.            Simmering in the simple
.            of.

.            Actually, it was more Venice, California,
.            next to the empty can of Mountain Dew.

.            Exceptional diseases, all
.            of them ex cathedra, into “I
.            am egoless, therefore worship Me.”

.            “The warship Me,” Poem thought,
.            swelling with self, ten leagues ahead
.            of neutering chocolate swords, and
.            increasing his lead..

.            Nimbly, the cat jumped up onto the ledge,
.            so real compared to what he had been dreaming that
.            Poem, feeling her solidity as he petted her,
.            continued misplacing himself even after she disappeared.

.            The mytht examerated.

.            The key dwimmed.

Another little something to take care of an entry, this one almost entirely improvised.

Note: for anyone absurdly wanting to read every entry of mine, there’s a “new” one for 6 June 2010 (entry 139) now in my archives.  I had published it as “private” by mistake.  Warning: it’s about my definition of visual poetry.

.          A pale orange sail with some red in it
.          was receding into a young June sun’s
.          blue opinion of the locale.
.          Oblivious to it,
.          Poem and a woman
.          asked out of
.          a long-lost map Poem had just
.          found in his notebook
.          for a course in calculus he’d taken
.          in junior college thirty years previously
.          walked slowly through
.          the small quarrels the ocean was having
.          with the shore.
.          Mid-Manhattan traffic sounds,
.          from some other poem–
.          sharp, yellow,
.          upside-down–
.          whittled a possible destination
.          into the dimming of his hopes.

I don’t really know what to make of this, but it seems interesting enough to take care of this entry with.

.

At a Wall, 10 July 2010

On a wall in
the lowest winds of his weirdness
Poem noticed a long
division example.
It showed “mathematics”
being divided by “number,”
giving a qoutient of “spring.”

“Uhn,” he thought out loud
after a moment’s reflection,
shaking his head in incomplete comprehension.
“To get mathematics from number,
you must multiply number by spring.”

“No,” quoth Criticism, suddenly
at his side that a dialogue might transpire.
“Note the term, ‘arithmetic,’
beneatht the term, ‘mathematics.’
The term, ‘spring,’ times ‘number’
equals only ‘arithmetic.’
To that you must add
the remainder to get ‘mathematics.’”

“Ah, so it’s a joke since the remainder
is the term, “hubris,’” responded Poem.
“Mathematics is arithmetic with hubris.  Ha ha.”

“You absorb learning most speedily, Poem,
but surely the text is more thanjust a jest.
Surely, it suggests most cogently
how number may majestically ascend
from where it usually winters all the year,
incommunicative, inert,
and almost less than winter,
to what the woods and meadows
celebrate into when multiplied by spring!”

“You’ve paved my grope across this text
most winningly–e’en to the utmost bound
of perfect reasoning,” cried Poem.

“That heartens me, good friend,”
responded Criticism.  “But tell me,
does the meaning of this text
completely satisfy you, as a work of art?
For such, I’m sure, its author
has intended it to be.”

“Why, yes, I think so, Criticism.
Wherefore should it not?”

“Ah,” smiled Criticism.  “Verily, you may be right.
“Yet I have still a question: how
can such a quantity as spring,
supreme among the seasons,
themselves the rulers of our earth,
be less in value than arithmetic,
however admirable the underknitting
that the spring carries out
of so much of
our scientific understanding?”

Poem paused for three full minutes.
“I must concede that you
could not be more correct,” he finally said.
But surely what the author wants to say
could not more skillfully be rendered;
ergo, how could it be be amiss
to overlook so trivial a flaw?”

“Because, iwht thought, it can
more skillfully be rendered,” shouted Criticism,
producing a magic marker
and with it slashing out “spring,”
replacing it with “1 laneful of May”;
hesitating, then changing “1″ to “2.7″–
then angrily changing “lanefuls” to
“meadowfuls.”

