What is the mind?

Despite two millennia of medical and scientific forays into the secrets of the human brain, and the myriad attempts to map its mechanics and musings, synapses and structures, the answer to this question eludes us still. We often imagine that technology will unlock these secrets for good, envisioning the mind’s complexities encoded at last in algorithms on databases. What, then, of other venues of insight into what and who we are? “It is part of the result of a poem,” observed the poet A. R. Ammons, “to personalize and familiarize, to ingest and acquaint – to bring feelings and things into manageable relationships.” A poem issues forth, along these lines, bearing witness to a mind at work – to the conjoining of circumstance, thought, recollection “overheard,” in John Stuart Mill’s phrase, as words and rhythms find their way onto the page. For words and rhythms are what we all share, in the end, to approach the mind – to probe this innermost, darkly elusive and otherwise inarticulable sense of who we are.

The question of the mind isn’t a new one for poets. On the contrary, the conceit of the mind’s revelation has coursed for centuries through the very root and fiber of their vocation. When Dante, in the Divine Comedy, tells of his crossing into the first circle of Hell it is neither his memory, nor his heart, but very specifcally his mind (la mente) that shudders in terror all over again. Poets in seventeenth-century England could “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose,” as T. S. Eliot famously quipped, infusing the life of their words with the sensuous vividness of corporeal experience. And A. S. Byatt ventured, at least with one of them, John Donne, what one experiences is “the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself,” of “being aware of, and delighting in, the electrical and chemical impulses that connect and reconnect the neurons in our brains.” John Keats, in 1818, feared his pen would never be done sieving through and gleaning his “teeming brain.”

Now with the rise of neurology and the cognitive sciences, poets come to confront the transformation of the conceit into a staggering reality: the rise of the embodied mind. On the strength of an ever-mounting influx of clinical, experimental, and anatomical evidence, with every day that passes thinking itself seems to materialize ever more distinctly as a quintessentially embodied occurrence. Is a poem, then, not the mind embodied? Does not the form, the content of a poem capture a foray into the most intimate moments and reflections of what we are, communicated across time and distance through the medium of language?

These are the questions animating the contributions to this special section. We open with an excerpt from Nikki Skillman’s landmark study, The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (2016), which sizes up the landscape of American poetry as it internalizes “the body’s invisible determinations of conscious life.” In “Broken Lyrics,” Lucy Alford undertakes a sweeping examination of the lyrical survival of the nexus between “the sensing body and the attending mind.” Laura Wittman’s “Embodied Mind and Time” interrogates the relationship between time and the corporeal heft of existence, especially as it pertains to the question of our mortal “aliveness.” Woven in between and right through the themes of these prose pieces pulsate the minds of our poets, whose words peruse the brain’s limits and liminalities, plumbing its depths.

The poems in this section suggest new cognitive textures and confgurations of how language and thought cycle in and through one another. Chris Holdaway speaks of “All-embracing language to forget” and William Clark muses over the “living beings/ inside /our ideas for things,” our words and thoughts taking on lives of their own. We witness, in Franny Choi’s poems, the dichotomy of mind and body sub/inverted: “When your mouth / becomes my wet-stemmed brain, I rush into / the world nerves-first. I think: Alive?” But we may otherwise discover, as does Hrishikesh Srinivas, a porousness between our internal lives and the external world, how “The same atoms that cling to the skin / That knows most.” Anna Seidel observes that “We move forward, unerringly knotted / in the secureness of larger patterns,” while Jack Giaour playfully interrogates our habit of surveying, locating our identities in agreement (or disagreement) with language we have somehow encountered.

Together these poems and writers nimbly explore dimensions of sensation and pondering, digging into our most human drives and proclivities, unsettling certainties and delighting in what is unknown about what (and how) we know. We hope that they will tickle your temporal lobe and set your synapses aglow.