Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments 2015

So we've already done a couple of haiku events this year, but I've failed to update my site. Basically these are ongoing affairs of battle thru haiku, where I host/MC the event, and we all share through the crazy characters we indulge thru haiku, and fun is had and connections are made and the world's evil is destroyed with immensity of wonderfulness.
Here is a google doc link that explains how they work in greater detail than most humans think about caring for nowadays.
Also I can do this nonsense anywhere there is interest. I will tell tall tales of wonderful realness, as part of my philosophical wanderings thru the deserts of the North American wilderness. I work well with both children and the incarcerated (so far), and am able to talk in whatever direction might be important to you, so long as it is also halfway important to me. I'm not a prostitute, though I've got books and zines and other nonsense ephemera of Raven-life that I hopefully will sell enough of to get Greyhound bus money home. If not, oh well, I guess I'm homeless in your town. Congratulations. Just hit me up at ravenmack at gmail dotcom. Also I have a FB page and Twitter which I think are in the sidebar but maybe not too. Google that shit though. I'll show up.

Upcoming events:

FRIDAY MAY 29 AT THE LITTLE GRILL

IN HARRISONBURG VA - 8:00 PM FREE

PLUS PREVIOUS EVENTS THIS YEAR

First event in Richmond of 2015 at Balliceaux, Ryan Apehead won regular tournament in finals over Amy Wonderchicklady.

First event in Charlottesville of 2015, at Al-Hamraa in IX Art Park as part of IX@6. Mostly I yelled nonsense at people who didn't know me, and then Benji the Boatwright won a shortened field tournament.


A night of nonsense in Richmond again. Flash-brain the bartender won the tournament, Eric this dude won the battle royal, and I beat Mr. Revolt of the Apes in a ridiculous death match.

2014 Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments

ROJONEKKU HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU NONSENSE. Probably worth nothing there are only two of these officially left for the year - the last Richmond one and then the year-end championship invitational nonsense. Participation has waned at times recently, as has enthusiasm both from others as well as myself. Looking forward to shutting it down for the winter and perhaps coming back with a revamped style next spring. BUT FOR NOW LET'S MAKE THESE LAST TWO EVENTS RAUCOUS AFFAIRS OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE GIBBERISH!

• October 22: Balliceaux, Richmond, VA, 8:00 pm sign-up, 8:30 pm kick-off
• November 8: BON, Charlottesville, VA, 7:00 pm sign-up, 7:30 pm kick-off

PREVIOUS POSTERS PLUS HOW THIS SHIT WORKS IF YOU STILL DON'T KNOW

old haiku flyers from 2014 & how that shit works

I hope to see all of you and talk in real life and conspire against these fucking robots that are starting to control every aspect of our lives and communications and creations. If you have any questions email me at ravenmack inside google dotcom or hit me up on Facebook where I am Raven Doctorlounge Mack or better yet twitter where I am the rambling subconscious of the Piedmont foothills at SSVa_Raven.

Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournaments are a variation on haiku battles that have existed as an off-shoot to poetry slams for the past decade. Our version was established with students in my Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts school, and has been adapted for public performance/competition. The idea is to be all-inclusive, of styles of poet, of types of people, of modes of thinking, of anything really, so as to cultivate as wide a diversity of short poems as possible. Our world needs more diversity. And then that diversity needs to be more diverse. Ten shades of the same thought is not diversity. Ten different thoughts is.
WHAT HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU ENTAILSA Hand-to-Hand haiku battle works as a single-elimination tournament, meaning any number of people can participate. The first round works to eliminate the field down to the closest number divisible by two, in one-on-one matches. From that point on, it’s a simple matter of one-on-one match-ups to narrow the participants down to four, and then a final two competitors. All early rounds are a best of 3, the semifinals a best of 5, and the finals a best out of 7. The number of rounds required depend on how many competitors.What does “best of” mean, and how does that work? Easy, yo. There will be three judges pre-selected for the night’s festivities. They will have two flags (different ones obviously, we’ll assume red and blue for ease of explanation). In each match-up, one competitor will have a red flag, and the other a blue flag. Red flag reads a haiku first, then blue, then after a brief moment of thought, the three judges, who hold both colored flags, raise the flag of who won that round, in their on-the-spot opinion. Whichever flag a majority of judges raises is considered the winner of that round, meaning if two out of three judges say blue, then blue wins the first round, and is up 1 to 0. Loser of any round reads first the next round, so red would read a second haiku, followed by blue, followed by judges’ decision, and so on, until one of the competitors wins 2 rounds. At most this would need 3 rounds to be completed, thus it is called a best-of-3. The same process is repeated, but with more rounds for the semifinals and finals.This means for all people reading haiku, you may need up to 25 or so different haiku, in the off-chance the first round, the semifinals, and finals all go to their maximum amount of rounds, and that you advance accordingly. Thus, I say you need a minimum of 20-some haiku, although if you are eliminated early or win rounds quickly, most likely very few of you will actually use that many haiku, perhaps even using as few as 2 or 3. No worries; save what you wrote for the next one.Here is the thing though: you select which haiku you read for each round, rather than reading them in a set order, so to have a larger, more varied arsenal of haiku gives yourself the freedom to choose ones that might fit your opponent or the moment more easily, to tap into the flow of the evening, or which one you would assume might strike a favorable mood with the judges. I look at it as each haiku is an arrow, and the more arrows you have in hand, the more likely you are able to find a sharp one. So come equipped as you see fit.On a personal aside, as a man who has literally written several thousand haiku over the past decade, a method I use is writing them one per index card. This is a good method for a hand-to-hand haiku battle, as you can have your handful of index cards, mark out ones you use, and shuffle them around and use them accordingly. Just a tip; you can use it or ignore it as you see fit. Once you use a haiku though, you can’t re-use it in the tournament format again, so if you put them all on one page, put an X next to the ones you’ve used so as to not repeat yourself.
WHAT ABOUT HAIKU?Ah yes, the terribly pretentious question us westerners are forced to ask ourselves with regards to a Japanese literary tradition based on a language of characters while we speak syllables. Haiku traditionally was tied to the seasons, and the most common western translation has been a three-line poem of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, which is often times seen as the truest replication of the Japanese poem. For the sake of our Hand-to-Hand Haiku purposes, to keep everybody on even ground, I tend to encourage that we go with this. Now somebody may say, “Wait, counting syllables goes against what haiku actually is, Raven Mack!” I can assure you, I know this form on a deep and personal level, and could tell you that haiku is not even a poetic form on its own, but is part of a larger group form of poetry called renga where the first part was called hokku and became the title of famous renga poems, thus it became its own thing as literary time passed. So haiku is not even technically what the hell it is supposed to be. So for all haiku traditionalists insulted at counting syllables, once you are holding mass parties where groups of people compose poems as a group with 100 verses per poem, you can hold your complaints to yourself. We cannot accept part of a tradition but pretend the rest doesn’t exist and call ourselves traditionalists. I mean, we could, and in fact that’s what most people do, but I’m not supporting that.So for our sake, our haiku will be three-line poems, preferably of 5-syllables, 7-syllables, and 5-syllables. I will not count them though, and if you feel overly confined by this structure (form is good for you though), you can stretch the definition of haiku to mean a short poem of 17-syllables (or less).Also, traditionally, these have been tied to the seasons, or nature, but I regard the act of haiku as more a meditation or habit of observation, which means all the screwed up parts of the world made by man are as natural as nature, and more than perfect for haiku. You can go traditional or you can go with observing the world around you or you can go experimental. Whatever’s clever. For me, it is a meditation on the world around me, and this can be natural or it can be spiritual or completely inside my own head. I use it as word medicine, so whatever I feel like I need the form to give me, to make me feel better, to help me process the world I’m in, that’s how I go.And obviously, you should write your own haiku. If you have competed before in a different Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand tournament, you're expected to come with fresh material. Obviously there are no haiku police who will count syllables or be like, "Didn't she read that one before?" We, as the viewing community, will police ourselves, so if you are in the crowd at an event and it seems someone's gone long on syllables or repeating themselves, I encourage you to chatter amongst yourselves about it to create that uncomfortable buzz thing that happens in public events. If the competitor repeats these shady activities, hopefully the buzz will turn to outright booing and jeering. In fact, unlike your standard poetry reading, I encourage the crowd to make noise and respond. This is not to be a silent awe affair.
BUT HOW WILL THESE BE JUDGED?A valid question, as none of us wants to be judged, and yet judges will be involved. Honestly, there is no right or wrong way to pick a winner, and this method will always be subjective. Always. But I am going to have three judges, and attempt to curate each of them from a different angle of cultural sensibilities. Judges’ decisions will be final, and also subjective, so never take it personally. This is meant to be fun, and will be fun, so nobody needs to get all, “Damn, why wasn’t my poetic greatness not properly recognized in this damn hand-to-hand haiku thing? This is bullshit!”Judges: You will judge as you feel appropriate. Like I mentioned above, I’ll pick you because I'm thinking you'll observe from a certain perspective, but I might be completely off on judging your personality, so feel free to toss that aside completely and just go with your heart. In fact, the whole point of haiku is to go with your heart, and this whole nonsense endeavor of a tournament is meant to motivate people to go with what’s in their heart, not worry and become anxious.
SO WHAT DO WE WIN?Winner of the night’s tournament will receive the accolades of an adoring attending public, and generally I try to have some sort of prize to present to the winner, depending on what I get my hands on from willing accomplices. As part of hosting the festivities, I'll share some of my own Rojonekku writing, or unique perspective, or perhaps just talk crap about what I've been cooking up in the kitchen. The entire motivation behind Rojonekku WFA (Word Fighting Arts) is to battle the complacency of routine life with words, and this means not just books or printed matter but stories and jokes and strange tales from stranger places and just everything and anything to be honest.So that is how the Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament works. If you are interested in participating - which I hope you will be - contact me at ravenmack at gmail dot com. Even though this is developed from the slam poetry tradition, my goal with this is to bring different styles of poets from different backgrounds into a mutually accepted format, and interact. Then we cross-pollinate each other, and everything will taste better.

