What is Science Fiction Tanka?

One of the hats I wear, when I’m not volunteering as a naturalist or pondering science, is as a poet. I started seriously writing short-form poetry in 2009, after the birth of my daughter. Science fiction haiku, known as scifaiku, is one of my favorite means of expression, and led me to a new project. (The information below is largely adapted from my poetry blog,
Stars in My Sugar Bowl):

Recently, I teamed up with my friend Susan Burch and co-edited a special feature at Atlas Poetica on science fiction tanka. Simply put, science fiction tanka is a cross between tanka and science fiction. In other words, tanka with science fiction themes.

I tend to think of tanka as expanded haiku, but they are really more of the opposite, since - historically speaking - haiku is an abridged form of tanka. The five-lined tanka has a rich history in Japan, and these short little poems were primarily sung as love notes at one time. 

While you can find isolated science fiction tanka published here and there, there isn’t much written to define exactly what it is. We explored the boundaries of the form as we sifted through the submissions. 

Strong science fiction tanka are well-crafted tanka with a clear voice and rich imagery that immerse you in an alien world. Poems about watching science fiction or pondering the idea of alien life didn’t grab us as much as poems written from a truly alien perspective. Yet, there has to be something about the poem for the reader to relate and adhere to. I think the mix between the truly bizarre alien experience and yet somehow familiar marks a good science fiction tanka in much the same way as the aha! moment - the reader’s reaction of wow, I didn’t expect the poem to do that but it’s exactly right - does for haiku.

I’ve heard that reading a good haiku sampler should be akin to trying a box of chocolates - lots of variety, a few favorites, but nothing tastes bad. I think we’ve achieved that with 25 Science Fiction Tanka and Kyoka, which can be viewed here. (If you can’t get the link to work, try standard view.)

At Twilight

even in this light

the grove of barren oaks

retains some magic

[Full disclosure: Are those oaks in my photo? I have not keyed them out yet, so I'm not sure. I wrote this poem a while back - and when I took this picture the other night, it was the first description to pop into my head.]

The Periodic Table of Haiku

I found something so strange and wonderful online today that I had to share it with you. The University of Minnesota at Rochester has put together a Periodic Table of Haiku. Most elements have a poem written about them and their properties. According to the website, this project was a 2009 venture of UMR's Center for Learning Innovation and seeks to "integrate chemistry and creative writing." The poems were written by students and faculty, and some of the haiku are quite good. Most poems reflect on the physical properties of the elements and describe how they react chemically.

I'm always interested in the many ways that people manage to combine science and the arts, and this project is a great example. Unfortunately, not all of the elements have been selected for poetry. So, I thought I'd take a stab at silicon & aluminum, two of the neglected elements. The project requires the haiku to have a 5-7-5 syllabic structure - so I did too - but modern haiku doesn't have to follow that format.

Silicon (Si)
master conductor:
your pure electronic grades
drive the world wide web


Aluminum (Al) in your reflection
I see pots and pans, cars, trucks ...
where are the people?


Photo credit: (top) Jannes Pockele, (bottom) Chris Harrison, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0

Why Toddlers Are Fun

Morning fog.

I tell the toddler
the cloud fell down.

We need, she says,
to tape it up.

Photo credit: comedy_nose, via flickr // CC BY 2.0

Take the Hexapod Haiku Challenge!

Do you like writing poems about insects? The North Carolina State University Insect Museum wants to hear them!

The Hexapod Haiku Challenge runs through March 20. The contest judges are looking for short poems that celebrate insect life:

"We would love to have haiku, senryū, haiga, and pseudohaiku that feature any familiar arthropod associated with the field of entomology ..."

Visit the contest website for more details. There's a special category for poets under the age of 13. I especially enjoyed looking at this poem about a bee from an eight-year-old runner-up in last year's contest.

Good luck!

Photo credit: carol2chat, via flickr // CC BY 2.0

Summer Smiles

beneath the gnarled oak
a boy is sprawled, exhausted
successful tree climb

Image credit: Little Brother (watercolor on looseleaf)
Poem: Mama Joules
Subject of poem: Kerm, who met his summer goal of climbing a tree!

Enter the Kids Count for Earthday Haiku Contest!

