Author :
Jan B. Hurych
Title :
THE OLD COACH ROAD (0)
Foreword.
At the time these poems started to appear in Hurontaria literary net magazine (English version), I was only experimenting. True, I wrote many poems before, but it was in Czech language and that was quite different matter. It's rather different to write verses in your native language. The rhymes are easier to come to one's mind, but more important: the poetic part of foreign language cannot be so easily learned when one is already an adult. To express own feelings, it takes extreme skills that can be easily obtained when we are young and still learning. True, one can learn a lot from reading foreign poems, but even more by correcting his own poems. And that art takes years and years, not talking about the art of thinking and feeling "in somebody else's language".
Well, my beginnings were rather dofficult: I took some workshops and used the valuable advices of Saskatoon "writers-in-residence". Unfortunately the one who was a real poet liked my stories more than my poems. Robert was from Wales and I am mentioning here only his first name, just in case he might change his opinion about my poems :-)) . To my further confusion, next year we had a lady, story writer, who liked my poems more than my stories! Of course, they might have been just polite to me, but I carried on, experimenting in different forms and styles to their utter desperation, I presume . So blame is only mine . . .
First limericks, as you may know, were written by Irish poet Edward Lear. They soon spread around the Anglo-Saxon world. They have a special rhythm as well as structure and they are mostly of humorous nature. We may sort them into three cathegories: those we can tell even when there are some ladies present, those from the second group are good when there are no ladies present but still there is some priest, and still others, the real one, are the genuine, sharp limericks. From that point of view, those included here are only the mild ones.
Finally, I experimented with some computer programs, designed to generate the poetry. They were only 10 percent efficient - I had to throw away 90 percent of poor quality stuff. That is not to say the rest is any good, but they might evoke some thoughts which are rather unusual. After all, those programs use just a random arrangement of some phrases or so it seems.
"Haiku snapshots" are written in Japanese style called haiku and they are three line poems with 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively, which do not rhyme. They usually have some references to nature, the object Japanese like most, but of course their intent is to create the special mood, invoked by unusual pictures tied together. That's why I called them "snapshots". I did use the computer generation here too, with somehow better results.
Jan B. Hurych