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crossing the corpus callosum The Musical phenomenology of Lisa Jarnot Jessica Lewis Luck Lisa Jarnot’s Night Scenes, published in 2008, begins with a casserole of poems cooked up with some Gertrude stein, slices from alexander pope and oulipo, and a pinch of dr. seuss. it’s definitely a dish best served out loud, as shown in “Zero onset”: an eagle added attaboy ongoing outboard oak of after agile april airs in inner age awoke apparent oaten apple arcs, amazing amish ax and undulating ache of air in archival attacks o agitation angrily, o okra ocracoke and after orange onset ilk upon update approach all-knowing error out of earth, o undulate aardvark applicable of oft aft oars, androgynal embark antagonistic afterburn, appalling anvil adze adversity, ambivalence, ashore ashore advance astrology all edible, of aging update om and opening and opening, unpacked allowed aroma authentic arching anarchist, allowance all awry an afternoon, albanian, unurgent and espied. (18) Like many poems in the book, “Zero onset” contains traditional lyric meter, form, and rhyme. not only is this a sonnet in rhymed couplets, it’s also a perfect Fourteener with seven iambic feet per line. But, to be sure, there’s something different going on here than in, say, philip sydney’s 16th century Fourteeners . Most significant is the absence of the lyric “i”; this poem is generated through constraints rather than from the personal experience of the poet. “Zero onset” is a linguistic term. The “onset” is the first of three sounds com- The Musical phenomenology of Lisa Jarnot 189 prising a syllable. For example, in the word “ball,” /b/ is the onset and /all/ is the rhyme. a zero onset occurs when syllables begin with vowel sounds, as is the case with almost all the words in Jarnot’s poem. (an exception is the word “all,” which contains only the rhyme and no onset sound.) The poem highlights the absence of the lyric “i” in the constraint itself—only four words out of ninety-six begin with “i.” Jarnot’s poem thus seems to enact a surrender of the lyric “i” to the rhyme and meter at play behind the sonnet form. This is a helpful description of Jarnot’s experimental poetics in Night Scenes, but in this essay i’d like to consider the work and the effects of reading such a text. it’s especially important to focus on this because the poetry, as it eschews the lyric “i”, also seems to effect a surrender of the reader’s “i” and promote a kind of ecstatic loss of self in the rhythm and music of the poems. indeed, that the poetry’s music is so “catchy” that it becomes difficult to even pay attention to the meaning of the words. What happens when the brain encounters such catchy nonsense? Using theories of literary and musical emotion from contemporary cognitive science, i will argue that Jarnot’s use of infectious musical language promotes a kind of cognitive border-crossing in the reader, from the more logical left cortex to the more emotional and musical right cortex. But i also consider how Jarnot’s poems question that ecstasy even as they invoke it, re-crossing the corpus callosum from right to left, in order to harness that readerly feeling of jouissance to résistance. But before we get to the poetic pathology report on the effects of her infectious poems, i’d like to consider the resurrection of “catchiness” as a significant category in post-Language poetry. i. The Catchiness of the avant-Garde according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though the term “catchy” originally referred more to visual effects that grabbed the attention, it now most commonly describes infectious bits of language and music, such as in “catchy titles” or “catchy tunes.” The word also has a sinister subtext: something catchy may be deceptive and liable to trip one up or be difficult to manage or execute (oed). Catchiness, of course, lies at the historical foundation of the genre of poetry. to preserve the customs, manners, and stories of an oral culture, the medium had to be catchy, easily memorized, recalled, and repeated by performers and listeners (Bernstein, “The art of immemorability” 505). in fact, “[t]he Greeks used the same word, mousike, to describe dance, music, poetry, and elementary education” (preminger and Brogan 804). With the advent of alphabetic writing, however, this catchy quality became less significant. as Charles Bernstein writes, it freed poetry from its “epic function...

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