POETICKS

I’ve decided, at least for now, the hell with it, I’m going with my old names, “Songmode Poetry” and “Plaintext Poetry” for formal verse and conventional free verse. Among my reasons for “Songmode” as opposed to “formal” is that some free verse poems can be formal, the haiku, in particular. I could keep classical 5/7/5 haiku bracketed as formal verse, but would have to list many other kinds of haiku as free verse. Another is that some poems that qualify by my definition as songmode, are not formal. Doggerel, for one, unless you want to claim that having rhyme give a poem a “form.” (“Doggerel,” by the way, I’m using as my term for unmetrical poetry that has a significant number of end-rhymes–which can include first-rate poems, everything in my taxonomy being descriptive not evaluatory.)   Poems that are metrical but whose line-length and/or number of lines is arbitrary would be in my songmode category without seeming to me as formal.

Elsewhere in my taxonomy I define form as simply the shape on the page of a poem, so all poems are technically formal by my standards. But I distinguish “classiformularity” from “idioformuularity,” the former being what most people would consider form–it being “the adherence of a poem to a set of rules having to do with some combination of line-length, meter, placement of rhymes, over-all length in words or syllables, etc., which some reasonable number of other poems also adhere to.” Idioformularity is simply “having a form adhering to no set of commonly followed rules.”

As for my preference for “plaintext poetry” over “free verse,” as I mention yesterday, too many kinds of poems that would not be in this category are technically free verse. Plus, I want conventional haiku in this category, including ones that are extremely formal (even beyond following the silly 5/7/5 rule).

One other minor change: I think I will be using “xenological” instead of “idiological.” No particular reason for this, I just like it better.

Now to finish off this entry with a medical update: my back seems significantly improved today; also, my leg does not. I fear that as the pain I’ve been feeling due to my back surgery recedes, pain do to my continuing arthritis of the hip is taking over. I do believe I am now and will be better off than I was before my operation, but might need the hip replacement sooner than I hoped I would. Otherwise, I continue to feel sleepy most of the time even though I’m no longer taking pain medication. So it was hard for me to get around to making this entry–or replying to all the e.mails I need to, including a couple from Matron Koppany with some terrific new visual punctuation poems.

Another short entry (which is code for “my back is still keeping me pretty much out of action”).

I feel it’s fairly easy to identify some of the categories that should be under “plurexpressive poetry”: visual poetry, sound poetry, mathematical poetry, performance poetry, cyber poetry.  I’m only confident about my definitions of two of these, though, and am sure I’m leaving out kinds of poetty that should be included.

I feel I have a good idea of the kinds of poetry that should exist under the umbrella of “linguexclusive poetry,” too, but not sure how to arrange them, nor–in some cases–what to name them.  There are six of them: formal poetry, free verse, surrealistic poetry, jump-cut poetry, syntax p0etry and infraverbal poetry.  At present I lean toward putting the last pair together under “language poetry,” and the middle pair under “idiological poetry.”  I’m toying with the idea of pairing the first two under “mainstream poetry,” since they are practiced by far the majority of poets.  But surrealistic and jump-cut poetry are fairly mainstream, now–and language poetry is getting there.  Another problem is that “mainstream” is taken as insulting by many mainstream poets.  Leaving formal poetry and free verse as separate categories is one possible solution.  The principal reason I don’t like that is that all the kinds of poetry under “linguexclusive poetry” are free verse except formal poetry.

I used to call the two kinds “songmode” and “plaintext” poetry, but “plaintext” seems a put-down to many though not intended as such.  And I’m now reversing course and trying to use standard terms or terms as close to standard ones as possible.

Conclusion: my taxonomy is definitely in progress.

A mathematical poem is a poem some or all of whose verbal elements undergo a mathematical operation centrally important to the poem that is simultaneously both significantly mathematical and significantly verbal–in the opinion of those capable of appreciating the poem.

This is close to Kaz Maslanka’s definition of an “equational poem” (I believe) but, unlike that, allows the poem to be more than an equation (as my “Mathemaku No. 2″ is).  This makes sense to me on the grounds that otherwise one must have separate classes for “pure mathematical poems,” and “impure mathematical poems,” and subclasses under the latter.  I don’t feel that most “impure mathematical poems” are different enough from pure ones to require separate classification.

