Carpe Diem #1808 LOVE acrostic challenge

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I hope you all have had a wonderful weekend. I had a busy weekend because I had to work. I am at work now, but have my coffee-break, so I have a little time to publish our new episode of our wonderful Haiku Kai.

This month our theme is LOVE and for today I have chosen a nice challenge for you. I love to challenge you to create a  so called "acrostic" dodoitsu. Let me first tell you what "acrostic" means:

An acrostic is a poem (or other form of writing) in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet.

An "acrostic" haiku example, acrostic: ONE:

Only eyes for you
Naked she lays down on the beach
Everlasting love

©️ Chèvrefeuille

sunny beach

But today I love to challenge you to create a Dodoitsu, that's a 4-line Japanese poetry form, let me tell you a little bit more about the Dodoitsu:

Dodoitsu is a form of Japanese poetry developed towards the end of the Edo Period. Often concerning love or work, and usually comical, Dodoitsu poems consist of four lines with the syllabic structure 7-7-7-5 and no rhyme or metre.

An example of a Dodoitsu:

One Night

one night I searched for a star
what I found was a full moon
now my every day is
full of shooting stars

© Ben Gieske (2012)

So the goal of this challenge is to create a Dodoitsu with the "acrostic" LOVE, the first characters of every line need to form that word.

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until February 16th at noon (CET). Have fun!

Carpe Diem #1564 Las Vegas ... come on gamble (out of the box)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

We are haiku-ing along the Pan American Highway, a 30.000 km long highway straight through the Americas from north to south. Yesterday we stopped at the City of Angels and today ... we will stop in ... say the opposite of Los Angeles, Las Vegas ... in the mddle of the desert were you can have a wonderful vacation and ... gambling.

Maybe you can remember our special feature "Out Of The Box" in which I challenged you all to create another kind of Japanese poetry or a different Far Eastern country like Korea for example.

Today I love to give you a "new" task. Think Out Of The Box with the themes of haiku. For example create a senryu, Cherita, Kyoka, or Sedoka. You also may "gamble" with the form by going free style. In other words ... "today it's your choice and not mine".

Las Vegas

The above image is a "still" of a time-lapse of the Las Vegas Strip. It's a nice image and I hope it will inspire you to think "Out Of The Box" ... well go for it!

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until Dacember 18th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode later on. For now ... have fun!

Carpe Diem's Road to Yesterday Celebrating Five Years of Japanese Poetry #1 Introduction "right from the heart"

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Let us take a trip back in time, back to September 2012, especially September 17th 2012. On that day I put Carpe Diem online with a kind of introductory, welcoming episode, for a new daily haiku meme inspired on a few other daily haiku memes in which I participated.

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September 17, 2012:

our first logo

This is my new weblog. I am Chèvrefeuille a Dutch haiku poet. I love to start a new daily meme for haiku poets. This weblog is the base for that haiku meme.
I hope to see a lot of visitors to enjoy the fun of writing haiku, a classical Japanese poem, on a theme given every day.

be inspired
write your little verses
right from the heart

I hope to see you all soon.

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As I look back to that time of preparations for the first ever prompt at Carpe Diem I smile. What nervous I was if it would work, if I could make it happen ... a daily haiku meme ... I was excited as I started, but also anxious ... because it had took me a lot of time and I just hoped it would work, it would become a success ... At that time I thought: "I just will give it a try, maybe it will last only for a few months, but than I have tried it". At that time I really hadn't thought that Carpe Diem would still exist several years later, yes of course I hoped it would be a success ... but there was at first the language. I had chosen to use English, but that's not my maiden language and at that time I didn't wrote a lot in English, but ... during the years I think my English has become better, at least good enough to write the blogs / episodes.

When the preparations were ready I finally could publish the first episode, Waterfall, that was on September 21st 2012, but the submissions started on October 1st 2012.

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September 21st, 2012:

For starters ... I will give the first prompt for this new daily haiku meme today. So you can think about it and be inspired.
Carpe Diem is a new daily haiku meme in which you can share your haiku. The haiku (or senryu) can be a classical or a non-classical one. It's all up to you. The first prompt for CARPE DIEM is waterfall. I think this is a great prompt to start with. Let flow your inspiration like a waterfall and share your haiku with us.

waterfall of colors
leaves whirl through the street -
departing summer

© Chèvrefeuille

Source: whirling leaves

Please be so kind to share a thought in the comment form. Do you have an idea for a new prompt? Well ... share it with us. I look forward to your contributions for this new haiku meme. And I hope it will be a success. I will try this to the end of the year ... so I hope that I can continue this haiku meme in January 2013.

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And so it started ... Carpe Diem, a daily haiku-meme. Back than the most episodes were short, mostly because of the fact that my English wasn't good enough, but also because of me being nervous if this project would succeed.
Well ... next month we will celebrating our fifth anniversary ... and I really hadn't thought that Carpe Diem, nowadays called Carpe Diem Haiku Kai, would be still alive and kicking. CDHK has grown, we are a real family of haiku loving poets, and there are more parts of CDHK and of course there was the wonderful cooperation with Jane Reichhold. She inspired me to go on and was also the one who gave me the inspiration, the idea, to create exclusive CDHK e-books.

Five years after the start of Carpe Diem ... a good reason to celebrate and I have to thank you all, my dear Haijin, visitors and travelers ... you all are my inspiration, my source, my engine to go on with Carpe Diem Haiku Kai.

like a family
you my dear friends I embrace -
unconditional love
shared by a bunch of haiku poets
from all over the world

© Chèvrefeuille

I am looking forward to our fifth anniversary next month and I hope you all do too, because we make Carpe Diem Haiku Kai together.

