On Poetry

I became a Philistine in my twenties. Partly it’s because that’s when I entered college and discovered my love of science. Chemistry tickled my brain in a sublimely satisfying way. I enjoyed reading ahead in my textbook, working on problems, and yes, even taking exams. Studying no longer felt like a chore. I stopped reading fiction, thinking it child’s play. I never understood poetry, thinking it frivolous and bombastic. Science and technology was the way of the future – ideas and imagination, yet grounded in reality. I was definitely a Wizard, not a Prophet.

Let me back up.

I grew up in a country with a (then) rigid school system with no choices in class schedules and subjects. National exam results shunted students along pre-determined pathways; mine happened to steer me towards the sciences in high school, but I never really understood nor loved the subject material. National exams were a chore, a rite of passage to be endured, and like many of my fellow classmates, I waited until the last minute to cram for the exam. I enjoyed school. But not for the learning. I enjoyed my time outside of school even more. Playing with friends. Reading fiction. Enjoying Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. I also enjoyed reading non-fiction, but made no distinction between different genres. Library access was limited, so I devoured everything I could get my hands on. However, I had read no poetry beyond childhood nursery rhymes.

College allowed me to choose my classes for the first time. This was bewildering, especially since I chose to attend a liberal arts college in the U.S. that I knew nothing about, beyond the very nice brochure and the generous financial aid package. I took solely science and math courses my first year, because I didn’t know any better. It’s when I discovered my love of chemistry, for which I’m very thankful! But I had to fulfil the distribution breadth requirements of my liberal arts education. In my second year, I chose philosophy and psychology to cover those bases while taking every chemistry class I could fit into my schedule. I avoided any class that smacked of Literature, not that I knew what it was. The required “freshman” humanities class was delayed until my final year, and to be honest, I skipped class aplenty while working on my chemistry senior thesis.

In my thirties, starting as a faculty member at a liberal arts college, I began to broaden my scope – at least enough, to be a competent academic adviser. I listened sympathetically to students agonizing over their schedule choices, especially since many of them had much broader interests than I did when entering college. I educated myself on the value of different majors in areas I was unfamiliar – the humanities and social sciences. I prepared to answer questions about the value of a liberal arts education, although I suspect my answers were simplistic in those early days. Several of my chemistry student advisees told me how much they enjoyed their sophomore-level poetry class offered through the English department; I made a mental note of it as an academic adviser.

Since then I’ve returned to the broader reading diet of my childhood. My choices are abundant and I’ve learned to be picky; I’ve blogged about a number of those books (but not all). This past year, there’s been a resurgence of sci-fi/fantasy; I recently finished the Broken Earth series and the trilogy that began with The Three-Body Problem. I think (or at least hope) I’ve been thoughtful about How-To-Read different genres. Yet I’ve managed to avoid poetry all these years.

But on holiday this week, a book caught my eye: How to Read Slowly by James Sire. I’d read the Mortimer Adler classic which has especially shaped how I read fiction. Browsing  through Sire’s book, I was reminded of thoughtful habits to get the most out of my reading – be it information or pleasure. I considered skipping the chapter on poetry, but I’m glad I persevered. Sire cracked open what to me was mystifying – why anyone actually enjoyed poetry. I’ve read poems before, recommended by friends, but found them obtuse and boring. That’s because I did not read slowly enough, and didn’t understand how to approach poetry.

Sire describes poetry as “Catching Reality in a Mirror”. Here are two paragraphs from his description.

About the great events of life prose seems and inadequate means of expression. Love, death, fate, the capture of a city, the defeat of an archenemy: to reflect on these with depth is to engage, if only internally, in a poetic monolog. Whenever one feels deeply, whenever mere words seem inadequate to capture the quality of a moment or an idea, we turn to poetry, either by writing it or searching for the right poem to read and meditate on.

In great literature – poetry and fiction – we see ourselves, our friends, our enemies, the world around us. We see our interests portrayed in bold relief – our questions asked better than we can ask them, our problems pictured better than we can picture them by ourselves, our fantasies realized beyond our fondest dreams, our fears confirmed in horrors more horrible than our nightmares, our hopes fulfilled past our ability to yearn or desire.

But Sire does more than pontificate about the joys of poetry. He guides the reader through several different types of poems, pointing out the interesting unique features of each piece. Good poems, great poems, are carefully constructed and multi-layered. A single quick read will never do. I should have known better. I tell my students that when they read primary literature they won’t understand it the first time. Usually it’s because they don’t have the experience and they trip over the dense, technical language. But things become a little clearer on a second or third read. The same is true for poetry.

In playful paragraphs, Sire exhorts the reader to re-read the poem after he reveals each morsel of analysis. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I was on holiday, what the heck? Maybe there’s something to this mumbo-jumbo. Then lo and behold, I was very surprised at how it works! I can’t quite describe the delightful surprise I encountered on a second reading, on a third reading. Read aloud, Sire exhorts. I did so – and again I was surprised at the difference it makes. It’s like a light turning on – illuminating the poem. It’s deeper and more interesting than I would have imagined. I now think reading poetry might be both pleasurable and informative. But I have to read slowly, allowing the colorful language and rhythm to sink in according to its own timing.

Reading Sire’s chapter on poetry shed light on something I’d been pondering recently – Is it possible to read nonlinearly? I don’t mean jumping pages in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure; that’s still a linear storyline. I’m thinking of whether it’s possible to read multi-linearly, through several different channels at once. The initial conundrum comes from my origin-of-life reading: Why is information linearly encoded in DNA/RNA and proteins? There are other branched molecules, oligomers, and polymers, in biochemistry – but the main so-called information-carrying molecules are linear chains.

Think about how we read. Symbols on a page. One after another. Linear. Maybe left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, but still linear. Hypertext with branching links? You might zig and zag, but it’s still one-dimensional. Is it because our brain is a linear processor at heart? Action potentials flow one-way. But neurons are arranged in an intricate web, and there’s an interesting interplay between the digital and the analog in the way information is received and responded to in our brains.

We can process information through multiple channels. I’m sitting in front of a TV screen with subtitles, with the volume on, and I understand both languages. I’m watching, reading and listening, simultaneously. 3D-TV. If a next-gen TV released some olfactory molecules, a fourth channel would open for my sense of smell. 4D-TV. The information in each strand might be impinging upon me linearly, but I’m processing in parallel. Multi-linear. It’s a richer experience. Perhaps more efficient, kinda like slime mold quorum sensing.

Our bodies and minds are taking in so much more information than our conscious awareness processes. To get a glimpse of the richness, we could attend to different aspects of the multi-linear information stream. Our friends could help us by co-experiencing an event providing an even richer smorgasbord, as each person notices different sights, smells and sounds.

Poetry does something similar, yet different. The medium might simply be words, but the words have been thoughtfully arranged for a multi-linear experience – one that requires multiple readings, voiced readings, slow readings. It might be the closest thing we can do to  communicate depth-of-experience where mere non-fictive description simply will not suffice.