What does Earth Day mean to you? Can you write a poem about it? If so, you could win a prize and your writing might be published in Sketchbook, a Journal for Eastern and Western Short Forms.

The international Kids Count for Earthday Haiku Contest 2010 is looking for haiku poetry (17 syllables or less) written by children and young adults ages 7 - 20 years. Poems must be written by individuals; each person can only enter once. There is no fee to enter. The theme of this year's contest is "What Earth Day means to you".

According to the Kids Count for Earthday website,

"The contest is designed to combine the love of earth with the sheer simple fun of writing Japanese haiku in English!"

The deadline for this haiku contest is May 23rd (postmark of May 22nd). For more details about where to send your entry and what information to include, please visit Kids Count for Earthday 5-7-5 Haiku Contest 2010.

Good luck!

[Update 10/9/10: Read the winning entries here!]

The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, & Evolution

I received a happy email today from Chris Lynch, the editor at Tangled Bank Press, which largely said this:

The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, & Evolution has launched!

The anthology, which marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, features over 100,000 words of speculative fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays about evolution. An international line-up of nearly 50 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, and Carlos Hernandez. (And me!)

The Tangled Bank is now available for download as a PDF (cost is US$4.99). Check out "Darwin's Daughter" by Christopher Green, a free short story from the anthology.

For more information, please visit the Tangled Bank Press, drop by Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Happy Darwin Day, everyone!

Best of 2009 at Mama Joules

I've been reading a lot of "best of ..." lists for 2009 lately, so I thought I'd recap this year at Mama Joules. See what you think of these posts from 2009:


Best Ideas for Gardeners:

Grow a Science Garden

Heinz Wholesome Memories Intergenerational Garden Award

Take the Lead Out of Gardening

Best Ideas for Mixing Art & Science:

Join the Fun at One Million Giraffes

Make-A-Flake

National Gallery of Art's Lending Library

Neuroscience for Kids (includes coloring pages)

Reuse Those Old Crayons!

Best Interview:

Meet a Beekeeper!

The Intelligence of Bees: Meet a Beekeeper! Part 2

Colony Collapse Disorder: Meet a Beekeeper! Part 3

Learning to Keep Bees: Meet a Beekeeper! Part 4

Best Invention:

Flying Car

Best Opportunities for Citizen Scientists:

Ancient Tree Hunt

FrogWatch USA™

North American Moths Backyard Inventory

Project BudBurst

Best Posts About Animals:

Cricket Ears are Amazing

Giant Frog Gets New Friend - Titanoboa

Venom & Vomit: Meet the Tarantula

Best Posts About Science Poetry:

Meet Scifaiku

Science Poem: Intrasolar Interloper

The Fibonacci Poem

Best Use of LEGO®s:

Kerm's Mars Rover

Little Brother's Mars Rover

Best Post of the Year

What is Global Warming?

Have a safe and wonderful New Year! Be sure to check out these fun ways to add science to 2010!

Photo credit: Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic,
through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license via Flickr.

The view from my front yard ...

delicate snowflakes
dancing down the darkened path --
winter's arrival

Photo credit: Mama Joules

American Tarantula Society's poetry contest for kids

Are you under the age of 18, living in the US or Canada? Do you like to write poetry about spiders and other creepy crawlies? Then I've got a contest for you!

I recently spoke with Wade Harrell, President of the American Tarantula Society, via email. He gave me permission to repost this information about ATS' current poetry contest for kids. This information comes from the ATS Discussion Board, a great resource for any tarantula enthusiast.

If you plan to enter, don't delay! The deadline for entries is December 10, 2009. If you have any questions about the contest, please direct them to Payton MacDonald (contact information below).

Good luck!

The ATS has received a generous donation to support more kids' contests ... The first contest is for original poetry. We seek two poems per entry, one a haiku and the other in a form of the applicant's choice. The content of the poems must relate to tarantulas, scorpions, and arachnids in general.

The winning entries will be chosen by a committee. The prizes are as follows:

First Place: A Nintendo Wii or Wii games
Second Place: A free year subscription to the ATS Forum
Third Place: A tarantula T-shirt

Each participant must be under 18 years of age (living in the US or Canada). Winners of an ATS contest in the last six months are ineligible. Multiple members of the same family may enter the contest. Please send submissions to the Kids’ Section editor via email if possible. Regular mail is also acceptable. Submissions must arrive by December 10, 2009.

