How Poetry Can Reach Us:

An Interview with Dr. Jeff Bowen

This interview has been adapted from its original transcript for publication.

Exploring the concept that poetry can communicate before it is understood, in this interview with Dr. Jeff Bowen he talks about psychological distance, imagery, and communication—how knowing more about the creator affects perceptions of an artwork, the differences between live performances versus a poem read privately, and how imagery and poetic structures like caesuras can alter cognitive interpretations. And then, how might the digital age also play a role in our understandings?

To start, what got you interested in psychological research? How would you describe your research interests?

Way back in high school, I was fortunate to have the chance to shadow clinicians in a hospital. I found the work that they did with patients rewarding, cultivating resilience and perspective, but what I found most fascinating was talking to therapists and clinicians one-on-one about where their interests—mental health phenomena, behavioral interventions and why they worked­­­—originated. These conversations made me realize there was a world of empirical investigation into social and interpersonal processes within psychology.

My subsequent work in a research lab focused on adult romantic relationships. What fascinated me in my own and other people lives was the fact that there was a scientific discipline exploring something that could seem, at first glance, so subjective. There, I found an academic family while developing autonomous research skills and by graduate school, I was prepared to develop a research identity and merge what I found interesting—relationships and motivation, self-control, language and communication—while finding my niche in the community.

There are multiple phenomena to explore within relationships research such as attraction and relationship formation, but I’ve focused primarily on how people maintain their relationships—what happens when you experience conflict with a significant other such as an act of betrayal, a misunderstanding, uneven sacrifices, a risk of infidelity. How do romantic partners mentally represent those moments and frame one another—what kinds of framings help those who can get through it? Which factors such as attachment styles feed those reconciliations?

As a budding young researcher, I once asked my research mentor whether knowing these things made one better able to navigate their own relationships. Can you operate in them more knowledgeably or more effectively? She responded that this kind of data can be a tool for capturing and understanding what’s happening, allowing you to learn from those experiences and understand yourself in a more comprehensive way. But most importantly, doing this work doesn’t detract from the intrigue and excitement inherent in our own relationships.

Based on your research, in what ways have you found words and pictures to influence people’s thoughts and feelings about others? How do the effects of words compare to those of pictures?

How people process language has been widely studied but not widely applied to art forms such as poetry, and I think there’s a lot of potential and value there—it’s an exciting new extension of knowledge. One thing I’m really interested in is a specific feature affecting how people represent things in their minds: if you’re thinking about a person, like a romantic partner, anticipating an event, a place—an entity to use an all-encompassing word—a good deal of research under the heading of ‘psychological distance’ exists can be found on the consequences of being further away versus closer to that entity. This distance can be experienced in many ways. Something can be literally near or far geographically, along a temporal chronological timeline, near or far in terms of certainty or likelihood (for example, something that’s definitely going to happen has a feeling of proximity) or socially close vs. distant.

Research has found that whenever an entity is more psychologically distant, receivers tend to focus on its abstract properties, meaning things that are usually true about it but not as physically grounded, more central aspects that will probably will be valid in all instances. But for psychologically close entities, we lean more on concrete elements such as idiosyncratic details and physical properties. Interesting research exists in psychology, communications, and business management schools fields showing that when you communicate with an audience that is more psychologically distant—literally further, perhaps a diffuse crowd of strangers versus an intimate space with close friends—people will tailor their delivery to that distance, often without consciously realizing what they’re doing. These shifts are seen through word choice, abstract language such as adjectives and metaphors, vs. the inclusion of concrete details and certain verbs.

These shifts can also be reflected by whether you’re using words at all: now, we often communicate in more image-based ways, a more concrete form of communication. An image is comparatively high-fidelity to what the entity looks like in your mind whereas when I say a word, you have to take the word, interpret it, make sure it’s in your spoken language, and maybe translate it into imagery and arrive at a mental concept.

How abstractly or concretely a message is crafted can affect whether receivers agree, are emotionally moved, understand it, and are convinced by the message. As poetic writing often incorporates both types of language and often includes descriptions of imagery, there are many implications regarding the effects it might have on the mental state of the reader.

