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20 June 2005: The past two days or so, I have had Important Insights into the Nature of Poetry. Thinking about why some people seem innately incapable of appreciating it--and others innately incapable of appreciating various kinds of it (such as visual poetry), got me under way. My first Important Insight (important, mostly, because new to me, I suppose) was that words are, among other things, grammatical objects. Ah, you knew they were. I did, too. But I had never thought of them as being grammatical objects inside the brain. That is, I realized that could be perceived as grammatical objects. This relates to poetry insofar as it gives words one extra way of causing verbal pleasure. It would be why, for instance, Cummings's locution, "pretty how town," can give pleasure to those with effective . . . "grammaticeptual sub-awarenesses."
Whazzat? My theory of psychology supposes the existence of, so far, ten awarenesses. One of them is the reducticeptual awareness. This is where a person processes symbola and/or concepts--numbers, words, ideas. . . . It is divided into at least two primary sub-awarenesses, the linguiceptual and the matheceptual awarenesses. The former is what counts so far as poetry appreciation is concerned. I divide it further into a number of secondary subawarenesses which include the grammaticeptual awareness.
My second Important Insight was that words (or syllables) are, among other things, location markers. This insight is far-reaching, for it seems to me to explain how we appreciate aesthetic form. I suddently connected it to my thoery's "cartoceptual awareness" or awareness of place in space (and, probably, time). I claim we have hard-wired maps that form the basis of our more complex learned maps of not only geography but of musical compositions, novels, philosophies, etc.--including poems. Recognition of repeated elements are central to the way we make, or learn, our maps. My grasp of this is not yet very good. Hence, my ability to explain it is--well, I hope at least suggestive.
But, surely, we automatically perceive symmetries as symmetries, and that is one basis of knowing where we are anywhere. And rhymes make sense as markers, and stanza breaks as milestones. Line-breaks as stop signs. I hope to think all this into sharper focus, and increased detail. But will leave it, for now (in this very preliminary proto-essay).
Once I got started on the different ways words can be perceived, I made a list of all the ways I could think of: What WORDS (or the equivalent or near-equivalent) can be perceived AS:
I hope it's plain from the list alone how many ways there are to appreciate what words do in poems--and how each person brings a different combination of awarenesses to a poem, or the smae group, but with each member of it working at a different level from the homologous member of any other person's group. I plan to continue this tomorrow.
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