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One of many doors: sensing the literary sense through a cognitive poetics-inclusive reading approach

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One of many doors: sensing the literary sense through a cognitive poetics-inclusive reading approach

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Content ONE OF MANY DOORS: SENSING THE LITERARY SENSE THROUGH A COGNITIVE POETICS-INCLUSIVE READING APPROACH by Jessica Piazza TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i Chapter 1: A Case for Cognitive Poetics 1 Chapter 2: A Cognitive Poetics-Inclusive Case Study of William Carlos Williams’ “The Attic Which is Desire” 22 The Attic Which is Desire 23 On the Choice of Text 24 On the Reading Approach: Influences and Departures 27 On My Cognitive Poetic Research 30 The Reading 31 The Visual: A Small (or Large) Machine Made of Words 31 The Aural: A Poetics of Attention 37 The Semantic Interplay 46 A Final Note 55 Notes 57 Works Cited 64 Appendix A: Poetics Survey Brief Overview 72 Appendix B: Poetry Manuscript / Interrobang 77 Appendix C: Poetics Survey Full Data Attached Separately CHAPTER ONE: A CASE FOR COGNITIVE POETICS 2 In a 2010 New York Times article on the future of the humanities, William Pannapacker—Associate Professor of English and Director of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities at Hope College—expressed his fear that integrating neuroscience research into humanities studies would continue the process of corroding his field that traditional literary scholarship began. Breaking down texts or parts of texts into categorical lenses such as New Criticism or Cultural Studies laid the groundwork for what Pannapacker called the “age of theory,” an age that “forc[ed] English professors to become amateur historians, sociologists and philosophers” instead of appreciating the work from a more fundamental or, as he puts it, “transcendent” point of view. He is not alone in this thinking when he writes: Cognitive approaches to literature strike me as similar to the search for the ‘God gene’; they take, as a fundamental premise, an agnostic stance with regard to the transcendent value of literature, and, in that sense, they may be the natural conclusion to the ‘age of theory’ (Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities? 1) In contrast, Cognitive Poetic theorist Reuven Tsur believes that including a focus on the neuroscientific understanding of text processing, instead of putting the final nail in the coffin of literary understanding, actually allows for a broader, more comprehensive and more fundamental understanding of literary texts. Tsur postulates that analysis of the cognition required to read and understand a text does extends those transcendent literary effects by acknowledging the physical and personal reactions readers have to literature and not just the intellectual or cultural. Tsur explains that traditional critics are limited in that they tend to function dichotomously: either as “impressionist” critics, focusing exclusively on the effects of the text (meaning, for example, how the text outwardly effects our considerations of culture, history, 3 race, gender, etc.) or “structuralist” critics, who find their locus of meaning in the workings of the structures of the text itself (i.e. how the signs, structures, myth-building and prosody work to create and sustain literary effects) (“Toward a Theory” 1). Tsur evenhandedly nods to both the usefulness and restrictions of traditional modes of theory, noting that considering texts via “stable, well-organised categories constitute[s] a relatively easily manipulable small load of information on one's cognitive system” but that these categorizations “entail the loss of important sensory information that might be crucial for the process of accurate adaptation” (Tsur, “Aspects” 296). In other words, the knowledge gained from traditional literary analysis—while valuable—does not undercut the importance of considering other more basic textual evidence, including sonic and visual information. Of course, critics might object that literary analysis is a recursive process, and that separating a reader’s reaction to the text’s sound information from responses to the semantic and cultural meanings within it is a Sisyphean task. And, to a large extent, I agree. It is folly to try to parse readers’ reactions to a text’s individual elements in a black and white way, especially without the helping hand that scientific tools like eye-tracking sensors or electroencephalography (EEG) equipment. Part of the problem is that there are several levels of affect that arise from any given reading, some sparked by a reader’s pure physical response to a text outside of cultural influences, and some that use cultural and historical memory to create feeling and meaning. Psychologist and Affect theorist Chris R. Brewin clarifies the two kinds of experiential processes engendered by a text as 1) the more bodily and immediate processes that are “rapid, inflexible and difficult to modify,” and 2) the dispositions we bring to any reading pre-wired into us by our knowledge (381). 4 Along those lines, academics might find it virtually impossible to parse the former pre- wired reactions from the latter immediate sensory responses. Which responses—they would have to ask—are animalistic and instinctive, and which come from notions we have already built in our subconscious depths through culture, society and learning? And how are we to even attempt this as literary scholars, not scientists or psychologists? The difficulty of this separation seems to be a decent argument against a cognitive approach to literary analysis. Certain critics, considering these sorts of problems, echo Pannapacker’s broad fear by citing potential practical concerns about the methodology of this kind of interdisciplinary research. In Work at the Boundaries of Science: Information and the Interdisciplinary Research Process, Carole L. Palmer predicts that interdisciplinary scholars will struggle mightily to “develop [the] competencies that will allow them to deal with [the] increased burden of comprehension” (86) necessary for integrating research from outside fields into humanities work. When they fail at this endeavor, she believes they will lower the standards of scholarship. And I understand Palmer’s fear, as I’m attempting exactly the task that concerns them. Yet my argument here, and in the Cognitive Poetic readings I attempt, is this: despite the potential pitfalls, it is a worthwhile pursuit to consider the questions of cognitive reactions to texts by using the growing abundance of neuro-, linguistic and psychological science available to us as both springboard for hypotheses and evidence to support them. If nothing else, this fairly new path of inquiry gives us a starting point to explore our intuition about texts, those notions we feel but have yet been able to explain. And, by trying to parse readers’ basic cognitive reactions to textually generated sound and visual information from responses that are more obviously social and historical, we invite some provocative questions. Most distinctly in my mind, as I mentioned above, considering the play between our basic, physical responses to sound and 5 spatial relationships and our more semantic and socio-linguistic responses to meaning—that is, trying to separate affect from contextualization—allows us to explore why we sometimes feel a text differently than we understand it. Or along the same lines why sometimes, perhaps even when the meaning of a given text is not so convincing or engaging, a reader might still feel so entirely entrained and entranced by the work. For example, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that poetry with rhyme and meter are more aesthetically pleasing to readers without regard to lexicality, noting that the presence of one or both “led to enhanced aesthetic appreciation, higher intensity in processing, and more positively perceived and felt emotions” (Obermeier 10). In other words, the sound of the poetry pleased listeners regardless of the words; a notion perhaps easily recognized from our own childhood days when we would happily sing along to nursery rhymes like “Ring Around the Rosy” whose dark words we did not understand. Attempting explorations into literary cognition and affect is an imperfect process, but recent work in the brain and psycholinguistic sciences along with the availability of data from decades of linguistics studies does provide an entryway into these questions, especially regarding the separations between a reader’s immediate cognitive and deeper cognitive responses to text. When critics disavow this potential knowledge source because it denies the “transcendence” of literature, they belie the primacy of craft in creating those reader responses. Does it defile the sanctity of poetry to admit that we have biological and neurological reactions to sound that are separate from lexical meanings? Certainly not; without that truth there would be no explanation for the prevalence of meter in poetry, nor for other sonic techniques such as assonance, consonance and alliteration. The understanding of sound and semantics as separate allows for the existence of onomatopoeia. It’s why lyric free symphonies can have emotional resonance. 6 Despite this, I do not claim that there is universality among readers’ responses to particular sound or visual information in text (and by sensory “information” I mean the pure audio and visual patterns themselves, without consideration to semantic or cultural meaning). In this, as with all theoretical approaches, the criticism of a piece or a body of work is based on the scholar’s own, particular interpretations of the work; there is only the hope that the reader will understand the perspective as the critic delineates and explains ideas, but never the promise of unanimous agreement. However, delving into how craft techniques create harmony or discord between a text’s sounds, visual elements and semantic meaning is not “an agnostic stance” as much as a scholarly one…and one in service of a truer understanding of a text’s intention, execution and meaning. The New Critics began this sort of investigation by touting the primacy of close reading. Now, interdisciplinary work between the sciences and humanities, focusing especially on studies and experiments that record human responses to various sensory elements of text such as sound information, offers a new frontier of knowledge for humanities scholars that expands the New Critical path. The added layer of inquiry into cognition allows for both the minute textual scrutiny of the New Critics and a consideration of the affect that the text creates, particularly from an individual, phenomenological point of view. Cognition is a many faceted process affected by sensory information, semantic understanding and a recursive building of meaning based on cultural and personal experience. A thorough Cognitive Poetic practice does not work against a New Critical one, but instead considers New Critical theories as one possible answer to the multi-part question of textual meaning. Instinctively, I think most of us know that the sounds of a text (and particularly poetry) can convey emotional effects that are separate and even different from the understood meaning of the words. Take the prosody of Eipo 1 poetry which, as Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel 7 write in “The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain and Time, “when reproduced in English, has much the same emotional effect as it does in the original” (93). Only reactions at a pre-lexical level could cause this kind of parallelism, and Turner and Pöppel infer that “such a minute correspondence between poets in such widely different cultures surely points to an identical neurophysiological mechanism” (93). In The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, John Hollander writes that poetry and music “affect a listener in some subrational fashion” through “the communication of feeling rather than of knowledge” (00). He implies these responses arise not from the communication of contextualized meaning but from the emotional and physiological reactions to the raw sensory data. The dichotomy Hollander sets up between immediate cognition (seeing, hearing) and contextualized cognition (considering, understanding) is the gateway into my own research. It is the interplay between the immediate and the subsequent/deeper cognitive reactions that interests me and, I believe, proves instructive. In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart discusses Allen Grossman's supposition that sensory elements like visual layout and sound are “never superseded by language” but, instead, that “sound making is always in tension with sense making, yet is also the pre-condition for sense making” (65). If compiling the multiplicity of meanings readers can make of a text are one sort of key to understanding it comprehensively, then studying how and why the meanings were made in the body offers another clue to consider. In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf cites neuroscience findings that do just that; she illuminates how the human brain separates the processing of textual information into individual, chronological acts. While readers generally experience reading and comprehending as simultaneous (and instantaneous) processes, the brain in fact breaks down immediate textual 8 analysis in order: first processing the visual features of the text, then the phonological elements, and only then beginning the process of semantic comprehension (8). This is a revelation with far-reaching implications. It is useful pedagogically; for example, we now understand some of the reasons hearing-impaired students have trouble learning to read, despite reading being a seemingly “silent” activity. It is useful historically, in terms of gauging new possible reasons why certain texts, especially those with noticeably interesting music or visual qualities, have survived in the canon. Another use of this information—and hopefully the one I am able to demonstrate—is instructive on a creative level. Using the chronological order of text processing to one’s advantage on the page, considering how spatial elements and sound serve as the sensory and intellectual starting point for readers, can at best help writers to guide readers eventually toward a particular direction of meaning-making. As Michael Boughn puts it: “Sound’s intelligence murmurs meaning as event rather than idea,” and that event is one of the first experiences readers have of a text. He goes on to say that “although that event may later be imperfectly stated and restated as idea. Sound’s intelligence is another order of form—elusive, transitory, mortal—which calls into question our imagination of meaning, as if it meant more or less than we know, or think we know" (169). The body, of course, factors into our reactions to the “intelligence of sound,” being, as renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it, “the main stage for emotion” (“The Feeling” 287). It’s not wholly useful to talk about the brain’s reaction to the sounds and sights of text without going a step further to discuss the body’s manifestation of those reactions. Musings on this appear periodically throughout modern theoretical history, seemingly since the idea occurred to writers that one does not have to write metrically. In 1875, for example, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “The Physiology of Versification — Harmonies of Organic and Animal Life” 9 (315), which sought to explore meter’s direct effect on respiration and the pulse. But the work completed over a century ago is coming to light now, through modern advancements in medicine: A study published in American Journal of Physiology—Heart and Circulatory Physiology confirmed that “recitation of poetry changed cardiorespiratory interaction, whereas normal conversation did not” (Cysarz, Von Bonin, and Lackner H579). The effects of reciting iambic hexameter verse on the participants in the study had cardiologic effects that were deemed therapeutic to patients; reciting those meters modulated the breath in such a way that they “enhance[d] the flexibility of regulatory processes to maintain stability and coherence between different functions.” The study cited several other reputable experiments that reported similar results regarding poetry and physiology; specifically that reciting poetry in different meters regulated breathing patterns in various ways, and that “these breathing modalities are used to activate or calm down the patient” (H579). And while reading text and reciting it are different activities that thusly work upon the body in subtly different ways, the reading of metrical texts lights up the same parts of the brain, thus invoking similar responses in readers that link to changing in breathing and heart rate. This practice has been known in a deeper sense for millennia; whether via chanting, drumming, or other repetitive and rhythmic soundings, cultures have exploited the calming, lulling and entrenching effects of sound. Linguistics experts and literary theorists also chime in on the body/brain connection that exists in reading particularly. In Cartesian Linguistics,” Noam Chomsky calls upon the philosophy that “human language, in its normal use, is free from the control of independently identifiable external stimuli or internal states and is not restricted to any practical communicative function, in contrast, for example, to the pseudo language of animals" (29). In other words, as 10 far as we know of the oral language of the animal, sound itself is sufficient to spark action and create internal bodily changes without imparting particular information (i.e., the dog’s bark might indicate danger or aggression, but the exact nature of the warning is unknown without further investigation.) This is in stark contrast to the human ability to creatively pass exact, specific and nuanced information through words. Regardless, knowledge that human language and text elevate our communicative capacities beyond those of animals does not belie the fact that we are animals, and thus still programmed to react bodily and instinctively to the sounds and visual cues of words right alongside our reactions to the more nuanced and specific content of words themselves. Reactions to the pre-lexical elements of text seem instinctual, while reactions to semantic and syntactic elements of texts seem indicative of a particularly human capability. Perhaps critics are hesitant to embrace Cognitive Poetics because they fear the exploration of the primitive, even animalistic components of reading. The human ability to write and read has often served as point of separation from (and elevation above) other species, and the power of written language to engender empathy and social change might give hope to those who believe we can rise above primitive instincts to create civil societies. But both the instinctive and intellectual are present in text, both are important, and the two can work in harmony to highlight a theme or emotional undercurrent within the text or counteractively to create disjunction within that text. "When sound and syntax slip into place," writes Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "the poem solidifies itself and rests on and inside itself. It embodies what it is” (21). Naturally, after the brain recognizes and responds to that visual and sound information on an immediate level, it starts to recognize the letters and their words and the syntax that organizes them. In Child Language, Learning and Linguistics, David Crystal posits that there are three available elements 11 of language up for discussion: 1. mode of transmission (graphology and phonology), 2. grammar (syntax) and 3. meaning (semantics, morphology) (26). Once the graphology and phonology have been tackled, the brain uses grammar, memory and lexical cues to assign basic meaning to those words, which is the first level of contextualization toward a signified meaning, from a Structuralist perspective. Finally, once those meanings have been negotiated, the brain begins a process of endless Derridian signification, including historical, cultural and personal contextualization—that allows for multiple readings and analyses (Derrida 234). This can be considered “contextualized cognition” or “contextualized response.” So while sound play evokes an immediate response, plot, imagery, narrative and character development lead to contextualized responses, which rely on readers’ understanding (and re-understanding) of the words as they attach (and re-attach) them to different signifiers. The music of a text, its line breaks or white spaces on the page have roots in communication that existed before language; sounds were a vital part of the human experience before words themselves were developed. 