“At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync.” (Steven Strogatz, Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, 2015)

What might this have to do with poetry? Bear with me . . .

Perhaps the best-known occurrence of this “cycles in sync,” most often arising only in isolated sections of the world, is nature’s mysterious manifestation of thousands of fireflies that gradually flash on/off synchronously in unison within a constant rhythm and tempo. The means by which this synchrony might be regulated and progressively emerge is believed to be a combination of:

• a natural chemoelectrical oscillation within firefly brain cells

• a firefly’s self-adjustment in response to the flashes of others.

The flashing begins in an asynchronous incoherence, but little by little – the fireflies both sending and receiving signals – a group unity is spontaneously achieved.

Or, as Strogatz describes it, “the fireflies organize themselves.”

Want a more personal, intimate analogy for what might be happening in a poem?

In three different locations, your heart has thousands of what are known as pacemaker cells – also a natural chemoelectrical conduction system – that use sodium, calcium, and potassium ions permeating the pacemaker cells to maintain your heartbeat. From birth to death these cells keep the heart at a certain rhythm and pace.

Individually and collectively, these unique cells self-organize your heartbeat.

Becoming lost in the writing process pretty much describes what happen when someone is deep into writing a poem.

Everything – the desk, lights, books, sounds, shelves, walls, doors other people – recedes as the writer advances forward, interacting with the unhurried, deliberate, measured construction of the poem, the time-consuming relationship to the word taking precedence over everything and everyone around the process.

The closer the writer comes to the completion of the work, the more there is a tangible, mental and physical feeling of communion with the body, flow and content of the poem. 

As with a puzzle built from many disparate pieces, a larger picture gradually appears; a growing clarity of feeling, communication and purpose emerges.

As it develops, the poem reaches what is known in many of the sciences as a point of phase transition – a process where a material transforms from one phase of matter to another.

Words become more than they were, something other than they were intended before arriving in the poem.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the beating heart of the poem finding its rhythm, discovering the right words and their combinations.

To continue this analogous train of thought, words are the cells of language, complete with their own versions of chemoelectrical oscillations and self-organizing principles and effects.

A word’s chemical energy of meaning converts to an electrical energy of comprehension.

Oscillation is a word’s sound, rhythm, rhyme, juxtaposition, resonance with other words.

These all act upon each other like multiple pebbles being dropped into a small pond with the ensuing, widening concentric circles fanning out, interfering with, succeeding as well as joining with each other.

Self-organizing is order, pattern, structure, grammar, syntax – but add in the human brain with its own alphabet soup of continuous interpretation, adaptation, modification as well as the massaging/messaging of technology’s media – and we have an outcome that, as a complex system, is a poem composed of collaborative, adaptive, networking elements and influences that produce a linguistically dynamic emergent pattern and structure.

although    it’s   true    that   everything   you’ve heard  about  the  mind  browsing  a  confluence    of    the   senses   while   also   freewheeling   all  the  angles  in  a  word    it  leads  to  a  mystery  of  how a  relationship  emerging  whole  out  of  the  heart  

being   both   a   commotion  at  the centre   of  thought  and  calm  at  the  perimeter  of  speech  surely  must   point  the  way   to  a  map  about  everything  being  everywhere  part  of   a  confusion  of  tongues   mistaken  for  the  real  purpose  of 

every  life  becoming  something   that   might   well   turn   out   to    be   a  language   in  a  language   in  a  language   that  continues  and  continues  to  look  for  what   the  brain  might  be  thinking  when  it  thinks  while  the  heart  at the brink  of

knowing  is  a resilient  country  of  intention  where  nimble  coercions of meaning  are known  and  not known  to exist  all  the  world  over  in  its  motley whereabouts  

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.

In an earlier post, I wrote that both writer and reader should focus more on how a poem comes to be.

We seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to understand what a poem means as opposed to understanding what a poem does.

The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, “A poem should not mean/but be”(Ars Poetica)

And then, of course, there is John Ciardi’s famous work, How Does A Poem Mean.

A product of the malleability of the brain – the liveliness, plasticity and suppleness of language easily carries the primary weight of what a poem does.

It’s clear there’s more access to a poem’s meaning through what it does, the intellectually objective experience of the poem as seen through its structure, diction, metaphors, rhythms, etc

That desire for meaning arises out of a craving to see an underlying connectivity and order in things.

But meaning in poetry, as in life, is riddled with complexities, contradictions, inconsistencies and the inexplicable.

An emphasis on meaning only creates a wider emotional/intellectual distance between the poem and the experience of writing/reading.

Affording more of a prominence to what a poem does provides the writer/reader with a closer approximation of what the poem is looking to realize and communicate.

A focus on meaning takes the writer/reader away from the poem.

A focus on doing binds the writer/reader closer to the poem’s performance of itself.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but rather co-dependent. As Ciardi said, “The dance is the dancer and the dancer is the dance.”

Articulating a poem’s meaning will remain forever just out of reach – defying a critical analysis that cannot quite rephrase/recast what the words of the poem have already expressed.

What a poem does is self-organize from a series on constituent elements and influences.

Self-organization in this context can be understood as a harmonizing action among heterogeneous and competing components in the poem caused as the writer/reader transitions from one component to the another.