Please submit entries to Children's Editor Payton MacDonald:
payton [dot] macdonald [at] gmail [dot] com

(replace the "dots" and "at" with the appropriate symbols)

Photo credit: Alvaro Guzman, through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License via Flickr.

OT: Where I've been lately ...

If you're a regular reader of this blog (thank you!), you've probably been wondering what Itinerant Cryptographer and I have been doing these past few months, since we haven't been posting as often. In part, we are still adjusting to life with our newest little scientist-in-training. But the other reason is that I've been drawn back to writing poetry. (You may have noticed, since posts on Fibonacci Sequence poetry, scifaiku, and an ode to Pluto have crept into this blog.)

So, I am happy to share that my poetry was recently published at Scifaikuest and AlienSkin Magazine. I also have a short (140 characters short!) piece up at the Twitterzine Nanoism. For my writing friends, my non-fiction article about Twitter markets appeared in FundsforWriters.

Have a good week-end, everyone!

Cicadas are LOUD!

the lone cicada
heralds summer's end
with blaring alarm

Wow! Tonight we saw a cicada up close on a tree trunk and boy, are they ever BIG! And LOUD! I had no idea. I've heard the sound of cicadas since I was a kid, and I have always thought the woods were teeming with them. Now, I realize that a single cicada can have a VERY LOUD song. And yes, this one sounded just like a car alarm. (However, it wasn't quite as big as this lovely sculpture of a cicada in Australia. It just sounded like it.)


Photo credit: Cyron Ray Macey through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The Fibonacci poem

If you like writing scifaiku, check out the newest kid on the block, the Fibonacci poem! Based on the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical relationship that commonly appears in nature, the Fibonacci poem consists of 20 syllables in six lines. The six lines have 1,1,2,3,5,and 8 syllables.

Do you see the pattern? If you assume a "0" at the beginning of this sequence for 0,1,1,2,3,5,8 ... then the sum of each number in the sequence is obtained by adding the two numbers preceding it: 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, and so on. In mathematics, the Fibonacci sequence can go on endlessly. In poetry, though, lines longer than eight syllables are hard to manage.

"Fibonacci sequences appear in [nature], such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone." (source: Wikipedia). This is the underlying math behind why we commonly see flowers with 3 or 5 petals instead of 2 or 4 petals.

Photo credit: Esdras Calderan, through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Fibonacci sequence poems, or fibs, had a huge resurgence in 2006, when Gregory K. Pincus discussed the form in this blog post during National Poetry Month. The newly rediscovered poetry form became so popular online that the New York Times wrote an article about fibs going viral. Their sudden popularity spawned Fibetry, an online forum devoted solely to fibs, and a new journal, the fib review.

Like scifaiku, fibs are fun and strangely addicting to write. This one is a science fiction fib, so I guess that makes it a scifib.

my
small
baby
alien:
your scaly green skin
looks so strange paired with my blue eyes

***

If you like this post, you might also like:

Try your hand at science poetry

Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest

Science Poem: Intrasolar interloper

Meet Scifaiku

Meet Scifaiku

Last month, I was busy writing poetry for the Poem-A-Month challenge over at Poetic Asides. One day, we had to write a haiku.

Haiku is not my favorite poetic form. It looks like it should be easy, but it is deceptively challenging. Historically, in Japanese, haiku were written with the first line having five syllables, the second line having seven, and the third line with five syllables again. But as I wrote in my anti-haiku:

a difficult form
even with 5-7-5
this is not haiku

Modern English-language haiku are usually shorter than 17 syllables. And you can have 1, 2, and 4 line haiku in addition to the 3 line version. Traditional haiku poems often capture a peaceful (or Zen-like) moment, commonly include a season, and provide some kind of comparison or insight. Ideally, they include an aha! moment which draws the reader into the experience.  Like I said, I find this type of poem hard to write. There’s a lot to consider when writing haiku. So, I was cruising around on the Internet, reading anything I could on the subject, and I discovered scifaiku.

What is scifaiku? Simply put, it's science fiction haiku. The term was first coined in 1995, when Tom Brinck wrote The SciFaiku Manifesto.