Have a great weekend.

Namasté,

Chèvrefeuille, your host

Chèvrefeuille, your host

Carpe Diem Special #164 Lolly's 6th "another anchor thread"

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I am a little bit sad, but I am also happy ... why? Well this is our last episode of Carpe Diem Haiku Kai's August 2015. We made a wonderful trip over The Nile and we had (including this CD-Special) six (6) wonderful CD-Specials in which I shared haiku and tanka written by Laura Williams (a.k.a. Lolly of Lovely Things) the winner of our second kukai "summertime".
Lolly had the privilege to be the central person of 6 CD-Specials, because of the length of this month. So for this last CD-Special of August I asked Laura which of her own written/composed haiku or tanka she would like to be the theme for this CD-Special.
Lolly is a very gifted haiku poetess and several of her haiku and tanka were published, of course not only in her e-book which I created for and with her. She emailed me a wonderful tanka and this is why she chose this tanka in particular to share here in her last CD-Special.

sifting through
the personal effects
of a spider's web
an autumn wind loosens
another anchor thread

© Laura Williams (a.k.a. Lolly)

published:

American Tanka; Issue #13

Spider web © Chèvrefeuille

[...] "This tanka was inspired by a Carpe Diem prompt "spider web." I like its dark, gothic mood and the alliteration in the last two lines. It definitely suggests death and grief as we all have to go through a loved one's personal items when they pass. I remember doing so for my mother-in-law as well as my mother and both grandmothers. The last two lines really bring the thought home. After the death of a parent it seems one's "anchor"  or security or a part of what made us feel secure is loosened or even gone.

It's a sad tanka, but I love for it because it expresses what I often feel when I think of all the women in my family that have passed away" [...]

I think Lolly says it in a beautiful way and I can see the beauty of this tanka notwithstanding the sad mood in which it is written. Thank you Lolly for sharing this beautiful tanka with us and all the other beautiful poems you have written and shared here. I am honored that I had the opportunity to bring your poetry here in the CD-Specials of August 2015.

Of course there is the "challenge" to write an all new haiku or tanka inspired on this beauty I have, however, chosen to write/compose an all new dodoitsu, as we learned about recently. It's another nice short Japanese poetry form and I love to try this form more often. So here is my response on this beautiful tanka by Lolly.

frail crystalline beauty at sunrise
hidden between bare branches
a blue butterfly struggles for life
spider waits patiently

© Chèvrefeuille

Credits: Cobweb

Well ... this is it, this was our last episode of August 2015. We are going on with a new adventure between the stars ... A Space Odyssey ... 
This CD Special is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until September 2nd at noon (CET). I will (try to) publish our new episode, the first of September 2015, Andromeda, later on. For now ... have fun!

 

Carpe Diem Tokubetsudesu #58 Dodoitsu

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Recently we decided, as a family of haiku poets, to open CDHK for other Japanese poetry forms. And to "warm-up" I have another Tokubetsudesu episode for you. This week I will tell you something more about a, not so well known, Japanese poetry form, dodoitsu.

Dodoitsu is a form of Japanese poetry developed towards the end of the Edo Period. Often concerning love or work, and usually comical, Dodoitsu poems consist of four lines with the syllabic structure 7-7-7-5 and no rhyme or metre.

One Night

one night I searched for a star
what I found was a full moon
now my every day is
full of shooting stars

© Ben Gieske (2012)

Credits: Shooting Stars

And this is what Jane Reichhold tells us about dodoitsu:

Recently there has been some interest in a minor Japanese genre called the "dodoitsu" that has a small following among English writers. It was a traditional form for popular and folk songs and the name ("quickly city to city") appears to refer to the speed with which such new songs spread. In Japanese, the "dodoitsu" contains twenty-six sound units (onji) composed of four phrases in 7-7-7-5 sound units. Its hard to find examples of "dodoitsu" among literature because most of these songs, sung in the accompaniment of the shamisen (a banjo-like instrument with three strings), relied on the oral tradition and are therefore lost to us. Since the subject matter was either love or humor as viewed by inhabitants of the pleasure quarters, the existing works have attracted very little attention in English.

The above "dodoitsu" however is a nice example. As I sought the Internet I ran into a recently written "dodoitsu" which I love to share here:

Love Like Raindrops

Love, like raindrops falling down
Embraced the dried barren earth
Each drop a soothing caress
That softens... and wins.

© CynthiaBuhain-Baello (2015)

I think this a nice poetry form which (maybe) needs more attention, because it's fun to compose them and it helps to make you maore creative and that will also have its influence on your haiku, tanka or other Japanese poetry forms.

Honeysuckle

Of course I had to try it myself and this is what it has become:

her shadow on the white wall
her nude silhouette arouses me
I smell her fragile perfume
Honeysuckle blooms

© Chèvrefeuille

Wow ... what a nice dodoitsu (with a twist) I know, I know ... that sounds immodest, but I am really proud on this very first dodoitsu ever composed by me. I think this poetry form can become another addiction of mine ...

I hope you all like this episode and this "new" poetry form, dodoitsu, and I hope to read your dodoitsu soon. Have fun!

This Tokubetsudesu episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and it will remain open until August 28th at noon (CET). I will (try to) post our next episode, White Nile, later on. For now ... have fun!