“There,” quoth he. “The author’s carelessly
implied disparagement of spring
impales the sensitivity of those
of us with taste no longer.
Do you not agree, good friend?”

“I do,” said Poem.  “You, once again,
have forcefully repaired my wayward wits.  That done,
O learned one, I ask:
would it be possible for us
to not exchange our views less stiltedly?
Or must we keep on parodying Socrates
and some dull blunderer that Plato
has inserted to make his hero seem astute
to his admirers?”

Poem’s show of resistance
to the instruction
Criticism had been trying to
improve him with came too late.
Criticism had been ignoring him,
concentrating on
calling up Number from before
the universe’s oldest axiom.
The winds ceased,
all words exceeded
the last syllable of enumeration
and a winter commenced
whose value was less
than the absolute value of zero.
Poem steeled himself
for the sort of epiphany
he so frequently
had to undergo,
but if one occurred,
he was not aware of it.

Criticism soon left.  For an hour–
or century–after that,
Poem felt Number’s continued presence,
although he could no more see him
than he could see his sibling, light,
there being no longer any matter
for light to bounce to him from–
and he himself had mostly gone,
only his awareness
remaining with whatever it
and light and Number were in,
as invisible as they,
but aching with internalness–
as, for all it knew, were they.

.

Poem & Number Discuss Mathematical Poetry

The ocassion was the official unveiling
of a large artwork called
the mathematical graffiti wall.
Number, somberly clothed
in the equation defining the sine function
that he might be visible to the audience
gathered to listen to him and Poem
discuss the wall, opined
that while it was arresting as visual art,
and illustrated the Pythagorean Theorum,
the origins of differential calculus,
and other aspects of mathematics
with commendable charm and skill,
some of the applications of that science
depicted onit, involving, for instance,
the square root of a valentine heart, or a tree(!)
made little sense.

“I disagree,” said Poem.  “I’m new to the various forms
of mathematical art, but I like the parts you mention..
According to my knowledgeable friend, Criticism,
they marry the purely conceptual
with the exhiliratingly sensual to result in
a wonderfully fresh kind of art,
an art which, among other things,
unghettos any mind flexible enough
to live in two perspectives simultaneously.”

“on the contrary,” retorted Number.
“It merely relieves the creator of such ‘art’
from any need to be coherent.”

“You’re wrong,” snapped Poem.  “The effective maker
of such art is forced to be coherent in two ways.
A good example of this is the poem
“to plus to equals too,”"
which was composed by a scholar
in the philosophy department of
Fordham University.”

At this point Asterrisk interrupted from off-stage:
“Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino,” said he.  “And
it’s Franklin University, not Fordham University.”

“Thank you,” smiled Poem.  “Now, what this poem does
is simple arithmetic, which it certainly does
correctly and coherently.”

Number reddened.  “Correctly!?
You’re telling us that it performs an addition
that yields ‘too’ as the correct answer?!”

“‘Too’ is a correct answer.  But when
I said it does arithmetic correctly,
I meant it performed its operation
according to the rules–it added ‘to’ to ‘to,’
or at least I’m intuitively convinced it did,
as I am intuitively convinced
the answer it got, coherently,
is one correct answer–
the way, it suddenly occurs to me,
4 is the correct answer to what is 2 + 2,
but not the only correct answer,
others being 2.5 + 1.5, and 17.3 – 13.3, and 2 squared.”

“Or your IQ,” he wasn’t crude enough
to say out loud.

“You’re being absurd.  Mathematics does
mathematics, poetry does poetry.
This thing does neither.  Only someone
of unsound mind could think otherwise.”

“Sorry, idiot, but it does both.”
At this point, the moderator had
to step between the two.
Fortunately, he had anticipated
just this sort of fireworks
when the two confronted each other,
so had two security men on hand.
With their help he managed to keep the peace.
Number, however, refused to continue.
So the unlucky audience was
denied Final Illumination regarding
the main matter of the discussion.

.

.

