Session Title: "Experimental Poetry and Cognition"

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900

Conference dates: 2/22 - 2/24, 2007

Abstracts: Luck, Rice, Rowe, Cruschiel

In this paper, I argue that the “openness” of Lyn Hejinian’s paratactical structure in her autobiographical poem My Life (1987) formally mirrors cognitive models of the collaborative nature of memory and identity itself, a model that she also takes up as a theme within the text. Hejinian has asserted elsewhere that “the poem is a mind” and that poetry “provides us with the consciousness of consciousness” (The Language of Inquiry 44, 344).  Her work, however, is often understood within a poststructuralist epistemology that would seem to run counter to theories of embodied consciousness.  In fact, the poetic device of parataxis, also called the “new sentence” by Language poet Ron Silliman, has famously been cited by Frederic Jameson as an example of the schizophrenic and depthless postmodern subject.  A cognitive approach to My Life, however, allows me to take Hejinian’s investment in the connection between poetry and consciousness seriously, and to explore the ways in which the new sentence and its openness reveal, per contra Jameson, the very real depths and processes of the embodied mind.  To support my argument, I use theories of memory as collaboration from psychologist Susan Engel.  But I suggest that Hejinian’s text complicates Engel’s more abstract model, illustrating the ways that other people can literally shape the landscape of the embodied mind.  The minds of others become alternative “lobes of autobiography” to shape the “permeable constructedness” that is her Life and her life (ML 27, 133).  My Life certainly explodes the essential lyric “I” of traditional poetry, not into a schizophrenic linguistic “subject” but rather into a multiplicitous, multi-voiced embodied consciousness. 

“Reading as Goniometry: Christian Bök’s Crystallography”

An experimental poem is an uncategorized specimen of language -- we see it or hear it and don’t know what to do with it. One approach to ungrammaticality in poetry identifies a process of “naturalization” by which the unfamiliar is tested, rearranged, and familiarized. Cognitive stylistics has examined some of the processes by which naturalization proceeds at the levels of textual processing (Bradford, Stockwell), and conceptualization (M. Freeman). In all of these accounts, something unusual or unexpected about the text forces the naturalization processes into action, leading to a resolution as if the poem were a riddle to be solved.

Bök’s Crystallography points us in a different direction. Bök figures texts as crystals, etched, measured, tested, and weighed for the purposes of categorization and the economies which depend on categorization, like manufacturing, collection, or sales.  But no amount of examination exhausts our fascination with gems, in part because of the fundamental simplicity of their fractal construction. Indeed, this simplicity only increases our fascination because it seems somehow not to account for either the uniqueness or the complexity of individual stones. By the logic of the book’s premise, poetic texts resist explanation for much the same reason. Measuring the interfacial angles of a particular poem does not decrease one’s interest in the poem.

This response in itself is one that requires a cognitive explanation. What are the structural requirements of a conceptual system that continues to divert attentional resources to complex but regular shapes even after the relationships between the various component shapes have been mapped?  Examples from Crystallography, especially the “Diamond” section, will be used to illustrate several component requirements, and an evolutionary perspective will be briefly entertained.

 Many Minds, One Body: Time Cognition in Fernando Pessoa

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) took modernist tropes of the fractured self and fictionalized identity to an extreme: he attributed his writings to 70-odd different “heteronyms,” named poets with individual biographies and radically diverse styles. Yet these poets all lived in the same body. Cognitive linguistics claims that the human experience of living in a physical body is the ultimate grounding for the mental constructs at the core of language. Pessoa’s cognition should thus be doubly constrained, by language and by embodiment itself.

Each of Pessoa’s four major poetic heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and “Fernando Pessoa” himself—presents a characteristic viewpoint on time. Metaphors of time are among the most studied of human cognitive structures; recent empirical work has shown how individual and cultural variations in language concerning time may be correlated with distinct conceptual structures and sensorimotor experiences. We would expect to find a common physical experience of embodiment and sensation across the four major heteronyms, alongside four distinct conceptual structures reflected in their distinct poetic voices. More specifically, we expect to find similarities in metonymic structures for time-measurement (grounded directly in physical experience) alongside variations in metaphoric mappings of time-experience.

Reading Pessoa, however, we find that the presentation of time is constrained more by language than by embodiment. The language of time-experience is grounded in physical and spatial metaphors which none of the heteronyms can fully escape; but Caeiro, Campos, and Pessoa-himself—in different ways—all use language itself to evade the metonymies of time-measurement. Thus for Pessoa, the body is a constraint which can be ignored at will, but poetry—and the poet’s identity—must, in time, come down to words.

Ewa Cruschiel
Colby-Sawyer College

Brackets, Parenthesis and Deictic Shifts in Jorie Graham’s Poetics

In this paper I demonstrate how parenthesis and brackets work in conjunction with the deictic shifts in Jorie Graham’s poetry. Graham’s profuse use of brackets serves to defer and obscure meaning as well as to violate the idealized cognitive models of “typical over non-typical.” Graham’s choice of brackets is an ethical statement about the nature of reality. Brackets resist the surfaces—what is given. Instead, they invite the reader to dig inwardly, to shed the layers off reality. Such understanding of brackets is in accord with the tradition of Descartes, Kant and Husserl. For these philosophers, things in brackets are unknowable. What one does not know, or, what one doubts, becomes segmented off—bracketed. Graham seems to depart from this philosophical tradition only to subvert it, however.

The deictic shifts introduced through bracketing and parentheses iconically convey a cinematographic zooming in of our perception.  The brackets, parentheses and colons create layers, unfoldings (and “infoldings”). They shed meaning, as one breaks the atom into smaller and smaller particles and into even smaller sub-atomic particles. They represent the ever continuous layering of reality, dividing splitting, shedding, a continuous digging into an unknown and silence. The cumulative effect is “inwardgoingness” which expands the meaning and supercedes closure.