Topical haiku

Until a few weeks ago (writing in May 2007) there was a weekday “topical haiku” competition running in the books section of the Guardian Unlimited website. As was explained on the Guardian site, technically the poems were senryuu not true haiku – but being a bit of a philistine/Brit/web usability geek I’ve plumped for tagging them as haiku anyway.

I was a regular contributor to the Guardian haiku page for a few years under the pen name Christopher Graeme and managed to win it a few times – I still have a big pile of unclaimed Penguin Classics waiting for me, if only I had time to read them (I’m a very slow reader).

Included here for the record backdated to the time they were written – are most of my submissions to the Guardian site, and one or two that were never submitted, together with links to the news stories they illustrated. They didn’t all get published – but then reading them back now I’m really not surprised.

Read the haiku (you’ll need to click in to the “Full Post” to click through to the news stories)