Finding Landmarks in Poems
I recently read Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation by Christopher Kemp and found it fascinating. It’s full of beautiful descriptions of the brain and its processes. And it got me thinking not just about how I know my way around my hometown, but also about how I find my way around a poem.
It turns out that language is integral to mapmaking and orienting; storytelling helps us navigate. We build mental maps faster when we have a personal story attached to a landmark than when we are just following a series of turns (ex. “turn right after the park where you had your first-grade school picnic” instead of “turn right at the next intersection”). Landmarks help us narrate and direct our movement through space; they help us connect our mental awareness of where we want to go with our multisensory awareness of where we are in space.
This helped me understand why I can navigate without GPS in places I’ve lived for years but become embarrassingly dependent on my phone when I visit a new city. It also helped me understand a pattern I’d noticed while editing poems (my own and others’): sometimes my initial response is to feel lost, ungrounded, disoriented, unsure which direction I’m facing or what I’m meant to be looking at. Even if I have a clear read of the speaker’s emotions, I don’t quite know where they point. In short, I can’t navigate my way through the process of meaning-making because the poem hasn’t fully developed its sense of place. (This is not to say I don’t want a poem to bewilder me a little; I want to be simultaneously bewildered and oriented when I read a poem.)
Poems (or the people who read them) need landmarks. A poem’s landmarks help readers explore the world of the poem; they tie together the tangible and the abstract or possible. Reading a poem is an act of navigation in that it fuses mental awareness and multi-sensory perception.
A landmark might be an image that begins or ends the poem—telling us just where we are. It might be an epigraph that helps us connect the poem to a particular context. It might be a reference to the sky, to the earth, to I-80, to the doors or windows of a room. It might be a series of memories that serve as touchstones from the speaker. It might even be a recurring sound that serves as a kind of mile-marker, charting a loop back to a particular mood or obsession. But all landmarks help the reader find their way into and through the poem.
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