The Best American Poetry

Part V, Affective Poetics and the Narrative Need: Toward a Revaluation, by Leslie Heywood

In my last post I talked about the mechanics of memory, and the way those mechanics take a narrative form.  I traced the ways affect potentiates memory, and the way both affect and memory effect perception and the interpretation of  stimuli an organism encounters at a later date.  According to Louis Cozolino, a psychologist whose work integrates neurology and psychotherapy, the implication of this is that “our past then [has] . . .an inordinate impact on our present.”[i] This is the case because of the interaction between explicit and implicit memory, which is part of the interaction between affect and cognition, and it is implicit memory that has the most powerful structuring force.  In Cozolino’s words:

• Explicit memory describes conscious learning and memory, including semantic, sensory, and motor forms. These memory systems allow us to recite the alphabet, recognize the smell of coconut, or play tennis. Some of these memory abilities remain just beneath the level of consciousness until we turn our attention to them.
• Implicit memory is reflected in unconscious patterns of learning stored in hidden layers of neural processing, largely inaccessible to conscious awareness. This category extends from repressed trauma to riding a bicycle, to getting an uneasy feeling when we smell a food that once made us sick.
• Explicit memory is the tip of our experiential iceberg; implicit memory is the vast structure below the surface. Many of our daily experiences make it clear that we have multiple systems of explicit and implicit memory.

It is primarily the systems of implicit memory that a creative writer accesses:  it is implicit memory and the affect that informs it which makes writing “creative” as opposed to expository.  Expository writing, by definition, tends to access more explicit memories and cognitive functions. It is more factual, “dryer,” less memorable.  It is those things in the affective register we remember best:  it is affective response that signal that yes, this, this thing, this moment, this scene, this experience is important, is what means.  Affective response signals to the right neurons to encode:  “the sort of scenes that stick in our minds are those that, for one reason or another, were experienced in a state of emotional excitement” (Carter, 164).[ii]  In a state of emotional excitement, the intensity of perception is increased, and long-term memory potentiation is enabled.  These are precisely the kinds of scenes that the narrative poet encodes.  These are the scenes that have shaken us, and situated us, and given us a way to understand our positions in the world.  In his poem “In the Marsh,” from At the Bonehouse, the poet Jack B. Bedell encodes this kind of moment:

Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part IV: The Function of Memory [by Leslie Heywood]

In my previous posts, I discussed the role of autonomic nervous system response and primary process affect in the brain’s initial stages of information processing, and how poets demonstrate this processing in their work.  In this post and in my final post tomorrow, I will focus on the role of memory in information processing, and how its insistently narrative form is reflected in the ways the poets Jim Reese, Vivian Shipley, Jack B. Bedell, ,and Gary Soto use memory in their poetics.  Again drawing on the work of science journalist Rita Carter, whose Mapping the Mind introduced the complications of brain process for a non-specialist audience, I will now discuss some of the basic functions of memory and how narrative is an innate part of its structures, and the implications of this for poetics. [i]

Memories are groups of neurons that fire together in the same pattern each time they are activated.  The links between individual neurons, which bind them into a single memory, are formed through a process called long-term potentiation (LTP) (Carter 160).  The following are the different types of memory):

• Episodic memory—retains a sense of time and space, sense of being there, recollection of state of mind when the memory was set down.  Personal `filmic’ sense of memory that represents past experience.  Encoded by hippocampus, stored in cortex.  Retrieval depends on frontal cortex.  This kind of memory is more associated with emotion.
• Procedural memory--`how to’ memories like how to lift weights or ride a bike.  Stored in the cerebellum and putamen.  Deeply ingrained habits (as opposed to simpler movement instructions) are stored in the caudate nucleus.  These memories are unconscious and automatic. Deeply ingrained habits (as opposed to simpler movement instructions) are stored in the caudate nucleus.  These memories are unconscious and automatic.
• Fearful/Traumatic memory—this includes phobias and flashbacks, and is unconscious (based in survival reactions connected to the autonomic nervous system).  These memories generate very quick reactions in response to environmental cues that sometimes seem to be an overreaction to those cues.  These memories are stored in the amygdala.
• Semantic memory—store of things we `know’ independent of our personal relationship to them—“useful facts” stripped of personal associations.  Information is registered by the cortex and is encoded in the cortical areas of the temporal lobe, and retrieval is carried out by the frontal lobe.  This kind of memory is more associated with “rationality” (Carter 161-2).
• Short-term memory—information from the very recent past
• Long-term memory—that information memorable enough to get retained and stored.  The process of laying down long-term memory takes up to two years, and until then these memories are fragile and can be easily wiped out.  If emotional excitement is initially experienced with the sensory stimuli, this pattern is much more likely to become a long-term memory. 

