grammar and neuroplasticity

Philip Davis has a fascinating piece in The Reader (UK) entitled "The Shakespeared Brain" which addresses an issue I for one, and I imagine many of us who have read and studied experimental poetry for any extended period of time, have suspected to be the case -- that non-normative grammar might change the way the brain works.

Beginning with "a specific intuition – about Shakespeare: that the very shapes of Shakespeares lines and sentences somehow had a dramatic effect at deep levels in my mind," Davis conducted an experiment with Neil Roberts, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, regarding the cognitive effect of a characteristic Shakespearean rhetorical device known as "anthimeria," or the syntactial forcing of one part of speech to perform the labor of another, i.e.

to try to see what happens inside us when the brain comes upon sentences like 'The dancers foot it with grace', or 'We waited for disclose of news', or 'Strong wines thick my thoughts', or 'I could out-tongue your griefs' or 'Fall down and knee/The way into his mercy'. For research suggests that there is one specific part of the brain that processes nouns and another part that processes verbs: but what happens when for a micro-second there is a serious hesitation between whether, in context, this is noun or verb. The main cognitive research done so far on the confusion of verbs and nouns has been to do with mistakes made by those who are brain-damaged and thus on the possible neural correlates of grammatical errors and semantic violations. Hardly anybody appears to have investigated the neural processing of a 'positive error' such as functional shift in normal healthy organisms.

The results are fascinating, and vary depending on whether or not the resulting shift creates sentences that still make some sense or not given the violation of normative grammar. But Davis goes on from this evidence to muse further (and in ways that will not surprise anyone who has worked with victims of traumatic brain injuries whose neural functioning has moved and thus been regained):

Shakespeare's syntax, its shifts and movements, can lock into the existing pathways of the brain and actually move and change them – away from old and aging mental habits and easy long-established sequences. It could be that Shakespeare's use of language gets so far into our brains that he shifts and new-creates pathways - not unlike the establishment of new biological networks using novel combinations of existing elements (genes/proteins in biology: units of phonology, semantics, syntax , and morphology in language). Then indeed we might be able to see something of the ways literature can cause affect or create change, without resorting to being assertively gushy.

Upon reading this I was immediately led to recall the audio file of a Bernadette Mayer class on experimental writing techniques, held June 1978 at Naropa, during which Mayer reads passages from Clark Coolidge's Polaroid (page 69), Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation (LIII), and Shakespeare's Sonnet 105 and invites students to explore the connections. It's a 39 minute audio file, and the passage in question takes place beginning at 7:00 minutes into the file. I won't reproduce those texts here but will include a subsequent experiment conducts, namely to offer three lines, one each from the three authors in question, and invite readers to consider which is by which. (Answer key in the comments.)

Test #1:
to one of one still such and even so
itself in come as same
and now and hours not at all

Test #2
once more to add feeling to feeling
off near to points in itself
one thing expressing leaves out difference

I reproduce Mayer's exercise in fun but also in the spirit of the very serious implications of Philip Davis' insight, namely to consider form his Shakespeare example what neuroplasticity potential lies in the writing of Stein and Coolidge among others.

coolidge at naropa

more from the naropa archives, clark coolidge
reading a long poem -- unpublished in its entirety tho i believe portions have appeared at least in sulfur or oblek -- called "city in regard," july 12, 1991. intro by bobbie louise hawkins. robert creeley followed but i've edited the file down to make it more managheable. (it's still clocking in at 15M so i won't be able to keep this file up indefinitely). total time 31:35 minutes; coolidge is a bit low in the mic for the first few minutes but eventually the levels come up. enjoy... (photo credit to randy roark for the cover of friction 7; link to the full program at the naropa archives here.)

cut-up technique

ron has a recent post that raises some interesting questions regarding use of collage or cut-up techniques in writing. like him i'm ultimately less interested in who did it first, but i wonder if the question why it emerges at a given historical moment is even answerable -- in part because the given historical moments (dada, 1916; burroughs/gysin, 1950/1960; koch, 1953; berrigan/ashbery, 1962-1963) are so fundamentally different).

ted berrigan's sonnets are the jumping-off point for ron's discussion. he wonders,

Given that he used cut-up or splicing techniques, some of them in such a way that you can’t miss the device – the same lines pop up over and over – and that some of the source material was his own very first “not-so-good” (to use Notley’s own judgment here) poems, I’ve wondered – during maybe three of my read-throughs – if a devoted scholar could reconstruct the “uncut” poems, the translations from Rimbaud, the miscellaneous additions that, in fact, make these so much more than verbal collages.

