HAIKU DIALOGUE – Man-Machine Interface – Communication – commentary

Man-Machine Interface with Guest Editor Alex Fyffe

By now, most of us are probably exhausted by the discussions around AI-this and LLM-that. Technology’s exponential growth is hard to keep up with, and each generation seems shorter and shorter even as the divides between them grow farther and deeper. The juniors at the school where I teach told me recently that “generation alpha is cooked, mister!” To translate: They have no hope for their younger siblings’ generation. They explained that “the kids these days” (remember, these are practically “kids” themselves!) are already caught in the rabbit hole of online misinformation and “brain rot” entertainment, and they all seemed to agree as a class that they couldn’t see any way for them to come out of it as fully functional people. Of course, every generation tends to despair the hopeless inadequacies of the next, so maybe we can chalk up their young cynicism to age-old attitudes. Then again, these complaints typically come later in life – adults griping about teens –, not from those so young already – teens griping about grade schoolers.

But whether or not all this doom and gloom is warranted, one thing is certain: To live in the modern world is to engage with technologies most of us don’t fully comprehend. Whether ordering food on a screen instead of from a cashier, watching other people play games on our phones, or asking a chatbot to write our essay for us, technology has become embedded in our daily lives. The prompts for this series – Man-Machine Interface – will be about the relationship between humanity and technology. Now that much of the cyberpunk fiction I loved in my younger years has invaded our reality, let’s write some haiku and senryu from this cyberpunk (cyberpop-punk?) perspective.

Below is Alex’s commentary for Communication:

Valentine’s Day
an Android and an iPhone
share gifs

Mark Gilbert
UK

People have these tribalistic urges to belong to a group and exclude others from that group so that they know where they stand. Nintendo or Playstation? DC or Marvel? PC or Mac? Gilbert shows us how deeply this belonging can go by referring to the Valentine’s Day couple as ‘an Android and an iPhone,’ identifying them as their chosen tribe. But he also demonstrates that technology can also bridge these divides – love can exist between an iPhone user and an Android user, for example, even if each secretly (or not-so-secretly) believes the other has bad taste (yes, this also describes my own home life). Despite their different group identities, they can share and laugh at the same gifs, almost as if brand loyalty doesn’t really matter, after all. Imagine that!

read receipt
rain finding
both windows

C.X. Turner
UK

A beautifully penned look at modern sorrow, Turner tackles one of the most modern woes of digital communication: the fact that we can see when a message has been read. Before the ‘read receipt,’ there was room for doubt – “Maybe they haven’t had time to see it yet… Maybe it didn’t go through…” –, but now we have the receipts. We know they saw what we wrote and that they simply chose not to respond to it. And so we have new frustrations, anxieties, and lonelinesses arising from one simple word: “Read.” Turner’s haiku captures this well with the melancholy mood set by the phrase ‘rain finding / both windows.’ We can imagine the speaker home alone, staring at that last sent text, the rain falling all around, feeling completely closed off and isolated because the person they want to hear from either will not or cannot respond.

lost network—
I take
the longer way home

Mona Bedi
Delhi, India

Bedi’s ku illustrates the freedom of breaking away from technology temporarily. It reminds me of an article I read about taking family road trips without GPS. The author mentioned planning out the trip on maps, having passengers act as navigators, and working together to get to where you want to go. He argued that it made the trip better because it forced you to pay closer attention to your surroundings and made you collaborate with your family/friends in a way that brought you together in a common goal. GPS makes us passive. We can zone out completely until the little voice tells us “In two miles, take the exit… In a quarter mile, take the exit… Take the exit.” GPS is certainly more convenient, and many people use it even when they know where they’re going just to try to avoid traffic jams. But even if it means taking ‘the longer way home,’ sometimes that’s more satisfying when you’re forced to actually engage with the world for a little while.

