Cognitive Processes While Writing Poetry: An Expert-Novice Study

To identify expert poets’ cognitive processes as they compose poetry, we asked 10 expert poets and 10 novice writers of poetry to think aloud as they composed a poem. Compared to the novices, expert poets revealed an associative playfulness and surrendering of consciousness, similar to that shown in research on general creativity in domains such as art, music, and science. Experts also demonstrated significantly more evidence of deliberate procedures and active revision. Novices rarely revised their poems. With regard to meaning, experts made significantly more comments about how the text was meaningful, in particular how textual elements evoke and amplify meaning, than about what the text merely meant. The novices commented more on what the text meant than how the text was meaningful. In discussing the results, we propose a model of the cognitive processes involved in poetic composition, and explore implications for instruction in school and post-secondary educational settings.     

The Creative Use of Poetry in the Counseling Process

Poetry is an effective, creative tool in counseling. This article enumerates the advantages of using poetry and poetic methods (e.g., such language makes use of a natural system of communication) and mentions techniques for incorporating either the poem as a whole or in part. Ways of creating poetic awareness in counseling are emphasized. Guidelines for when to use poetry in counseling are suggested along with cautions on the incorporation of this method.     

The world and image of poetic language: Heidegger and Blanchot

This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ??world?? occurs in poetry specifically through images, and how we can conceive of the imagination in this regard without reducing the imagination to a mimetic faculty of consciousness subordinate to cognition. Continental thought in the last century offers rich resources for this study. The notion of a ??world?? is related to the poetic image in ways fundamental to the Heidegger??s theory of language, and may be seen in Continental poetics following Heidegger, including Blanchot??s examination of poetry in his account of the space of literature. By means of images, I shall demonstrate, poetic language is exemplary in relation to ??world?? in two ways. (1) Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world, specific to that poem, for its reader. Poetic images then, exhibit a generative evocation of world. (2) Through images, a poem may evoke the way in which space and time are inhabited as a world of human dwelling in an ontologically or existentially meaningful way. The relation of images to world is, then, an illumination or a disclosure of world. The first of these relations remains, to a large extent, immanent to the poem, but may be seen as an analogue of the essentially human experience of inhabiting a world. The second relation transcends the poem and relates the poem immediately to the existential framework of human dwelling.     

Poetic Possibilities in Conversations About Suffering

Suffering is presented as an experience affected by the meanings, stories, and conversations held by sufferers and caregivers. Seen this way, therapy offers many opportunities to join sufferers and caregivers in a search for meanings, stories, and ways of talking that best serve them. By bringing a poetic sensitivity to how therapists listen and intervene it is possible to engage these clients in reflecting upon, trying on, and engaging in new, relief-promoting forms of meaning. Further, this way of intervening can heuristically prompt sufferers and caregivers to engage in poetic meaning-making when they feel stuck on the sameness of meanings they associate with suffering.     

Effects of distorted auditory and of rhyming cues on retrieval of tip-of-the-tongue words by poets and nonpoets

Auditory cues (the target word distorted by a low-pass filter) and rhyming cues act as retrieval aids for people who have a word on the tip of their tongue. Parallels between the tip-of-thetongue phenomenon (TOT) and the perception of well-put passages of poetry are also discussed. It is argued that the effects of these poetic passages derive in part from the engagement of TOT-like processes. In support of this hypothesis, poets (poetry appreciators) are shown to be more aware of being helped by TOT retrieval cues than are nonpoets (poetry nonappreciators); however, the retrieval cues do not differentially influence successful recall of TOT words by poets and nonpoets.     

Baudelaire’s Aesthetic

This paper will take up the work of Charles Baudelaire, poetic and critical, in order to present the Baudelairean aesthetic and to make a case for its relevance in our judgments about art today. Baudelaire was the first poet of the modern built environment and is known as the father of modern poetry. While his poetry is still admired, his aesthetic has been historicised: deemed to belong to that time and place in which Baudelaire wrote. This paper will argue that this historicisation by subsequent aesthetic theory and philosophy is a suppression of something integral to art and artists, without which art is liable to lose what is true about it and sink into a morass of irrelevance and triviality, or (as will be argued has partly happened) may become devoid of any value beyond the business interests that control it. In this regard, it will be suggested, Baudelaire’s aesthetic has important redeeming qualities.     