How might those effects influence an individual’s interpretation of words arranged in poetic constructions, for example words before or after a caesura?

When you’re presented with information and there’s a clear segment in that information, you may internalize it with that segment in place. For example, if you’re writing about a memory and you put this big break in, when someone reads it later, they may experience this memory as coming from two very different characters—the character from the first memory is distinct from the character from the second memory, especially if that break is obvious. So, whether that means the interpretation happens in two separate phases is interesting because the susceptibility for the kinds of ideas messages presented on either side may be considered less likely to influence one another and vice versa. Therefore, the choice to introduce that break can be kind of like a signpost for “consider these things as two separate elements that may not effect one another as directly,” whereas without the break there is more fluid continuity in mutual influence, a more reciprocal relationship. So poetic formats such as caesuras and stanza breaks could shape the reader’s experience especially in terms of appreciating change or growth.

In 1932 T.S. Eliot famously argued, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” and some research has stated that the brain is hardwired to appreciate poetic sounds. Do you think that the arrangement of words could cue certain judgements as well? What aspects of cognition could affect this?

Word choice is enormous. I’ve done some work on the correspondence of word choice and patterns of word use between certain speakers and how patterns of having synchronous syntactic structures affect how speakers come away from the conversation. For example, structural feelings of similarity, mirroring, can bring people to feel as though they’re on the same page. But this isn’t always true: if the conversation is about something negative, then when you start to synchronize word choice, it might escalate the unpleasantness. But for individual speakers, I like to illustrate it this way: if a person wants to invite another to dinner, they could say, “Hey do you want to grab a bite to eat later?” or “Hey, are you busy later, could we go have some dinner?” In terms of purpose, that’s the same request. But, in terms of word choice, if we’re not mucking around too much with the general meaning we still have great flexibility with how we say it.

Those words that we have the most freedom to swap in and out are called function words. There’s some research that finds that function word choices greatly shape the way a message is received even when content is communicated to the same degree: this extends to inferences about a speaker’s demographics, intention, emotional thrust, all of which may or may not be accurate. Other research suggests that from function word choices alone you can find consistent interpretations of personalities, demographics as I mentioned, education, and even deception. When we read, we don’t go one word at a time, so there’s a more gestalt message in the encounter that gets communicated, driven in large part by the configuration of function words, resulting in the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

In creative writing, when the goal is to convey something about the state of mind of the author or the character, or elicit a response in the reader, then I think these things can be enormously impactful. If they’re read out loud, they have all these interesting phonetic properties that can cause different mental states in the recipient—whether it’s more soothing, or even more jarring. There’s plenty of research on perceptual fluency and whether we can absorb information because it’s easy to understand or has some inherent flow. When a message is more fluent, we tend to find it more compelling or convincing, especially if it tracks with what we already believe. So, this points to the dichotomy you note: that before you’ve even processed something, are you still expecting something about the communicative intent? And I think we do, whether we’re using deep deliberative processing or appreciating some of the more heuristically available elements like the rhythm and the flow and the word choice. If something is easy to read but challenging to understand, with unfamiliar words or structures, you may cause your reader to pause and think about it. But maybe that’s the very intention. Or maybe it’s an unfamiliar structure but a soothing and familiar cadence. So I think that playing with that dichotomy can have all sorts of effects on your reader.

What then might be the effects of reading poetry aloud versus seeing it?           

This question also resonates with the idea of psychological distance. Something that is verbalized tends to induce some of that proximity because you get an audio stimulus and not just text. There’s some research in communication science that suggests that having a richer medium for communicating a message, especially when it’s something more complicated or ambiguous, tends to be a better match for getting the message across.

In your research regarding compassionate love, where people wrote supportive notes to their partner in distress, you described the effects of words on physiology. How might language influence stress responses more broadly?

