Random Notes from a Crank

Listening to radio on the way back from our trip to Iowa today, I surfed through a few classic rock stations. That moniker is getting stretched mighty thin. In the wake of a thirty minutes, I listened to a smattering of tunes from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I get why the stations are including songs from the 80s and 90s, but after a while, the pseudo-genre of classic rock is going to bust. I just don't think it's elastic enough to afford The Cult's "Fire Woman,""Ohio," Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero," and Beatles' tunes. Aside from the work of Foreigner, I like all three of those groups, but it seems to me that considering the demographics, lovers of music from the 80s and 90s might not want stuff from the 60s and 70s mixed in. Thus, the niche stations of satellite radio.

One radio station that has gotten it right though is KFMW Rock 108, the station that started exclusively purveying in hard rock/metal when I was in high school. 

I have finally started reading Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene, a book written by a cognitive neuroscientist that I bought over a year ago. It's damn interesting stuff. One tidbit that I thought I'd share goes out to the poets. In the chapter titled "The Brain's Letterbox," there's this nugget that might be pertinent to writing verse. It relates to the fixation which, for purposes here, would be the center of the page. Dehaene provides these points to ponder: "Letters that appear on the right side of our gaze are at a clear advantage: they go straight into the left hemisphere [where the "brain's letterbox" resides] and do not have to travel any distance to reach the letterbox area [where reading initially happens in the brain]. Letters that appear on the left, however, first reach the right hemisphere and must then move across the two hemispheres through several centimeters of callosal cable. As a result, even in normal readers, reading is always a bit slower and more error-prone when words appear on the left side of fixation rather than on the right. The increased length of transfer and, perhaps most crucially, the reduced flow of information transmitted through the corpus callosum are costly for word recognition. Thus, in the human brain, positional invariance is incomplete: not all zones of the retina are equally efficient at reading, and, like AC [a person used as an example], we all see [comprehend, understand] words somewhat better on our right." Now, I'm no poet, but I've dabbled in writing verse some and read a bit about the craft of poetry through blogs and two books mainly -- A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns -- but the research provided here coheres with half of the advice I've gotten about writing poetry: the advice that the start and the end of the lines are the most important parts of the lines. But what I think people might need to consider is that the end of the line may have the most impact if what Dehaene relates is true, and it seems to be with the bevy of neuroscience he has backing him up. The neuroscience research might also seem to advise poets to use easier images/words to grasp at the start of the line and then employ the more complex/difficult poetical diction at the end of the lines because the brain apparently has a better chance of "getting it" if the gaze is turned toward rightward. 

And by the way, I heard one song on Rock 108 today that could compete with Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" for the rock song with the most cliches. That was some bad, bad poetry. Just horrible.