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Matt Madden

comics, education, translation, oubapo

iPhonic Haiku

May 25, 2016 by matt 4 Comments

While studying haiku for a series of workshops about comics and poetry I found myself starting to unconsciously look everywhere for 5- and 7-syllable phrases. I found one in the most banal of places: it turns out that the factory preset signature when you use the Mail app on an iphone—the ubiquitous “Sent from my iPhone”—contains exactly five syllables. It seemed to me a haiku series was in order.


By this remote lake
The fireflies blinking brightly.
Sent from my iPhone

fregeneuil

 

I’m in a café
Wifi pass: chrysanthemum
Sent from my iPhone

 

Notification:
New Like on Tumblr. A pre-
Sent from my iPhone.

 

Signal here is crap.
Let me know if you get this.
Sent from my iPhone

 

Sun shines through rain clouds,
Walk down to the river, ab-
Sent from my iPhone


Here’s a bonus haiku from my longtime correspondent and booster Stephen Saperstein Frug who offered this commentary:

I’m a fan of Matt
Madden’s haikus, which all end:
Sent from my iPhone.

In another vein, teacher and cartoonist Kevin McCloskey offered this  “Facebook limerick:”

Matt Madden is in a cafe,
Drinking a floral latte,
He should be drawing,
As that’s never boring,
But I waste time the same way.

[Update as of May 30:] I sent this blog post to my friends in Oulipo and Paul Fournel sent this response which he has graciously allowed me to share :

Voilà qui est beau,
You would think it’s a Bâ Sho
Sent from your iPhone.

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Filed Under: Blog, Writing Tagged With: constraints, poetry, writing

Comments

  1. Marco Fulvio Barozzi says

    May 31, 2016 at 10:01 AM

    Thousands daffodils:
    A vision from the long lake
    Sent from my iPhone.

    Reply
  2. David Boyer says

    June 1, 2016 at 11:01 AM

    Interesting post. I love the series, but I did want to say that most contemporary haiku poets don’t bother with the 5-7-5 syllable count. We keep it short, but no one I know counts syllables like his anymore.

    Reply
    • matt says

      June 1, 2016 at 12:28 PM

      Thanks David and yes I realize that contemporary poets aren’t much concerned with counting syllables and the like. But if you look around my site you’ll see that rules (and how to bend them in interesting ways) are where I get a lot of my creative juice.

      Reply
      • David Boyer says

        June 1, 2016 at 12:46 PM

        Fair enough. It’s just one of those all-too-common misconceptions about haiku that gets my hackles up!!

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