Confabulatory, my dear Watson

"Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another..." - Robert Frost

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - that is all ye know
on earth and all ye need to know'
- Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

Rita Ann-Higgins once observed that"to get at the poetic truth it is not always necessary to tell the what-actually-happened truth; these times I lie." We're all familiar with the idea that the truth of a poem may not always be a literal one, that the poet lies, even, in the service of a 'greater' truth (if, like Keats, we are willing to conflate beauty itself with truth). Perhaps less familiar is the notion that these creative distortions have a parallel in the functional asymmetry of the brain.

In 'The Telltale Brain', V.S. Ramachandran reports the case of an intelligent sixty year old woman who was paralysed after a right hemisphere stroke. Upon examination, the exchange between doctor and patient went like this:

"Nora, how are you today?" I asked.
"Fine, Sir, except for the hospital food. It's terrible."

"Well, let's take a look at you. Can you walk?"

"Yes." (Actually, she hadn't taken a single step in the last week.)

"Nora, can you use your hands, can you move them?"

"Yes."

"Both hands?"

"Yes." (Nora had not used a fork in a week.)

"Can you move your left hand?"

"Yes, of course."

"Touch my nose with your left hand."

Nora's hand remains motionless.

"Are you touching my nose?"

"Yes."

Later, when Ramachandran grabs Nora's lifeless left arm and raises it to her face, asking her whose hand this is, she replies that it's her mother's, not her's. Asked to touch her own nose with her left hand, she grabs and lifts it with her right hand and uses it as a tool to touch her nose, showing that, even though she was denying her left arm was paralysed, she must have recognised that it was on some level.

This process is known as confabulation, the spontaneous production of false memories. Obvious confabulation like Nora's is usually a result of the left hemisphere running unchecked after right hemisphere damage. One function of the left hemisphere is to stablilise our behaviour and make what we do seem internally consistent. It helps us to form a coherent narrative. The left hemisphere may often fabricate information in the service of the bigger picture, the overall view of the self. As Rama puts it, "if there is a small piece of anomalous information that doesn't fit your 'big picture' belief system, the left hemisphere tries to smooth over the discrepancies and anomalies in order to preserve the coherence of self and the stability of behaviour." Normally, we seldom notice this tendency, but it is strikingly apparent in the case of patients like Nora who have sustained damage to the right hemisphere, which acts as a check on the confabulating left, reminding us of holistic, external reality.

I'd suggest that poetry's relationship with truth can often be seen as a series of productive confabulations, designed to preserve the internal coherence of the poem. If taken too far, confabulation in real life can be pathological (deluding yourself into thinking you are rich enough to buy a Ferrari, for example) but, within the domain of the poem, confabulation is benign, sometimes even crucial. The very process of metaphor is a kind of elegant confabulation: producing a new truth from something that is not literally true but becomes so within the argument of the poem. For example, when Norman MacCaig tells us in his wonderful poem 'Movements' that 'lark drives invisible pitons in the air / And hauls itself up the face of space', we believe him in the service of the poem's truth, the idea poem's narrator 'sees' these animal movements so vividly he can 'become them, here, / In this room's stillness.'

When we write, poets confabulate all the time, sometimes without even knowing we're doing so. Since a poem is often forged from the connection between two otherwise unrelated ideas (embodied most strikingly in sonnets, where the 'turn' can take the poem in a different direction), facts become merged, discrepancies are necessarily smoothed over in the service of the poem's particular message.

Paul Muldoon has written amusingly about the origins of his well-known, off-kilter sonnet 'Quoof' (the title poem of his 1983 collection): 'Quoof' was a family word for a hot bottle, something Muldoon had taken to be passed on by his parents: "a shibboleth of the kind that occurs in the private language of any family".  In the poem, this becomes a symbol for language's limits and possibilities, how the narrator has used the word, 'taken it to so many lovely heads / or laid it between us like a sword'.  Discussing the poem, Muldoon remarks: "I wondered a long time about the etymology of this word 'quoof'. Did it come from Gaelic? From Elizabethan English, like so many of my father's words? According to him, he first heard it from us, his children."  To the poet, all remembering is a kind of half-deliberate misremembering.

Whilst I certainly won't make a habit of using my own poems in 'Poetry and the Brain' (luckily for all concerned) an example from my work seems fitting  here because I can offer insider knowledge about the process behind the piece and ruin its effect entirely afterwards by explaining some of it; a liberty I wouldn't dare take with someone else's work. Here's a poem I wrote recently, set in a well-known Sheffield pub:

Fagan’s

Themed quiz, the host part-drunkard, part-Messiah,

his long hair lapping at his mustard tie.

I’m trying to connect everything with fire:

the page reads starter, cracker, fighter, fly.

My pints of Moonshine and my team of one.

The strip lights catch the table like a spark.

I turned to ask you something and you’d gone -

the windows give their version of the dark.

Half way down West Street, you’ll be lighting up.

What links the fire of London, and the colour blue?

I’m wondering if a match would be enough

or if there’s really no smoke without you.


As I started writing it, this poem rapidly became a confabulation of different memories: the second grafted onto the first for illustrative purposes. This poem could be read as a straightforward, autobiographical narrative. There'd be no reason for the reader to suppose otherwise. In actual fact, here were two things: a memory of one of Fagans' remarkable, peculiar pub quiz nights (where we really did have to connect everything with fire) and a second notion of a personal loss, or perhaps an imagined, symbolic loss. The departure described in the poem didn't happen literally as it's implied in the narrative. Rather, the night in Fagan's became a vehicle for giving a vague idea a more concrete form - whether or not it succeeds, of course, is another matter! A series of smaller confabulations took place along the way. For example the details of the 'host' in the first stanza are invented too, though the words 'starter, cracker, fighter, fly' are faithfully recalled: we confabulate in the service of rhyme and meter as well as thematic unity.

Richard Wilbur

I won't say too much more about 'Fagan's', save for pointing out that many of my poems come about through this kind of confabulation of memory, this kind of juxtaposition. I'd like to finish with the words of someone much more erudite, Richard Wilbur, whose poem 'Lying' muses on some of these themes. Starting thus:

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm...

The poem continues to argue this is justifiable, will not rupture 'the delicate web of human trust', for

...in the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
to what each morning brings again to light.

Finally:

...and so it is with that most rare conception, nothing.
What is it, after all, but something missed?

Poetry is the alchemy of turning myriad nothings into strange somethings. Such alchemy often relies on confabulation: a tendency we all have, embodied in the functional asymmetry of the brain.