Bobby has made Mailer’s tag his own, but this is an adver­tise­ment fa mice elf agin. I’ll be read­ing my poems at Myopic Books this Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 20,  at 7 pm. Details here. Daniel Borzutzky is also read­ing, so please stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

How awe­some is it that Sawyer was blast­ing “Search & Destroy” last night.

[I recently men­tioned to my per­sonal trainer, the poet Anthony Madrid, author of The 580 Stro­phes, that I was writ­ing about John Ashbery's Plani­sphere for the LRB. He sug­gested we read it together & com­pare notes. When I saw that his notes were grow­ing as exten­sive as my own, I asked him to write them up for this space. This is the first install­ment; I hope the loyal read­ers of DE are as pleased with the results as I am. —mr]

ONGO­ING PLANI­SPHERE NOTE­BOOK

Anthony Madrid

1.

People are much too free with the phrase “a great book of poetry.” They think if the book has ten really good pieces in it then it’s a great book.

They don’t talk that way about albums. For it to be a great album it can’t just have some hits. You have to con­sider the not-​hits, too. I wanna say: If you simply skip over the not-​hits with no regret what­so­ever, you can’t really call it a great album.

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.

***

CHICAGO REVIEW is pleased to announce the pub­li­ca­tion of issue 55:1: SEVEN POETS FROM BERLIN, edited and intro­duced by Chris­t­ian Hawkey.

Fea­tur­ing:

POEMS by Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck, Hen­drik Jack­son, Uljana Wolf, Stef­fen Popp, Sabine Scho, and Ron Winkler

&

TRANS­LA­TIONS by Chris­t­ian Hawkey, Nicholas Grindell, Nicholas Perrin, Cather­ine Hales, Susan Bernof­sky, J.D. Schnei­der and Andrea Scott

as well as:

FIC­TION by Jorge Edwards and Deb Olin Unferth

an INTER­VIEW with Jorge Edwards

ESSAYS by Jef­frey Yang and J.H. Prynne

plus REVIEWS and NOTES!

To order or sub­scribe, visit:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/review

***

(our cover is cour­tesy of Andreas Töpfer)