i think berrigan's papers are at syracuse, so this may not require that much reconstruction. but an essay of mine on clark coolidge from a while back might serve as a useful example of one kind of possible reconstruction. there i discuss one of berrigan's sonnets, which reads

This excitement to be all of night, Henry!
Elvis Peering-Eye danced with Carol Clifford, high,
Contrived whose leaping herb edifies Kant! I’ll bust!
Smile! “Got rye in this’n?”
Widow Dan sold an eye t’meander an X. Whee! Yum!
Pedant tore her bed! Tune, hot! Full cat saith why foo?
“Tune hot full cat?” “No! nexus neck ink!
All moron (on) while “weighed in fur pal!” “Ah’m Sun!”
Dayday came to get her daddy. “Daddy,”
Saith I to Dick in the verge, (In the Verge!)
And “gee” say I, “Easter” “fur” “few tears” “Dick!”
My Carol now a museum! “O, Ma done fart!” “Less full
Cat,” she said, “One’s there!” “Now cheese, ey?”
“Full cat wilted, bought ya a pup!” “So, nose excitement?”

alice notley's annotations to the penguin edition of the sonnets contain the following for the above poem: “see line 1: This sex I meant to be a love night and real, whispered I, etc. Made up by me — a poem written in phonetics. . .” (83). and as i wrote in the coolidge essay, "The sonnet is thus an English-to-English homophonic translation of a prior (and only partially recoverable) Berrigan text."

the parenthetical aside is not really clear without the explanation that i think editor nate dorward must have removed from the essay. what i meant is that you can partially reconstruct berrigan's original by essentially translating this poem homophonically "back into english." his notes says "This excitement to be all of night, Henry! / Elvis Peering-Eye" is a phonetic or homophonic english-to-english translation of "This sex I meant to be a love night and real, whispered I" for example. i do not know what to do with the rest of line two, but i suspect that "whose leaping herb edifies Kant"(line 3) may orignially have been "who sleep in her bed if i can't."

ron goes on to discuss kenneth koch's celebrated serial poem when the sun tries to go on, which begins

And, with a shout, collecting coat-hangers
Dour rebus, conch, hip,
Ham, the autumn day, oh how genuine!
Literary frog, catch-all boxer, O
Real! The magistrate, say “group,” bower, undies
Disk, poop, “Timon of Athens.” When
The bugle shimmies, how glove towns!

and reasons

if Koch is being less systematic than, say, Mac Low, I think it’s impossible to imagine just writing this, say, as it came to him. [note: in the comment box, jordan disagrees.] That really doesn’t become possible, so far as I can tell, until sometime in the early 1970s, most probably in the work of Clark Coolidge, specifically after he dropped the idea of the long poem he’d embarked on after Polaroid and The Maintains, works that equally problematize normative syntactic integration into units of meaning, but do so using systems throughout. Look, say, at Quartz Hearts instead.

ron's chronology is a bit off, which is understandable given the lag times and, in the case of quartz hearts, unsequentiality between the composition dates and publications of coolidge's work. quartz hearts was a "hinge work" (coolidge's words) between polaroid and the longprose, and thus was written before the longprose (even though it was published in 1978, after the bulk of the longprose and a few years before coolidge abandoned that project.)

quartz hearts was written straight out, as ron suggests. but i've studied the manuscripts for polaroid at suny-buffalo, and they suggest that it was also written straight out, by hand, all caps, on 5 x 7 note pad paper, and published as such without significant revision -- and not "using systems throughout" as ron claims. among the polaroid manuscripts there are some loose sheets or working notes that i describe in my unpublished book-length study of coolidge's early work. one set provides a very loose schema of seed-word strings, as this passage from the relevant chapter of my study describes:

This set of working notes for Polaroid among the Coolidge Papers at SUNY-Buffalo contains what amounts to a five-page holograph schema or table of word strings, one for each page of the poem, as follows:

1 — IT — THEN — SUCH
2 — IT — THIS — THEN — SINCE
3 — IT — SUCH — WHOLE
4 — IT — ONE — SOME — STILL
5 — IT — THOSE — SOME — ITSELF

There is clearly a correlation between each string of seed words in the schema/table and the pages of the poem, which appear to have been the result of verbal improvisations using the seed word strings as their basis. Essentially they become focal points around which each page of the poem operates, as a comparison of the words in the first string of the table (“it,” “then” and “such”) with the opening lines of the poem indicates:

of what can it such
as which since can it
not

been as nor can of whence what
never even
as
a single ever still of still
of when as now then

[...] In terms of compositional strategies, it is difficult to tell with certainty whether Coolidge’s holograph schema or table was constructed prior to (and thus serving as a compositional aid for) the poem itself, or after the fact of writing the poem. I am inclined towards the former conclusion, based on what he states in the interviews.

