"haiku" news and stories

Do you consider yourself a pizza lover? A specialist of sauce? A connoisseur of cheese?

Can you express your love for pie in poem form?

The Washington Post wants your pie-kus, written in - you guessed it - haiku form (which, for those of you who weren't paying attention in fifth grade, is an un-rhyming poem consisting of three lines: The first is five syllables, the second is seven, and the third is five.

Get your creative juices flowing, because the deadline is April 30. E-mail your poem to food@washpost.com with "PIE-KU" in the subject line, or send it to: Pie-Ku Contest, c/o Joe Yonan, Food Section, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. Make sure you include your full name, address and telephone number.

Good luck, my pizza-loving poets.

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I love to read Is My Blog Burning? so that I can stay updated on all of the contests circulating around the blogosphere. I'm usually shy about participating (though I did enter a cupcake contest just once), but I think it's great when people create dishes and posts for the sake of the blogging community, and I love to see the results. Anyway, Is My Blog Burning? alerted me today to a contest called Haiku That Blog, in which contestants write a haiku poem about a particular blog and one lucky winner receives a fabulous prize. The blog for the contest is Lunch Bucket Bento, which I'd never seen before, but it looks adorable.

The contest got me thinking, however, about haiku for Slashfood and food blogging in general. I wrote three. My favorite is this one (note: for an English major, I was never very good at writing poetry):

Read it for Breakfast,
Lunch, Dinner, and in between
Slashfood – keeps me fed

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Sure, the fast food industry has recently spurred non-fiction books, documentaries and plenty of investigative journalism, but fan fiction? In a similar vein to the LiveJournal community of McDonald's employees, here's an LJ community composed solely of fan fiction based around the McGriddle breakfast sandwich. Really. There's some sci-fi, some suspense, even McGriddle haiku and jokes. For instance: "Q: What do you get when you line up 8 McGriddle Breakfast Sandwiches in a row? A: MMMMMMMM!" I also particularly enjoyed the short story involving the Hamburgler reflecting on his past while "Lying in his cell, doing a "dollar value menu" upstate."

Back in middle school, I think one of the first poems I ever wrote was a rhyming little ditty about Spam. Lucky for you, I have no idea where that little gem went. What I do know is that The Spam-Ku Archive has nearly 20,000 haiku (and other assorted verse, and a book) dedicated to that most beloved meaty little block.

Some are poignant:
Empathize with them
Cut your finger on SPAM top
Pigs must feel that too

Others are just plain weird:
Freezing midwinter
The warmest thing you can wear?
Jacket made of SPAM

My pending entry:
Hurricane supplies
The loneliest can of all
Eat some more tuna.