Monthly Archives: March 2009

This Is Your Brain On Poetry

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I’m not big on biological reductionism when it comes to the arts, especially when the evolutionary biologists start talking about the “evolutionary value” of this or that cultural practice, making up their little just-so stories. But I was intrigued the other day by this article describing the way the brain processes jokes. It occurred to me long ago that a lyric poem and a joke share certain structural similarities — ones Michael Theune could no doubt elucidate in detail — but in simplest form, the punchline, the payoff, the turn or the pivot that surprises. So here we have the human brain, which loves pattern and repetition, music:

This process, of memory formation by neuronal entrainment, helps explain why some of life’s offerings weasel in easily and then refuse to be spiked. Music, for example. “The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns, and music plays into that inclination,” said Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University. “From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear.”

But the joke, which the brain also likes, depends on variation and timing and detail:

Really great jokes, on the other hand, punch the lights out of do re mi. They work not by conforming to pattern recognition routines but by subverting them. “Jokes work because they deal with the unexpected, starting in one direction and then veering off into another,” said Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.” “What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember.”

In poetry, then, one is forcing the brain to operate on more than one level. In an older paradigm — that of the left and right hemispheres of the brain — it was possible to imagine something similar going on: the left hemisphere’s interest in and control over meter and pattern combining with the right hemisphere’s interest in novel arrangements. The physiology is of course much more complicated that the metaphor, but the metaphor is still suggestive. Poetry integrates different kinds of cognition, even kinds that might seem to be in conflict with each other.

A good joke or a good poem has a ground of pattern against which a specific path is picked out and that path has turns and surprises concealed in it, sometimes using the camouflage of pattern to conceal itself until the right moment. Question: What does the surprise — the punchline — yield in terms of knowledge? Insight? Understanding? Can a punchline or a surprise be empty?

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Cross-posted to The Plumbline School.

The Old Populism

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What with all the new populism going around, I’d just like to lay claim to a little of the old populism myself. To wit:

I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

Now, I don’t want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don’t want your pleasure yacht.
All I want’s just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.

We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You’ve stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.

So, I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

Think me dumb if you wish, Mister,
Call me green, or blue, or red.
This one thing I sure know, Mister,
My hungry babies must be fed.

So, I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

That one strikes a chord, what with the CEO of AIG urging his managers to give back half their bonuses — but only if they were more than a hundred grand.I just paid my taxes today and I realize, all things considered, I’m fairly well-off. My whole household income rounds out around the minimum bonus this guy Liddy thinks might be just a little excessive, under the circumstances, you understand. I actually got a bonus this year — for being at my job 20 years — it was in the mid three figures range, after taxes were withheld.

And here’s another one from the same file — pretty sure I learned them both from a Pete Seeger record when I was fifteen, listening secretly while my Republican fundamentalist parents were at work:

I’ve traveled round this country
From shore to shining shore
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw.

I saw the weary farmer
Plowing sod and loam
l heard the auction hammer
A knocking down his home

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the farmer sweated for

l saw the seaman standing
Idly by the shore
l heard the bosses saying
Got no work for you no more

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the seaman sweated for

I saw the weary miner
Scrubbing coal dust from his back
I heard his children cryin
Got no coal to heat the shack

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

I’ve seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land
l prayed we’d get together
And together make a stand

Then we’d own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we’d share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for

Hmm . . . I guess we do own those banks now. I guess we’d better start living up to our progressive fantasies. Sentimantal? Maybe, but maybe we ought to try living up to our sentiments, too. That includes you, Mr. Obama.

More Books on Writing Fiction

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A few more books for the beginning fiction writer — or for the poet long in the tooth who decides to give fiction writing a try — starting with a couple of good anthologies:

The Story Behind the Story – Andrea Barrett & Peter Turchi: This is a good anthology of short stories by many of the usual suspects in many of the usual modes. It includes fairly brief statements by each author describing the genesis of the story. These statements tend toward the personal rather than the technical, so, while they are interesting, they remain idiosyncratic and not terribly useful to the student, except insofar as a student needs to see what sorts of  experiences (ulikely or ordinary) can generate a story. (Judith Grossman’s brief explanation of her story, “I’m Not Through” goes right to the heart of the fiction writer’s problem, however.)

12 Short Stories and their Making — Paul Mandelbaum: This anthology is similar in conception to the Barrett & Turchi book above, except that each author is interviewed by the editor and the interview appears after the story. Because Mandelbaum is interested in technical as well as personal matters, he pushes the writers to explain their methods, which the attentive student will find useful. Because Mandelbaum asks his various authors similar kinds of questions (while allowing the interview to find its own shape), there is much more consistency of response than in The Story Behind the Story.

