HAIKU DIALOGUE – Man-Machine Interface – TMI – 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 TMI:

waves of news
my worry stone
worn thin

Bryan Rickert
Belleville, IL

This was one of the most expertly crafted responses I received. The diction, metaphorical imagery, alliteration, slant rhyme: Everything works together perfectly to achieve its effect. On the most literal level, the poem is about someone so overwhelmed by the constant news that he relies on a ‘worry stone’ (a small, smooth stone that people rub with their fingers to help relieve anxiety), but he has relied on it so much that it’s wearing away. The word choice enhances this even further. By referring to the constant news cycle as ‘waves of news,’ we are presented with the image of a natural phenomenon: a stone on the beach being eroded over time by the ever-rolling tide. Too much news and too much anxiety about it become timeless, naturally occurring parts of the world (and considering Thoreau was writing about this over 150 years ago, perhaps that’s true). In addition, the poem feels musical because of Rickert’s use of sound devices. Each line contains one “w” word: ‘waves… worry… worn.’ This alliteration carries us through the poem and also reinforces the theme: The waves cause worry that wears us down over time. And the last three words of the poem – ‘stone / worn thin’ – consist entirely of single stressed syllables that are all slant rhymes, each one ending in the “n” sound. Stressing each syllable and ending them on a consonant slows down the reader, reflecting how the speaker of the poem feels exhausted by the news. Even the choice of ‘worry’ and ‘worn’ is compelling, since they both start with the same three letters, and the second word is “worn” away by one whole letter, again emphasizing the very theme of the work. A truly marvelous poem.

refresh
refresh
the streams cut a channel
through
my sleep

Adele Evershed
Wilton, CT

Although it’s not common to see a five-line ku, Evershed’s choice of lineation thoughtfully mimics the topic of her poem, with the middle line ‘cut[ting] a channel’ through the other four nearly-even short lines. The double meaning of ‘streams’ plays into this metaphor, too – we understand the ‘streams’ to be digital streaming, but the data turns metaphorically into water, dividing the speaker between her desire for sleep and her desire for more content to consume. The repetition of ‘refresh / refresh’ reveals her obsessive need to find out if there is anything new to see, but it also suggests a longing to feel refreshed. The speaker wants to sleep, to be refreshed, but she can only refresh the page instead, and, by doing so, cannot be refreshed herself. She finds, in the end, only weariness and exhaustion, and endless need.

post after post after post fencing the summer

petro c. k.
Seattle, WA

In the context of this prompt, we expect ‘post after post after post’ to refer to someone making or reading posts on some social media platform, but petro surprises us with the follow-up, ‘fencing the summer,’ which pulls us out of the digital and into the world of physical labor. Or does it? Read straightforwardly, it becomes a poem about persistently working to finish putting up a fence or multiple fences: someone working on their backyard or taking on a summer job putting up fences for others. It’s monotonous work, and in the heat of summer, too, it must be exhausting. This reading also implies that the work takes the course of the summer to complete, denying the speaker much of the freedom often associated with the season. But returning to the original prompt, perhaps this poem can be understood in an entirely different way. Maybe ‘fencing the summer’ is metaphorical, and it is getting caught up in the cycle of online posts (doomscrolling, for instance) that seems to create a fence around the summer, isolating the speaker from the outside world. A teacher or a student, for example, might find their precious summer days gone in a flash having just spent every day lost in a world of online posts, fencing them in until the summer has already gotten away from them. That’s why this poem succeeds as both a subversion of the prompt and a thoughtful meditation on it.

iPhonebation

Bruce Feingold
Berkeley, CA

I’ve always been drawn to minimalism, but I’m a bit wary around one-word poems. There are certainly some classics out there, but they tend to fall flat more often than not, especially when they are just normal words passed off as artistic pieces. Made-up words, though, have potential – it takes some thought and craft to come up with a good word that encapsulates something meaningful. And Feingold has accomplished that with ‘iPhonebation.’ It instantly feels like a word that should exist already. The effect is immediate and intuitive, humorous but also serious. And for something so short, it can be interpreted in several ways. First, we chuckle because it’s a mash-up of two words we know, one mechanistic and one organic. In this more literal reading, it says something about our physical relationships with our phones, how they can be used to fulfill personal needs. Going slightly deeper, we could understand it to be a commentary on how people use their phones to find a kind of self-obsessed pleasure in posting and commenting, the exhibitionism of selfie culture and oversharing, for example. And beyond that, we could even read the poem as a criticism of the cult of identity that has long surrounded (and been encouraged by) Apple and the iPhone brand. One word that acts as commentary on intimacy, egoism, and brand identification: That is why this one succeeds where so many other one-word poems have not.

