The no contest Contest - Charles Henderson's Blog

No, this is not a contest but am running it on the contest page. I am stealing this idea from Cyndi’s blog about writing projects as opposed to a single person writing a single poem. My finished product will have ten haiku in a string. You will furnish the haiku and the subject matter will be taken from this:
A group of boys are taking a hike on the Appalachian trail from New Found Gap in the blue ridge mountains to Fontanna Dam. This trek is a shade over a 100 miles long and will be done in 5 days. They carry food and cooking utensils. They will be sleeping in a building provided by the state which has a chain link fence on the one side with a gate which can be locked or tied shut at night. There are bears and many other animals all along the trail. At times the boys will be walking on the crest and looking left can see some 30 or so miles into North Carolina or to the right into Tennessee. The clearings on the mountain top often have old weathered, broken down cabins many years old, uninhabited. On the sides which face the prevailing winds the trees look like something out of a horror movie. They are all dead and gnarly and weather beaten, while everywhere else they are lush and green.
The boys will at other times be walking at the bottom of the canyons as the trail meanders through the trees and mud wallows of the bear. The smell is rank and musty like an old mildewed dirty sweaty tee shirt. The bears are completely wild, but are brown bears, so not usually harmful except when threatened in close quarters. The Adirondak (the name of the shelter) will hold 10 persons and at night many have to sleep outside because whole football teams come up for the first week of training and many boy scout troops make the trip.
A spring is usually down the hill a ways and that is where you get water to drink and wash. The springs have been divided into an upper spring for drinking and a lower spring for bathing, washing dishes and clothes and for watering horses.
At one point in the week a boy camped outside is picked up by a huge male bear and carried down the ravine. It sets him down and by a carefully placed blow to the bear’s anatomy it forgets about him just long enough for him to get a good head start back to the camp sight. Poor bear was shot by the rangers the next day, and it weighed some 500 pounds. The kid had 16 puncture wounds in his back.
One more day of walking and we are snuggling up to thick blankets in a Fontana village cottage. A good bath, meal and movie and a whole night of shooting the bull and rehashing the trip. Not, me, I had to drive the next day. My car had been brought in by some of the other parents.
- - - - - - - -Oh Kay!!! For the haiku you can make up, add lib, change facts any way you wish to the above narrative to get you a haiku out of this. I will decide which ones I will use and in what order to best fit this tale. As I said at the beginning I will have at least 10 haiku and maybe a couple more than that. These are going to be the ones which interest me the most and look the most like haiku and sort of make sense when you read them as a string. I will publish results in another blog.  As I said it is strictly a fun, writing project. We had a couple more really neat experiences on the trip. I will try to relate them to you in a follow up blog, and probably post some of the more interesting haiku. String haiku are supposed to all relate to the previous haiku--- the second to the first, the third to the second, and so on. Yet they are supposed to make sense when taken out of the string context and read alone. This is not going to be a big mental challenge, it is just for fun. So, don’t worry if you are rusty at haiku. But if you can write me one that knocks me off of my feet, wow, have at it.

Brian Strand Date: 3/31/2013 2:15:00 AM I think this is called a renga Charles? Nice idea of a Western version.A Blessed Easter to you and your family,&all your participants in this excellent collaborative twist for our PS poe try workshop .Rgds Brian Login to Reply Charles Henderson Date: 3/31/2013 11:04:00 PM thanks Brian, hope to see one of yours listed.

Debbie Guzzi Date: 3/30/2013 3:56:00 PM So the entrant only writes 1 haiku? hmmm and then you string them together into a story? Login to Reply

Debbie Guzzi Date: 3/30/2013 6:17:00 AM Morning Chas, loooooooong narrative there, I wish I had been on the hike. I have never seen a bear? Login to Reply Charles Henderson Date: 3/31/2013 11:07:00 PM Believe me there is a big difference in seeing one in a cage vs. from behind a tree.