2 As mentioned, the brain and body process visual information first, when generating context for language, followed by sound clues on a micro level (phonemes, words) and a macro level (overall textual rhythm). Then, separately but seemingly concurrently, the reader makes “sense” of the language using semantic knowledge, personal experience and cultural and historical contexts. In these processes, a disconnect between the sensory and sense information might occur so that, for example, a literary work might seem eerie, even when it is not, or a poem might make a reader sad or wistful, regardless of whether anything particularly sad occurs narratively. That neuroscience has explained some of the mechanisms behind this disconnect would be an ostensibly insignificant discovery, 12 perhaps, except that it opens the door for the entire field of Cognitive Poetics as a starting point for a more comprehensive literary criticism and analysis. Neuroscientific evidence supports this potential for disconnect, especially advancements in neuro-imaging where the question of separate but dependent neural responses to the music, visual elements and intellectual meaning of text finds foundation. Certainly Turner’s insistence that “poetic meter mediates between left-brain linguistic capacities and right-brain musical and gestalt capacities” (“Inner Meaning” 200) is confirmed in a 2002 issue of NeuroImage Magazine: Recent brain imaging studies on language processing (with auditory stimulation) have shown that temporal and frontal areas of both hemispheres are involved in the processing of connected speech, with a preponderance of the left hemisphere for the on-line processing of syntactic features (Friederici et al., 2000a) and a preponderance of the right hemisphere for the on-line processing of prosody (for example, melody and metre of speech Meyer et al., 2000a) (Koelsch 956). We now understand that processing language is both a left-brain and right-brain activity; language had previously been considered a left-brain function, while processing music, for example, was a right-brain activity. This serves as ground for the belief that readers respond differently, and separately, to syntax and to prosody, semantics and music, and during these lateral moves between brain hemispheres, the potential for conflicting (or corroborating) emotional and intellectual responses arises. The psychologist William James may have been the first to popularize the roots of this idea, theorizing that perception of a fact, sound or sight in the mind excites the body, and that the brain’s recognition of this bodily change is what we commonly consider emotion. Damasio supports aspects of James much-criticized theory and 13 expands upon it in The Feeling of What Happens, writing “the emotional responses target both our body and brain.” 3 (288) Examples in which these functions play out separately are helpful. In Chapter 8 of The Body of Poetry, Annie Finch relates the story of “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who spontaneously suffered from Spasmodic Dysphonia, a condition in which the area of the brain responsible for speech ceases to function. That part of his brain was functional, but was not communicating with the neural pathways to the vocal chords. However, as Finch relays through quotes from Adams’ blog posts, at one point the cartoonist realized he could speak—if he spoke in rhyme. Adams called rhymed speech “effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech,” and through repetition of rhymed verses, Adams’ “brain remapped. [His] speech returned.” Finch called this “amazing and mysterious,” but more importantly “borne out by modern studies showing that rhythmical language is processed in a different part of the brain from prose and normal speech” (204). Thus, the particularity of the words Adams read (and spoke) were not important…but the sounds and cadence were able to act quantifiably upon the brain. On a basic level of reading, in parsing the complete sign of a word, the brain first recognizes the pictures as letters with accompanying sounds. Seeing sights and hearing sounds are what spark the brain to find context. Just as waves crashing might sooth a person while a loud noise would make him jump to detect danger, a text with repetition and soft sounds can be lulling while incongruous sound play can be jarring—regardless of what the words themselves mean. This part of textual processing can be thought of as “immediate cognition” or “immediate response.” In some ways, exploring this element of linguistic meaning is key to the idea of Cognitive Linguistics. In “Incorporated But Not Embodied?” Dick Geeraerts writes that “a 14 minimal interpretation…would not be that linguistic meaning is predominantly iconic or indexical, but rather that it is ‘embodied’ because it evokes the full range of experience that comes with a concept, linguistic meaning, in other words, is encyclopedic rather than just structural” (447). The recognition and decoding of pre-semantic information is the beginning of an embodied theory of poetics. In determining the usefulness of a Cognitive Poetic approach to literary analysis, perhaps it is helpful to consider some previous ideas on how readers understand and interpret written language. Ferdinand de Saussure (and his disciples in Structuralism) recognized that the immediate material of the word, its “sound-image” is an inextricable element of the usefulness of the word, further theorizing that the links between the word sign and its object signifier are arbitrary. This is debatable in terms of linguistic, evolutionary and cognitive sciences. Studies suggest that we use sounds to make help us make meaning and context, so perhaps the complete separation of the two is not as theoretically attractive as it seems; an idea that post-structuralists would agree with. A true Cognitive Poetic analysis veers wildly from structuralism as a perspective in that it cannot believe “the written sign is arbitrary, its form is of little importance” or that “the actual mode of inscription is irrelevant, because it does not affect the system” (Saussure 118). In fact, while Saussure insists, regarding the visual presentation or the sound of the words, that “none of that is any importance for the meaning,” my reading follows more along the lines of Charles Bernstein’s belief that “sound is language's flesh," and as such is as much a part of its makeup as the meaning buried within it (20). Signifiers make noise. They exist. Though words that demonstrate onomatopoeia (like “buzz”) often demonstrate this well, as the signifier phonetically sounds like the signified, the truth is that any word has sounds that have multiple and possibly divergent effects. Certain vowel sounds themselves have been shown, in 15 studies, to have particular connotations across cultures. Certain consonants (like fricatives) and certain vowels (a good example being the /I/ phoneme, or the “i” sound in “it”) have been shown in multiple studies across multiple disciplines to be the most unpleasant, regardless of the words they comprise, while certain phonemes (such as /y/ like the “y” in “yield”) are most often associated in studies with pleasantness (Whissell 28). 4 As neuroscience research allows us to follow the brain’s processes, we see that the signifier itself sparks its own initial processes separate from the signified, eventually igniting other processes as it is contextualized with its signifier(s). However, the noise that the signifiers make will not always affect readers in the same way, and this leads to another significant criticism of a Cognitive Poetic approach: the necessary focus on the individual reader and his/her experiential readings. This necessity raises the same concerns and queries that all reader-oriented criticism does, and in fact Cognitive Poetics is a part of the reader-response approach. Detractors may well insist that mining any individual reading cannot lead to predictive evidence, and I agree with that objection. On the other hand, a combination of reader-response critical techniques addresses some of these problems. My particular brand of reader-oriented Cognitive Poetics is both phenomenological and hermeneutic (a distinction I will explain momentarily) and is also crucially just a single element in a holistic critical space that allows for multitudinous interpretations of texts from widely varying perspectives. From a phenomenological perspective, research into text’s effect on the brain and physical body relies upon consideration of the phenomenological relationship between the text and the reader. In “Phenomenology of Reading,” Georges Poulet asks: “…how could I explain, without such take-over of my innermost subjective being, the astonishing facility with which I 16 not only understand but even feel what I read?” (57). With that query he suggests phenomenology is a space that, as Bruce Smith points out, offers a suitable “synthesis” of the polarized ideas of New Criticism and post-structuralism by taking into account both the understood reading of a text and the felt reading of that same text. Wolfgang Iser noted: “The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader—though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text” (279). A full consideration of a literary work, then, might deal with both of what Iser calls the two poles of a literary work, “the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refer[ing] to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader.” Through science, we can hypothesize that the reader is “acted upon” in several ways, and thus realization comes from several sources—some physiological, some neurological and some cultural/historical. All of these make up “the actions involved in responding to that text” (279) and thus all of them are worth consideration. Psycholinguists, prosodists and phenomenologists veer away from computational and empirical evidence here to share a goal in one unique way: all are concerned with how the text itself can entrain both the body and mind of the reader to create experience. For the purposes of a Cognitive Poetic argument, I imagine Iser’s aesthetic realization as a response to Donald Wesling’s idea in The scissors of meter: grammetrics and reading, that poetry, and in fact all literature, functions by “restructuring the patterns of real and imaginary experience…mak[ing] both reality and language more perceptible by putting them together in different ways” (42). Westling invites us to analyze the interplay of language’s functioning on two levels: 1) the “real” experience of the language, that is, the text existing in the world, with 17 the sights and sounds that accompany it and 2) the “imaginary” world that comes to life inside our heads once we contextualize and re-contextualize the language. In the former, we are interacting with something through our physical body, while in the latter, our mind creates the world of the text in our imaginations. The former depends upon a sensory, pre-lexical set of responses while the latter focuses on the imaginary, which inherently depends on semantic, some might say rational, meaning for narrative use. But the dichotomy between responses to the pre-lexical and the morphological text elements is the crux of an argument against Cognitive Poetics that has been raging since before the term even existed. In Phenomenal Shakespeare, Bruce Smith summarizes how literary theory since Descartes overwhelmingly favored rational thought over the personal and passionate reader experience: …hence structuralism, with its search for the principles that underlie the superficial distractions of myths and stories. Hence Saussure’s linguistics, with its attention to the formal system of language rather than the vagaries of individual utterances. Hence deconstruction, with its insistence on the arbitrariness of all forms of difference-marking. Hence Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, with its grounding of personal identity and its discontents in language. Hence political criticism, with its application of these axioms to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationhood….What happens to sensations, feelings, emotions, aesthetic pleasure? To acknowledge these unclear and indistinct matters becomes an act of ‘false consciousness’ (6). But the false consciousness is, in fact, any theory that ignores pre-lexical textual elements and their effects, through the medium of the body, on feeling-making. Largely, Smith argues, 18 theories of reading that integrate this sensory—and thus individual—analysis of texts have been suspect because of “the personal nature of sensations and feelings. They are the possessions of individuals, bourgeois or otherwise, and hence cannot be generalized in the way Marx’s base and superstructure can or Saussure’s s ≠ S or Lacan’s imaginary, symbolic, and real orders” (Smith 7). However, so much of literary theory already deals with the scope and nuance of the rational response (and quite well, in so many cases) that a true close reading of the cognitive effects of the sensory elements of texts can only add another point of view in approaching textual meaning. And it seems unreasonable, in my view, to argue against a broader view of literature. Of course, critics cite a similar argument against phenomenology as they do against cognitive or neuroscience-based readings: there is no way to standardize these approaches. However, phenomenology (especially the Husserlian variety) is a discipline that “studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy n. pag.). Certainly Husserl himself hoped to extrapolate phenomena from personal observations and reactions to a text that might still be observed by or cause a reaction within any reader. Phenomenology, then, becomes especially helpful to my argument since I will enact my initial readings from the first person. It is my body being affected in unique and personal ways, and it is my contextualization that grapples with the rational assertions of the text. And while this sort of reading isn’t new, it’s crucial. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out in The Phenomenology of Perception: “we cannot apply the classical distinction of form and matter to perception…perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the ‘world.’ We experience a perception and its horizon ‘in action’…rather than…by explicitly ‘knowing’ them” (12). In the field of Cognitive Poetics, we aim to show our own perceptions in 19 action and in relation to the “knowing” that follows, thus performing a reading that recognizes both. Further, I attempt to isolate and examine how specific craft tools can evoke especially vivid sensory responses, especially those common to poetry, and how writers have increasingly recognized them and used such tools to their advantage. The idea is that as writers find new and deeper ways to use these tools in traditional ways, though cross-genre, or with technology, this sort of reading will be increasingly important to fully understand the texts. Take new media or digital poetry, which takes a static text and turns it into an interactive object, living in time and “existing” only when a reader/user interacts with it. Consider how important a cognitive poetic critique of the poem could be in understanding how that text is acting upon the body of its “user.” In the introduction to New Media Poetics, Adelaide K. Morris breaks down several ways the book’s essays discuss the increased interplay between text and body that digital media necessitates; an interplay that I believe can be most fully analyzed by including the many avenues of Cognitive Poetic inquiry: In the process of turning an object into an event, a digital image is not just activated but also augmented, amplified, and filtered by the user’s body. In chapter 11, Carrie Noland describes a variety of ways in which new media texts engage and extend the body’s energies. For both Noland and Hansen, the most profound effect of digitization is this coordination between a user’s living body and the digital text. Far from turning users into automatons, Hansen argues, digitized images enter into a circuit with them, making their bodies into laboratories or workspaces where digital information is converted into corporeally apprehensible images. In new media poems…the virtual space of the image is 20 transformed from an impersonal cognitive schema—for example, a set of equations in Memmott’s poem, a clock dial in Cayley’s, a star map in Strickland and Lawson’s—into an immediately graspable, profoundly personal experience, one played out through its interface with the proprioceptive and affective body of the user (19) On the other hand, philosopher Hans-Gorg Gadamer argues that understanding must necessarily involve a “fusing” of the reader’s horizon, or way of perceiving the world, with the horizon of the past, or historical “other.” I agree that it would be unreasonable to ignore the cultural or historical impressions left by or created by a text, and one way to do so is via the hermeneutic aspects of reader-oriented criticism; studying responses to sensory textual information alongside “acute awareness of the cultural situatedness of reading and interpretation” (Literary Criticism – Poetry Beyond Text n. pg.). Still, while I agree with Poulet that “…every word of literature is impregnated with the mind of the one who wrote it” and that “such an interpretation of reading is not false,” I am, like him, less interested in this interpretation than in exploring the way “the individual who wrote it reveal[s] himself to us in us” (58). It is within us, through the mind, but also through the senses, that readers bodies become conduits for communicating the sights, tastes, smells and sounds the author conveys. Pre-lexical responses require that the text act upon the reader, to some extent, through a mimesis that is not only imitation but further a sort of commandeering of the reader’s senses through manipulation of the sound and visual setting of language. Just as much literary analysis seeks to illuminate themes within the work, recognizing structural and formal patterns that strike sensory chords in an implied reader (or in a group of readers studied by computational linguists) adds a dimension of knowledge for readers, academics and writers alike. 21 This brings up one of the most important arguments for Cognitive Poetic research: the potential usefulness it might have for writers. It is true that, as with much phenomenological scholarship, a cognitive poetic analysis will generally come from a first person perspective. Thusly, Cognitive Poetics cannot instruct poets on how to evoke quantifiable sensory responses in all or even a majority of readers. However, for the same reasons a poet pays attention while crafting images, lines, meter and narrative toward a particular literary end, understanding exactly how some less commonly studied elements (like pure sound on a phoneme level, or visual spacing on the page, or alliteration as psychological manipulator) can be hugely useful, even if that knowledge comes anecdotally from a single reader or a small group of readers. For writers who hope to play the senses against the intellect via the materiality of the text, these are precisely the kind of responses they might hope to gauge in their audience. 