RAGING WITH THE TRUTH: Condemnation and Concealment in the Poetry of Blake and Hill

An analysis of Geoffrey Hill's lyric poem about William Blake illuminates the relations between art, prophecy, and imperial politics across more than two centuries. Hill's poem responds to David V. Erdman's argument that Blake was resolutely, if ineffectually and sometimes secretly, opposed to war. It also establishes Hill's own cryptic but definite resistance to contemporary war and warmongers, while it mourns poetry's public powerlessness to halt the violent competition for material resources. Ignored by the majority, poetry fails to bring about the ethical social change that poets often envision. The layering of perspectives (Hill the poet and scholar writing about Erdman the scholar, who is explicating Blake the poet and artist) allows for a multidimensional interpretation of the role of poets and prophetic poetry. Despite their fury at society's deafness and greed, and frustration at their own incapacities, poets—because if they are great poets, they are prophets, too—continue to speak to their audiences about the problems of this world and about the better worlds that can be imagined. Hill's text obliquely teaches how the small success of a great poem can provide a minor note of consolation as it objects to terror and tyranny.     

The crisis of Greek poetics: A re-interpretation

Conclusion The central thrust of Platonic poetics - for Plato had no aesthetics - is not the outright abolition of poetry, nor merely a relocation of it in view of recent acquisitions in the scientific knowledge of the day. Rather it is the quest for an authentic poetry and for ways of differentiating true from false poetry. The experience of transcendence through poetic symbols - of insight into ultimate reality - cannot be explained on the basis of the mimetic theory. The world as a totality, its origin, the gods in the heavens, the shades and shadows of Hades, the tragic Destiny of the dramatist, and their interplay: these are crucial to the Greek experience of reality as voiced by the poet, but for none of them is there any possible model in the visible world, natural or craft-produced.²³ Consequently these can never be imitated, and thus too the traditional vocation of the poet as the namer of the holy is precisely what gets eliminated in the last book of the Republic, and in Aristotle's refurbishment of mimsis.Plato takes poetry seriously both for the polis and in the polis because it poses a serious danger. Poetry threatens the safety of the city which is within us (Rep. 608). Yet with Hölderlin he could agree that Where there is danger there also lies salvation, and so recognize the veridicousness of poetry, its truth-bearing power. At the basis of every life-form, every political order, there lies a poetic projection. The work of philosophical criticism and dissent can therefore not but enter into the quarrel with poetry. For Aristotle on the other hand, poetry, its meaning transvaluated, has been removed from the precinct of conflict. To put the point dramatically: one could never imagine Aristotle expelling the poets from any state, real or ideal. That would be a category-mistake since the worst that poetry can do is to turn into a catharsis interruptus.Although we have no unmediated experience of Being, the theory of inspiration points in such a direction. Yet even for the poet, it must be stressed, poetic inspiration must not be torn from the process of its self-realizing production or techn. Nor is the Heraclean metaphor fully adequate to critical interpretation, for it emphasizes sensitive conformance to the word at the expense of the distance required for proper engagement. The missing dimension is hinted at in the interrogative approach of Socrates, in his concern for the discovery and preservation of truth. Poetic inspiration, but also poetic interpretation, will not be poetic unless it is, as Heidegger says, a coming-to-work, whether that means a work of art or work of thought. Poetic inspiration must be an eventuation of truth in the work; as distinguished from mystical inspiration, it seeks embodiment and mediation. In other terms, for there to be an artwork both the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension of craft must intersect. The eventuation of truth in the work must be fitting, due and opportune; the intersection must have its proper measure (summetria, Phil. 643). This alone constitutes the genuine necessity of the work, and only when this character prevails can the eventuation of truth take place.     

Poetic rhyme reflects cross-linguistic differences in information structure

Identical rhymes (right/write, attire/retire) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information-structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers' intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.     

