Thanks for those thoughts, Don.
McGilchrist keeps saying, "The contrast isn't between left and right. It's between part and whole." And then Mlinko asks him yet another left vs. right question.
I enjoyed their discussion, but I found it a bit ironic that Mlinko seemed to be defending the right brain in such a stereotypically left-brained way.
As you emphasized above, the "left brain : right brain = formal verse : free verse" correlation just doesn't hold water. Even if rules and structure and rhyme and meter are inherently appealing to the left brain, that doesn't mean formal poetry is inherently inimical to the right brain. When writing formal poems, formalists often end up in unexpected, non-linear-thinking places, precisely because we have to consider so many unrelated possibilities while in search of a rhyme or a conveniently-stressed word.
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