22 CHAPTER TWO: A Cognitive Poetics-Inclusive Case Study of William Carlos Williams’ “The Attic Which is Desire” 23 The Attic Which is Desire the unused tent of bare beams beyond which directly wait the night and day— Here from the street by *** *S* *O* *D* *A* *** ringed with running lights the darkened pane exactly down the center is transfixed. William Carlos Williams 24 ON THE CHOICE OF TEXT Attempting to parse the immediate, sensory responses to visual and audial information in a text can be a worthwhile pursuit in analyzing literature in any genre, and as such any piece could potentially work as the subject of this type of reading. But in practice taking on this type of reading is daunting. Trying to separate what we instinctively feel from the meanings we have created is a painstaking, exhaustive task and thus I found, for my case study, that certain types of texts would be more provocative, evocative, and simply accessible in this particular way. Poetry specifically, more so than fiction, relies heavily on sound and visual structure to contribute to meaning. As a genre, it also offers many examples of texts that are not easily understood— semantically or thematically—upon a first reading, which gives readers some space to suss out which reactions are sound-based and which arise from semantic meanings. The tradition of poetry also offers an array of writing tools that serve primarily (sometimes even exclusively) as tools for evoking pre-lexical responses. Plato says as much in The Republic: “… lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action,” he writes, “in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled” (448). Plato’s assertion that people believe when the poet “speaks…in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well” —such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have” underscores how certain elements particular to poetry circumnavigate the rational mind by influencing the senses (442). Meter, rhyme, line and stanza breaks; all are textual elements that do not solely impart specific information but work through the senses to incite response nonetheless. For example, sound poetry and language poetry are viable as poetic genres in large part because of the sensory/ 25 pre-lexical responses they attempt to arouse. 5 When the signifiers of language are separated from the objects and ideas the words signify, the sensory response becomes a primary concern. William Carlos Williams 1930 poem “The Attic Which is Desire” is an ideal primary text for enacting a Cognitive Poetic reading, especially one that isolates the effects that non-semantic sound elements have on a phenomenological reading. First published in Blues 6 in 1930 and then in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909-1938, the poem features strong sonic play and spare, image-heavy lines that eventually coalesce into a loose narrative. It is free verse and visually unusual, but relies heavily on classic sound techniques like iambic meter, assonance and consonance. All these elements enrich the poem’s potential as subject for a Cognitive Poetic reading, as does the play with sound that both incorporates and argues against traditional meter. Poets and critics can’t seem to decide how to categorize the piece; various scholars have cited it as an example of Futurism, Modernism, Realism and Imagism. The poem is by no means one of Williams’ best known pieces and in fact, the relative obscurity of this piece to the general public became important to my work. This is partially because it was not a poem I myself was familiar with before this began, and partially because I could also expect that the majority of my subjects (in questionnaires I administered) would not recognize it, or certainly not as often as some might recognize a piece like “This is Just To Say” or “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Still, it is one of the touchstone works scholars bring up when citing examples of modernist imagism, gestures toward typography play / concrete poetry and consideration of “the thing itself” in American verse. This variety of perspectives bodes well for a reader who wishes to analyze the poem in a way that lives both outside and alongside previous criticisms. Of course, while this particular poem is useful because the examples of sound and visual play are so blatant, any poem (or piece of prose for that matter) could be subject to this kind of 26 reading. The basic neurological processes remain the same in all readings, though some linguistics experts have noted the difference in the brain as it reads expository writing, instructive writing and creative writing, and have broken this down even further into categories of reading by genre. 7 Still, the statistical prediction of reactions that linguistic and scientific studies have offered us at the phoneme level would remain of interest when doing a Cognitive Poetic reading of any piece of writing. Still, I chose poetry, and this poem, because the rhythms and structures created by poetry can do specific things to the reading brain and body that are useful signposts when trying to separate sensory reactions from semantic ones. Additionally, the juxtaposition of the scientific and traditional analyses is richer when the scholarship is more multi-faceted, as is that on Williams and this piece in particular. One way to sum up the choice of Williams as a subject is to bring to light his complicated relationship with the ideal use of words in poetry: should they be “things themselves” or associated signifiers? In Ideas in Things, Donald W. Markos argues that it is a little of both. He writes that “Williams wants to free words not from referential meaning altogether but ‘from the usual quality of…meaning.’” Markos’ theory is that Williams’ system of “liberat[ing] word from thing is to intensify one’s awareness of the phonic and rhythmic textures of the words themselves, to savor the sounds of words and their feel in the mouth.” This approach, at heart, presupposes the necessity of a Cognitive Poetic approach to understanding and writing poetry. That Williams concentrates on the sensory information of words in this way but also incorporates a belief in the word not just as sound element or rhythmic element but also as visual image/object itself makes him ripe for a reading style that focuses on all of these issues. And when using these initial analyses as a foil for teasing out semantic meaning in poetry, it is also useful that Williams demonstrates a “poetic practice [that] often shows his awareness of a word’s 27 earlier meaning or its multiple meanings” (59). This, then, is a multi-path study of a text. Understanding affect through the particular and scientific lens of cognition and physiological response is a new, exceptionally useful door in a hallway with many doors. 8 ON THE READING APPROACH: INFLUENCES AND DEPARTURES My main goal here is to enact a sound-focused cognitive poetic reading on actual text. To perform a close reading of the poem’s sound information, I first eschew the semantic and narrative meanings in order to highlight sensory responses alone. From there, I perform a more conventional close reading of the text. By offering my own sensory responses to the poem alongside traditional methods of analysis, I seek to tease out an important notion: that understanding the chronology of the reading brain can act as a guide for writers as they attempt to use sound to manipulate meaning. However, because this reading is through my eyes (and brain, and inner voice), it is necessarily personal and thus phenomenological in nature. Still, while I can claim no universality to these responses, my main endeavor is to offer an analysis that can work toward some predictability of response. As noted by a group of critics and linguistic psychologists in The European Journal of English Studies, “literary critical statements are partly normative rather than descriptive; they may offer an account of how we could or might read a poem rather than how any particular person does so” (23). Still, I hope this individual view will invite new or different ways of thinking about the poem, just as any cultural or literary critic’s individual analysis of the text might illuminate as-of-yet unexplored points within and approaches to the work, even if it is different from one’s own reading. As a counterpoint to the phenomenological reading, I juxtapose my analysis with scientific and linguistic data that supports or complicates my own reading, as well as a cross- 28 section of traditional analyses of this particular poem from a range of scholars working from different schools and points of view of theory. While this isn’t a Cognitive Poetic necessity, I believe it’s crucial to my project. Cognitive Poetics offer neither a final say over the potential reactions to the text’s sensory data nor even a standalone truth. Rather, the gesture of Cognitive Poetic study for me is inclusive and enlightening in a holistic sense. Mining the potential physiological, psychological and neurological elements of textual processing is yet another tool to help with the work of understanding. Setting these science-based analyses next to more traditional work highlights the notion that only collective, eclectic scholarship can reveal a poem’s many truths. The first step of the phenomenological reading I will perform on the poem is an analysis of affect. In Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Silvan Tomkins insists that affect is an instinctual reaction to the stimulus of the text, and Robert Zajonc elaborates by pointing out that affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding (151-172). 9 However, later Affect theorists acknowledge that affect happens at both pre- and post-cognitive levels, which helps explain why a reader experiences pre-semantic reactions to text and the contextualization of text as simultaneous. 10 Along those lines, my phenomenological reading of affect will be recursive, since it is the immediate sensory affect that helps, as Antonio Damasio puts it to “enable more rational modes of cognition,” and those rational modes then engender further affect, and so on. 11 In other words, while I will attempt to recognize and isolate my reactions to the visual and sound structures in this reading, I take into consideration that the separate brain processing of the visual, phonological and semantic still feels, to a reader, like a single, synthesized process. 29 I also recognize that my reading itself, though initially focused on sound and visual elements instead of semantics, is rooted in the New Criticism methodology of close reading. However, the end product is wholly different from a New Critical reading in that I use these techniques in service of parsing a phenomenological experience. Therefore, in an antithetical gesture from New Criticism’s goals, my reading suggests that the text is not self-contained. While Derrida might insist that there is nothing outside the text, a comprehensive cognitive poetic methodology amends that there is nothing outside the reading of the text (158). The text exists as the basic set of stimuli, and thus is contained, but a reader’s consciousness does the interpretation, and that consciousness brings with it a world of outside influences. Whether one thinks of the reader as a manifestation of Husserl’s object of intuition, Kristeva’s subject of enunciation, or Antonio Damasio’s notion that “feelings are largely a reflection of body state changes,” nonetheless the reading begins and ends with his/her processing of the text (“The Feeling” 288). 12 Thus, while my analysis of Williams requires the aforementioned New Critical techniques of analyzing the structures of the text, etc., unlike the New Critics I draw numerous (and absolutely necessary) correlations between the formal structures of the text and the outside knowledge that shapes how I experience those structures in relation to the semantic meanings of the text. For example, at one point I discuss the movement of the iambic rhythms as speaking both to the historical understanding of the modernist movement and the particular affinities of Williams as an author and critic. In that moment, while the technique combines elements of New Criticism, Affect Theory and even Phenomenology, it is inclusive in that it relies on exploring how those analyses interact with some of the major psychological, cultural and social critiques. It is the play between them that grounds this methodology. 30 ON MY COGNITIVE POETIC RESEARCH In addition to extensively reading the available research on psycholinguistics, physiology and neuroscience related to textual processing, I also created and conducted my own survey using William Carlos Williams’ “The Attic Which Is Desire” as its source material. The survey included 429 participants from ages 15-71. I found participants through various means, including Internet communities (i.e. Reddit), personal association (i.e., friends asked friends) and educational environments (including students at USC and UCLA.) The only barrier to entry for the survey was being non-English speaking, as facility with the English language was important in understanding the questions. (Not all participants spoke English as their first language, however.) Participants first listened to an audio reading of the poem twice, and then answered several questions about the poems that especially focused on the sound information in the text. They were then able to read the text of the poem and answered another set of questions that focused largely on the visual information. Finally, participants answered several questions on their overall interpretations and impressions of the poem. The participants rated the whole or parts of the text for factors including heaviness/lightness and darkness/brightness of certain words, the choppiness/smoothness of its rhythm, the effect of repetition and the overall positive/negative effects of the poem. They were also asked about the influence of various visual elements of the poem, including the lineation and white space, on the pace of their reading and interpretation of the text. They were asked which words and sounds stood out to them from a sound and a visual point of view. Participants were also able to conclude with their own interpretations of the poem’s meaning and any other comments they wished to make about the text. I refer to this survey several times in the following essay and the data is available in full 31 for your reference (Appendix C). I’ve also included a short summary of some of the key findings of the survey (Appendix A). It is important for me to acknowledge that this survey was casual and to a large extent anecdotal. I am not a behavioral scientist and thus I lack the expertise and experience necessary to collect data that would hold to rigorous scientific standards. However, I have a B.S. in Journalism and worked in that field for several years, and what I accomplished is akin to a journalistic interview with over 400 people on a single subject. As a scientist that is not rigorous enough to draw conclusions, but as a curious party interested in how a particular poem works magic (and what I will reveal isn’t magic at all, but brilliant craft) on its subjects, I believe this survey has a lot to offer. THE READING The Visual: A Small (or Large) Machine Made of Words 13 In The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, William Bohn acknowledges the weight of a poem’s visual elements on the reactions of its readers, arguing that internalizing the layout of a poem is a separate, and independently important, part of internalizing its meanings. He writes: “Not only is each letter a unit in a verbal chain; it belongs to a visual chain as well. As the reader deciphers the linguistic message, he retraces the visual message line by line. Thus the work exists simultaneously as a poem and picture” (2). While it’s clear that spaces in poetry often exist simply to take the place of a pause or punctuation or to create word groupings, from a purely visual perspective that does not take into consideration the time period, author, or any of the semantic meanings of the words and title, the overall picture of Williams’ “The Attic Which Is Desire” elicits several immediate responses. 32 The lines are short and narrow, and this linear format of the poem immediately suggests either ascent or descent. Once we understand that this poem is about an attic, the obvious link is made; in this case, like stairs leading up to that attic, the visual structure was a harbinger of the content. However, this isn’t only an actual attic, but a metaphorical attic “which is desire,” and thus it is useful to note both elements of ascent and descent in the visual structures. The complicated nature of desire as both lofty and transcendent and the root of the Freudian unconscious (and thus potentially shameful and buried) is fleshed out in the visual placement of the text. This actually gives way to an issue countless readers and critics note in regard to this particular poem: the embodied representation of sex and sexuality in the poem’s visual form. The narrow column of text, to me, is immediately phallic, although according to Rae Armantrout it is a “narrow, vaginal column of text (par. 3). Though the lines are all short when compared with the average poem, their lengths are inconsistent, from a quatrain of single letter lines to couplets whose lines contain one to three words. The radical asymmetry between the lines of the poem’s many couplets kindle anxiety, an up-front prediction that the visual choppiness is a forewarning of tumultuous shifts in sentiment or meaning. Poet and critic Dana Gioia believes that “[e]very poem should have a model line. The standard line length should be clear—consciously or unconsciously—to the listener or reader,” and that “the expressive value of all disruptions should be greater than the loss of momentum and the breaking of the pattern’s spell” (Gioia). The line-length variation that creates a lack of a “model line” in this poem anticipates the disruption that the reader will feel halfway through the poem when pulled out of the imaginary into the concrete realm of the neon sign’s poetic imagery. 