Tag: poetry

Axon, signal, text

The book I started work on in November has become two! The first, Horsetail Rhizome, starts in Sumer & ends with Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second, Occam’s Aftershave – for which I just drafted the text below – picks up where Horsetail leaves off & reaches into a future of quantum-genomic computing long after the Singularity.

I first met the polyvagal model of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) when looking for ways to tackle a chronic illness. It now strikes me that, whether or not it helped with my migraines, the model offers an approach to the relation of poetic rhythm – on the scale of phoneme, sentence, or canto – to our beings as innervated mammals.

As conceived by Dr. Stephen Porges, polyvagal theory says that a long branching parasympathetic cranial nerve, called vagus, “wanderer,” for its reach from earwhorl to bowel, gives us three frames (one more than we thought) for responding to stimuli.

Its ventral branch allows rest & digestion & opens us to affection & attunement. It goes quiet when a threat is perceived & the sympathetic nervous system readies heart lungs muscles sense organs &c. to fight or flee. The two we learned in school.

New to the picture is the nerve’s dorsal branch. It’s how a deer freezes in your headlights, or a bird your cat caught in your palm, or you or I raddled by rape or earthquake. Yeats’s rag & bone shop. Destination of every katabasis. The heavy hopelessness I feel a week into Trump’s second term. Freud’s death drive. But last resort of the life force. Can’t fight back? Run. Can’t run? Hide, go small, disappear, dissociate, die inside, for now. Notice how sentences & fragments, declaratives & imperatives – the ones you just read – affect you differently, bodily. That’s what I’m talking about.

Lot more to it, of course, as a physiological theory of mind. It has helped me some with mine & others I know with their troubles. I’m asking now though about its potential for literary theory. What might it disclose about the physiology of the poem – the poem as it addresses one’s imaginal body (mind’s eye, mind’s ear, mind’s limbs & organs) through kinetic & proprioceptive signals in its language?

Poem as embodied imaginal transcript of journeys up & down the vagal ladder.

I can say this much. I make a poem by enacting transits – lived the moment of making or recalled & relived – across realms of ease, activation, paralysis. I translate animal postures in the world into bodily aspects of human speech – stress pitch duration tempo as they register in mouth chest gut musculature – and image – direction of the gaze to curve line jag field & pattern. I do it, for instance, with the ampersand. I did it just now by omitting one. In “Weed Flower Mind” I used a fractured lyric form to chart the ups & downs, blisses crises & overwhelms, I met in zazen. My Dumuzi & Inanna poems make of their motions, from heaven to earth & underearth & back up, mythic correlates for states of attunement & danger & despair. My script for SCRO attempted the same in a sort-of confessional sort-of stream-of-consciousness.

Here’s the grandiose part. Maybe it’s not my method but the method.

Notes towards expansion of that idea – reductive as poetics in this form – hopelessly impressionistic about the science – maybe worth pursuing even so –

Divine Comedy. A vagrant’s journey from arousal (dark wood) to dorsal (Hell) to arousal (Purgatory) to ventral (Paradise) with many loops & sub-loops. To be frozen helpless abandoned by God is Hell. To be wholly at rest in the wholeness of being is Heaven. Beatrice as an icon of the attunement – heart-connection self-connection mirror neurons blazing – ease in the ANS makes possible.

The Tempest. Begins with a shipwreck (arousal) then assigns subplots to each nervous domain. Stephano & Trinculo are essentially predators (arousal). Alonso is immobilized by grief (dorsal) & pricked by Gonzalo (executive function) into movement. Miranda & Ferdinand savour intimacies (nexus of ventral & dorsal). Prospero engages in magical combat & is never ruffled (nexus of ventral & arousal). In the end everyone converges in a grand reconciliation (ventral ease). A comic or romantic schema.

“Ode to a Nightingale.” One begins in a murky crossover of ease & numbness (nexus of ventral & dorsal), ventures toward the nightingale seeking attunement in its song (ventral), finds instead the sound of death (dorsal), returns to one’s body more alert (nexus of ventral & arousal).

“To Autumn.” Intimacy with all life (ventral) in heightened alertness (arousal) conducted knowing it’s soon to end (dorsal). The poem stands at the intersection of all three modes. Where its wonderment comes from & how it makes peace with death.

Mrs. Dalloway. Rapid irregular cascades among ventral arousal & dorsal. An interior realism – convincing, compelling, whatever the artifice – because its verbal activity enacts how these states actually play out in the nervous system.

Tender Buttons. Every phrase a site of play & heightened vigilance & the insoluble.

It may be no more than warmed-over Structuralism. Or a poorly thought-out update of Aristotle’s catharsis. But I can’t shake my sense of the text as a verbal map of a nervous system – a map in periplum of one transit through a nervous system – a transit a reader can take as a sort of inner guided walking tour – because whatever the accidents shaping a life, we all as human animals have roughly the same nervous system. That system – it seems to me now – is the poet’s real instrument.

