Surprise! I’m back already. May be back on vacation tomorrow, though. I’m back today because I somehow managed to produce a new mathemaku yesterday:
Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco's 1436 Map of the World
Archive for the ‘visual poetry’ Category
Entry 114 — “Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World”
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Entry 70 — More Poems from My Past
Sunday, January 10th, 201010 January 2010
One Poem poem I found while hunting for poems to add to my upcoming book that isn’t great but certainly expresses my opinion of those who believe poetry should be a servant of politics:
. Protest Poetry
.
. Poem was angry.
. He had just read
. yet another puritan’s denunciation
. of poets who declined to write protest poems
. about contemporary social ills, war, etc.
. To demand that a poet write such things
. made no more sense to him
. than to demand that a cook
. bake protest pies,
. or a shoemaker
. cobble protest
. boots.
.
. Let neurotic seekers of victims
. to pass their self-pity off
. as compassion for,
. in high and correct-
. in-all-the-best-circles profile
. take care of the protesting.
. All the social woe in the world
. was but a comma compared with
. that final enormous text
. it was the poet’s duty
. to add his yes to,
. however frailly.
.
. Or so Poem claimed
. in the protest poem
. he immediately wrote
.
A much different poem I found in my hunt was this:
I’d come across a poem or poems by Ezra using the horizontally-split word technique and at once wanted to try it myself. I don’t find the result satisfactory–but it has potential, I think.
Entry 69 — Hunting Up Old Poems of Mine
Saturday, January 9th, 2010I’ve been gathering and fiddling with Poem poems for a collection Arnold Skemer is going to publish later this year. I’ve found around 25 that weren’t in the collection of Poem poems Geof Huth did and seemed to desrved to be in the new collection, but will probably go with only 19 or 20 as a few seem out of place with the others–not that there’s much of a theme binding them all.
As I was doing this, I got curious as to how many Poem poems I had on hand. I’d found only thirty or so. I figured I should have or four or more per year since the first collection. So I checked the date of the latter–and found to my dismay that it was published late in 1995–14 years ago. Since then I’ve averaged only about two Poem poems a year. I did know that I’ve have slow years but I thought I’d had a few good ones to make up for it.
I continued hunting for Poem poems, finally finding a few more in a file of old poems I had forgotten I had. One or two weren’t bad. I also came across this:
It’s a visual poem I made for some project of Crag Hill’s that either never came off, or came off without my poem. I think it’s unpublished even at my previous blog. I quite like it. Another pice of mine I came across is this:
I’m posting int now not because I like it but because I can’t figure it out. I understand that columns with letters running down them in alphabetical order keep going until they line up in such a way as to spell winter, but . . . Okay, now I see that winter causes the alphabets to restart downward. The year is chaotic until winter occurs by accident, and it imposes some kind of order on it. But what has that to do with Stevens? And why wouldn’t spring get things in order? Why are so many of the columns on the left so random.
I should write notes to myself about some of my creations. Actually, I’ve made a few poems I wrote notes to msyelf about, but the notes didn’t help. I suspect that if I don’t pretty fully understand what I’m up to in a piece as soon as I’ve made it, I never will. Nor will anyone else. Yeah, I know–even if I understand one of my pieces, it’s unlikely anyone else will. I expect quite a few people to be able to understand the top one in today’s entry, though.
Entry 62 — An Apple from #728
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
There are a number of current visual poets who do not consider the above poem, one of the most popular visual poems of all-time, highly. So, to continue to be a Prime Annoyer in vispo circles, I’ve taken it upon myself to defend it. On the surface, it is merely a specimen of visual onomatopoeia, or poem whose text says what it looks like–or, if you prefer, poem whose graphic elements show what its text says. I think even those who don’t think much of it would admit that it was clever and effective for its time. I think it may be more.
What I like about it, what I think makes it special, is its worm. I believe its critics fail to appreciate how subtle it is. I doubt a person who has never seen the poem, particularly a person with little or no experience with visual poetry, will find it right off. If he does, it will act as a welcome counter to the boredom generated by all those instances of “apfel.” It will also seem apt. A rather fakey apple has become a real, flawed apple. Or does the poem suddenly concern not an apple but a worm in his home? In any event, it must take on larger symbolic meanings–about decay, the impossibility of perfection, the secretive intrusion of evil, etc. The glossy glibness of the apple makes it possibly a parody of magazine advertising–which is carried out with attractive pictures concealing worms.