Enacting memory and grief in poetic landscapes

Much geographical work has focused on sites of memory, where memories and grief are inherently tied to particular places, monuments and landscapes. Memories and grief can also, however, be spatially and temporally dispersed and fragmentary, creating landscapes in which things are simultaneously present and absent. In this paper I trace the creation of a memorial poem - a marwnad - for my great aunt, who lived her entire life on the margins of Cors Goch, a lowland bog in rural south-west Wales, as part of a long tradition in Welsh-language poetry. Like many Welsh marwnadau, the poem highlights spatial and temporal complexities of memory, emotion and grief. They are both inherently tied to shifting, ephemeral, fluid landscapes and politicised in changing regional and national cultural landscapes, speaking to challenges faced by rural communities and the changing geographies of the Welsh language. As well as reflecting the temporality and seasonality of site-specific memory and grief, the poem contributes to that temporality as memories resurface and intensify during composition and in subsequent personal readings. I discuss the place of such performative poetry in mapping grief and the implications of poetic grieving and memory-making for absence and presence and relationships with the landscape.     

GUIDED READING IN POETRY: COMBINING AESTHETIC APPRECIATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF ESSENTIAL SKILLS

Reading and sharing poetry fosters richness in languages and encourages understanding of ideas presented through a beautiful form of expression. Poetry takes the reader through expression of emotion and the ideas that these emotions inspire in the poet. Further, the poet stimulates the reader to explore his or her own feelings and ideas. Discussion of what a particular poem means to individual students provides opportunities to share ideas and feelings which the poem evokes.

The use of poetry invites students to read lines or particular phrases which are appealing to them or about which they have a question. Furthermore, teachers should be encouraged to combine the aesthetic dimensions of poetry with skills development. A poetry guide for encouraging basic language skills is presented herein.     

‘You Could Call It Magic’: What Parents and Siblings Tell Preschoolers About Unobservable Entities

How can we explain children's understanding of the unseen world? Young children are generally able to distinguish between real unobservable entities and fantastical ones, but they attribute different characteristics to and show less confidence in their decisions about fantastical entities generally endorsed by adults, such as Santa Claus. One explanation for these conceptual differences is that the testimony children hear from others about unobservable entities varies in meaningful ways. Although this theory has some experimental support, its viability in actual conversation has yet to be investigated. Study 1 sought to examine this question in parent–child conversation and showed that parents provide similar types of content information when talking to children about both real entities and entities that they generally endorse. However, parents use different pragmatic cues when they communicate about endorsed entities than they do when talking about real ones. Study 2 showed that older siblings used discourse strategies similar to those used by parents when talking to young children about unobservable entities. These studies indicate that the types of cues children use to form their conceptions of unobservable entities are present in naturalistic conversations with others, supporting a role for testimony in children's early beliefs.     

The Implied Imperative: Poetry as Ethics in the Proverbs of the Tirukkuṟaḷ

The Tirukkuṟaḷ is a text of Tamil proverbs that circulates widely in South India today. While the first two sections of the text contain practical pieces of ethical advice, the third section contains an extended love poem. This variation in content has resulted in a dichotomous view of the text in which ethics and poetry are viewed as fundamentally distinct. This paper blurs the distinction between ethics and poetry by showing how the poetic form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ's proverbs not only enhances the text's ethical message but also participates in the ethical formation of the text's audience. Building on Geoffrey Galt Harpham's notion of sub-ethics, I argue that the Tirukkuṟaḷ uses three literary strategies—metaphor, inference, and suspense—to engage the audience in modes of “sub-ethical” reflection by raising ethical questions and framing ethical choices.     

