With the help of our good friends at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, we came up with a way to invite cool kids from Bushwick to Echo Park to lift their voices up and sing as one, to the extent that ever happens outside of an Arcade Fire show: The Hipster Haiku contest. The contest is over now, but the lingering whiff of sulphur and the warm fuzzy feelings remain.

We received hundreds of entries, many of them very very funny. The ten best are featured in the book Hipster Haiku, along with the names of 200 more runners-up. Congratulations again to:

Patricia Bailey of Klamath Falls

for the best “Dear John” letter ever

Lia Davis of Austin, TX

for her sweet-but-sly celebration of geek crushing

Beth Lowell of Morristown, NJ

for concentrated essence of summer-in-the-city

Ashley Macknica of New York, NY

for parsing the subtext of a thousand LES cruises

Frank Merlino of Plano, TX

for his hilarious connection of ennui and Sax Rohmer

Peggy Nelson of Garfield, TX

for the killing understatement

B Newman of San Francisco, CA

for expressing the optimism of the age

Audrey Southgate of New York, NY

for sprinkling haiku with a briliiant dash of chiasmus

Tracy Taylor of Mission Viejo, CA

for a pleasingly peaceful, Sunday afternoon image

Heather Van Doren of Toledo, OH

for bringing the laundromat motif full circle

So what were the criteria for success? Just what is a hipster haiku? Our contest guidelines, below, may give you an idea. And if these guidelines help inspire you to write your own hipster haiku, then goddammit, we’ve done our jobs.

Hipster Haiku Writing Guidelines

1. Form. Here is the form that a poem must take in order to be considered eligible. This form, you will not be at all surprised to hear, is called a haiku:

    one line of five syllables

    a second line of seven syllables

    a third line of five syllables

2. Content. The haiku must be about hipsters or something related to them. The less said about this, the better.

3. Function. Extra haiku credit may be accrued by observing these guidelines for classical haiku:

• A real, classical haiku refers, through symbol or figurative language, to the season it describes—and it always describes a season, or at the very least, something about the natural world. (A hipster haiku, on the other hand, is more likely to refer to the season in which Dr. Scholl's exercise sandals enjoyed a brief but celebrated revival in Manhattan's East Village.)
• A classical haiku creates a moment of "transition" or "cutting," which allows the poem to shift gears, or which in some way expands the poem's scope. (A hipster haiku often attempts this through a colon, dash, or some other form of punctuation that implies a pause, a break, or a shift in tone. Emily Dickinson should have copyrighted the em-dash while she still had a chance.)
• In a classical haiku, each line usually contains one self-sufficient phrase or unit of meaning that doesn't carry over onto the next line. (Hipster haiku, while aspiring to the formal elegance of three self-sufficient lines, fails as often as it succeeds at such formidable concision.)