Supportive messaging is interesting because when it’s coming from a person who knows you well, there are certain expectations about the role that person plays in your life. So maybe this connects to if somebody is writing poetry specifically for you versus a writer that doesn’t know you—how do you bridge that gap? According to the research, compassion and responsive support has three properties. One is that if you’re a person in distress and you’re expressing it to somebody that is trying to alleviate that distress, if their message communicates understanding then that’s a great start—I comprehend what it is that you’re telling me, and my response suggests that I knew what you meant. The next ingredient is referred to as validation, that the fact you’re feeling this way is reasonable even if I don’t feel that way myself: that a person could feel this way is warranted. I am affirming your humanness in the fact that a person could feel this way. And on top of that, if you could communicate care and affection to alleviate a negative emotional state through intimacy or compassion, an intention to be loving or warm, then with those three ingredients the supportive messaging often gets through most effectively.

Because distress is often experienced in part physiologically, whether through elevated heart rate, blood pressure, or fluctuations of body temperature, sometimes those effects can be effectively regulated by a support provider who knows what these person’s’ needs are. There is even some evidence that people can co-regulate which might speak to live poetry performances. When you get to experience manifestations of a person’s emotional or physiological state, you may find your own responding sensitively or potentially synchronously.

You alluded to this in a previous question about line breaks, but I’m curious how those principles could relate to semantics. People oftentimes say that it’s tough to learn to read poetry, but could the arrangement of words provide the reader with unconscious clues? What might be the limits of this?

Things that are unfamiliar can be challenging, which may affect people’s perceptions when going into a poem. Perhaps this functions in a manner that’s similar to confirmation bias, how you can put up a block when you’re reading something that doesn’t track with your own thoughts or that makes you uncomfortable. We have a lot of ways to manage how we engage with something before we experience it, we’re rarely if ever a blank slate before we go into reading anything. Imagine how people talk about their first experiences with Shakespeare—it was a real slog, I had to go word for word trying to translate it into how I tend to think and talk without losing the thread, or maybe when I finally comprehended, it was hard to gain that big picture story. And so, when a poetic voice is unlike modes of familiar communication, that could present a barrier.

But in terms of how something might be arranged, whether the poetry is relatable might have more impact on understanding than its structure. Even if it’s not structured in a way that’s particularly familiar, people generally connect very well to things they relate to. For example, if I read poems that were structured in a way I’d never seen but that spoke to something that I care about versus something that’s easy to read but that’s a universe away, maybe compatibility in experience could address some barrier to entry.

If relatability matters more to reaching readers than form, how do you imagine that this understanding could shape students’ introduction into poetry? 

We introduce high school students to Shakespeare, but what if we introduced them to high-level poetry written by high school students who are going through similar psychological challenges? If you’re drawing on your life—an ‘art is life’ kind of thing—then potentially you’re giving somebody a point of contact whereas if everything about the speaker is so dissimilar, the barrier of entry may feel too high. For example, I’m a sports fan and I like basketball. If I want to make basketball interesting to somebody that doesn’t like sports or basketball, I would do it in a very different way—I may do a character driven story about an interesting career path, so even if you don’t care about basketball at all you’d go, huh, well that’s an interesting person, and I can relate to challenges of balancing professional and personal life or working on a skill I don’t have. So how the themes come across has a lot to do with it. And in general, people connect to voices where they feel that their experiences are represented—we can have plenty of conversations about experiences of representation but especially in art, movies for example, if suddenly there’s a hero I can relate to, I might have an interest in a genre that previously seemed like it wasn’t for me.

Looking at poetry, I think that if you asked some people to think about what a poet is, off hand, does that conjure an image of a particular age or gender? Of a certain moment in time? Is the poem always in iambic pentameter? Sing-songy rhyming? And if that’s a very narrow perception that people have, then how do you break through it?

That speaks right to what we’re trying to do in terms of celebrating poets. We’re going to be taking photos of poets, doing nice black-and-white type portraits and through that, we hope to help readers get to know them better. In most journal publications, only a short bio shows up, a tiny blurb which usually isn’t enough to glean anything else.