33 And while the short lines suggest to me personally a quickness of reading not often found in poems with longer, prose-like lines, the variable lengths of the lines in this piece actually slowed down my reading. The short lines create so much white space on the page; more space than the average page of prose and most poetry. In a psycholinguistic study that tracked the eye patterns of participants reading poems with variable amounts of white space, analysts concluded that “textual space suspends textual time,” demonstrating how most readers’ eyes linger longer on words with more white space around them (Roverts 36). So, as a reader, the necessity of eye- scanning back and forth so quickly over the short, choppy lines is frenetic, but the white space is slowing. The combined effect is one of disjunction and disquiet. Mallarme’s concept of visual silence, however, in which white space creates a “privileged space for the text and its individual images” is also important here in understanding a reader’s initial visual reaction to the Williams poem (Bohn 4). Bohn mentions this in his work on visual poetry, also noting Gerard Genette’s “margin of silence,” which he believes is the main necessity in the poeticity of language, that adds intensity to a work by separating it from normal speech or prose (96). A visual scan of the white space of William’s text suggests on one hand the heaviness and import of individual words on each line, but on the other a potential chasm between those words and the intended meaning of the work. The look of poeticity itself begets a tension for me even before the creation of semantic meaning. In other words, because the page offers so much of Mallarme’s visual silence, my immediate reaction is that there will be an accompanying semantic silence, a refusal to spell things out that would require much work on the reader’s part in drawing out meaning and making the connections that are likely occluded in the words of the text. As a reader, before I even consider the words of the text, I suspect things 34 will not be explained. This initial feeling is supported in the actual meaning of the poem, as the reader is made immediately aware that the desire is remains “unused.” The emptiness of the attic is itself a sort of white space. The attic of the poem both is and isn’t a real thing: it is metaphorical desire hidden inside the speaker who feels separate from the world, but it is also a concrete, geographical location with a neon sign outside of it and specific imagery to place it in reality. The visual silence on the page forecasts the complicated, often untenable chasm between one’s inner self and the bright, obvious, lighted outside world that haunts the poem. To return to the sexual considerations of the piece, in Opus Posthumous, Wallace Stevens notes the possibility of “assigning a female role to the unused tent in ‘The Attic Which Is Desire,' and a male role to the soda sign” (Doyle 126). In this reading the triangle created by the “tent / of / bare beams” is a vaginal image, a triangular, empty space that begins the poem. Along those lines, the white space of the page itself is an empty, receptive space upon which the phallic line of text visually asserts itself (though Armantrout might insist that it is “the ejaculatory soda” doing the asserting, not the entire column of text.) In Reading Space in Visual Poetry: New Cognitive Perspectives, the authors point out how important analysis of textual space is, asserting that “spaces in texts... visually reinforce the conceptual organization of a given text [but] at the same time facilitate the process of perception by guiding the eye and the mind of the reader” (Knowles et al 75). However, on an even more micro visual level, the graphological deviations of the poem from standard written language are also immediately apparent at first glance and have an effect on coercing perception and meaning- making. For example, Williams’ poem contains few capital letters (except in the quatrain, which will be discussed later) and very little punctuation. The resulting text is visually smaller than a poem using sentence case or first line capitalization would be. Also highlighted is the lack of the 35 first person pronoun in this poem—especially the “I,” which can provide so much capital/lowercase variation in text. Considering that alongside the lack of capitalization in the first word of the first sentence, there is an even stronger expectation created that the speaker’s voice will be a whisper, not a boom, slipping into the reader’s consciousness not as an authoritative or commanding voice, but like stream of consciousness or an afterthought. The unequal lines work to the same effect: the white space resulting from the recessed lines anticipates an idea about the speaker of the poem even before semantic sense is made. Joseph Hillis Miller, in Poets of Reality, wrote that Williams’ use of white space via the recessed lines of several couplets created a “poetry of humility” (345). Donald W. Markos noted “spare lines—composed of bits of grammar surrounded by white spaces…reflect a saint-like ‘poverty,’ an absence of egotism” (141). It seems no accident that the “desire” of the poem’s title is an unfulfilled one, and that although the speaker is standing in the world of the neon sign, he is focused on a bare attic and the dark window that leads to it. Realizing, later, that the one capitalized full word is “Here” in the eighth line, gives that word an unusual heaviness of meaning. It pulls the reader away from the idea of an attic into the reality of place that the speaker experiences, heightening the Objectivism that Williams helped to create. It urges the reader to understand that, for the speaker, “here” is a concrete place, not solely a vehicle for the metaphor in which desire acts as the tenor. That single capital letter takes the poem from philosophical to concrete, laying the groundwork for the poem’s most important visual moment. Beginning on line 11, those “running lights” around the “soda” sign in the pictographic moment offers the most overt visual gesture: *** 36 *S* *O* *D* *A* *** Without looking and thinking about the word soda itself, the image created is that of an object, a boxed and solid thing that has weight and presence in the brick and mortar world. To my mind, it is insisting upon itself as a thing both inside and outside the text, breaching the chasm between the page and the world. That visual gesture reminds me that text is both meaning and also material. This moment is key, as we later understand, because it doubly plays on the idea of “sign.” On one hand, from a structuralist perspective the word soda is a linguistic sign like any other. The signifier of sound and sight point to a signified meaning, and Saussure might insist that the mode of inscription does not affect the meaning. However, in a later, more semantically driven reading of the poem it’s clear that the moment actually suggests a real life sign, as one outside a window. It is here I realize without any doubt that a word on a page is an object as well as a sign, and that objects have importance in that they “act upon the reader” (as phenomenologist Georges Poulet would put it.) The objectified text, in this case, has acted upon me by insisting on drawing me to the street outside the “attic” of desire, which also draws me literally outside the literariness of the text. That the material thing signified by the text—soda—is such a small, seemingly insignificant object is also important. Why such a focus (in visual structure, and, as I’ll show below, in sound) on this every day object? But this illuminates (no pun intended) how the tiny, seemingly unimportant object of desire becomes writ large when stored away in one’s internal attic of desire, both in and of itself and as metonomy for other desired objects. 37 The Aural: A Poetics of Attention 14 In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart writes that “to speak of the aural aspect of poetry is to begin to speak necessarily of its linguistic dimension, but we will also need to consider the prelinguistic and extralinguistic dimensions of sound embedded in the language of poetry” (60). Her theory is that these sound elements, while eventually integrated into a holistic understanding of the text, actually contribute to the path a reader takes in pursuing semantic meaning. She writes that “the semantic and discursive aspects of poetry emerge from, but do not entirely displace, such non semantic features.” Julia Kristeva offers a similar notion when discussing the “chora”—what Susan Stewart calls “a retrospectively posited prelinguistic condition out of which the linguistic form…emerges”—and the effects of prelinguistic understanding on meaning making. Stewart cites Kristeva’s description of the chora: “The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e. not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for another position (i.e. not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm” (Kristeva 94). Kristeva asserts that understanding the reading subject by mining the “theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted.” All this implies that a Cognitive Poetic reading that analyzes a reader’s initial, even rudimentary, reaction to the sound information in the text is a useful mapping tool, akin to knowing which point on the map one is starting from when taking 38 a long journey. Certainly there will be turns, twists and revisions of direction; but without that starting point it is almost impossible to fully understand the route. Here might also be a good place to address a potential objection: much of the analysis I do in this section draws upon source material on the sounds of language, and some of those sounds regard spoken language and not specifically text. Luckily, that is not as big of a problem as one might think. In a 2012 article in The Journal of Neuroscience, the authors studied the activity in the auditory-related areas of the brain to see if they lit up during silent reading. The answer was a resounding yes; they found that the areas in the temporal lobe that respond to speech (as opposed to random sounds) respond to the written word in a comparable way. The study shows that “we all produce an ‘inner voice’ when reading silently” that our brain treats much like a real voice reading, for example, a poem aloud (Brookshire par. 10). Consequently, much of the data relating to the neurological responses to speaking language applies when studying reading language. Now, to begin considering the specific sound structures of “The Attic Which is Desire,” it is helpful to consider Williams’ modernist leanings through the lens of Ezra Pound’s notion that “break [ing] the pentameter…was the first heave” toward a modern poetics. 15 The poem, upon first read, definitely eschews any formal prosody; Williams arranged his poem in a visually evocative way that uses fragmentation to disturb the evenness of sound. Nonetheless, the piece manages to do more than just nod to the iambic rhythm (and even to iambic pentameter itself) in several long, important moments of this rather short poem. This seems shrewd on Williams’ part, despite his desire to break free of the “beautiful illusion” (178) of romantic poetry, because the iambic rhythm has time and again been found (both scientifically and historically) to be pleasing to the ear and body. Though Williams might not like it, because of his use of the 39 recurring iamb he accomplishes the sort of vers libre that embodies T.S. Eliot’s notion that one should stray from the meter most effectively by nodding to its existence first (518). The first moment of iambic rhythm in the poem happens early: x / x / directly wait x / the night x / and day-- It is a small instance, but a comforting one after the heavy spondees preceding it (“bare beams,” etc.) and also an easy transition to the ear from the alliteration in the stanza before. Later, in close reading the semantic meanings, I am led to wonder whether this sound movement helps convey the idea that the day and night existing outside the speaker is simple (inviting easy, lulling iambs), whereas the complicated inside of the attic of desire is rough (and asks for less regular meter.) The entire end of the poem after the soda sign, however, is iambic. (There is a missing unstressed head on the first line, though the second reads perfectly; “ringed with” is a trochee, but the unstressed “a” in “soda” elides into the next line to keep iambic rhythm.) With one small exception the poem reads in syntactic groupings like iambic pentameter: / x ringed with / x / running lights x / x the darkened / pane x / x 40 exactly / x / x down the center / x / is transfixed Perhaps this marriage of measure and chaos figures into Williams’ idea of the “variable foot,” a notion that has often confounded scholars but that, according to Williams himself, are just “the spaces between the stresses, the rhythmical units, [that] are variable.” He notes that the “feet” he mentions aren’t stress-based, but are “spaces in between the various spaces of the verse” (Koehler). 16 When Stanley Koehler interviewed Williams for The Paris Review, he called this technique “ a metrical device that was to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse,” which aligns with this poem’s physicality (a rigid column, yet longing and outward looking) and semantic meaning (the fixedness of the speaker in the attic juxtaposed with the urban life outside his window.) In an essay in William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry, Michael Boughn calls this variation in meter “the modulation from the prosody of expectation to the prosody of attention,” which aligns with the sensory reaction I had upon first reading the choppy lines of the piece. The rhythm was soothing but the unusual, short line breaks were an awakening, a call to attention to each word’s import, similar in some ways to the visual reaction those breaks evoked. Broughn wrote that “the basis of the prosody of attention is unpredictability” and the sound and form of “The Attic Which Is Desire” deliver that unpredictability (171). Regarding meter and sense, it is kind of wonderful that “transfixed” is the last word of a poem by a poet who eschewed the classic meters as outmoded and ineffectual, yet ended his poem in this almost perfectly traditional rhythmic way. Aside from its lull, the iambic rhythm 41 has, in recent criticism, been accused of an oppressiveness that stems from the weight of its omnipresent history, representation of the patriarchy and a Euro-centric view of poetry in the academy. This complicates the idea of a “pure” reaction to audial elements of the poem, as it seems likely that informed readers will pick up on this familiar rhythm immediately. This changes things somewhat; Williams could be sure that while the choppiness and brokenness of the meter is jarring, its continuing existence throughout the poem in the first place invites a measure of sound fixation. For example, if we hear a loud BOOM on the street, we jump: our neurological reaction is to be startled. When we hear many loud booms sustained over a period of time, we do not jump anymore…the pattern has been accepted and becomes both its own sound and part of the general atmosphere. This atmospheric aural lull is, if nothing else, transfixing. Perhaps Williams himself was transfixed by the old ways, or, even more interestingly, perhaps it is desire that keeps us transfixed and unable to move forward. Thus, we keep our desires in the attic, where relics like the iamb are stored, perhaps forgotten, but not actually discarded. However, as I note below, several other structural decisions of sound actually move the poem even further from common metrical verse. But more importantly, the first impressions of the sounds don’t begin solely with rhythm of the lines. As noted above, the stark variations in line length are jarring from a visual perspective, but those complications continue at the level of sound as well. Stewart mentions Friedrich Hölderlin’s belief that “the unanticipated caesura is not simply an alternation of a rhythmic pattern, but is as well a gesture of breaking or hesitating that opens the text to eccentric positions of unintelligibility and death” (Stewart 66). The unanticipated pause is the bread and butter of this poem, and it’s easy to feel a sense of dread or uneasiness because of it. 42 Regardless, the most intense sound element is not variation but repetition, via alliteration, assonance and consonance, creating moments of sonic choppiness or stiltedness surrounding them where the word sounds were complexly unrelated. Allen Grossmen argues in Summa Lyrica that sound especially affects readers in terms of establishing difference (variation) or no difference (such as the parallelisms of rhyme or meter.) “Rhyme,” he writes “like all phonic or merely structural repetition…summons to common membership at the level of the species, tend[s] to extinguish difference as transcendence and establish difference at the level of substance” (362). Consider this in terms of Turner and Poppel’s notion in “The Neural Lyre” that the human nervous system “respond[s] only to the new and unexpected” (279). So, the alliteration in “bare beams / beyond” or “ringed with / running lights” and the consonance in “directly wait/the night” are lulling and desirable to a reader for the lack of difference they create. That also means, however, that the discord is highlighted when those moments are presented then discarded, as in “and day—/Here” or “exactly / down the center.” Repeated sounds (i.e. alliteration, assonance, consonance) can either speed up or slow down the reading of a poem depending on the particular sounds repeated. In the survey I conducted with over 400 participants, the vast majority (85%) found the rhythm of the poem “choppy” as opposed to “smooth.” In this case, the alliteration moves the reader more swiftly through the lines and, as one respondent noted, “serve[s] to smooth and speed up what is an otherwise intentionally choppy, slow poem” (Respondent ID 71068589). Not surprisingly, respondents also mostly agreed that the line breaks created a audial contrast to the quickness of the repeated sound information; 81% said the line breaks made the reading “choppier,” and 51% said the same of the white space. Seemingly, the white space and line breaks function together 43 as stops might in music. This is another implication of Hölderlin’s theory of the unanticipated caesura (Hölderlin 102,109). Along those lines, the two most discordant moments in Williams’ poem, sound-wise, are at the beginning –“the unused tent / of” has none of the sound repetition at all—and in the lines before what also happens to be the visually most disruptive moment— “from the street / by / SODA.” In the first line, the “unused” clearly indicates neglect or separation, but the sound of the word itself also can suggest dirtiness or, in my associations, sinfulness; certainly a heaviness. This might have to do with the u phoneme of word “unused,” which linguistics studies subjects often find heavy and dark and which, as the main ictus syllable of the word, influences its overall effect. 17 As linguists John Ohala and Eugene Morton proposed, “over evolutionary time, humans instinctively associate pitch with size. Lions, bears, seals make low sounds, canaries, mice, rabbits higher sounds. Not always, but enough of the time that when we hear a low frequency (even in an "O" or a "U") we may think heavy, fat and dark things whereas higher frequencies (even in "I's and "E"s) suggest small and light things (Krulwich). The word “tent” might lighten things up a bit, but the first significant sound in the body of the poem is that u vowel, and it makes a gloomy impression. Add that the connection between that “u” sound and the word “you” and you have an even more personal and haunting beginning. 18 More complexly, this association could have something to do with what David I. Masson calls the “ad hoc associations” one often makes between words of similar sounds. In this case, unused also contains used, which has its own problematic correlations with the word desire, as in, “being used” by someone. (These are semantic associations, of course, but based particularly on sound relationships, which shows the recursive nature of text processing.) Also, cognitive linguistic studies have shown that posterior vowel sounds like “oo” are considered—outside of 44 any meaning—to be “large and dark” by listeners. 19 This large, dark feeling works well for me, in Williams’ poem, to create uneasiness. The same is true for the /o/ in “soda,” which feels like a heavy, ominous word out of context. 20 These are the moments in the poem that I felt the most off-balance, but also the moments that the meaning seemed to speak directly to the fissure between one’s inner and outer life. The tent is unused. Even if the poem is situated in the cave of the embodied mind, the real objects of life exist outside the attic, not inside the mind/body. This is the primary concern of the poem, and the sounds play around that theme. Still, alliteration itself, though pleasant because of the soothing nature of repetition, can range for readers anywhere along a scale of pleasant or unpleasant based on the specific repeated sound. In my survey, a small majority of participants found both the “b” and “t” sound repetitions pleasant over unpleasant, but many found them neutral. For me, when the already dark “unused” is followed by the alliteration of “bare beams / beyond,” those stuttering triple B sounds are immediately unpleasant. The consonance in “directly wait / the night” that follows also has a hard and unyielding effect. Edward L. Thorndike’s statistical study “The Association of Certain Sounds with Pleasant or Unpleasant Meanings” indicates that the /b/ phoneme rates on a negative scale (which indicates unpleasantness), as does the hard /t/ phoneme. 21 Regarding pleasantness and unpleasantness, it would be an oversight not to discuss— especially in a poem about desire—the relationship of the sounds in the piece to sexuality. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo bring up the connection between sound and sexuality in Harpsichords Metallic Howl—: The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's Sound Poetry: For many theorists of poetry, sound has an inherently libidinal component: ‘[Sound] is an agency for desire productions,’ writes McCaffery, ‘for releasing energy flow, for securing the passage of libido in a multiplicity of flows out of the Logos.’ In 45 sound poetry, Gerald Bruns similarly expounds, ‘the body becomes the machine or vestibule of gratuitous expenditures of energy’ (255). Along those lines, I took special notice of the word “transfixed.” Participants in the poetics survey noticed that word most frequently upon hearing (and not seeing) the poem, and they overwhelmingly (73%) considered the word more hard than soft. It’s a surprising word, one that rolls into sibilance with a hard and unexpected “x” sound lingering: the sounds of the word themselves perform the same action the word signifies. Saying it, the tongue moves from the front and top of the palate and recedes, consonant clusters transitioning from soft to hard, locking the jaw in a fixed position that strengths the semantic meaning of the verb. It is bewitching, almost sexual. Roland Barthes makes the claim that certain words can have that kind of power, noting in The Pleasure of the Text, that [A] word can be erotic on two opposing conditions, both excessive: if it is extravagantly repeated, or on the contrary, if it is unexpected, succulent in its newness….In both cases, the same physics of bliss, the groove, the inscription, the syncope: what is hollowed out, tamped down, or what explodes, detonates (42). “Transfixed” does explode, as the fricative consonants of the beginning of the poem turn, after “SODA”, into increasingly plosive sounds, building with the preceding hard “k” sounds in “darkened” and “exactly” that detonate the last syllable, a highly acute “xed.” One of the least immediately obvious effects of the sound play in the poem, though, is the synesthesia that Williams creates by associating color words with vowel sounds that represent them well. In “What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive,” Reuven Tsur notes an 1950s era experiment by Haskins Laboratory that “offer[ed] an explanation to our intuition that back 46 vowels are darker than front vowels,” which are perceived as bright (20). In the moments where we have color-associated words (“light” and “darkened”) it’s interesting to note how the vowels that constitute those lines align perfectly with cognitive linguistic notions of vowel perception. So, just as the color white contains all the spectrum of light (i.e. brightness), the lines that deal with light “ringed with / running lights” have primarily front vowel sounds (the high front ɪ for “ringed,” the front diphthong aI for “light” and the central ʌ for “running”). Conversely, the phrase “darkened pane” semantically pointing to a lack of light, also uses back vowels that are commonly perceived as dark (the ɑː in “darkened,” though the diphthong aI in “pane” isn’t as readily categorical.) The Semantic Interplay: Of the 429 participants I surveyed, 170 thought the word “soda” stuck out after hearing the poem (not seeing it), 200 believed it stuck out after hearing and seeing it, and 356 found “soda” to be the most important word based solely on the visual structure of the poem. Almost every survey mentioned the word “soda” either for its visual or aural impact (in addition to, obviously, questions that everyone answered on that specific word.) Those lined up letters (S / O / D / A) and the accompanying, attention-grabbing asterisks capture the eye and hold it, insisting upon themselves as the central moment of the poetic space. From a sensory point of view it is a high-jacking; the rest of the poem’s individual lines recede while the words-as-sign become everything. Certainly this affects the reading later in the process as the reader tries to get at the locus of semantic meaning. The SODA sign, which is both sounds, lines of meaning and an object simultaneously, is reminiscent of that other moment when words, physical spaces and meaning collide in our view: 47 the ever present advertisement. In fact, the thingness of the sign on the page is in itself an act of commodification: through the pictorial representation Williams has taken the word—something usually conceived as far more insubstantial than the thing it signifies—and made it into an object. John Timberman Newcomb posits that Williams’ attic represents the space of his imagination, while the window is an emblem of his perception, and that “the two together make a “composition [that] acknowledges that the goal of the sign and all advertisements is to transfix the eye of the consumer” (263). In A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present, Cary Nelson adds that “such signs register not merely the general prevalence of ads in our lives but a specific pressure that all ads strive for: to capture our visual field so powerfully that we become quite unable to look away” (262). However, that Williams turns these faculties toward the world of capitalistic desire via advertising isn’t a problem for Newcomb, who believes that “by repurposing its transfixing capacity for the benefit of his artistry, Williams posits a modern poetry not despoiled but empowered by the world of the commodity” (263). And it’s true that Williams was vocally anti- Marxist and enamored with the “American idiom,” both in language and in the possibilities of poetic subject. Still, there is a darker side to this urban, capitalistic vision in the poem. Martin Heusser writes of a “brutal violence” (228) in the way the sign is transfixed in the window, insisting that a “lure of indulgence and satisfaction is associated with transfixture…and the desire characterized as unacceptable” (228). And this isn’t simply the same old criticism one hears of capitalist society every day; it happens to directly apply to the typography of the poem as well. From a neurological and psychological standpoint we, as readers, are beholden to the “SODA” sign in our reading process; it is vibrant and alluring and cannot be ignored, for better or worse. Because we intuit that the “SODA” moment is both overly aggressive and captivating, 48 even seductively playful, and because as people we have both pressing material and capitalistic desires as well as shame and self-judgment for feeling those desires, the sensory way we react to the sign strengthens the dichotomous ideas we have about capitalism and our lives. It is an American dilemma, filtered through a new American poetics that was excited by the materiality of everything, whether goods or poetry. Besides the visual space the SODA sign commandeers, there is a phenomenological complication when considering the way that poetic moment sounds. Deciding, internally or externally, on the correct oral (or aural) interpretation of that textual moment feels impossible. In other words; there is no standard. Donald W. Markos touches upon this conundrum, noting that when Williams himself read poems aloud he did not pause where the lines break were or for any white space, noting that “a listener cannot consistently tell when lines or stanzas end” (62). So, then: *** *S* *O* *D* *A* *** How does one hear it, especially when it’s read with the eyes? Do the phonemes assert themselves to establish their own sound structures or is there an experiential relationship that links the visual and sound sense of that poetic moment? One reader—the composer Steven Mackey—believes that the implied flashing motion of the sign also implies a schema for the way readers might internalize its sounds. Mackey famously used this poem as the libretto to a choral and woodwind arrangement in the early 2000s, partially because he felt that the SODA sign, as an object within the poem, created its own rhythmic imperative: 49 I imagined “SODA” as a tireless ostinato, flashing in regular beats, present before we arrived and continuing after our attention shifts….I was inspired by the counterpoint between elements of stillness set against elements of movement: one example is the empty, dark attic set against the obsessive flashing soda sign” (Mackey). Still, the brain’s amazing ability to process visual and sound information in such extremely rapid succession that it seems simultaneous comes into play here. Though the neurological processes of reading are indeed consecutive, the feeling of understanding all the elements is concurrent; we see the soda sign and hear the word for soda in our heads separately, but it doesn’t feel that way. This is due to our brain’s highly systemized and automated integration of rules about the sounds and letters in the English writing system that we call the alphabetic principle, which Maryanne Wolf says “depends on your brain’s uncanny ability to learn to connect and integrate at rapid-fire speeds what it sees and what it hears to what it knows” (8). There is even a potential invitation in the layout to read the sign not as a word, but as separate letters (S-O-D-A). So, if we are reading the poem instead of just hearing it read aloud, the question remains whether the spatial arrangement of the “sign” in the poem will change the way we actually hear the word it makes, in terms of rhythm or inflection. And the answer? Not confirmed, but the research point to yes—or at least to a symbiosis of the relationship between the visual and sound effects. Many of my survey participants did say they read the word as separate letters, once they had access to the text. (Interestingly enough, the phonetic components of “soda” do not change very much when reading it as a single word or individual letters, since the four letters of “soda” are all pronounced fairly phonetically. The sibilant /s/ is longer and the phoneme /u/ turns to /A/, but otherwise it’s very close. This is 50 unlike some words, like “right” or “gauge,” whose letters separately make very different sounds than the word itself.) Still, as we saw earlier in experiments that eye-tracked readers to determine whether white space influences the pace of reading, there are even broader suggestions that pace is informed by all sorts of visual experimentation within the text. Personally speaking, my reading of “SODA” was slowed down substantially by the placement of the letters and asterisks, and not just because I was arrested by it visually. The “visual prosody,” as Markos calls Williams’ patterning of verse elements apart from rhetorical function, changed the time I gave to the word in my head (134). The long column complicates the isochrony such that “SO” and “DA” are both lengthier, drawn out syllables. The horizontal reading slows down an English language reader who is used to looking left to right. All these create a slowing, especially noticeable in the second syllable “da,” which in natural speech would trip away swiftly off the tongue but, due to the poem’s typography, lingers. The line spacing also gives rise to a second potential oral reading, one in which the letters of “SODA” are read individually like “S-O-D-A,” slowing down the pace of the poem even more. This reading foreshadows the last line, as the transfixed reader is trapped in the sign, forced to sound out the name of each letter on each line of the poem before moving on the denouement. Though in other sections I have already individually discussed the potential temporal effects of visual layout and prosody/diction for the reader, it is worthwhile to note that there is an imbalance: the visual elements that influence pace seem to most often do so by asking the reader to pause and consider, while the audial elements of the text, rooted as they are in a sounding of the words and lines inside a reader’s head, necessarily occur in time, so can speed up or slow down the reading at will. The sounding of the text is phenomenological and experiential; it is an event that can be executed in many different ways depending on reader and situation, as opposed 51 to the fixed spatial positioning of the text. Roman Jakobson explains in Language in Literature: Both visual and auditory perceptions obviously occur in space and time, but the spatial dimension takes priority for visual signs and the temporal one for auditory signs. A complex visual sign involves a series of simultaneous constituents while a complex auditory sign consists, as a rule, of serial successive constituents (469). ⁠ It is not so surprising that upon first glance the “SODA” sign is grounding, stabilizing and heavy; the very nature of the visual sign is fixity, especially when compared to the flickering “running” lights (that nonetheless never go anywhere, destined to circle and circle) and the sound sign of the word which is fluid and fleeting. In “The Sound Shape of the Visual: Toward a Phenomenology of An Interface,” Ming Qian-Ma, states that “to see, in this sense, is to frame the fluctuating multitude into a timeless pattern of fixity and stability, to transcend the whirling chaos of noises into an ideally eternal form of silent clarity and transparency” (266). Intuitively, this seems to hold water: we believe what we see more readily than what we hear because the visible object is a reference, checkable and able to be kept as a guide. Qian-Ma pulls John McCumber into this argument, calling on his view that “we cannot see the momentary. Vision requires relatively fixed objects….By contrast, sound ‘disappears as it arises’ and thus 'it is the reverse of stability’” (242). There is irony, then, to the way the main visual element of “The Attic Which Is Desire” counteracts this idea of fixedness. Instead, the signs “running lights” are full of motion, insinuating a more chaotic and fleeting space than the sounds of “SODA” themselves, which roughly half of the respondents to our questionnaire thought felt “heavy.” The verticality of the “SODA” sign functions differently from the narrow layout of the entire poem text. The column of the whole poem does offer certain visual associations (many 52 say a phallic ones, specifically), but is less of a pointed pictorial representation than the “soda sign” and acts more as an aid to the reader in pace and semantic meaning. While the sign is taken in as a whole (its series of “simultaneous constituents” forming a picture to be viewed in totality), the narrow line of text forces a slow reveal of information during the line-by-line reading process that creates suspense. In poems with longer lines the saccades (units of rapid eye movement between fixed points that linguists and scientists use to track reader’s responses to information on the page) yield a lot of information that necessitates a hierarchy of words for the reader, from information-heavy words that feel more important to filler words (conjunctions, articles, etc.) that do not. In “The Attic Which Is Desire,” scanning the short lines one at a time only allows the reader to glean small tidbits of information per saccade, which creates weight in words that normally would not carry much. (Think about the word “of” in the second line, which would normally be skipped over almost entirely.) Still, the verticality of the whole does serve an important and deft little pictorial function in a recursive fashion: once you read the poem, the page itself becomes the darkened pane, with the poem transfixed down its length. The narrowness also indicates a narrowness of vision or subject. Singularity or smallness of subject isn’t unusual for Williams, especially in his shorter, more Imagistic poems. Frederick Morgan wrote that in Williams’ work “vision habitually narrows to a single object or incident, to broken glass in a yard, or a girl finding a nail in her shoe.” In “Attic” we have the sign, always the sign, in the forefront of our gaze. “In its simplest form,” Morgan writes, “this is a poetry of direct observation of individual objects,” ⁠ and so Williams forces us to observe (on the page and in our heads) the SODA sign, just as the speaker is transfixed by it (675). To complicate this, however, there is the question of the attic itself, which provides the only other image in the poem. This is a poem about desire, and in my own reading I feel the 53 speaker looking up at a barren attic longingly from the populated and electric world. The play between the sparseness of the setting (as embodied in the short lines, truncated by enjambment) and the excitement of the space in which the speaker stands (as demonstrated by the asterisks surrounding SODA) is immediately evident from just glancing at the poem. Heusser writes …this superimposition of the brightly illuminated electric soda sign with its running lights on the one hand and the bare, static beams of the attic with its dark window on the other defines desire. Desire arises from the disparity or discrepancy between the attic with its artless woodwork, dull, functional, dusty – an image of routine, social and cultural constraints – and the promise of pleasure and of gratification radiated into the dark night by the flashing light of the soda sign (228). In this sense, the visual contrast enjoys a correlation with the narrative dichotomy: alone vs. populated. However, the night is “waiting,” so there is a sense of anticipation that counters the loneliness. Syntactically speaking, the poem could be read so that the pane itself is transfixed, not the speaker; the darkened pane waits doggedly for the SODA sign to illuminate it. This reading creates a different kind of anticipation; one that William Marling believes mimics a kind of sexual desire. “Soda will light, presumably, in a moment,” he wrote “but it leaves the reader at a state of attention. Interruption is anticipated, not achieved” (295). Marling insists this anticipation, borrowed from painting techniques at the time, privileges the "erotic atmosphere,” creating an undertone of sexual longing that justifies both the poem’s title and the phallus of text thrusting up on the page. Regardless of whether the desire in the poem is sexual, the contrast of settings — in and out, day and night, attic and urban landscape—implies a “distance from which the poet observes 54 his community ⁠ .” Christopher MacGowan’s calls the attic a “hostile world,” noting language like “bare” and “unused,” while the “imaginative space” of the outside world, characterized by the lights beyond, beckon but cannot reach the speaker: the poet watches, and incorporates visually into his poem, a space that is filled with language – contrasting with the "unused "communal potential of the attic itself. Isolation is tempered by the promise that the space from which the poet watches the community might become the space upon which the community could be met. [But] the status of this imagined space remains potential and serves to emphasize through its reach back to the poets own space the distance and isolation from which he engages his community (124). The contrasting spaces within the setting, then, speak to the uneven lines and broken rhythm of the text. The music of the poem that could be smooth—the potential is there in the regular meter—is stunted and broken by the line breaks. What could be whole and symmetrical visually, as the poem almost is a true column, is made jagged and irregular by the uneven lines and aggressive pictorial typography. Just as, for the speaker of the poem, the night waits but is frozen in the space of the poem, unreachable, the contrast between what could be regular and isn’t permeates the sensory material of the text. The irregularity, though, is what brings interest and texture to a poem that could easily have been visually and aurally monotone. Marjorie Perloff criticizes Hayden Carruth for missing this truth when he complained that the unusual line breaks and typography “interfere with [the] reading,” and are “inexcusable” for that. “A remarkable misunderstanding,” Perloff writes “implying, as it does, that typography is detachable from the poem, that lineation is just a nuisance, ‘interfering with our reading’ of