Years ago, when I was teaching in the legendary English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, one of our poets, Jerry Maguire,convoked a group to read poems.  Jerry’s idea was to bring poets and critics together in order to compare their readings.

What happened surprised me, at least, and, I think, just about everybody in the group.  It turned out that poets and critics read poems quite differently.

The critics concerned themselves with things like repetitions and contrasts of themes and meanings.  The poets, however, paid attention to repetitions and contrasts of vowels and consonants, rhythmic patterns, and all kinds of features of the sound of the poems.  To be sure, there was a certain amount of overlap, but nevertheless, the poets and the critics were reading poems quite differently.

Now, it turns out, they may have been using different systems in their brains.  Kenneth Heilman, a neuropsychologist at the University of Florida, has a fine paper setting out the “information-processing approach” to the various aphasias.  He lists eleven different aphasias, and his paper uses the kind of block diagrams computer programmers use to distinguish and interrelate them…