foul glittering streets / once beautiful souls all made / ugly by money
Haiku | “made ugly by money”
September 23, 2016 by Peter Galen Massey
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Peter Galen Massey 
but I still wish you’d break away from that 5-7-5 and reach the heart of the senryu…
Weeeell. (Are you familiar with the slow drawn out American “well”? It usually signals what comes next is a carefully considered answer to a reasonable question.) On the 5-7-5 — and I think we’ve talked about this before — I actually find its restrictions helpful. It is the only poetic form I’ve found that makes it easier for me to write rather than harder. I also like just how difficult the haiku form makes it to write something good. The arbitrary difficulty of the challenge gets me really juiced up, I’m not sure exactly why, but I don’t think it is because I unconsciously want to set myself up for failure. It does mean that I’m only really satisfied with about 1 in 10 to 1 in 15 of the haiku I post. As for the heart of the poem — well all of us are always chasing the heart of the poem every time, aren’t we? — but that heart seems to be as rare and elusive as a unicorn. And that complicated by the fact there is just no telling what people will like. Things I think are good fall into utter silence. Other things I write just to feed the beast, the occasional neighbor will stop me on the street to say they liked. As for this one, did I reach the heart? Nah. There is something to it though. The contrasting foul / glittering + beautiful / ugly may be as old as the hills, and it is, but it gives it something. And if you had seen the wealthy sterile suburban American shopping street that gave rise to the haiku, horrible horrible horrible — did those people really dress up on a Friday evening and fight through all that damned traffic just to sit outside a fake Italian coffee shop on a fake cobbled stone street surrounded by people exactly like them all dressed up too? — you’d slap the laurels on my head. Except I believe your point is I should have told you about that too. Yes?
Yes, but just ignore me – I have this bee in my bonnet…