Language Dethroned

Beyond Language and Disconnection, by Maryke Cramerus

Foregrounding Language: Why? (And Why Not)

The current poetics, which has dominated academic poetry for almost four decades now, makes language the primary organizer of the poem. Other elements are minimized or absent due to the overwhelming focus on words as "signifiers" with shifting and problematic meanings. Contemporary poetics reduces poetry to lexical units and line breaks, banishing sound, movement patterns, and narrative elements from the poem.

Yet cognitive science over the last 20 years has shown that most of our cognitive processing and sizable chunks of conscious thinking do not rely on words at all. The old model of thinking as always and everywhere encoded in words--completely dominated and organized by language --has been decisively disconfirmed by a plethora of studies.

If language is not the all-dominant way that we know the world, organizing a poem as a language game or referential system becomes simply one among many possible ways of constructing a poem. Decades of research demonstrate that the complexities of word meanings are not portals to the "deep structures" of the mind, which are sensory and motor rather than purely linguistic. Poetic focus on the types of confusion inherent in language does not indicate greater depth of understanding of the mind or self, and does not necessarily tap into the hidden springs of literary creation. Many of those wellsprings lie elsewhere.

The relationship of signifiers to referents, and the device of using units of language as metaphors (letters as imaginary instruments or objects, pages and typefaces as fantasied habitations or terrain, etc.) are clearly poetic subjects that have inspired reams of poetry over the past 35 years, but there is no basis for privileging them above other poetic subjects except personal preference and poetic inclination. The realization that much of our knowledge of the world operates outside of language frees us from the burdensome obligation to foreground language and allows us to construct new subjects, styles, and horizons of meaning.

Nonlexical Cognitive Processing

The processes of cognition are deeply rooted in wordless and largely unconscious sensory processing and templates derived from movement patterns. This is easily seen with emotions, which can only be internally "read" through movement patterns (typically by facial muscles) which were originally actions with a practical goal-oriented action-function, such as baring the teeth, lifting the brows, averting the gaze, etc. We know our own emotions by the "readout" the brain takes from the activation of facial muscles (which the brain can read even if the actual movements are inhibited to the point where there are no changes visible in the face.) No words are used in the original readout, and internal recognition of our emotions can occur without using words at any stage of the process.

Much of our knowledge is never encoded into words, even in the final stages of processing and storage. Additional large tracts of information are accessible to language only with great difficulty. In addition, nonlexical cognitive processing undergirds and penetrates language itself, shaping how language is constituted and how it is used. This means that meanings do not in fact "collapse" when words are confusing or overlap.

Meaning typically survives even if the speaker does not resort to nonlexical meaning-makers such as gesture, pointing, intonation, facial expressions, body language, or other modes of expression based on motoric templates and the ritualizations of emotion and self-display. Of course, we do continually avail ourselves of gesture, intonation, facial expression, and physical enactments in order to express meanings. Some of these ritualizations and action patterns. are hard-wired and present from birth, such as smiling and eyebrow flashes, which are present in blind infants within hours after birth.

Nonlexical cognitive processing typically keeps meanings intelligible even when words are confusing, garbled, homonyms, or paradoxical. After Clinton's 1992 debate with President George H. W. Bush, James Carville was amazed that Bush did not realize that the woman in the audience anxiously asking the President about the "national debt" was in fact asking about the 1992 recession. He felt that her meaning was obvious from the context, despite her using words with a very different meaning.

Language itself has crucial motoric and sonic elements as well as lexical and syntactical features. The lips and the tongue can vary how they move in pronouncing words, changing the force, speed, and patterning of how words are sounded, and the larynx can vary pitch changes and timbre with great flexibility and expressiveness.

There is no reason why the nonlexical elements of poetry should be considered as "superficial" rather than deep and primary, or as somehow lacking in sophistication--mere extraneous decoration festooning a more solid and consequential scaffolding of words reductively viewed as lexical units and groupings. Experience and research indicate that sonic, motoric, enactive, and narrative means of expression are complex, sophisticated, highly expressive, as well as deeply rooted. They are part of the very core of meaning, not peripheral and superficial add-ons.

