The Winner

The winner of the Joe Don Baker Haiku contest is . . .

. . . i don't know yet.

This is a very hard decision for me. Forty-six poems were submitted, and there were some really excellent entries. i found myself literally doubled over with laughter at all of Kevin Kim's. Especially this one:

I once saw Joe Don
tear a wolf in two using
only his nipples

Interestingly, despite the requirement that a true haiku make some reference to a season, only one entry, by Matt Rustler, came close to doing that:

Joe Don, sixty-eight,
Lion in winter. Still not
One to trifle with.

And Victor had me rolling with this one too, which i think is inspired:

Mitchell! A cop with
A gun, a drink, and no friends.
Well, there's that hooker.

Scof's use of the dead/head rhyme, while not what i'd expect in a haiku, is a rather appealing musical reference for this former bay area girl. Plus he introduced me to a new website reference, DeadorAliveInfo.com:

Large is joe don's head
Which makes this all funny since
I thought he was dead

And Shelly does some interesting, experimental, and not entirely successful stuff with vowel alliteration and slant rhyme:

The haiku is done
Where is Annika now that
We need her wit now?

i particularly liked this next one, by Rocket Jones' Ted, because it combined Victor's rat obsession with an oblique reference to a Crispin Glover movie. What actor could be more antithetical to JDB than Crispin Glover? And Ted's haiku is perfectly free of enjambment:

Remake Willard flick
Joe Don Baker in the lead
Victor's fantasy

While it may or may not be technically correct to use enjambment in haiku, i think it should be used sparingly in most poetry. But almost every single haiku in the contest contained some form of enjambment. So, like that unfair professor you hated in college, i used this technicality to eliminate many otherwise worthy poems from contention, based on their degree of reliance on enjambment.

GEBIV posted what i thought was a solid haiku, relatively free of enjambment, but he committed the fatal error of ignoring the 5-7-5 rule:

Great shades of Elvis,
Rocking the gates of Graceland.
Who is this Joe Don Baker?

Still other poems were easily eliminated because they had nothing to do with Joe Don Baker. After winnowing down the list through various secretive and unfair methodologies, i came up with these eight nine finalists:

Mitchell! A cop with
A gun, a drink, and no friends.
Well, there's that hooker.

Remake Willard flick
Joe Don Baker in the lead
Victor's fantasy

Dictionary page
Joe Don Baker defined as
Genius with a sneer

Baker, broad-shouldered:
late-night tv heroics,
stuff of my childhood...

Joe Don walked tall
When Dwayne Jonhson wore diapers.
Johnson is his bitch.

Annika's secret
she's got a Joe Don tattoo
on her inner thigh

Joe Don Baker is
Gary Cooper in High Noon
for the Nascar set.

Groesbeck, Texas sits
sleepily west of Waco,
until the bar fight.

I don't know Joe Don.
Don't really give a rat's ass.
Wrote a haiku, though!

A haiku should reveal some sort of spiritual enlightenment, and i'm going to need some spiritual enlightenment to pick a winner from these eight. i'm now going to go sit under a lotus blossom or whatever and try to make a decision.