I think of this as sort of parallel to Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” for it’s a summary of what’s in Xerolage30, many of my best poems at the time of publication. The divisor is where the mid-heaven is in my astrological chart, so represents my poetic career peak.  The poems in Xerolage30 times that peak equal the collage of fragments from many of the pieces in my collection, with a remainder of “mystery,” and other things from my “Odysseus Suite.”

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          Poem spent the day interviewing
          a spoke from a bicycle wheel that was all
          that was left of a Schwinn he’d had ten
          years ago.  He was interested
          in the spoke’s relationship
          to quantum mechanics
          considered chromatically.
          This caused a flap.

          His present bicycle went nowhere.                             
          Criticism intervened, trying
          to rescue the incredibly dead patch Poem
          had gotten himself into by
          using it to illustrate his thesis
          that little boy blue’s absence
          was impossible for any poem
          to overcome.

Yes, I am as out of it as I’ve ever been. I was hoping my non sequiturs would get close enough to sense for me to do something with them. They never did. But behold: I still eventually steered my text into an at least slightly intriguingly unsettling epiphany. Not that it makes up for the badness of the rest of the poem. But wait.  So this entry won’t be 100% worthless, here’s my “Cursive Mathemaku No. 2,” again. While going through my 2011 entries I came across this and changed my mind about it: it suddenly seemed to me the best version of the poem, not the third-best. So I’m using this entry to make public its officially being granted the title of “Cursive Mathemaku No. 2.”  Weird how much I prefer it to the one I once greatly preferred to it.

I really like the black lines, I don’t know why.  They’re very simple.  I think they give the thing thrust, they increase its seeming to be going somewhere.  Aside from that, spirals are always a plus.

Note: the yellow cursive reads, “any preposition whatever.”

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PerfectMatch

In Entry 536, I called the following a “misfire.” It made no sense to me. Coming across it again a week or so ago, I completely changed my mind: it makes perfect sense to me, now (if only meta-rationally). I now think of it as being as good as anything I’ve yet done. I also decided my “Cursive Mathemaku No. 2″ is probably better without the colored background I added to it.  Sometimes, though, I actually finish a piece permanently.

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Target Coupon Codes

To make this entry more than a diary entry, here’s a poem of mine from a year or so ago.   I posted it then, but just now made a slight change to it, making a whole new poem.  I changed “full” to “certain.”  I decided the implication that I’d come to understand everything was dumb.  Now what kind of understanding I’d achieved is unclear, but should come across as Important.  I don’t know whether this poem became visual later; I don’t think it did.  I think it may work best as is, but who knows.

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Hotel Reservation

I have one problem with this: my only version of  it is a low-resolution jpg, which I don’t know how to convert to high-resolution tif, except by simply redoing it.  Any suggestions from anybody out there who knows more than I do about this kind of thing?

I didn’t re-post it only to ask for help, or because of how much I like it, but as an example of how my work as a poet has evolved.  Actually, I want to show that it has evolved.  That’s because Paul Crowley, the nut I most argue with on the Internet about who wrote the works of Shakespeare, seems not to believe that a poet’s style, or way of making art, evolved once he’s past his apprenticeship.  Of course, he will claim I’m not a poet, and that the evidence I’m about to produce to show my evolution indicates only trivial changes, not anything like genuine evolution.  I enjoy talking about my work, and analyzing any poem, so will go ahead with my demonstration, anyway.

First of all, I should state my claim: it is that over the past couple of years, my style as a poet has evolved appreciably, and that this poem illustrates it.

(1) I only began using cursive ten or fewer years ago, and never for more than a word or two.  This poem and two others have all or most of their texts in cursive.  Because the difference in expressiveness between print and cursive is visiopoetically meaningful to those who appreciate visual poetry, this wholesale use of cursive script counts as a significant evolution of style.

(2) My use of cursive is more elegant here than it is in mt other two recent poems making extensive use of cursive.  Note, for instance, the large O, and the increased gracefulness of all the letters compared with the letters in my other two cursive poems.

(3) Twenty years ago, I didn’t bother giving my poems backgrounds.  Since then I have, and have slowly been improving (but have plenty of room for further improvement).  Note the harmony of the background’s shape and colors with the text, especially the O. 

(4) The background has another important value–the connotations it picks up as a result of its being a variation (mostly through color changes) of the background in another poem of mine.  Connecting poems of mine with others’ poems and others of my own poems is another way I’ve evolved as an artist, not doing it until perhaps twenty years ago, then only very slowly doing it to a greater and greater extent.  This poem may be the first to re-use an entire background from another poem.  This is not trivial, for it allows this poem to suggest “dictionary-as-temple,” the main part of the foreburden of the poem its background is from.  It also should make this poem easier to enjoy, the same way the repetition in a new musical work of an old theme is usually pleasant to hear.  I believe the happiness of the colors of this version of the background gains from the reminder of the different, lower-key mood evoked by the other version.

