FEATURED POET: HELEN MORT
Before we begin, I need your opinion on vanilla slices and general bakery. What’s your favourite? That’s a life or death question. I’m not particularly discerning. If there’s a cake, I’ll eat it. If it’s a cake with booze or coffee in, I’ll probably eat it in one. My favourite cake to bake is whisky and ginger loaf (best served with a dram) but it doesn’t survive long past the making. Poetry: what is it good for? The right cerebral hemisphere, if the book that inspired my PhD thesis is to be believed. I’m studying whether poetry and neuroscience have anything useful to say to each other and the tome in question is Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and his Emissary’. McGilchrist suggests that many of the features that distinguish poetry from other forms of verbal expression (prosody and temporal sequencing, for example, or ‘music and timing’ to put it better) are connected to the right hemisphere of the brain and its unique, holistic processing style. This is interesting because for decades, neuroscientists focused almost exclusively on the role that the logical left hemisphere plays in language comprehension. Poetry, as we all suspected, is a unique form of expression. It’s easier to come up with a list of things poetry is bad for, of course: liver, skin, wallet, relationships, eyesight, sanity. In no particular order.