Haiku Nation

Time Magazine takes a look at mini-lit.

From the story...

Short is in. Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing. Six-word memoirs. Four-word film reviews. Twelve-word novels. Mini-lit is thriving.

Like traditional Japanese poetry, the new pop-culture haiku says a lot with few words. These days digital eloquence is defined by pithiness. Witness the rise of Twitter.com where more than a million users submit messages of 140 characters max (i.e., no longer than this sentence). In the book world, a surprise hit this year has been Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. The book, which features entries culled from more than 25,000 submissions on smithmag.net begins with children's advocate Robin Templeton's "After Harvard, had baby with crackhead" and includes superchef Mario Batali's "Brought it to a boil often."

...the six-word meme is spreading. A North Carolina preacher encourages six-word prayers. A group of techies trade six-word e-mails. And the trend has sparked a revival, on YouTube, of "Weird Al" Yankovic's (This Song's Just) Six Words Long.