There’s Thrift in Heaven: Why the Feet of Poetry Beat Toward Freedom

By Elizabeth Coons

To be fully free, we must make informed choices at the level of framing as we sift imagery into experience. The deeply figurative nature of poetry allows us to compare alternative framings in an abundance that is unavailable in declarative speech, where lines of reference are exclusive. . In addition, in imitating our own mind's movements, poetry lets us start to name them, thereby expanding the reach of comparison and choice within.

This book looks at the relation among freedom, poetry, and informed choice. It also explores how poetry can endure through the depth and abundance of its framing demonstrations.
Poetry can
• Demonstrate framing processes that, by reordering, reveal long-hidden features and extend our visible domain.
• Build the comparative skills that increase choice across domains
• Reflect and trace our current framing processes
• Fortify us against manipulative influence

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663212436

Elizabeth Coons

Elizabeth Coons is an independent scholar who seeks to find out whether “great” or enduring poetry endures in part because it performs cognitive services that we need both to survive and to be free. For the past ten years, her “day job” has entailed technical and medical writing. With added study, she qualified and works as an editor in the life sciences. Throughout her professional life, she has been a member and later an officer of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and its local predecessor (the Alliance of Independent Scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Elizabeth also belongs to the American Medical Writers Association, the Unitarian Universalist History Society (UUHS), the Union of Concerned Scientists, an active UU church, and the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences. She enjoys creative nonfiction, 18th-century rhetoric, running, swimming, choral singing, and running a household of busy people and two busy cats.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Elizabeth Coons.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

844-349-9409

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1244-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1243-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020921441

iUniverse rev. date: 12/30/2020

Contents

Introduction

How I Got Here

The Composite Present

Snow Physics

A Mistake

Drawing to Scale

Widening Our Repertoires of Models

Reach for Sunlight

I Can Hear the Quiet Coming

The Hut at Gulls’ Cove

The Next Light

Still

Our Moon

Making us Aware of Our Own Framing Processes

On Evans Way

Turning Sixteen

The Closet Door

Lenses and Framing Mirrors in Donne, Blake, and Dickinson

Summarizing Note

Bibliography of Works Consulted

Introduction

This book includes a collection of my poems from the last ten years. Also included is my case for asking, as we teach and evaluate poetry, how the poem in hand extends, diversifies, and above all illuminates our own schemes of emphasis and other framing practices.

Perception, of course, varies with the perceiver. However, most of us would agree that perception, like learning, is a process with parts, sequences, and contingencies. It is illuminating to remain aware that the operations of learning and perception are always at issue when poetry is written or received. These operations are now the formal subject matter of cognitive psychology, but they have always mediated between poets and readers’ or listeners’ experience. In these terms, great literature that reaches us from earlier centuries endures in part because it has helped its readers or listeners to perceive, organize, and use the imagery that they encountered off the page. Art in general and poetry in particular usually perform important cognitive services for their viewers, listeners, and readers.

At the most elemental level, poets, and storytellers initially support our pursuits of knowledge by reminding us that the present is not a monolith but an assembly of imagery. These figurative writers also demonstrate that a good part of this incoming imagery is variable, and amenable to change including our own intervention.

Many of us may feel that we natively know that the present is composite, contingent, and amenable to intervention by way of choices that we make in our emphasis. However, almost all of us benefit from periodic refresher demonstrations. For example, it is all too easy to personify the present, treating it as an enemy, a potentate to be placated, or a friend. This demonstration of the plural or many-faced present is one of the first changes that art of any kind makes for