Nonlexical features of poetry include

poem elements that echo motoric organization (such as rhythm, staccato, crescendo and diminuendo, acceleration and deceleration, force, brusqueness, languor, exaggerated prolongation or clipping short of sounds)
sonic effects (sibilance, assonance, rhyme, the clustering of harsh-sounding consonants, the "colors" of vowels, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc.)
narrative elements such as contrasts, reversals, repetition, parallels, foreshadowing, suspense, and various devices used to provide the "sense of an ending," including but not limited to elements used for "resolution" and "closure."

Wonder and Bewilderment

The central subject of language poetry and also of a great deal of contemporary poetry that rejects language poetry is confusion. The poem focuses on confusion about language, reality, meanings, events, subjectivity, identity, relationships--and numerous other areas and dilemmas. Confusion and disconnection have been anointed as the privileged subjects for poetry--the markers for what is deemed poetic. It then becomes obligatory for the poet to convey confusion and bewilderment about what is going on, even if what he or she sees is as simple as a branch casting a shadow or a bird flying away.

Poem after poem in today's journals show us poets bewildered by the simplest of events. This befuddlement has been labeled "wonder" and has been de facto defined as the poetic emotion, much as the Romantics anointed anguish and rebellion as markers for the poetic. Naturally, the tone of today's poetry is spaced-out and fuzzy; descriptions are blurry and indistinct'; the bewildered speaker is detached from what he or she observes or experiences. Contemporary poems display a host of distancing devices--spatial, temporal, and conceptual-- to set the poem's material at a distance, to screen and filter it, and to make it blurry and difficult to grasp. Remoteness, disconnection, and bewilderment have become enshrined as the very essence of the poetic.

If poetry is liberated from its preoccupation with the relationship between word and referent, acknowledging that much of human knowledge is encoded in modes other than words, we are suddenly free to address a whole new range of subjects, and to address them in novel ways. A modern empirical understanding of the mind frees us from the prison of foregrounding language and its problems, which had forced us to disconnect and distance ourselves from our experience and from the people, beings, calamities, etc. that we encounter. Henceforward, poets will still be dealing with the paradoxes of language and the shifting and ambiguous meanings of words, (and exploiting them for poetic purposes) but they will not be forced to make them center stage or insist on them so tediously.

One of the tasks of the new poetics is to devise new ways to write poetry about new subjects (and a much enlarged range of subjects) without the "beauteous" rhetoric of the early Romantics, the Victorian pieties and sentimentality, and the distancing, remoteness, and artificially induced bewilderment of Modernism. The deficits of late stage Modernism cannot be remedied by returning to the poetics of the past, or solely by reviving sonnets, villanelles, meter, and rhyme, however useful these may be in certain contexts.

To succeed, we will need new styles, new structures for organizing the poem's material, bolder and more adventurous rhetoric, and richer sound patterns. I invite the Poetry Revolt's readers to join with me in casting off the restrictions and dogmas of contemporary poetics and to move forward as pioneers of this whole new territory opening out before us in as we remake twenty-first century poetry.

A further essay, The Brain and the Poetic,
http://www.poetryrevolt.com/poetic.html
develops these ideas, relates them to T. S. Eliot's concept of "dissociated experience," and provides a close reading of a poem as a concrete example of the integration of lexical, sonic, motoric, and narrative elements.

|About the Revolt| |July 08 Poems| |Satiric Poems| |Political Poems| |Brain and "Poetic"| |Language Dethroned| |British poets| |Ovid's Love Poems| |Ovid's Aurora: Model for Poets| |Selected Poems| |Children's Poems| |Fall 2007 Issue| |The Workshop| |Apollinaire: Autumn| |Apollinaire:Crocuses| |Articles & Links| |Children's Poems in French| |Special Projects| |Submission Guidelines| |How to Submit| |Contact us|