Poems and figurative/non-literal language

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Mr. "I know the secrets of the universe" probably has all the poems memorized anyway. No wonder such base speech looks like word salad to him.


Some poetry I can get and I appreciate as I enjoy studying linguistics but I never really get complicated metaphors and I can't produce poetry in the slightest.

I just think he, as almost all other people in the world, has internet access and knows how to google things.

I was trying to be sarcastic. I'm not very good at it.

Hey Friend,

I'm autistic, and I love poetry. I want to echo what others have said, in that different people react differently to different poems. Our autism undoubtedly affects our experience with poetry, not necessarily in a negative way. For me, personally, poetry has been of immense help in understanding what it means to be human, in understanding that I'm not alone in my sense of alienation and my struggle to be understood on my own terms.

I'm hearing from you that you are frustrated by the difficulty in unwinding some of the thematic subtlety that can sometimes be involved with poetry. I hear you. For me, giving myself permission to not like certain poets/poems is essential.

There are poets who are very difficult to understand, both in terms of elaborate language and obscure allusion, probably especially for autistic types. (For example, I find Milton's "Paradise Lost" to be extremely difficult/not worth my personal effort to actually understand, even though it's a staggeringly beautiful poem, and obviously has a great deal of meaning for a great many people. I'm just not on his wavelength. I love Robert Frost, but speaking as an English major, I usually keep my mouth shut about him because people generally have different reactions to him than I do. Ditto T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath.)

But I want to stress that, by and large, poets are not trying to disguise what they mean in an elaborate word fortress to keep what they are saying hidden. If that was what it was, it would be pointless. We have to work so hard to understand the rest of the world in the first place. Poetry simply tries to express things that more literal language fails to convey, and it does so in a way that scratches the deep places we all have within us. Let me show you what I mean. Dylan Thomas didn't say "Don't die," he said ""Rage, rage against the dying of the light." It's wonderfully compact, and yet, for me it has almost physical force. When my parents were dying, I knew exactly what he meant, and it was a comfort to know that other people had felt that way too. I felt a sense of connection in my grief, you know?


Anyhoo, here is a halfassed list of poets who I find to be Autism-friendly, and why.

Seamus Heaney is great, and he is often (not always) pretty straightforward. He likes the arresting phrase/image. "Digging" is wonderful.
The British WW I poets. Military History is my special interest, and the searing intensity of some of their best work is staggering. I can't read "Dulce et Decorum Est" without crying a little.
E.e. Cummings is a wordplay artist extraordinaire, which some of us find charming. I sure do.
There is a lot of speculation that Emily Dickenson was autistic. I certainly think it's very possible. She makes you work for it, but if you stick with it she has this wonderfully crotchety sense of countercultural alienation, which we can all identify with, I think. Speaking of which, Allen Ginsberg is a great countercultural icon, and well worth your time. Rimbaud and Bukowski are a lot of fun, if you like gritty, darkly comic stuff.

I hope this was helpful. Hang in there.

-Rob

I have been on a Milton kick lately. I had always found it difficult, but the real solution was to listen to it rather than read it. There's a magnificent recording by Frederick Davidson that I'd recommend to anyone who wants to take a crack at Paradise Lost. It's an older recording that you may be able to get at your local library; it appears to be available as a torrent also if you know how to process those:

http://toraudiobook.com/audio-books/par ... -milton-4/

I recommend it very highly. Just let the reading flow over you, and you'll be struck again and again by amazing lines and images. For example: Satan escapes from Hell with the help of his daughter-wife Sin and his son-grandson Death, who burst open Hell's massive gates that open onto the realm of Chaos. Chaos is neither Hell nor Heaven nor Earth, but something more frightening, almost like we might imagine the inside of black hole, with matter and energy in a ferocious hurricane. As they burst open Hell's gates they feel Hell's smoke and flame blast behind them out into Chaos, where

Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth, and height,
And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars.... Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature, and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire ... the wary Fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

Well I read a lot of poetry, and though I had difficulty in the past I usually just push myself through and I'm eventually able to piece together the meaning. Not for some of the really weird modern crap which I have a truly hard time with, but for some of the older styled poems from places like England, Greece, China, Persia, India, etc. These, I find, are pretty literal once you can get past the weird usage of language. Some of it is beautiful. Comparing modern art to poetry is like comparing classical music to classical poetry, because classical poetry flows, it's got a form to it, it's descriptive, deep, in depth, philosophical, and rich in emotional context. That was probably one of the most "neurotypical" sentences I've ever written lol.

“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”.
This is a description of human fragility in comparison to...basically everything else including the Gods. The meaning isn't hidden, and it allows you to think extensively into the actual meaning of the statement. This is from the Odyssey by Homer. It is 2800 years old and it isn't some gamble for attention like many of the modern strings of nonsensical words.

I don't want to post an example of a bad poem because I would feel mean, so here is a link to something interesting: http://flavorwire.com/384480/the-absolu ... elebrities

I used to think I disliked poetry. That is, until I looked around myself and found poetry I liked.

I have trouble with interpretive dance.

A few times I've watched stuff like "So You Think You Can Dance" and every time it's something like this.

Dancers: "Our dance is a story about a boy and a girl meeting and falling in love."

*They dance

Me: "How would anyone figure out what this is supposed to mean if you hadn't just told everyone?