the poem for a substance.” Perhaps she sums up a 55 Cognitive Poetic consideration of the poem when she rebuts that “the typography is in many ways the poem’s substance” (99). ⁠ And though Carruth might not like that, scientific evidence would have to, at least in part, support Perloff’s notion. A Final Note: It seems useful to end with my own short holistic assessment of the poem, especially after so much time spent breaking it into parts and comparing my views with scholars, readers and scientists. Here, at the end of my research, it feels impossible to separate my somatic reactions to the text from all I’ve learned about it. (I refer to my initial notes when I want to consider my “first read” reactions, of course, but it is hard to recreate that mindset.) It was certainly fascinating to me to ask my survey participants whether the poem made them feel more positive or more negative. I happen to agree with the 56% who believed the poem made them feel more negative, but also understand why almost half disagreed. In my estimation, a number of factors add to the opinion that this is a dark piece that, while contemplative, feels frustrated and frustrating. One factor is the meter. I appreciate that the choppiness of the initial couplets resolves into a more regular meter; that relieves a certain amount of anxiety for me as I read the poem. But anxiety is the key word for me, here. Michael Boughn, as I mentioned in the notes, called Williams’ meter “the prosody of attention” and I revised it to “the poetics of attention” because I think that is an overall important factor for Williams in his writing, and for readers who want to experience his work. In fact, though, it’s just as easily a poetics of anxiety. A work that asks the reader to pay such careful attention to each and every word, including the “of” and the “by,” creates a feeling for me of paranoia, as if meaning is so slippery and fleeting that we must hold 56 onto it as tightly as we can. Williams made this poem into an object, at least in places, and in my mind that can be a noble thing (who doesn’t want lovely things to stick around) but also a futile and desperate thing. “Nothing gold can stay,” wrote Frost, and that seems a deeper truth. This poem, mining desire, exploring the concrete in relationship to the inner world, finds itself transfixed on the inner world (the attic, that is) in a way that implies the concrete things in the world are compelling but ultimately useless. But then, Williams created a “concrete” thing out of language, and even on the first reading of the poem I could feel the incongruity of that. All of this seems to add up to dislike of the poem, which it certainly isn’t. The darkness of the piece, the lack of resolution between the internal and external worlds (expressed through the sensory elements of the text as well as its semantic meaning) and the play with language all come together to make an extraordinary “machine made out of words.” I am a poet who obsesses on the concept of anxiety in my own work (see Appendix B), and so there is a compelling element here for me. And though I prefer when a poet offsets the restlessness/fears sparked by a poem with some counterpoint, whether a lightness of rhythm or a moment of relief, even my own darker own reading can’t undermine the playfulness that attempts to burst through the text with “SODA” “Soda” is kind of playful and funny, after all. It is a play on something we want in a physical way; a different kind of desire that almost pokes fun at the sexual desire the title alludes to. Using the stuff of every day life in poems is a wry and modern gesture, and that alone allows a tension that for me somewhat, if not fully, saves the poem from despair. 57 NOTES 1 The Eipo are a culturally identified group of Indonesian people that live in the Daerah Jayawijaya of the Indonesian Province of Irian Jaya. The number of Eipo people numbered in the 800s in 1980 but might be more now. 2 It is crucial that I point out that these craft elements don’t ONLY evoke pre-lexical responses. These reactions are flight or flight bodily and physiological responses, but from there, the craft tools further invite endless contextualization and interpretive readings, each which can produce a new set of responses. No element of text produces sensory responses alone, since we are thinking, analytical beings who integrate our body responses into a holistic set of data that we use to figure out meaning. Also, though the pre-lexical response is physical and neurobiological, how we think about that response while we’re having it and after we’ve had it play largely into our rational responses. 3 As for criticism of the James-Lange theory of emotion (which is basically the idea that physiological changes in response to stimuli trigger (or create) emotions, the two main opposing theories are the Cannon-Bard theory and Schachter and Singer's Two-Factor theory of emotion. The former is in direct opposition to James-Lange in that Cannon and Bard believe that emotions create physiological responses in the body. The Two- Factor theory of emotion holds that emotions spring from physiological arousal as well as cognitive interpretation of the arousal. From his writing, one could infer that Damasio’s ideas on emotion, while supporting the 58 physiological influence on emotion that is the cornerstone of the James-Lange theory, probably have more in common with the Two-Factor theory. 4 If this all seems too neat, it is. Studies that try to separate the pleasantness or unpleasantness of phonemes (via linguistics) or words (via affect theory) always have a caveat, which is that combinations of words and letter sounds work together to create matrixes of emotional value…not to mention that once people place personal, historical or cultural values on words everything changes. The study I cited by Cynthia Whissell acknowledges this; it mentions trends (i.e. /I/ has a weak tendency toward unpleasantness, so it would follow that the /I/ sound is used less often in texts or words considered “pleasant” according to affect dictionaries and studies. And, in fact, this is confirmed.) But it isn’t across the board, obviously. There are still plenty of pleasant words and word combinations that use the /I/ sound multiple times. The work I’m doing here doesn’t ignore the truth of word/sound combinations and their effects; of course the specific combinations of sounds will have nuanced connotations, which is why I read and write poems in the first place! Though, as a side note, it’s perhaps funny that I’m going through Shakespeare’s sonnets to give you an example of this, and every time I come to a few /I/ sounds together they are always moments of crisis, problem or struggle. “Let us not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (116) with the impediments being the unpleasant idea, or “Those petty wrongs that liberty commits,” (941) where taking liberties leads to wronging your loved one. Still, the value here is not in uncovering the one key to alphabetic or lexical affect, but to analyze trends to see what we can learn about reading and writing. 59 5 Sound Poetry being that poetic where the sounds (some or all of which can be phonemes) are orchestrated to make semi-musical compositions, whereas Language Poetry emphasizes the reader’s agency in bringing meaning to a text, often by juxtaposing words without concern for straightforward narrative “sense.” Though they are quite different, both rely to some extent on the sound of the textual elements to inspire the reader/listener to create meaning. 6 Blues magazine was an avant-garde/modernist literary publication that existed for only one year. In the magazine’s mission statement its editor Charles Henri Ford wrote: “there is only one class of literature more intellectually depressing than the sentimental, the trite, the expected” and that the goal of Blues was to “revitalize and introduce new rhythms in creative writing” (Su n. pg.). Certainly this seems like a concept that would be right up Williams’ alley. 7 Though taking in a text visually and hearing its sounds are the basic steps in textual processing, simultaneous neurological acts happen depending on the type of text we’re reading. For example, researchers in Spain learned that when people read vivid descriptions of smells or textures the areas of our brain devoted to smell and touch lit up, not only the ones dealing with language- processing (Murphy Paul); an effect which is non-existent when reading strinctly informational text. Furthermore, researchers in Essex recently did a study on the different brain areas that light up when reading poetry vs. prose, and found that poetry stimulates the brain areas associated with memory and introspection, sometimes even more strongly than the “reading areas” are stimulated (Flowers). 60 8 And yes, at heart Cognitive Poetics is a type of Affect Theory, which in itself is a type of Reader Response Theory. However, the “cognitive” element is new only because we now have the equipment to pursue an understanding of brain processing and cognition with reasonably concusive results. As the website “Poetry Beyond Text” eloquently puts it: “Cognitive critics take reader-response theory, which Wolfgang Iser and Meir Sternberg developed in the 1970s, one step further: questions of literary interpretation are not just relocated firmly in the reader, but more specifically into their bodies and minds. By expanding the range of tools available for literary analysis, cognitive critics hope to open up new pathways for literary criticism and critical theory.” 9 As mentioned in the introduction, Zajoric’s statement is backed up by neurological research that notes our separate processing of visual, phonological and semantic elements of text. 10 For more on this see Lerner, J.S., and D. Keltner. "Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgment and choice." Cognition and Emotion 14 (2000): 473- 493. 11 In my personal understanding of poetry, I do not privilege the cognitive over other means of understanding, but I do believe that cognitive approaches are just beginning to find their footing, so a golden age of mining this information is front of us. 61 12 Again, I should point out that I don’t entirely agree with Damasio’s definition of feelings, preferring a Two-Factor theory of emotion myself. But I am not a brain scientist, and so I’ll claim no particular expertise on this. 13 Williams called poems “machines made of words” in his introduction to The Wedge (1944). 14 In William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry, Michael Boughn called WCW’s meter “the prosody of attention,” but I believe this plays out over all his poetic gestures so I modified it. 15 Note here that Pound didn’t just mean pentameter per se; the word was a convenient metonymic for formal metrics on the whole, and especially the ever-present (and some say oppressive) iamb. 16 He goes on to say “I would say perhaps the confusion comes from my calling them the feet,” which I would agree with (Koehler). 17 Though this is a statistical truth often noted in linguistics studies, my own poetics survey plays it out: 71% of respondents found the word “unused” to be more dark than bright or neutral, and 61% found it to be more heavy than light or neutral. 62 18 For repeated “u” sounds and plays on the word “you,” see Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” That poem, like this, implicates the reader (and the subject of the poem) over and over, seemingly as a condemnation. An excerpt: And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. (Plath) 19 In Robert Krulwich’s article “Vowels Control Your Brain,” he mentions a marketing professor names Richard Klink who conducted a test in which he created pairs of nonsense words (each 63 pair made up of one front vowel and one back vowel word), then assigned these words as the names of products. He then asked questions about the participants’ assumptions about the products based on the word names alone. Across the board the back vowel-named products were imagined as heavier, thicker, richer, bigger or darker. Take his imaginary laptop brands “Detal and Dutal.” When asked which laptop was probably heavier, they tended to choose “Dutal.” 20 Though unfortunately my survey participants disagree with me, and linguists, on this one. 47% of participants thought “soda” was more light (as opposed to 35% who found it neutral and 18% of think it’s more heavy.) 59% of participants think the word soda felt more bright (compared to 25% who found it neutral and 16% who found it more dark.) This could be problems with my survey, it could be that participants were unwilling or unable to truly take the word out of context of the poem and the object the word signifies, or it could be that all liguistics studies aside, some people will always skew the other way, and I might have gotten many of those! 21 While this is specific to words and subjects in English, Thorndike took statistics from many different languages, and all except German rated the /b/ phoneme unpleasant. The /t/ phoneme was more variable, and though slightly on the negative scale for English, it never went past slightly pleasant in any language for which Thorndike took data. My survey certainly supports this in that the skew is only very slightly one way. (Though unlike Thorndike, my participants skewed pleasant.) 64 WORKS CITED Armantrout, Rae. "Cheshire Poetics." Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2014. Barthes, Roland, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard. The Pleasure of the Text. 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Which specific words and phrases from the poem, if any, stand out to you? Most frequent answers: transfixed, beams, soda See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 8. Does the repetition of any letters in the poem stand out to you? If so, which specific 73 letters? Count Percent Answered 172 73% Skipped 65 27% Most frequent answers: b, r, t, s 9. What word in this poem stands out the most based on sound alone? Most frequent answer: transfixed, soda See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 10. Think specifically of the SOUND of the word "unused." Say it to yourself slowly a few times. In terms of weightiness, does it sound: Count Percent More Heavy 147 62% More Light 38 16% Neutral 52 22% 11. Think specifically of the SOUND of the word "unused." Say it to yourself slowly a few times. In terms of darkness and brightness, does it sound: Count Percent More Dark 167 70% More Bright 24 10% Neutral 46 19% 12. Please use some adjectives to describe the mood or feeling of the word "unused.” Most frequent characteristic of adjectives: negative See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 13. Think specifically of the SOUND of the word "SODA.” Say it to yourself slowly a few times. In terms of weightiness, does it sound: Count Percent More Heavy 80 34% More Light 116 49% Neutral 41 17% 14. Think specifically of the SOUND of the word "SODA." Say it to yourself slowly a few times. In terms of darkness and brightness, does it sound: 74 Count Percent More Dark 37 16% More Bright 141 59% Neutral 59 25% 15. Please use some adjectives to describe the mood or feeling of the word "SODA.” Most frequent characteristics of adjectives: cheerful, upbeat See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 16. Think specifically of the sound of the word "transfixed." Repeat it to yourself a few times. Which adjective best describes the word? Count Percent Hard 173 73% Soft 64 27% NOTE: Questions 17 – 20 were left blank to prevent the participant from seeing the poem text. Once they scrolled past these blank questions, the text of the poem was available for them to read and reread. 21. Does the long, narrow visual formatting of the poem on the page suggest anything to you? Count Percent Answered 221 93% Skipped 16 7% Most frequent mentions: sign (esp. the soda sign), a slowing of the reading See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 22. Do the short lines of the poem affect the speed at which you read the poem? Count Percent Yes, the short lines slow down my reading. 156 67% Yes, the short lines speed up my reading. 64 27% No, there is no effect. 14 6% 23. Do the line breaks make your reading of the poem smoother or more choppy? Count Percent Choppier 190 80% Smoother 35 15% There is no effect. 12 5% 24. Does the generous amount of white space on the page affect the speed at which you 75 read the poem? Count Percent Yes, the white space slows down my reading. 120 51% Yes, the space speeds up my reading. 49 21% No, there is no effect. 68 29% 25. Now that you see the poem on the page, do any words or phrases stick out to you? If so, which ones? Count Percent Answered 222 94% Skipped 15 6% Most frequent answer: soda See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 26. Now that you see the poem on the page, do you notice any repeating sounds? If so, which ones? Count Percent Answered 201 85% Skipped 36 15% Most frequent answers: b, r, s, t See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 27. Do you find the repeating "b" sounds ("bare beams/beyond") in the beginning of the poem pleasant or unpleasant? (It might help to say some "b" sounds or "b" words aloud to yourself several times.) Count Percent More Pleasant 139 60% More Unpleasant 42 18% Neutral 51 22% 28. Do you find the repeating "t" sounds ("directly wait / the night") in the beginning of the poem pleasant or unpleasant? (It might help to say some "t" sounds or "t" words aloud to yourself several times.) Count Percent More Pleasant 86 38% More Unpleasant 62 27% Neutral 81 35% 29. What word in this poem stands out the most to you based on the visual formatting of 76 the poem? Most frequent answer: soda See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 30. In one or two lines, tell me what you think this poem means See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. 