Poetry

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Hi,

I've been taking a poetry module at uni for the last couple of months, and found it really hard at first but recently I've started to kind of get into it. It's weird, it kind of makes you think in a different way that I really didn't like at first (it made me feel physically sick and I couldn't seem to write a poem) but once I'd been trying for a while (having to coz of uni work!) it sort of started to 'click' a bit. I'm still not great at it, and it still makes me feel uncomfortable so I can't do it for long without having to go for a run to 'balance' it out but it seems to be working OK :s. Has anyone else had this sort of experience? I'll post few poems to see what you think- any opinions would be really useful since I still not sure what exactly poetry is!

Science

It's past midnight; the witching hours
softly creep through the darkness.
Music muffles out of an open doorway,
shadows thump as hearts beat.
Seeing fluid bodies merge in time
I'm the wrong piece in an incomplete jigsaw,
watching chargeless as giggling electrons
attract and repel, weave an
intricate dance amongst pulsing protons.
Chemistry was never my best subject,
much less the murky peripheries
where chemistry meets biology,
the hormonal collision of chemical bonding
with fusion and reproduction.
Walking home, constellations map the sky.
The moon cycles its rhythmical shifts.
There's safety in physics, cause and effect,
bound in formulae, logic and reason.

Alchemy of Oats

There’s a strange alchemy to making porridge,
the way a stirred saucepan of watery oats
metamorphizes, pulses and thickens.
A sense of achievement, that you
in that bleary brained, pre-coffee state
have somehow achieved something,
a primal fusion of two basic elements.
You can express yourself through porridge;
bad mood bowls drowned in soya milk,
guilty childhood dribbles of golden syrup,
sensibly Scottish oats thick with salt,
exotic, provocative hints of cinnamon.
Kettle boiled, water steams to instant coffee.
Oatmeal scraped from saucepan to bowl.
Ritualistic acts of nature.

Snow White

The world looks different
through a prism of glass,
veil-shrouded in the moonlight.
Snowflakes protect her heart
from the outside world.
The mind is a mirror,
self-reflecting, watching
shadow outlines drift distantly,
framed through ice-grey eyes.
The kiss scares her.
Ice is no match for fire
and her heart’s sizzling bright,
shocking her with its intensity.
Even frozen hearts burn
white at the core,
and hers is no exception.
The sensation terrifies her.

Yes, that's poetry. Not at all bad, either.

I say "not at all bad" rather than good, because if you keep at it, and keep writing poetry, no doubt some day you'll see these as clumsy and awkward. They aren't actually as bad as you'll see them, by the way, but it is hard to view your own work objectively. Been there, done that...

And I don't praise writing lightly. I'm a writer; I take it seriously. I might stay silent, to avoid hurting someone's feelings, or dodge the question if I have to, but "not at all bad" from me is more of an endorsement than "Excellent!" from a lot of other people. (I have reached the stage where my fingers twitch, itching to pick up a blue pencil, even when reading published work.)

From reading the first poem, I understand what your problem is when you feel uncomfortable with poetry. You are used to logic, science, clearly defined answers. Poetry is much more fluid and flexible than that. Although I have AS, I grew up reading so much I actually found myself on the other side of that divide. I am good at math - but it is disconcerting for me; it makes my mind feel as though it is in a straitjacket. I absorbed so much language (I am also hyperlexic, just in case you didn't guess ) when I was young that I programmed my mind for the more subtle things that can be conveyed by language. The safe (to you) limitations of math and hard science are, to me, intolerable constraints that constrict my mind and prevent me from expressing the larger and more elusive truths that can only be spoken as poetry or story.

Why did I just bother with that long explanation? On the one hand, the more you write poetry, the more used you'll grow to using it. You do have an innate gift for it. On the other hand, as you continue, you'll reprogram your mind so it is more comfortable in those realms. I doubt you'd ever reach the point I did; one reason for my extreme attraction to language was the fact that I began reading early (I went into first grade already able to read Readers Digest) and was also able to read very fast, so I read a huge amount very quickly. But you will still change your thinking, your abilities and attitudes. Only you can decide if that is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps your experience so far will help you decide that.

I really like the first one And thats saying something, as non-pro poetry usually make me cringe, scientific poetry doubly so. My only advice is to avoid technical words like "proton" and "electron", 99% of scientific nomenclature is phonetically awful for poetry. Describing stuff in terms of abstract imagery doesn't really evoke emotion, but referring to things like hues of light, and charges and sparks does