The behavior and context of each of those constituent elements and influences do not define how they behave collectively.

In a poem there is no central organizing mechanism or entity ordering things. There are several contributors.

The poem for writer/reader becomes an emergent self-organizing co-creation visited upon by the non-linear, continuously changing and exchanging influences and adaptations by the brain, language and participating media.

The planned and unplanned disorders, capricious symmetries and structural blueprints pressing themselves upon us are found in the poem’s diction, voice, tone, syntactic array, cadence, imagery, the strategic pulse and presence of each line . . . to name just a few.

A poem, like the brain, seeks a sensory, thought or emotional shaping and outcome of the world it experiences.

What a poem does is manifest that shaping and outcome through self-organization.

The collective experience and accumulation of these separate contributions to the poem is greater than the sum of their parts. It moves within a gradient of the individual element and the many as experienced in passing from one point or moment to another.

Modern physics observes a similar process called renormalization theory that “describes in detail how the properties of a physical system change if one increases the length scale on which the observations are made.”

A poem shows that what you see will always be more than what you see . . .

where   an  unexpected   word   can  bring  to   light   the  devious   distillate  of  a  poem  it being  the  methodical  synchronicity  of the latitudes  and  longitudes  of  triangulations  from the surface of a sphere to points on  an emotional  plane where 

expressions  quite   luminous  emerge in electrochemical  appetites  and yet while  no  appearance  can   reliably occur  apart  from  the countless  pathways  of  its  happening  these preferences   will  make   known   how every    brain   endlessly 

calculates   neuronal   coordinates   in   coordination  with  a  heart veering  from external  angles  into  technical   or   harmonizing    sense  feelings  leading   to  a   likeness   well   beyond   appearance   seen   with   a  point   of   view   looking 

through  eyes expecting  to  locate   a relationship  in  a  place   where  sensations  in   the   mind   are  perceived   as   a   puzzle   with   more   than   one   solution

Tune in to my next post on Monday, April 29 to read “The Fireflies of Poetry” 

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.

And so in poetry we again come around to the notion of “place” – a map composed in the size of the world.

Poetry explores, pulling itself through the filter and modifying axis of the brain adapting to its filter of technology, arriving as the outcome of an accumulation of emergent differences and harmonies made “available / to any shape that may be summoning itself / through me / from the self not mine but ours.” (A. R. Ammons)

Everthing in a poem is a map – its word structures, properties, patterns giving us a functional mapping from one meaning/experience domain or range to another.

The terrain of a poem is made up of two places: the mapped domain of the poem itself, and the elusive and indeterminate unmapped territory of understanding, interpretation, meaning and experience around the poem.

A poem becomes a place within and between the latitude/longitude lines of its linguistic landscape, dynamically evolving and interacting within a grid-like network of modifying relationships.

The theory in physics and computer science for this is known as the principle of locality, or locality of reference.

In language theory, its act of positioning might be more akin to collocation or juxtaposition, deriving from language theory where locality refers to the proximity of elements in a linguistic structure.

Fields of influence, meaning and experience of words interact, coalesce and propagate within the relative proximity, meaning or experience of other words around them. 

As in science, where the distances between those the fields of influence materially increase, the forces of meaning or experience between words theoretically “fall off like the square of the distance between them.”

Continuously adapting to the stimuli of its more immediate environment, the mind is likewise outfitted to do the work of a map – by turns short and long-range, spatially symmetric, navigational – an omnidirectional guidance satellite piloting us through both celestial and earthly passageways of meaning and experience.

The technological space of electronic media we now inhabit, communicate and think through is both a measure and reminder of where poetry cannot help but follow.

Poetry takes as its map the search engine of metaphor – one thing presented as another, where the physical and intellectually perceived distances between one thing and the other simultaneously bind them together and also hold them apart.

In a poem, metaphor is always hard at work probing for a unity in the identities of attraction and resistances of difference.

Poetry – as on a Mercator Projection – becomes in the mind that screen/sheet of paper impossible to make align smoothly on a sphere.

Once inside it . . . the mind has places to go . . .

from  the  equator’s edge  to  the  poles  where  all that is scheduled  to be measured  becomes immeasurably flat  as there is in the increasing latitudes  every  sign  of  distortion   and  also   ample  imperfections  of thought  in-between  what  is  self-

examined   or   self-positioned   scale being  neither  near   nor  far  fetched nor  an  impediment  in  a mind’s  eye  fixed  inside  the  many  persuasions  of  meticulous longitudes  located  in exacting  square  spaces  each  manipulation 

augmenting  a  confluence  of  parallel coordinates  being so  remarkably theoretical  that measures must  be  initiated  where  navigation  at a distance  from everywhere  is  everywhere  understood  to  be  90 degrees  with  rhumb  lines  also  thought  of  as 

personal latitudes  of poetry interrupting  disrupting   a  brain’s belief  in  north  south  east  west  all  of  it  contained  here  in  a  locus  of  rhetoric

A poem is about modification and transformation, not precision and completion.

Anything we write about what a poem might be or do can never be a single discourse, a closing judgment. The poem changes constantly in our mind, and likewise so our attempts at defining it must be continuous as well.

Tune in to my next poetry post on Wednesday, April 24 to read “What a Poem Does, Not what it Means”

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.