Editorial team

MEET THE FOOTBALL HAIKU WORLD CUP TEAM


Matthew Devereux. Amongst other things, Matthew has also written "Chess Fantasia: 1,001 love letters to the game". 

The photograph on the left is almost a decade old. He has far less hair on his head now. 

He is based in Woking, Surrey, England. Woking in Surrey possibly has some shops that offer hair replacement therapy.

Matthew couldn't tell his mora from his syllable. He has no conception whatsoever of the difference between a haiku, a tanka, a senryu, a waka, a renga and a cynghanedd.

These days, Matthew is very rarely seen outside his Facebook profile.



Alan Summers. Founder of With Words, Alan is a man of haiku through and through. Alan is a haiku editor with the haijinx magazine for the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, Africa and the Indian Sub-Continent; and Renga/renku editor for Notes from the Gean.  He is about to embark on a six month contract in the North of England as a haiku/renga poet. 

If you would like to see Alan in action, he is archived at the British Library for his part in Antony Gormley's Fourth Plinth "One and Other" project based in Trafalgar Square, London: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100223124345/http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Alan_S.

Alan has also just finished organising the Bath Japanese Festival. The Bath Japanese Festival is a Japanese festival in the city of Bath in the south-west of England, not a festival involving people speaking Japanese in a bath. He has also graduated to becoming a manga character. That is just the tip of the Alan Summers iceberg. Not only that, but his surname is also a kigo (or 季語 or season word).

Alan Summers is available in Facebook form.


Tim Souster. A primary school teacher in London, England, Tim Souster represented Oxford University at football, gained a First in English literature, and has written book reviews for "The Times Literary Supplement" and "The Financial Times". 

He was once a singer in a band that played a limited number of shows in the south-east of England to no acclaim whatsoever. 

Tim Souster is usually mistaken for Tim Souster, the avant-guardist electronic musician and composer. In his spare time Tim Souster enjoys listening to BBC Radio Four, making his own cider, working with taffeta, pottering about, and playing his krumplehorn, a medieval Welsh and Cornish musical instrument (much to the delight of his neighbours).

Tim Souster did not ask for this photograph to be used on this website.
Tim Souster is at Facebook but he isn't fundamentally interested in computers, let alone web 2.0 or social networking sites. At his Facebook profile there is a photograph of him eating sausage rolls.

Timmy Killeen. Timmy Killeen runs the English Football Post. According to
the picture at his Facebook profile, Timmy Killeen enjoys eating seafood. According to his Facebook status updates, Timmy Killeen likes going to the beach instead of sitting about at home like an o-taku (おたく) constantly updating his Facebook status.

Timmy Killeen is based in Galway, Ireland. This does not mean that he wrote the song "Galway Girl" written by Steve Earle and recorded with Irish musician Sharon Shannon. Equally, it does not mean that he is Irish musician Sharon Shannon. Nor does it mean that he is non-football loving comedian Stewart Lee singing "Galway Girl".

Timmy Killeen has a Facebook incarnation where he is available for seafood discussion. Unless, of course, he is on the beach. Eating seafood.


Peter Ulrik Roeder. Peter Ulrik Roeder is an awful lot more than a Facebook avatar and is the author of "GAME OVER". He is based in Lyngby, Denmark. He said he was basically too busy to be involved in this project. Because he is Danish he has some markings above the 'o' in his surname that an English person basically cannot cope with. He says he isn't basically all that interested in football.

He did write a haiku for the book but it wasn't a footballhaiku (or foothaiku) and it was as heavy as a book by Kierkegaard. In his photograph he is wearing a pink hat with frilly bits because the photo was taken on New Year's Eve and all Danish people wear pink hats with frilly bits on New Year's Eve. Despite this apparent frivolity, they write haiku like this (which, hopefully, is not a comment on Denmark's chances of getting out of Group E against Japan, the Netherlands and Cameroon):

a dream vanished
the evil in my life
ruined it all


Adriana Piccardo. Adriana Piccardo is the creator and administrator of a Spanish-language haiku group at Facebook. Or, as she prefers to refer to it, either 'seahaikufootball' or 'sea haiku football' or 'haikuooll' or 'haik's cool' or 'haicool'.


Adriana Piccardo is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Adriana is a psychoanalyst who specialised in HR in LA. She fell in love with Japanese culture and has bought five tatami, kimonos and blossom flowers. She loves classics, fiction and Japanese films. The moment she was asked on board the FHWC Team she wrote the following:

My mother would say
Oh, you're still watching the match
Yes mom, be my guest

Adriana Piccardo said that she doesn't really understand this project and that haiku don't really have space for football. She also claims that she shouldn't be involved because she is "legally blonde" though technically it would, presumably, be more of an impediment if she were illegally blonde. One of her comments was in the form of a free-form senryuette:

But haikus are supposed to be related to the Cup?!
OMG!
Sigo sin entender!

