I remain blank in the brain, so will return to my old project of revisiting old blogs in hopes that will get me going again. A check of my back-ups indicates I made my last entry to the old blog 27 October. In it and the entry just before it, I reported on my last trip to the hospital. My entry for 25 October was the last in which I discussed old entries, getting to #610. So I will turn now to some fumbly work with letters I did in #611:
These seem to me like they ought to be interesting but they don’t grab me, at all. In #612, I reported that I’d gotten an e.mail from an old literary friend (and early buyer of A StrayngeBook), Fred Stokes. A not-too-interesting entry on Me followed, then this, which I quote in full more to give an idea of where my head was at the time than because it says very much:
“7 October 2005: Or, to continue my musing of yesterday (about the effectiveness of my aging brain), maybe I’m just recycling ideas I’ve had for decades. Whether original for me or just recycling, I think my putting literature into four classes, narrature, anthroture, evocature and poetry was nutty. Just a momentary aberration, I hope. I have nothing against the over-all concept, however. Ergo, I am rephrasing it today in a single statement: Every poem has four zones of operation: (1) the sagaceptual (or narrative) zone, (2) the anthroceptual (or people-related) zone, (3) the protoceptual (or imagery-centered) zone and (4) the reducticeptual (or technique-focused) zone. What the poem does as a story, what it does as self-expression, what it does as an evocation of a scene or object, and what it does as a mechanism or (i.e., how its grammar works, what its form does, what–in the case of my mathemaku–its mathematics does, and so forth). Right now, I can think of no other operational zones it might have (but would not be at all surprised if it had others, even very obvious others).”
I should have mentioned that there’s no such thing, in my poetics, as an idea-centered poem. That’s because a text primarily about an idea would not be a work of literature but of what I call “informrature,” the use of words in pursuit of some truth. Ideas can be important in poems, as is the case with many of Wallace Stevens’s, but only for what they allow the poem to do as (usually) protoceptually.
#615 and #616 continue my discussion of zones with the addition of two new ones, one (the verbo-protceptual zone) for verbally-mediated sensory perceptions (as opposed to direct ones like the sound of the words used), and one (the verbo-reducticeptual zone) for the ideas or thought of a poem. I had scanted the latter because I believe any text with a significant amount of ideas disbarred from being a poem–it must be either advocature or informrature (i.e., propaganda or nonfiction). I now realize that all poems have ideas, however vague, and some them to a significant degree (although, I contend, never are they the most important elements in the poems). So almost every poem will to some degree enter an idea-zone.
The center of interest in #617 was the zero-onset, which is the blank onset (or absense of consonant) that begins some syllables–as in “out,” or “or,” for instance. Next I took up vowels that act as consonants the way the u in use does, and the o in “one.” My last two entries in this set of ten have two versions of a mathemaku I was working on:
It’s not quite there, but I think it has the potential to be Major. The pond, it should be obvious, is a cousin of Basho’s.