a glimpse
of snow angels —
mom’s video call

Anthony Rabang
Philippines

Rabang’s poem is a jubilant embrace of technology’s ability to diminish the gaps between us. When two people live far apart, it’s possible that one sees snow regularly and that the other rarely or never sees it at all. But video calls can transport us to where it’s happening, almost like opening a window onto another world. We can catch ‘a glimpse’ of what we would otherwise miss out on, all while catching up with a loved one. The use of ‘snow angels’ here is a lovely detail. Who made the snow angels? The mom? Visiting grandchildren? Either way, the speaker gets a peek into a distant heaven before returning once again to his own world.

laptop camera
my father’s face
smaller every year

Sandip Chauhan
Virginia, USA

Video communication helps to bridge the gap between us, but the distance still remains. There is something heartrending about watching your parents lose their vitality on a small screen somewhere far away. Year after year, there is less and less time and energy. Chauhan expresses this perfectly with the description of the father’s face becoming ‘smaller every year.’ This diminishment happens before the speaker’s eyes but through a camera, one step removed. You can sense the sorrow and regret behind the screen.

packaging everything I don’t want to say thumbs up emoji

Shloka Shankar
India

How many “thumbs up” have I sent people when I didn’t want to say anything real? It’s such an easy thing to do. One little symbol, quickly read as “yep, good, okay, all right, got it,” but not much beyond that. Shankar slyly shows how we can passive-aggressively pack all of our unsaid thoughts into that image, use it as an easy out when we’d rather not bother with anything more complicated than that.

another summer
of increasing silence
Alexa, play birdsongs

petro c. k.
Seattle, WA

This ku satirizes the way technology is increasingly replacing the natural world and our place within it. The first two lines get at the sense of isolation and emptiness in the world, but the turn at the end is what really sells it: ‘Alexa, play birdsongs.’ The speaker is using the ever-present Alexa to fill the void with artifice. When nature is gone, the device will be there to replicate it for us and assure us that this is normal.

speech device
the  patient  wait  for
“I love you”

Margaret Anderson
Vancouver, BC

When I get overly cynical about modern technology, a poem like this comes along to remind me of how beautiful it can be. Kalyanee Arandhara accomplished something similar on the long list with a poem about how video calls have made it possible for the deaf to communicate across the world from each other (something audio-only communication made impossible previously). In Anderson’s poem, we see how technology can also give a voice to those without one. Speech devices allow those who otherwise cannot speak to give voice to those emotions that they wish to express, and they allow the person’s loved ones to hear those precious words, even if it means waiting a little while for them to come out.

the tension
held in place by cables
birthday texts

C.R. Harper
USA

Harper expertly overlaps literal description and metaphor to address the fraught emotions behind some seemingly simple text messages. The term “cable tension” refers to the force exerted on a cable/cord. The cables that make much of modern communication possible are, in this poem, holding a different kind of tension, the kind that comes from human relationships. It is the speaker’s birthday, presumably a time for celebration, but the ‘birthday texts’ bring with them an anxious feeling, possibly because the people sending the texts are only communicating because of the birthday, making the speaker less than thrilled to hear from them. Old relationships that are ‘held in place’ because of birthday reminders, for example. Words from someone you’d rather not have to hear from but can’t completely disconnect from for one reason or another.

dead sea scrolling for your good news

Adele Gallogly
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

The language here is doing a lot of work. ‘dead sea scrolling’ works not only as an allusion to the famous Dead Sea scrolls but is also reminiscent of “doomscrolling,” only slightly more apocalyptic. In context of the Dead Sea scrolls, ‘good news’ also brings to mind “the gospel,” further overlapping the social media landscape with religion. On one level, the poem is about scrolling down deep through X (or your social media platform of choice) to get to something that isn’t awful, digging through layers and layers of atrocities for something positive. But the religious language creates another level, in which this search for ‘good news’ is also a spiritual struggle for meaning in a fallen world.