More important, however, is the fact that the use of “seed phrases” indicates that Coolidge here has continued earlier compositional strategies, ones that goes back to poems like the “Bond Sonnets” and “Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric,” both from 1964. Recall that the former used a chance procedure to derive and arrange words from the Ian Fleming source text, while the latter was published exactly as it was written into a notebook with no revision. Of course, the strict procedural technique of the “Bond Sonnets” and what I called earlier the improvisational collage form of “Flag Flutter” are hardly the same thing. The Maintains also involved chance elements (what words happen to be on the same page of the dictionary) and improvisation. What becomes clear when one examines the additional materials at SUNY-Buffalo related to Polaroid, namely the holograph manuscripts of the poem itself, is the fact that the poem was written straight out from beginning to end, on unruled pages roughly five-by-seven inches in dimension (probably from a writing pad or tablet) with little to no revision. Polaroid thus clearly extends the improvisational element that has been central to Coolidge’s writing process from early on while adding a procedural element that Coolidge had abandoned for most of the intervening decade.

so ron's claim for coolidge "using systems throughout" polaroid has to be qualified, or at the very least distinguished from what we know of mac low, koch, berrigan, etc.

onedit

chris vitiello tips me off to a great online pub called onedit, edited from england by tim atkins (depicted, left, with miles champion).

tho unstated, the editorial mission appears to be to combine new work with older, uncollected, archival type stuff. the courier typeface (produced in image files rather than text) also conveys this retro-contemporary aesthetic.

issue 5 has, among other things, an uncollected sonnet sequence by alice notley and two uncollected poems or poem sequences for the early 1970s by clark coolidge.

notley's "GREAT INTERIORS, WINES AND SPIRITS OF THE WORLD" was written in battersea in 1973 and appeared in out there #4 (1974), an notley issue of a mag published out of northeastern illinois university in chicago. she describes this as something of a follow-up to 165 meeting house lane, her earlier denby-esque sonnet sequence and first book.

selections from coolidge's AIR appeared in All Stars, a monster anthology tom clark edited in 1972 for grossman/goliard and including many of the likely NY/bolinas suspects: berrigan, notley (conincidentally, her 165 meeting house lane sonnets), saroyan, gallup, etc. at the time coolidge was very unhappy with the way poem was excerpted and printed in that anthology (seemingly random selections, individual sections broken up and run on separate pages where the MS clearly shows a three-section-per-page format that he was using in other serial poems of the time), so it's nice to have the complete text as he'd prepared it finally available.

CONGERIES is a 20-page selection that ran in julliard #9 (spring 1972), a mag i know nothing about and as a manuscript completely unknown to me. it's quite a diverse batch of stuff, prose and poems, and in my estimation ranges chronologically from as early as 1965 or 1966 to the early 1970s. "joe the blages" and "onyx" look like they date from the flag flutter and u.s. electric period. "white," "duchamp's door" and "jug ending" look like minimalist word salad, short-line pieces resembling something from space (but not the constellation poems of section 3, not the same attention to arrangement). there are various prose pieces too, "station stratum" resembling the "one's plenties" proses from the something else yearbook and quartz hearts. "the best" is an exploration in statement and the sentence as compositional unit (one sentence per line). other proses like "route five," "instant kyoto postcard," "the coca colas" and "the wrong reflection" resemble the pieces he had collected into a booklength manuscript that was never published: one's plenties: selected proses 1969-1973.

here is a smashing little zukofskyian lyric

          DEEM

          like a nail on
          the way's froze
          by shell
          from a bowl
          in a light

          the red
          stops here
          a time roll rose
          to boom eel

and this is a great little "procedural" lyric (as i call them, not many of which are collected, there's one in the THE WORLD 15, untitled, whose first line reads "the hen one comes to," it takes and manipulates lines from ted berrigan's "tambourine life)

          CARLSBAD CAVERNS

          where night         where night    where
          night will     where night will it enter      enter
          summer         where      stem see
          stem it send
          it or thirst in o where of will        no sight
          tap at the fall    the reef
          and stem laugh of it lights
          our where stem     here in out
          night lick will it
          end      not only where night will         it enter

great thanks to tim atkins for making this stuff available!