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 Extra September 28th 2018, pre-announcement October 2018

credits

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

It's almost October and that means ... time to celebate as we do every year in October, the month in which I started CDHK back in 2012. This year we will celebrate our 6th anniversary and I hope it will be a wonderful month full of celbrations. However this year I hadn't enough time to invite celebs from the poetry and musical world to join in our celebrations. So our upcoming anniversary I will try to create all episodes to celebrate our 6th anniversary.

So I cannot tell you what we are going to do, but of course I have already created a new logo for our celebration month. That logo I have published already at the right side of our Kai, but I will give it here again.

As you can see this logo shows you Mount Fuji, the Holy Mountain of Japan, surrounded by the beautiful colored leaves of the Japanese Maple. Of course no need to tell you why I have chosen this logo for our 6th anniversary, but I will tell you why this choice ...

Mount Fuji is the Holy Mountain of Japan and it's celebrated in many haiku and tanka for example this one by Basho:

Mount Fuji
like the tea-grinding mill
carried by the lice . . .

© Basho (age 33)

Mount Fuji in autumn

Or this one written by Yozakura, the Unknown haiku poet and apprentice of Basho:

through cherry blossoms
at the end of the day -
snow on Mount Fuji

© Yozakura

And that's not all what I can tell about my choice. The Japanese Maple is one of the most beautiful trees and if its leaves are coloring than the Japanese know that it's really autumn. Maybe you are familiair with the thought that autumn is the most beautiful season to write haiku (and tanka) about, not only for its colors, or feeling of departing, but also because the moon is on her brightest in autumn according to the Japanese.

So this logo points in many facets towards haiku, the first idea fromwhich CDHK evolved to what it has become now ... a warmhearted family of poets that love the beauty of Japanese poetry.

Next month we will celebrate our sixth anniversary and I hope you all will be part of it.

Hope to see you all next month as we will celebrate our 6th anniversary. Come on ... be part of it. Invite your friends to participate in this celebration.

Namasté,

Chèvrefeuille, your host.

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 Ghost Writer #19, Georgia on kyoka

!! I am posting this new GW-episode earlier, because I am in the nightshift. So you have to be a bit more patient, because it's open tonight for your submissions. !!

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Another week has gone by and it's already time for a new Ghost Writer post. This week Georgia of Bastet's Waka Library is our Ghost Writer and she has a wonderful post written about the kyoka. Kyoka is similar with senryu, but it follows the rules of the Tanka. Kyoka is one of the lost forms of Japanese poetry. I think it''s a gorgeous post and it will learn us something new.
Georgia ... thank you for this wonderful post. have fun!

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First of all I’d like to thank Chèvrefeuille for this opportunity to write about the kyoka genre of Japanese Poetry. Though far from an expert, the research has been interesting under many aspects.

Kyoka, though it had been around for a long time in the Japanese written poetry it had it’s heyday only in the last quarter of the 18^th century.  Poetry had been reserved to the aristocratic samurai class and usually written in Chinese. Waka (Japanese Poetry) began to weave it’s way into the merchant class allowing them to create and enjoy poetry even if they didn’t have the extensive literary experience and training of the samurai, they could follow the metric rules and create acceptable verse.  Kyoka ("playful verses" 狂歌) became very popular at the time and was written by ukiyo-e ( "pictures of the floating world") (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-e) artists, commoners and of course samurai, though under pen-names.

The rules of kyoka are rather simple:

1.    The syllable structure is 5-7-5-7-7.

2. It divides in two, the 5-7-5 part is called kami-no-ku ("upper phrase"), and the 7-7 part is called shimo-no-ku ("lower phrase").
3. There is a subtle turn, often unexpected in the middle of the poem, usually after line two or three.
4. It has a syllable of thirty one (or fewer syllables).
5. It is humorous verse or a parody of a famous waka (tanka).
6. May contain internal rhyme but should avoid end rhyme.
7. Try to punctuate lightly, though some publishers prefer no punctuation.

