Putting it in the drawer

How long should you put a poem
in the drawer for?

Re-drafting can be the bane of a writer's life. That's partly because it requires a lot of patience (as well as persistence). In an article on the topic for Mslexia magazine, Jane Holland cites American writer and tutor Annie Finch, who says: ‘My favorite time to revise is when I haven't seen a poem in years or when it is defamiliarized in some other way – put into a manuscript, printed in a magazine, or when I've just finished performing it at a reading.’ 

Certainly, there's usually a necessary distance involved in the re-writing process: poets are all familiar with the notion of 'putting a poem in a drawer' and coming back to it later, once the white-heat of its creation has worn off.

I started thinking about the basis for this necessary distance afresh after reading about the research of Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist who studies unconscious thought. Dijksterhuis and his colleagues were initially interested in the importance of unconscious processes in decision-making; the interesting fact that we often make 'better' decisions when we've been distracted during the decision making process rather than consciously deliberating on the issues. Dijksterhuis was first fascinated by the topic of incubation: "Why is it that we suddenly have a good idea or that we suddenly know what to do regarding an important decision? We hypothesized that, in addition to conscious thought, there is also unconscious thought. That is, even when conscious attention is directed elsewhere, we can unconsciously mull over a problem, idea or decision. By now, we have accumulated quite some evidence suggesting that there is indeed unconscious thought, and that it can be extremely useful. "

In an article published in 2011, Ritter, van Baaren and Dijksterhuis looked at the role of unconscious processing in creativity. More specifically, they were interested in idea selection as well as idea generation. They hypothesised that creative ideas could be generated just as successfully using conscious or unconscious thought, but that the advantage of unconscious thought lay in its role in successful idea selection. Participants in their study were asked to generate creative ideas (in this case, the ideas were to do with how to make queuing for a cash till in a shop less boring). They were then asked to select their most interesting and creative idea from the suggestions they'd come up with. Some participants were asked to do this after a period of conscious deliberation, whereas others were distracted for two minutes (during which time unconscious processing was assumed to have taken place). The individuals who were distracted during the deliberation period proved much better at selecting their most creative idea.

My dog, trying to redraft
a poem for me.

Extrapolating from the lab to the poem is always a problematic enterprise. But perhaps findings like these go some way towards supporting our intuitive sense that it's often better not to think about a poem for a while once you've finished the first draft, why it's a good idea to put it in the drawer. Speaking personally, I often carry initial ideas or first lines for poems around in my head for months before I even put pen to paper - when I finally come back to the idea, it feels as if I've been working on it on the sly.

Of course, it's hard work putting a poem away. Patience wouldn't be considered a virtue if it weren't difficult. Here are some stirring words from Galway Kinnell on the virtues of waiting.

Wait


Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

'Be Drunk': Lehrer's two types of creativity

I've just finished Jonah Lehrer's new book 'Imagine', which promises to have a go at 'collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony' to reveal where creativity comes from, as well as how we harness it.

Does it live up to that hyperbole? Of course not. 'Imagine' has relatively little to add to our appreciation of specific creative works (which, arguably, is a good thing: great works of art remain relatively self-contained). Lehrer does not collapse the layers between the synapse and the sonnet and I'm quite relieved he doesn't. Throughout 'Imagine' Lehrer does, however, establish creativity as a multi-faceted process and he develops some compelling arguments about how some of these facets are related to brain function. Being the eloquent polymath he is, he does so with panache. 'Imagine' is an accessible and thought-provoking read, for all its back cover is a little OTT.

