Accidental Haiku

Constraints are important. They can define the nature of what we see, as when you drop a frame onto an image, suggesting, at least, that what is framed is now “art”, or when you slap some numbers and lots of indentation onto a patch of text, making it look like legislation. Poetry used to have constraints — rhyme schemes, meter, number of feet and lines, etc. — which, I suppose, was one way you knew it was poetry; and haiku is among the few surviving examples of constrained poetry in common use today.

So long as you adopt the 5-7-5 syllables definition of haiku, it’s not terribly hard to find them anywhere, and to re-examine the prose so captured in a new light, if even for only a moment.

One of the “accidental” things I learned at the recent CanLII hackathon was that the good folks who bring you OpenParliament.ca like to have a little fun on the side with all that text emitted by MPs. For example, they apply a haiku finder to parliamentary debates to seek out that 5-7-5 amid the blather, and all you have to do is click a button (again, and again, and again) until you find something pleasing.

MP Greg Thompson once wondered:

What is the correct
     method of pulling a fish
out of the water?

And MP Scot Brison averred:

They believe Jean Brault.
     I trust Justice Gomery.
They believe Jean Brault.

And MP Joe Comartin told us:

We all know that there
     are different types of people
who steal vehicles.

Curious as to how it was done, I came across a free-form haiku finder by Jonathan Feinberg. So I entered a bunch of text from Supreme Court judgments. Surprisingly, I found our top people don’t speak much haiku. But eventually — by stabbing at random in the CanLII database — I came up with a couple that illustrate what could happen:

The burden of proof
     under the Mining Tax Act
is set out in s.

[Halifax (Regional Municipality) v. Nova Scotia (Human Rights Commission), 2012 SCC 10]

The Crown’s obligation
     as a fiduciary
must be considered.

[Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada (Minister of Canadian Heritage), 2005 SCC 69]