On the Bodily Pleasures of the Written Word

Often I wonder why anyone ever reads anything that’s not informative. Poetry is usually not cool animal facts, it rarely explains the economy to us, let alone how to replace an alternator. So the question is why we seek out squiggles of ink arranged weirdly on a page, why we like the sensation of those squiggles going into our brains, forming their silent sounds and conjuring up their images, thoughts, and sensations. (And what even might be the sensation of thoughts, of thinking itself?) So there are some words on a page. What does your brain do? When you imagine a movement, or watch a movement being performed, your brain’s neurons fire that would fire if you yourself were completing that movement, this seems to account for a lot of the fascination or viscerality of watching sports or dance. And words must do something like that, in our brains, in their conjuring up. So in a sense a person writing words is making little packets of sensations to shape an experience in another’s brain, tickle it, lead it along, or whatever. Brathwaite claims:

The oral tradition [as opposed to the written], makes demands not only on the poet but also on the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the poet makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where the meaning truly resides.

I’m not saying he’s wrong (I would never), but maybe here I can make my small argument for the written word having more kinship with orality—with both bodily sensations and with a network of community—than is usually assumed, and how that has implications for what it can do.

Sounds are the fundamental material of language, of poetry, of not only words but also the written word, and the way our minds understand the world is first and foremost bodily. When we read a word, even if we don’t sound it out, or say it “out loud” in our brains as a word (like, in word-time), we somehow still feel the sibilance learned from the movement of our tongues around the shape of the words in our minds, even when our tongues lie still, even as the mind’s mouth mouths them along as they were written. We still feel the insistence of a beat structure, a rising and falling cadence, or the wit of a secretly or expertly placed rhyme. Speaking of—or studying—alliteration, or assonance, or prosody, or kinds of rhymes, or the “music” of a poem wouldn’t even make sense if this weren’t true. So the poet is working first with sensations and the page itself is a playful field where the reader’s mind is manipulated into these sensations. We all sort of know the sensation of an image in the mind—the joke about not imagining a pink elephant works at just this crux of language→image, spontaneously, as our brain creates it as the word enters it. But what about how metaphor works—a sort of titillation of our pattern recognition software, our mind bridging the distance, finding resonance? The pattern recognition software of our brains, which is joyfully excitable, can do this with almost anything—this is the dense concatenated joy of Gertrude Stein, or take this rarefied version from Lance Phillips:

2] Cat’s rib part carcass
the sun fell from
attention  3] I am afraid

You can almost feel your mind glomming on to things, constructing resonances. It is A physicality, A bigness, and A jarring emotive statement. I can’t describe it, because it is itself a resistance to our stolid models of descriptiveness. Olson writes “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it […] by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.” And like this, or because of this, in these moments it’s like you feel the muscles and the electrical charge in your brain rise to meet the words on the page and be rearranged by them. There are masters of all aspects of this, every writer working with expanding the possibilities of their material, of its potentialities to induce sensations. How far you can wait and then land a rhyme, in H.D. or Derek Walcott, how far you can even make words that don’t rhyme, rhyme, we watch this with awe in some of the masters of hip hop, or in sensing what kind of mental vibration two disparate words or ideas placed next to each other can elicit. All the things are the material but the ultimate material is sensation.  

And there is then this reason why people are interested in poetry when they need some different kind of relation between language and sensation. Édouard Glissant sets up a distinction between what he calls “free or natural” versus “forced” poetics. Of natural poetics he writes, “there is no incompatibility between desire and expression.” But of the other he writes, “I define forced or constrained poetics as any collective desire for expression that, when it manifests itself, is negated at the same time because of the deficiency that stifles it, not at the level of desire, which never ceases, but at the level of expression, which is never realized.” I don’t fully understand the complexities of his analysis, and the complex layers and critiques of history, language, and dispossession illuminated in it, but I wanted to come back to this moment which we, as people, come back to, where the language we have is not sufficient and we are failing at making the language we need, where “the level of expression” is incompatible with our desire—which is the desire for the language we are using, or reading, to convey or induce of us or for us what feels like the necessary, or right, or true, sensations.  And this could be straight up playfulness, E. E.Cummings being a straightforward example (I am not opposed to joyfulness as seriousness):

dim 
i 
nu 
tiv  

e this park is e
mpty (everb
ody’s elsewher
e except me 6 e  

nglish sparrow 
s)a 
utumn & t 
he rai  

n 
th 
e 
raintherain

Or it can be brutal. My friend the poet Timmy Straw said “anguish can be a kind of joy” which hit me like a rock, and which I think is embodied in these lines by Gerald Manley Hopkins:

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief 
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing — 

But in either case, in any case, whatever the case is, whoever any particular age calls experimental, the people who are writing where they need to create a different kind of relating to language, different kinds of sensations in language, structures of thought, ways of thinking, sensations of thinking, from us and for us, whoever needs it, let it get to where it is going, be appreciated. With the written word we have so much access to so much! And it is not sterile, not non-sensuous, not non-collective. Jean Toomer writes “Poems are Offerings. Gifts to me I give to you.” And the body may remain still, but our little electric brains in our little warm bodies are reading the squiggles together, seeking a continuous chain to invisible ears.