We shape and are shaped by language. It orients who and where we are.

The operational shape of a poem’s plan is always emergent; its layering is a rhetoric of substance and selection:

POETIC LAYERING

discovery – fragmemntary, selective information to exploratoration

preparation – accumulation, positioning of language to methodology

fabrication – progression, elaboration of performance to integration

recollection – emotional, diagnostic and reconsideration to memory

release – convergence of thought/language in execution

Rhetorical layering is not consecutive or sequential in a poem, but rather is organic and nonlinear, continuously composing, persuading, eloquently shaping meaning and experience.

In some ways layering is what the poem does as opposed to means, an important concept that we can get to later.

Layering is a poem’s internally evolving engine of persuasion, influence, organization and pleasure, reflecting the infinitely changing directions the mind takes as it both creates and experiences the poem.

A poem is a neurological product as well as an algorithm of language — navigating data fields of the brain, the sensory world and technology — through which images, ideas, and perceptions are filtered and altered.

The mind speaks to us in a language both known and unknown – a language that is always at the edge of thought, but not the thought itself – a language that is the representation of the thing thought or experienced, but not the thing itself.

A poem possesses within itself the structural design of intimacy, a kind of internal, natural architecture that pulls together, assembles and fabricates what is thought. As a product of the brain, it is a hybrid of technological influences.

Every poem poses a question whose resolution, though clearly described within the work, remains stubbornly silent, mysterious and unanswered.

A poem is full of the invented and the real, with no logical explanation as to why or how they might be related. That is its genius and essential beauty, and also is what releases us from needing to know the difference.

Poetry imposes a story upon experience.

A poem creates belief within uncertainty – realizing an assured buoyancy oscillating between confusion and understanding, disorder and symmetry.

When writing then reading occur online, the writer then reader become a part of the altered perceptions generated by the medium through which they are communicating.

The best paradigm for poetry in its creative process and compositional technique might be embodied in the experience we all encounter when searching on Google.

Exploring, seeking for something, we sort through search after search, adding, blending, coalescing layer upon layer of informational segments until some level of knowledge or experience is achieved.

Sometimes the search is a dead-end. Sometimes it is merely prosaic.

Words can fail as something put into words escapes our ability to explain what it is.

And yet, from time to time, that search also can produce something in the brain that shares the characteristics of thought, sensation and emotion where the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. We can’t wholly explain why that is so. Maybe that’s a good thing.

The solution is there in the words of the poem, but can’t be described.

We can come close to articulating its core, but the mystery remains . . . something that is just right and still just out of reach of the language articulating its meaning:

Perhaps  it’s  also  a  point of view  or  perhaps   only  differences  of   opinion  where electric  media   spin   off   digital  provocations   broadcasting  into  a  figure-ground relationship  ending  up  perched    on  a   precarious   limb   ready  to  instantly   steal    

away   like   a    bird    once   unseen  but  now  discovered  so   perhaps  we   are  in  a place  where   every   word   recedes    inside   its  own   distortions   and  where   any personal   distractions  might   overwhelm   an    emotional   quarrel    as negotiations   

will   in  a  heartbeat   result   in  feelings  of  conflict  and  a focus  on  abstraction  so explicit   it  is   in   the   blink  of  an   eye   an  unconscious   subconscious   image   we see   in   one another   our  eager   faces   leaning   deep   into   the   frozen   screen  the  

esemplastic  mind  thinking  that  all  this  is but  another  timeless form  of  amorphous decomposition  a growing  impatient sense  of intimacy  painfully starved of its  shape. 

Every poem presents a question whose resolution, though clearly described within the poem, remains outside of the poem itself, stubbornly silent, mysterious and unanswered.

Tune in to my next poetry post on Friday, April 19 to read, “The Place of Poetry in the Brain’s GPS.”

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.

“Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually.” (Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading)

Around 8,000 (BC), we were in the early stages of tracking/accounting for quantities of things by means of clay tablets.

A few thousand years later we moved on to cuneiform and hieroglyphs that reflected strongly established, layered, multifaceted societies requiring more complex methods of tracking, recording, information control and decision-making.

By the middle of the 8thcentury BC, the Phoenicians had initiated classifications and arrangements of letters and characters.

Later, consonant and vowel sounds were further developed by the Greeks, ultimately producing what is known as continuous script – a lack of spacing between written words, reflecting language’s oral tradition origins in speech.

Nicholas Carr, in describing this period, says, “reading was like working out a puzzle. The brain’s entire cortex, including the forward areas associated with problem solving and decision making, would have been buzzing with neural activity.”

It’s here that Saenger points to a critical transition between oral and silent reading. By the 15 century, “ . . . a gradual change in writing―the introduction of word separation―led to the development of silent reading.”

Add in the cumulative effect from Gutenberg’s press

So . . . what happens in poetry as that silent, solitary activity and experience – for both writer and reader – is now filtered through electronic media?

Poetry can no longer be entirely silent or solitary in its connectivity, execution and experience.

 A new, networked, more collaborative writing process emerges that links and combines personal thought with broad arrays of electronic media, information, algorithmic directions/suggestions and a variety of focused external influences.

Think of a poem now as an autonomous but widely connected space arranged into consecutive compass points of access, internal orientation, with entrances and exits linked to external references, choices, comparisons.

The poem becomes more and more a reflection of the embedded predispositions of electronia media and the rapidly adapting mind.

