The Daily Beatle : haiku

Showing posts with label haiku. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Wednesday haiku - "I Call Your Name"

I made an oversight when composing the haiku for songs from Past Masters, Volume One, the compilation of early Beatles singles and b-sides that also includes the four tracks off the Long Tall Sally EP. I mistakenly thought all four were covers, and skipped over them because I didn't want to get bogged down in haiku for non-original songs. As it turns out, one was an original - "I Call Your Name," written by John before The Beatles formed.

Between the twelve-string,
the cowbell, and the ska bridge,
"Name" unfolds with flair.

(The rest of my Beatles haiku can be found here.)

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

A haiku for pretty much every song by The Beatles

At long last, my Beatles haiku project has come to an end; the finished product is below. I began writing these haiku for a simple reason: I wanted to contribute something original to the world of Beatles writing. As far as I can gather from searching the Internet, no comparable undertaking has been completed and published. If this is the case, terrific. If not, I've still had a rich experience becoming intimately familiar with pretty much all of The Beatles' songs. As lightweight as these pseudo-poems may be, a lot of research went into their formation. I'd like to think that, on some level, this project serves as a history of The Beatles. It addresses the band's influences, the development of their sound, their individual personalities, important figures in their lives, significant events, the Lennon-McCartney partnership, and more. But I also realize that, on another level, it's just a curiously packaged collection of trivia.

Either way, I hope that you read it, enjoy it, and maybe even learn from it. If you spy any errors (i.e., misinformation or non-conformities with the 5-7-5 haiku format), please let me know.

Finally, it would be quite an affront to decency if I failed to thank The Beatles for their wonderful songs. They've brought so much joy and inspiration to so many people, including myself. I suppose these haiku could be seen as a show of gratitude (however meager by comparison) for all of that.

Here they are, by album:

- Please Please Me
- With The Beatles
- A Hard Day's Night
- Beatles for Sale
- Help!
- Rubber Soul
- Revolver
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Magical Mystery Tour
- The Beatles
- Yellow Submarine
- Abbey Road
- Let It Be
- Singles and B-sides

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Singles and B-sides haiku

Below, you'll find the haiku I've written for The Beatles' non-album singles and B-sides. It's everything from the Past Masters collections with the exception of these songs: "Love Me Do" (which I had already done), the German-language renditions of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You" (skipped for obvious reasons, I think), the covers from the Long Tall Sally EP and Larry Williams' "Bad Boy" (I didn't feel like getting bogged down with covers), "Get Back" (which I had already done), the charity version of "Across the Universe" (it's superior to the one on Let It Be, but it's not blessed with canon status), and "Let It Be" (which I had already done). For all of the other songs, I wrote a haiku, and they collectively represent the last ones I composed or will compose; in other words, I'm done. Tomorrow, I will bring them all together in one post and finally close the book on this project.

Enjoy.

1) "From Me to You"
2) "Thank You Girl"
3) "She Loves You"
4) "I'll Get You"
5) "I Want to Hold Your Hand"
6) "This Boy"
7) "I Call Your Name"
8) "I Feel Fine"
9) "She's a Woman"
10) "Yes It Is"
11) "I'm Down"
12) "Day Tripper"
13) "We Can Work It Out"
14) "Paperback Writer"
15) "Rain"
16) "Lady Madonna"
17) "The Inner Light"
18) "Hey Jude"
19) "Revolution"
20) "Don't Let Me Down"
21) "The Ballad of John and Yoko"
22) "Old Brown Shoe"
23) "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"