Haiku 101, Intellectual Property Haiku (IP Haiku)

I’ve written thousands of haiku.  It all started one morning in Pittsburgh.  I woke from the strangest dream.  In my dream, I tried to convince people I was a composer (I was and am a composer) but they wouldn’t listen.  They found a poetry journal from Australia and in the journal were haiku I had written.  They told me I was an INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED POET who specialized in haiku.  I told them I was a composer, not a poet, but I couldn’t convince them of this.  Strangely, after I awoke, I laughed at this bizarre dream but then started to research haiku.

I found out that the most common form of haiku was a three-line poem consisting of 17 syllables.  And there was a nice symmetry to the structure.  The first line consisted of 5 syllables, the second had 7 syllables and the third had 5 syllables.  An “A – B – A” form.  In music a “rondo” has an A – B – A form (and a rondo can have a few other forms).  I had never written a rondo (and still haven’t) but I decided to start my RONDO CAREER as a poet instead of  a composer.  So, I started to write   5  –  7  –  5  haiku.

My haiku obsession – haiku career – began that way.  I’ve gone through periods of writing hundreds in a few hours.  Sometimes my haiku tell a story.  Other times they are related to a theme, and still other times they are disconnected and without any purpose, like my life.  (I do not have a purposeful life – I have a purpose-less life.  An ambient free-form, drifting life.  Enough of this theme.)

I used to get reprimanded by poets and scholars who knew better than I (knew better than I about everything – just ask them).  Even my Japanese girlfriend told me that haiku were supposed to be about nature, not vehicles for telling deranged and absurd stories that would be parodic and unauthorized episodes of   –  –  –  –

The Dating Game

Leave It To Beaver

The Brady Bunch or

Love Boat

Or that haiku were not supposed to be vehicles to criticize and protest President Reagan, Barry Manilow or American pop culture.  My haiku started out as an escape mechanism – I was composing too much complicated concert music and found that if I got away from the music and started to write in this happy 5-7-5 format, I’d feel better.  My escape would be realized.

Here is one installment of a bunch.   These are about copyright and intellectual property and date back to 2004.  If I can find my first analog book of haiku, I’ll break those out over a period of time at emichaelmusic.com.  But for now, here are some IP haiku.

INTRO

Copyright haiku
Musings manipulations
And sometimes held thoughts

If you can publish
Them they might bring you good luck
Forward them to friends

(Maybe I’m confused
Maybe it’s email that needs
To be forwarded)

In any event
Here is the first installment
Of  I. P.  haiku

Chapter 1

I just bought a bomb
It came from Best Buy and I
Think it is legal

The bomb has a name –
Jay-Z’s “A Cappella Black
Album.”  Still, a bomb

I think of it as
Silly Putty; a means for
Creativity

But this Putty is
Also copyrighted stuff
So, fun with limits

Press Silly Putty
Onto newspapers and watch
The print get copied

I now have a new
Cool thing –  an embodiment
And derivative

My Silly Putty
Has infringed the copyright
Of a newspaper

Chapter 2

And it gets worse – I
Copied an Op-Ed piece from
Today’s New York Times

I took the writer’s
Best part and transferred it to
My Silly Putty

This Silly Putty
Is worth more financially
As I took good stuff

My idea was
To combine Putty and print
And make something new

There were thousands of
Print sources for me to use
I had to choose well

Or I could phrase it
This way – there were thousands of
Sources I could steal

Not “use” but “steal.” But
Isn’t all expression at
Some level not new?