Note, too, that the worm does not share the apple’s onomatopoeia–that is, it doesn’t look much like a wiggly thin worm. So it’s breaking with the rest of the poem is all the stronger.
Conclusion: the poem may not be a masterpiece of the first order, but it does not reflect unfavorably on Visual Poetry, as some contend. Indeed, I wish the distance from such a work of most art called “visual poetry” by its makers were considerably less.
Entry 61 — 2 Poems by Geof Huth
Friday, January 1st, 2010They’re from #721:
Entry 53 — Christmas Poem by Ted Warnell
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Received 4 years ago, exactly. Still holding up!
Of course, it’s much better at about twice the size of the above, which would be, I believe, its proper size.
Entry 48 — Full Effectiveness in Poetry
Saturday, December 19th, 2009I’m skipping ahead to old blog entry #796 today to make a point about my recent cryptographiku. #796 has Cor van den Heuvel’s poem:
. tundra
I go on in the entry to say I believe Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio,” of 1954, was the first poem to make consequential visiophorically expressive use of blank space:
. silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio
I finish my brief commentary but then opining that van den Heuvel’s poem was the first to make an entire page expressive, the first to make full-scale negative space its most important element. Rather than surround a meaningful parcel of negative space like Gomringer’s masterpiece, it is surrounded by meaningful negative space. I’m certainly not saying it thus surpasses Gomringer’s poem; what it does is equal it in a new way.
I consider it historically important also for being, so far as I know, the first single word to succeed entirely by itself in being a poem of the first level.
Then there’s my poem from 1966:
. at his desk
. the boy,
. writing his way into b wjwje tfdsfu xpsme
This claim to be the first poem in the world to use coding to significant metaphorical effect. Anyone who has followed what I’ve said about “The Four Seasons” should have no trouble deciphering this. I consider it successful as a poem because I believe anyone reasonably skillful at cyrptographical games will be able (at some point if not on a first reading) to emotionally (and sensually) understand/appreciate the main things it’s doing and saying during one reading of it–i.e., read it normally to the coded part, then translate that while at the same time being aware of it as coded material and understanding and appreciating the metaphor its being coded allows.
I’ve decided “The Four Seasons” can’t work like that. It is a clever gadget but not an effective poem because I can’t see anyone being able to make a flowing reading through it and emotionally (and sensually) understanding/appreciating everything that’s going on in it and what all its meanings add up to, even after study and several readings. Being able to understand it the way I do in my explanation of it not enough. This is a lesson from the traditional haiku, which must be felt as experience, known reducticeptually (intellectually), too, but only unconsciously–at the time of reading it as a poem rather than as an object of critical scrutiny, which is just as valid a way to read it but different.
Entry 42 — A Knowlecular Analysis of the Visiophor
Monday, December 14th, 2009#682 through #688 contain pieces of an attempt at an analysis of how, according to my knowlecular theory of psychology, we experience visual poetry. It’s a jumble I hope at some time to make a coherent essay out of but for right now I’ve made it a page you can access by clicking on “How the Brain Process Visual Poetry” in the Pages section to the right.
Entry 41 — An Early Final Definition of Visual Poetry
Saturday, December 12th, 2009#681 had this:
The visual poem, “Gloria,” superimposed on my text is by Ladislav Novak. I think my final definition of visual poetry still my best, but would reserve it now for “pure” visual poetry. Note that when the page above was published (in the 1990 edition of my Of Manywhere-at-Once), I thought of visual poetry as the union of textual and visual rather than verbal and visual matter. Otherwise, my definition of visual poetry is about as I have it now.
Entry 39 — 3 by Endwar
Thursday, December 10th, 2009They’re from #674.
Communist Evolution
NoNo
Transgender
#673 had two poems by John Elsbergs from his Runaway Spoon Press book, Broken Poems for Evita. One was this:
RAISING EVA
(Or, the myth of art and politics)
L
EVITA
tio nis
th EPRE
fer
RED al TERN
at ivefor
thosewhona t UR
ALLY S
inK
And that’s it for this entry. (Am I feeling more worn out than ever for no reason? Yes.)