Neuroscience and Connection-Making in Contemporary Poetry. Helen Mort

‘Something else, then something else again’: neuroscience and connection-making in contemporary poetry. Helen Mort PhD Thesis The University of Sheffield English Language and Linguistics March 2015 1 Acknowledgements I am indebted to The University of Sheffield for awarding me a University Prize Scholarship that enabled the completion of this PhD thesis over three years. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my patient and supportive supervisors, Dr Joanna Gavins and Professor Adam Piette in the School of English. Thanks also to Dr Tom Stafford in the Department of Psychology for his support and many useful reading and research suggestions and to both the School of English Work in Progress group and the Cognitive Poetics Reading Group which provided forums for discussing new ideas. I am also indebted to all the poets who agreed to be interviewed as part of this thesis and gave up their time so generously, not just in the interview process but throughout the whole project and to everyone who has read or commented on the blog I kept throughout my research ‘Poetry on the Brain’. Thank you to my friends and family, particularly Ben, Alan, Jill, Ed, Kathy, Andrew, Grace, Mike, Jim, Ruth, Iain and Ian, all of whom have helped out in vital ways. And a special thanks to my dad, Andy Mort for his meticulous proof reading skills. Last but not least, thank you to all the members of Derbyshire Irregulars Climbing Society for helping me keep my feet on the rock and my head out of the clouds. 2 Abstract This thesis establishes a dialogue between neuroscience and contemporary poetry, based on Bakhtin’s principle of dialogicality (1981) and presents a novel approach to combining two disciplines usually regarded as separate. The contention of the thesis is that neuroscientists and poets are often concerned with the same questions about human consciousness and seek to explore the same ‘mysteries’ and that the perspective offered by each field can be greatly enriched by the other (Burke and Troscianko, 2013). I define and develop the approach I call ‘neuropoetics’, setting close thematic studies of key poets (including Norman MacCaig, Paul Muldoon and John Burnside) and qualitative data drawn from interviews with contemporary poets in dialogue with texts and ideas from the domain of neuroscience, notably McGilchrist (2009), Ramachandran (2011), Trimble (2007) and Shermer (2011), but also including Libet et al (1983), Turner and Poppel (1983), Rizzolati (2004), Seung (2013) and others. In this thesis I relate the work of each of the contemporary poets in my study to key issues in contemporary neuroscience (specifically metaphor, patternicity, negative tropes and free will) according to the dialogical principles established at the start. I then draw the work of all three poets together in relation to the themes of memory and self- identity. In conclusion, I evaluate this thesis alongside recent fMRI studies of creative writing and consider how the two approaches could be combined in a future enquiry that gives equal weight to poetry and neuroscience. 3 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Popular depictions of neuroscience and poetry 8 1.2 The structure of this thesis 11 1.3 The poets 12 1.3.1 Norman MacCaig 15 1.3.2 Paul Muldoon 17 1.3.3 John Burnside 19 1.4 Methodology: ‘no intimacy without reciprocity’ 22 1.5 Summary 28 Chapter 2: Literature Review 2.1 Lyric poetry and the implied presence of a consciousness 30 2.2 Why neuroscience? 34 2.3 The convergence of the twain? 41 2.4 Existing literary scholarship on literature and science 43 2.5 The neuroscientific revolution 47 2.6 Existing work on the neuroscience of creativity 50 2.7 Conversations in cognition 53 2.8 Outcomes of the conversation 59 2.9 The view from nowhere: what is neuroscience and what is a poem? 60 2.10 The dialogic alternative 65 2.11 Towards neuropoetics 70 2.12 Summary 72 Chapter 3: MacCaig and Mistrust 3.1 Exact and inadequate 73 3.2 Norman MacCaig’s poetry 76 3.3 Our inadequate language 84 3.4 The neuroscientific parallel 92 3.5 Language and embodiment 103 3.6 The living mountain 108 4 3.7 MacCaig and the right hemisphere 110 3.8 Summary 116 Chapter 4: ‘Should they not have the best of both worlds?’ – Paul Muldoon and duality 4.1 Telling new weather: Muldoon and duality 117 4.2 The critical framework 121 4.3 Muldoon and misreading 128 4.4 Reading Muldoon: a hemispheric parallel 132 4.5 Muldoon and inter-connection 137 4.6 Only connect: the believing brain 142 4.7 Connection for connection’s sake 147 4.8 Summary 155 Chapter 5: The Asylum Dance – John Burnside and Apophenia 5.1 The liminal life – critical contexts 157 5.2 Why link writing and life? 160 5.3 Apophenia and creativity 168 5.4 Parallel worlds and negativity 179 5.5 The importance of nothing 187 5.6 Past, present and future: the illusion of free will 191 5.7 ‘What we desire in pain is order’ 198 5.8 Summary 201 Chapter 6: ‘Or the room where they say he wrote ‘Snow’…’ – poetry, neuroscience and memory 6.1 What is memory? 204 6.2 Not an ending – poetry and the past 208 6.3 John Burnside’s versions of the self 212 6.4 Paul Muldoon’s alternative histories 220 6.5 Norman MacCaig and doubt 226 6.6 Memories and mind-altering lines 234 6.7 Summary 237 Chapter 7: Conclusion 5 7.1 Summarising the dialogue 238 7.2 Poetry, neuroscience and qualia 239 7.3 Recent fMRI studies of relevance to this thesis 241 7.4 Evaluation of this study and suggestions for further research 244 Appendix 1: Transcripts of selected interviews 247 Appendix 2: Transcripted quotes from 2007 interviews 274 Bibliography 278 6 Chapter 1: Introduction In Chapter 7 of his Biographia Literaria (ed. Engell & Jackson Bate, 1983) the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge asks the reader to consider the mind of a person engaged in an act of composition, or even in a more mundane task like trying to remember a name. He presents an analogy for this kind of thought process: Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets…and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem for the mind’s self- experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (Coleridge, 1983: 124-5) For Coleridge, this intermediary was the imagination, which acts as a synthesising power uniting the spirit and matter, the mind and nature, as part of the total and undivided philosophy he was trying to outline in the Biographia. Since art comes from the imagination, the symbols of art represent how the mind perceives itself in relation to nature. Thus art is also part of this constant mediation between man and nature. Coleridge’s reference to the ‘alternate pulses of active and passive motion’ which accompany self-experience implies that the mind both constructs and receives its reality, in partnership with external influences. Though Coleridge was writing the Biographia in 1815, his detailed account of the mind and the imagination remains pertinent in 2014, and alludes to issues at the heart of the twin disciplines examined in this thesis: neuroscience and poetry. Both often focus on the character of what we call ‘the mind’ and how this relates to the act of perception and to what Coleridge considered to be the realm of matter or nature, distinguishing as he did between subjective self-perception and perceptions of the observable, natural world. In this study, I will frame and develop a dialogue between neuroscience and contemporary poets and will consider the relationship between science and art, the relationship between art and the mind and ‘the mind’s self-experience’ in the act of 7 thinking and, furthermore, in the act of poetic composition. The Romantic interest in the mind perceiving itself in the act of perception is something which continues to preoccupy the 21st century neuroscientists and poets examined in this thesis. In this introductory chapter, I will briefly look at popular depictions of both neuroscience and poetry (Section 1.1) before outlining the structure the thesis will take (Section 1.2), the poets included in the study and the reasons for choosing these poets (Section 1.3) and the methodology used (Section 1.4), establishing the framework for a dialogue between neuroscience and contemporary poetry which can enhance our understanding of both disciplines and suggest new points of comparison and overlap between science and literature. My aim throughout is to create the basis for an interdisciplinary conversation between these two different perspectives. 1.1 Popular depictions of neuroscience and poetry In ‘Secrets of the Brain’, published in National Geographic (February 2014), Zimmer observes: ‘Scientists are learning so much about the brain now that it’s easy to forget that for much of history we had no idea at all how it worked or even what it was.’ (Zimmer, 2014: 28) We are, as a BBC article from 2012 noted, living in ‘a golden age of discovery in neuroscience’ (Feilden, 2012) in which it might be easy to forget that this science has only come to prominence in the last three decades.

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