Lehrer is clear that he's not trying to pinpoint some kind of special 'creative neuron' or reduce creativity to a formula: "although people have long assumed that the imagination is a single thing, it's actually a talent that takes multiple forms. Sometimes we need to relax in the shower and sometimes we need to chug caffeine. Sometimes we need to let ourselves go, and sometimes we need to escape from what we know. There is a time for every kind of thinking." If this sounds a bit hippy (I almost started singing The Byrds when I read the last line), fear not: Lehrer's taxonomy of creativity is much more exacting than some of his prose implies. In the first part of the book, he focuses on two kinds of creativity: divergent and convergent thinking. In the process, he makes an interesting and important contribution to Kay Redfield Jamison's ideas about the connection between bipolar disorder and creative writing, which I wrote about last week.

Lehrer begins with divergent thinking, via an interesting anecdote about Bob Dylan and writers' block (you can read an abridged version of the chapter here). He's interested in moments of insight, moments where, having abandoned our usual systematic approach to solving a problem, we make an unusual connection that offers the answer. In an argument familiar to fans of Iain McGilchrist's 'The Master and his Emissary', Lehrer points to the right hemisphere as the home of remote associations (if you want to be really specific about it, the anterior superior temporal gyrus is the closest we have to a 'neural correlate of insight') and suggests that this kind of creative thinking is most likely to come from open attention, an inability to focus even, a kind of daydreaming. This is unsurprising if we accept the notion (again, familiar from McGilchrist) that "...while the left hemisphere handles denotation....the right hemisphere deals with connotation."

And, good news, drinkers: it seems that alcohol is a factor in this kind of divergent thinking. Lehrer has written at more length on the benefits of booze elsewhere. The bad news, however, is that a few shandies can inspire the wrong kind of daydreaming: it's important to be aware that your mind has wandered if you're to harness any useful creative insights and alcohol lowers this awareness.

In a great chapter on W.H. Auden and Benzedrine, Lehrer sets this kind of divergent thinking against a second kind of creative thought: a heightened state of attention in which ideas converge, something akin to what Heidegger called an 'unconcealing process'. This clear-sighted, dopemine-fuelled style of thinking is moderated by the pre-frontal cortex: rewarding connections are processed by dopemine neurons and enter working memory. Auden's amphetamine addiction would have reinforced this recursive loop, creating a sense of clarity. If divergent thinking is like building something up, convergent thinking is more like whittling it down. And whereas divergent thinking and moments of insight are correlated with positive, almost euphoric states, convergent thinking is associated with melancholy, which serves to sharpen the spotlight of attention.

It's here that we begin to see the connection with Redfield Jamison's work on manic depression: "the necessary interplay of these different creative modes - the elation of the insight and the melancholy of the unconcealing - begins to explain why bipolar disorder, an illness in which people oscillate between intense sadness and extreme euphoria, is so closely associated with creativity." To put it far too crudely, "the exuberant ideas of the manic period are refined during the depression." As Lehrer is careful to point out, this doesn't mean that people only create when they're manic or sad, but it does explain the significant correlation between these illnesses and artistic achievement.

In 'Imagine', Lehrer goes on to examine (amongst other things): how groups of people generate creative ideas, why cities are important and the power of being 'an outsider' in your chosen field. But for me, this contrast between divergent and convergent thinking was the most interesting part of the book. He succeeds in illuminating the difference between different kinds of creative thought.

Lehrer's conclusion seems in part that creativity requires intense effort as well as inspiration - something any poet could have told him in an instant. If you want to pervert his argument entirely, though, you could just get drunk when you want a flash of insight, and take amphetamines when you need to work on your drafts. I won't be held responsible for the bad artistic results.

On that note, I'd better finish with a translated instruction from Baudelaire:

Be Drunk


You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

A fine madness: poetry, the right hemisphere and mood disorders

Re-reading August Kleinzahler's great poem 'Green Sees Things In Waves' recently, I was reminded of poetry's mind-altering capacities, or at least its capacity to capture altered states of mind. The poem starts off with Green's strange perceptions

Green first thing each day sees waves -
the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it,
waves - which, you might say, things really are...

...and then we're off on a rollercoaster LSD trip, which takes in parallel worlds of the-party-in-the-same-room, hallucinated cats and next door's vibrating plumbing. Green just 'can't find the knob to turn off the show'.

