Be Brave Friday
I like the chill-driven features of language
Here’s a kind of secret about me.
I read at least one poem a day and I rush out one draft a day, too.
I know! I know! It’s nothing close to the scandalous gossip about me that a current town council candidate told me about to my face a couple years ago as if it were true.
It was not true.
But in a weird way, poetry feels dangerous. Maybe even a little scandalous? There are so many stereotypes about poets and poetry.
Poets are snooty. Poets don’t care about reality. Poets drink a lot of poet drinks and are of no use when it comes to practical things.
And I do not fit most of the stereotypes about poets or poetry lovers. I work. I don’t wear a beret. I do not have to hold onto things to walk straight. I’m not addicted to coffee or to tea. I am not silent, smelly (hopefully), or live in an attic.
So, if I don’t fit those stereotypes, I must not be a poet, right? Or someone who loves it?
I’m definitely not someone who shares my love very often.
POETRY CHANGES YOUR BRAIN
There’s a really interesting (to me) article on Greater Good about how poetry can change your brain and change you in a positive way. Gasp, I know, right? All those English teachers from your childhood were onto something.
Poetry changes your brain in a good way. We all want that, right?
Mable Buchanan Palmer writes of a recent study, “The team noticed that an area of the brain involved in pleasure called the nucleus accumbens behaved uniquely in response to poetry, showing that listeners can feel the most aesthetic pleasure while showing physiological markers of negative emotion. When humans are most ‘moved,’ it seems to be from a complex mix of pleasure and suffering.
“Even more interestingly, the experiment’s elaborate logistics for tracking the sensation of chills enabled it to identify key ‘chill-driving features of poetic language,’ including word positions (chills were most likely to occur at the ends of lines, stanzas, or poems) and speech acts (participants were more likely to feel chills during lines or phrases coding social communication or emotion, like use of second-person pronouns like ‘you’).”
How cool is that?
There are chill-driving features of poetic language. They change your brain for the better.
Me? I’m kind of addicted to those chill-driving features. And I’m more likely to find that poetic language in a poem than a self-help listicle or a tweet or most social media posts.
Poetic language is often long language; it comes in a space where thought and nuance is allowed to spread across a page. So, a place like Substack, an essay, a speech, a poem, certain kinds of novels.
You get it, right?
Our brains get pleasure from the sound of the poem and from the connections and associations that we make in reading them.
Poetry can even make kinder communities and kinder brains.
Palmer writes:
“One 2023 study found that participants in a virtual COVID-19 poetry community experienced mental health benefits; other research finds that therapy incorporating poetry can improve well-being for people in palliative care,” Palmer writes. “Poetry may also help us build empathy for each other and, in doing so, strengthen our relationships. In 2021, Kent State University researchers put this idea to the test by investigating whether poetry could decrease the stigma against individuals who are incarcerated.”
Here’s the thing. We all need kinder brains. We all need kinder communities
You owe it to yourself to chase those poems, that language.
*My WRITE BETTER NOW posts also come twice a week if you sign up for them, too, which you should. Cough. That’s me trying to sell. I am terrible at it, I know.