Sanjay Noonan is a 3rd year Medicine student at Sussex.
” I started writing poetry when I was 14, although it has never been something I have shared . It was a way to align thoughts I couldn’t ignore when I couldn’t make sense of them and it gradually just became something I did more often. It was never really a conscious thought to start writing as I had never had any training or encouragement to do it, it just seemed to help.
As I have grown older I have shared my poems with a few people, although they have always been something that I write for myself. This is the first time I have ever thought about sending them to be included in anything, I guess now that I have done this once it might make me feel better about doing it in the future but I am in no rush to; writing is not something that I could sit down and decide to do, it has always been something that comes as more of a compulsion for whatever reason so it’s hard to say if I will ever even write another thing!
Nature really fascinates me and takes up a lot of my mind. I love how the world constantly changes itself while still maintaining balance, and I think that applies to so many things that it is a theme I have seen come out in things I’ve written. Time and the changes that it implies is another thing that comes out when I write, and I guess that ties in with nature. I feel like so many things in nature can be so confusing that writing convoluted poems about them seems to make some kind of sense!
There is a few poets who I have really loved reading in the past and who have definitely impacted me. Studying WWI poetry and the context behind it was incredible to me – Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas being the two that particularly stuck in my mind. Since then I have read a lot more and found so much really incredible work. Rabindranath Tagore is the man currently in my coat pocket that I have been reading a loving for a while now, here’s to finding more!
When I finish my degree I would like to work with MSF, and one day work towards starting a non-profit health service in areas where it would be difficult for people to access treatment. I wouldn’t expect to be doing cutting edge medical science, there so much as offering more basic help with problems that have easy resolves but require attention and skills that otherwise might not be available. I have seen and been involved in work like this in the past and it has been something I have been really set on for a long time now – I don’t really see that changing. There’s also so much of the world to see that the thought of staying in England for too much longer seems impossible. I guess only time will tell.”