There are three styles of kyoka:

1.    The Kokin style which tries to use all the rules of waka, but ends up being comical.

2.    The Tenmei style (born from a famous aristocratic poet, Ôta Nampo (1749-1823) who wrote under the pseudonym of  Yomo No Akira) which tries to impart an artistic flare to the poem whilst using colloquial language and writing about every day subjects and emotions.

3.    The third form is Honka-dori which takes an existing waka and parodies it. This latter form was more favored by the upper classes who could enjoy the subtleties of the parodies which the lower classes could not.

Yoshiwara no

Yomise o haru no

Yugure wa
iriai no kane ni

Hana ya sakuran

In Yoshiwara
the women are showing their wares

This evening –

Blossoms glowing in the echoes
of vesper bells

© Yomo No Akara (Translated by Steven Carter)

Here, Akira is talking about the ladies of the ukiyo-e plying their wares in the red light district.

It’s very difficult to find translations of the Japanese kyoka due to the ambiguity of the language, mundane language, puns and word associations. Let me try my hand:

in Busch Stadium
the pitcher smiled then let loose
smashing the batter's arm
he sure balled up that inning
two others’d been based on balls*

© G.s.k. ‘14

*base on balls - if the pitcher throws four balls, the hitter is awarded a free "walk" to first base.

For the most part, senryu has supplanted kyoka although there are several kyoka writers in English.  The form has become practically extinct.

For some modern English examples:  http://simplyhaiku.com/SHv7n2/reviews/Streetlights.html

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What a wonderful post ... maybe there is someone in our haiku-family who will be caught by kyoka. It's not really my ''cup of tea'', but it is great to read a post about this extinct poetry form. So I hope this GW-post will inspire you to write kyoka ... and maybe you are caught by it ...

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until August 1st at noon (CET). I will try to post our last episode of this wonderful CDHK month, the 6th haiku by Matsuo Basho, later on. For now ... have fun!

Carpe Diem's Freestyle #4

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

To give you all the space to share your haiku, senryu, tanka, kyoka and all other Japanese kinds of poetry I have launched a little while ago the Carpe Diem's Freestyle feature. I will try to publish a Freestyle episode once a month.

Freestyle is what it is ... just share your poetry without a given prompt, maybe you have read a wonderful haiku, or did you write an awesome haiku but it didn't suit to the prompts given. Then this is the place to share that poetry with Carpe Diem. Feel free to share your poetry and enjoy the publishing here at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai.

For this episode of "Free-style" I love to share a "Troiku" I have used one of my favorite haiku written by my Master Basho:

the pumpkins look cool
flecked with mud
from the morning dew

1: the pumpkins look cool
    almost humanlike -
    all souls night

2: flecked with mud
    the white chrysanthemums
    after the storm

3: from the morning dew
    Monarch butterfly drinks to life -

    sound of funeral bells

Awesome! What a nice Troiku, even better then I thought. After reading it twice aloud I felt that there is a connection between all three haiku destilled from the haiku by Basho.

Monarch Butterfly

Well I hope you liked it and I love to invite you all to share your own Freestyle here with us. This Freestyle-episode will stay on 'till November 15th 11.59 AM (CET) and I will try to publish that same day the new episode of Freestyle.

Carpe Diem Imagination #3, city park

Dear haijin, visitors and travelers,

I have a new episode of Carpe Diem Imagination for you today. For those who are new here I will explain the goal of this Carpe Diem Imagination again. I give you a picture, photo or something for your inspiration. In other words 'paint with words' what's the picture does with you, means to you and so on. Today I have a wonderful photo for you for your inspiration.

silence  ...
in the middle of town
the old pond


Well ... I hope to read wonderfully composed haiku inspired on this photo. Let your imagination flow and share yours with us all here on Carpe Diem, a community for haijin.


This episode of Carpe Diem Imagination will stay on 'till March 14th 11.59 AM (CET).