in the subway
all the bowed heads
phoneward

Jonathan English
USA

I see in this response echoes of Simon & Garfunkel’s classic “The Sound of Silence,” in which “the people bowed and prayed / to the neon god they made.” The song even mentions the “words of the prophets” being “written on the subway walls.” Whether or not English intended this as an allusion, it works all the same, capturing a more cynical look at the way people willingly seem to prostrate themselves before The Machine, which has transformed from Paul Simon’s day into the handheld devices most of us now carry. The choice to end on the word ‘phoneward’ is inspired – it works both to clarify the image of a gathering of people all looking at their phones, of course, but it also rhymes with “homeward,” which is the word we might expect to see here – everyone in the subway heading home for the day (“Homeward Bound,” one might say!). Because of this, English implies that people have replaced “home” with their “phone,” looking to it for the comfort they seek. They may be in the subway physically, but their minds are already gone.

digital feed
all those ones & zeros
adding up to nothing

Curt Linderman
Seattle, WA

Linderman’s poem suggests that the social media we ‘feed’ on turns out to be ‘nothing’ but slop and empty calories. But like pigs at the trough, we hog it down, even if it only leaves us constantly hungry for something more. All those binary numbers, and yet the math isn’t ‘adding up.’ We think that we are consuming something important in the moment, but how much do we actually remember the next day? Or even the next hour? Down one hatch and out the other, undigested.

between the lines
even negative space
negative

Millicent Bee
Richmond, VA

Bee’s poem hinges on the double meaning of ‘negative’ to get at the more subtle ways social media discourse can ruin our day. When reading other people’s posts or comments, we often need to read ‘between the lines’ in order to catch the tone of what’s being said. The ‘negative space,’ or, in this case, what’s left unstated directly, often implies more negativity than is literally present in the words themselves. Reading tone through digital communication is notoriously difficult (there is a humorous Key & Peele sketch about this very topic), but Bee highlights the negativity underlying much of digital discourse today. There is no escaping it, even when it isn’t there outright. The negativity underneath it all still comes through.

black moon–
the chronic symptoms
of a viral comment

Laurie Greer
Washington, DC

Greer’s poem pairs well with Bee’s, as it also examines the harm that social media communication can do. The haiku-like fragment, ‘black moon–,’ sets the tone effectively. Rather than a “new moon,” a ‘black moon’ suggests something melancholy. This leads us to the phrase and its strong use of alliteration and consonance throughout (‘chronic,’ ‘comment,’ ‘symptoms,’ the hard “c” and soft “m” sounds of which also resonate with the fragment’s ‘black’ and ‘moon’). Greer suggests that one ‘viral comment’ can lead to long-term effects, shaping the way people see someone as well as how that person sees themself. It can metaphorically – maybe even literally – make them sick, which we understand from the choice of the words ‘viral’ and ‘chronic symptoms.’ Gossip is like a virus, and social media allows for gossip to be amplified to a dangerous degree.

terabytes in > {{ cerebro-stack overflow error }} > [!!#@??]

Mark Meyer
Mercer Island, WA

The most visually clever response to the prompt, Meyer uses digital language to show us the mindblowing effects of information overload. The term ‘stack overflow error’ refers to “a type of buffer overflow error that occurs when a computer program tries to use more memory space in the call stack than has been allocated to that stack” (Robert Sheldon, TechTarget). Meyer attaches ‘cerebro-’ to this error to say that our brains have exceeded their allocated memory space due to the ‘terabytes’ of information being crammed into them, which results in a complete breakdown, represented here by ‘!!#@??.’ This resembles the use of grawlix in comics, symbols which appear in place of curse words. But they also suggest the outrage (‘!!’) and confusion (‘??’) that is so prevalent when scrolling through social media feeds (‘#’ and ‘@’ also being heavily associated with social media posts).

fifty pilot whales…
they show the bodies
on the news

Tony Williams
Scotland, UK

I hadn’t heard about this story, but Williams is referring to a specific event that occurred a few years ago on a Scottish island, in which fifty pilot whales washed ashore and died. I was drawn to this poem because of the specificity of the incident in the fragment but also because of the subtle weight beneath the words ‘they show the bodies / on the news.’ Williams is able to convey quite a lot of emotion with a seemingly neutral statement of fact. One might read the poem as a commentary on just how detached we have become from the display of horror before us. But I think there is something in that commentary itself that hints at a heaviness in the speaker, a frustration with the exploitation of tragedy that goes beyond the facts – ‘they show the bodies’ when they don’t have to. And they show them because tragic imagery draws more eyeballs than plain facts. And there is a pain in that observation, a realization that we have seen something we can not unsee, maybe something we shouldn’t have. And now it is there in us, a tragic image of death and suffering, one stone among many stones in our hearts.

