"Thin Slicing"

I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's very fine book BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING,




and much of what he says about the idea that sometimes a decision made in the blink of an eye--some might call it a knee-jerk reaction--is often better than a more studied, calculated, and time-intensive, reasoned approach. This idea in relation to poetry is worthy of its own posting, which I'll get to later (once I've finished the book and have thought about it some more, or maybe I'll finish the book and just blink before I respond).

What made me want to blog today is this--in his book, he talks about Insight Puzzles. You know what they are. Little verbal conundrums that you have to think creatively to solve. It's the type of assignments and break-out-of-the-mold thinking that I teach in my creativity workshops. It gets you out of functional fixedness. It gets you think differently of words, of relationships.

Here's one, for example:

A father and son are in a terrible car accident. The father dies. The son is rushed to the hospital, then taken into the ER room where a doctor looks upon the boy and says, "I can't operate on him. He's my son!" Who is the doctor?

Many of you might've heard that more famous one. But what about this:

A huge steel pyramid is inverted so it stands on its point. Any movement of any kind will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $1,000 bill. How do you remove the bill without toppling the pyramid?

Answers anyone?

It's exactly this type of sideways thinking (my term) that poets use to intuit, to feel, to surprise their way into linguistic and imagistic brilliance. I'm thinking of Yusef Komunyakaa, Kay Ryan, Li-Young Lee, to name just a few. They find ways to get at something from unexpected angles and impress us with their ingenuity. For that, we, as readers, are glad.