exquisite corpse, anyone? . . .

A week or two ago, the folks at WordPress sent me virtual “happy anniversary” wishes, reminding me that I’d started this blog with them four years ago. It’s hard to believe that I’ve kept this enterprise going all that time, and that what started out as an exceptionally naïve venture into the world of haiku has led me down a path that has sustained and nurtured me so faithfully all these many days and nights later.

Although I readily admit a temptation to delete some of my early posts (ones that present a dubious learning curve as I felt my way through and around a form that on the surface can appear deceptively simple), I was happy to run across an early post that was, I think, fairly successful–thanks in large part to a longtime poet friend of mine named Van K. Brock, who sent me a string of gritty haiku prefaced with the following

Margaret, sorry:
all else should be more lovely,
with stars, planets, moons.

And to which I felt compelled to respond to, in Exquisite Corpse fashion, with

stars, planets, moons–
so many old friends I see
circling my night sky

Given the double whammy of this month’s blood-red harvest moon and eclipse–not to mention the approach of Halloween and Día de Muertos–I thought it would be fun to resurrect our Exquisite Corpse to see what readers could do with it. The rules are simple: take the last line of either Van Brock’s or my haiku and use it as the first line of your own haiku; then, send your E.C. haiku to me in a comment to this post. I’ll combine all the E.C. haiku I receive into a sequence (perhaps with a transitional haiku or two) and see what develops in a pre-Halloween post I’ll feature here.

Care to keep the exquisite corpse circling?  If so, respond here in a comment (which will remain hidden until the final sequence is revealed) by October 22. That should give me enough time to, hopefully, assemble something suitably exquisite . . . or, at the very least, more than a little interesting.

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