A left-brainer does poetry

I know nothing about poetry. I never read, studied or had any interest in it. I blame my glutinous left hemisphere. And my lack of patience. To read – and appreciate – poems you need to be the type of person who stops and smells the roses.

Yet, here I am taking a short course in poetry.

Why? I don’t know why. But I’ll take a stab. A microscopic crack let a sliver of light seep through in 2017. That sliver was Rupi Kaur. A poet who became famous through instagram. I appreciate Rupi’s succinct delivery of truisms. Plus, her style was easy for my logical mind to digest. And thus a seed was sowed.

Writing poetry, though, is another matter. It started last year, with just four poems. And I have written a handful since. They’re not great. I know this. They might not even be considered poetry.

These poems spilled out organically. I later realised why. Writing in stanza offered me something that writing in prose didn’t: An easier way to express emotions. I found that charged stuff got bogged down in the many words of prose. And I wouldn’t be able to come out with what I wanted to say.

In the first week of the course, I was introduced to a definition of poetry:

Poetry is expressing the inexpressible.

The crack widens each week. Good poetry is, to put it in my teacher’s words, “distilled language”. It also needs to be “evocative, associative and allusive”. And that for a reader of poetry “the beauty of not knowing the meaning makes it alive”.

Verbs are paramount for creating distilled language. To paint this picture, we were given 12 verbs to turn into a poem as a writing prompt:

• dancing
• pressed
• collapse
• disappeared
• order
• worry
• sliding
• humming
• playing
• raking
• suturing
• cauterising

Here’s what I came up with:

Dancing in the sky
I pressed myself against clouds
they did not collapse
but I disappeared
in which order
I do not worry
sliding / humming / playing
I find myself
raking clouds
suturing not cauterising
puffs into a blanket
buffering my being
from all that is dust

I giggled while writing this. I could picture myself having a good ol’ time in the clouds, but at the same time, it does hold a philosophical meaning for me.

My right brain is chasing the tail of my left. It might just catch up yet.