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Scottish author Jim Murdoch discusses writing, his own and other authors, and muses at length about his fascination with the perversity of language. Veering from the nostalgic to the acerbic his blog will amuse anyone with a love of language.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'haiku'
Guest Post: Haiku and its related forms: an introductory essay
I've written a couple of posts about short forms of Japanese poetry (most recently Why I hate haiku) but I've always been acutely aware that I've been out of my depth. To that end a while back I asked my very knowledgeable friend Art Durkee to see i...
Why I hate haiku
Learn the rules; and then forget them. - Basho Allen Ginsberg didn't write haiku. Like many he recognised that the seventeen characters of this Japanese form do not automatically correspond to seventeen syllables of English or f...
Egocentrifugal poetry
When we understand, we are at the centre of the circle, and there we sit while Yes and No chase each other around the circumference (Chuang-tzu.)In an article in the New York Times, David Orr recounts the following anecdote which got me thinking:In a...
Less is more or less (part two)
(If you've missed it, here's Part One)One-line haikuSince the 1960s, some poets in the English-language haiku community have experimented with so-called "one-line haiku". The first such one-liner to receive serious recognition was Michael Segers's pi...
Less is more or less (part one)
“Less is possible.” Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture In Japan reductionism and miniaturisation have long been the social norm and it is a challenge to cram a lot into a tiny space. I remember when I had my ZX...
