A few weeks ago, Ange asked:

Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own dif­fi­culty as well as its plea­sures (prosodic, sen­sual, scenic) to max­i­mize its poten­tial as a unique cul­tural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?

Today I came across a week-​old arti­cle in the Boston Globe that sug­gests one way to start answer­ing the ques­tion. Drake Ben­nett reports on research in cog­ni­tive flu­ency, “a mea­sure of how easy it is to think about something.” A fair amount of the research sounds like the sci­en­tific for­mal­iza­tion of common sense, and the pri­mary result of the stud­ies can hardly count as novel or sur­pris­ing: our brains like to take the easy route when­ever pos­si­ble. “Fluency is an adap­tive shortcut,” Ben­nett writes. “According to psy­chol­o­gists, it helps us appor­tion lim­ited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our atten­tion and we have to quickly figure out which are worth think­ing about.”

More inter­est­ing is the way dis­flu­ency can be put to pro­duc­tive use, which smacks more than a little of Adorno’s defense of artis­tic and philo­soph­i­cal difficulty:

Number of reviews of final­ists for the 2009 National Book Award for Poetry pub­lished by the New York Times: 0

Number of poetry reviews pub­lished by the NYT in 2010 so far: 2

Number of those reviews ded­i­cated to Tony Hoagland’s Unin­cor­po­rated Per­sons in the Late Honda Dynasty: 2

From The Telegraph:

“It’s not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk,” one rep­re­sen­ta­tive said, accord­ing to the English-​language Moscow Times, which had a reporter on board.

“Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself. The worst that could happen is he’ll trip over some­thing in the cockpit.”

From “Hot Bur­rito #2” by the Flying Bur­rito Brothers:

1) “Yes you love me and you sold my clothes.”

2) “Yes you love me and you stole my clothes.”

3) “Yes you love me and you sew my clothes.”

I always thought it was 1 or 2— not 3, but some­where I heard 3 is the right one. [I also thought “4 dead in Ohio” was “Oh daddy oh ay oh” for years, so ah um.]

Sub­script: Graham Foust, in an inter­view some years ago with David Pavelich at Chicago Post­mod­ern Poetry:

“A lot of times I’ll hear some­thing incor­rectly and then like it better than the “cor­rect” ver­sion and then decide to use it in a poem.  I’d wager that a huge number of lines in my work were hap­pened upon or “writ­ten” in that way, though I’d also wager that I couldn’t go back and label which ones with any cer­tainty.”