I took a creative writing class last semester as part of my degree requirements. I’m working towards a Communications degree and I had burned out a little after so much technical writing and expository writing, so I wanted a fun break.
For our class assignments we wrote some poetry as well as short stories. The poems included haiku and sonnet work. While I found that writing sonnets is actually quite difficult, the haiku poems were intriguing to me. I’ve already posted one of my class haiku poems Winter earlier on Focal Plane.
I recently came across a contest on the ThinkGeek.com website for writing tech haiku. I decided to try my hand at writing some of them, and it turned out to be a good way to pass a few spare minutes at work. Instead of entering the contest, though, I am presenting the haiku here on Focal Plane. So now, for your amusement (I hope), I present my first tech haiku:
cooling towers soar
overclocked memory chips
render polygons
Although haiku are only three lines, they have a lot of rules to follow. The rule that is probably most well-known is that haiku must contain a certain number of syllables. The standard syllable count is 5-7-5. That’s five syllables for the first line, seven for the second, and five for the third. Tech Haiku #1 follows this standard count.
I have also found web references to other syllable counts which I found worked much better for some of my poems. I used a 3-5-3 count for the Winter haiku .
Well, my lunch break isn’t quite over, so I have a few minutes to spare to start another tech haiku. Here goes…
keyboard jams
Stay tuned.
