As a break from poetry and its accoutrement–letters, biographies, journals–I’ve been reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. It is, essentially, a collection of case studies of patients with various neurological diseases. It’s charming, light and hopeful for the most part, and as a consequence, it’s been a great relief.

However, while I was reading Chapter Nine, “The President’s Speech”, poetry couldn’t help but elbow in. The chapter seemed to suggest a new way to conceive of what makes a good poem, new questions to raise in the process of revision.

In “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes how his patients reacted while watching a technically unnamed president ( “the old Charmer, the Actor” ) give a speech: some patients “looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive”. However, the far majority of the “patients were convulsed with laughter.”

This particular collection of patients consisted of two groups: one group with aphasia and the other with tonal agnosia, which is also known as aprosodia. Aphasia is, according to Wikipedia, “a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language” and Sacks describes tonal agnosia as a state when “the expressive qualities of voices disappear – their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character–while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood.”

Sacks says that while patients with aphasia cannot understand speech on the word level, “something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that–at least with emotionally-laden utterance–the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed.”

As a consequence, he feels that it is impossible to lie to the aphasiac: “to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one–this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs–they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give–or remove–verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice. In this, then, lies their power of understanding–understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic.”

Patients with tonal agnosia, on the other hand, have to rely solely on the literal world of language, but can also get along with the aid of observing body language. However, in “The President’s Speech”, Sacks describes “Emily D.”,  a patient with tonal agnosia who is also losing her sight. As a result, Emily had to give “extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same.” He goes on to explain,

“She could less and less follow loose speech or slang–speech of an allusive or emotional kind–and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose–‘proper words in proper places’. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree, for lack of perceived tone or feeling.

In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of ‘expressive’ speech–in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words–despite being more and more lost with ‘evocative’ speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).”

In an essay titled “Writing” included in The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claims that every poet has an inner censor to whom he or she submits work for approval and criticism. He goes on to recommend that “to keep his [the poet's] errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”

After reading “The President’s Speech”, I should like to nominate two new personae for participation in this censoring process: the blind tonal agnosiac and the blind aphasiac, each of whom could simultaneously critique the poem that has been–or is being–written, and both of whom the poet should aim to please.

This would mean that the poem should, on the one hand, be completely emotionally authentic in “every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations”; there should be no emotional misstep.

However,  as Ezra Pound writes in “A Retrospect”, “if a man use ’symbols’ he must use them so that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.” A poem has to work on this most literal of levels as well, not relying only on the authenticity of emotion, but remaining clear to the tonal agnosiac who can grasp only the literal meaning of the poem through “the apt choice and reference of words”.

The poem should be understandable both as an inarticulate emotional whole and on the literal level of the “verbal contraption”.

However, as Sacks writes, “We normals–aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”

Maybe it’s time to start passing our poems around at the psychiatric ward instead of in the MFA program? Would that be redundant? I guess the MFA program at least has access to booze. Is that enough of a definitive characteristic?