poker haiku goes tanka?

karpov and i had an email exchange today that i wanted to catch here. he's referring to an off-beat poker game called "omaha" that's played mostly by hustlers, stupes and the infirm. ("nuts" is poker slang for the best possible hand at any given moment.)

***
[from k-pi]

These are crap, the equivalent of your 2nd grade class pounding out the haiku...written while playing two poker hands at the same...clearly breaks rules because I need three haiku to deliver point. Crap crap crap.


Omaha high lo
queen queen king king not suited
Flop 9T hearts Jack

I bet small, large raise
one call, I re-raise all in
Call call show my nuts

One fool has 78
other king queen plus two hearts
5th street heart knifes mine


***
[from b1]

the hard thing about this one is trying to convey all the action in 17 syllables ... it requires editing and preciseness.

maybe something like this?


playing omaha
all-in my nut straight gets beat
by one with flush draw


it's worth noting that there's a form of japanese poetry that pre-dates haiku called "tanka," that is probably the most written form of poetry in the world. the format is 5-7-5-7-7. the third line of 5 syllables is considered key because it's the hinge line ... the best written tanka can be read such that the 5-7-5 part makes a poem and the 5-7-7 part makes a poem. so my haiku above probably wouldn't work as a the starter for tanka because of the awkward preposition -- and any sort of doing that and claiming to be modernist in style (like staring a novel with "but none of that mattered ...") is just lame and lazy in this case.

in the purest form, tanka is written by 2 people and called "renga." one person writes 5-7-5 and the other finishes with 7-7.

pure haiku is not supposed to express feeling, but rather evoke it in the reader -- put you in the kind of fiesta mood where you want to burn incense and meditate.

in the feudal days of japan a party was not considered complete until a tanka had been written about it. so japanese tanka can be very emotional and funny in its lowest form and talk about things like the happiness of marriage, getting too drunk at a party (there are volumes of this), trying to get inside that cute little plantation girl's kimono, etc.

my understanding is haiku, in fact, came from bosho going crazy and writing a ton of tanka starters with heavy shinto/buddhist overtones. someone, most likely drunk at a party and expected to write the next 7-7, said, "hey man, these are pretty good. let's just call *these* poems. bashō, you da man! more sake! where is that hottie from the shack on the hill? hey kenji, how much for that sword of yours?"

so you could re-write it as tanka and get the space you need for the dynamics. i've never written tanka and i'm for damn sure not going to start on this -- like the death of hunter thompson in starting this journal, i need a big reason, and your overplaying a flush drawing board is not good enough.

of course the great thing about starting with this as a tanka is it completely ignores any sense of japanese aesthetic while faking it's of that form. it's the rough equivalent of busting into the buddhist temple in kyoto, kneeling with one eye open, then standing up and loudly saying, "kewl god you guys have here. i dig him. hey, does anyone know if there's a mcdonald's around here?"

and for that reason alone, may be worth trying.