(5) The use of color in tension with greyscale is another trick new to me twenty years ago that I exploit more and more in my present works, as here (though I’ve done more with it elsewhere).

(6) I think my language has evolved over the years, too–from fairly literal to metaphorical and/or surreal.  The “logic” of this piece and most of my recent pieces is not so easy to guess, which may be an unfortunate evolution, but an evolution nonetheless.

(7) You can’t tell from this image, which has been reduced in size to fit the normal computer screen, but the hard copy is larger than anything I did ten or more years ago, which is another result of evolution. 

Here’s my first or second mathemaku, done thirty or more years ago, to make the profound evolution of my style more inescapable. Yet I maintain this piece is at the level of later pieces; it is simply more condensed. For one thing, it is only linguistic and mathematical. Nothing visioaesthetic happens in it. The eye is used only to recognize the symbols it contains, not to enjoy colors or shapes the way my faereality poem compels it to–i.e., not a visual poem (except inthe mindlessnesses of those for whom just about everything is a visual poem). It is short, and printed. Its words are simple to an extreme.

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bank account

Diary Entry

Saturday, 31 December 2011, Noon.  Tennis again after four days off (Thursday because it was in the forties).  I’m still not right but played okay.  After playing, I picked up some thyroid pills.  Now I’m home, not feeling like doing anything productive, but not in the mood for anything to do to evade my chores, like reading.  Later note: I worked a little on the lesson in mathemaku appreciation power-point slide show I have in progress.  Didn’t do anything else.

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Dell Inspiron Laptop Sale

 Diary Entry

Friday, 30 December 2011, 4 P.M.  Early in the morning I ran another horrendous mile.  I had to push jiust to keep going nearly every step of the way.  Later I printed twenty hand-outs (in full color!) for my show, and printed copies of the agreement for my exhibition I have to sign.  I listed the works I’ll be showing.  I need to add their measurements and how much I’m selling them for.  I keep changing my mind about that.  I believe I’ll probably take $100 for most of the 8.5 by 11 ones.  $600 for “Mathemaku for Ezra Pound” and “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes.”  Not that I’d get even $100 for them.  I’m thinking signed prints of my “Long Division Valentine, No. 1″ for $20.  I found a loose-leaf binder to hold my explanations.  Then, amazingly, I found my hole-puncher.  Easily.  I figured I’d have to buy one the way things vanish around here, expecially things I haven’t used for over a year.  I don’t think I’ve used the hole puncher for ten years.  I’ve also spent a lot of time putting two old essays from Comprepoetica into the “Pages” of this blog.  I’ve been busy, just not very effectively.

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Vitamin D

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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easy approval

* * *

Friday, 9 December 2011, 8 A.M.   Now that I’m starting to get things done, my luck has soured.   A while ago I was getting ready to take the three framed works I now have for counter-display to the Arts&Humanities Council office.  I could only find two.  I was carrying the missing one around in my bicycle basket a few days ago.  Looks like someone grabbed it.  Unless I found a some incredibly stupid place to hide it from myself here.   Luckily the frame was a cheap one, and the poem, which I’m sure the ones who stole it had not interest in (if they stole it for the poem, I’d be very pleased) is about the easiest of the ones I have to zap out another copy of.  It’s the “Hi” one.  But I’m out ten dollars or so, and have to ride out to get another frame, a wearying chore that upsets my plans for the day.

It is now a little after nine.  Just as I was about to leave to get a new frame and take care of a few other errands, I found the “stolen” work.  It was in a packing envelope (as I remembered it had been) and right in the chair I would naturally have put it in after getting back from the bike ride I’d had it with me on.  My jacket was draped over it, but not entirely over it.  I should have looked where it was as soon as I thought it lost.  I’m not going senile–I’ve been doing things like that all my life.  I must say, I feel a lot better.  And something good came from it: needing another copy of the poem, I fooled around with it at Paint Shop and improved it.  (Hey, that counts as my work for day on exhibition-related matters!)

It’s now eleven.  I did some more work concerned with the exhibition: I went to the A&H office and talked to Judy, the lady in charge.  I got a better idea of things from her–such as the date of the opening (3 January 2012).

5 P.M. and I’ve corrected my “A Christmas Mathemaku,” which I’ve always considered a potential crowd pleaser, and done a write-up on it.  I plan to leave a framed copy of it at the Grumman Exhibition Center on Monday.

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Order Flower Bouquet

* * *

 Thursday, 8 December 2011, 3 P.M.  I’m in a good mood.  The poem above came out reasonably well, and smoothly–and gave me something for this blog entry.  It will probably be in my show, so counts as work done for that.  But I also got one of my piece for that into a frame that can be set on a counter, which counts indisputably as work for the show.   Meanwhile, I’ve disconnected completely from my Shakespeare book.  Next, I have to get a press release for the show done.  Should be easy but I’m having trouble pumping myself up to do it.

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