In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I’d post a selection of some poetry on brainy themes. Here, for instance, is the opening stanza of Franz Wright poem in the latest New Yorker, entitled “The World of the Senses”:

What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.

I sometimes wonder if people have always had a sense of their senses being special effects, or if the modern age (and by modern I mean everything since the Enlightenment) is particularly conscious of the fact that, as Kant put it, “the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.” I mean, Plato wrote about those flickering shadows on the cave wall, but that was more about Platonic forms than about the fallibility of our senses. And what about before Plato? Is there something about our sensory reality that makes us inherently suspicious? Or is that suspicion a by-product of modern skepticism and science? (I was surprised, the other day, to meet a first grader who knew all about visual illusions…His favorite was the dalmatian and the dots.) After all, we didn’t always realize that our reality was merely an emanation of a trillion electrical neurons, which had been haphazardly engineered by natural selection. Perhaps we stopped trusting our senses when we stopped talking about the “soul”?

And here, because it’s April, are the first and last stanzas of “You,” one of my favorite Auden poems:

Really, must you,
Over-familiar
Dense companion,
Be there always?
The bond between us
Is chimerical surely:
Yet I cannot break it.

Who tinkered and why?
Why am I certain,
Whatever your faults are,
The fault is mine,
Why is loneliness not
A chemical discomfort,
Nor Being a smell?