silent mode
the good news bee
at full volume

Tré
Blue Ridge, USA

I was also unfamiliar with the ‘good news bee’ before reading this poem. It turns out that it isn’t a bee, really, but a hover fly that looks somewhat like a bee and will often hover around a person’s head. A legend says that if it hovers by your ear, then something good will happen, which is where the nickname comes from. Presumably, it’s whispering good news. The speaker in Tré’s verse can hear the good news, thankfully, because he has put his phone on ‘silent mode’ – only by putting away technology can we truly listen to the natural world that surrounds us, at least ‘at full volume.’ The tech tends to muffle our perceptions, distract us, and can make us miss out on the good things in life.

after supper walk
to talk to the Lord
no cell phone

Cindy Putnam Guentherman
Loves Park, IL

Guentherman takes this a step further. Whereas Tré focused on the dichotomy between technology and nature, she looks at the divide between the technological and the spiritual. For her, sacred spaces are set apart from the mundane and vulgar world of cell phones. To commune with the spiritual, she leaves her phone behind and crosses the boundary into the natural world where she can reach something deeper. There is a wry bit of humor in the way she presents this information, too, suggesting that you can’t call ‘the Lord’ on the phone! The communication she seeks out on her ‘after supper walk’ can only be found in quiet self-reflection. The phone and all of the noise surrounding it only gets in the way, distracts from the more significant voice she wishes to hear. For her, God is not to be found in the machine.

coloring leaves
all the supplement bottles
half-finished

Keiko Izawa
Yokohama, Japan

Izawa focuses on a tangible aspect of our culture of excess and wastefulness, honing in on ‘half-finished’ ‘supplement bottles’ littering the landscape. There is an irony in the presentation, with the first line sounding somewhat lovely, only for that line to be undercut by the description of litter that follows. All the color comes from these bright supplement bottles abandoned by the wayside and the liquid that remains within them. When I think of supplement drinks, I tend to think of trends perpetuated by online figures trying to sell unnecessary products to people with the claim that they will improve their lives. And so many people who follow various social media personalities find themselves overpaying for crappy drinks they don’t actually need and won’t even finish because they’re seeking out easy solutions to problems. They only end up creating more problems thanks to their excessive spending and wasteful actions. But the colors stand out, anyway.

I pause the war
to answer
an email

Dan Campbell
Virginia, USA

Such a striking opening line: ‘I pause the war.’ Of course, we understand that Campbell means something like “I pause the video covering the war,” but by condensing it to ‘I pause the war’ and suspending the line there, it’s almost surreal. There is also the feeling that he has the power to call a time out on the conflict, like a politician agreeing to a ceasefire. We’ve seen a lot of pausing and starting up again in recent months, as if the war were nothing more than a video to be played at leisure by those in charge. Of course, Campbell continues: ‘to answer / an email.’ And the poem becomes an insightful look at how we are forced to multitask between processing massive worldchanging events and relatively unimportant personal duties or niceties. Our minds are constantly shifting between the horrors of war and the etiquette of email. And technology reduces it all to the same level. This, then this. This equals this. Pause. Play. Pause. Play.

how predictive text I am

Sarah E. Metzler
USA

By simply taking a common phrasing – ‘How [blank] I am’ – and filling in the blank with ‘predictive text,’ Metzler provides a glimpse into 1) how technology has shaped our thoughts and 2) how we can push back against it. We might expect to hear something like “how clever I am!” here, but Metzler, showing her own cleverness, replaces the adjective with a noun phrase, ‘predictive text,’ to comment on the modern phenomenon of our devices constantly predicting what we are going to type so that we can efficiently autofill the rest of the statement without having to type it all out. In one way, Metzler is pointing out just how predictable most of our thoughts and queries are for the modern machine – after all, it often knows what we were planning to say; much of communication is simply repeating basic patterns. We’re usually not very clever at all. The machine, in fact, can appear to be cleverer than we are from time to time. But then she refuses to write a predictable line here, instead making a choice that the machine never would have guessed. She creates something novel by avoiding the “proper” part of speech. This displays something that we’ve really known all along: that poets have to think outside of the usual patterns in order to say something fully human.

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

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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.