The Fireflies of Poetry

“At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync.” (Steven Strogatz, Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, 2015)

What might this have to do with poetry? Bear with me . . .

Perhaps the best-known occurrence of this “cycles in sync,” most often arising only in isolated sections of the world, is nature’s mysterious manifestation of thousands of fireflies that gradually flash on/off synchronously in unison within a constant rhythm and tempo. The means by which this synchrony might be regulated and progressively emerge is believed to be a combination of:

• a natural chemoelectrical oscillation within firefly brain cells

• a firefly’s self-adjustment in response to the flashes of others.

The flashing begins in an asynchronous incoherence, but little by little – the fireflies both sending and receiving signals – a group unity is spontaneously achieved.

Or, as Strogatz describes it, “the fireflies organize themselves.”

Want a more personal, intimate analogy for what might be happening in a poem?

In three different locations, your heart has thousands of what are known as pacemaker cells – also a natural chemoelectrical conduction system – that use sodium, calcium, and potassium ions permeating the pacemaker cells to maintain your heartbeat. From birth to death these cells keep the heart at a certain rhythm and pace.

Individually and collectively, these unique cells self-organize your heartbeat.

Becoming lost in the writing process pretty much describes what happen when someone is deep into writing a poem.

Everything – the desk, lights, books, sounds, shelves, walls, doors other people – recedes as the writer advances forward, interacting with the unhurried, deliberate, measured construction of the poem, the time-consuming relationship to the word taking precedence over everything and everyone around the process.

The closer the writer comes to the completion of the work, the more there is a tangible, mental and physical feeling of communion with the body, flow and content of the poem. 

As with a puzzle built from many disparate pieces, a larger picture gradually appears; a growing clarity of feeling, communication and purpose emerges.

As it develops, the poem reaches what is known in many of the sciences as a point of phase transition – a process where a material transforms from one phase of matter to another.

Words become more than they were, something other than they were intended before arriving in the poem.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the beating heart of the poem finding its rhythm, discovering the right words and their combinations.

To continue this analogous train of thought, words are the cells of language, complete with their own versions of chemoelectrical oscillations and self-organizing principles and effects.

A word’s chemical energy of meaning converts to an electrical energy of comprehension.

Oscillation is a word’s sound, rhythm, rhyme, juxtaposition, resonance with other words.

These all act upon each other like multiple pebbles being dropped into a small pond with the ensuing, widening concentric circles fanning out, interfering with, succeeding as well as joining with each other.

Self-organizing is order, pattern, structure, grammar, syntax – but add in the human brain with its own alphabet soup of continuous interpretation, adaptation, modification as well as the massaging/messaging of technology’s media – and we have an outcome that, as a complex system, is a poem composed of collaborative, adaptive, networking elements and influences that produce a linguistically dynamic emergent pattern and structure.

although    it’s   true    that   everything   you’ve heard  about  the  mind  browsing  a  confluence    of    the   senses   while   also   freewheeling   all  the  angles  in  a  word    it  leads  to  a  mystery  of  how a  relationship  emerging  whole  out  of  the  heart  

being   both   a   commotion  at  the centre   of  thought  and  calm  at  the  perimeter  of  speech  surely  must   point  the  way   to  a  map  about  everything  being  everywhere  part  of   a  confusion  of  tongues   mistaken  for  the  real  purpose  of 

every  life  becoming  something   that   might   well   turn   out   to    be   a  language   in  a  language   in  a  language   that  continues  and  continues  to  look  for  what   the  brain  might  be  thinking  when  it  thinks  while  the  heart  at the brink  of

knowing  is  a resilient  country  of  intention  where  nimble  coercions of meaning  are known  and  not known  to exist  all  the  world  over  in  its  motley whereabouts