Poetics of Cognition: Thinking Through Experimental Poems

Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks: How do experimental poems "think" and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss.

The cognitive research Luck draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can reshape the activity of the reader's mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. This book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century.


Author: Jessica Lewis Luck
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 08/14/2023
Pages: 228
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.40h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781609389055
ISBN10: 1609389050
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Poetry
- Psychology | Cognitive Psychology & Cognition

About the Author
Jessica Lewis Luck is professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. She lives in Redlands, California.