31. If you have anything else to say about the sound, visual look or meaning of the poem, please say it here. And thank you! See full data for report (Appendix C) for details. Appendix B: Poetry Manuscript The creative portion of my dissertation, Interrobang, is a full-length poetry collection published by Red Hen Press in 2013. Theories of Cognitive Poetics inform my work, and while the scholarly sections of my dissertation aim to offer writers a different perspective on sound and visual elements in craft, my manuscript serves as an example of how I have done so myself. This book specifically makes use of the potential for sound elements to play against semantic sense. Primarily sonnets, each poem is titled after a clinical phobia or philia. Heavy rhyme and alliteration evoke a pot-and-pan clanging musicality that belies the darkness of pressing fears and lusts. I call the relentless musical style of this book “obsessive metrics,” and it is meant to evoke both the excitement and horror of obsessions. As I mentioned above in my final note on William Carlos Williams’ “The Attic Which is Desire,” I appreciate attempts to counterbalance darkness of subject by using craft to insert lightness or a sense of play. In most cases in this book, hyper-crafting the meter and rhyme is my method of choice for doing this in my own work. For example, my poem “Automotanophilia” begins: You married a marionette for the lumbering way that she succumbs to teeth. You saw; she sways and says okay. And she admires the daze you move in, hydroplaning days away This poem is titled after a clinical condition in which people lust after non-sentient beings that mimic consciousness/aliveness; a dark subject already. It opens with the image of the poem’s addressee marrying a puppet (actual puppet or puppet-like human, reader’s choice) using woodcutting and sawing language to indicate the manipulability of the puppet wife. Again, dark. Reading it, however, I believe there’s playfulness, lightness in ii the anapestic first line (the first single unstressed syllable notwithstanding), a galloping rhythm that seems childlike or excited. The continuity of that playful rhythm and the heavy, nursery-like rhyming are what makes the poem even more eerie; does the puppet wife know she’s a puppet? Does the husband know what he’s doing? It’s hard to say, because we’re swept along with the cadence like a child might be in a nursery rhyme. In contrast to Williams’ opening in “The Attic Which Is Desire” (“the unused tent / of // bare beams / beyond which / directly wait / the night”), seems forlorn and halting. It is made rhythmically jerky by the almost spondee of “bare beams,” at least until the “SODA” sign relieves some of the tension. Half-rhymes and alliteration are present in Williams’ poem, but they do not soothe, instead creating an uneasy mood that aligns with the uneasy rhythm. Williams’ is using this effective technique to capture the stress, disconnectedness and futility of unused desire, and in doing so he plays with rhythm in sound in this poem just as I attempt to in Interrobang. However, as readers will see, Williams and I are clearly interested in opposite effects. iii INTERROBANG poems Jessica Piazza iv Table of Contents Melophobia: Fear of music ......................................................................................1 PEOPLE LIKE US ...................................................................................................2 Asthenophobia: Fear of weakness ...........................................................................7 Lilapsophobia: Fear of tornadoes and hurricanes ...................................................8 Clithrophilia: Love of being enclosed ......................................................................9 Automatonophilia: Love of things that falsely represent a sentient being .............10 Achluophilia: Love of darkness .............................................................................11 Anablephobia: Fear of looking up .........................................................................12 Heresyphilia: Love of readical deviation ...............................................................13 Atephilia: Love of ruin ...........................................................................................14 Basiphilia: Love of falling .....................................................................................15 Xenoglossophobia: Fear of foreign languages .......................................................16 Kopophobia: Fear of fatigue ..................................................................................17 Phobophilia: Love of fear ......................................................................................18 Caligynephobia: Fear of beautiful women .............................................................19 Aerophobia: Fear of drafts or airborne noxious substances ...................................20 Pediophilia: Love of dolls ......................................................................................21 Hierophilia: Love of sacred things .........................................................................22 THE PROLIFIC .....................................................................................................25 v Thalassophilia: Love of the sea ..............................................................................30 Theophobia: Fear of god ........................................................................................31 Eisoptrophilia : Love of mirrors ............................................................................32 Eisoptrophobia: Fear of mirrors .............................................................................33 Eremophobia: Fear of loneliness or of being oneself ............................................34 Ankylophobia: Fear of immobility of a joint .........................................................35 Panophilia: Love of everything ..............................................................................36 Apodysophilia: Love of undressing .......................................................................37 Patroiophobia: Fear of heredity .............................................................................38 Apeirophilia: Love of infinity ................................................................................40 Atomosophobia: Fear of atomic explosions ..........................................................41 Pharmacophilia: Love of drugs ..............................................................................42 Nephophobia: Fear of clouds .................................................................................43 Antlophobia: Fear of floods ..................................................................................44 Asymmetrphobia: Fear of asymmetrival things .....................................................45 Chionophilia: Love of snow ...................................................................................46 Erotophobia: Fear of sexual love ...........................................................................47 Kakorrhaphiophobia: Fear of failure .....................................................................48 WHAT I HOLD .....................................................................................................49 vi This is the radiant House of Love at the side of the road. This is Selfless Agony of Sweethearts, Holidays, Popular Causes & Songs, History, and all the other forms of compulsion and echo, echo and compulsion. Yes. Oh. Yes. Oh. ~ LAURA KASISCHKE Without obsession, life is nothing. ~ JOHN WATERS Interrobang: a punctuation mark designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question. ~ MERRIAM-WEBSTER, 2012 1 Melophobia Fear of music They’ll tell you there are only two ways: flawed windpipes that knock like water mains behind thin walls or else a lovely sound like wood- winds sanded smooth—no middle ground. They’ll find you practicing your scales, determined not to fail. A voice too frail, too thin, begin again, again, again, now overwrought, now under-sung; not done. They recommend: just sound as much yourself as possible. But we know possible is slippery. As my New York’s an ocean filled with steel, your Texas is an ocean, too, of sky. Sing into a conch and you’ll sound like yourself. Sing into a conch and you’ll sound like the sea. 2 People Like Us Remade again, we make the same mistakes again: unthinking love like insects lustfully swerving loops. Like most girls, I stoke mental midnight barbeques— destroy incriminating artifacts, defend, absolve the most foregonely inconclusive men. By day I play nonstop if/then, internally pluck a love me, love me not lament. And when he goes, I go too far; turn hard. I bolt the locks behind him, one by one. But always when he comes I weave a line from gauze, thin thread for him to climb from her to me once more, decision time delayed again. He can’t be sure. I’m sure I’ve done things wrong. But he attracted me; it happened, still. And now our love’s not whether, but how long until. /…/ 3 It isn’t whether. No. Only: how long until how bad it gets. So quick, our clutch. Sluggish, our rift. How costly this, a wished subletting of the heart. Not mine to squat in; he’s not mine (it’s fine). But still: that sock-to-the-stomach, sudden hollow Ugh! You see the ante? I’m already un and raveling; this scanty hope swan-songing my integrity. (But maybe, also, just a little, reveling? Piñata pricked, unpilfered? Tamed tsunami swell? An overflowing loving cup?) Tut, tut! Too cursed. Too much. I won’t allow it. Silly, sad, or worse: tonight I’ll disavow these high-jinks, hurts, these hells. (I will? I might.) I must. Such surefire track to lack, a certain fade to black….Oh, fuck it. Holler back. /…/ 4 Drawn curtain: faded, black. We fucked. We hollered. Back- tracked and let sunlight in. Repeated. Weekended in secret. Got outed. Paused. Rebounded. Tended belabored hearts, but badly. Madly loved. Attacked covertly. Wept explicitly. Like sailors pressed to duty on a ship, we gauged our endless trip in knots; threw cannonballs of angry nots, then stripped our decks with unexpected yeses. Reaped such bless- ings, only to blaspheme them. Wars, then truces: meant them. Didn’t mean them. Lost him and redeemed him. Pleased him. Keened. Appeased no one. Repeated. When he ceased his meanness, I retreated. Wanted, but discounted what I needed. Didn’t know I ended when this first began. But I would do it all again. /…/ 5 When this began, I knew I’d do it. Fall again, do wrong again. Born into debt, I know I owe for every weapon, every word. Each lie, each sin, each deed a bead that slides along a wire in rows, internal abacus to tally each offense. Together, we hurt everything we touch; apart, ourselves. How do we choose? At some point, counterpoint is pointless—only voices voicing dissonance. Our bodies: losing arguments we enter in- to too relentlessly, astride a fence we see can’t pen us endlessly. We’ll pay eventually. Your stroke, your fingers at my throat, the paraffin that I become: we are both crime and smoking gun. And we’ll continue hiding it from everyone. /…/ 6 We can’t continue hiding. Almost everyone is hiding; almost everyone is getting caught. Distraught, we fight. We keep our shutter-eyelids shut against the doormat-sleeping days we know will come. And every winsome man’s like him—an eyelash shy of possible. And every frantic woman wants to get to the heart of a fleeing, wing-beating heart. People like us: we’re dust, we’re everywhere. We lie in spaces between places praying madly for each other, staying mad at one another, hot because we’re bothered. Chasing careless fathers or neglectful mothers. Listen well: I love him, but it’s over. The inevitable mess we’ve been, unmade again. Mistake I’ll never make again. 7 Asthenophobia Fear of weakness Hallow A holy man holds holly plants aloft, so wholly bent on kissing every saint. Though he mis-thought (it’s mistletoe he wanted), my haunted face will dip beneath the branches, masquerading as each missing martyr. Watch me barter for his hijacked heart. Hollow What wasn’t there was never mine to lose. (Empty: the promise. Empty: the noose.) When he pressed the depression at my throat, he was not cruel. I was not forced. Like me, the tree’s worst weakness is its hollow. I always do regret tonight tomorrow. 8 Lilapsophobia Fear of tornadoes and hurricanes Preparedness: a myth. Imagine it: two city rivers overflow, converge. Graffiti-covered handball walls afloat— new arks—above the subway cars submerged like sunken ships. Two weeks ago a row of stubborn Brooklyn brownstones doffed their lids to twisters, skylighting the high-lit glow of street lamps bending at the waist from winds. Undone beneath the raised hand of the bay my house abuts, one year the water touched our knees before we fled. But flood’s not much compared with these cyclonic days. No way to gauge you: wrath or pleasure, unfixed track away or toward. Untoward, you leave no wake. 9 Clithrophilia Love of being enclosed Like lighter flame in wind, you wind your hand around the ember of my bending body. Such wonders, harbored. Undiscovered land enfolded, but not claimed. Unnamed, I’m hardly less inclined to burrow in these covers. But, Lover. Don’t hover above me, laughing, friendly. Instead, end me where you begin: pressed to the fence of you—then beyond, within. Such tunnels summon. Crushing fog above doubly envelopes our shelter of bed. And I’ve ached for it all: a closet; a stall; the crevice between your flesh and the wall. A way to forsake this freedom I’ve heeded too often. Your darkness. This coffin. 10 Automatonophilia Love of things that falsely represent a sentient being You married a marionette for the lumbering way that she succumbs to teeth. You saw; she sways and says okay. And she admires the daze you move in, hydroplaning days away: exultant accidents. Instead of me, a blissful wooden girl; a wooden knee submitted for exhibit. Deadened trees: the shelter you inhabit. And didn’t we expect it, eking out animatronic epochs on the sofa? Both electric— me with boredom; you ran programs: tricks for trenchant eyes. Disguised, the lists you ticked led straight to this. Your love nest: nuts and bolts, no musts. No lust. No faults, and no one’s fault. 11 Achluophilia Love of darkness My tired love sleeps. His eyes alive with movement: flicker, flicker, mimicking trains and halfway open. Tragic: one should be blind when sleeping; waking's already hardship, overload of the heart. Awake, the body blinks, incredulous: stunned and working. Mornings waking, swept by the moving world, he whispers of seeing, talks of seeing halfway in sleep—the curse of sleeping sight, the bedfellow shadows, how the dark is never static the way we dream it must be. He tells me we've been here, surviving for hundreds of years, half dozed. The minutes fly in the day. At night we watch each other, watching. I sleep. I dream his dreams of a moving darkness. In my dreams my own eyes half open, watching him, asleep, and I see him sleeping, seeing, moving. Night, when I'm covered with his eyes, and his eyes won't cover him. It's night, and I can't distinguish sleep from sight. I move, and I understand him: we have lived for years, somewhere in between the blink and the blindness. 12 Anablephobia Fear of looking up White clapboard crosses dot the highway like so many road signs pointing up, somewhere impossible to travel to. And more, a rush of diamond signs appear each mile. Some read just: THINK. Those mark an accident. Others: Why Die? And those mean someone did. One day I heard a man say that his wife gave up the ghost. But he was like a ghost. Maybe that’s the truth. We die to leave the losses that we cannot give away. We drive too drunk. We drive too close to things. We die to tempt the edges that we fear. We die to rise. We die to travel up. 13 Heresyphilia Love of radical deviation The way change sounds you think there’ll always be more of it; jingling cacophony for the bus ride, for the Laundromat, reinventing itself the way change does—hands empty one moment and the next, windfall. You’d think all change happens that way: a misinterpreted conversation and suddenly you’re in Rhode Island, two days later, four hundred miles and gas money you didn’t have, your last quarter plinking into the steel eyeslit of a vibrating bed the likes of which you’ve only seen in movies, highway high-beams bursting two by two in the window like searchlights, working alchemy on your parasol of cigarette chain-smoke so the whole damn room shines like a steel ceiling. The way change happens you’d think the air always looked like this, like furious fog hiding the highest peaks of a bridge inside her coat, but a breeze shivers through the room and now everything’s different, and you’re younger than you remembered and Rhode Island is perfect, perfect. The conversation was not misinterpreted, you see that now, it was a dozen conversations plaited together to keep them tidy and smaller than they were. You left because you wanted to. There was nowhere to go, but here: the extraordinary thing about the horizon is that it is everywhere. 14 Atephilia Love of ruin A phantom feeling: lashes fluttering against my cheek. No flesh, no nerve. Wax wings: imaginings that spring from wish alone. The thirsty wanderer endures the same fateful mirage: eats sand and tastes champagne. You seem so whole; I’m left no room to mourn the rubble we’ve become. The pilgrimage we make each day; our devastated bed beguiles. We are the sights to see. Engaged by graveyard days, I rest against your head- stone chest like flowers, so you’ll understand what wilting is. One kiss with ravaged lips. Embrace with wasted lust. Remaindered man and woman wrecked by wants. This mess is us. 15 Basiphilia Love of falling We wake and walk to find an oak that fell with no one there to hear. Old questions stand. I press my ear toward ground to feel or not to feel remainders of the sound it did or didn’t make. My lover laughs. Without the noise, without the cavalcade that trunk and branches make collapsing, what is left for us is only aftermath. He knows how new a silent, upturned tree must be for me. He knows that it depresses me: I’ll never know the music its fall might have made. He reaches for my arm. He pulls me toward decaying ground. The tender sound our falling bodies make is small, but sure. 16 Xenoglossophobia Fear of foreign languages The background’s Brighton Beach. Acrylic, yes but her Cyrillic written here is thick as paint already. This new house—gauze house of family faintly sketched, smudged pencil, chalk, ghost house—around the figure is not quite translucent. Young, the figure sits as though behind tight curtains. Young, the figure paints new letters on white walls. The background’s cold and iron hard. The figure, from a book, is kneeling, gripped by pages, ciphers strange and riveting. Outside, blank walls. Brown brick. The unfamiliar signs that seem to change like hours. The figure of her speech is bright: gray sea, white house, red slash that is her heart. 17 Kopophobia Fear of fatigue The pension in Prague had no alarm— we missed the early train we stayed awake to catch. My fault, our doomed attempt to sleep in shifts; I thought I wouldn’t doze mine off. For us, no clear Hungarian lake to see the sun’s eclipse; it shadowed us outside the train, out-dimmed by clouds. We caught our breath in Budapest. We fell in love— adored this city, thriving on its brokenness. The bleak facades of burned-through tenements were testament to how destruction does not mean the thing destroyed was beautiful before. Those dragging weeks we built and razed each day, and nothing that we made endured. Our statuary garden songs were frail as monuments composed of candle wax. Your sketchbook left on the Bazilka floor like trash; my notebook sloughing ink in rain. It was a mess, but we make art that’s made for drowning. On the bridge by the Danube, that storm deluged the city as we ran, outpacing it until it caught us, sang staccato rain into our hair and fled too frantically ahead. I never said I loved that broken way you looked when things went wrong. I should have. And I can’t forget the fire-chewed bricks, the statues saved from riots; how they braved ruin. We could not survive it. 18 Phobophilia Love of fear The censors will reveal the body, but black out the eyes. The art of listening will be unnecessary. Every stop: a not-lewd interlude. We pause to catch our breath: it’s trapped. Tomorrow: paradise. Tomorrow, trucks idling at yellow lights will dash, will crush the thousand hands that wave unvoiced applause. And then: mass graves. And time in estrus. Every life contained and wide as boulevards. Tomorrow, circuses will drop the safety mesh, disaster checked for falling flyers with brute prayer alone. Though some will slip, we know the system will be wholly good. It will, if it is willed. 19 Caligynephobia Fear of a beautiful woman I carry who I used to be inside my heart, a sleight of hurt. The ugly girl I was at first lives in this fist, my hidden trick. Those nights when hand- some boys unstick and exit, quick, I wake her up still in my clutch, enraged. Then: punch. 