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Consciousness by Joanie Mackowsk


            "Consciousness" by Joanie Mackowski is a free verse poem that appeared in the February 2012 edition of Poetry Magazine. In this poem, Mackowski explains the awareness and response of human beings to their surroundings by presenting the workings of our mind. The poem appears to be like any other free verse but what makes Mackowski's poem special is its unusual content, the human mind. This leads to "Consciousness" being like a "definition poem", providing different descriptions of the mind. Throughout the poem, it is like Mackowski turns the mind over and over in her hands and helps us in experiencing the mind in ways we would never have thought of, through the concept of consciousness.
             To convey her thoughts on the mind and the idea of consciousness, Mackowski makes vast usage of similes and metaphors. She uses everyday life objects in each simile and metaphor to develop a sense of familiarity for the reader in her poem. This allows her to convey complex ideas about consciousness and the mind in simple layman terms that are easily comprehensible for the reader and thus make her poem easy to follow. Mackowski mainly uses the rhetorical devices of similes and metaphors to present the concept of consciousness from two different angles, physical and mental, creating various images for both aspects of consciousness in her poem. These images are Mackowski's main medium for presenting her ideas on the role of consciousness in our understanding of the human mind.
             The imagery in Mackowski's poem is clearly evident, with each simile and metaphor presenting a different mental image of the mind. Each image invokes some common notion related to the workings of the mind and our consciousness. The starting phrase of "skull with softly flickering" (Line 1) is an example of this and reminds the reader of a very common picture of the nerves in the brain lighting up as electrical signals are transmitted through them.


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