Can you understand poetry as a person on the spectrum?

Post Reply New Topic

I'm wandering, since one of the symptoms of Autism is that we tend to understand sentences literally, then it's possible that we must have difficulty absorbing poetry. I was always very interrested in arts and I enjoyed them all except poetry. All my painter friends would gather and read poetry while I would sit there baffled. I've tried my best to understand but to no avail. I might say poetry to me is like the fourth dimension, I cannot see it. What is your experience with poetry? Is the inability to understand poetry a feature of autism? If you like poetry, which are your favourite poems?

I find those metaphorical poems boring and hard to.get, even though I understand metaphors and don't look at life in a literal way. I don't think I was the only kid at school who didn't understand them though, because when kids had to read them out to the class from a textbook they often frowned in confusion as they read, then they would laugh at a poem that was supposed to be serious - to which the teacher would yell at the class and had to explain to everyone that the poem was saying about trauma or whatever.

I tend to only get the simplest allegories.

I understand symbolism in poems very well

I get poetry and allegory, I just really don't like poetry.

I prefer prose.

It can take me a long time to understand some poetry, which I usually only encounter as song lyrics. When I try to write poetry, the usual search for the right word becomes so difficult that what works tends to dominate what I can say. I assume that the authors have the same problem to some extent, at least.
However, I notice that various form of poetry are incredibly popular as slogans and advertising jingles. People seem to treat them as more accurate, not less. I think this is because writing is a very recent invention compared to speech, and through all those years, a story told as a poem was more likely to be correctly remembered, and therefore true. Whenever there might be a lapse of memory, the rules of the poem would suggest the right version. It is like self-healing Roman concrete.

To be or not to be....that is the question...

While I can understand metaphor, I struggle with poetry. Listening to something in real time I cannot process fast enough to get the meaning. It becomes word salad.
Somehow song lyrics are easier. Why is that? Perhaps because they are usually less of a continuous, dense flow of words? Does the music make it easier somehow?

I can.

But the level of how I interpret words and wording varies from how much I can access and use my verbal abilities, my current emotional states, the amount of references and knowledge I have beforehand, and to my own current levels of consciousness.
Mostly because I just heavily rely on patterns first before any 'meaning' arrives to a certain point.

Most at the time, I'm not interested.
Anything involving language itself seems to be my weakness. Sometimes it's a source of frustration.

Not merely because I'm autistic, but because I'm specifically a kind of autistic who do not have great verbal aptitudes like most aspies tend to have.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Sometimes things are open to interpretation and sometimes they are not. I generally don’t like it when someone narrows the interpretation. It can be fundamentally ridiculous.

I generally like to interpret things and can do it unless someone else is judging my interpretation as wrong and then whether I am right or wrong is determined by the weight of the other person or people’s opinion.

p.s. I imagine what I just wrote could be poetic if it rhymed.

My teachers in English class would often enjoy my poetry work. Unfortunately, to the degree of making me read out my poems to the class as an example. It always felt awkward. However, I couldn't stand poetry that didn't rhyme. I always just gave up when it came to Haikus. One teacher liked my work so much that she offered to write a letter of recommendation and suggested that I enter a national poetry competition. I didn't.

Yet, there was one area which I struggled. Feeling without analysing.

"How do this poem make you feel?"

"Well, I think the writer was going for - "

"No, how does it make you feel, personally?"

"...Uh, sad?"

"Why?"

"Well, I think that the writer was using - to convey a melancholy feeling - "

"Yes but, without analysing, just locating why you're feeling that way"

"..."

"..."

"Give me a moment"

I didn't have problems with poetry, except for Emily Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass". I remember getting to the point of crying from frustration at not getting it at all. Mom (an English major & completely flummoxed) eventually just had to tell me it was about a snake. I don't think of snakes in yards/grass typically. I can't remember coming across one in our yard ever. Or at school. Or at a friend's house. I could see it after she told me "snake", but I don't see it in a modern context. I also got stuck on the part about "a Boy and Barefoot" because she's not a boy. Lol, the frustration is rising in me while looking at it to write this.

Rambling emo freeverse, no matter how artistically presented, is monotonous, repetitious, boring, and generally based on one person's hatred of everything.

Rap is no better, no matter whose music has been "sampled" (a.k.a., stolen) to use as background.