I’ll get to the clerihew eventually (I promise) but first let me digress about the verse form known as the haiku. I’ve mentioned at least one haiku here before — in my post on Virginia Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway — and in that post I mentioned that the original Japanese haiku form has a large number of constraints that don’t translate well into languages like English. You can read the difference between the two forms here and here.
The simplest form of English-language haiku is this: a three-line poem whose first and third lines have FIVE syllables, and whose second line has SEVEN syllables. That’s it. Some people insist that there should be some kind of reference to a season in there. (My Wolfe/Hemingway haiku does that, for example.)
Recently, I stumbled across an Internet challenge to re-cast the lyrics of a favourite pop song as a haiku, the only constraints being that you can’t mention the name of the band OR the title of the song in the poem. Here are three haiku that I created, along with a link to the original songs. I also re-wrote the last haiku as a clerihew; you can see it at the bottom of the page.
| Pop Songs as Haiku | |
|---|---|
 Dancing at the beach Summertime with sea creatures
Beware crustaceans!
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh5J33KAaqw |
|
New Orleans brothel
Ruins many a poor boy.
God, I know! I’m one.
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-43lLKaqBQ |
|
Queen Elizabeth
Would be a pretty nice girl
Seen through wine goggles.
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh1hKt5kQ_4 |
Her Majesty, the Clerihew
Queen Elizabeth the Second…
Awesome girlfriend, you’d reckon.
But you’d need to drink a lot more wine
Before you cross THAT line.
Clerihews 