morning call
the koel’s coo fills up
grandma’s pauses

Minal Sarosh
Ahmedabad, India

I admire the way Sarosh’s poem blends modern human interaction with the sounds of the natural world to express conflicted emotions. ‘morning call’ suggests that the speaker frequently talks with their grandma, showing the closeness between them. But the conversations have lulls during which the grandmother perhaps drifts off a little or struggles to find something to say. Of course, this also implies that the speaker remains silent during these pauses, waiting for the grandma to continue. Maybe there is a little bit of sorrow in the speaker, knowing that the grandma might not be altogether with it. But there is also something beautiful ‘fill[ing] up’ those gaps, the sound of a koel cooing, almost as if speaking for the grandmother. The sound of the bird ties the grandmother to nature. Beauty and sadness interwoven by sound and silence.

zoom meeting —
the lavender scent
from a clay pot

Lori Kiefer
UK

One of several Zoom meeting ku, I selected this one because of its unexpected juxtaposition. By starting with the scene setting (‘zoom meeting –‘), we are drawn mentally into the world of screens and seeing other people in their rooms and offices through those screens. So when the phrase hits us not with a visual image but with a scent, it reads as synaesthesia, one sense interpreting another sense – in this case, vision interpreting smell: seeing someone’s plant on the screen and unexpectedly smelling its ‘lavender scent.’ Of course, the speaker could simply be distracted by the scent of their own plant in the room during their zoom call, but I find this other interpretation more intriguing and compelling. On top of this, the specificity of detail and the slant rhyme in the final two lines (‘lavender scent,’ ‘clay pot’) simply make this a pleasure to read.

Join us next week for our next prompt…

Bios

Guest Editor Alex Fyffe teaches high school English in the Houston area. His haiku and senryu have been published in various journals, including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Failed Haiku, Akitsu Quarterly, and the Asahi Haikuist Network. He is also a contributor at Prune Juice, where he writes articles about modern Japanese senryu in translation, and he is currently working on a series of articles for the Japanese gendai senryu journal Manten no Hoshi comparing the similarities and differences between English-language and Japanese-language senryu. Some of his favorite short form poets include Issa, whose work he discovered in the intermediate Japanese textbook he used while studying in Hikone, Japan, and Santoka, whose writing introduced him to the liberating concept of “freeform haiku.” Currently, Alex uses haiku in the classroom to ease students into poetry and build their confidence as readers and writers. He posts haiku, including translations of contemporary Japanese haiku and senryu, on Twitter @AsurasHaiku and on Bluesky @asurashaiku.bsky.social.

Assistant Editor Lafcadio, a former teacher, now works from home writing, editing and proofreading study guides for nursing textbooks. She lives in Tennessee. She has written poetry for a long time but a couple of years ago fell in love with Japanese micropoetry and hasn’t looked back. Lafcadio has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She writes under the nom de plume of Lafcadio because nom de plume is so fun to say. You can read her poems on Twitter (X) @lafcadiopoetry or BlueSky @lafcadiobsky.

Assistant Editor Vandana Parashar is an associate editor of haikuKATHA and one of the editors of Poetry Pea and #FemkuMag. Her debut e-chapbook, I Am, was published by Title IX Press (now Moth Orchid Press) in 2019 and her second chapbook Alone, I Am Not, was published by Velvet Dusk Publishing in April 2022.

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. She lives in New York City and enjoys reading and writing haiku.

Managing Editor Katherine Munro lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and publishes under the name kjmunro. She served as Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada for ten years, and her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). Find her at: kjmunro1560.wordpress.com.

Portrait by Laurel Parry

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.

Please note that all poems & images appearing in Haiku Dialogue may not be used elsewhere without express permission – copyright is retained by the creators. Please see our Copyright Policies.

Photo Credit:

Banner Photo Credit: A double-exposed photograph showing Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory by Dickinson Alley, ca. 1899, Public Domain Image Archive

Haiku Dialogue offers a triweekly prompt for practicing your haiku. Posts appear each Wednesday with a prompt or a selection of poems from a previous week. Read past Haiku Dialogue posts here.