20 Aerophobia Fear of drafts or airborne noxious substances Clipper of breath, ship-bound, I sail with it. I let it fill me in. There’s nothing here, without, that harms within. Drink in the draft. Whistle through my chewed-up pen cap—nearly fume, almost contaminant: as near a version of us touching lips we’ll share again. You think it’s chilly, friend? Just wait until the porch breeze rushes through the gate I’ve built around the bed. You’ll shiver then, because my shivers ceased. No, I can’t foul your nervous lungs, and no, I’ll never own an arsenal so pathological it spoils the air. If what you fear is true, the poison in the atmosphere is you. 21 Pediophilia Love of dolls The week her daughter died, the room her girl had occupied became a home for dolls. The first an angel: fearsome, glass-gazed gift to dull a mother’s utter grief; the next a paint and porcelain she numbly bought from QVC. It looked like her. And now she sees her small grandchildren grow, and knows it’s good. But they can’t guess each small doll dress arranged by day comes into disarray by night. They bring her more, naïve. Don’t know she weeps in the overflowing sea of limbs that manage, year by year, to commandeer the bed, the floor, and more. An orphanage of girls. A thousand eyes that cannot shut. 22 Hierophilia Love of sacred things Pray Along a fault line—yours, mine, or ours— the church bells in this earthquake shake. Off-put, they find autonomy. Canticle, laud and litany. Our beauty rouses reveille. But dampened revelry, tonight, despite our not-quite incidents. Elegy, requiem, incant. Disposed to quaking, cant and chant, an evensong unsacredly intoned, incessant as Sunday. Carol, compline, threnody. Choral, descant, psalm and lay. We’d never love that way. /…/ 23 Prey If we’ve been trapped beneath each other’s eyes. And if this trap. If this sequestering. If all your fine ideas were less refined. If you were mine. If Sundays, holidays. If noon, if dawn, if I keep you too long on telephones, I will atone. If bones and earth can quake without consent, you’ve lent yourself, the archway I’ll stand under. If you were thunder I could steal, I’d pay so dearly. If I tracked you. If you came too quiet. Or: if riot. Alibis become important. Try it. If a way to heaven, hell, my house. Tomorrow. If this sorrow. If I hunt you, will you? /…/ 24 Pry I’d rise wrapped in the vise of you. So rapt, like spinning children track a fixed point with their eyes. And trapped, we will be twinned with Siamese desires. Unholy selves enshrined by arms and lies, tongue-tied. No sin. We’re children, more than any child: my alibis and your denial. Your spine unmarrowed, heart a sieve. I will not be derivative. Not even if. No Sunday hunt. No quake, no fixed. No fixing this. Love’s first thought is separation. Last, to never let it happen. 25 The Prolific The red, the blue, the streak of orange stripe— they’re everywhere; so, too, are sound and scent and still, if all were still the air would pipe its tactile breath nonstop like bakeries’ bent street fans wafting out exhaust of bread at us each morning, as we passed on 23 rd . He’d tell me less is more. I’d say: I’ve heard. But I’d want more; felt there was more of less for me those days than more of more. The swirl of world went on, but at the center of this narcissistic universe: one girl, dead-stopped. Red cup. Blue shirt. I moved my hand through orange streaks of hair—a shift in space that couldn’t rift. My eye bereft. /…/ 26 In space that cannot rift, the eye’s bereft of stimuli. A boy was here, but left an empty seat. I can’t just stare at space that once was filled and not perceive the trace of stirring lingering. That boy. We walked down 23 rd a lot, and talked, and smoked and looked at all there was to see, the more of street urbanity. We walked the floor of gum coating the ground, built toss by toss; the buildings that had sacrificed their gloss to sheets of smog. It calmed me: a world built of what’s beneath it, never done, the silt foot-pounded down by countless hurried feet. He couldn’t love it. It was not complete. /…/ 27 He couldn’t love me—I was not complete the way his wishful eye completed me, subtracting toward an ideal sum. I’d see myself lost part by part: white neck, large feet, wild hair—erased—a disappearing hand pressed lightly to transparent collarbones. He wished for tides, forgot they caused sea stones to wane and yield. But glass worn down to sand, if not as beautiful, is also not as delicate. I couldn’t disappear beneath his blink. Instead I found the spot on 23 rd where, when the sun struck clear glass buildings, streets appeared to multiply. Then a thousand of me walked away. /…/ 28 A thousand other men could walk away from me a thousand times, and yet I’d pay them hardly any mind. The only one who matters is the one I left. He’s gone the way a flash of bright light goes: still there in afterimages, a shadow where a statue stood. But 23 rd Street’s full of immigrants who see this way: the pull of memory placing a tree where raised- wires ought to be; a river where the paved roads actually run. And if they can erase a city with nostalgia’s sight—replace the truth with things they loved—I wonder what my own imperfect eye could substitute. /…/ 29 My own imperfect eye is destitute when faced with all there is to see. He’d said: just close them, then. I said: I can’t—minute details I missed would haunt me when I did. But now I do. I walk down 23 rd Street blind, a movie played on loop beneath my lids. A vast, prolific world swells all around me, kaleidoscope of sound and scent redoubling, but I know nothing of it, only see in flash- backs. Empty seat. Raised cup, a grip belied by see-through hands. Unfinished buildings slashed by vivid streaks of sun; a city wiped too clean of reds, of blues, of orange stripes. 30 Thalassophilia Love of the sea The Gulf gulls’ chants at dusk all sound alike to me, but symphonies of secret tones must prove expressiveness beyond the spike of elegiac grief I hear. I’ve known only another coast, but the lyrics hold. One gull might say: This short-lived breeze. This day: most gray, His brother must intone: I told this pair of pier-posts crumbling: wait. Matte sky stays stable perching on these two bad feet. And that is Texas singing in a trill I know. Unbordered world, far from the weight of my heat baked adopted land. It’s all music again, at last beyond the fence of the inland blue-black grackles’ dissonance. 31 Theophobia Fear of god Unglued from truth one day I almost think: I must be decoupage from scraps of God. Leftover. Fiend. Created—thread and ink unstitched and pasted. Stolen from the shroud. Un-bless this dwelling built without consent. I never chose this ice floe for my home. Amass no mass. I am the God I’ve known: untaken turns unwrecking what wasn’t; a cricket’s ticket punched when I crushed it. Oh, swear these deeds I can’t undo are not divinity in minor chord! Oh lordy be. Oh, woe is me. And more importantly: I choose to worship what I’m chosen by. If you love everyone, then who am I? 32 Eisoptrophilia Love of mirrors Impression pressed upon the glass perfects even the grossest forgeries. Reject the sea. Reject the turning tide. Just below clear water, I reside as duplication of the lake. Take me away, another underneath again. What mirrors cannot ditto isn’t sin. /…/ 33 Eisoptrophobia Fear of mirrors What mirrors cannot ditto isn’t sin simply performed behind the glass. Within the frame of windowpane, negated dark. Those fleeting squares reveal our darkness back. Aloof, the rain plays taps. Above, the trees are inimitable. Distinct, thus blessed. Reflected, I am never at my best. 34 Eremophobia Fear of loneliness or of being oneself Hi I. Hi me, on this, a birthday. Hi, internal eye of this year’s storm. Hello you: point without an exclamation. Wave a single hand, then wave the other, pair them off. A sacrifice concise as this: pity your pity today, and let it lie. An alibi for a scoffing enemy. Myself, and my most toxic company: myself. These withered candles leak their wax. What could these last wet decades turn, and wane. Picture me, today, as a metronome. I’m home, away, one way, the next, and strike each hour, and strike again, a single tone, one arm, one fist. Alone, exalt, against. 35 Ankylophobia Fear of immobility of a joint Locked here, I’m loch-jawed: a Nessie of tetanus. Unhook me, unhinge me, this liquid imprisonment. Taciturn elbow, mulish talocrural, my stubbornest joint is submerged in your tallow. This candle, this window, you squirm like a minnow, repeat like an echo, arthritic libido. I’m caught. I’m unmovable. Abjectly literal. You? Irresistible force meeting object, we forge into junction—one tongue in one groove, and we fit, and we fit again. Limit my movement. I’ll ease your impediment. 36 Panophilia Love of everything Today this weather’s better than itself: all background clamor, siren song, our schemed and ill-conceiving strategies. This shelf, chaotic and precariously leaning next to your appalling bed, a trove of wonders hovering over us. But love itself I never deigned to love; all give and giving in. So I don’t understand my drunkenness on scribble scrawled above the mirror in the ladies’ room: You’re doomed. Ecstatic that it’s almost true. And though I should not love you yet—obliged to slow and genuflect to sense or self-defense— because of you, I’ll love everything else. 37 Apodysophilia Love of undressing When many veils are pared to one what more to gain obscured? The dance must end. One spin: the veil has fallen to the floor. One more: the centrifuge that I become has pinned you there. Again, I win. Undone, my clasp has claws. This sloughing of my clothes breaks laws that aren’t written yet. And now my grasp is masquerading as embrace because many a lip twixt cup and slip has tried to bare my cloth-clad heart. But what I hide is hidden even more the more I show. Still, all of this means yes. The air’s desired caress; I have no no. You’re sure you know me? So, you’ve guessed. There’s nothing to undress. 38 Patroiophobia Fear of heredity She’s learned to work her family like a field of failing grain. A tricky heirloom passed to her at birth – a crop she neither yields nor reaps. Her mother, tied to Brooklyn, cast a wish: a heavy, stone-shaped girl. She threw so far, such skips, she can’t get back. And last night when she dreamed she did return, she knew it was a dream; each eyelid twitch still miles between them. Still, her mother’s voice: But you do own this land. And maybe it’s denial how she refuses it, won’t bend to claim a side or plant a flag. It’s been a while since she’s owned anything. Even her name: her father’s. Her face, his. Like him, she’s not inclined to argue over heavy things. Like him, she takes no pride in sweat, no heed in God. But while his silences hang thick as clothes that never dry, she tries to make her body her own, talks loud, denies his heartbeat rose to shadow hers with quiet minuets, deficient spins. He can’t share what he knows. /…/ 39 She watches, stays away, wishing they’d weight their expectations down until they drowned all hope for her. She’d praise the day they’d set her free; the day they’d let her let them down; renounce a family tree for solid ground. 40 Apeirophilia Love of infinity Before continuum, define discrete. Two points or pennies on the edge of things. Now halve that space. Things never touch. As if we don’t collide: my skin, unto, into, your skin. You say that if we pantomime shared flesh, it doesn’t mean we’re whole. Discrete. But we collide; we make tautology of us. We’re what we are because we’re what we are – so where’s your tangent? I can be a line, extend the distance to you, in- finite; bisect you at a fixed point. I’ll bisect you only if I am the line. If I’m the line, intending to bisect, I must be infinite; you must be fixed. 41 Atomosophobia Fear of atomic explosions And what about: again? If not explode, then fracture, blaze. Or, leave. One year I wrote three hundred sixty five laments. The next I watched two lamps burn out at once. The wreck of me sees every city gone. Each night the train implodes: my own New York set right, then overturned like bowling pins. My god. But really: what about again? What could, what if, what next. I may not run so fast next time—not knowing what I know: a blast of sky and time; of scientific pap. I need a nap, a borough in my lap to stroke to sleep, another year of peace, a bang, a bigger bang. I need release. 42 Pharmacophilia Love of drugs ~ This poppy in the vase will close, after it blooms. But wilting is like human prosthesis. She’s not there, but feels it; swears she is. ~ Each hard white rock a bead. One hope, one need, and more. She covets them; glides each along the abacus of her calculating heart. ~ Power to calm and power to kill. Potted here, they’re wilting. Though no life strives to decorate the windowsill, she’s tired. She will. ~ Poison camouflaged, she says. They’re red as wind-scoured skin. Exquisite, she takes them in. And, merciless, they rise. They take her with them. ~ Scarlet on beige; bright red on white. Short-lived shock on neutral life. Lovely sprays. All is vague. Imagine her days: all the same, the same. 43 Nephophobia Fear of clouds The woman weeps; her wide eyes slowly grow translucent, eyelids turning membranous and fluttery. Those lashes beat like wings. Her vision feels as overcast, she says, as her entire unleavened life. Small things all haunt her: uselessness, the endless throw- away events that dampen days, the sky’s stark darkening as winter months encroach. But strange: that same sad girl finds butterflies in summer, softly steals to where they perch and smoothly clasps one colored wing. She’d see her power if she knew the slow command that wing beats have of winds. A deity; a woman trapping weather in her hands. 44 Antlophobia Fear of floods Is ebb the measure of the flow? She goes, she lets; she skirts the nervous ocean’s salt and semi-circle frowning, knowing take then give again, not sure how much that get is worth in give. Such oceans make a lake of her own basement every year, below ground where her mother lives and wades in worn- out foam flip-flops. That stubborn water won’t pull back, as if it knows her mother’s own sharp knack for asking back exact amounts she gives. A skill she lacks. And like that flood, she does not choose her low-laid rooms for rest, but goes, and goes, and stays. She does not flow there. No. She ebbs. She ebbs to such excess. 45 Asymmetriphobia Fear of asymmetrical things Here’s the torment only the warped heart knows: One side withers. The other grows. And grows. 46 Chionophilia Love of snow Past lengthening days I loathed the draining, dazing winter light; the whitening waking me each blazing winter. The ashes of our strange, mislaid chronology remained, but each insistent day came anyway, not phasing winter. Our boot-prints decked the snowy portico. Or not our boots, the ghost of them. Such lingerings of one amazing winter. Revelers strolled the glowing city slush and sulfur streets. I wanted to collapse it all like a theater set: razing winter. I wasted days crazed with waiting for beginnings. But now no more unending. No more stunned, steadfast stargazing winters. Forgetting is divine. Divine: a name unfastened from its handcuffed history. Forgetting has renamed me and I wake, now praising winter. 47 Erotophobia Fear of sexual love This scene’s a sad and difficult duet: etude of please, next time, I need. The night’s impossible and lukewarm, slightly wet and half as thick as sleep. I reach for you, intrude, appease. Each time, my need beats night to knees and me awake and heavy-tongued and thick. Just half-asleep, I reach for you, your neck, your hipbone, chest. All chaste. I clasp my knees. You’re not awake or, heavy-hearted, act it. Lucky fan-stirred air has access to your neck, your hipbone, chest. I chase the asp that eats its tail. I’ve failed again. I’m nailed to slats. Unlucky, too-stirred air repressed inside a bottle. Wailing hunger martyr who still eats despite and, flailing, fails to fill, to save. Your eyes the gimlet gaze of bottle glass, mine hungry, waiting, bothered by an appetite that grows too fast. I’m not saved, never filled; despise this scarlet crave for you, for hurry. Worn, but sure as salt. In appetite, there’s only fast and not. Impossible, our lukewarm slightly wet. My blue hurry, your torn, voiceless halt: they keen such sad and difficult duets. 48 Kakorrhaphiophobia Fear of failure Derailed, your vantage point is not of stairs you’ll scale, but stars you can’t. Wrong turns advance no grace and no divine. Anywhere you land feels falsely fine. When you commence, each errand’s a half-empty glass to sip your water from, to sip your wine. You start a dialogue with never done, a trip, a wire, a current to defibrillate your half-stopped heart. Breathing uncaught. Unfailed, you delve. Another devil is de-veiled. A doppelgänger born with every task: the evil twin of its unfinishing. The harbor, never there, is menacing. Its ebb, unanswered question asked and asked. 49 What I Hold A glint – an intimation of what gleams. Just simple incidentals; nothing grand in pomegranates, Coney Island, reams of new newspapers hitting dawn-dark stands. The birds I hear don’t sound like opera, not like flutes or piccolos at play. They sound like birds. Sometimes the birds are all I’ve got. There’s nothing grand but wakefulness, the ground I jump from; nothing but the shining air which might be a light left on for me. A glow, though small, intense and worthy of my care. I pity the fragile, but I still forgo the sturdy cup and choose the demitasse. Whatever’s in my grip, it’s made of glass. /…/ 50 Whatever’s in my grip, it’s made of glass- blown promises, assurance that forged skin will harden, change to something that might pass for beautiful. But though I know that in- side every crafted sphere there is just air, I cannot love the space between the words, can find no pleasure in the silence there. And if the point is trusting what’s unheard – how every stop, in time, will yield a sound – the shape I seek is not one I create. Thorns twist around themselves to form a crown; they frame an emptiness we’ll consecrate. Without the skips, the beat would not exist. My hand grasps nothing and still forms a fist. /…/ 51 My hand grasps nothing and still forms a fist for me to rest my heart against. There’s doubt in everything but what I own: the trysts I thought were trusts are minor – they amount to nothing but a blink over the lifetime of the eye. When subject fails to add up, there’s the sum of my own fingers, vanities, the way the body shows me just what’s mine: the run of timid freckles sprinting down an arm, a clavicle to climb, the bones that hold my weight despite themselves, despite the harm I’ve caused. And every story I’ve been told is hidden in my spine, a refugee. Worry my backbone like a rosary. /…/ 52 Worry. My backbone, like a rosary, cannot withstand the press of all this faith. I’ve wrapped myself around the things I see so tightly that my stories feel like breath – beholden to them, I inhale their rich minutiae desperately, but when I let them out they have been changed. This is a switch that stripes my best attempts. I need to get perspective now, and so, unusual as it may seem, I’ll stop to look outside these lines; to ask if it is sin to pull myself away from this, or prayer to ride the story out. But who will answer me? I’m not a girl who has epiphanies. /…/ 53 I’m not a girl who has epiphanies, but once one happened, waiting for a light to change. An ancient woman raised a weak gnarled fist to tap my window just as night advanced. I lowered it. She spoke – a voice as thick and cumbersome as wool – My feet, she said, I can’t get home. I had a choice, but I said no. And she went down the street, the queue of cars…they all said no, and no and no. I knew this damage was my own; I had been taught such fears. I knew. And so? Perhaps I changed my mind and drove her home. And maybe to this day that choice still seems like a hint, a minute’s inkling of what gleams. APPENDIX C: Poetics Survey Full Data

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Creator Piazza, Jessica (author)

Core Title One of many doors: sensing the literary sense through a cognitive poetics-inclusive reading approach

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 04/02/2014

Defense Date 03/07/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect theory,cognitive poetics,holistic poetics,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Poetry,psycholinguistics,reader response theory,sound in poetry,The attic which is desire,visual structure in poetry,William Carlos Williams

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Bender, Aimee (committee member), Richter, Daniel (committee member)

Creator Email jpiazza@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-373145

Unique identifier UC11296990

Identifier etd-PiazzaJess-2310.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-373145 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PiazzaJess-2310.pdf

Dmrecord 373145

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Piazza, Jessica

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA