from The Lyric in the Age of the Brain

Widespread, if ambivalent, acknowledgment of the mind’s basis in concrete, physiological states and processes has changed not only the terms but also the forms contemporary poets use to describe consciousness. As poets come to conceive of the mind as an embodied machine, the linguistic reflection of the mind—the machine of the poem—inevitably transforms as well. In its description of “mind rising / from the physical chemistries” of a goldfinch alighting in a cherry bush, A.R. Ammons’s poem “Mechanism” exemplifies recent poetry’s ubiquitous absorption of empirical terminology within its descriptions of consciousness, but the poem also illustrates the latter dimension of response—the poem’s answer, in its formal shape, to an embodied conception of the mind. Its forty-eight lines are divided in turn into jagged, isomorphic tercets, and constitute a single sentence punctuated by commas and colons. Ammons initiated his widespread use of colons instead of periods in Expressions of Sea Level (1964), the volume that contains “Mechanism”; the appearance of the colon coincides with the pervasive appearance of the kind of clamorously scientific diction that appears in the poem:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,

the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
unique genes,
molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into
sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,
territorial rights, mind rising
from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
racial satisfaction:

From Ammons’s perspective, the definitive gaps marked by periods would rupture the unified substance of the poem—what he calls its “tissue”—which is itself a representation of the unified texture, the seamless process, of inner life. In another poem, “The Ridge Farm,” he writes that “mind... flows and stalls, holds and gives way,” identifying the motions of the mind with the punctuated flow of impulses through cells, with the peristaltic and pulsating operations of his organs, with bodily processes that are defined not by closure but by continuity. As Ammons himself observed, the colons equalize the poem’s syntactic parts by obviating initial capitals, transforming the poem into a reticulated network of equivalent, dynamically interconnected clauses. The verbal object thus becomes a rhizomatic structure that is itself an image of the complex biological activity—the billions of operations— whence it emerges. In his ars poetica “Corsons Inlet,” Ammons uses open, improvised, organic forms to evoke mental flow, but in keeping with the interest of “Mechanism” in the genetic mechanisms through which evolutionary processes “redeem,” as he puts it, “random, reproducible” actions from chance, the poem’s identical replications of its idiosyncratic stanza form resemble the integral ur-activity of life, the autonomous action of genetic “molecules that reproduce themselves.” Having juxtaposed the intangible system of a “morality” to the animate system of a goldfinch elsewhere in the poem, Ammons also evokes with his orderly textual silhouette the emergence of elegant, abstract orders—the coherent orders of rational consciousness—out of apparently chaotic and nonintentional natural events.

“Mechanism,” then, expresses Ammons’s biological materialism in the substance of its formal structure; its third-person account of the goldfinch defamiliarizes human consciousness and attempts to picture its objective dynamics through both its content and its form. And yet while thematic and formal descriptions of consciousness as a physiological phenomenon are among recent poetry’s most patent responses to our embodied conception of mind, there exists an even more foundational aspect of response, for the body’s role in shaping interiority touches not only how poets describe the mind but also how they experience it. Unlike their modernist precursors, poets writing since the mid-twentieth century tend to associate embodied being not with experiential amplitude but with constraint, determination, passivity, and mortality—concepts that permeate what it feels like to perceive and attend and think and remember. As a result, poetic accounts of these processes widely attest to the feeling—the almost physical sensation—of running up against the boundaries of apprehension. The signs of mortal imperfection that riddle conscious experience become for poets invitations to reevaluate the conception of the poetic subject as keenly perceptive, mnemonically reliable, and fundamentally empowered by imagination; these signs also occasion lavish engagement with the concept of material constraint itself, an idea that bears special significance both for the lyric—the most corseted and self-consciously minimal genre of literary art—and for the avant-garde anti-lyric—the most self-consciously materialist strain of contemporary literature. More indirect than Ammons’s poem in their manner of registering our ascendant, physiological conception of consciousness, such representations of mental failures and constraints register pervasive, tacit effects of the biologization of subjectivity upon our appraisal of the possibilities and parameters of conscious life.

