Author: Droqen

Dear Jack, Mer, and Zeigfreid: What is letterclub? A brief history: Jack and I somehow ended up talking about his wonderful idea of haiku games. I forget exactly how it all happened, but I remember we discussed having a more public conversation, working towards some theoretical end goal (a book?), and eventually our group of… Continue reading Happy New Year! What is letterclub?

i can only focus on one thing at a time. i am an easily distracted person. specifically, i might say that it is quite easy for me to find myself deeply interested in things, to see what is interesting about a thing and to be affected by that quality. i can only focus on one… Continue reading seek that thing which is not a thing

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… Continue reading art as answer-space

[..] haiku does have a magical, marvelous form of its own, when it works – it just doesn’t fall out of almost nothing. And that is a good thing, a useful thing. — Jack, Appreciation as Practice A limerick’s satisfying nature can be maximized, and irreversibly completed; once frog is rhymed with snog it doesn’t… Continue reading coy form

In my last post I wrote that a platformer celebrates how its own medium is constantly in motion. Breaking. That was quite a stressful thought. I have been reading The One-Straw Revolution (notes here), and though I am cynical about the type of finger-pointing at “business is the problem with our world” it continues to… Continue reading Natural Platformers; or, simple art is sufficient

Or, okay, Zeigfreid, I will notice the medium Kigo (季語, “season word”) is a word or phrase associated with a particular season, used in traditional forms of Japanese poetry. Kigo are used in the collaborative linked-verse forms renga and renku, as well as in haiku, to indicate the season referred to in the stanza. They are valuable in providing economy of expression. Kigo – Wikipedia… Continue reading Platformer Kigo

The limerick is a constrained, minimal form of text constrained to be about a much simpler kind of beauty, so simple as to be, arguably, artless. 75 Funny Limericks, perhaps among the most artless web pages to exist, says of limericks that “The beauty of the limerick is that anyone can write them.” And from… Continue reading Aside: LIMERICK games

In looking up Basho’s Fueki-Ryuko (不易流行) online, I discovered an intriguing quote from ‘the teaching of Basho’, after which I named this post: Don’t follow ancient masters; seek what they tried to seek. Haiku As a World Phenomenon (by Susumu Takiguchi, retrieved from thehaikufoundation.org) (punctuation mine) When Jack asks “What is it that [..] playing… Continue reading seek what they tried to seek

I’m lucky enough to live with someone who reads Mandarin with some fluency. Together we were reading translations of 靜夜思, and I was struck by how much her attempts to literally translate it to me captured which these plain-English translations did not. Wikipedia presents this translation of the third and fourth lines of the four-line… Continue reading Interpreting 靜夜思, and the Timeless Way

Today I read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost through a few times with my partner, and discovered (with the help of a “poem guide”) that I had spent over half of my life so far supposing I understood it when in fact I had misunderstood it crucially in a common way, common to… Continue reading The Road Not Taken