In addition, memory is characterized by the following processes: 

• Consolidation—the replay from hippocampus and back again that turns fleeting information into long-term memory (164).
• Covert recollection—unconscious memories (174).
• Priming—unconscious recognition of a stimulus or prime.  The prime is the stimulus itself, something like a previously encountered face (174).
• Prolonged exposure to stress hormones damage the hippocampus and therefore memory recall and consolidation (174-5).

The different types of memory are located in the following brain structures:

• Temporal Lobe (cortex):  long term memories;
• Putamen:  procedural memories, like riding a bike;
• Hippocampus:  memories are laid down and retrieved here, particularly personal memories and memories related to finding your way;
• Amygdala:  unconscious, traumatic memories are stored here;
• Caudate Nucleus—genetically encoded memories (instincts) are stored here.

Affective Poetics and the Need for Narrative III [by Leslie Heywood]

Yesterday I discussed how the poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Joe Weil enact what I am calling an affective poetics: a poetics that demonstrates the bedrock of our affective response outlined in the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose empirical work in affective neuroscience has established the basis for emotional continuities across species. Panksepp’s seven affective systems, which he represents in all caps to indicate their primary process nature, include SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, JOY, CARE, LUST, RAGE, AND FEAR. These systems are situated sub-cortically in the brain, inform and serve as the building blocks for cognition, and represent one of the first levels of response to stimuli. Today I will discuss how behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, which articulates a level of affective response to stimuli that is an elaboration on Pansepp’s seven primary process systems, and occurs at an even deeper level, itself contributes to an affective poetics as seen in the work of poets Kate Gale and Bruce Snider. While Panksepp’s work lets us understand neural circuits between higher brain structures and those in the brainstem; Porges’s work allows us to understand the neural circuits between the brainstem and visceral organs: “neural circuits mediating the reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures, which impact on the availability of these affective circuits” (The Polyvagal Theory, 258). The main postulates of the Polyvagal Theory are the following:

• Emotional regulation and social behavior are psychological processes that respond to events, environment, and people. They shape our sense of self, help form relationships, and determine whether we feel safe in various contexts. Neural circuits are bidirectional, biobehavioral processes that mediate reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures: psychological processes influence body states, and body states influence psychological processes like perception (Polyvagal Theory, 257, 259, emphasis mine).
• Polyvagal Theory provides the context for cognition—the bodily states it describes make cognition possible or impossible.
• Neuroception—the unconscious perception of safety—triggers a response according to these systems, starting with the social engagement system (SES) and ending with the “freeze” behaviors as a last resort. It precedes perception.

• “The evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system provides the neurophysiological substrates for affective processes and stress responses”
• We react to real-world, environmental challenges with three neural circuits, in this order:
• 1) We react with our evolutionarily newest system, the Social Engagement System, a parasympathetic neural circuit that is expressed in the newer myelinated vagus nerve that “functions to facilitate pro-social behavior and to maintain calm behavioral states” (265-66).
• 2) If this doesn’t satisfy our quest for safety, we react spontaneously with the older, sympathetic nervous system that supports fight/flight behaviors.  This system mediates between the two vagal circuits.
• If fight/flight fails, we resort to the oldest vagal circuit, a parasympathetic circuit expressed in the older, unmyelinated vagus nerve  that inhibits motion and is linked to disassociation in response to trauma (playing dead, and having the sensation of floating out of your body).
• Pathways regulating the striated muscles of the face and head and the myelinated vagal fibers regulating the heart and lungs” (270).
• The SES calms the viscera and regulates facial muscles, “enabling and promoting positive social interactions in safe contexts” (270). 

• Porges calls this the “brain-face-heart circuit,” and is both a stress reliever and responsible for the pro-sociality often exhibited by our species.
• “Specific bodily states foster different domains of behavior” (Porges, 278). 

