Some Thoughts on "A Mind Thinking"

Abstract

new catchphrase has entered the discourse of and about twenti eth-century poetry unthinkingly. Although the catchphrase, which defines the task of the poem as that of portraying thought, mind thinking, has achieved great popularity?it has been employed by Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Bernstein, and James Longenbach?it is highly problematic. Even glance at formula tion reveals inherent difficulties, ambiguities and dated ness. While the poem of a mind thinking is presented as radical alternative to the poem as static product of thought, it presents picture of the mind's activity that is not at all radical. A mind seems natural, eloquent, fitting; parts?mind and think ing?correspond with Cartesian clarity which, even after encounter with the all-powerful evil demon of doubt, could confi dently claim that mental phenomena were the results of ing rather than of dreaming or delusions. In century following Rimbaud's anti-Cartesian declaration, I am another, and in cen tury suspicious of the mind's mechanisms following psychoana lytic boom and the work of postmodern critics from Barthes to Irigaray who describe the self as construct, that such formula tion could become so popular seems incredible. Thought must be given to the ways in which this catchphrase has metamorphosed from origins as merely descriptive tool and as passionate though uncritical expression of poetic ambition and praise to most recent and most troubling manifestation as critical device for system-building. Thought must be given to the meanings and the uses and the meanings of the uses of this increasingly problematic catchphrase. phrase, thought, but mind thinking, was first used by the critic Morris W. Croll in his essay, The Baroque Style in Prose (in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, Princeton University Press, 1966), merely as part of description; Croll says of his essay that its purpose is to describe the form of.. .baroque prose (208). Although non-evaluative, Croll's exciting descriptions of baroque prose?It preferred the forms that express the energy and