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 I’m posting it again to illustrate two points.  One is that is has always been considered a “concrete poem,” because it consists of nothing but words, yet has a visual component absolutely necessary for it to have any appreciable aesthetic value–the visual appearance of the absence of text in one part of it.  That, of course, is what makes the poem a classic by depicting a silence greater than the silence of printed words–by, that is, surprising one encountering the poem (with the ability to appreciate it) with a sudden poetic understanding of something central to existence.

My other point occurred to me when recently reading something by Richard Kostelanetz in which he speaks of finding “that with words alone (he) can make the most powerful images available to (him).”  In context, he seems to be suggesting that these images are more powerful than those others get with works combining verbal and graphic elements.  I can’t go along with that.  However, on reflection, I saw how solitextual visual poems like Gomringer’s and Kostelanetz’s can be said to have a unique aesthetic punch compared to poems mixing graphics with text.  That’s because of the increase in the unexpectedness of whatever it is a solitextual visual poem does visioaesthetically compared to what the other kind of visual poem does.  I claim that both kinds of poems will, if successful, put an engagent in Manywhere-at-Once, or a part of the brain neither a conventional poem or conventional visimage (graphic image) is likely to put one, but the engagent will already be partway into that location upon first encountering a poem combining the visual and the verbal whereas he will only be in the verbal part of his brain until the pay-off in a purely solitextual poem, so the pay-off will come more forcefully, and probably be more intense.  The mixture of graphics and text, however, will be able to make up for the reduced intensification by increased richness–by going to a larger Manywhere-at-Once or inter-connected Manywhere-at-Onces.  Equal but different.

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Since they’ve all given me pleasure through their writings and what has been written about them in books, I suddenly realized the other day that people who don’t read–perhaps the majority of people in America?–go through life without this pleasure.  How horrible.  But many of them, I suppose, get some kind of analogous pleasure from people in the news and/or on television.

Be that as it may, I don’t know how I would have gotten through my own life if not for all the culturateurs’ lives I’ve dived into, sometimes staying immersed in their lives on and off for over a year.  I’m speaking of those a large portion of whose oeuvres I’ve devoured, and then gone on to read biographies, and autobiographies if available, of.  Excluded, unfairly, would be my first culturateurical heroes, because I encountered them before knowing about biographies–and without the experience to become interested in favorite writers automatically after becoming interested in their writings.  Before, that is, I knew myself as a writer–or involved in any vocation.  Hugh Lofting, Dr. Doolittle’s creator, for example.  The fellow who wrote the first twenty or so Hardy Boys books, whose name I can never remember although I did as an adult read his autobiography.  Carl Barks, who wrote and drew the best adventures of Donald Duck and his three nephews (and Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander), and so may others responsible for the comic book stores I loved.  Jules Verne and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

As I’ve written, my first cultural heroes as an adult, or near-adult, were writers of comic essays like Robert Benchley and James Thurber.  And authors of science fiction whose names I can’t just now remember, except Isaac Asimov’s, whose name I remember for other reasons.  Well, Ray Bradbury, too.   Mystery writers, too–like Ellery Queen (actually two men whose names I can’t remember) and the author of the Charlie Chan mysteries.  But I was still too young to dive into their lives as well as their works.  That too often there was little about their lives available to dive into was another factor.

I believe Oscar Wilde, when I was 17, was the first author I truly dove into the oeuvre and life of, and then quickly into George Bernard Shaw’s.  About a year later come my first poet, because I was slow to mature beyond simple appreciation of prose in literature–clear prose–and representational visimagery, and marches in music, was John Keats.  Wilde wrote some fine poems but I still think of him mainly as a dramatist–an essayist and novelist, too, but a poet as a sideline.  H. L. Mencken and Nietzsche were two others.  C. P. Snow, Dostoevski (and not Tolstoi), Shakespeare not as soon as one would have thought he’d be, perhaps because I was first exposed to him in school.  At the same time, I read many other authors with enjoyment but didn’t dive into.  Turgenov, for instance.

I’ve mentioned most of my literary heroes elsewhere, so won’t go on with my list here.  I just want to emphasize my main point, which is that some culturateurs got to me to such an extent that I needed to read just about everything they’d written, and as much as possible about their lives.   Which is why my greatest hope now is that others will eventually dive into my oeuvre and life the way I dove so often, and still dive.  Or do I?  I still read a lot, but it’s been a while since I discovered a new writer I wanted fully to devour.

Outside of literature, there have been almost all the standard composers of classical music through Shostakovich and Prokofief, and Glass but not too many contemporaries I’m ashamed to admit.  And I’ve not read too many bioigraphies of composers.  I’m not sure why that is.  I have read quite a few biographies of painters.  Cezanne probably the most although he’s not my favorite painter.  The painters I would have bought thousands of dollars worth of books containing reproductions of their work if I could have afforded it have been Klee, Pollock, van Gogh, Marc, Renoir, Monet, Picasso, Durer . . . Again, there are many others I really liked, but didn’t like as much as the ones mentioned.  Or as Homer, Hopper, Chagall . . . so many others.  Only a few architexts.  Wright, maybe Gehry.