The phylogenetic stage of the autonomic nervous system determines the behavioral, physiological, and affective features of reactivity to things in the environment.  Physiological state limits the range of adaptive behaviors and psychological experiences (265).  Trauma can limit an individual’s ability to engage the vagal brake associated with the SES because trauma victims often  have faulty neuroception and become hypervigilant, always reacting to the environment/people as though they are a threat.

The SES helps detect and express signals of safety in the environment—it “distinguish[es] and emit[s] facial expressions and intonation of vocalizations . . . By calming the viscera and regulating facial muscles, this system enables and promotes positive social interactions in safe contexts” (270).  In other words, it helps us read body language, which is what dogs do as their primary modality of communication, and which is what we do when we are using our pre-conscious neuroception. 

Implications of the Polyvagal Theory for poetics include the following: 

• Affect is primary process and occurs before and informs cognition
• Polyvagal response in the CNS & ANS inform affect
• Both are evolutionarily earlier processes linked to survival value.

One of the main implications for poetics is that if we understand the affective basis of memory and cognition, our poetics will proceed from and value the “bottoms up” approach to information processing as do all our affective and cognitive processes.  Again, these processing levels are bi-directionally linked and indissociable, so even if affect triggers other processes, it is still informed and shaped by secondary and tertiary process memory and cultural learning.  Language and its effects are not primary, or secondary, but rather part of an integrated circuit in this approach.

We can see these patterns of bidirectionality as they are informed by  Polyvagal Theory and its systems of response in the poem “Hotel Room, Patterns of Light” by the poet Kate Gale, from her aptly named book Mating Season (Tupelo Press): 

HOTEL ROOM, PATTERNS OF LIGHT

And now you whose face I have nearly forgotten
Remember how you said you would change the world?
Remember how you smoked weed and drank tea and told me 
in one hotel room after another how glad you were 
you knew your purpose?
Remember how you painted me a picture on birch bark,
a canoe paddling upstream carrying light in the stern?
As if one canoe could make a difference.
Remember how you went to Flagstaff to visit your mother?
When you came back you said, I slept with this hooker 
over the holiday, Sweetness, had to see what it was like 
to order a woman around.
I remember the pattern of light on the hallway floor
shadowed with these little slivers of darkness
that kept disappearing. I opened and closed my mouth 
several times without speaking. Like a fish I was.
Before I left, I dropped the birch bark on the floor.
You left it there, sat rocking back and forth.
Don't go, you said. But you looked all hollow to me.
I could see the door right through you. 
Your voice sounded faraway, like a radio station 
you can never tune in. I walked out into the cold air, 
open sunlight. Last I heard you were in furniture sales.
Measuring success one couch at a time.

Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part I [by Leslie Heywood]

The recent “neuro-revolution” in poetics has tended to replicate the privilege granted to cognition over affect in other areas of neuroscience.  What is most important, from this perspective, is the prefrontal cortex and its attendant brain systems:  those most linked to tertiary processes, the “higher” forms of reasoning that are unique to the human brain, the kind of meta-critical capacity that distinguishes us from our dogs and dolphins, elephants and apes.

Research in neuroscience has been guilty of the same biases until recently.  The term cognitive neuroscience was often taken to describe all brain processes, as if all brain processes were cognitive, primarily because of the assumption that emotion is regulated by cognition and that cognitive processes occur first, structuring the emotion in fundamental ways.  “Cognitive gating mechanisms” were seen to inhibit emotion and determine its expression, thus representing emotion as raw material that is only given its form through cognitive processing—emotions are viewed in cognitive terms.

 This is called a “top down” model of information processing.  However, the most recent advances in neuroscience tell a different story, one that makes a convincing argument for a “bottoms up” model, and one that has wide implications for poetics and the value we have granted to the cognitive over the affective.  Any such attempt to purge affect and narrative is doomed to failure, since it ignores the indissociable relation between affect and cognition, emotion and reason, biology and culture, the brain and the mind.  As current neuroscience has spelled out in some detail in its theories of “functional connectivity,” the one is not possible without the other.[i] 

Instead, “brain-behavior processes” are the products of interaction effects between each, neural circuits that include the control functions of the primary process emotional states themselves.  In fact, recent advances in affective neuroscience argue for “more realistic models that incorporate dynamic properties and bidirectional interactive multi-way communications.”[ii] Instead of occurring through a top-down hierarchy in which cognition occurs first and is the controlling mechanism, neural activity has recently been shown to occur bidirectionally in multiple regions. Furthermore, as the phylogentically oldest part of our brains, the affective systems are most linked to fundamental survival mechanisms that “provide a necessary foundation for higher functions to operate” (Cromwell and Panksepp 2032). 

