Haiku Corner: On Charlie Rose

by Garrison Keillor

Charlie Rose appeared

One night with a big shiner

And did not explain

Who or what hit him

Thinking this too trivial

For public TV

And allowed women

To think him heroic but

In fact he fell down.

Featured on the Best American Poetry website on 27 April 2008, with David Lehman’s explanation that “This is Garrison Keillor’s contribution to the renga that Vickie Karp created for the “inside thirteen” blog of New York City’s PBS outlet, Channel 13. Renga is the name of a Japanese ‘chain’ form in which two or more poets collaborate in haiku or in alternating stanzas, a haiku stanza (three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables) followed by a two-line stanza, each line containing seven syllables.”