ORDER FROM VIRTUAL STATES: A DIALOGUE ON THE RELEVANCE OF QUANTUM THEORY TO RELIGION

Abstract. Lothar Schäfer has written a poetic tribute pointing out the relevance of quantum theory to religious beliefs. Two items in his article trouble me greatly. First are the excessive claims about the relevance of quantum mechanisms for the creation and evolution of life. Schäfer's claim that “everything that can happen must happen” can be dangerously misleading. The quantum rules predict that most outcomes have a near‐zero chance of occurring. Although “anything can happen” can be a wonderful metaphor for living life, it can be dangerous if taken literally. It can also be misleading when applied to Darwinian mechanisms. My second trouble was with Schäfer's desire to extract moral values from quantum principles in a literalist manner. Extracting ethics from science has always been problematic. Luckily, Schäfer provides balance to these objections by including many wonderful passages that in my opinion correctly point out how quantum theory should change the way we conceive of our place in the universe. I list twelve points in which the quantum ontology differs from our normal Newtonian ontology. Awareness of these aspects is typically missing from our usual appreciation of nature, so Schäfer's poetry on a number of these points is well appreciated.     

The Problem of Modernism and Critical Refusal: Bradley and Lamarque on Form/Content Unity

In this article I revisit A. C. Bradley's account of form/content unity through the lens of both Peter Kivy's and Peter Lamarque's recent work on Bradley's lecture “Poetry for Poetry's Sake.” I argue that Lamarque gives a superior account of Bradley's argument. However, Lamarque claims that form/content unity should be understood as an imposition applied by the reader to poetry. Working with the counterexample of modernist poetry, I throw doubt on both this claim and some associated presuppositions found in Lamarque's account. Modernist poetry appears to intermittently fail to exhibit form/content unity; its unique value also appears bound up with this intermittent failure. However—against the moderates, like Kivy and Kelly Dean Jolley, who this counterexample may seem to support—I claim Lamarque is nonetheless correct that form/content unity is intrinsic in response to poetic value. I argue form/content unity should be seen as a demand, which poems (like modernist poetry) can intentionally frustrate.     

TELEOFUNCTIONALISM AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Fred Dretske's teleofunctional theory of content aims to simultaneously solve two ground‐floor philosophical puzzles about mental content: the problem of naturalism and the problem of epiphenomenalism. It is argued here that his theory fails on the latter score. Indeed, the theory insures that content can have no place in the causal explanation of action at all. The argument for this conclusion depends upon only very weak premises about the nature of causal explanation. The difficulties Dretske's theory encounters indicate the severe challenges involved in arriving at a robust naturalistic understanding of content.     

Abracadabra Tongue: Poetry Magic

The author has known that poetry is magic since she was a child. However when she sat down to write about it she went blank, confronted by the taboo against magic in our rationalistic culture. In the way of Jungian magic she is helped by dream figures. The Muslim Solomon takes her on a flying carpet journey which reveals the magic of poetic influence: how Hafiz influenced Goethe influenced Lorca influenced her, which is how Persian mysticism found its way into her poetry. She tells the story of her development as a poet, how she learned fermentation magic—the difficult and often painful process required by poetic vision and revision in which grapes must be crushed, favorite phrases and metaphors must be ruthlessly smashed. The Queen of Sheba, another dream figure, shows up to tell her version of the story of her relationship with Solomon. She reveals the dark, fierce, and lusty lineage of her “old black magic” and how it has made its way into the author's poetry.     

Gnosis

The transition from form to meaning is not neatly layered: there is no point where form ends and content sets in. Rather, there is an almost continuous process that converts form into meaning. That process cannot always take a straight line. Very often we hit barriers in our mind, due to the inability to understand the exact content of the sentence just heard. The standard division between formula and interpretation (or value) should therefore be given up when talking about the process of understanding. Interestingly, when we do this it turns out that there are ‘easy’ formulae, those we can understand without further help, and ‘difficult’ ones, which we cannot.     

Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond

The Ganser syndrome, or “talking past the point,” (originally identifying symptoms of inmates on remand when questioned by prison doctors), is explored as a form of insubordination against the stigmatizing effects of overdetermined diagnostic categories. The strategies of approximation that characterize the syndrome are likened to comedy routines/vaudeville styles and to their employment of punning, clownery, and ambiguity to challenge the more privileged cultural values of clarity, literalness, and precision. The seeming craftiness of Ganserians is related to the aesthetic tactics of the trickster figure and to the physical buffoonery of hysterics. Stylistically, this paper synthesizes the languages of critical theory, Gracie Allen routines, personal narrative, jokes, and poetic reflections on the notion of being approximate.