Crucially, these are the systems shared across all mammalian brains, and point to an affective experiential universality across all mammalian species, including humans.  From a neuroevolutionary perspective, the affective remains fundamental.  It is not a matter of cognition always generating a behavioral response, for instance, such as reader response.  In fact, quite often, it is the more fundamental processes that inform behavior, those “from the gut” responses linked to the embodied, “so powerful it gives me the chills” effect in aesthetic response—a response in the autonomic nervous system triggered by adrenaline. 

With this new information, it’s time to examine the interaction effects, the feedback loops between affect and cognition in poetics.  An affective neuropoetics would, like Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, proceed from the bottom up, locating the roots of our motivations and aesthetic response in the primary affective processes. 

A wonderful example of what I am talking about is Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poem “Watching the Pelican Die,” first published in Prairie Schooner and forthcoming in The Silence in the Empty House (NYQ Books. 2013).   The embodiment of what I have posited here as a site of the interactions between the affective and the cognitive, the poem enacts what, in her own aesthetic theory, Gillan has termed the dialogue between “the cave” and “the crow,” which are the metaphorical representations of affect and cognition.[iii]  For Gillan, the privilege historically granted “the crow”—the social discourses and systems of valuation associated with scientific rationalism, tertiary process cognition, and the masculine—has served to devalue the embodied, the feminine, and the emotional that represents “the cave”—precisely those primary process affects that Panksepp has empirically situated as the very basis of and possibility for the cognitive.  The “cave” in Gillan is the equivalent to affective brain processes in Panksepp, and is similarly fundamental:

Watching the Pelican Die 

On TV, I watch the pelican with its mouth wide open,

its wings and body coated with oil.  Is it screaming?  I do not hear

the sound and since this is a photograph, I don’t know if it was caught

in that mouth-stretched howl when it died or if it’s howling

in recognition that it cannot survive the thick coat

of oil that bears it down. 

 

The ladies who take care of you when I’m gone tell me you

are having trouble.  “His hands,” they say, “his hands.”  When I

come home, I see that your hands have turned black

at the tips and I see that the ends of your fingers

have been eaten away.  I watch the dead bird in the Gulf

floating on top of the water, its legs stiff and straight in the air,

its body drained of all motion, all light.

 

The next day I take you to the doctor; he tells us he will have

to operate to remove the gangrenous flesh.

 

The announcer on CNN says BP didn’t want the photographer

to take pictures of the dying birds covered as they are

with the black slick of oil.  “They were hoping,” he says,

“that the birds would sink and the evidence

would be swallowed by the ocean.” 

 

In the late afternoon, I hear my daughter cry out. I rush to see

what has happened, and you are stretched out on the bed,

your body so thin you look like a boy. You do not move. 

I call 911 and the ambulance takes you to the hospital. 

 

BP is trying to put a cap on the spewing oil rig; the CEO

keeps saying, it’s no problem. Clumps of oil wash ashore

and float on the surface of the water.  The beach is littered

with dead fish and birds. 

 

At the hospital, they want to know whether we want

extraordinary measures.  “No,” I say.  “He has a living will.” 

We hover around while they admit you.  You have forgotten

how to speak.  Mostly you lie in bed, staring into a space

above our heads. 

 

In my mind I see that screaming bird, its mouth wide open,

a picture of torment and despair. 

 

I reach out to hold your hand, stroke your forehead. “Dennis,”

I call out, “Dennis.”  You do not hear me.  The doctor comes in

to see you.  “Well,” he says, “he should have been dead five years

ago.  What did you expect?  You shouldn’t have taken such

good care of him.” 

 

“We did everything we could,” the BP president says, looking

directly at the camera.  “It’s not such a calamity,” says

the governor of Louisiana.  “We don’t need to stop

deep water drilling.  Our economy will collapse if we do.” 

We stand around your hospital bed.  My brother comes in

and says he’ll try a stronger antibiotic.  “It’s bad,” he says,

but he waits until we are in the hall to tell me.

