Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

2026 marks 10 years since Hamish Ironside’s Boatwhistle Books published Off the Beaten Track, a beautifully-produced and quirky haiku anthology with a difference, available to buy here.

Twelve people (including Hamish himself) were allocated a month each, from February 2015 onwards, to write a haiku every day: six experienced haiku poets (Hamish Ironside, me, Michael Dylan Welch, Christopher Herold, George Swede and Bob Lucky), and six who were not (Hugo Williams, Matthew Welton, Sally Read, Momus, Fabian Ironside and Éireann Lorsung). Of the latter six, Williams, Welton, Read and Lorsung were, and are, very established longer-form poets, and one (Momus) was, and is, a musician and blogger.

The results were unsurprisingly mixed in terms of what might be considered traditional, high-quality haiku, but never less than interesting. Here are half a dozen examples:

A daddy-long-legs
crawling up Noël Coward’s face
on the television

Hugo Williams


lost in the rain
I smell the sheep reviving
in my jumper

Hamish Ironside


evangelicals:
their keyboard-player gives it
the full Rick Wakeman

me


car trip—
we add new harmonies
to a disco tune

Michael Dylan Welch


our shadows
ride home on
the shadows of our bikes

Matthew Welton


snowy owl
the moon slices pathways
through the woods

Christopher Herold