Greetings Gatherers!
Have you ever forgotten about a dish in the fridge?
I cleaned out our fridge today and found a few pieces of Tupperware tucked into the far back corners of the top and bottom shelves. I think some of them once contained leftover ingredients for holiday cookies that someone had carefully stored for later use.
They were now covered in a festive green layer of proto-antibiotics. Our family calls this phenomenon forgotten science experiments.
This week I also experienced the results of another forgotten experiment. Eight years ago, I put up a gig on the freelancer platform Fiverr, where I offered to write a series of marketing haiku for companies.
I was experimenting with different ways to get paid for writing poetry. I had a lot of experience working as a freelance copywriter and thought maybe a few businesses would be willing to take a risk on something a little weird.
Only two or three people ever bought the gig, but the clients seemed pleased with the results.
The last time anyone bought the gig was six or more years ago. I had long forgotten about the old experiment. Then this week, a Dutch company ordered five haiku about wearable sensors for livestock.
I was thrilled! I dutifully wrote a series of haiku and sent them off. The client was not thrilled. They informed me that I didn’t know what a haiku was. They told me it had very strict word counts and that some of my lines only had two or three words.
I messaged the client and explained the 5-7-5 structure of an English language haiku poem was based on syllables, not words. (I did not want to get into free verse haiku that are often even shorter!) I sent them a web link that explained a bit about haiku.
As of now, I haven’t heard anything else from the client, but I get the feeling that they regretted their marketing experiment.
I realized that when I created the gig eight years ago, I made some assumptions about the knowledge future clients would possess. I assumed nobody would order the gig without knowing what a haiku was. I did not bother to define haiku in the description.
I still wonder if there is a market for B2B haiku (B2B is jargon for companies that sell to other businesses, business-to-business.)
Later, I will do some more experimenting with the idea of selling poems to companies—and this time, I won’t forget about the experiment and fail to clean it up!
If you’re interested, here are the haiku I wrote for the client:
Livestock wearables
Track animal welfare for
Conscious consumers
Farms save money with
Digital phenotyping
Livestock data stream
Animal welfare
And production improved by
Wearable sensors
Raise better livestock
Digital biomarkers
Key to farm’s future
Phenotyping tech
Makes modern livestock farming
Much more efficient
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
P.S. Here’s a brief note on haiku capitalization. There are seemingly as many ways to deal with capitalization as there are haiku poets. In my illustrated haiku, I follow the standard typographic convention for comics which everything is capitalized. In my non-illustrated haiku, for most uses, I do not capitalize anything except proper nouns and the pronoun “I”. For the B2B haiku, I capitalize the first word in each line as this is what many people believe a poem “looks like”. I also used this format in my first two haiku collections, Pirate Haiku and Horror Haiku. I don’t think any single capitalization method is right or wrong, but I’m always interested in hearing why poets choose one style of formatting over another.
Okaaaaay--haikus about wearable livestock sensors? You can’t make this $hit up!