Adriana Piccardo reads a lot more books than just the Books with Faces.  Above is a photo of her at the To-ji temple (東寺), Kyoto (京都).  She particularly enjoyed the tea room.



Roxana Elena Roseti. Roxana is based in Romania and is an editor on the Romanian newspaper Jurnalul National, where she edits and writes work on culture, society, lifestyle and so on. She used to edit the Jurnalul de duminica. Because she is so busy as a journalist and writer, Roxana is not a character in the play "Cyrano de Bergerac", let alone "The Tao of Bergerac".

Whatever the speculation in the bars and boulevards of Bucharest, it is also highly unlikely that she is a relation of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti or the poet Christina Rossetti.

Roxana Elena Roseti is Facebookable.



Jon Greenbank. Jon Greenbank writes for the English Football Post.


It might be safe to assume that Jon Greenbank is an Alfred Hitchcock fan. His article "I saw it all" contains no fewer than twenty-five Hitchcock film titles in such a short space that the reader is struck immediately by Vertigo.

The story goes that Hitchcock once threw a dinner party where all the food was dyed blue. Jon Greenbank has been on record describing himself as being "an imbiber of nature". Anybody invited over to Mr.Greenbank's abode for a soiree might be advised to bring their own food and drink along with them.

Jon Greenbank's Face is booked, though his face doesn't always look much like his face there.




Dick Whyte.  Dick Whyte is a Renaissance Man from Wellington, New Zealand, for whom haiku is just one feather (he co-edits "Haiku News") in a voluminous and multi-dimensional cap that also incorporates country music, "noise" music, abstract and experimental film-making, digital art and musings on metaphysics, philosophy and noology. He also edits the digital art blog HOTLINKS and the Tao Wells fansite Dick's Art Blog. Not content with fitting all that into 24/7 (he has presumably discovered a way to live without eating or sleeping in order to cram it all in) Dick has also pioneered a way of rendering himself barely the size of a human eyeball, which comes in handy in areas of high population density. Currently he is archiving his own work at ART DICK.


Even though it is barely the size of a human eyeball, Dick's Face is also Booked.


Rob Scott.  Rob Scott is a haiku poet from Melbourne, Australia. His poems have been rejected by editors all over the globe. Enough to fill a book. And there’s the rub. He is currently doing his Masters thesis on the history of haiku in Australia. He spent one year as a goalkeeper in the under 10’s which makes him an expert on the beautiful game. He has also lived and worked in the soccer-mad countries of The Netherlands, Sweden and Japan. In his spare time Rob dresses up as a fairy, a frog, a super-hero or whoever his three year old daughter is bossing around at the time.


In Australia, apparently, according to travellers' tales, there are all sorts of extraordinary things in existence, such as Tasmanian Devils and black swans and even a fabulous entity called 'Australian Rules Football'.  Rob has written extensive Aussie Rules Haiku.  Like the rest of the team, he is not averse to Facescribblisation.




Dave 'Serjeantina' Serjeant.   
The Football Haiku Team is currently an entirely cybernautic entity whose stock-in-trade is the manipulation of the abstract characters of written language, but an interesting form of speculation would be whether they would have defined positions if they ever take to a football pitch together, or whether they would adopt a version of Total Football.  If they were to adopt positions, a major decision would be whether to play Manchester City fanatic Dave Serjeant as a Midfield General in the Colin Bell mould, or whether, technically, a Serjeant cannot be a General without so many feathers being ruffled that nobody would know where they stood anymore.   Another problem is the fact that Dave admits openly that on the rare occasions that he plays he makes up for "lack of talent" by being the dirtiest player on the pitch.



From day one Dave has brought dazzle and dynamite to the team dynamics.  Dave fires out haiku, senryu and micropoetry thunderbolts at a site called Distant Lightning.  At his Facezone he lists his musical influences as everything from Explosions in the Sky to Flying Saucer Attack.  When Serjeantina's around, literary pyrotechnics are never far behind.


Dave Serjeant likes to ride his Sparklehorse down the Tobacco Road.  Whereupon he allows his magical brain to ruminate.




Rishi 'Rish the Dish' Dastidar.  Solskjaerian supersub Rishi Dastidar tells us he is so busy that he can barely afford to provide more than a "few tweets" to the team, but given the size of Rishi's mega-brain, a few tweets are worth their weight in gold.


Plays on Rishi's name are unlikely to generate anything better than 'dastardly like Dastidar' which doesn't work euphonically and doesn't work because Rishi is not dastardly.  Neither does he have a dog called Muttley.  Although he has written a beautiful haiku about Pickles the dog.    The photograph below comes from his meeting with Madalyn Morgan.  He has a different photograph at his Facebookmanifestation.  


Amongst other achievements, Rishi has recently deconstructed the ancient Greek alphabet and re-branded Alpha as Beta.