Poetic Forms Winner: The Acrostic
Hi everyone!
If you haven’t read about Acrostic Poetry yet, then please do take a look to find out how you can write one as well!
This week we had three entrants and all of them were very different and very well written! Aley gave us another take on the art of writing a poem about a poem and used a lot of clever language, while Olivia turned our perception of the word ‘Gregarious’ upside down with a poem about teenage girls who are too gregarious!
However, it was niteowl’s response to the challenge which I have decided to feature today:
Extraction
niteowl
Embalm me in chemicals and shine
X-rays through me to see the
Truth I hid away. It’s not
Right for you to break me down. Go ahead,
Analyze me, but you
Cannot decipher my essence
Through my broken parts.
I am gone because you had to
Overwhelm me with solutions.
Nothing can save me anymore.
What works so well in this poem is the layers of ambiguity. Who is this persona speaking to us from beyond the grave, is it someone who felt overly judged by society and took their own life? Is it a young person, an old person? A disabled person or a fat person? This persona is left very open to the reader’s interpretation and it’s easy for the reader to fill someone they know into the persona’s place, maybe even themselves, and to connect with the poem in that way.
Then on another level, does there have to be a speaker at all, or is it a doll propped in place, behind which we can see the method of analysing poetry itself. Even as we try to dig deeper into this poem, it is telling us that this is the error of our ways and that we shouldn’t be searching for solutions, but just accepting something as it is.
So I’ll let this poem be and say nothing more about its possible meanings, but I also love the natural flow of the words from one line to another and the directness of the tone, the use of such commanding phrases as, ‘Embalm me’; ‘Analyze me’; ‘Overwhelm me’. This is a great poem – thank you for sharing it, niteowl!
** Image owned by Enokson at Flickr.