Maybe Jung was right about a collective unconscious. Not seated in the brain box – emergent in our nervous tissue, taken all together, as interface, as rhizome.

Assignment: Memorization and recitation

I’m a forward-leaning poet. Of the works of our many-stranded canon, I swoon to those that lean forward in, & out of, their own times.

Also, I swear by a practice learned in a rearguard setting, private boys’ school in the English model I suffered in 4 years: memorization & recitation. It does get the work down in yr bones.

Here’s how I’ve tried to make that work for my Western dears.

Memorization and Recitation Assignment

A great way to get into the bones of a poem is to memorize and recite it. The process yields insights into the music, structure, and rhetoric of a poem that a more analytical approach can miss. So you’re going to memorize a poem and recite it to the class. Poems in the course outline that are underlined are eligible. I’ll post a sign-up sheet for recitations soon; they’ll begin in about three weeks. Please

do not choose a poem by the poet you working with in your song project;

do not sign up for a poem if two people have already claimed that poem.

Some further guidelines:

Choose a poem to which you feel an emotional or imaginative connection.

First concentrate on memorization. The key here is repetition. Read a line or phrase off the page, put down the poem, say the line or phrase from memory, check what you said against what’s on the page, and repeat till you have it right, without too much effort.

Break the poem into manageable chunks, e.g., quatrains. Let the rhymes be the mnemonic device they maybe originally were. Same with the rhythm, if it’s highly regular.

Once you can recite a chunk (even if effortfully) practice it, either silently or out loud, whenever you can – standing in line at Panda Express, waiting for the bus, going to sleep at night. (Especially going to sleep. A study trick every student should know.)

Check periodically against the poem; don’t memorize a wrong version by accident.

Be sure you understand every inch of the poem. The literal meanings of the words, the sentence structures, the figures of speech at work there.

Also, have these questions in mind: who’s speaking, to whom, and to what ostensible purpose? and what purpose might there be under the ostensible purpose?

You have it fluently memorized when you can recite it at double speed without error.

Then you can turn your attention to recitation. The goal here is a heightened naturalness. You want to sound like a person speaking to other persons. With that in mind:

Don’t let the meter force you into monotony. Poetic rhythm is fluid and variable; let your fluency in English, not an abstract idea of meter, guide your enunciation.

Don’t overstate the line end. As a rule of thumb, you can add about half a comma to whatever other punctuation is there. (More if there’s a rhetorical reason for it. Less if there’s an enjambment you want to convey.)

Listen carefully, a number of times, to readings of poems posted on Canvas – especially ones you find effective or moving. Where does the reader speed up, slow down, pause, emphasize?

Finally, practice, practice, practice. Recite your poem to friends, to family, to strangers, to me (remember those office hours). Get and learn from our reactions. A poem is an offering of beauty; offer it beautifully.

The image?

Many-stranded, forsooth.

It’s from an exhibition at the Met on the early modern meeting between the Islamic and European worlds. The deets:

Reciting Poetry in a Garden

Object Name: Tile panel

Date: first quarter 17th century

Geography: Country of Origin Iran, Isfahan

Medium: Stonepaste; polychrome glaze within black wax resist outlines (cuerda seca technique)

Dimensions: Panel with tabs: H. 35 1/4 in. (89.5 cm)
W. 61 3/8 in. (155.9 cm)
D. 2 1/2 in. (6.4 cm)
Wt. 300 lbs. (136.1 kg)
Each tile: H. 8 7/8 in. (22.5 cm)
W. 8 7/8 in. (22.5 cm)

Classification: Ceramics-Tiles

Credit Line: Rogers Fund, 1903

Accession Number: 03.9b

A lush landscape provides the setting for a picnic, complete with fruit and beverages in Chinese‑style blue-and-white vessels. Two men sit in conversation, one writing and holding a safina (an oblong format book typically containing poetry), flanked by a man standing on the left and a woman on the right carrying a covered bowl decorated with Chinese designs. The patterned robes, silk sashes, and striped turbans resemble costumes depicted in seventeenth‑century Persian drawings and paintings.

Orientalism? Go on, say it. I’ll respond, try to.

☜ teaching portfolio

Exercise: Fragment work (1)

Imagine you are time. Pick a fragment from Carson’s Sappho that looks whole and erase most of it. Use brackets and the space of the page, à la Carson, to indicate where things have gone missing. Aim for a fragment just as resonant after your treatment as it was before. For example

and gold chickpeas were growing on the banks

might become

gold [                                      ] wing

Rock & flowers

That language is material, yes, but alongside it, that matter is a thinking.

earth is interesting:
ice is interesting
stone is interesting

flowers are
Carbon
Carbon is
Carboniferous
Pennsylvania

Age
under
Dogtown
the stone

the watered
rock Carbon
flowers, rills

– Charles Olson, “Maximus—from Dogtown, II”

Brings to mind Issa, that we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers. And Ronald Johnson’s thought that light evolved the eye in order to see itself.

What I’ve been reading here. Jed Rasula, This Compost. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems.