I’m super-lethargic again, and this time nor willing to take a dose of APCs.  That’s because I fear my body is too screwed up to meddle with pharmaceutically–any more than my doctors are already meddling that way with it.  So just a word today–”spools” spelled backwards.  It’s the longest word I’ve come up with so far that is a word in both directions.  I bother publicizing it so I can pontificate a bit on my belief in the value of going conceptual as a poet.  I would call the above a poem if printed “sloops spools.”  But it would be an extremely trivial poem because amusing only; “god dog” is much better (putting aside how many times we’ve all seen it) because it has a conceptual interest: the fact that a dog can be considered the antithesis of a god.  Hence, its backwards spelling is a metaphor for its “backwards” meaning.  The images conveyed by the two spellings also interact more interestingly than the images conveyed by “sloops” and “spools”  One set of words is amusing; the other amusing and interesting.  Too many pwoermds and related poems are only amusing.

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All I can say about this one at the moment is that it’s delightful.  (It’s terrific, too–both visimage and poem.)  I hope when my brain is working better to say something more cogent about it.  Meanwhile, I’m grateful to have ssomething I like as much to fill this entry with.  I’m as sleepy/ blodgy as ever, by the way, but yesterday I got 400 words of my next column for Small Press Review done, and I expect to get another 400 or more done on it today, so I’m not quite non-functional.  And I do feel mildly optimistic about existence.

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When people wonder if anyone in the group of artists I’m associated with is at the level of–say–Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Berryman (as Geof Huth recently did in a return comment to one of mine at his blog the other day), one of the artists I think of who seems to me to make such wondering absurd (here as poet and visimagists rather than as visual poet) is John Vieira: there are at least ten of us equal or better than the two major minor poets and one minor major poet mentioned.  Yes, I include myself, even though I do realize that one cannot properly evaluate one’s own work since much of what one thinks one put into it may not be there for others (even if helped to see it).  Or flaws one is sure one didn’t put into it may be there for others.  Alas, my work isn’t considered worth showing up by the establishment, and my friends are all polite, so I’ll probably never learn the truth.

Anyway, here’s a sample of John’s recent work, a package of which arrived in the mail today, just in time to give me something related to poeticks for this entry.  I was going to write about a cat.  I still will, but not today.

One reason I love this still life of John’s is that I couldn’t quickly figure out what seemed so good about it.  It’s pears as I don’t believe anyone else has ever captured them, but there’s more to it than that.  Something of haiku simplicity and depth is there.  The pears seems to me to just tumble off the line John has rendered them out of into being, too deliciously quickly to obscure one another.  John’s poem about them matches their simplicity, and heightens the spirit of the drawing without repeating it.

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It’s built around a famous haiku by Basho: “on a withered branch/ a crow has settled;/autumn nightfall.”  The Japanese in my rendering translates as “autumn fnightfall.”  My divisor comes out of who-knows-where, but my remainder alludes to a distant sail in a rendering of a Chinese poem by Ezra Pound.  My quotient is a fragment of a map of Norwalk Harbor on Long Island Sound overlaid with portions of a Sam Fancis painting severely reworked in Paint Shop.  The sub-dividend product consists of the SamFrancisfied Harbor in full, and the background graphics are also alterations of portions of the Francis painting.  Fadings, fragmentations, disappearings, endings . . .

I don’t consider this one of my A works, but would be satisfied if all my works seemed as good to me as it.

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Here’s a visual haiku I like from the latest issue of Haiku Canada Review (Volume 6, Number1):

Another haiku I liked was in a letter to Haiku Canada Review from Dina E. Cox:

                                             new snow
                                             I almost forget
                                             our quarrel

One last haiku I want to mention so I can make a negative remark is this, by Marshall Hryciuk:

                                    smudge of cloud
                                    boat’s murmur
                                    lost in the waves

My negative remark is not about Marshall’s poem, which I like a lot, but about the renku, an example of which Marshall’s poem begins. I can’t remember ever reading one that didn’t fairly quickly pall on me, although I’ve certain read ones which, like this one, were full of good and sometimes excellent material. I think it too difficult for a renku to stick closely enough to a particular topic (and it needn’t be a narrow one) for me to feel I have to hit my appreciation’s restart button too often. I believe, no doubt arrogantly, that the many people who like poems that jump around, lack the ability intensely to appreciate sufficiently to have trouble easing from one nice image to an unrelated nice image. Renku “stanzas” Of course, many of the best poems seem at first to lack what some would call inexorability and should be grazed at first rather than gobbled.  A renku’s “stanzas,” if any good, are too strong too allow an engagent like me to do that for more than five or six of them.

