Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard or read a poem, and reacted to it with WTF??

Raise your hand again if you normally love it when this happens.

 

If you’re often turned off by the feeling of not understanding poetry, you’re not alone. The American poet Billy Collins relates how a high school student once wrote to him saying “Whenever I read a modern poem, it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.”

 

Recently in the Atlantic magazine, writer Noah Berlatsky accused several prominent poets of applying their wit and humour “in a way designed to alienate as large a public as possible.” Notice: Designed to alienate.

 

I’m sorry to say that even some of my own family and friends find that poetry can incite them to hostility, even rage. They suspect that poetry is an elaborate hoax; they just can’t prove it.

 

If you don’t take kindly to feeling flummoxed by poetry, there’s a scientific explanation for this. Your brain undoubtedly possesses a genetically-determined and anomalous trait: it’s human. Your brain has evolved to interface with language in certain ways. And poetry does something truly perverse—it uses language for purposes for which it was never designed. No wonder people get pissed off.

 

An impressive amount of our brainpower is finely tuned for one purpose: the efficient concoction and digestion of meaning through language. The dazzling diversity of human languages attests to the endless ways in which our species has managed to choreograph acrobatic gestures of the mouth into arrangements of words and phrases, and press them into the service of carrying meaning. To linguists, who obsess about the detail of how it all works, the route between the sounds of flapping lips and tongues and the reading of another’s thoughts is intricate and mysterious, and far from fully-understood. But our brains treat it as child’s play—we vacuum meaning out of sound waves and hardly give language a second glance. Your brain is the ultimate linguistic supercomputer; language’s code, once cracked, warrants no further attention.

 

When we hear a person speak, all of this linguistic supercomputing is driven by one urgent goal: to understand what the speaker intended for us to understand. This instinct to pounce on the intended meaning of the other is seared into our DNA. We imbue even the simplest of acts of communication—like pointing—with a specific intended purpose. What’s more, we’re willing to invest a fair bit of effort into figuring out what this purpose is, taking it on good faith that there will be one.

 

As an experiment, try this some day: stand in the middle of a crowded downtown street pointing up toward the sky. For good measure, try emitting noises of astonishment. Your fellow humans won’t be able to resist looking up, eagerly searching for what’s capturing your interest. Maybe it’s activists rappelling down the Calgary Tower. Perhaps it’s a marriage proposal being scrawled by airplane exhaust. A flock of crows about to dive-bomb City Hall? Seeing none of these things, they’ll keep looking for anything out of the ordinary that would be worth pointing out. And, coming up short, they’ll glance back at you, now convinced that you’re a little crazy.

 

And this is the problem with much of contemporary poetry: there is no clear, single, intended purpose. It’s not that readers are lazy. No one’s expecting meaning handed to them on a plate. We’re willing to do some work to connect the dots, but we instinctively expect that at the end there will be a flash of insight, like the moment when the punchline of a joke suddenly has a point and becomes funny, that sudden instant of “Aha, I get it!”

 

Everything about the way we’re built for communication leads us to expect that moment of insight, that homing in on what was meant. Strange things happen when it’s nowhere to be had.

 

I’ve been fascinated lately by a line of research by psychologists Travis Proulx, Steven Heine and their colleagues. These researchers are interested in the psychological impact of literature or art whose meaning is opaque. How do people react upon reading an absurdist story by Franz Kafka, or seeing a painting by the surrealist Magritte? What happens deep inside them when their cravings to find that clear, intended meaning go unmet?

 

A couple of things, they’ve found. One is that people keep trying to construct meaning for some time afterwards; they don’t simply give up and shut their brains off. On the contrary. In one study, students read a Kafka story, and then later had to try to make sense of a made-up language they’d never seen. These students did better at finding patterns in the language after reading Kafka than another group of subjects who’d read a more conventional piece of fiction. What was happening in the minds of the Kafka-reading students? It seems that, without any clear resolution, the drive to find meaning kept frantically churning, and attached itself to the next available thing on hand.

 

Travis Proulx believes that any experience that creates a “feeling of the absurd”—that is, a violation of any important expectations about meaning—sets the mind on a mission to find or affirm meaning in any other way possible. Packaging up foreign language- learning CDs with generous dollops of avant-garde art and poetry might not be a bad idea. But the need to settle on meaning is a double-edged sword. Researchers have also found that this drive to recover meaning sometimes causes people to find patterns where none actually exist. It can make them superstitious, connecting dots a bit too eagerly. (It makes me wonder how many people who see the Virgin Mary on their piece of toast or Jesus on their Tostitos have just come off reading David Foster Wallace.)

 

But it gets weirder: This free-floating, unresolved, unmoored-from-meaning state can even have political consequences. Being disoriented by art, it seems, can tilt people toward a more conservative frame of mind. What do people do with all their unresolved need for meaning? Often, they find comfort in structures that already have ready-made meanings attached to them, including traditional values, identities, or modes of thoughts, clinging to these.

 

It’s the feeling of the absurd again: When Travis Proulx and colleagues showed people more weird art with slippery meanings, and asked them afterwards how deeply attached they felt to their ethnic, religious, or national identities, their subjects ranked these as fairly important. But others, who’d seen more accessible pieces of art, didn’t think these things were as important. In another test, in which subjects were invited to imagine themselves as a courtroom judges, being disorienting by art led them to be harsher in their treatment of a woman who’d been arrested for prostitution.

