I haven’t read the arti­cle Bobby refers to. (Monkey exper­i­ments … snore.) How­ever, I have been read­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tist Stanis­las Dehaene’s Read­ing in the Brain, which has much to say about the archi­tec­ture of our brains and how our read­ing and writ­ing sys­tems adapted to it. I won’t go into all of it (par­tic­u­larly since it will be the sub­ject of a future Lingo column) but it does have pos­si­ble impli­ca­tions for (page-​based) poets that might be useful to float here.

1. Read­ing and writ­ing are still rel­a­tively new to us as a species. “Writing was only born fifty-​four hun­dred years ago in the Fer­tile Cres­cent, and the alpha­bet itself is only thirty-​eight hun­dred years old.”
2. Read­ing is dif­fi­cult. As hyper-​specialized read­ers, we can’t appre­ci­ate how rad­i­cally lit­er­acy reor­ga­nized our brains, and how much work the brain still has to do to break down and recon­sti­tute words into mean­ing, across hemi­spheres, within mil­lisec­onds.
3. There are two dis­tinct path­ways the brain may take to retrieve mean­ing from the writ­ten word: the lex­i­cal route and the phono­log­i­cal route.
4. The phono­log­i­cal (speech-to-sound) route is slow and inef­fi­cient. It forces us to pro­nounce the words men­tally to figure out what they mean, as opposed to retriev­ing a mean­ing through a fixed, mem­o­rized data bank of words (the lex­i­cal route). (Though these routes oper­ate in par­al­lel and simul­ta­ne­ously, Dehaene claims there is actual rivalry between them. One or the other must get the upper hand.)
5. If a word is unknown, rare, or irreg­u­lar, you are forc­ing the brain to go the slow & inef­fi­cient way to mean­ing.
6. Seman­tics mobi­lizes a wide­spread array of brain regions; mere prosody (e.g. non­sense) does not.

If you were just start­ing out as a poet, would know­ing this make any dif­fer­ence to you with regard to your style or your expec­ta­tions for your “career”—your read­er­ship, your recep­tion? 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?

And why aren’t we (poets across the inter­net) asking these ques­tions rather than snip­ing about the usual things — whether X mag­a­zine is boring, whether Y poet is avant-​garde enough, whether Z critic is secretly refer­ring to one­self when pooh-​poohing unnamed poets in a mag­a­zine essay? For instance.

“You’d be hard-​pressed to find a better sum­mary of the plight of con­tem­po­rary poetry than Mon­treal poet Michael Lista’s recent obser­va­tion that “most of the so-​called avant-​garde poets can’t write, and most of the so-​called lyric poets can’t think.”—Carmine Starnino, The Globe and Mail

I can think of a number of poets who can both write and think; the a-g mut­ters that they are “boring” and the main­stream mur­murs that they are “cerebral.” In any case, they are not usu­ally well rewarded. I can only con­clude that the status quo serves the inter­ests of the major­ity all around. Why?

Because it is the most demo­c­ra­tic system.

My latest Lingo column, Lin­guis­tic Cur­rency, is now up on the Nation’s web­site. It takes off from Ferenc Karinthy’s novel Metro­pole, and a fas­ci­nat­ing book on the role of Eng­lish in the trans­for­ma­tion of Slo­va­kia into a modern Euro­pean (read: free market) nation.

“Miss Poem” of Hamra Street, in addi­tion to “Jardin des poetes,” a plant nurs­ery on the high­way out­side Byblos, and “Poeme,” a lin­gerie store near the bottom of the Chouf moun­tains, tes­tify to the world­wide rel­e­vance of peignoirs, green­ery, and dream­ing women (”over the seas, to silent Palestine”) to the work that poetry does (that is, if it is work, and not some kind of, well, cheese­cake). I want to say some­thing like, well, rage and crisis are not the end-​all of poetry, it’s the rêve, is it not?

And then I read about women’s ritha’ (elegy for fallen kins­men) in pre-​Islamic poetry, and how the cliches of the bereaved are tran­scended only in the part of the elegy des­ig­nated the tahrid, or call to vengeance. That is, by West­ern stan­dards of orig­i­nal­ity in poetry, the women really hit it when inspired not by grief but by blood-​lust.

One can’t help think­ing of rage, too, while look­ing on per­haps the oldest text we have writ­ten in the Phoeni­cian alphabet—the mother of all linear alpha­bets.