About the numbers in yesterday’s cryptographiku: they indicate how many spaces to indent each of the numbered words. In the proper version of the poem, where each such word lines up with respect to the bottom line indicates part of the coded text secreted in the poem.
Now one of my memorable epigrams, a new one although the message is same old same:
If a distinguished critic condemns your poem in print, worry; if it were any good, he’d never have been aware of its existence
Something I may have discovered when skimming the 2009 issues of Poetry that a friend gave me: if Poetry is any indication, Iowa Plaintext Poems are no longer 90% de rigueur in Poetry Establishment magazines. The school whose poems are based technically mainly on the jump-cutting of “The Wasteland” (or is that “The Waste Land?”) with extra surrealistic automatic writing thrown in a la Ashbery seems number one now. Peculiar, because just a few years ago, it looked like Poetry was setting up as the nation’s champion of accessible poetry.