You’re speaking directly to one of those abstract/concrete issues too—by sharing something as concrete as the poet themselves, this increases psychological proximity and by extension the accessibility. I even do that sometimes: when I teach about things like psychological theories, I’ll show pictures of the person who discovered it on the slides to ground people in a moment in time. Behind all of this is a person, and you’re also a person, so perhaps you can sink your teeth into something about these ideas of people who have something in common with you.

Given that our journal pairs poetry with photographic interpretations, based on your research in cognition and vision, what are some ways this pairing could affect how a person reads the poem after seeing the image? Are there any understandings of each, the photo and the poem, that would likely remain independent of the other? 

I think that it’s going to have a considerable impact. I am sure there is some separation there—when you’re digging into the poem you might not be thinking as much about the author of the poem. For example, if you are asked to reflect on a person (we can use Instagram as an example) and I show you a picture, you need to be able to hold something in your head about it in order to evaluate. You’ve probably had the experience of reading a book and then, when a movie is made about it and the actor is different than the character you imagined, it’s jarring. But if you are given a physical representation the first time you receive something, now you are channeling a physical representation of this through the author’s lens and there may be some value to that, especially since they may be pulling from something more personal in poetry. So, because you know a little bit more about the author from one end and see the visual interpretation from the other, I think there would be something more interpersonal and original about the reader’s experience.

There’s plenty of work out there that discusses how language was first designed for communication, presumably face-to-face. But now we’re using language for all these interesting things which it may not have been originally been adapted for, such as writing and art. So, when something originally best equipped for communication is being co-opted for all these other interesting functions, then that could mean that we experience a lot of writing as communication. When you start stripping away other elements that are typically present in face-to-face communication, then that might take away from the experience of being spoken to. But then, in the reverse, if you add those things back in, e.g. seeing who the speaker is, the poem may resonate on a more personal level. This implies that, in addition to the feeling of connection and concreteness of the picture, incorporating pictures could help the poem exist in more of a communication context rather than I’m just going to write this and put this up for whoever comes across it. Which is fine as an art form, but I feel a lot of times a poem is written to communicate, so a picture could put the reader in a better position to receive that message.

It’s cool what you said about how we craft our messages, how we sit with them and think about them. There’s this quote by former UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, “The poem is the original text,” people really being careful and thinking their words through in these bite-sized paragraphs.

 I think a lot about curation in general, whether it’s in poetry or imagery. Exposure of the thought process can be helpful as well, the knowledge that a lot of time and effort went into creating the poem, text, photo. So maybe teaching this behind-the-scenes work alongside an entry into poetry could soften some of that initial barrier.

What are some things you hope to study in future research on relationships, language, and cognition?

We’re definitely looking at the function of imagery in psychological measurement because it has a lot of implications (it’s not reading a poem in this case but rather responding to a questionnaire). Since responding to a questionnaire can be such a hollow, passive exercise while the things you’re responding about tend to have a physical or picture-based form, we’re trying to construct sensitive measurement tools to move the field along.

In terms of relationship processes, I am interested in how self-control and successful conflict negotiation manifests in patterns of word choice. Even though we don’t usually exercise a lot of conscious control about over the individual words that we use, at least most of the time we’re not exercising that level of discreet control. However, there are some ways in which this is changing: we certainly think about a message before we craft it especially now on social media platforms where we can edit and curate, so are there practices that we can learn from the couple that really handles difficulties the best? Not as prescriptive guidelines by any means, but we look for commonalities that seem to work for couples. Perhaps as a field we can we distill them down for people who are struggling, something they could harness and use to thoughtfully reconsider ways that they tend to communicate. Especially when it’s difficult, they don’t have a lot of emotional bandwidth because what they’re talking about is already stressful or challenging.

I think it’s likely that we’re going to be moving in the direction of the role of social media in shaping relationships in addition to relationships’ role in shaping social media, including your Tinders, Bumbles, and other platforms. How do people navigate the online/offline divide with a significant other where there’s a private/public line that can also be snaking through different positions generationally and geographically? So, thinking about something that’s very prevalent and current will be important to seeing how well our existing frameworks in relationship science hold up in those newer environments. How will they have to be adapted and changed?