 

The social worker says, “You should put him in a nursing

home.”  My brother says, “You kept him home all this time. 

If he gets a little stronger, I’ll let him go home and he’ll be

around the things he knows.” 

 

The doctor comes in and says, “He’s not going to make it.”

The social worker admonishes us with her bag

of common sense.  She does not love you.  We take you home. 

I sit next to you and hold your hand. 

 

The MSNBC reporter stands on the beach in a hurricane

and picks up a huge glob of oil with a stick.  “Look,” she says,

“look,” and drips the oil on the white sand.  She is shaking

with fury at such destruction. Dead birds float behind her. 

 

“I’m in so much pain,” you say, though you have not complained

before.  Althea feeds you a jar of baby applesauce.  You open

your mouth and accept the food.  When I see the pelican

on TV with its mouth wide open in horror, I remember you

as you lay dying.  On the Gulf, the earth and the sea

are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that finally

defeated you after you struggled against it for all those years. 

 

Some things are bigger than all of us.  We cannot defeat

them.  If there is enough carelessness and greed in the world

even the ocean can be destroyed, and you, who fought

against this illness with such courage, even you

cannot survive, the blackened tips of your fingers, the oil

heavy on the birds feathers, the birds dead and floating on

the surface that gradually sink and disappear. 

 

Astonishing in the depth of its representation of the levels of brain processing, “Watching the Pelican Die” moves from affect to emotion to memory to cognition and back down the chain, establishing the affective basis for human behavior and relations and showing how cognition, when detached from the other levels of processing, can be responsible for destroying the very things it relies upon most—the basic attachment mechanisms of relationships (Panksepp’s “CARE” system), on the one hand, and the biology of ecology, and the relationship between the basic levels of the ecosystem, on the other.  The movement in the poem between the grief the narrator experiences (the basic affective system that Panksepp terms Panic/Grief) and the ways that grief resonates throughout the larger cultural landscape of destruction and loss is a quintessential example of a narrative poetics that embodies and demonstrates the principles of affective neuroscience. In Gillan’s poem we have one of the most bidirectional representations of the relationship between affect and cognition, the cave and the crow, that I’ve seen in contemporary poetry.   As Gillan puts it, “poems hide in a place deep inside you that I call the cave . .  . In the cave are all your memories . . . Every person you’ve ever known or loved or hated everything you are afraid of in the world and in yourself.  In the cave is your rage and your fury and your passion” (Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, 13).
 In neuroscientific terms, Gillan’s “cave” is affect, the primary process affective  brain systems that underlie secondary processes like memory and cultural learning.  Affect is the bedrock poets draw upon, and it is informed by the reactions in the ANS & CNS that neuroscientist Stephen Porges, in his "Polyvagal Theory," calls “neuroception.”

Tomorrow I will discuss the seven basic affective systems in further detail, especially as they are instantiated in the work of the poet Joe Weil. Later posts will explore Polyvagal Theory, its concept of “neuroception” and the vagal ventral complex that links the heart, face, and brain.  Using this work from affective neuroscience, I will discuss the movement from neurophysiology to affect to aesthetics by way of Panksepp’s seven affective systems in conjunction with the Polyvagal Theory and its implications for memory and how creative writers use it via the work of poets Gary Soto, Bruce Snider, Jack Bedell, Vivian Shipley, and James Reese.  The work of all these poets and the affective neuroscience that helps explain their aesthetic projects will be linked to the need for narrative poetics, and narrative as one of our most interactive, bidirectional brain processes.

Extreme Elegies [by Michael Schiavo]

 

Michael Gizzi (1949-2010)

Morgan Lucas Schuldt passed away on January 30 due to complications from cystic fibrosis. I wanted to sketch a portrait of Morgan for this blog, wanted to write about not only his extraordinary life, but the love supreme that his poetry embodied. His death, though, is still too close, and it will take me just a little more time.

I attended his memorial services in Tucson, where he lived for much of the last decade of his life. Like William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg before him, Morgan was a thoroughly Jersey boy, but he found a home in Tucson. He found Mark Horosky and Adam Chiles. He found Stephanie Balzer and Barbara Cully. He found Boyer Rickel.

The climate change from Vermont to Arizona—I mean going from unseasonable April warmth in New England to anomalous frosty weather in the Southwest—the mourning at various memorials those few days—as well as the bourbon that occasionally accompanies said grief—fused with passing a year earlier of Paul Violi—another friend and mentor—all this left me tattered. I returned to work at The Bookstore physically twitchy, emotionally worse.

After catching up with Matt on what I’d missed—including a poetry reading by Clampitt House fellow Bruce Snider—I was presented with a stiff manila envelope. Scrawled on the front was a signed note from the poet Barry Sternlieb: “For / Michael Schiavo / a few from the zen master. / (one just a proof, / the other a signed + / numbered edition— / primitive, but still / packing a punch!)”

I slowly unsealed the envelope. After removing one of the cardboard flats, I gently untaped the fine paper therein to reveal broadsides of Michael Gizzi’s “Extreme Elegy” and “Second Extreme Elegy” that Barry had printed in the mid-’80s. At one point, after a few months of employment at The Bookstore, Matt had informed me that I was only the second poet he’s ever hired. The first was Michael Gizzi.

A Tonic, A Ton

 

Barry is a wonderful guy. We would talk whenever he’d stop by the store, and I know we talked about Michael Gizzi, but I can’t remember as I ever told him just how much I loved his work, how much it had, at one point, intimidated me, and then later enthused me with its familiarity. I’m sure I never told him that one of my favorite Gizzi books is Continental Harmony. And I’m positive I never told him that “Extreme Elegy” is one of my favorite poems not just in that book, not just of Gizzi’s, but of all time.

What I wonder is if Barry will ever fully understand what he did for me this past spring, even when he reads this. In that one moment, through that unassuming act, those poetic powers that I felt closest to, that I felt were forsaking me through the deaths of those whom I most loved and respected (M. Gizzi himself passed away in 2010), all at once, those powers announced their presence.

I wept.

Not out of grief, no, but filled—and not of a sudden—with the consolation of the universe.

—

EXTREME ELEGY

Michael Gizzi

 

                                   after Ives

 

The Last Rites, man

3 helpings! Extreme

Triadic Unction a -bury

a -port a -ton, troughwater

with shadowbarn

                                   like mausoleum

deathward we glide, our viscera

slung The pitch

of New England the mind of an ear

shockt into blooming a -shire

a -vale a –wick     oaken

lid going to sleep

near still-

ness of my life—America,

un

writable love

of foliage in voice

          beside an axe

                    ’til evening

Canvas in moonlight an oversight

comin’ up backstream But only

          a rheumy cache

                                        of russet spittle

like oaken funk, New England, a tonic

 

                    a ton

 

Hazards [by Michael Schiavo]

 

"You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

 

"A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one." — Wallace Stevens

 

 

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." — Gertrude Stein

 

My Mistress' Ipad is Nothing Like the Sun (by Laura Orem)

So you're sitting in an airport, waiting for your flight and jonesing for some poetry. Guess what - there's an app for that! Touch Press has announced Shakespeare's Sonnets for Ipad. At $13.99, it's expensive, but worth it. The app includes performances of all 154 sonnets, facsimiles of the original text, notes, and commentary, along with other gadgets and functions. In other words, hours of fun for the poetry-minded.

Here's a sample: Patrick Stewart reading Sonnet 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes").

 

 

The sonnets are read by David Tennant, Kim Cattrall, and Jemma Redgrave, among others. My only gripe with this app is that the wonderful Stephen Fry only reads one selection: Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"). Here it is:

 

This is not Touch Press' first foray into poetry. They previously released an app for The Waste Land.

 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender, On Thunderclaps & Other Extremes

Equal parts gin, whiskey and brandy, shaken and strained. According one Prohibition-era recipe book, Here’s How!, once you serve it, you’d better run. The Thunderclap does sound pretty awful, and lethal too—a hit-and-run act of weather not unlike the real weather we’ve been having, most recently, a coordinated attack of tornadoes across Oklahoma, Kansas and a few other Midwestern states.

Who is responsible for this vile concoction? Here’s How! suggests that the bartender is, and that his best course of action is to leave the scene of the crime. But when it comes to the equal parts raw sewage, mining residue, and smog that polluters serve up, denial is the favorite course of action. It’s as if the bartender poured you a Thunderclap, stood before you while you downed it, and then said, “I gave you no such thing.”

