Tidings, Blogosphere!
messages in a bottle
at currents’ mercy.
No photo today with my haiku: instead, a few questions for my blog followers and visitors.
Last week I tidied up the widgets in my sidebar, as well as reorganising the categories and tags to all my posts. It was a time-consuming task but as satisfying as spring-cleaning the house.
This week is about tweaking my content (if necessary) but to do this, I would appreciate your feedback. So today, I’ll begin with a haiku related poll and, if none of my questions quite fit what you want to say, or you would like to enlarge on your answers, please leave a comment. Many thanks 🙂
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Sarah Potter Writes 
feels good to tidy things up. Like opening the windows and allowing the winds of change to blow through.
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That’s a good way of describing it. I like the concept of allowing the winds of change to blow through.
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Interesting poll, Sarh. I like the second option. Happy Monday to you. 🙂
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Thanks for your feedback, Sylvia. I think I prefer haiku that way, too, but have opted for punctuation so far, as WordPress shares the poem as a single line on facebook, so it ends up looking quite random. But come to think of it, my followers there are used to my randomness, so it doesn’t really matter!
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Dang, but you are organized and thorough! Take my vote with a grain of salt. I love photography and art (though I was never a great page designer back in the olden days), but I adore, cherish, and am devoted to the words, so I honestly hadn’t noticed the sidebar change other than the gravatar, though I’m certain it does feel logistically very satisfying. As to the poem at hand, punctuation simply helps me to know where you, as an author, wanted the breath to be taken, a pregnant pause to be felt, a full stop to slow me down, etc. I think “unpunctuation” is more useful, to me, for haiku or experimental Ginsberg-esque poetry. (Or, to the opposite, really mindful and artful-in-itself punctuation like cummings did.)
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Thanks for your thoughtful feedback, Leigh.
I share a house with an ex-lawyer who, having spent many years preparing legal documents, is incredibly sparing with commas. If he asks me to proofread anything for him, I feel compelled to add commas, especially on either side of sub-clauses, but I only ever put them to him as suggestions.
I agree with you that punctuation helps the reader know where she or he is; to define in a subtle way, the pace and mood of the piece and mark the changes as they occur. Personally, I find unpunctuated prose very hard to follow. As for my haiku, at the moment, the majority vote is for me to stay with the punctuation.
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Have you ever seen the scene in Red Dwarf (the TV show) where Rimmer is adding all those commas, after practically every 2 or 3 words? Funny! I love the story you related about living with a lawyer! Yeah, unpunctuated is hard to follow for me also, but I enjoy the challenge from time to time (if it’s skillfully done, know what I mean?)
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Ah, yes. Red Dwarf. It seems we like all the same television series. Not a lot on at the moment on British telly, other than Dr Who,The 100, and Under the Dome. That weird French series The Returned is also going to …well … return soon. If you haven’t seen it, I suppose it’s sort of a zombie story, but one unlike anything you’ll have never seen before.
Anyway, this is all digressing far from original subject of punctuation, a thing that I’m sure doesn’t interest zombies at all!
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I tidied too or tried!! my categories and tags were starting to look like my bureau drawers (and I voted)!!
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I must have driven WordPress mad, as I kept changing my mind about which things I wanted as categories and which as tags, so must have converted and re-converted between the two about fifty times. I’m still not sure whether to have Haiku and Tanka as categories or tags. At the moment, they are tags, with Poetry as a category. Speaking of bureau drawers … on the “to do” list.
Thanks for voting. The poll results so far, seem to indicate that the majority are happy with things as they are.
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Hi Sarah,
Too many choices! Whatever you have been doing has worked for me, although I don’t remember exactly what that is. I guess, now that I think of it, seeing the photo first and then the haiku can give you a bit of that Ah Ha! feeling when the words match the photos so perfectly, as they always do.
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Hi Naomi, that’s good to hear. Just checking, as I like to keep my followers happy:-) So far, I’ve put the photograph first followed by a punctuated haiku, although on one occasion a purist suggested my haiku would be better unpunctuated and with no capital letters. But he did offer his opinion very pleasantly.
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