Jeffrey Goldberg says "Dahlia Lithwick is a Haiku Genius."

"She's condensed a week of Senate blather about Sotomayor into exquisite little poems."

I'm no poetry expert — maybe you are — but I don't see why these should count as even marginally good haiku. I suppose the whole thing is that it was done at all — making Senators' statements about Sotomayor into haiku.

Here are some teaching materials on haiku, focusing specifically on haiku in English:

The haiku poet cultivates awareness so that s/he may experience some unusually forceful impact coming from ordinary life or from everyday surroundings....

In 'haiku spirit' the poet adopts a self-effacing and faithful attitude towards the object s/he perceives. S/he does not set out to be moralistic or didactic or judgemental. The haiku form has been used successfully to write adages and epigrams, but because the aim of adages and epigrams is to mould opinion they are not haiku in spirit....

[M]any successful haiku result from a long process of draughting and re-writing, during which the poet clings hard to the original perception.

The pain is to give readers the means to feel as the poet her/himself felt at the time, or maybe differently, without any explicit (and so directive) statements about actual feelings. Some typical attitudes are humility, serenity, compassion, acceptance of transience and man's lonely state, joy in resurgence and company, wonder, wistfulness, as well as humour of a whimsical and sometimes paradoxical kind.

Now, those "typical attitudes" are so obviously not what one finds among Senators that the idea of writing bad haiku in the voice of a Senator is a very good one, but if you're doing bad, be really bad — there's a blog, Bad Haiku — and I think — I think — that would have to exclude anything that Jeffrey Goldberg would proclaim as the work of a genius.

***

And I know, I know, I know: How can you take advice about taste from someone who writes "S/he" and "her/himself"?

UPDATE: And curses! What a missed opportunity to keep up what began as an accidental Theme of the Day. Permit me to compensate via this update:

1.
Dead Sea Shells Worship
Lobster Fangs In Hades Door
While I Sleep Dead

2.
Lobster and artichokes
Slather with spirits
Canine hurls protein yak

3.
Snip my buttons off,
With your shearing claw, my sweet
Lobster in my pants

4.
Though warm tasty and
delicious, urine should not
be served with lobster

5.
Such a tasty meat,
Drenched in succulent butter
Lobster dies for me

All right. Enough. I am satisfied.

UPDATE #2: Jeffrey Goldberg is not amused.