Like haikus? Like maps? There's a website that blends them both.

The creators at Satellite Studio created OpenStreetMap Haiku, a site that whips up a brand new haiku for every single address, neighborhood, town, etc. you place your cursor over.*

As the creative team explains in a blog post:

"Looking at every aspect of the surroundings of a point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world. The result is sometimes fun, often weird, most of the time pretty terrible. Also probably horrifying for haiku purists (sorry)."

Inspired by artist Naho Matsuda's EVERY THING EVERY TIME project, which used data points of one city to create short poems, the Satellite Studio team followed suit--albeit on a massive global scale.

The myriad of nearby data points from a selected spot include grocery stores, schools, bus stop locations, etc., to generate the haiku. They even include current weather and time of day, which leads to a potentially new haiku again and again for a selected spot.

Some randomly selected locations checked just now:

Boston, MA @ 28 State Street:
A bird in the tree,
Meet at Court Street, 1
The blurs of lifetimes


Paris, France @ 3 Avenue de l'Opera:
White paint on concrete
Quite chilly
Dear You


Tokyo, Japan @ JP Tower:
Commuting back home
A vacant lot
Warm air from the subway entrance


Checking local places I personally know, OpenStreetMap Haiku generated a variety of poems suggesting again and again that it was "a sad day."

Either the haiku generator is feeling down in the dumps or I need to reevaluate where I live.


*It works well in populated nations. But some random sparse locations, like Micronesia, weren't worth a haiku according to the map. Let's have a moment of silence for Micronesia then.