Unlikely as it seems, the denial tactic has been very successful. Pew’s latest poll shows 62% of Americans don’t believe that pollution is heating up the planet, either because they’ve bought the “natural patterns” argument (“This Thunderclap is perfectly harmless! It’s the water vapor ya gotta watch out for.”), they haven’t seen enough evidence to form a belief (“Thunderclaps are just a theory”), or, scariest of all, they haven’t yet reached the question of responsibility because they deny the planet is getting warmer in the first place (“Thunderclap? There’s no Thunderclap here.”). Among Republicans—i.e., those charged with protecting the 1% from taxes and the polluters from governmental regulation—a very thick layer of denial obscures facts that in clean air would be glaring. Only 19% of them think pollution is driving up the temperature.

Ease of denial comes, in part, from the language concerned environmentalists use to talk about their passion, a set of terms drained of all passion. So forget global warming, greenhouse gasses, carbon
footprint, human activity, climate change, CO₂ emissions, and all the other post-doc terminology when it comes to a sober discussion of the state of our planet. Let’s ask one simple question of climate deniers (what does that term even mean? taking a stand against the existence of weather?):

“Gosh, that was some tornado/hurricane/tap water on fire. Do you think pollution has anything to do with it?”

You’ll get a resounding “yes.”Even from Republicans.

It’s similar to the “yes” you would have gotten in 2006, if you’d asked my neighbor, “Wow, your crappy 2-bedroom ranch is appraised at a half-million dollars! Don't you think that’s a little high?” Among my home-owning friends at the time, the ridiculous price tags attached to our modest dwellings was a common object of marvel. And yet when the bubble burst, howls of “We didn’t knoooowwwww!” arose—not from us, but from the banks, real estate hustlers and speculators who’d driven the prices so high.

Those are the same howls polluters will send up, when the weather gets too bad to ignore. But don’t worry: we won’t hear them under all that angry, gray, flammable water.

Fuck Them [by Michael Robbins]

Most of the poets I know are atheists. Hell, most of the people I know are atheists. Given that only 1.6 percent of Americans self-identify as "atheists," I conclude that I live in a bubble, like most hypereducated aesthetes on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum (I realize that's redundant). To their credit, most of the atheists I know don't consider themselves to be super-special people who should get together and crow about how much smarter they are than all the dimwits who fall for old fairytales about their big daddy in the sky, which is what Daniel Dennett would have them do (consider the self-triumphalism of the ReasonFest conference).

I have nothing at all against either a philosophically-informed atheism or a casual atheism that arises from a simple lack of religious temperament. There is little that annoys me as much as that smug atheism whose adherents refer to themselves as "freethinkers" or "brights." I have met a lot of these people, and not one—not a single one—has ever had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps my anecdotal experience is misleading. Perhaps there are scores of self-described freethinkers who know the history of the concept of reason, who have read Aquinas and Kierkegaard and Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth, who can refute the countless historical errors and category mistakes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as handily as David Hart and Mark Johnston can. But if there are, they're keeping a low profile. And I'm confused about why they would associate themselves with an intellectually bankrupt movement (Johnston rightly calls them "undergraduate atheists"). Because there is an honorable atheism, a school of real thought to which atheists can lay claim. Hart puts the point this way:

The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

Nietzsche would laugh at the idea that the human animal could free itself from delusion by seeking an ontological foundation in the natural sciences. Because the idea is laughable.

A Book is a Book is a Book…[By Leah Umansky]

I may not have always been a reader, but I love books. I’m a bit of a book snob. I love libraries for research and note-taking, but for pleasure-reading, I’m selfish. I need my own book. 

I’m needy when it comes to books. I want my own margins, my own headers and footers, my own lines to underline and draw boxes around. I love the idea if borrowing a book in a library, especially if it’s an old book with a worn-in binding, and yellowed pages. With that said, I’m hesitant to even borrow books from friends, because impulsively, I’ll write in them.

Ironically, some of my favorite books are literary-themed.  I’ve listed three here, (though trust me there are many others): Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Travelers Wife , and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love. They all either have characters who are librarians or writers, or take place in some kind of literary landscape. If you haven’t read these books, you should. They are filled with urgency, desire and a love for the written word, but do not ask me for my own copies, because some are signed and I assure you my pages are filled with my markings.