It wasn’t meant as a challenge but how else could it be taken? I realize that I like a challenge — tying myself into knots trying to realize some impossible structure. The act of making art, for me, is designing a puzzle for myself that nobody has ever solved before… and then solving it. Without any constraints, what am I solving? I may create something, but I haven’t triumphed over anything. With external constraints, I’m not making art… I’m merely solving an ordinary problem, perhaps in a way that someone else has already solved it before… Hmm.
I’ve been poking at a very good writing-process book called Bird by Bird which was recommended to me so long ago that I don’t remember who recommended it to me, and enjoying the thought that making art is always troublesome. It’s never comfortable.
I thought, ‘nu-uh, I’ll show you!’ But[..]But maybe that’s just it – haiku seeks to subvert expectation, while limericks seek to satisfy expectation. Ah, no –[..]
And I thought ‘sure, but can’t you outwit this requirement by[..]
~ Jack, https://letterclub.games/2022/07/10/i-once-met-a-man-from/
Would it be foolish of me to say now — after over a year of letterclubs! — that the purpose of exploring and discussing the definition of haiku games is to present ourselves with a beautifully impossible riddle to solve, whose answer-space we find fascinating, and whose (eventual) answer’s flaws we might pick apart for spare parts before building our next puzzle?
I really enjoyed what I read of Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language; it revealed to me so much about how endless and varied the process of art-making is. Each poet produced such different works under such strict constraints, each poem beautiful in its own way.
To appreciate is to care.
Anyway, I’d like to share this poem with you that I wrote because I thought I might challenge myself — not express myself or share a vulnerable moment, but set a challenge for myself and create something absurd. I suppose this is its own, different sort of vulnerability: an exposure of my arbitrary and abstract interests, masked in success.
Here is my unnamed poem with seven lines in it:
haiku before you or couplet two? No, I'll show this limerick true a sound that came through the snow muffled winter crow zig-zag flight rhythm like that of haiku.
There is something that I love about awake, and I think what I love about awake is that it does something impossible. It solves a problem nobody needed solved in the perfect way, but it makes itself the perfect solution in the same way that Kafka made his own precursors. The fact that it is both a pretty good acceptable solution, and the first and only solution which has ever been presented, makes us blind to every other possible solution. The unspoken problem becomes the problem which only the one work could solve. This hole was made for me.
P.S. Here are my earlier attempts at solving the problem:
haiku on tissue
limerick’s tune makes you swoon
cold haiku meter/cadence
haiku cold-blooded
couplet flooded, grieve the
flowers un-budded
haiku in cold blood // couplet’s hot crud
–but why cry? // limerick’s rhyme-flood
patternless haiku
couplet, at two
whoa! not so:
limerick, it’s true
I wonder about your thoughts on games for which the answer precedes the question? The games that I’m most proud of usually work out that way – as scraps of other games (mechanics, themes) which I build out into something new.
yes, sometimes the answer precedes the question 🙂 often the process, however it starts, can involve moving the goalposts so that the answer i have becomes the perfect answer to some new question i never thought i’d ask, one i maybe never could have asked. sometimes i don’t need to pursue a question at all, i find i can erect a lovely post where i stand and that’s enough. like, “look at this!”
art is weird.