Haiku #1 and #2

I must admit that aside from my otherwise aesthetic feelings towards the format particularly, poetry holds a certain cathartic value for me. Some feelings, some thoughts are so deeply held it seems they are only fully recognized in poetic forms.

At some point, I suppose, I’ll have to reckon with my own little contradictions—a man who strives after the rigorous logic of mathematics as the key to life simultaneously giving voice and comfort to his deepest passions in poetry, not exactly the most logical or deterministic form of expression. Perhaps if I wrote in Lojban . . .

Regardless, here are number 1 and 2, in that order:

A vibrant blossom.
softly its gentle beauty fades,
withering to dust.

Hope of love and joy,
once cast aside by fearful hearts,
crumbles into dust.

Another interesting feature of haiku and poetry generally is the need to encode information though subtext, metaphor, and other lingual constructs in order to convey the complete message. For instance, while neither of the above are per say particularly cryptic, unless one knows me and my life at time of writing (within a month of this post), what's really being spoken to will remain unclear. Presuming the analogy to cryptography can be sufficiently fleshed out, one interesting information theoretic question might be this: Given a particular amount of poetry, how much total information could be unambiguously conveyed? The idea certainly lends a new twist to "literary analysis".

Haiku

I've decided one thing to do before I die is learn and practice the art of Haiku.

Why Haiku? Three reasons. Those are the challenge, the experience, and the convenience.

As self expression goes, a single thought into 17 syllables is fairly trivial, craming it into exactly 17 is non-trivial, and doing it well is very challenging. Mix with my own semi-perfectionist nature, and this gets interesting fast. Example: "W.T.F" is a complete thought, but how would you express the same thing in 17 syllables?

I can't explain it, but there's something about the experience of Haiku which is simply amazing from start to finish. The setup, the suspense, the contrast . . . it's just awesome to finally look at even a decent haiku (much less a good one) and simply enjoy the way it works on me.

Third, poetry takes lots of itterations before it's anywhere near good. Haiku's being as short as they are, the cyclic rate for a complete set of revisions is high (even if the number of revisions is longer). This is more compatible with my lifestyle as I much more frequently have 15 minutes (which can be enough to ponder a single word choice) here and there than the hours it would take to consider the implications of a single work or comma on a larger poem.