Contemporaries whom I’ve dived into, principally by publishing them, are Scott Helmes, Guy R. Beining, Karl Kempton, Richard Kostelanetz, Kathy Ernst, Marton Koppany, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Geof Huth, John Vieira, John Martone, Bill Keith, Carol Stetser, Joel Lipman, John Bennett . . . many more–but none like I dove into Wallace Stevens, because so comparatively little critical and biographical matter is available on them, which is disgusting.

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My latest lazy idea is to use the poems in my Poemns as the basis of long division poems.  The above uses part of the coded text from the poemn about a boy writing his way into a secret world.  I already see how to make the above more interesting: enlarge the letters and color their interiors increasingly magical . . . if I can.

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With these I’ve been trying for gorgeousness.  I think the first may have achieved that, but it’s basically all orange, and I want multiple colors.  The second shown above is one of many that kept coming out blah.  I finally made some ground toward my goal with the last two, although I have a long way to go.  Another learning experience–that I ought to have begun long ago.  I’m explorative but only slowly so.

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Eat broccoli

(Apologies: once again I posted this as “private,” having forgotten to tag it “public.”  I generally keep my entries “private” so no one can see them but I until I’m satisfied with them, at which time I hit a button that makes them “public.”  Ridiculously often I forget to do this, as was the case this time.  No big deal, just one more reminder to me, as if I need it, that I’m a moron.)

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On ‘‘A Susan Sontag Reader)

What gave Sontag’s early essays their aura of daring and controversy was the remarkable air of confidence she brought to the task of defending and codifying the values implicit in this movement to strip the arts of what she herself described as “moral sentiments?” Bidding a not-so-fond farewell to art that was conceived, as she put it, as “a species of moral journalism:’ she hailed the advent of a “new sensibility:’ whose most distinctive feature was said to be that “it does not demand that pleasure in art necessarily be associated with edification?’ Fundamental to the new sensibility-as she wrote in her manifesto-like essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility” in 1960s-was “a new attitude toward pleasure” And it was as the Pasionaria of this new, pleasure-seeking revolution in sensibility that Sontag emerged as a critical spokesman of the Sixties.

- From “Susan Sontag: The Pasionaria of Style” (1982), reproduced in The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

I reproduce it because one of the reasons Kramer was not a leading hero of mine was due his insistence that art should be morally edifying.  Of late, however, I’ve been wondering how much I genuinely believe that.  For instance, isn’t my newest long division poem, a moral statement?  It plainly tells those encountering that the arts and humanities are a damned good thing.  Perhaps even more emphatically, it asserts that the achievements of human kind are of the greatest value.

Note: I’ve changed the remainder to “small clouds, dawdling west”–I felt a need to tone down the bliss of the poem.

Back to my poem’s morally assertive message, and it is that, my defense, after reflection, is that while the message is there, it is merely an excuse for the metaphors responsible for its aesthetic punch, if it has any: the multiplication of dead music that results in something fairer than morning–something, the poem now claims, rendered equal to humankind’s achievements by virtue of simple clouds doing what clouds quotidianly do.  Properly attended to, in my opinion, the poem isn’t anything to argue or agree with, but to sensually enjoy.  As are the poems of Stevens which so often, on the surface, are statements about aesthetics, but at the deepest far more than that.

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What I forgot to mention yesterday that even more important (for me) in a poem, is a significant archetypal element.  Again, a poem can  . . . I was going to say “be first-rate without a significant archetypal element,” but I’m actually not sure of that.  Of course, it would be hard to write a poem lacking such an element–as I would define it.  An archetypal element is basically any of the final dichotomies, or their personification or other representation.  God/Dog, for instance.  I think both components of the dichotomy ought to be present–if only implicitly.  Consideration of friendship, for instance, can alone make a poem archetypal so long as somehow enmity or the like is in it, too.

Okay, the preceding is me trying out thoughts much more than laying down the law.  So just think about what I’ve said, students–you needn’t memorize it.

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I’m super-lethargic again, and this time nor willing to take a dose of APCs.  That’s because I fear my body is too screwed up to meddle with pharmaceutically–any more than my doctors are already meddling that way with it.  So just a word today–”spools” spelled backwards.  It’s the longest word I’ve come up with so far that is a word in both directions.  I bother publicizing it so I can pontificate a bit on my belief in the value of going conceptual as a poet.  I would call the above a poem if printed “sloops spools.”  But it would be an extremely trivial poem because amusing only; “god dog” is much better (putting aside how many times we’ve all seen it) because it has a conceptual interest: the fact that a dog can be considered the antithesis of a god.  Hence, its backwards spelling is a metaphor for its “backwards” meaning.  The images conveyed by the two spellings also interact more interestingly than the images conveyed by “sloops” and “spools”  One set of words is amusing; the other amusing and interesting.  Too many pwoermds and related poems are only amusing.

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