We're all familiar with the Byronic notion that poets themselves are 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'. Kay Redfield Jamison's thoughtfully-written book 'Touched With Fire' reviews some of the research connecting the activity of writing poetry with, amongst other things, suicide, manic depression, affective disorder and hospitalisation to discover whether there really is such a thing as 'fine madness' or whether such associations are part stereotype.

As a social psychology student several years ago, I did my undergraduate dissertation on social representations of poets and poetry. The term 'social representation' comes from the French social psychologist Serge Moscovici and refers to the stock of ideas, values and beliefs a particular social group holds about something. Moscovici studied the reception of psychoanalysis in France and how it came to be represented in society. In my research, I was interested in how we collectively 'see' poets as a group, whether the stereotype of the 'mad creative genius' frames people's perceptions of what being a poet involves. To cut a long story short, it does, and there's been a large amount of literature devoted to the idea. In fact, my study suggested it was poets themselves that sometimes held these ideas most strongly.

So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, or is the relationship a real one? Kay Redfield Jamison, who has written eloquently about her own experiences of manic episodes, posits a 'compelling association' between some aspects of bipolar disorder and some aspects of verbal creativity. In particular, she believes that the states of hyper-association which accompany a manic episode are characterised by rapidity and flexibility of thought and a capacity for forming original connections which are also pronounced in creative thought. Importantly, Redfield Jamison tempers her assertion by being very clear that people who suffer from manic episodes are not in those states most of the time and that by no means all writers experience these kind of episodes.

In his book 'The Soul in the Brain: the Cerebral Basis of Language, Art and Belief', Michael Trimble takes Redfield Jamison's argument one step further and tries to suggest a neurological basis for this connection.To Trimble, the clue lies in the functional asymmetry of the brain. To summarise his argument too briefly, poetry is the language of the right hemisphere. Associations between manic depression and poetry reveal just this biological association, since bipolar disorder is associated with right hemisphere activity. Thus "poetry and mood instability are linked through common associations to the functions of the right hemisphere." This is why early attempts to explore a possible link between poetry and schizophrenia revealed little correlation: schizophrenia is associated with reduced activity of the right hemisphere.

Trimble's argument is much more subtle and interesting than this summary implies, and I really recommend 'The Soul in the Brain...'. Over several chapters, he painstakingly demonstrates the link between poetry and music (via the right hemisphere's capacity for prosody and rhythm) and connects this right hemispheric bias to the evolution of language and music from a common ancester (an idea I've written about elsewhere in relation to the work of Stephen Mithen). Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is Trimble's attempt to show how our tendencies towards music and poetry are also connected to religion and myth-making, an idea that I can't possibly do justice to here. In short, Trimble says that the thread that unites music, poetry and religion is the neurobiology of the right hemisphere and its strong connections to the limbic system (a specialised role maintained sometime in the brain's evolutionary history). Reading 'The Soul in the Brain...' it's easy to see how some of these ideas must have inspired Iain McGilchrist's work 'The Master and his Emissary'.

The correlation between mental illness and poetry is a huge, contentious topic, one which writers themselves often have very strongly-held personal beliefs about. This post isn't intended as any kind of decisive or exhaustive commentary, or even as a thorough overview (it couldn't hope to be ins so few words), but more as an attempt to present ideas that connect this much-debated topic to the idea of functional asymmetry of the brain and suggest another way of looking at it. I'm sure there'll be many different future perspectives. For now, I'll end with the wise words of none other than Emily Dickinson and her poem 'Much Madness is divinest Sense.'

Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —

The Body Electric

Dogs: secretly aliens?

