Haiku/Senryu / Writer's Block

Thanks.

Athirst: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/athirst

I’m surprised you feel that references to a fountainhead, reservoir, and the play on rainstorm don’t constitute natural elements.  What’s more natural than the source of stream?

Had I left this untitled and changed the last word to ‘rainstorms’, there would have been no indication that this was about writer’s block specifically, or even about the person generally.  In that case this would have been an attempt at a literal haiku.  Instead, I chose to write a senryu which does not follow the conventional haiku ‘rules’.  Yes, I was attempting something clever by using the natural elements mentioned as a metaphor for writer’s block.

Athirst is my favourite word in this piece.  I love that it’s archaic and unexpected.

Reservoir suggest a man-made feature, while fountainhead can be misconstrued as the book by Ayn Rand.

Ahh…the beauty of redundancy in the English language, and of interpretation in the individual!  

I suggest you look up ‘arid’ and ‘athirst’ in a dictionary.

http://www.answers.com/arid

http://www.answers.com/athirst

Understanding this piece is not dependent on the age of the reader.  It is dependent in part on the reader knowing or taking the time to look up the definition of any words they don’t understand.

Doesn’t inspiration generally come from outside oneself?

The reservoir of creativity/ideas/inspiration, needs to be constantly replenished whether from within or outside.  I believe therefore that unreplenished works perfectly.

Do you have a suggestion for an alternative?

Yeah, something along the lines of regenerating.

I’m glad you liked it.  I wrote a couple of versions of this, but wasn’t 100% happy with any of them.  After giving it some time and looking back at it now, I’m actually really quite happy with this one.

I’m not sure I’d agree with you about the need for intelligence to understand haiku.  Sure, you need to know what some words mean, or be proactive enough to find a definition.  But if I wrote something that was at too high a level for most people to interpret or relate to, I’d have missed out on an opportunity to give to others.

For anyone that hasn’t ever suffered the pain of writer’s block, they wouldn’t relate to this anyway.  So I suppose the group of target readers for this piece is already limited.

That was what I was getting at, writers must think in order to be presented with the writer’s block issue. intelligence is key in understanding writers block in and of itself