 

Being confronted with a lack of meaning or with unresolved meaning seems to have the effect of making people gravitate to whatever predictable, available meaning happens to be on hand.

 

All of this makes me think that the Dadaists may have had it backwards. For example, one early twentieth-century Dadaist performance piece had customers in a pub walk past urinals while hearing lewd poems recited by a woman dressed in a white communion dress. This was supposed to liberate them from their attachments to traditions and national identities. But the apparent senselessness of it all may well have driven many people into the arms of the very traditions and social structures they were supposed to abandon.

 

(All of this also makes me think that right-wing parties should get over their allergy of funding avant-garde art. It could be their best campaign move ever.)

 

And to me, it also explains why poetry that is “hard to get” provokes such an unsettling feeling in people, why it can get their backs up, why, failing to find a clear purpose, they conclude that its purpose is to alienate.

 

Still.

 

Raise your hand if you’ve ever loved a poem you didn’t understand.

 

I have. You may have your own reasons, but I’ll tell you some of mine.

 

I’ve studied the science of language for many years because it tells me fascinating things about language: about its breathtaking complexity; its formal elegance; its orderly structures; its tension between pattern, pattern, pattern, and deviation; its staggering possibilities for taking apart and recombining elements in new ways; the way it never stands still, but morphs with generations, or shapeshifts from one social group to another.

 

But poetry I read because it makes me experience all of these things. It immerses me in a warm bath of all of the things about language that thrill me.

 

Poetry can do this only because, after all, the point of poetry is perverse. Unlike most of the language we use in our lives, its purpose is not just to act as a meaning delivery device. Its point is to wallow in the aesthetic qualities of language. As I’ve recently heard Billy Collins say, poetry exists so that words can enjoy themselves. A poem is a verbal party.

 

And I love this analogy, because I’ve noticed that no ever seems to show up at a party only to ask “What the fuck is this party supposed to mean?”

 

But in order to join in the linguistic festivities, we’re forced to back away from the way in which we’re biologically programmed to approach language. Poetry requires that, instead of gulping meaning out of its husk as quickly as possible, as we’ve been trained to do as lifelong computers of language, we hold it in our mouths for a long time, savouring it, slowly appreciating its textures. We have to learn to notice consciously the things that our minds have become so good at unconsciously processing—and then tossing aside—on their way to getting to the meaning.

 

But in the end, what is art for, if not to stretch ourselves beyond that which we’re biologically programmed to do?

 

Meaning in language is like the caloric content of food—meaning and calories are the whole biological point of eating or talking. But poetry is like the art of cuisine. Eating gets a lot better if, on its way down to our gullets, we take the time to actually taste our food, to notice and enjoy its flavours. And it gets a whole lot better if what we eat has been skillfully prepared by someone who is an expert at manipulating the flavours and textures of food.

 

Once you move away from the mindset of thinking of food as just a way to fuel your body—once you’ve become a gourmet—there’s no going back. It’s the same for us lovers of poetry. Sure, you could eat without caring about how your food tastes. But why on God’s green earth would you want to? It’s just like this with language. Its pleasures open up if you can take delight in the silkiness or the chewiness of its sounds, in the textures provided by its rhythms, in the startling pairing of words that you’ve never heard together before, like funky ways of throwing ingredients together, in the measured and judiciously-chosen seasonings provided by certain words.

 

Poems, to me, then, are like dishes prepared by superb chefs of language. At times, the chefs get adventurous with their ingredients. Not all of their poems suit my palate right away. Some of them are very dense and rich, and meant to be consumed in small bits at a time. Others may be immediately addictive, making me crave another one right away. Poetry is rarely comfort food. It’s not what I reach for when I’ve been psychically battered and exhausted. But it’s at its best when it’s fresh and inventive, exciting to the palate.

 

It may not be what language was designed to do. But poetry is what language is capable of.

 
 

 

Despite over a century of poetic innovation since Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un

Coup de Dès Jamais n’Abolira le Hasard (1896) & almost 50 years since the publication of Eugen Gomringer’s manifesto Concrete Poetry (1956), there is still no accepted critical vocabulary for concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is often contextualized historically & is categorized as a subgenre of radicalized praxis from its predominantly modernist period in the 1950s through to the present. By reiterating this historical precedent—a stridently modernist activity—criticism on concrete poetry more often than not reifies the idea that this form is still in its infancy, requiring a citation of poetic precedent in order to justify its existence. Brion Gysin remarked that “writing is fifty years behind painting,” an assertion evident in the cultural & critical reception for concrete poetry. My own concrete poetry is dedicated to the exploration of Letraset. Once ubiquitous in business and graphic design environments, Letraset is now an antiquated cultural artefact denigrated to artist production. Only once the business community rejected Letraset in favour of computerized graphic design technologies did dry-transfer lettering enter an artistic vocabulary. Ironically, that transition occurred once the medium was deemed not cost effective by its manufacturers and slipping out of production. I view poetry, as typified by concrete poetry, as the architectural structuring of the material of language; the unfamiliar fitting together of fragments, searching for structure.