What do you think of when someone says the word 'alien'? If you're as unoriginal as me, it's probably a cliche from science fiction: little green men with insect-like eyes. Or perhaps you just think of the more abstract notion of 'otherness'. A recent article in the New Scientist, 'Aliens, but not as we know them', poses some interesting and challenging questions about the nature of experience. Its author, Ian Bogost, considers what might define an 'alien' and argues that they could well be all around us (dogs, penguins, polyester and cornbread) since "the experience of "being" something else can never be verified or validated, but only speculated about."  Traditionally, when we think of aliens, the 'other' is still something we can recognise as being enough like us to warrant identification - the cartoon alien still has a near-human body, still has a language. But, as Bogost puts it, "why should we be so self-centred as to think that aliens are beings whose intelligence we might recognise as intelligence?" It's a good question and one that got me thinking about the importance of the human body in thought, intelligence and, of course, poetry.

Questions about what constitutes intelligence always lead back to Artificial Intelligence - the subject of a fascinating BBC Horizon documentary earlier this month. To put it very crudely, AI is based on the idea that, deep down, we are all rather like computers ourselves and that intelligence depends on a system's organisation and functioning as a symbol manipulator. The capacity of computers to be 'intelligent' in this way was famously demonstrated by Alan Turing's test involving a human judge in conversation with a human and a machine. The fascinating, fast-developing world of AI is underpinned by a computational theory of mind (the kind favoured by Stephen Pinker in his book 'How the Mind Works') and, as such, downplays the role of the human body in cognition. Cognition is logical, autonomous and disembodied. This, of course is nothing new: perhaps the most famous exponent of 'mind over matter' was Descartes, with his belief in mind / body separation.

Certainly, we all experience our bodies as strange, alien even, from time to time. Jane Hirschfield's poem 'A Hand' conveys some of the distance we sometimes feel from parts of our own bodies:

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles, 

not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body. 

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— 

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink. 

The maple's green hands do not cup 

the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open. 

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. 

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

The kind of mind/body dualism favoured by Descartes might seem to be tempered by neuroscience, which emphasises physical processes in the brain - a part of the body. But is this really so different? Some would argue that, in neuroscience, the body is only important in terms of its representation in the somatosensory cortex; the body becomes a vessel for the mind and brain. As Raymond Gibbs puts it "neuroscientists...seldom acknowledge the role played by the body as a whole in the cognitive operation of the brain."

I was lucky enough to hear Gibbs give a short talk on Thursday at a symposium in Oxford, in which he made a compelling argument for the embodied nature of perception, language and experience, demonstrating how "human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing, intelligent behaviour." Gibbs is influenced by the philosophy of writers such as Merleau-Ponty, who defined perception as an organism's entire bodily reaction to its environment. One of the most interesting experiments he used to illustrate his talk was to do with metaphor and the body.

Participants in Gibbs' study were taken out into a field and shown the location of an object, some distance from them. They were then blindfolded. The participants were read two short texts, both of which used the familiar conceptual metaphor of a relationship as a journey. In one version, things were 'moving in the right direction' whereas in the other, the relationship had 'stalled', and the people were 'moving apart' rather than 'moving forwards together'. The participants were then asked to walk forwards to where they thought the object they'd previously been shown was. With remarkable consistency, participants overshot the mark after hearing the first, positive text and stopped short of it after hearing the second. Gibbs used this to illustrate the ways in which our understanding of many concepts is intimately related to our physical experiences (for example, the way we interpret a word like 'stand' with its many literal and metaphorical meanings has a lot to do with our bodies and the way we acquire language - see previous blog posts about the possible mimetic origins of language for more about this...).

I've briefly and badly described one experiment amongst many here - Gibbs' arguments were much more sophisticated and I could have listened to him talk all day. Inevitably, my thoughts strayed to poetry at some point and the different ways that poets think about and write about bodies. From poets who celebrate the earthy, or even the slightly grotesque aspects of physicality (I'm thinking of Craig Raine here), to poets who seem to operate best in the realm of out-of-body experiences (such as John Burnside), most poets have something interesting to say about the body. We can't get away from our bodies, after all. In fact, as writers, we're often overly-preoccupied with them: is it a coincidence that so many poets have a tendency towards hypochondria?

