POETRY BRAIN
You’ve probably seen this image before. It’s a cartoon of your brain’s hemispheres and the kinds of thoughts each half of your brain handles. Left brain is straight-line, logical, and full of words and numbers and measurements and stuff like that. Right brain meanders around, spiraling in and out, just seeing what-is and mostly having a hard time talking about it.
I was reading Leonard Shlain’s book, THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS: The Conflict Between Word and Image. In it, he does a cool riff on “metaphor,” a thing that is dear to poets.
Shlain says, “When people find it necessary to express in words an inner experience such as a dream, an emotion, or complex feeling-state, they resort to a special form of speech called metaphor that is the right brain’s unique contribution to the left brain’s language capacity…. Metaphors allow one to leap across a chasm from one thought to the next. Metaphors have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously.” …
