In this talk I will compare two different ways that lyric poems give readers a sense of movement, and examine the cognitive linguistic basis for these effects. The first example will be the poem "Looking West" by former poet laureate Billy Collins. He manages to put the reader in motion by combining an implicit first person perspective with verbs of motion and strings of prepositional modifiers that denote motion in a single direction. Recent research on the processing of motion verbs in metaphorical uses (fictive motion) by Matlock, Boroditsky and others suggests that fictive motion involves mental simulation of motion that is immediately integrated with eye movement and visual processing. Collins' poems shows how poets can manipulate the somatic responses to language to build a coherent narrative structure that is simultaneously fantastic and true.
The second set of poems come from the Imagist poetry of George Oppen's first book, Discrete Series (1934). Oppen's poetry is resolutely visual, and the movement he simulates is as if it were observed, not from fictive motion but from exploiting the figure/ground biases coded into lexical items and certain grammatical structures, especially deictic items. Two examples will be given where the poet creates a kind of Necker Cube effect by juxtaposing lexical items that imply different figure/ground constructions of essentially the same image, while a third poem will be shown to exploit the subjectivity/objectivity distinction described by Langacker (1985 and elsewhere). Using an item described in the visual field, Oppen is able to flip the reader from being an objective viewer to being an onstage participant in the scene, a dramatic effect which seems to have a distinct somatic correlate. Rather than narrativizing the viewer's movement through space, Oppen invites the reader to see a narrative in sequences of perceptual choices.