I prefer to write when I'm on the move,
ideally in a place like this...

I've written before about the physical aspects of my own writing and the fact that I write my 'best' (or perhaps just what I consider 'best') poems when I'm outside - running, climbing or even walking the dogs. The process of writing can't be easily separated from the kind of movement I'm involved in. I know there are quite a few other poets who write in the same way. For those who don't, physical factors are usually still important: where they are, what's going on around them, how they feel... Poetry is by no means an entirely cerebral activity. And when poets turn their attention directly to the subject of the body, the results can be startling, unsettling or just celebratory - I'm thinking of Lucille Clifton's great 'Homage to my Hips'.

I'll finish with a poem from Michael Symmons Roberts book 'Corpus', which considers the body with real subtlety and variety. It seems to me that this poem, 'Attempts on Your Life', has a lot to say about the relationship between mind, soul and body. It begins describing a winter night which

...slid from the hills to tap
your soul. It rubbed against you
like a cat in from the cold.
It frisked you gently so as not
to wake you....

It did so, we're told, because it believed that the soul has a location, that it might be 'written on a slip / of rice paper' or else 'tucked between / your teeth, behind your ear / like a cigarette.' Eventually, of course

...the night left empty-handed.
Worse, it swept the streets for litter
as you slept - intact - your soul as
heavy as your self; sleek, seal-like,
made of light, love, marrow,
milk and honey, made of body.

I don't know how the mind / body debate could be transcended better.

One Nothing short of a Something

We often describe good poems as things that feel 'complete'. But much of the power that such poems have comes from their very incompleteness, from the things they don't (or can't, or won't) say. In a poem like Charles Simic's 'Country Fair', for example, the poet casts a spotlight on a particular scene not just to illuminate it but to make us think about what lies in shadow. 'Country Fair' has what I think is surely one of the most striking openings of any poem:

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
it doesn't matter. 

The extra legs, Simic tells us, soon became unremarkable anyhow:

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.


She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

The point of this haunting poem, of course, is precisely that these stanzas are not 'the whole show'. We're left with far more questions than answers. As such, Simic evokes a sprawling, bizarre, half-sinister world that stretches far beyond the confines of his poem.

To me, great poems often seem to prove the truth of Socrates' admission that "all I know is that I know nothing." Poetry has a healthy relationship with incompleteness; the same incompleteness which can seem like a threat or weakness to some disciplines. Iain McGilchrist writes about the quest for certainty in sciences and humanities in his book 'The Master and His Emmisary', demonstrating how this quest may be a flawed one. Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem elegantly illustrates the impossibility of completeness. Gödel's mathematical theorum demonstrates that within a consistent system of axioms, there will always be statements (in this case, about numbers) which are true but cannot be proved by the system. Therefore, such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

McGilchrist extends these arguments to demonstrate the points of weakness in rationalism and, typically, frames the quest for certainty and the existence of incompletness in terms of the brain's hemispheric differences. It is the 'way of seeing' characteristic of the left hemisphere that over-values this kind of certainty and, in doing so, creates a self-referential 'hall of mirrors' which it is difficult to see outside of. The right hemisphere by contrast, is more capable of what Keats called 'negative capability' - the tolerance of uncertainty.

Undoubtedly, a certain amount of negative capability is necessary to the appreciation of poetry. I think the power of incompleteness is beautifully illustrated by Andrew Greig's poem 'Norman's Goodnight', and it seems appropriate to let this poem have the last word. In the piece, Greig considers death as a form of departure:

One drops
in a bunker.
Another on his doorstep,
Christmas morning, shovelling snow.


When I go
may it be like that,
a short fall down and out
while busy in open air


like a pigeon 
winging it across clear sky
curves then plummets,
brought down by stray buckshot.

