Archive for the ‘Poetics’ Category
Entry 1733 — A Limited Entry
Monday, February 23rd, 2015
Okay, maybe I shouldda said “more limited than usual.” I’ve had a busy day away from the computer–with nothing I was sufficiently burning to say to inspire a good entry, anyway. So, just a minor thought followed by Knowlecular Psychology stuff I’ve written about before but want to repeat to get my brain a little more well-fastened to it.
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Thinking about my tendency to try too hard to make sure my readers had all the information they needed fully to understand what I was writing, it occurred to me technology could come to my aid: I’m sure Kindles could be fixed to allow me to avoid boring any reader with information he doesn’t need could but also provide him with a text he could click to at any time which would have all the extra information. Right now footnotes can do this, but what I’m speaking of would not be intrusive the way footnotes are.
Indeed, a reader could be given a choice of texts–one with the math explained, one without that, for example; or any other appropriate specialized version.
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Re: my knowlecular psychology, I was thinking again about what most poems are about, and went through my list again: (1) people; (2) imagery sans people; (3) concepts . . . Is that all? Doesn’t sound right, but I’m too out of it right now to think of any others.
What knowlecular psychology has to do with this, is that the first category could be described (as I’m sure I’ve more than once already described it) as “anthroceptual poetry.” Or as “sagaceptual poetry,” which is poetry in which what happens to one or more people is more important than the people–for the reader, the joy of vicariously experiencing a human triumph is more important than the joy of empathetically merging with another human being. Two kinds of people poems.
By imagery poetry, I mean poetry that is more concerned with conveying the beauty of the sound and/or the visual appearance (primarily or usually) of what is denoted by a poem’s words–or protoceptual poetry. As for concept poetry, I’m not sure any kind of genuine poetry is more conceptual than either of the other two (and almost all poems contain both anthroceptual and protoceptual matter). If it existed, I would call it “reducticeptual poetry.” A good example would be “lighght”: it is aesthetically dependent on its conceptual element–the conceptual datum about its orthography; but that element’s only use is to metaphorically lift the image the poem is about into, well, poetry, so I consider the poem more protoceptual than reducticeptual.
It may be that certain conceptual poems do use conceptual elements to lift a content that is ideational rather than sensual into poetry. Indeed, perhaps one of my mathematical poems may provide some reader more with a feeling of the poetry of asensual mathematics than with anything sensual image that may be an element of the poem.
Something requiring more thought.
Note: what I wanted primarily to glue into my memory was the term “protoceptual.” I’ve had trouble with it because I for a while was using “fundaceptual” in place of it. Eventually I needed “funda” elsewhere in my psychology and felt it too confusing to have it there and with “ceptual,” so went back to “protoceptual,” which I used before for the term.
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Entry 1701 — The Elements of Free Verse
Friday, January 23rd, 2015
“Imagery, the only prevailing poetic element in modern free verse,” quoth Sarah Ruden, a skilled translator of classical literature in “Back to Tragedy,” an article in the January 2015 issue of The New Criterion. Others may have said things about poetry more ignorant, but none come to mind. Ruden is an amiable, knowledgeable writer, so I have to think she just stopped thinking for a moment. I doubt her editors knew any better.
Imagery is of course one of the many poetic elements in modern free verse (if we consider my own free verse “modern,” as I do), but much more important that imagery is the metaphoric use to which the best poets put it, figurative language being an element of free verse. As are all the melodational devices of formal verse except regimented rhythm (meter). Freshness of language and syntactical expression are also elements of all poetry, including free verse. Infraverbal devices are central to many of the best free verse poems, and–it seems to me–can play a role in formal verse, too. Then there is the defining poetic element of free verse, expressive lineation, or line-breaks placed where they work best aesthetically rather than where a metrical form requires them to be. I doubt if Ruden, or David Yezzi, the poetry editor of The New Criterion, are even aware of such things–or of the wide-spread addition of purely visual or purely auditory matter to free verse poems.
Amusingly, these people have almost as much trouble with the American Poetry Establishment as my crowd does, but because the certified poetry of today is beyond them rather than beneath them.
