Poems as Novelty Detectors

In the Editor’s Note of the July/August 2019 Poets&Writers Magazine, Kevin Latimer wrote, “. . . it made me appreciate how easily the human ear can block out background noise. (It’s a built in function of the brain, specifically the “novelty detector” neurons, which store information about patterns of sound and stop firing if a sound or pattern is repeated).”

According to this article Specialized neurons allow the brain to focus on novel sounds by Joel Schwartz in UW News, “novelty detector neurons are somehow able to store information about a pattern of sound, they may also be involved in breaking down an ongoing stream of sound into segments and making predictions about what sounds are expected to occur next.” This makes me think about poems that use anaphora, meter, or rhyme to create a pattern and then suddenly break that pattern.

I love all things neuroscience so I loved seeing it come up in Poets & Writers. I started thinking about how when you’re reading poetry it can become a blur of white noise and then that one word or phrase suddenly grabs your attention, and you want to read the poem again, slowly, and you want more words or phrases that do that, that make you sit up and take notice.

With the billions of poems out in the world, how do we still create something to trigger the novelty detector? I was looking at the course videos for Sharpened Visions yesterday, and Douglas Kearney was talking about how metaphor only works when you bring together two very different things. For this week’s assignment we are to take our metaphor to an extreme and create a conceit, using the example of The Flea by John Donne in which he says a flea is a marriage bed. Definitely a novel idea. And he sticks with it for the whole poem and makes the comparison make sense (the flea created a union of two people by biting both of them).

In what other ways do poems trigger your novelty detector neurons?

The Prompts

dVerse Poetics: Today’s prompt is to emulate Maggie Smith’s conversational mode of address.

NaPoWriMo : Write a poem in which you closely describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or place, but which, of course, really does.

PAD Challenge : It’s two for Tuesday 1. Write a poetic form poem, and/or . . . 2. Write an anti-form poem.

Thought Purge Today’s prompt is “A better world”

We’re halfway through and yesterday, thanks to Wetweather Spring I became aware of two more places to find daily prompts: Quickly and River Heron Review.

Quickly’s prompt is : Abstractions

River Heron Review’s prompt is to lose yourself in memory.

Talk about novelty, I keep finding new places with daily prompts for NaPoWriMo. If I collect all the prompts from all these sites, I may never ever run out of new poetry prompts.

Today’s Poem

Novelty Detector Neurons
~after Maggie Smith

I want to talk about the background noise—
the whisper of the laptop fan, the drone of cafe voices, the highway

traffic in the distance—patterns of continuous
sound we drown and let disappear.

All we talk about is novelty—
What’s new? Breaking news! I got the flashiest

newest thing—as if this second holds a better
world than the last one. But what about

now? And now? What my neurons have muted
are fresh to a new arrival. She notes the whir

of the ceiling fan, tracks the wallpaper pattern,
feels the clash of her shirt with the tablecloth

as she sits. But it will all be forgotten soon.
Happy memories are swallowed in the blinding light of pain.

See you tomorrow!