Narrative Design – Madison Smart Bell: This is the most theoretical and narrowly focused of the books under discussion here, with the fewest stories. Bell divides narrative structures into “linear” and “modular” and provides several examples of each, with extensive analysis that includes an almost line by line set of notes for each story. His general discussion of each story is clear and useful; personally, I get bogged down in the detail of the notes, but others may find these useful. Again speaking personally, I liked the “linear” stories Bell selected much more than the “modular” ones, with the exception of a piece by Miriam Kuznets, “Signs of Life.”

The Half-known World: On Writing Fiction – Robert Boswell: This is a collection of essays dealing with specific issues and drawing on particular works of fiction with which the reader will need to be familiar. Not really a beginner’s book, it’s probably going to be most useful to those who have read a good deal and already written some fiction. One of the most useful things Boswell emphasizes is that in literary fiction, the writer only knows the half of things, that his / her characters and plot emerge from the unknown and must remain partly mysterious even for the reader. This was a great relief to me as a beginner, since that is how I find things in my stories.

Modern Library Writer’s Workshop – Stephen Koch: This book takes the attitude of a coach, addressing specific problems the writer will face in trying to get a story on the page. It covers the basics in a friendly and direct way, referring to many works of (mostly short) fiction to illustrate its points. It also quotes many writers — too many, sometimes — on various subjects related to the craft of fiction. Along with LaPlante’s book (see my earlier post), this is a sensible and encouraging guide.

Counterintuitive

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This item in the NY Times caught my attention yesterday because I am writing a story in which a religious woman is dying. According to the study quoted, very devout people request more heroic measures to extend life than those who are not religious. One would have thought otherwise, given that the afterlife should be no great mystery for believers. The study’s authors say that the devout believe life is sacred and that they have a duty to extend it. I have another theory: the devout are more frightened of death than non-believers because they fear damnation. At least among the Christians I knew growing up, one’s salvation was never quite assured. This of course keeps people in a state of exquisite fear and trepedation throughout their lives, as they build ever more elaborate visions of paradise to distract themselves from their obsessive fear of eternal punishment. Or if they don’t fear damnation, perhaps they fear nothingness, which would give the lie to their lives as believers. This is the sort of belief system that eats away at life by inducing continual anxiety, then in a final irony desperately clings to life in the face of death. This is the way my mother lived and died and I find it profoundly depressing.

Books on Writing Fiction

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When I first began writing poetry as a teenager, I could not get enough of books like John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? I was interested in the technical nuts and bolts of writing and at the time the Ciardi book and a couple of others were the only things available. As my competence increased, I got more interested in theory. The theory that was available in the 1960s to a suburban kid with a library card was almost exclusively the New Critics: I remember reading big swathes of Patriotic Gore and The World’s Body — even though I was reading Eliot’s poems, I didn’t get around tho the predecessor texts, Eliot’s essays, until I got to college. Such were my obsessions and fascianations as a young poet; over the last few months I have returned to my youthful state of obsession, but this time with the writing of fiction. I never thought I could do it until a few months ago, but now I have written a handful of stories and I find myself interested in technique more than in theory, though the two form a kind of moibus strip, or course. Following, then, are a few notes on some of the books I have found most useful as a beginning fiction writer (though one in the unusual position of not being a beginning writer, as such.)

The Art of Subtext – Charles Baxter: This was the first “how-to” book on fiction I read and it’s not really a how-to at all, but a meditation on what makes literary fiction literary. Fiction that has a subtext and is overdetermined operates in a different way from commercial fiction.

Method and Madness — Alice LaPlante: This is the most gracefully written textbook I’ve ever encountered in any field. LaPlante’s sensible dissection of the “show don’t tell” rule, for instance, is the essence of clarity. The choice of examples and the explanation of techniques is virtually perfect.

The Practice of Creative Writing — Heather Sellers: Another good textbook. I bought this originally on Joshua Corey’s recommendation and I probably will use the book next time I teach my introductory creative writing class. In the meantime, I’ve found it chock full of useful advice for a beginning fiction writer such as myself.

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Note: Subtext is part of a very sweet little series of books on writing from Graywolf Press that also includes Donald Revell’s The Art of Attention, with which I have many disagreements but is nevertheless an elegant and useful book, as well as James Longenbach’s very useful The Art of the Poetic Line.