HAIKU DIALOGUE – Man-Machine Interface – TMI

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.

Prompt: TMI

In his mid-19th century book Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up…,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip…. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.” A couple of paragraphs later, he continues: “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,—that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.”

Reading Walden today, it is impossible not to see what Thoreau was writing about back then playing out now ever faster and more thoroughly than before. We are surrounded by information, both true and false, not just in the daily local paper but now incessantly and all around us. At our fingertips at any given moment is a constant stream of data – reports, speculations, jokes, AI-generated videos and images – and it has become more difficult than ever to navigate those floodwaters. We live in a TMI world – Too Much Information – and it is easier than ever to be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of it all.

For today’s prompt, write a haiku or senryu that illustrates the effect of living in a world with an endless cycle of news and conversations about the news, which are constantly accessible through our technological devices. Feel free, too, to respond to Thoreau, if the idea moves you.

The deadline is midnight Eastern Daylight Time, Saturday, July 25th, 2026.

Please use the Haiku Dialogue submission form below to enter one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme, and then press Submit to send your entry. (The Submit button will not be available until the Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in.) In the Poem box, with your poem(s), please include any special formatting requirements & your name & residence as you would like it to appear in the column. Please note that by submitting, you agree that your work may appear in the column – neither acknowledgment nor acceptance emails will be sent. All communication about the poems that are posted in the column will be added as blog comments.

Join us next week for Alex’s selection of poems on the topic TMI…

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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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.