Charles Prize for Poetry

So, on Friday I submitted two poems for this years Charles Prize for Poetry. It's a competition for poems about Science, Medicine and/or Health. So I send my compliments to my office-mate Dave who directed me to the competition.
 

I submitted two plant-based science poems. The first was called "Hyothetico-Deductive Method". It was a bit of a joke about how the Scientific Method can work in a 5 year old (grass consumption is involved). To the left is an schematic of how the method works.

Basically this is touted as the golden rule of science, the way science works. If data cannot be run though this system and pass, to some it is not considered to be true scientific data. 

It can provide a bit of a logical exercise, which is something I use in my first poem.

The other poem "Vegetarian" was a bit of a play with the sounds of scientific words. The meaning to some science words may be mundane, but they sound so lyrical. I also was fooling around with the idea that fruit are sexy bits of plants. Flowers are genitalia and fruit are ovaries. It was a fun poem, if a bit odd.

I don't usually write poems about science. I tend to have difficulty doing that for some reason. If something manages to come out, then hoorah. Otherwise I'm content with writing poems about people and weather or romance-y things. I've been using this book called Writing the Life Poetic by  Sage Cohen and it is really interesting and had some good writing exercises. One thing that I thought was really helpful was the chapter that talked about finding your theme. She basically states that while it is important to be able to write about different subjects, there will be those that you tend to gravitate to and write about naturally. She strongly suggests sticking with those and not trying to force yourself to write about something you think is more important. When she tried to write about those themes that she felt were more significant than her usual theme which was in her case "love", her writing came out contrived and simply wasn't as good.

The point of all this is that although I am a scientist, and I would like to write more 'science' poems, the good ones are few and far between. I generally try not to force it and good things tend to come from it. 

Here's the link to the poems on the Charles Prize Blog below. I'll let you know how I do.

My poem entries