According to Brinck, scifaiku explores science or science fiction themes. The poems don't have to adhere to the traditional 17 syllable form of haiku, in part because so many science terms are long and unwieldy and eat up a lot of syllables. However, scifaiku should still be brief and get to the point.

I like scifaiku. Instead of a Zen-like moment, scifaiku poems explore things like alien encounters, the vastness of space, or thoughts about stars. You could even write a poem like this:

her green tentacles
wrap around my tender wrist
i love my new pet

Photo credit: Lenny Montana
through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

***
Updated 2/28/18. I’ve been writing haiku for nearly 9 years now and wanted to revise my definition.
***
If you like this post, you might also like:

Try your hand at science poetry

Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest

Science Poem: Intrasolar interloper

OT: Finished Poetry Challenge!

I'm happy to announce that I have finally finished the Poem-A-Day poetry challenge over at Poetic Asides -- 30 poems in 30 days, to honor National Poetry Month. Working on the challenge has encouraged me to try new things. You never know how trying something new might inspire you, or even inspire others.

Photo credit: Erik Harmon, BurningWell.org

Science Poem: Intrasolar interloper

I'm participating in the Poem-A-Day Challenge over at Poetic Asides. Yesterday's prompt was "outsider" and I decided to write about the planet Pluto.

***

Intrasolar interloper
(dedicated to former planet Pluto)


On a rocky outcrop of your ice-laden heart,
we sacrificed your stature.

Despite seven-six years of service,
retirement was no guarantee.

Nix and Hydra still shadow you
holding up your Kuiper belt.

Your union with Charon, however,
remains an unconsummated affair.

Highly eccentric and inclined to dramatic
circles of ovoid oblivion,

You rotate off-kilter, adrift,
your volatile nature frozen in time.

***

Artist's rendition of Pluto and Charon
Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)

Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest

I’m happy to follow up on a previous post,Try your hand at science poetry, and report that the Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest is alive and well and celebrating its 20th year! I recently received an E-mail from Ashley Berrios, who is coordinating the contest this year. She told me that the deadline for contest entries is tomorrow! So, for all of you who are competing, good luck with your entries.

If you are unfamiliar with the Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest, here are some facts that I learned from Ms. Berrios:

• Although most entrants are from the state of Massachusetts, this contest is open to all students in grades K-8 - including those in special education classes - but the poems must be written in class. Teachers choose the best poems from their classes and submit them to the contest, with parental permission.

• The purpose of this contest is to integrate writing and art with science. All poems must reflect current scientific knowledge. Students can write about any scientific topic except science fiction.

• Up to grade 5, the entries must be illustrated. For grades 6-8, the author may choose whether or not to illustrate the poem (or, for these grades, they may also choose to include a photograph).

• Poems must compete in one of eight categories, including Most Original Poem, Most Humorous Poem and Most Expressive Poem.

It may be too late to enter this year’s contest, but it’s not too late to start planning for next year! Since the website is not currently up-to-date, to learn more about the contest please contact Ashley Berrios at berriosa [at] bc [dot] edu or write to:

Dr. George Ladd
Professor Emeritus
Science Poetry Contest
Lynch School of Education
Boston College – Campion Hall
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

[Update: 3/9/09 -- The Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest has a new website! The deadline for the 2009 contest is April 3, 2009. Check the website for details!]

Try your hand at science poetry

Are you looking for something different to do today? How about writing some science poetry? Here are some poetic forms with examples of science poetry written by children, taken from previous entries to the Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest . (Unfortunately, this contest appears to be closed, but I’m checking into it).

Here’s my childhood contribution to the oft-underappreciated science poem. I was nine years old when I wrote this ditty, which won an honorable mention in a poetry contest. You just never know where science poetry may lead!

Maybe in the Future

Maybe in the future,
We will find
A mysterious planet,
One of a kind.

All around this planet,
There is an eerie gloom.
And when you look up in the sky,
There is only half a moon.

The small eight-inch people,
Smiling as can be,
Have only one red hair, on their heads,
Small as the eye can see.

These are courageous people,
Fighting very hard.
And maybe in the future,
They’ll land in someone’s yard.

[UPDATE: The Massachusetts Science Poetry Contest is alive and well! Check here for more details!]