.    The Age of Vendler
.
.    Sometimes,
.    frustrated by a bouldering
.    of some sky he was trying to daisle
.    a fresh pulse through,
.    Poem envied the traipses

.     of never fully-specified ladymoods
.     that monopoliszed the highest praise
.     of the tenured
.     and regretted the balls
.     that kept him mythodically direct,
.     technically venturesome.
.     and socio-economically marginal–
.     even as he knew
.     in his heart of hearts
.     how trivial the appreciation of the academy was
.      compared to where he went,. however ineptly.
.
.
.     On the Importance of Getting Published
.
.     To ask if you should write poetry
.     even if you cannot get published
.     struck Poem at first like asking
.     if you should get laid
.     even if you cannot get it
.     on tv.
.
.     Then he saw that poetry
.     as donation sans recipient
.     is hardly comparable to two-party sex.
.
.     But so what? Pumping jizz
.     into one’s own kleenex
.     is still better than no sex at all,
.     or getting published
.     even if you can’t write poetry.
.
.
.              Poem’s Trudge
.
.                     Pouhm trud
.                     ged through yet another of his att
.                                        empts to regrammar something into p
.                oetry, in this case a phoneline 3 or 4
.                             sprows had haikued above h
.     im & the splanch of worn twilight behind it,
.                     getting nothing but the standard pre-cerebral
.                                              sprout of “meaningfulness’ all
.                                                   the fash
.                                   ionable poets of the time
.                            were getting big money in grants for, the disgstd
.          down yet lower when his ineffectuousness
.                itself sprang an epipha
.                                                             ny.
.

I’m keeping them out of the collection because they are about Poem as a poet, which I consider confusing.  If I get enough of them, I published them in a collection called, Poem as a Poet.    I may have five or six of them.  I t doesn’t looke like I’ll ever have the twelve or more I’d want for a collection.

.             His Origin

.             He was just fragmentary echoings
.             of Stevens, Roethke, Hughes
.             some misslept vagrant thought one day set racketing
.             through Crazy Jane’s untrellised ardors,
.             shedding feathers and farting
.             as he faltered into words princed
.             eventually, with occasional fingers,
.             genitals, and voice struggling always
.             to light up
.             with silence.

Poem Ventures North-South

One morning, Poem set out for the north-south.
Never having gone precisely there before, he hoped
the change would shake him out
of the null zone he’d been too long in.
The sun was halfway to noon,
when he rippled into a locked gate,
“Prose Poem,” engraved on it.

Straight through the gate, Poem strode, that element of him that
was fictional not for the first time being of advantage. A few dazed
steps later he realized he’d come to a corner of his final telephone
call to his father–the one Poochie, the little rubber dog his father
had given him one birthday, daily merged more completely with.

From the Shell station across the street, now long-abandoned, rose
some aria from La Boheme. Many slow clotheslines later in China the aria sank in a suburban Chinatown alley’s moonlit Drunkenness.
Poem would surely have left at that point had one of the gas pumps
not unworried a carton of Camels (his father’s brand) into something resembling cherry-blossoms. From them, the aria from La Boheme re-emerged. The shadow it cast resembled Roman legions–from when
Rome was still a republic.

Is it any good? Who knows?

.

.                               Poem Encounters a Nigger Man

.                               One day when Poem was aimlessly making
.                               his way through yet another text, he
.                               was suddenly accosted by
.                               a drunken nigger man, almost too indignant
.                               to be able to stand, who blamed him
.                               for the presence in the text of
.                               the phrase, “nigger man.”  Wanting to be alone
.                               with his thoughts, Poem merely growled that
.                               he had nothing to do with what was in
.                               the text, which wasn’t exactly true since
.                               Poem was clearly an alter ego
.                               of the text’s author.