Spaces between words are synaptic pauses, bridges spanning voids filling the reader with the expectation of what comes next, what once was there but now isn’t, the consilience and pleasure of thought.

The language of the screen absorbs you as you absorb it; it’s a puzzle of need.

Poetry gives readers the illusion that it follows an apparent narrative line, but in fact it follows more of a cephalopodic network that wanders about, sometimes aimlessly in search of a direction, and arrives by getting somewhere (one hopes) unexpected. 

The restless clockwork of mind and poetry – the algorithmic arabesque of self-organization and spontaneous order and release – connects to the complex electronic word marquetry or intarsia hovering like slight whispers on the screen, thoughts like apparitions.

Like a search engine, a poem is forever in search of its own meaning, and that meaning is forever in search of an audience.

Poetry in the era of electronic media is simultaneously a problem and solution conjoined, linked together as one, inseparable from the thoughts that co-create it, indivisible from the feelings that shape it

Think of a poem now as a kind of see-through technology that adds/introduces to the brain ideas, images from the real world with the chemical algorithms of the mind then acting on these as a kind of hyperlink to wider arrays of words and meanings.

Think of poetry’s writer/reader experience now as a long-distance transaction conducted with a more immediate intimacy, instantaneously repeated over time and through multiple channels.

A poem on the screen now quickens the mind, a resonance, connectivity and ricochet acting as a synthesis of insight, design and distraction, the fusion of everything you thought you were doing and the disruptions that take you away from that plan.

Tune in to my next poetry post on Tuesday, April 16 to read “A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection”

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.

A poem becomes a self-organizing model of the media and a mind’s neural networks.

Each new electronic/digital medium through which we communicate has become a critical new partner in the evolution in language.

Poetry today is working hard at looking at, often trying to resolve or unpack issues arising out of the confluence of the mind, the media, and the metaphorical design and patterned structures of language.

Ultimately, for the poet as well as the reader, some assembly is required.

A poem becomes a self-organizing model of the media and mind’s neural network, algorithmically and heuristically creating the paradoxes, fallacies and insights, the planned and unintended thoughts and feelings.

We are all only beginning to understand the degree to which the electronic media – for better or worse – alters and shapes our thought processes, our language and creative decisions and reach.

The effects in our writing show up as:

changes in presentation                                   expanded narrative styles

new structure of works                                   enlarges vocabulary

increases in distractions                                  broadening of uses for technology

expands multitasking                                      blurs digital divide of writer/reader

imagery shaped by search engines                  content added from search engines

modular reading/writing habits                        modified syntax, punctuation

fragmented phrase/sentences                          quicker research time

digital memory vs. neural memory                 fragmented ownership

technology as teacher                                      technology as ‘the muse”

For better and worse, technology has become the ultimate disruptive heart of modernity.

What might all of this mean?

With electronic media available, everything is possible within the poem, which means an infinitely variable array of probabilities in both content and form are a keystroke away.

Learning how to reorganize itself to read from a book, the brain must now learn to reroute the same neural circuits as it reads from the desktop, laptop, handheld.

Technology has been helping the brain to research or communicate. How is the brain responding to that technology?

You can be guided by or you can guide the media you use by materially expanding the range and reach of your interests.

Electronic media urges upon the brain a new choreography to language.

In poetry, adaptations in response bring changes in compositional pace and spacing of diction as well as in its syntactic sequencing and stride.

Maneuvering in grammar and punctuation is more intricate, stylistically varied and narratively sophisticated.

The resulting slide and pivot, pause, leap and momentum of the poetic line take on the appearance of a more nonchalant control whereas the actual outcome is often far more technically controlled, complex and rhythmically exact 

Today, poetry from the technologically enhanced brain is a data-river, feeding on and into every aspect of human experience.

It wraps its way around each bend, continues to flow, though never depending on the same solution it finds a place to slow and rest, then flows once more forward into the quick white cataracts and sulphur blue pools of the poem.

Inside it there is only the way forward, with no way of return. It constantly renews and feeds itself by the waters of its source and those joining with it.

The data-river is always moving ahead, distracting itself in tributaries, then gathering together the substance of its past, the momentum of its future, the evidence of its flow.

Throughout its path and direction, the signatures of its presence, the shores and bedrock of its being are the measure and evidence of its additions and subtractions.

Stand in the river. It is always changing around us. It meanders. It becomes an emblem of the continuous mind, an eloquent extension of what you think is where you are going:

the data-river  a  periodic  and  anti-symmetrical  self-induced  distortion   meanders  inside   the  will  of  its  own  nature  retaining   no   obvious  sense   of  shape  though  freely  fine-tuning  its  method   drifting  downstream  according to  the direction of  a slope  where  ripple  ramble  loop  and  roam bend  and  flow  within  the average  mean curves of  oscillation  or  amplitude   and  yet  the  mind  immersed  as it  is  on  a  path  of  which   little  is  known   also  knows  itself   as  a medium   often  at   times indifferent   and  unmeasured  where  riffle  range  chart  and  pool  will modify  its scale  of change  knowing  what  plan  its  course  will  take  will   likewise  shape  an  outcome  where  word  after  word  appears and  disappears  the  continuous  mind  thinking  in  a  geography  of  thought  chasing   a  vanishing  point  of   no    return   no   longer   obvious   or  self-evident

It is always changing. It is a change in complex systems or organization, replacing former ways of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking, composing or configuration.

Tune in for my next poetry post on Friday, April 12 when we’ll look into, “Poetry’s Curve Towards Infinity”

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.