I’ll be out of town for the next couple of days, and recovering from the trip the third, so probably won’t post here again until 4 April. I’ll be visiting with Marton Koppany and Clark Lunberry. Should be fun.
Archive for the ‘Nothing Much’ Category
Entry 413 — Another Holiday
Thursday, March 31st, 2011Entry 412 — Commercial Activity of Sorts
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
Just a small announcement: if you go here, you’ll find my new agent’s author’s box for my Shakespeare and the Rigidiks. Whitt Brantley is my agent’s name. I had a nice conversation with him on the phone yesterday. Seems energetic and intelligent–and a nice guy. He’s hoping to sound out some publishers soon about doing something with my book. Fingers crossed but I’m afraid I don’t expect much. Which isn’t a vote of non-confidence in Whitt but in the world.
Entry 506 — Random Comments
Thursday, March 24th, 2011A few trivial recent comments of mine just to let the curious know I’m still alive. It looks, though, like I won’t be posting much for a while, for I’ll be out of town each of the next two week-ends.
Back to Wilshberia
Here’s another definition of “Wilshberia.” I think it probably the most accurate one. All the kinds of poetry between the formal verse of Wilbur and what I consider the jump-cut poetry of Ashbery taught by more than a few English professors. So you’d have to survey English departments to pin it down, which I now believe is why I haven’t been able to define it perfectly. That and the fact that I use it without much thought–in threads where no one else is using much thought. A really good brief but not perfect definition would be simply the kinds of poetry William Logan discusses in the New Criterion.
Williphobia
Next, something from the essay on Williphobia (psychotic hatred os Shakespeare of Stratford) I’ve been trying to get done (deleted because outside the scope of the essay, but here because I don’t want to forget it): I hypothesize that mature knowleplexes, healthy or flawed, do not come into being until puberty. Before that a person’s charactation, or normal level of mental energy, is not high enough to discriminate to any extent among knowlecules (bits of data) arriving, haphazardly organized, accompanied sometimes with contradictions not recognized or dealt with when recognized. That is, everyone tends to be a Milyoop before puberty–excessively, uncritically, open to the environment. Children can and do form knowleplexes (full-scale understandings of various unified subjects), but they will be limited to daily (pre-sexual) life, and consist, understandably, mainly of early, simple knowlecules. No child will form a rigidniplex (near-insanely clung-to irrational understanding) except a rare, highly screwed-up one (such as an autistic child). Children’s main intellectual flaw is generally ignorance, not irrationality–they haven’t the charactration to be seriously irrational. (Although they are prey to enthusiplexes.)
A Visit to an Establishment Website
Now from Contemporary Poetry Review, followed by my responses to it, followed by my second thought about my response:
Five Lessons from AWP: Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings
1) You should recite your poetry, not read it.
2) If you can’t recite your poetry, then you can’t remember your poetry. And if you can’t remember your poetry, why would anyone else?
3) A poetry recital should be a performance. Most poets read their poems in front of an audience as if they were lecturing to a group of college students. This betrays two illusions. The first is that the poetry audience is the same as a classroom of captives. The second is that the audience must indulge the poet, rather than the poet showing sufficient respect for the audience to entertain it.
4) A poem should be recited to an audience before it is ever published. This should be a part of the poet’s method of composition and revision. Our modern practice is exactly the reverse: to publish a book of poems and then read them aloud, generally for the first time, to an audience. Is it any wonder that so many poets are so dreadful?
5) Never be boring. (Many poets are boring – their poetry too.)
Response #1
1. Only a grind remembers poems in any detail. A lover of poetry’s only important concern is remembering who wrote each good one he encounters, and perhaps enough besides that to help him find it later.
2. If one can sufficiently understand a recited poem one has never encountered before fully to appreciate it,it’s unlikely to be very good.
3. Don’t be boring? What a revolutionary idea! Up there with don’t be stupid.
Response #2
Okay, said my smarter self, one good way to appreciate a poem IS to take in its spoken surface so well you can remember it (assuming, as too many do, that all poems are words only). But there are a lot of just-as-good other ways of appreciating a poem, without remembering hardly nothin’ about it.