There were a lot of other good haiku in the issue.  Anyone interested in the form really should become a member of Haiku Canada.  (Note: you don’t have to be Canadian.)

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          the words, “old pond”;

          a frog, splashing in,

          noiselessly

Diary Entry

Sunday, 1 January 2012, Noon.   Crap: two days in a row I forgot to change the setting on a blog entry from “private” to “public.”  I just fixed that.  Otherwise, a real accomplishment for the morning: I finished my power-point presentation about how to appreciate a mathemaku.  I printed out a copy of it that is now in a binder, ready to be read at the exhibition.  Who knows, I may even get something else done today!  3 P.M. I posted a copy of the presentation here as a Page.
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     Sonnet from My Forties

     Much have I ranged the kingdoms Stevens forged
     Of deeply penetrating inquiries
     Into, and deft use of, the metaphor,
     And volumes filled in vain attempts to reach

     The heights that he did. Often, too, I’ve been
     To where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps
     Toward high-hued sensibility begin
     In Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

     Of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
     That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
     That Pound re-morninged splashingly to life,
     But failed as dismally to match their works.

     Yet still, nine-tenth insane though it now seems,
     I seek those ends; I hold to my huge dreams.

 Diary Entry

Friday, 16 December 2011, 11:30 A.M.  I have a few small exhibition-bookkeeping chores yet to do that I’m letting go for this weekend so I can concentrate on the stack of reviews for Small Press Review I have to do.  One of them will be of I, a novella by Arnold Skemer that I find excellent but a very slow read, in the best sense of the description. 

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mindless x ( ) = less mind

The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:

old pond

frog

splash

!

Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that.  Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.

 * * *

Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M.  Tough day.  A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40.  I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago.  Then marketing followed by the delivery of ”The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present.  After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore.  I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much.  But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore.  Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty.  Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.

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     Sonnet from My Forties

     Much have I ranged the broad-skied latitudes
     That Stevens festivalled his inquiries
     On truth and the imagination to,
     And reams used up in vain attempts to reach

     The heights that he did. Often, too, I’ve been
     To where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps
     Toward high-hued sensibility begin
     In Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

     Of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
     That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
     That Pound re-morninged windily to life,
     but failed as dismally to match their works.

     Yet still, nine-tenth insane though it now seems,
     I seek those ends; I hold to my huge dreams.

Okay, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m not so enthusiastic about it.  I changed line 3 from “On truth and metaphor in due course to” to “On truth and the imagination to,” a definite improvement.  The first stanza still doesn’t quite do it for me, but the rest of the poem seems fine–or would, I’m sure, if I hadn’t read and reread it some many hundreds of times.  Needless to say, it’s in the old-fashioned mode of Hopkins/Yeats/Thomas and probably over-rich–certainly to today’s taste.  It’s somewhat redeemed by its use of reversed rhymes (which are full rhymes, not alliterations).  It still sums up my life in poetry, though–alas.

* * *

Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 5 P.M.  A non-productive day, although I did try to get a few things done.  Mainly, I spent a couple of hours getting a copy of terms that are for use in my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes”–twice, the second time because I needed them a different size.  (Actually, I plan to have a full-size version of the work, and a smaller one, so I can use both sets of terms.)  Earlier, another round of tennis, which went fairly well for me, for a change.  A second breakfast with teammates at the nearby McDonald’s followed.  Later I had a doctor’s appointment to get through and some grocery shopping to do.  I got some new medicine for my continuing urinary problems.  Right now I’m weary, as usual.  I feel, as I often do, that if I could just go to bed and go to sleep for twelve or thirteen hours, I’d be a new man.  But, although I’m more than sleepy enough than I should need to be to go to sleep, the chances are I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, nor stay asleep for even as much as an hour if I did.

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In the meantime, though, I grabbed a poem Mark Weiss posted at New-Poetry for use here:

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

by: W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

“A great poem,” I said in a comment about it (which I’ve revised in the unnervingly many places it was needed), “not least for its being metrically the same throughout. At least to my generalizing sort of ear; anti-reductionists will find each line ever-so-gloriously-different from all the rest metrically–not that I am deaf to that, but I ignore it as aesthetically irrelevant. (Nice to see he starts almost as great a percentage of his lines with ‘And’ as I sometimes do.)”

Later note: I’m wrong about the meter: it is broken by “flickering,” “glimmering,” “brightening” and “wandering.”  All of which are perfect where they are for other reasons.

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