I’m beginning to think this one is okay, after all. One thing I’ve been meaning to point out in case any future students of poetry are ever drawn to my work is that I seem more and more lately to be recycling old images of mine–like the remainder in this piece, and the boats from Klee. I consider this a step up, not down, because it’s a way of multiplying allusions. It’s also a form of variations on themes.
I had high hopes for this one, which I composed yesterday. I even thought I might work a sequence out of it, using the Klee ship “musical theme” as the first step of a visual symphony. But I wasn’t satisfied with what I did with the ships. As I worked with them, though, I came up with a lot of minor ideas I liked. The main one was a suddenly conscious attempt to provide a metaphor for the coming of spring. But I also liked breaking up what was originally as single framed image, and changing the sizes of each unit. Grey-scaling the first two tiny ones seemed a nice touch, too. And the escape of the final ship! I didn’t like my dividend too well, either–after my initial enthusiasm for it (being a sucker for anything having to do with spring). For some reason it doesn’t seem quite there, for me. Maybe I’ll simplify it to, “a brook’s revived consideration of an April countryside.” Yes, I think I was trying for too much. . . .
.
Thinking about what Tony Robinson had at his blog spurred me to this motto of my own (obnoxious) practice as a poetry critic: Try for maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I understand it, and expressed with the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage. I originally continued with “–with no significant suppression of emotion, regardless of the tender feelings of the hyper-offendable,” but upon reflection found that nice to say but too secondary for this motto.
Better: Using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, try to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I see it. Ah, but I now see that “the value of what I’m critiquing” would include what the latter does to advance poetry. Ergo: Try, using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing.
And here’s a copy (an imperfect one) of my motto as a poet:
.
Xerolage30 is the issue of mIEKAL aND and Liz Was’s Xexoxial Editions’ series of one-author collections of visiotextual art that was devoted to my work. I was looking through it for accessible purely visual poems to use in my next local exhibit. I wasn’t too happy with how little pleasure the items in it gave me, although the objective part of my brain told me they were mostly pretty good. I ended choosing eleven of the 20 or so in the collection. I’m not sure how many I’ll use–no more than seven or eight, probably, because I want half my pieces to be fairly recent mathemaku. I may not use the following, which is the (not too accessible) mathemaku I made for the cover of Xerolage30:
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.”
.
Poem’s Latest Visit to Nowhere
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.”
.
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.
.
Well, according to astrology, I’ve begun to decline vocationally after reaching my peak a week or two ago. It wasn’t much of a peak. I got my art on display, but doubt that more than a handful of people have looked at it, and probably no more than one or two has really looked at it. I haven’t been very productive, either. I’m going to return to my Shakespeare book today (after a little head-start last night). My intention is to either finish it, or–if I have significant trouble with it–switch to another project of mine, a non-fiction book that may be of general-interest but I’ll say no more about–to keep its theme, which is original, I think, and will be its main selling point, a secret. I will say that it’s about life in general, not about Shakespeare, psychology or poetics.
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.
.
One of my works that I was particularly pleased with when I came across it while backing up blog entries was the following:
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.
.
I have another Page available for browsing. It’s a pdf file called “How to Appreciate a Mathemaku,” consisting of a slide show of about 25 pages in which I take the viewer on a step-by-step tour of a single mathemaku, “Mathemaku in Praise of the Dictionary.” I’ll have it at my exhibition. I’d be grateful for any comments on it. My main concern is whether or not it will help ordinary people get something out of my poems.
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.
.
I expect everyone reading this to come visit.
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.
.