.                                                                          When he
.                               tried to continue on his way, though,
.                               the nigger man persisted, blocking his attempts
.                               to escape him until Poem finally
.                               exploded, telling the Nigger man that the phrase
.                               belonged in the text, the text obviously
.                               being about the type of black man the phrase
.                               stood for and he exemplified.  Poem went on
.                               to lecture the nigger man about the stupidity
.                               of caring about the names people called you,
.                               then made a quick move to one side that freed
.                               him of the nigger man before the latter could
.                               start in on all the innocent African Americans
.                               that had been lynched.
.
.                                                                          The nigger man didn’t
.                               mind.  He had more whiskey, and it wasn’t
.                               long before the daylight, under
.                               its, and his harmonica’s influence,
.                               began no longer to seem
.                               nothing more than a day’s proper wage
.                               but something wonderful the next
.                               roll of the dice had a good chance of winning.

.                                  Another Failure

.                                  For half the night
.                                  Poem struggled mightily
.                                  to sing himself a sleep
.                                  that melted understandings into him
.                                  as intricately deepening as April rain
.                                  dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;
.                                  but nowhere in it did
.                                  anything extend beyond
.                                  its decimal point.

I will now repeat it, with a comment in purple under each of its lines:

.                                  Another Failure

.                                  For half the night

The poem’s first line-break notifies the reader that he’s in a poem, as does every poem’s first line-break; slows his read to force him to pay at least a little more attention to what’s going on in the language of the poem and what its expressing, particularly its imagery, as do all line-breaks; with the corroboration of the poem’s other lines, if the reader glances at them, informs him of the poem’s pace, in this case comparatively quick; gives his mind a resting place from the possibly difficult material of the poem (again, like all line-breaks); presents a hint (possibly misleading) of the kind of poem the will follow as to style, subject matter, rhythmic nature, technique, point-of-view, and the like, in this particular case, mainly suggesting quotidianness via a commonplace diction, and the representation of a highly standard image; and, finally, setting up a rhyme by leaving “night” in an emphazied location of the poem.

.                                  Poem struggled mightily

The poem’s second line-break does most of the things its first one did but also pretty much establishes the poem as free-verse, and puts “might” near its end to rhyme with the final word of the previous line.

.                                  to sing himself a sleep

The next line-break does little new, but the extra time it gives the reader may help prevent his reading “a sleep,” a key contributor to whatever value the poem has, too hurriedly.

.                                  that melted understandings into him

Coming a little late compared to the other line-breaks, this one is responsible for giving its line a feel of magnitude, importance; I believe it will be welcomed for the pause it provides the reader to think about just what its line and the preceding one mean

.                                  as intricately deepening as April rain

The next line-break lets its line extend even more.

.                                  dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;

Then a line-break halting its line somewhat sooner than the previous line-breaks halted theirs–perhaps indicating the we’ve reached the poem’s peak and are now quieting.

.                                  but nowhere in it did

Another short line, now, stopped before it says anything–stopped also on a word a more standard line-break would not have, to “merely’ keep the reader from being completely on balance.

.                                  anything extend beyond

The penultimate line-break does little more than prevent the reader from too quickly learning where the sentence he’s reading is going.

.                                  its decimal point.

The poem’s final line-break provides it with a sharp short clear end.

Any questions?

Additional comments: when I wrote this poem, I paid little attention to the line-breaks I was making–they came pretty much naturally.  I’m sure that’s the way it wis with most composers of free verse.  The “did” I thought about before going with, though, and I think I came back to one pair of lines that sounded wrong, and change the line-break between them.

A reader, too, if experienced, ought not pay much conscious attention to the lineation of a work of free verse–but, if effective, it will have a great deal of influence on his understanding of the poem.

One last comment: in the right hands–those of E. E. Cummings, for example–line breaks can be employed to do much more of value in a poem than they do in “Another Failure.”

.

.

.

DiscountContactLenses

It is now 13 November 2009. Since writing the above, I’ve had second thoughts about the final line. It now strikes me as too subtle. So I’ve come up with the following revision: