Bringing Poetry
Power To Epidemiology
New Haiku
Contest—Win $300
Dictionary.com defines haiku as a form of verse written
in 17 syllables divided into 3 lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. We
recently came across a National Public Radio story entitled “Haiku
Traffic Signs Bring Poetry To NYC Streets”. The story described a
dozen haiku traffic warning street signs and quoted the designer
saying “Poetry has a lot of power. ‘If you say to people: ‘Walk’
‘Don’t Walk’ or ‘Look both ways’. If you can tweak it just a bit---and
poetry does that---the device gives these simple words power.” A
couple of NYC signs read as follows:
Imagine a world
Where every move
matters
Welcome to that world
Too averse to risk
To chance the lottery,
yet
Steps into traffic
This story reminded us of some of the haiku submitted in the early
days of The Epidemiology Monitor and gave us the idea to create a
Haiku Contest for Epidemiologists. The purpose of this contest is to
elicit haiku which best capture the methods or purposes of
epidemiology. The winner for the best entry will receive a $300 cash
prize and bragging rights. We might be persuaded to create a t-shirt
with the winning haiku, including the author’s name to be worn in
epidemiology and other less formal situations. All entries become the
exclusive property of the newsletter. The deadline for submission is
June 10, 2016. Send your entries to epimon@aol.com
To get your creative juices flowing, here are sample
haiku collected years ago by The Epidemiology Monitor. These were not
submitted as part of any contest and may or may not have had much to
do with epidemiology. They were published in the newsletter in 1985
and reprinted in Epi Wit & Wisdom, our compilation of the best from
the first 20 years of the newsletter.
Four haiku were submitted by
Craig Hedberg:
Public health haiku
Melt the snows of ignorance
Blanketing disease
Cigarette smoking
Raises up clouds of health risk
That storm without cease
Crabs are summer’s fun
In a memory transformed
By incessant itch
Germs are drowned in
soapy froth
As hygenic flood
Washes the handscape
Four other “haiku”, breaking the rule about syllables,
were submitted by Dan Cherkin
Epidemiologic haikus
Have few syllables
At the end.
Love, prophylactically,
Means never having to say
You are sorry.
P.I. slain by sharp rebuke
Death certificate reads
"Grant funds denied".
Natural causes out of vogue
Smoke or salt or sloth
Have grave results
Send
us your imaginative haiku expressing the power of epidemiology! There
is no limit to the number of entries allowed. In the event that two
haiku are very similar, the earliest one submitted will receive
priority consideration. All decisions made by our panel of judges
will be final. Be the first to submit at
epimon@aol.com ■
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