Poem, Running Away

Poem was running away
from his creator, who
had nothing to say, and
was saying it badly, and
forcing Poem to stay in it
to–so he hoped–legitimize it
as a poem.

Technically, it was already a
poem since it
was lineated.

Otherwise, it was as far from being
a poem as anything of words could
be.

So Poem’s creator described him dead
of multiple hatchet wounds, bleeding
horribly,
in the hopes that a little gore would
swindle the page
the text was on of
achieving world-class
nullity.

But Poem reddened rabbit-through,
an Anchorite of the ashen second island
past the fat lady in Paris,
cystic with automatic wrists that
in-loved the current dilts, so
anywhere-bisting beyond somewhere
unfiscal in talcum they sow.

Naval moons;
the woo, the woo–
too too for someware.

.

BackcountryOutlet.com Coupons

Okay, as I was saying, “Part of poetry’s distortion is the distortion of words”–a major part, because it means not just distortion of spelling or visual appearance of words but distortion of placement (syntax–or even just distortion of where words stop at the end of a line as in traditional poetry).  Distortion of subject matter, particularly metaphorical distortion, point of view and other aspects of a text, are also important, but certainly distortion of words is the most overt saidway poetry takes into what I consider its enlarged vision.

To try to give my tennis friends an idea of why some of the words in my poems are distorted (one mentioned “unlessoned,” which I use in my “Mathemaku for William Blake”), I came up with the comparison of the way I distort one or a few words in a poem to a wife’s surprising her husband with a new hairstyle–with, that is, a distortion of her appearance.  In both cases something is intentionally altered in a de-normalizing way.  A common result is instant confusion, and dismay.  But in both cases, if the distortion is successful, the reader or the husband adjusts to it, and comes to like it, as a welcome change to something that would otherwise have seemed unnoteworthily usual at best.  In both cases, too, any return to the old way will seem refreshing–a now-no-longer-daily usualness.

Of course, the key is achieving a successful distortion: a hairstyle that works with the shape of a wife’s face, and her personality, and other hairstyles of the time, as well as the history of hairstyles, and no doubt much else I’m not aware of, not being a hairstylist or serious student of personal appearance; and a lingual distortion that works with what the poet is trying to do with his poem as a whole, as well as sounds nice and/or looks good or interesting, and so on.  I consider my “unlessoned” a HUGE SUCCESS (whatever anybody else thinks of it!) because it carries out a semi-clever pun, in the process allowing me to to take a shot at formal education.  Coming just in front of “lane-loving,” it also contributes to what I feel is a pleasant burst of alliteration.

There is unquestionably a lot more I could/should say to lesson my friends into appreciating what poets try to do but I’m too worn-out (tennis, earlier, plus whatever is wrong with me) to continue.  (One important note, though: no reason a prose-writer need not distort words as I just have, and try to do in my critical writing; the only rule should be worrying more about clarity in prose, and–of course–leaving out all or most of the other distortions one might use in a poem.) 

.

Danskin Coupon Code

Now a few random remarks on art. A genuine artwork, I contend, is an intentionally distorted representation of some portion of reality–as opposed to a . . . reportagework(?), which is an attempt at as accurate as possible a representation of some portion of reality. Only people with very little experience of reportage mistake it for art. But there are a lot of the latter, many of them quite bright. I was reminded of this yesterday when with my tennis friends at my latest exhibition. Some were particularly interested in why I use the kinds of words I sometimes do. As usual, I had no ready answer–just that poets try to twist words to make them more interesting. Thinking about how better to give my friends an idea of what poetry does, I worked out a sketch of a lesson, which I’ll try to post a good draft of here tomorrow. I’m too worn-out from having been out on my bike doing errands, to have the energy to write it now. Yes, I do get easily worn-out.

One note: poetry is special among the arts in being an indirect representation of reality–a poem is an intentionally distorted representation of verbal reportage concerning a portion of reality. Part of poetry’s distortion is the distortion of words.

.

Chadwicks Promotional Code

Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry.  You can’t rescue any hidden life, whatever that is, with prose?  Or some other art?  Or science?  Why wouldn’t using language to drown certain aspects of unhidden life be equally or more valuable? 

Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet.   It sure isn’t everything to me.  It and serenity are only two of many pleasures it is the function of art to provide.   Its manner of providing them is what sets it apart from verosophy and other endeavors which can, and try, to lead to wonder and serenity, and other pleasures.

Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.”  Nice thought–but unattainable heavens to dream toward are a high good, too.

Seven propositions:

1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose).  I agree: a poem is a verbal construction different from almost all other verbal constructions.

2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego.  As does almost anything else I can think of, when it isn’t nothing but ego.

3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning.  Which the infinity of possible verbal meaning can express.

4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam.  All the arts, like all the sciences, have become vastly superior to what they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, but anti-progressives mistake the sentimentality that becomes more and more attached to the old because of their age for aesthetic rather than nostalgiacal value.  Compare the clumsy “novel” in the Bible about David with almost any competent commercial novel of today, for instance.  Consider how much more of existence the best art of today is about compared with earlier art.  For just one thing, today’s art has a vastly larger tradition to make allusions to than previous art had.  There have been artists in the past as great as our best, but what our best have produced is significantly better than what they did in part because of the what the artists of the past did.  (Note, this is a subject requiring a book.)

5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique–and, obviously, to learn it–is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.)  I more or less agree with all this, but I wonder how one can avoid using some technique.

6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief.  Every work of art requires a container; I call that container form; one calling it “an extension of subject matter,” if I understand him, needs to tell me what, then, is containing it and the subject matter it is an extension of.  I don’t know what ideology and religious belief have to do with it; how would they be not subject matter?

7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic.  I think meter is both natural and imposed–necessarily imposed to add predictability to balance the difficult-to-accept unpredictability of horses going beyond prose that poetry at its best is. 

A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings.  Just to be argumentative, I would say that a poet’s having to write for others (and he needn’t) greatly increases his field of play.  (Note that our Wilshberian’s poet writes rather than composes.  It never occurs to any Wilshberian that a poem might be more than words.)

.

Blockbuster DVD

Not much to say about it except that it is inspired by one of the more famous of Wordsworth’s sonnets, which describes how the ocean, “with his eternal motion make(s)/ a sound like thunder–everlastingly.”

.

Portland Fast Cash Advance

I did think of a subject to discuss, and think I may be able to.  I still feel tired, but once I get started typing, I can usually keep going for a little while.  What I thought I’d like to discuss was whether or not I’m talented as a composer of non-representational visimages (visual artworks) like the one I posted yesterday.  I now think I may be because:

(1) I very probably have a very good and broad memory for visimagery which allows me to base my work on superior preceding work.

Background: a good portion of the aesthetic value of a non-representational visimage depends, I believe, in what it does with what has preceded it.  That’s because I consider a nonRep (let me call it, at least for now) to be a variation on one or more of all the visimages preceding it.  Every artwork causes its engagent to remember some other artwork, or group of artworks–almost always without “knowing” it (by which I mean that his analytical brain doesn’t break in and tell him what’s going on); the new work is compared to the remembered work or works.  If the new and old coincide too completely, the engagent will be bored; if they coincide too little, the result will be painful confusion.  The idea is for it to be just enough unfamiliar.  That I’ve held for 45 years is the entire basis of aesthetic pleasure.  I’ve seen nothing to contradict my belief, although no one yet has agreed with me about it.  Mostly, I think, for fear of recognizing oneself as a machine.

(2) I’m sure I’m more sensitive to the boringly familiar than most people, too.  In any case, I usually make a fair number of changes in the visimages I make, constantly recognizing the too-familiar.

(3)  Similarly, I seem also to be innately quicker to perceive the absence of unifying principles than others, and a unifying principle, more than anything else, prevents a work from becoming excessively unfamiliar.  Hence, in nonReps, I automatically repeat shapes and colors all over the place, as well as try to find and sustain some suggestion of an over-riding image–like a landscape with a moon in it.

(4) Keeping the images’ elements in some kind of balance–putting a splash of red to the left if there’s one to the right, for instance–is another thing I do automatically.

(5) Trying for interesting contrasts, is important to me, too–jagged lines versus smooth lines, for instance.

(6) Often but not always I try for as many different kinds of shapes and colors as I can handle.

(7) I don’t think I have a better-than-average sense of color, but I do have some notion as to what colors go well with others.

I don’t think about all this much when at work–they’ve become second nature; but after leaving a piece and coming back to it, I often do.

Okay, call these “Rough Notes of My Practice as a Visimagist.”  And let me go back to bed.

.

Office Depot Discount Code

 Diary Entry

Thursday, 22 December 2011, 4 P.M.  Another tennis morning–practice, not a league match.  I dropped some items off at the Arts & Humanities Council office, then did a little marketing.  After getting home I haven’t done much but escape read.  Just now, though, I’ve read over what I’d previously written about Jake Berry’s essay on the Otherstream.  It’s not bad but disorganized, so I printed out a copy to try to work out something that seems logically arranged from.  (Hard to do that on the computer, for me.)

8 P.M.   I’m getting very few Christmas cards this year, which does not make me unhappy, but one I like very much to get, the one from Eleanor Nichol and her daughter Sarah, arrived today.  I just used it to take care of this entry.

.

Nordstrom Online Store

And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:

About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.”  I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever.  I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white.  The original frames are each eleven by seventeen.  Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.

* * *

Sunday, 4 October 2011.  Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is.  I played tennis early in the morning–badly.  I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.

.

Engagement Rings

.

Priceline Hotels

I’m pretty tired, this time for the legitimate reason that I only slept a half-an-hour last night.  I didn’t feel particularly edgy, for I wasn’t anxious about the procedure.  Maybe my body was.  Stress affects it much more than it affects the part of my brain the brain calls “me.”   As is often the case when I have insomnia, I had quite a few ideas.  One of them was a refinement of my long-held belief that it’s unfair to hold an innovative poem to the same standards of clarity a conventional poem is held to since the former is likely only clear because one reading it has been educated in the reading of such poems since nursery school or earlier, and has (probably) not been exposed to anything like what he needs to have been to find an innovative poem clear. 

 The refinement is a new term: “the clarity-to-exposure ratio.”  Or how clear a poem is to an engagent on a scale of, say, one to a hundred, and how much exposure he’s had to poems of its kind on the same scale.  Hence, a poem by Frost may have a clarity rating of 95, but an exposure rating of 95, as well, because of what school teachers have taught him about formal verse, and his memory of nursery rhymes, and much else.  One of my mathemaku may have a clarity rating of 8 (because it will have understandable words and recognizable mathematical symbols and, perhaps, recognizable graphic images).  It may have the same c-to-e ratio as the Frost poem, though, if its exposure rating is only 8,which it could well be because no such poems will have been taught to its engagent. 

Offhand, I would say a poem approaches ideal clarity to the degree its clarity-to-exposure ratio approaches point nine.  After its exposure rating has reached 100.  I make point nine (or some such figure)  the ideal because perfect clarity is boring.  That I consider a fact of aesthetics, not an opinion.

.

Western Union