Frabjous Times

Q

Four lines?

A

It’s a brick, a verse form I invented a few years ago. It was originally a four-line scifaiku poem consisting of one line of two syllables, one of four syllables, two of three syllables, in any order. I have further imposed the restriction that each line consist of a single word.

Q

But otherwise like any other scifaiku?

A

Well, it is usually pretty hard to figure out where the kireiji or “cutting word” goes so sometimes it gets left out. But it should have a science-fictional element in it, as here with the notion of swimming technology. I always like it when I can write about something that isn’t automatically about ships flying in outer space.

Q

Why not just write the poem as a regular scifaiku, which has (in your scheme) the same number of syllables anyway? Is it just the challenge of making a four-word poem?

A

I think of it as more of an esthetic difference. The compactness of the lines without any whitespace makes the poem look like a monolith on the page, or in this case, with the 4-3-3-2 syllable count, an inverted teardrop shape. It is can also come across as kind of like a telegram from the future, or an alien inscription. But the name “brick” is a little bit of wordplay taken from virology; it is what they call the smallpox virion.

Q

A lethal dose of scifaiku.

A

You’ve got that right.

Q

Yeah, but I think the second line is cheating. It should be self-propelled with a hyphen.

A

True, there I am doing some violence to the language. Or to typography. But I really wanted a single word that was three-syllable synonym for automotive there, without the little break in the middle that the hyphen would cause. I console myself that the S sound in that line and the final line counts for something.

Q

You could have put in “spluttering” instead.

A

Hmm.

Q

I don’t know for sure whether I understand that fourth line “swimming,” anyway.

A

The poem could be seen as describing either large-scale devices swimming through fluid, vehicles like submarines perhaps, or else it could be talking about microscopic things in a drop of water possibly. The first line sets up the allusion to that movie Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines from the 1960’s, as if one could imagine some kind of race between competitors in strange contraptions in a watery or liquid methane environment instead.

Q

I could imagine that would make a pretty picture.

A

You’re right: this is a scifaiku which really cries out to be illustrated haiga-style. Maybe I might get around to that someday, maybe even with the “spluttering” line of yours.

The fourth in a series of discussions on poetry.

Only the racquet arm was allowed to move; otherwise the two participants were required to stand unmoving and show no sign of anxiety, fear, or trepidation. To do otherwise in the Mensur was looked down upon as unseemly, and a display of uncontrolled anxiety could even be deigned as sufficient cause to stop the contest.

Q

You don’t need to explain horrorku to me. It’s pretty obvious that if one can accept science fiction-themed poetry, why not horror-themed in the same form. But what is this “yet another” thing?

A

That’s just me getting snarky about cliché. I’ve done others in this vein before, criticizing the kind of writing which does not take enough risks by avoiding the obvious path. If you read enough verse with vampires and werewolves, blood and carnage and fear, monsters and midnights and other low-hanging horrible fruit in them, you want to see something that has none of those elements in them to see if it can be done.

Q

Sounds pretty dismal.

A

Well it would not be horrorku if it weren’t dismal, would it? Think of the poor dark poetry editors who have to read things like this day in and day out:

Bloody vampire

a bloody vampire

waiting by the dark graveyard,

a bat flies over

(Which I just made up.) To me, even though that has all the elements of a horrorku, the way it just kind of throws them out there makes it less interesting than it could be.

Q

You mean it just sort of tells you about the subject instead of showing it in any kind of novel way.

A

Take a look at this list:

• It is a poem.
• It is a poem limited in length, in English that limit being somewhere between 15 and 20 syllables.
• It presents images rather than ideas.
• It is intuitive rather than intellective.
• It uses observation of nature and the seasons as a basis for that intuition.
• Its observations are specific rather than general.

That was written about English-language haiku, not any of these speculative fiction derivatives (thus the item about nature and the seasons which would not apply to scifaiku or horroku), but the esthetic point being made is still useful to ponder. I think the bat poem has problems with the part about being intuitive, more so than the wooden stake poem, which starts out open-ended and ends before the reader really knows what went on.

Q

Oh, so you’re saying that the original poem wasn’t supposed to be using cliché after all, but is actually an anti-cliché statement?

A

You didn’t get that? Yes, the idea is to write a horrorku (or whatever) that takes a hackneyed subject but which itself tries to put a new spin on things. There’s enough trite verse out there that there seems to be no real point to add to the collection.

Q

You mean that

Yet Another Mummy Horrorku

on my way to work

I passed a mummy - he was

a very strange sight

isn’t worthy of posting to the Scifaiku list?

A

Keep working on that, there.

The third in a projected series of discussions on poetry.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

“I imagine the goddess of love as having descended from Mount Olympus for the sake of some mortal man. And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her. And so I shall call the picture: Venus in Furs.” — Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Unaligned chromosomes persist in HURP-depleted metaphase cells.

Normally dance choreographies never change once they are created. But Richard enjoys watching dances naturally evolve so he observed the way dancers were inclined to dance Metamora.

Q

I get it, this scifaiku something about biology, right?

A

Molecular biology, yes. But without the footnotes it is nothing more than a plain old senryu.

Q

What’s that?

A

Senryū. They’re the first cousin to haiku, with different rules governing subject matter and form. My point is that the verse itself does not actually carry the science fictional content in its words, the analog to the so-called season word in haiku.

Q

So is that a bad thing?

A

If you don’t like it, it’s bad, otherwise it passes. I prefer to regard the added information (the title and the footnotes) as part of the poetic experience so I think it’s okay. After all, scifaiku (and fantasyku and horrorku) have to set up a lot more backstory generally than mainstream non-genre poetry, so if that has to slop out into the title and the footnotes, so be it. Maybe it is cheating, but I personally like the value added by the extra stuff.

Q

Still, it seems as if you can get the science or science fiction content into the poem by shorthand or something, without sticking it in the title (which I know that real haiku don’t have), that’s got to be better.

A

I won’t disagree with that. But tell me, did you at least get the pun in this one?

Q

(blank look)?

A

Look up cell on Wikipedia and see what it has to say about the word’s etymology, when you get a chance. It’s a tiny little joke of mine.

The second in a projected series of discussions on poetry.