Another topic that seems to come up a lot around me recently is Twitter, specifically is it good for anything. I first checked it out last year when there was a wild fire near my sister’s house in Los Angeles — someone was posting updates about the fire, but calling my sister turned out to be much more informative (and accurate). Then this week there was a article in the NY Times about a woman who tweets mini-recipes. For instance:
Biscotti: mix 1/3c sug/3T oil/egg/t anise flavr; +c flour/t bkgpwdr. Roll log to fit bkgpan; pat down. 30m@375/190C. Slice~14; brwn+6m/side.
Quite a feat of condensed writing and getting the bare essentials into 140 characters. (You can see more here.)
The article says “entries on her personal Twitter stream are all written as senryu, a syllabically constrained poetic form like haiku. Here’s one: ‘As a Catholic schooled atheist, I’m sorry for an awful naught.’”
I didn’t know about senryu, and here’s what Columbia Encyclopedia says:
senryu (sĕnrēū’) , a Japanese poem structurally similar to the haiku but primarily concerned with human nature. It is usually humorous or satiric. Used loosely, the term means a poem similar to the haiku that does not meet the criteria for haiku.
and wikipedia says “Unlike haiku, senryū do not include a kireji (cutting word), and do not generally include a kigo, or season word.” Now I’m not sure what I write — since I like the cutting word part but usually don’t have a season or nature word in mine.
There’s a twitter stream of only haiku — here’s the first example I saw (which is probably really a senryu):
Bad 401k.
Hidden fees eat it away.
Zombie savings plan.
and a senryu stream. And finally haiku headlines, which condenses the news into 3 line snippets — probably the perfect way to keep up with the world for those of us who think we’re too busy…