‘This is one of the things i most love about poetry … how language can be used to change perceptions, to rewire …’
This post started as a comment on Nathan’s blog, where a ridiculously awesome conversation sprung up in his comments section for this post. Check it out. I’ve excerpted my latest contribution to the discussion below.
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“This is one of the things i most love about poetry … how language can be used to change perceptions, to rewire … ”
Jo, Nathan and I were just talking about this the other day. How we now know so many things are capable of changing the brain. Exercise, for example, literally promotes neurogenesis, the creation of new brain matter. And that’s not a fringe scientific finding.* It’s being studied and reported on all over the place, including the Centers for Disease Control. Perhaps most notably, this phenomenon of a changing brain can be seen in people who suffer strokes and who have certain types of reversible dementia. The brain can and does rewire, rebuild itself.
But the brain isn’t relegated to re-growing into its previous shape, simply hooking up old connections as if it were an operator at a busy switchboard. The brain can make never-before-established connections, grow into new ways of experiencing and understanding the world and into new ways of relating to the body and processing signals from and for the body. This is where things like meditative practice can come in. This is where things like poetry come in.
We spend so much time running our brains along the same ruts — the same fears, concerns, worries, preoccupations — in short, the same (often dysfunctional) thought patterns. To break out of that, we need our minds to be broken into, in a sense — both as readers and as writers.
As a poet, when I write I do feel something from outside, something I will loosely and erroneously call “other,” is taking up residence in me and helping me to see things from a different, often unexpected and inexplicable, perspective. This in turn helps me to experience the world in a different way. I am rewiring my brain. I do this often enough, and my thoughts start to change. My perceptions change. I get out of those ruts and possess — for lack of a better word — a different consciousness. I become other.
And that’s what empathy is, is it not? To start by embracing and experiencing self, then to move beyond self to understand and embrace, accept, other. Then to realize other is not other at all, and self is not self at all. There is no differentiation. There is none.
This shift in consciousness which I experience when writing also happens for me when I read poetry. This is why I feel poets are doing themselves a great disservice when we don’t read other poets’ work. We are losing half the transformative experience, if not more. I would argue we are losing more, actually, and that it takes a lot of transformative reading experiences to result in one transformative writing experience.
Sometimes people balk at me when I say poetry can change the world. They are wrong. If poetry can change me, or you, or anyone who read and writes it, then it can change the world. Because that’s where changes in the world begin: in each one of us. Change is like a brush fire. So small you don’t notice it at first. Then heat. Then a glow. Then, before you know it, the flames are everywhere and everything that moves is hauling ass to get the hell out of the way.
Besides, if any one of us is changed by poetry, we all are in a sense. The world has already been changed by poetry. We have already been changed by it.
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Note
*This is not to knock fringe scientific findings which, in my opinion, are some of the best scientific findings.
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I agree totally with everything said, here, on Nathan’s blog….I LOVE your dissected frog analogy. I LOVE Nathan’s insight into empathy. I am running round like a bluearsed fly though, so can’t stop but absolutely this is something that should be talked about. Two quick points I want to make. To those who say poetry should not be political, I say bullshit……it can effect change. To those who say the self shouldn’t be in poetry, I say don’t quiet us, we want to be heard…………I love poetry *sigh*. But I’m incoherent cos I’m rushing.
Jo, along those lines: I just updated my Facebook political view to read, “the personal is political.”
All my personal / “self” poems are political. I think *all* personal / “self” poems are political.
You are far from incoherent, obviously.
Right the personal — political is dialectical. We make an abstraction for the sake of discussion when we speak about them as distinct entities. To make rules about poetry based on abstractions kills poetry.
Abstractions always kill poetry.
I went to a poetry reading last night in Atlanta. Many of the poems had a political voice, or conscience. And I’ve gotta say, none of them were in favor of McPalin.
My favorite poets write with a voice of the people.
To me your essay touches on so many truths, it would be hard to list every one.
Like the brain growing new synapses, yes! Like meditation helping one to see the world in a new way, yes! Because meditation and the act of writing poetry are practiced while the brain is in a similar state. Alpha waves, and then dipping into theta. A relaxed state is where the ideas take form, where they are born.
And reading, oh yes. I read the logo for a writing program that said ‘read a hundred books to write one.’
Wonderful conversation!
“we need our minds to be broken into, in a sense”
A very Sufi-sounding insight!
Christine, you know, I often write in a very heightened state. Not in alpha waves at all, but rather a state of arousal. Does this make me odd?
Dave, that whole last section about people who don’t think poetry can change the world is aimed at you — at a comment you made to that effect in reply to a comment I left on Via Negativa. Don’t you want to tell me my position about poetry changing the world is full of holes?
It did seem very much like the sort of thing I would’ve said myself. Which makes it somewhat suspect, of course.
Dave, c’mon: Tell me poetry can’t change the world. You know you wanna.
I love this post, especially this: “Then to realize other is not other at all, and self is not self at all.”
And I agree about reading – reading poetry changes me intensely and permanently, even when I don’t realize it. In Breaking the Alabaster Jar, interviews with Li-Young Lee, he talks about this very idea: that the simple act of writing (reading) the poem already changes the world. Think of the butterfly flapping its wings…
Oh, Melissa. Thank you for mentioning that Li-Young Lee book. I will have to check it out. I am also glad you don’t think I am full-o-shit. Your opinion means a lot to me.
May I think of the moth flapping its wings instead of the butterfly?
Of course, moth away – I know you and moth have that connection…
What can I say, Melissa? The moths chose me. I am left with no choice but to worship them back. It’s only fair.
Oh, I love this. I’ve spent a fair bit of thinking about the re-wiring of brain, the building of literal new connections, in martial arts terms: not only the creation of new muscle memory/physical responses to old situations (falling? do NOT put out your hands but instead welcome & use the ground – afraid of the knife? do NOT freeze, use the attacker’s momentum, that sort of thing). And a fair bit of thinking about how poetry changes the world. But I hadn’t linked the two, and of course they are. Poetry re-wires. And yes, especially reading it.