Poetry and Perception

I just wrote this to my poetry analysis students:

Hi All,

Don't forget the close reading notes in the resources folder on smartsite.

To get an A grade, you need to talk about interactions between levels. In a way, you are starting to reassemble the poem after having broken it down.

This is congruent with what we know about perception, in which objects seem to appear as manifolds, not as pixels that are then scanned. Some researchers at Berkeley recently reconstructed brain images from brain wave scans using a computer that searched YouTube for similar images based on interpretations of the wave patterns. You can see them on YouTube, it's rather uncanny.

What we learn from this is what some philosophy (phenomenology) already knows: you perceive things as a whole, in a single shot. You don't assemble pixelated breakdowns of things. You see a cup of coffee: the whole cup is right there, in your mind.

It's a bit tricky doing this with a poem--or with anything--because we tend to be unconscious of the physical level(s) of reality. We just want to walk through it, drink it, allow it to work on us unexamined.

Yours, TM