Enjoy nearly 3,000 haikus about how shitty 2020 was, because we're all poets now
If we were among polite company and asked to summarize 2020 using a single word, we might say something like “complex,” “difficult,” or “exhausting,” all the while knowing the more accurate—if uncouth—answer would be along the lines of “shitstorm,” or even a long, exasperated exhalation of “Fuuuuuck.”
One survivor of the past twelve months, Eli Holder, decided to combine the two methods of communication via Doom Haikus, a site that has managed to archive what is now thousands of Japanese-style classical poems tackling everything awful in 2020.
Holder recently explained that, around March of last year, they began feeling extremely “overwhelmed” (whatever could have prompted that?), and thought to themselves, “What if, instead of gloomy news… we just had gloomy haikus?!” Simple enough. Hell, even Doom Haiku’s “About” section is given in a neat and tidy 5-7-5 syllabic form: 2020 News / Was All So Bad, But Maybe / Less Bad as Haikus?
To help crowdsource submissions, Holder cleverly solicited poetry through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, subverting a service that is usually employed to outsource labor in typical Jeff Bezos fashion. “About 2,000 people have responded and there are now 2,700 haikus, forever memorializing the worst year of our lives, as anxious sets of 5, 7, 5 syllables,” they said.
So, what served as these amateur poets’ muses? Perhaps unsurprisingly: mostly Bernie Sanders, Trump, and/or COVID-19.
Bernie Wants High Tax?
Don’t Fall for False Math in Memes
Higher Tax for Rich.
Trump is Losing His