We've spent some time discussing what we bring to poetry in terms of our reading history and our aesthetic lenses, so while we prep for coming weeks where we'll burrow deep into mechanisms of poetry, let's now talk about what we bring to poetry from outside poetry.

Even as I'm sitting here surrounded by books and cowboy hats and a little drawing my girlfriend made me to demonstrate what a dinosaur bee was when she decided to start an online journal called Dinosaur Bees and a Polaroid of friends I made in my MFA program and Facebook invites to poetry readings and a giant orange SLOW X-ING donkey stop sign thing that I inherited from my poet friend Jack, I realize that my life isn't really all poetry. The world is busy and they don't make bagels out of poetry. The best we can do is kidnap the world and turn it into poetry. The best poetry can do is kidnap us and save us from the gnarly stuff. Some of my poet friends are at their most animated, really, not when talking about poetry but when talking about pickling or dollhouses or bus routes. It's fun to think about what we carry back to our work from the rest of the animation. It's funny how poets often strive to be experts in random things. It's funny how those things don't turn out to be so random after all. One poet I know can't stop once she starts talking about concepts of neuroplasticity and embodied metaphors, how an understanding of language can never evade a fealty to the body. Evade from the Latin "to walk away." Fealty you can walk all the way back to the proto-Germanic "biudanan," which means to stretch out or reach for something.

For one reason or another, I am really into reaching at cognitive science. Except I'm into it in a fluffy, lyrical way that would probably drive a cognitive scientist up a wall, but that's okay, right? That's poetry? For example, do you know what mirror neurons are? They are a scientific basis for empathy. In the 1980s and 90s, Italian scientists were monitoring the neurons of monkeys. One day, one of the scientists brought a sandwich into the lab, and the scientist accidentally discovered that "some of the neurons they recorded from would respond when the monkey saw a person pick up a piece of food as well as when the monkey picked up the food." And what's true in the monkey is true in the Monkees. So there are places in our brains that don't know the difference between witnessing and acting. Or that's how I like to poetify it. And learning about things like this, the poetry part of my brain goes: "If that's true for people, why can't it be true for pronouns? How can I make mirror neurons out of language? What does any of this mean for all the love poems I didn't know how to write until I learned this?"

One of my favorite books I read last year was Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, which proposes (among many things) that emotions and feelings are different (emotions are in the body, feelings are the mind’s awareness of emotions), and that we evolved consciousness in order to be aware of our having feelings. Not just feelings, but our having of them. In other words, we have a mind in order to know how we feel. I mean, it's way more complicated than that, but as someone who loves to make gratuitous use of the word "feeling" in several interrelated noun and verb forms, it was pretty exciting to gnash on.

A floaty poetry direction I go from there is this: you know that objective correlative stuff? The fancy way of saying that an empty pie tin is sadder than the word sad? The problem with Eliot's magic correlative isn't the correlative part, of course, but the objective part, because feelings are never objective, which is probably why so many people bother having such different ones. I do like the way Eliot talks about how a cabbage is always a cabbage, and here's the neurologically spiced aesthetic theory I hold: a cabbage is its own feeling. Everything is also its own feeling. We navigate different histories of associations, of course, so your cabbage feeling isn't mine, but feelings happen just as much between and among as they do inside. Probably my ideal "poetry effect" is something akin to the laughter shared between two people who could neither, if pressed, explain exactly what they're laughing about. Were they to start explaining, they would start retreating back into themselves. So I aim for communicative acts that are also, somehow, their own irreducible/inexplicable feelings, rather than references. I know that's fuzzy, but it's fuzzy to aim for one particular cloud versus another, and it's fuzzy to explain bowling, but nobody complains about those.

I also, on a more practical level, love the way lineages of disciplines outside poetry challenge me to re-route connotations of certain words. Certain strands of philosophy are great for this, philosophy charging here and there as it does with recharged definitions. If I had a dime for every time I got excited thinking about the way Martin Buber uses the word "encounter," I would have a lot of excited change. But Damasio also makes me start re-thinking the tired/tried ways I use things like "state" (as in "state of being"), "pattern" and "feedback." Take, for instance, this paragraph from a review of Damasio's work, a paragraph attempting to summarize some of Damasio's finding and churning out what I see as some pretty exciting poetry:

For example, if we see the approach of an aggressive looking man, this image provokes sympathetic nervous system activation which affects the internal environment of the body by its action on smooth muscles and hormonal levels. This change in body state corresponding to the emotion that we call fear leads to patterns of nerve cell activation in the brain. Emotions are therefore cognitive representations of body states that are part of a homeostatic mechanism by which the internal milieu is monitored and controlled, and by which this internal milieu influences behaviour of the whole organism.

When it comes to language use all over, they do make poetry bagels, because I think the inevitable result of pushing language to serve things like complex scientific topics is inevitably a poetic act. And for us poets, it is total poetic fun to pilfer from that bagel box, to take words into the wrong room, like a microwave in the attic. If you really want some fun reading, check out this article: "Embodied cognition and beyond: Acting and sensing the body," by Anna M. Borghi and Felice Cimatti, which I got off an official academic database, so mum's the word! In this article, some neuroscientists talk a lot about hands and self-awareness of bodies and feelings and language, and most of it I don't understand at all, but then I read part 7 and I realize that these neuroscientists have something to teach us about poetry:

In addition,
we can say that words metaphorically extend our body, thus
extending our cognitive activity. This last point pertaining words is
worth stressing, because it encourages us to consider language not
simply as a means of communication, as it is usually seen in cognitive
sciences, but as a unique way of acting in the world. Using
Wittgenstein’s claim we would want to literally assume language
to be a set of instruments: “Language is an instrument. Its concepts
are instruments” (Wittgenstein, 2001, I, § 569). According to
Wittgenstein when we use a word we are not translating an inner
thought to an external word. This is a classical dualist position, typical
of the orthodox cognitivism, which separates mind and body,
thinking and action, the inner and the outer. On the contrary, in
Wittgenstein’s embodied theory meanings are not mental entities,
but kinds of actions: “for a large class of cases–though not for all–in
which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the
meaning of a word is its use in the language” (I, § 43). Language
is a set of external and social instruments which extend body’s
natural boundaries and abilities. A sentence is an actual or possible
action in the world. Each word, in this model of language as
a form of acting, entails different and unique ways of doing (or
preparing to do) something ...

I mean, how poetic can you get, right? "A sentence is an actual or possible action in the world." Wowzer.

So what do you carry into poetry's room? How does your interaction with other "disciplines" shape your understanding of poetry and color your own work? Where do you see poetry elsewhere in the world besides Poetry?