All the poet wants is the time, in this sudden departure, to murmur 'some brief word of thanks / and letting go -'. He recalls the last time he saw the late, great poet Norman MacCaig, standing at the door of his house and how MacCaig said goodbye:

as I turned the stair
his hand came up, waved:

Ta-ta. Ta-ta.
Masterly concision -
thank you and
goodnight in one.


I hope to be 
even briefer as I fall:


          Ta -  

Zombies in the brain

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to the brilliant, fake-blood extravaganza that is The Walking Dead: a post-apocalyptic TV series, set in an America where zombies (or 'walkers') have taken over the states. Sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes wakes up from being in a coma to find the landscape around Atlanta profoundly altered - survivors fight for their lives against the walkers, hungry for their flesh. In true Lord Of the Flies style, the plot focuses on  the surviving group's need to balance their humanity with their need to stay alive.

It's compulsive viewing. Zombies are nothing new on TV, of course - the 'Godfather of all Zombies', George Romero, was making films like Night of the Living Dead back in the '60s and zombies have appeared in many cultural guises ever since - but there's something especially fascinating about them. 'The Walking Dead' captured my imagination so much because, for all its premise is far-fetched, it also seems strangely plausible.

We use the term 'zombie' all the time to refer to people. If we've got a spectacular hangover, we might say something like "I've just been a zombie all day". So the word 'zombie' has become a kind of metaphor for all kinds of disconnected states. Perhaps it's not surprising that poets are drawn to the idea too. In her book 'Minsk', Lavinia Greenlaw has a poem called 'Zombies' in which the narrator recalls the boredom of growing up in Essex:

How Sundays drank our blood as we watched
dry paint or the dust on the television screen.
How people died bursting out of a quiet life,
or from being written into a small world's stories.
Who can see such things and live to tell?

First the place, then the people are portrayed as zombie-like. Greenlaw goes on to describe:

How we hunted all night for noise and love,
striking out across the ploughed and frozen earth,
lurching from rut to rut until at the edge
we smashed our way out through a hedge, to fall
eight feet to the road. Of course, we felt nothing.
Was it not ourselves who frightened us most?
As if brightness or sweetness could save us.

The conceit of 'Zombies' works so well because it seems perfectly natural. So why are we so obsessed with them? Why do we (shudder to think of it) identify with zombies so much? Perhaps the answer lies in our brains. Iain McGilchrist thinks so. In his book 'The Master and his Emissary', McGilchrist characterises the hemispheres of the brain as having two fundamentally different - incompatible, perhaps - ways of attending to the world. The left hemisphere, which McGilchrist believes has come to be dominant, is characterised by abstraction, disembodiment, a preference for the mechanistic, while the right hemipshere's mode of attention is more holistic, intuitive, embodied, connected to the natural world (NB: for a fuller account of McGilchrist's ideas, see previous blog posts).

I never thought I'd find a neuroscientist writing about zombies, but McGilchrist argues that the left hemipshere's cognitive 'style' and the notion of a zombie have much in common:

"...the uncanny looks extraordinarily like certain aspects of the world according to the left hemisphere, in which vitality is absent, and the human is forced to approximate to the mechanical. Zombies have much in common with Frankenstein's monster after all. They perform like computer simulations of the human. There is no life in their eyes... So called 'zombie' states are characterised by dissociation, in which the conscious mind appears cut off from the body and from feeling. That in itself suggests a relative hypofunction of the right hemisphere."

Far fetched? Perhaps. Interesting? Undoubtedly. Not that it'll help us when the zombie apocalypse comes, of course... I'm off to check the lock on my front door. Happy Easter!

A Bittersweet Symphony

I've admired the poetry of Durs Grünbein for years, but never read any of his prose until recently. Grünbein's book 'The Vocation of Poetry' (which succeeds as a kind of Ars Poetica, even though he expresses a suspicion of them early on), contains some interesting observations about the idea of the lyric 'I', the implied narrator of the poem. Discussing a particular poem of his in which he was aware of having found an authorial voice' Grünbein describes how writing this poem made him aware of "the paradoxes inherent in writing poetry, such as the impossibility of knowing just how many voices had gone into creating your own."

The poem in question deals with the idea of a divided self:

From under the edge of the night
Toward me I'm silently diving.
Inside me it's roaring - my ear
Is taking a walk in the rain.
A voice (it is someone's, not mine) -
Monotonous - lingers behind.
A lurch then: bones, stones
...skull crash course.

I was struck by how the structure of the second line emphasises the dislocating effect ('I'm silently diving towards me' wouldn't be nearly as effective) and how this extract seems to capture something of the disembodied feeling you sometimes get when writing a poem: almost like what Julian Jaynes would call an 'auditory hallucination'.

Grünbein goes on to discuss the notion of the 'I' in greater depth. He says the poem made him aware of how "...your so called 'lyrical I'...was only partially congruent with the intellectual being behind it, whom only you were familiar with... The Romans knew all about the histrionic element in any form of public discourse, including poetry, and coined the term 'persona' for it.... The poetic subject...is not concerned with the real person, the one carrying a driver's licence and identification papers, but with the stranger beneath the mask. 'Larvatus prodeo' - 'I show myself wearing a mask', was Descartes' motto, and it captures in a nutshell every writer's constitutive two-facedness."

Thinking about that unavoidable 'two-facedness' in poetry, something I've written about myself (my first collection 'Division Street' is all about necessary divisions of various kinds) I remembered the thought-provoking neuroscientific work done by Benjamin Libet on our perceptions in time. Libet's work dealt mostly with automatic and unconscious reactions and how spontaneous, volitional acts are experienced by us as conscious and deliberate. Libet's studies of this 'readiness potential' proved controversial because they might be taken to imply that since unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, therefore free will plays no part in their initiation. If unconscious brain processes have already taken steps to initiate an action before consciousness is aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated. In other words, we know not what we do, but we have the illusion of control.


This in turn links to the idea that our perceptions of time founder because memory is a thing we constantly reconstruct. A fascinating blog post by George Musser summarises some of the research in this area, arguing

"It’s not that our memory is a glitchy wetware version of computer flash memory; it’s that the computer metaphor just doesn’t apply...we store only bits and pieces of what happened—a smattering of impressions we weave together into feels like a seamless narrative. When we retrieve a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the time next we go to remember it, we don’t retrieve the original memory but the last one we recollected. So, each time we tell a story, we embellish it, while remaining genuinely convinced of the veracity of our memories."

Richard Ashcroft preparing to vault some cars in the
video for 'Bittersweet Symphony'...

No wonder the poet is inherently 'two-faced'. To quote those notorious Wigan lads The Verve, I really am 'a million different people from one day to the next.'

I wonder if this awareness of multiplicity, or 'two-facedness', of the slippery nature of time is what makes poets so fascinated by other lives - particularly the lives we might have led. I've always been obsessed by poems like John Burnside's 'The Good Neighbour' which imagines a kind of 'double' who represents all the things the narrator could have become, yet keeps a distance all the same, or poems that let us briefly inhabit another person's world, offer a glimpse into a alternative reality. There's a great poem by Michael Symmons Roberts in the latest issue of Poetry London called 'The Others' which I kept returning to because of its theme, our 'opaque' thoughts of other people getting ready for the day. There's a sharp sense of longing about this poem which kept drawing me back to it. The other people alluded to in the poem:

...dress in other people's many ways:
shirt first, shirt last, no shirt at all.
And some resent the clothes they have to wear.


If you were there to see them, you would mark
the way they thread their buttons through,
the pout they give the mirror as they leave.

There's probably no poem that captures this envy of the lives we can't lead better than Derek Mahon's 'Leaves', which I'm sure is familiar to many readers of Poetry on the Brain, but which I'd like to end with anyway:

The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfilment.