Contemporary poetry strays from traditional ideas of a poem: rigid structure, definitive rhyme scheme, commonly about nature or love. Poetry exemplifies and dissects certain internal states, tracing racial, political, and gendered themes of universality and solitude. At my university, I’m currently enrolled in a class dedicated to Contemporary American Poetry where we discuss the complexities of this genre. I’ve found studying poetry makes me a better writer. This comes from the emphasis on dissecting details, utilizing a larger context as reference, and reconciling metaphors with the reality which poetry embodies. Details: I understand poetry is not for everyone. It’s confusing, sometimes upsetting, and not everyone connects to it. Like any other form of writing, the participation of the reader is as important as the author’s. Poets and readers alike must make an effort to be conscious of the connections between words and their referents in reality. This sense of awareness also yields a better comprehension of the details in poetry. The most compelling part of poetry, in my experience, is the deep attention to detail. For example, Claudia Rankine uses her profound awareness of micro-aggressions to detail one moment’s “intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds.” Rankine develops in her poem these daily occurrences of oppression to turn the mundane into the profane. With every poem I read I am more astounded by the level of concentration to the details which she describes with such fervor. Noticing them in written works creates a distinctive awareness of including them…

Announcing The MIT Press will publish Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing by Mark Johnson and Don M. Tucker in fall 2021. From a philosopher and a neuropsychologist comes an interdisciplinary theory of knowing as embodied, embedded, enacted, and emotionally-based. Plato’s allegory of the cave trapped us in the illusion that the mind is separate from the body, from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be eternal and absolute. With recent advances in neurobiological and computational sciences, we now understand that what we think and how we think depends on our brains and bodies as they operate in our physical, social, and cultural environments. Everything we experience, know, feel, value, and do results from bodily processes of which we are seldom aware. Mind and self are inescapably rooted in motivational systems controlled by values and emotions tied to survival and well-being. Knowing arises from these fundamental biological values, which make possible and shape our abstract conceptualization and reasoning. Mark Johnson is Professor of Philosophy and Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emeritus, at the University of Oregon. He is author of The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (2018), Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (2017) and Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science (2015). He is co-author, with George Lakoff, of Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 2003) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The…