As I was struggling with my latest sonnet,
imagine my relief when I came across this article from the UK Daily Mail. It's finally happened--science
solved poetry! According to a recent study, people like poems that evoke “positive
feelings” and have “vivid imagery”, and dislike poems that are boring or
negative. I cannot believe that the UK Daily Mail just sat on this research while
I’ve been beating my head against the wall all of these years trying to figure
out how to make it big in the poetry racket. If only I had known that “people
enjoy feeling happy”, I could have been downright famous by now. I feel utterly
foolish for wasting my time and my reader’s time by writing poems about
middle-aged angst, the state of work in America, being childless, escaped
snakes, and the homeless in Las Vegas. My entire body of work flies in the face
of the researcher’s advice to avoid negative topics and “low valence subjects”
such as sadness and disappointment. I am such an idiot. Now, in all fairness,
the article does conclude that "readers did not at all agree on what poems
they found appealing, an outcome that supports the notion that [brace yourself
for a shock] people have different tastes."
So maybe there’s a small chance that somewhere out there is a reader who will appreciate
my low-valence poetry, but nonetheless, I’ve got some serious time to make up
for.
In the spirit of positive feelings and vivid
imagery, below is a scientifically formulated haiku I worked up while plotting
my meteoric rise to the top of the poetry world. I made sure to include “blossoms”,
“tree” and a reference to blazing fire as suggested by the researchers:
Ablaze
The ruby bird hides
In the vermilion blossoms
Spring’s conflagrant tree
You may mail my Pulitzer to my home address.
This weekend as I’ve been working on various and
sundry things involving sonnets and self-publishing research, I’ve been taking
short mental breaks to monitor an idler that I recently downloaded from Steam.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the parlance, an idler is a game that runs
independently on your computer. You can just leave it going and your little
toons will progress through the game on their own, but you can also pop in
at will to make adjustments, collect your gold, and level the characters up.
Rather than being distracting, I actually find that toggling back and forth is
helping my concentration a great deal. I think that ADHD and ADD are woefully
over-diagnosed (please don’t e-mail me), but I took a quiz online a while back
to see if I had ADD, and well, let’s just say I don’t not have it. My score wasn’t off the charts, but I am
ADD-adjacent. I think having several things to jump back and forth between
keeps my mind from wandering and keeps boredom at bay.
I have been thinking again about completing my
Advanced Medical Directive, but I’ve come up against complexities that my brain
can’t seem to process, and all I can think about is making sure that if end up
in some state wherein I can’t communicate, that my feet aren’t cold. My hands
and feet get really cold, and I hate air-conditioning, and those hospitals just
blow freezing cold air on patients day in and day out. I know that if don’t say
something, they are going to leave me there, sockless, with my feet painfully icy.
I do not want painfully icy feet! What I should do is carry a pair of thick
socks around with me at all times, and a lanyard with a card that reads, “In case of
unconsciousness, please cover feet”. You heard it here, folks. If, God forbid,
you ever have to come and see me in the hospital, bring socks!
--Kristen
McHenry
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