To illustrate these imaginative consequences of the embodied mind for poetic representations of subjectivity, we might turn from “Mechanism” to a very different kind of poem. While Jorie Graham’s “To a Friend Going Blind” draws no descriptive terms from science, it explores what it feels like to run up against the limits of embodied perception—limits that close in with distressing urgency on Sara, Graham’s friend, as she loses her power of sight. Two interwoven vignettes unfold within the walls of an Italian town, each an allegory of the process of reckoning with the “built-in / limits” of the perceiving body. In one, Graham, a disoriented visitor to the town, traces its “inner / perimeter” in a circuit along its medieval ramparts; in the other, Bruna, a well-adapted native of the city, balances practical and aesthetic concerns as she selects material to sew a dress:

Today, because I couldn’t find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town’s entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch. The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns. Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain, the built-in
limits. It’s only as an afterthought she asks
and do you think it’s beautiful?
Her measuring tapes hang down, corn-blond and endless,
from her neck.
When I look at her
I think Rapunzel,
how one could climb that measuring,
that love.
But I was saying,
I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cashcrop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object,
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her. She puts it on.

Cultivating our empathy for Sara, Graham stresses that the extreme privation that awaits her friend as she goes blind differs only in degree from the prohibitions the body imposes on all human sensation. Both vignettes center, appropriately, on moments of touch. Relinquishing sight altogether as she feels her way along the stone, Graham imagines sunflowers “as far as one can see”—a view that clearly transcends the real, impoverished view she pieces together from her glimpses of the blurred “yellow valley” that flickers through the “cracks and the gaps / for guns.” The deteriorating wall is an inexorable physical limit that is also, its cracks reveal, vulnerable to time; the wall is a figure for the boundary of the corporeal senses that conduct the given, imperfectly, to “inner” life. There is no “shortcut through” to a fuller picture of reality; all looking is “a loose worship / seeking an object”—a humble, hopeful endeavor to touch the actual through approximation, to feel out knowledge through a vast, concrete array of embodied constraints.

Just as Sara, offstage, forcibly confronts the limits her body imposes on her vision, Graham, the disoriented visitor, runs up against the surrounding ramparts, searching unsuccessfully for someplace they might “break open.” The “texture, grain, the built-in / limits” of Bruna’s cloth remind Graham of the experiential texture of an “idea,” for thought, she reminds us, feels material; even a “good idea,” in its almost tangible presence, has constraints recognizable to both the senses and the intellect—constraints Graham identifies with the constraints of material substance. The question, then, is what to make of those limits, how to reckon with the confinements of the material without reference to anything beyond the material. This recuperative act of making, of course, is precisely what the artificer Bruna accomplishes; aware of the city’s walls but unconcerned by them, sensitive to the possibilities of the finite cloth, she is preoccupied with generating a workable, inhabitable, beautiful form out of the resistance of physical substance. It is not because she subordinates aesthetic concerns to practical ones that she asks, as an afterthought, “and do you think it’s beautiful?” The question is an afterthought because Bruna is equipped, however modest the material, to make it so. She not only accepts limits but masters and wields them: the measuring tapes she uses to shape the dress drape over her shoulders like Rapunzel’s braids, the archetypal image of escape through beauty. When Bruna puts on the dress, it is “the shape of what has come / to rescue her”; the consolatory reckoning with limits that accompanies any act of creation (particularly the act of creating poetry, which is both confined and liberated by its own forms of measure) is the model Graham proposes for redeeming the exigent limitations of the perceiving body.

Contemporary American poets are always walking the perimeter of interiority, feeling its limits. They attribute to the built-in constraints of a physiological mind our intuition that human experience misses, mistakes, and distorts the given in countless knowable and unknowable ways. Breakdowns and failures—from forgetting a word to going blind— highlight these omissions and distortions, rendering the body’s invisible determinations of conscious life suddenly obvious; like lightning in a dim landscape, crises of perception, memory, and attention violently illuminate a correlation between the scope of human mental power and the frailty of the mortal body. By isolating and investigating such crises, recent poems have become, like the proliferating technologies that scientists have developed to investigate mentality over the past several decades, refined instruments for tracing the scope of cognitive potential in disenchanted terms. As they ascribe the limits of consciousness to universal conditions of physical reality, these poems deconstruct boundaries that have traditionally framed our self-understanding: boundaries between self and world, between inside and outside, between human will and the furtive biological operations out of which that will ostensibly arises.

Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.