upcoming

previously

Philadelphia Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament/One Thousand Feathers Reading

Just as a general note of awareness to all potentially interested parties, this next Friday, March 1, there will be a Rojonekku/Fresh Dipped event at the Fresh Dipped Space at 26 South Strawberry Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as part of the First Fridays thing of artistic things. What will this particular event entail? Great question, bro.

#1: RAILROAD SPIKE DISPLAY - as seen on my Workingman Shop etsy which of course will be for sale or just looking at and shit.
#2: STUDY STYLE CRYPTIC LEARNED ELDER ART - because Fresh Dipped is a screen-printing joint, we will have some dope ass screen-printed wackiness on display. Me and Deric the Fresh Dipped proprietor have been working on this in the cloud, which is not an online storage area but us communicating to each other above the chemtrail clouds, so that our thoughts are pure. If we are going to encourage you to study another person's style, we want it to come from a good place. There was some discussion about whether you "learn" a style or "study" a style, and ultimately we felt that you cannot actually "learn" anything completely, and once you do, it all changes anyways so you yourself become unraveled by your own attachment to your own "knowledge".
#3: ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS READING - I will be reading something I guess, I don't know. There will be some of my One Thousand Feathers pamphlets with me, which I may read from, or I may recite some old rhymes, or I may read some of the haiku from the Beerbox Haiku Project, which I've purged from this website and have been editing like a delirious wino the past few weeks, to be released in March as a gangsta ass book of poetry that doesn't suck. Speaking of which, if you have ever been to a reading of poetry or writing, then you know how much they usually suck. The spirit of this event is to not suck, so whatever I read, I will try to make it as chaotic as possible and encourage you to yell and scream and holler and curse along with me or at me. Which brings me to...
#4: HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU TOURNAMENT - which I will be hosting. Below in quoted form is an in-depth description of how this even takes place, BUT I NEED SOME WILLING PARTICIPANTS to jump up in this thing. The spirit of this event is community and expression and all those other dumbass creative buzzwords. No seriously, I need some vibrant motherfuckers to come vibrate with their natural born word rhythm skills in a friendly-but-competitive environment. We had the first one of these this past weekend at the Bird Tribe Compound in rural Virginia, and it was a blast. I am very excited to bring my backwoods down home folksy anarchistic mystic fuckery to a wonderful clusterfuck of western civilization like Oldtown Philadelphia. I ALREADY HAVE PRE-GROWN MY JAYSON WERTH BEARD (even before he grew his own, which is actually a Raven Mack beard)! If you are interested in taking part as a haiku competitor or judge, hit me up at ravenmack at gmail dot com or on my twitters @SSVa_Raven. Below tells you what the fuck is going to happen, with my reading/hosting haiku kicking off around 19:30 on 01 Mar 2013 aka 7:30 or so in the evening y'all.

Hand-to-hand haiku is an actual thing that has existed as an offshoot of poetry slams for over a decade, but I am bringing it to the here and now because it is a thing I wish was happening so that I could take part, so I guess I will emcee the affair and create its existence locally.

WHAT IT ENTAILS

A hand-to-hand haiku battle works as a single-elimination tournament, meaning eight people start out in one-on-one matches, where one winner advances to the next round, and so on. Thus, there will be four first round battles, two semifinal battles between first round winners, then a final showdown between the two semifinal winners. For our purposes, the first round will be a best of 5, semifinals will be a best of 7, and the finals will be a best of 13. What does that “best of” mean, and how does that work? Well, that’s easy.

There will be three judges pre-selected for the evening’s festivities. They will have two flags (different ones obviously, we’ll assume red and blue for ease of explanation). In each match-up, one competitor will have a red flag, and the other a blue flag. Red flag reads a haiku first, then blue, then after a brief moment of thought, the three judges raise the flag of who won that round. Whichever flag a majority of judges raise is considered the winner of that round, meaning if two out of three judges say blue, then blue wins the first round, and is up 1 to 0. Loser of a round reads first the next round, so red would read another haiku, followed by blue, followed by judges’ decision, and so on, until one of the first round competitors wins 3 rounds. At most this would need 5 rounds to decide, thus it is called a best-of-5. The same process is repeated, but with more rounds, for the semifinals and finals.

