Got a yen for poetry?
The Wall Street Journal reports on a haiku contest sponsored by a Pittsburgh nonprofit offering people the chance to opine on the upcoming G20 meeting in the city. The winning entry (which isn’t all that good in my opinion) will be displayed on a theater marquee near the event site.
The haiku format is typically 17 syllables, three lines (5-7-5). Some G20 haiku I liked better:
Ten billion people –
Environmental debate
Won’t feed all those mouths
– Stanley Harms
what country am I
dying of hunger and thirst
number twenty one
– Jean Kirby
Matinee idols
At the G-20 Summit…
See them in Pittsburgh!
– Tanja Cilia
I’m no Vinca, but here’s one I came up with:
The city of steel
hosts the global supermen.
Will they save the world?
The Journal also reports on a plan to have messages from a Twitter account flashed in Morse code from a building across the street from where world leaders will be meeting.
Sound strange to translate modern messages into an archaic language before transmitting them to the world? That’s the point. The project is designed to demonstrate the “lack of transparency” of the G20 process.
Though the old and the new media do share a common thread: both were designed to get to the point as efficiently as possible. SOS, after all, was the 19th century’s LOL.