I continue to believe that a poem whose subject is mathematics or which discusses rather than carries out a mathematical operation should be called a mathematical poem since otherwise one’s taxonomy, as I’ve stated often, will be burdened with an endless number of different classes at its highest levels, one for a poem about every conceivable kind of subject.

The same revised template gives me my definition of visual poetry:

A visual poem is a poem in which some or all of its verbal elements combine with visual elements to result in a formation centrally important to the poem that is simultaneously both significantly visual and significantly verbal–in the opinion of those capable of appreciating the poem.

Note: for the purposes of this definition, words as words are not “significantly visual.”

I desperately hope my definitions will hold up, but nevertheless welcome comments and suggestions.

Today may be a taxonomical breakthrough day for me.  Those reading this should be aware, however, that I’m pretty doped up due to the back surgery I had two days ago.  In any case, I have been driven by some excellent comments to this blog or back-channel from Kaz Maslanka, Gregory St. Thomasino, Connie Tettenborn and Karl Kempton to massively rethink certain of my poetics terms and definitions, some of them going back centuries.

The mainest term involved is “textual.”  From certain completely logical things that Connie said I realized that I have been suffering from a linguistic dissonance for thirty years or more without realizing it: I have been using “textual” to mean both “everything involved in the written language” and “just those elements of language whose denotation is of no significance in whatever it is they are a part of.”  Basically, I was distinguishing linguistic matter of no consequential verbal meaning from linguistic matter of consequential verbal meaning.  Why?  Chiefly so I could distinguish visual artworks containing linguistic matter of no consequential verbal meaning from visual artworks containing linguistic matter of consequential verbal meaning–what I’ve most recently been calling “textual designage” from “visual poetry.”

I have always considered such a differentiation one of the most importance functions of any rational taxonomy of art since I believe the difference between what words do and what visual images do to be huge.

At the same time, though, I unthinkingly often referred to a critical essay or a poem or the like as a “text,” and thus “textual.”  I now ordain that henceforth what I’ve been calling “textual designage” shalt be known formally as “infraverbal visimagery” and informally as “infraverbal visual art.”  “Text” shalt be known as anything containing textual elements of any kind, in any combination, and–verily–know ye that all textual elements shalt be divided into two groupings:

(1) textemes

and

(2) words.

The first shalt be defined as any textual symbol–letter, punctuation mark, space, mathematical symbol, etc.–or unified combination of more than one such symbol that is smaller than a syllable.

The second shalt be defined as any texteme or combination of textemes that is used to represent an object in the material universe or an idea about existence.

My intention is to define words as most people take them to be.

Important note: in some contexts, a texteme can also be a word, in other contexts not.  For instance, “a” is a word in the previous sentence but not in the sentence, “x, p, a and c” were scrawled on the front wall of Joe’s house.”  I deem it taxonomically necessary for me to further ordain (arbitrarily) that punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, chemical symbols, etc. are textemes but not words when they are averbally specialized. I am doing this simply because I don’t feel the mathematical treatment of visual elements in the absence of any “verbal words” should qualify as mathematical poetry–because only the mathematical and visual portions of the brain (in my view) are significantly involved in their appreciation.  I believe, however, that mathematical symbols can sometimes act as “verbal words.”  For example, in the (silly) expression “-/+ = divided by/times. ”   The minus and addition signs don’t tell a reader to subtract or add, they say “minus” and “plus,” which I maintain is different.

Punctuation marks similarly can be “verbal words” rather than specialized texteme, as the periods and colons in my “Mathemaku No. 2″ are, in my opinion, since they don’t tell an engagent what specialized act to perform but say what they are: full stops and pauses indicating something to follow.

I hope what I’m saying makes sense, but it’s tricky to express coherently–and, I’m sure, to get anyone to agree with.

This has led me to change my definition of poetry to literary texts containing words or textemes acting as words whose specific meanings are essential to the over-all aesthetic meaning of the text, and which is distinguished from prose by the significant presence of flow-breaks.  Flow-breaks being essentially line-breaks but also other devices that break prose flow such as a cluster of asterisks at various points in an unlineated text, or the halting of every line in a text after some pre-determined number of spaces, even if it meets breaking off in the middle of a word.  I have defined flow-breaks in my detail in my taxonomy.

Tomorrow I plan to present what I hope is my final definition of mathematical poetry.