Entry 358 — 3 Recent Internet Posts of Mine
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011Three recent posts mine to take care of this entry without doing any work, two to New-Poetry, one to Geof’s blog:
1, A Response to Crisman Cooley, who wrote:
Tipping my hand. I have a criticism, not original or uncommon, that poetry today is a page phenomenon– composed on the page, published on the page, read (silently) on the page, rarely becoming sound. Poetic referents, maybe under influence of media, are primarily visual, leading sound images to clank and clatter behind. Merwin says something similar here. Though I don’t think Merwin himself embodies the solution.
If the words never stir the air, how can they emerge from anywhere in the body? I’m fine with words stirring the air, but I think the proposition that they must do that to “emerge from . . . the body” a little narrow-minded. To each his own.
I’ve been writing plays exclusively for the past 5 years and have been struck by how the play must be recomposed as soon as I hear the words out loud and see them acted out. The words need to be made physical for the physical space. And I begin to see that there is a big difference between mental words and physical words, mental writing and physical writing. If a poet does not have actors to speak the words, the next best thing is a video recording of reading the words. That is another way of making them physical. Reading them out loud to yourself doesn’t do it because the sound is conducted through bones in your head and doesn’t give an idea how the words sound to other people. So, if you don’t have access to other people reading (actors are best) you can use a device.
This is a kind of a first step toward a poetics of sound. More on that shortly.
I find my mental voice sufficient for appreciation of the verbal effects you’re speaking of. Sure, nice to hear other voices just as calligraphy is visually nice, but minor. What most counts for me is the conceptual effect of words, multiplied by metaphor, but necessarily sensual as well since metaphors depend on sensual images of some kind.
To end this lesson as unpleasantly as possible, I will now reveal what needs to be understood for an intelligent discussion of the value of sound in poetry: that there are three levels of sound possible in poetry:
1. verbal sound, or the sound all words have when pronounced
2. enhanced verbal sound, or the sound some words can have when employed melodationally–that is, in rhyme, alliteration, and the like
3. averbal sound, or the sound metaphorically interacting with words to produce sound poetry (rather than accompanying it only, as music often does)
2. A Brief Addition
I try to pause at the ends of the lines of my linguexpressive poems but when nervous can at times forget to. I think poems are generally read (but heard) much more than only heard, and that line-breaks and other kinds of flow-breaks will work on the page almost automatically. I prefer my poems to be read, if read by people intelligent enough not to speed-read them. But certainly reciting them will add something to them. The best experience of a poem would be to read it, then hear it recited while reading it. Unless you’ve got it memorized when hearing it.
3. To Geof, after he posted his latest definition of “visual poetry”: a photograph of a young man standing between the two rails of a railroad track:
Intellectual nihilism can be fun to play, I suppose, but I should think a game you can’t lose would eventually become boring.
Note: the book-title presented does not say film is visual poetry, it says film can have the effect of poetry. Ask just about anyone, even a linguist, to give a definition of poetry, and he’ll say something along the lines of “emotionally-moving words,” not “an emotionally riveting film,” or “a beautiful woman.” The fact that any word can be used metaphorically does not mean no word can be used objectively to specify something. “Cow” will always mean something that goes “moo” even though root beer with vanilla ice cream in it is called “a brown cow.” And I’ll bet “cow,” by some spelling and pronounciation or other, has <i> always</i> meant an animal going “moo” just as “poetry,” by some spelling and pronounciation or other has always meant “words doing something more special in some way than prose can.”
Addition to No. 3.:
Geof gives “tone poem” as an example of a conventional use of the word, “poem,” for something that isn’t a poem to parallel his use of “visual poem” for something that isn’t a poem. The parallel is poor, however, because “tone poem” indicates something extremely specific that everyone knows is not a poem whereas “visual poem,” as Geof uses it, confusingly indicates a huge range of vastly different things, many of which are not poems, but some of which are. Moreover, it would be hard to find a good term to replace “tone poem,” but easy to replace “visual poem” where it stands for a non-poem by my “textual design,” or simply, “picture of textual matter.
Entry 342 — Mr. Sluggard
Sunday, January 9th, 2011I guess my favorite entry topic is my laziness. Here I am reporting on it again. But I did accomplish two things. I sketched a new mathemaku. Make that, “possibility for a mathemaku”–it’s a tribute to Homes and Watxon but very literal: “London” divided into “crime,” basically, although I’m going to add crime-related words to “crime,” and hide “solution” in the murk of the graphic I have in mind. I feel my recent mathemaku have been too literal. I haven’t been able to break out into the surreasoning I feel result in my best mathemaku.
One other thing I managed to do was re-do part of “Mathemaku in Praise of Reading, No. 1.” I should be able to finish it tomorrow. If I weren’t feeling so blah, I’m sure I could finish it this evening–I still have two or three hours to go before beddie-bye. All I’m doing is enlarging it so all the words will be readable. Not as easy a chore as it sounds, at least for me, whether because I’m a dunce or Paint Shop is very tricky to use. My version, I’m sure is, for I believe I’ve lost features, and I don’t think all the features I still have function properly. I’ve re-installed it several times, but it still isn’t working right, as far as I can tell. Things might go better soon, for I ordered a new copy of it from an Internet outfit. $16 is all it cost. Should get it in a few days.
Anyway, I have to do more than hit an “enlarge” button, for that spoils the resolution of many of the elements. So I have to do them over. I am also probably going to change the background.
Entry 331 — Magazines
Friday, December 31st, 2010.
My health is fine, and I’ve been in good spirits for several days, yet I can’t seem to do any serious work in my two main interests, poetry and verosophy. Today, in fact, I did no work in either. In spite of my not having anything else on my schedule like tennis or marketing. I did pay two bills. One other thing I suddenly did was much more spectacular: I finally gathered up all the magazines littering my living room–over a hundred spread out over the floor and two chairs and the sofa and in stacks on the floor and on my coffee table, put them in order and found good places for them, mostly in cardboard magazine holders libraries have, which I had room on one of my shelves for. A good number–well, thirty or so–I am throwing out. I do still have a two-foot-high stack of magazines next to the end of a bookcase in my hall, but it’s out of the way, and my cats used to like it.
Speaking of cats, a mostly black one visited my house a week or so ago, coming onto my lanai, which has a section of screening out. It hissed at me and ran away when I came out to investigate the noise it was making. The same one (I think) was whining in front of my house this morning, but stayed far from me when I when out to see if I could make friends with it–and return it to its owner if it were tagged, and possibly keep it if not. It kept whining, though, so I put out a dish of tuna. I’m still a sucker for cats. (It eventually ate the tuna, pausing to look at me looking at it through the kitchen window, then returned to the food.)
Entry 312 — Yes, My Entries Can Get Even Worse
Sunday, December 12th, 2010The day was not a total loss: I did some good work on the review I’m trying to get done and now feel confident I will actually get it done. I think I just have to organize what I have and put in a few transitional passages.
Entry 285 — Two More Textual Designs
Monday, November 15th, 2010The following thumbnails link to two more frames of the sequence of textual designs I made and didn’t like. I keep thinking I may be able to use details of them in better works, preferably visual poems of some sort.
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Hmmm, I like the thumbnail of the top one much better than the full image.
Entry 259 — Have My Entries Reached Bottom?
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010For this entry, I’m so out of it, I’m going to fill it with a quotation of an exchange between me and John Kennedy at the Forest Of Arden, one of the two Shakespeare Authorship sites I participate in:
ME: “For anyone who doesn’t know what I meant, I will revise what I said: ‘nor no man’ says, first “a man.” The two negatives, one of them with ‘ever’ being identical to ‘never,’ canceling each other grammatically–yes, according to me.”
“Not a safe assumption. The ukase against double negatives in English is more recent than Shakespeare’s time.”— John W Kennedy
ME: “Well, I did say or imply Shakespeare probably believed he was saying, ‘no man, and you better believe it, I mean NO man,’ rather than what the words say, regardless of ukases. I admit to not knowing when official recognition of what a double negative should mean began. I’d be interested in what Ben Jonson thought of them.
“I still maintain that double negatives cancel each other grammatically. That writers way back when didn’t realize this is, for me, beside the point. Although we have to respect there usage. Maybe I would say something like colloquiality trumps grammar. I’m sure linguists have treated this kind of thing, probably giving it a name.”
And, going all out to show me at my worst to the little girl, here’s an exchange about a new cinematization of The Tempest that’s coming out with Prospero played by a woman–as a woman, I imagine:
” Peter, I share your qualms. Throughout Shakespeare’s plays, deep erotic anxieties surround the father/daughter dyad at the point of separation. Casting a woman as Prospero cannot but undermine this
incestuous subtext and thereby make the film less interesting than it could have been. — Groundling
Me: “I’m even more politically incorrect than you, Groundling–I think the casting is ridiculous because men and women are different. What’s Caliban going to be, I wonder. And the sailors. Now, what I would not mind seeing is a play in which Tita’s son gets raped and hacked.” What I didn’t bother to say is that there isn’t any incestuous subtext for me in The Tempest. For the loons who believe in that tripe, why wouldn’t it remain, homosexually?
Aside from this kind of minor fun, I am continuing the round of Civilization I was playing yesterday. I am gaining on the leader, but unfortunately–as I guessed would happen–the number two nation has suddenly started running away with the game, creating military units far faster than I can, and having gotten a military unit equal to my ancient cavalry. I had to go to war with this nation, Persia. I have a chance because I have three good armies, and got Spain to go in with me against Persia. Arabia, the only other nation in the game, is already opposing Persia–badly, which is why Persia is gaining points faster than any other nation. This is major. It may be the only chance I get in my whole life to win Civilization at this level! I’m ridiculously excited. Too excited to go on. I’m shutting down the game until tomorrow.
You can be very sure I let you know what happens! Even if I lose. It’ll take me a long time to lose, though, for I’ve saved the game many moves back, and will return there if Persia gets the upper hand this time against me, and replay it over and over again till I either win or am convinced I can’t. In the latter case, I will cry.
Entry 258 — Going to the Mall!
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010Downhill am I going. I did nothing productive. Am continuing to have a good time with Louise and John, though (my sister and her husband). Went to the mall with them–for lack of anything else to do: Port Charlotte has nothing of much interest to go to, nor do I have much to offer in the way of conversation, or games, or whateveer else most people have for visiting relatives. Anyway, I bought a new pair of loafers that I needed, and groceries, and some allergy medicine, and sun glasses, them because for the first time in my life sunlight bothered me a week of so ago when I was playing tennis, and again the next time out.
I seem to be doing well in this round of Civilization I’m in although I’m still in last place. I’m gaining on everyone, though, and at peace much stronger militarily than any of the other nations. (Thanks to the little girl who has, without being asked, taken it upon herself to let me know when I make a typo, or forget to move an out-of-place sentence to the right place, as happened here, or something similar. She’s fairly good on this kind of thing, although not good on colloquialisms–and worse than worthless on adult errors. Too bad she feels compelled to spend time here when she could probably be helping people trying to write finished pieces rather than rough drafts of rough thinking, as I mostly do here).
I made it in the afternoon to a doctor’s appointment only to find out my doctor had decided to take a month off. His office had tried to get ahold of me, but I’m near impossible to contact by phone since my computer connection to the Internet is dial-up, and I’m on the Internet a lot when home, even when off the computer since almost all telephone calls to me are junk calls I want to block.
Ate out. Nice meal: pork chops, a baked potato with a lot of butter, rolls, with a lot of butter, and a salad. Lemonade was my drink. I rarely drink anything alcoholic–because I’ve never liked the taste and because my half-Irish father over-did the drinking.
I didn’t get home until about an hour ago. Finally threw this together. I hope to post a half-interesting entry before the end of the week, but who knows. Louise and john will still be here tomorrow, and I have another doctor’s appointment.