POETICKS

I believe, by the way, that the few good non-equa-phorical poems get most of their punch due to their evasion of metaphor. That is, those experiencing them get pleasure from the unexpected absence of metaphor or nything approximating mataphor. It may even be that such poems cause those experiencing to experience anywhere-at-Once by activating two separate brain areas–one of them empty! (A kind of “praecisio” for Geof Huth to consider.) The pay-off would be a feeling of image-as-sufficient-in-itself.Be that as it may, I brought this subject up–well, I brought it up because I couldn’t think of anything else to discuss today. But I wanted to begin considering visual poetry neurophysiologically, something I haven’t before, that I know of. Recently, I’ve been trying, in particular, to distinguish visual poetry from illustrated poetry in terms of my knowlecular psychology, which is entirely neurophysiological (although the neuorophysiology is hypothetical). I’ve been having trouble. I believe I have a beginning, though. It is that an illustrated poem, like some of William Blake’s, put a person experiencing them in a verbal area of his mind first, and then into a visual area of his mind. The text activates his verbal area, the illustration his visual area–at about the same time that his verbal area activates some of the cells in the portion of his visual area activated by the illustration. This results in a satisfying completion that enhances the pleasurable effect of the poem.

A classical visual poem–a poem, that is, that everyone would consider a visual poem–will put a person experiencing it in a verbal area of his mind and a visual area of his mind at the same time. Because the text and the illustration will be the same thing.

The activated visual area will cause (minor) pain, because not expected–that is, it will be due to textual elements used in unfamiliar ways, or graphic elements jammed into texts in unfamiliar ways. If successful, the poem’s verbal content will secondarily activate some of the cells in the portion of the subject’s visual area the visual elements did–to result in the same kind of saisfaction the illustrated poem resulted in, except faster (the precipitating experiences not being consecutive but simultaneous), and with more unfamiliarity resolved, a plus in my theory of aesthetics.

Apologies if all this seems dense. I’m feeling my way–and writing for myself more than for anyone else. I hope to find my way to clearer expression, eventually.