ENGAGING THE INTELLECT

One of the defining features of poetry is its ability to stimulate the intellect, such that the reader's/listener's response does not end with the moment of reading/listening, but continues to reverberate within the mind for seconds, minutes or even years afterwards.

In poetry, the imaginative stimulus is provided to some degree by sounds and rhythms working at the level of the subconscious. However, the intellectual appeal of poetry lies largely in its concentrated use of meaningful words.

• Sound and meanings together evoke remembered images, voices, emotions, etc.
• Memories, once invoked, trigger others across the inscrutable labyrinth of the listener's/reader's mind.
• Memories, perhaps previously unrelated, come together in the forefront of the mind.
• The intellect, once engaged, acts upon the assembled information to create new associations and ideas.
• The reader or listener gains satisfaction from the process, such as solving the puzzle presented by the poet, stumbling upon a new line of thinking, etc.

These processes are made still more exciting by the uniqueness of the mind, in the sense that each person's mind encapsulates a unique portfolio of personal memories and a complex matrix of associations formed through unique personal experience.

Even the simplest words may trigger an idiosyncratic series of responses that would not all be familiar to others. For example, the word "seaside" might conjure up thoughts of happy childhood days in one person, while causing someone else to shudder at the memory of a near-death experience.

From a poet's perspective, the evocative and imaginative power of a piece is increased by choosing words (and phrases) that are likely to trigger complex responses - for example, words that:

• are open to many different interpretations (e.g. senseless, flat, land);
• represent grand or otherwise challenging ideas (ineffable, eternity, loving);
• have emotive or otherwise strong associations in the minds of many people (flower power, slimy, bayonet);
• cause the reader to stop and think, perhaps by virtue of their relative unfamiliarity or unexpected context (ineluctable, iron tapestry).

SUB-TEXT

When the imagination and the intellect become engaged, the reader/listener is likely to perceive meanings that are not explicitly stated in the text. Such thoughts may be nothing more than irrelevant interference, caused by the evocation of memories that have no immediate relevance. Importantly from a writer's perspective, however, many such thoughts are a logical outcome of the interpretative process, and may be premeditated accordingly.

Specifically, the reader/listener works to construct a coherent mental "picture" (whether truly visual or not) of what is meant by the text. If the mind perceives that important details are missing from the text, it may call on memories to fill the gaps. The picture changes as further information is provided explicitly by the text. The sub-text is the part of the picture that is never explicitly stated, but is nevertheless crucial to the reader's/listener's interpretation of the text.

It is virtually impossible, of course, to provide a truly complete picture using words alone. Characters in books, for example, are differently perceived by different readers, however carefully the author describes them. Indeed there are few writers, and especially poets, who would seriously want to eliminate ambiguity, with all its potential for richness and evocation, from their work. On the contrary, since poetry is deliberately concentrated into few words, the sub-text may be as powerful as the text itself. Part of the wonder of sub-text is that, whilst it may be largely intended, different readers/listeners may perceive meaningful sub-text that the writer had not foreseen.

Sub-text may be used to mirror any or all of the functions of text. The key question for the writer seeking to develop sub-text is "How do I get across the idea that ... (e.g. the girl is about to have a nervous breakdown; A is out to rob B; etc) without actually saying it?"

Click here for a full list of topic sheets concerning subtext.