If we assume, as both everyday folk psychology and most philosophers of mind in the wake of Descartes’ mind-body dualism have, that thinking happens in the head (or in the brain), it would hardly make sense to believe that objects like poems think. Literary texts are not built out of neurons and synapses. And yet, as contemporary theorists of extended cognition argue, mental processes often extend into the cognizing organism’s environment, composed partly of actions performed by that organism on the external world. Actions performed by the thinking organism on worldly structures (manipulating, exploiting, transforming them) archive and embed information in the environment so that it is available for future processing. As we make notes to and for ourselves, our mind (and memory) extends to our notebooks. As we write, we deposit our thinking on the page and make that thinking available for future readings. This panel focuses on the specific form thinking takes in poems, particularly (though not exclusively) lyric.
Beyond theories of distributed cognition (beginning with Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’s seminal essay, “The Extended Mind”), this panel topic has its conceptual roots in poetic studies such as Giorgio Agamben’s The End of the Poem (1999), Stathis Gourgouris’s Does Literature Think? (2003), Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking (2006), Robert von Hallberg’s Lyric Powers (2008), Lynn Keller’s Thinking Poetry (2010), G. Gabrielle Starr’s neuroscientific study Feeling Beauty (2013), Reginald Gibbons’s How Poems Think (2015), Jonathan Kramnick’s Paper Minds (2018), and panelist Marjorie Levinson’s Thinking Through Poetry (2018). In opposition to neuroaesthetic approaches that attempt to account for aesthetic experience in reductively scientific terms, we will demonstrate how poems think through examples of close reading, in league with the best critical work devoted to poetic cognition as a topic for the discipline of literary studies.
Marjorie Levinson will open the panel by following her aforementioned recent book in discussing the kinds of thinking modeled by poetic organization when it takes the general form of Romantic and post-Romantic lyric. Her conceptual resources for thinking about thinking of this kind come from the discourses of self-organization as carried on by students of the physical, digital, and life-sciences of the 20th and 21st centuries. She will show how this works by presenting a reading of a classically post-Romantic lyric (Robert Hass’ “Meditation at Lagunitas”) and of a lyric writing that quarrels with that form (a poem by Lyn Hejinian). Levinson will use the latter to test the limits of the self-other, entity-environment, structure-history relations (relations of self-organization) that, she argues, organize the former.
Marshall Brown will follow Levinson by focusing specifically on cognitive differences between poetry and prose. Verse is distinguished from prose by two specific characteristics, interruption and alignment, often by metrical patterning, and in more general terms by focused attention on individual words. These characteristics lie behind the slowness of verse that compensates for its brevity. They complicate understanding and delay meaning. The general term for the complication and delay of meaning is thinking. The thinking of verse is processual or, in other words, dialectical, often implying reversals of expectation—“in/versions,” in a pun that has been made by Yopie Prins but that he takes from Sir Philip Sidney's line, “Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show”—and it is typically carried by the complexities of small words that prose uses for orientation, including conjunctions, pronouns, and deictics. Accounting for the processual and reflective character of verse requires revising the longstanding notion of a “lyric present,” foregrounded most recently in Jonathan Culler's book, Theory of the Lyric. Brown’s paper will offer intensely close readings of moments in three poems as a contribution to recognizing and characterizing the operations of thinking in verse: “Amaze” by Adelaide Crapsey, Astrophil and Stella 1 by Sidney, and “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats.
Finally, following the release of her forthcoming book Forms of Poetic Attention (2019), Lucy M. Alford will focus our attention on one specific cognitive-perceptual attunement activated by verse: vigilance. Vigilance constitutes a mode of attention in which there is no present object of focus, but rather an openness to potential objects: a vigilant scanning of the attentional field. This state of sustained awareness or alertness is marked by a readiness to detect the appearance of a potential but unpredictable object, signal, or change. While this might seem like a passive or purely receptive mode, vigilance is incredibly challenging to maintain, requiring focalization not on a present object but on the potential emergence thereof. Building on Simone Weil’s writings on attention, Alford will explore two kinds of vigilance as they play out in poetic form. For Weil, the practice of vigilant attention depends on the possibility of revelation, and also on the renunciation of desire for revelation. In this sense, her notion of attention can be seen as poised between the two kinds of formal vigilance Alford identifies in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé. Hölderlin’s use of syntactical delays followed by sudden shifts into emphatic present tense suggests a mode of revelatory vigilance: a preparation for the epiphanic moment of arrival. In Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, reading across white space and scanning for syntactical connections across multiple typographically interspersed threads of text requires a non-revelatory vigilance, navigating contingencies and afflictions here on earth, toward a more gradual, horizontal transformation.