The Creating Brain: reaching Xanadu

Nancy Andreasen, professor of psychiatry at Iowa University talking with Lynne Malcolm, All In The Mind, Radio National, 21 May 2012.  Dr. Andreasen's most recent book The Creating Brain: the neuroscience of genius is published by Dana Press and distributed in Australia by Footprint Books.

"... creative people tend to be very curious about all kinds of things, they tend to be adventuresome, they tend to be a little bit iconoclastic, which is related to being original of course. Sometimes they just perceive things in a totally new and different way that other people are simply not able to see. I mean they see things that are true and real and that are obvious to them – that's especially true in science and math and they aren't obvious to other people. You know some of the creative scientists I know say over and over, isn't that obvious, isn't that obvious, it's just obvious, doesn't everybody know that, that's obvious.
They are sometimes a little prone to get into trouble because they are original and seem rebellious and especially you could get into trouble when you're a younger person. You may be unpopular with your teachers because you might seem like a know-it-all; you may be unpopular with your peers for the same reason. So some people who are creative have somewhat miserable childhoods. And I think it's one of the challenges of our society, of all societies, to figure out how to actually recognise and nurture these original kids rather than essentially sometimes punishing them for their originality.
Another characteristic is that they tend to be obsessional, not in a diseased way but they start to chew on a problem – and that might be writing a story, it might be a math problem, it might be a computer science problem, it might be creating a painting – and they get into it so deeply that they may end up working all night on what they're doing."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-creating-brain---reaching-xanadu/4016828

 http://nancyandreasen.com/

Harold Bloom

 "Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for "figurative language is "metaphorical", but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal."

Four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor.
Irony - commits those who use it to issues of presence and absence.
Synecdoche - "symbol" - figurative substitute of a part for a whole also suggest that incompletion in which something within the poem stands for something outside it.
Metonymy - contiguity replaces resemblance, since the name or prime aspect of anything is sufficient to indicate it, provided it is near in space to what serves as substitute.
Metaphor - transfers the ordinary association of one word to another.

"Figuration of tropes create meaning, which could not exist without them, and this making of meaning is largest in authentic poetry, where an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness."

from The Best Poems of the English Language

 Harold Bloom reciting Wallace Stevens 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon'

"The Anatomy of Influence": Six Questions for Harold Bloom

The Poetry of Politics: Australian Aboriginal Verse - Adam Shoemaker

For example, as Stanner has commented, the Black Australian sense of oneness with the soil – which is the essence of the land rights campaign – is a relationship which requires a poetic understanding:

No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets.^[364]

http://epress.anu.edu.au/bwwp/mobile_devices/ch08.html

Elizabeth Bishop at 100