to post about a livejournal meme that I recently discovered, since it involves poetry. Memes are processes, thought or otherwise, that can be transmitted from one person to another through various means. A definition I found here calls a a meme "a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern."

One person could show another how to gut a fish, for example. Or s/he could write a quiz called "which 70's sitcom are you?" Then both parties will share the benefit of the knowledge. Benefit or no, the replication is the key--the fact that once one person "catches" a meme, they transmit it to others. Nowadays, a major mode of transmission is the Internet. I derive benefit from some of the memes floating around, but others that I've come across are kind of silly. I mean, quizzes are nice, and sometimes even come up with funny results, but I wouldn't inflict an entry full of a dozen quizzes I took on people that I wanted to keep reading the things I wrote.

I read about a literary meme that I found interesting on asciident's pages, and here's a link to her post (with my comment). That got me to looking at other memes (there are scads of sites devoted to them,) especially LJ-specific ones.

I found one that I really liked, a meme that goes through your livejournal when you enter your username, and extracts haiku that you wrote inadvertently whilst spewing prose all over the place. It isn't perfect, because it relies on a syllable counter that is computer-based and thus fallible. But it does come up with some interesting results. Go here to perform the haiku meme.

Here are some haiku I got when I ran my site through it.

These first three describe the whole premise of today's post. Art comments on art, like asking the I Ching a question about itself.

donut art it'll make
its own niche and then fill it
you'd be surprised

inspired donut
poetry and resolved to
go looking for some

a writer whose work
i enjoy and i'm never
going to let him live

Then we get to the call to arms, the carpe diem, the inspirational poem:

make plans for the night
of your life because that's what
you're going to have once

(my comment: and only once, hence the name "the night of your life.")

i noticed that
people who dream of donuts seem
to dream about them

(sounds reasonable...)

Religious imagery has been a popular source of inspiration through the ages. Here's a haiku that describes the difficulties and paradoxes associated with seeking God through religion:

i notice that he
crosses himself backwards once
and correctly once

Here's a pair that works together:

once again on one
hand she finds donuts in the
same place she found love

gooey donuts on
the other hand giving a
donut to a man

The results ranged from the cryptic:

effort for its own
sake on his part other than
his labor of love

to the straightforward:

short recollections
of her dreams waking in the
middle of the night

to the randy (everyone loves erotic poetry, after all):

manufacture an
excuse to put you in the
back seat of their car

A few more describe frozen moments in time, and our perceptions of them:

save all those silly
campaign letters that fill your
mailbox at this time

a she-bear out of
the woods to maul some children
that make fun of him

searching for it I
just kept my eyes open to
look at what came in

A couple succinctly stated a motif that runs throughout these pages:

if the word donut
appears at all it appears
in several dreams

you're into fresh eggs
but please don't abandon the
things once they get grown

Three stanzas make up a story of a brief, possibly tragic relationship in the following:

i saw someone in
the elevator at the
building where i work

thoughts and memories
rushed through my little mind
when i saw someone

of detail but not
quotidian or banal
we chatted a while

And on that note I'll close, since:

the height of fun but
this should be the last time since
i'm fittin' to get

sums up what this has been. Once again, poetry doesn't have to be sought out, but instead comes to us seemingly of its own volition. These remind me of the chopped up poems William S. Burroughs produced when he took a page of text, folded it and cut it, and then matched the lines up in a different order. The results produced not just the same themes, differently stated, but also hidden, deeper meanings springing from the innate power of the words themselves.

I also came to the conclusion that livejournal isn't just for teenaged girls writing bad poetry. It's also a method for random poetry to come from putting ourselves out there just a little bit, trying, perhaps without even knowing exactly what we're trying to do, and just living. There's definitely poetry in that. We're all transmitting it without even trying, as poetry is a meme that has established itself in mankind just as E. coli have established themselves in our intestines.