Having spent quite a few days working on my upcoming books, I am amazed to discover that the bulkiest one of them all is my haiku collection, cheerfully entitled Catching Up with Issa. Although each one of them counts only one-hundred and sixty characters, including spaces, they have been piling up since 2004, when I adopted this format for my poetry, which was a joke of sorts on my mobile-phone text-message limitation at the time. Right now, there are close to one-thousand and eight-hundred of them, but their number will grow and grow. In a few years, I expect my haiku to become my main form of writing. The way I am going, I will catch up with Issa in a few short years. Say, five years at most. Which makes me ever-so-slightly sad, I must admit. Having caught up with one of my favorite poets, I will feel kind of lonely. As well as bereft of a perky prank.

Addendum I (November 7, 2016)

I just counted the haiku in my collection, and there are only a few more than one-thousand and nine-hundred of them at this juncture. In other words, I have come up with only a hundred or so of them the last twelve months. As there are more than twenty-thousand haiku to Issa’s name, my chances at catching up with him are slight at best (“Catching Up with Issa,” August 14, 2011). To wit, the perky prank is here to stay. Hooray!

Addendum II (August 14, 2018)

Well, well. To begin with, my haiku collection is far from the bulkiest one among my books at this juncture. No less than three of them are way ahead of it in terms of bulk. Perhaps more important, I have added no more than a hundred haiku to my collection since the first addendum was written. Although I still expect haiku to become my main form of writing in the years to come, I hope to come up with no more than about fifty of them a year. In short, I have no chance of catching up with Issa any longer. None whatsoever. As far as perky pranks go, mine is but a dud.