Thus, for all people reading haiku, you may need up to 25 different haiku, in the off-chance the first round, the semifinals, and finals all go to their maximum amount of rounds. Thus, I say you need a minimum of 25 haiku, although if you are eliminated early or win rounds quickly, most likely very few of you will actually use 25 haiku.

Here is the thing though: you select which haiku you read for each round, rather than reading them in a set order, so to have a large arsenal of haiku, so to speak, gives yourself the freedom to choose ones that might fit your opponent or the moment more easily, to tap into the flow of the evening, which one would assume would strike a favorable mood with the judges. I look at it as each haiku is an arrow, and the more arrows you have in hand, the more likely you are able to find a sharp one. So come equipped as you see fit.

A personal aside, as a man who has literally written several thousand haiku over the past five years, a method I use is writing them one per index card. This seems like a good method for a hand-to-hand haiku battle, as you can have your handful of index cards, mark out ones you use, and shuffle them around and use them accordingly. Just a tip, you can use it or ignore it as you see fit.

WHAT ABOUT HAIKU?

Ah yes, the terribly pretentious question us westerners are forced to ask ourselves with regards to a Japanese literary tradition based on a language of characters while we speak syllables. Haiku traditionally was tied to the seasons, and the most common western translation has been a three-line poem of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables was the truest replication of the Japanese poem. We are going to go with this. Now somebody may say, “Wait, counting syllables goes against what haiku actually is, Raven!” Well, let me tell you, I know this form deeply, and could tell you that haiku is not even a poetic form on its own, but is part of a larger group form of poetry called renga where the first part was called hokku and became the title of famous renga poems, thus it became its own thing as literary time passed. So haiku is not even technically what the hell it is supposed to be. So for all haiku traditionalists insulted at counting syllables, once you are holding mass parties where groups of people compose poems together with 100 verses per poem, you can hold your complaints to yourself. We cannot accept part of a traditional but pretend the rest doesn’t exist and call ourselves a traditionalist. I mean, we could, and in fact that’s what most people do, but I’m not supporting that.

So for our sake, our haiku will be three-line poems, preferably of 5-syllables, 7-syllables, and 5-syllables. I will not count them though, and if you feel overly confined by this structure (form is good for you though), you can stretch the definition of haiku to mean a short poem of 17-syllables (or less).

Also, traditionally, these have been tied to the seasons, or nature, but I regard the act of haiku as more a meditation or habit of observation, which means all the fucked up parts of the world made by man are as natural as nature, and perfect for haiku. You can go traditional or you can go with observing the world around you or you can go experimental. Whatever’s clever.

And obviously, you should write your own haiku.

BUT HOW WILL THESE BE JUDGED?

A valid question, as none of us wants to be judged, and yet judges will be involved. Honestly, there is no right or wrong way to pick a winner, and this method will always be subjective. Always. But I am going to have three judges, and sort of suggest each of them concentrate on a different vague aspect that pertains to them, such as “artistry” or “spirituality” or “dope ass rhythm” and so on. Judges’ decisions will be final, and also subjective, so never take it personally. This is meant to be fun, and will be fun, so nobody needs to get all, “Damn, why wasn’t my eternal creativity of poetic greatness not properly recognized in this fucking hand-to-hand haiku thing? This is bullshit!”

Judges: You will judge as you feel appropriate. Like I mentioned above, I’ll give you a theme as a suggestion for your focus, but you can toss that aside completely and just go with your heart. In fact, the whole point of haiku is to go with your heart, and this whole nonsense endeavor of a tournament is meant to motivate people to go with what’s in their heart, not worry and become anxious.

SO WHAT DO WE WIN?

Winner of the night’s tournament will receive a railroad spike etched with HAIKU LOUNGER. I carve haiku onto railroad spikes as a thing (as seen here - http://www.etsy.com/shop/WorkingmanBooks). You will not get an actual haiku spike, but you will get the HAIKU LOUNGER trophy spike, and you will be declared the victor in some sort of fashion, and end up with something tangible to hold in your hand and be like, “YES! I have finally arrived!”

That is the plan. This will be the first of these we host in Philadelphia, and we hope to do it once or twice a year at the Fresh Dipped space moving forward. The whole point of this is to spread the joy of quick poetry, and also make a fun battle-game out of it. It will only be as fun and amazing as we all make it though. If you are worried at any point, be assured I am emceeing the whole event, and will make it entertaining on my own if need be. Do not feel any pressure at all. Enjoy the experience.

If you have any questions beyond this, hit me up. ravenmack at gmail.com.