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Quick Hits: A Brief Collection of Black & Blue Gridiron Haiku

Average customer rating:

Light Reading FUN!
an insult to haiku, football and publishing itself!

Quick Hits: A Brief Collection of Black & Blue Gridiron Haiku
Bill Mattia
Manufacturer: 1st Books Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

Light Reading FUN!.......2003-03-24

Sure this is not pitch perfect Haiku - but if I read the author correctly - he calls his work popcorn poetry and seventeen syllable short poem structure. These are seventeen syllable snap-shots of the game of football - so in that light I forgive his "out of the box" thinking when it comes to his brand of western style haiku. If you are looking for light reading without anal retentive conditioning about how things should be done then you can't miss with this ditty...

an insult to haiku, football and publishing itself!.......2002-10-31

As an avid haiku poet and football fanatic, I could not wait to read this collection. Unfortunately, Mattia should be benched, as he fumbles on EVERY SINGLE VERSE in this self-published book. It seems he knows very little about haiku. He embraces the classical 17 syllable form for each poem, but lacks kigo (if you want to consider the word "football" a season-word then I should say half have kigo), immediacy, and all of the other classical elements of this disciplined form. Most of the haiku are generic descriptions of the game of football itself, e.g. "it's a bag of pain/ it's a sack of sacrifice/ this game called football", that one being one of the few that does not seventeen words in its composition. I've read haiku from third graders that illustrated a better understanding of poetics as well as this form's roots. Some of the "poems" are shameless like this verse on the last page: "The END is now here/ I'll have more books out real soon/ Please give them a try." I have no idea why the word "end" is in caps, but most verses within have this peculiar feature. Furthermore, the font used for all of the verses is fuzzy and not very pleasant to look at. Finally, in Mattia's insufferable first-person bio, he claims to recognize Zen in haiku, yet goes on to call it "poetic popcorn" and the "cotton candy of communications." Huh? He also states that he hopes to be "the dynamic vehicle that delivers" this poetic form to the western world, proclaiming himself "the Bruce Lee of Haiku"!! Where has Mattia been for the last 40 years!?! If one wants to learn from the true Haiku ambassadors, please read R.H. Blyth, Harold G. Henderson & William J. Higginson.

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