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Entry 1699 — More Scraps
Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
Scrap #1: Yesterday’s mail included another chapbook from Mark Sonnenfeld, Check Check Done and Done, half of it devoted to poems by Mark and half to poems by Dory L. Williams. Good reading but one thing in it by Dory L. Williams really knocked me out: to me, it’s an epigram, because a statement of an opinion, so according to my taxonomy a work of informrature. Be that as it may, it’s as good an epigram as I’ve come across in years, if ever:
Covetness
If you want fame and money without real
achievement behind it, you’re not greedy enough.
Scrap #2: After I posted yesterday’s entry, I remembered a central feature of Iowa Workshop Poetry I’d intended to mention before any other, but then forgot: it’s the recognition of the potential of ordinary subject matter for tranfiguringly successful poetry–as in Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and in all the best haiku. I am all for ordinary subject matter . . . but it can’t do much unless connected to archetypal matter one needs to be in one’s magniceptual awareness to be able to employ. Williams’s poem is, finally, not about a wheelbarrow anywhere near as much as it is about Beauty.
Lesson for poets: keep explicit abstracts and generalities out of your poems as Ezra tells you to, but build you poems on them as I tell you to. This, incidentally, you don’t necessarily have to consciously strive for, but you must be able to recognize when something worthily archetypal begins to show under your poem’s words so as to strengthen those words’ connection to it–and/or weaken the visibility of their path to it. The archetypal foundation of the best poems is much more often understood in their engagents’ marrow long before it’s dealt with the reasoning parts of their higher faculties, if it ever is. (Few poets have very large reducticeptual awarenesses or scienceptual awareness, which are where analysis is carried out.)
Possibly more important than the connection to the archetypal is the technique, the freshness of the technique employed to make that connection, which is usually metaphorical.
I’m just repeating old thoughts of mine, disorganizedly. Jus’ tryin’ to make it through another blog entry.
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Entry 1678 — A Specimen of My Poetry Criticism
Wednesday, December 31st, 2014
I’m trying to catch up with my collection of Small Press Review columns in this blog’s “Pages” and am about to post the one that follows. I liked it so well (after making some small improvements to it), that I’m taking care of this entry with it:
EXPERIODDICA
September/October 2014
Richard Kostelanetz’s Latest Infra-Verbal Adventure
Ouroboros
Richard Kostelanetz
NYQ Books, Box 2015, Old Chelsea Station,
New York NY 10113. $16.95. 2014. Pa; 188 pp.
An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tail, so an excellent title for Richard Kostelanetz’s collection of 188 words swallowing their tails, most of the time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, as “ouroboros” itself does on the cover (when its s joins its “our”). Those that do not use their first letter as their last to finish a word: “extrapolat,” for example, has only one e but spells “extrapolate” when made into a circle. It’s fun to find smaller words inside them in Kostelanetz’s collection: “tea” and “eat,” for example, in “appetite,” which not knowing at first where the word begins forces one to discover rather than automatically read without thinking about it. But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities?” To use the term my Internet friend Chris Lott thought might be more appropriate for works like them than “poems”–and which turned out to be a term I’ve needed for my over-all taxonomy of verbal expression for a long time but never thought of!
The term seems right for some of Kostelanetz’s words, but only some of them–like “ouroboros.” The addition to it of “sour” is amusing but, for me, not poetically enlarging enough to be a poem rather than a verbal curiosity—which I now define for use in my Official Taxonomy of Verbal Expression as “a text that states an amusing or interesting fact.” That makes it (write this down!) “informrature” (i.e., texts primarily intended to inform) rather than one of the other two kinds of verbal expression in my taxonomy, “advocature” (i.e., texts whose primary intent is to persuade, or verbal propaganda) and “literature” (i.e., verbal art, or texts intended primarily to give aesthetic pleasure). In effect, “ouroboros” as a circular word that “disconceals” the word “sour” states the fact that its letters can be used to spell “sour” following a certain rule, that being to connect the word’s end to its beginning by means of a circular spelling.
Not that such a word doesn’t veer near poetry (which can be succinctly if roughly defined as not-prose) due to its visual difference from conventional prose, its making a reader go slow (a major aim of poetry) and delivering more connotations than prose generally does. But, for me, it is visually-enhanced the way calligraphy is, and infraverbally-enhanced the way “ouroboros” spelled “ouROBoros” to reveal one of its inner words, would be. Yes, it looks good on the page, and makes us think about it more than it would conventionally printed, but it leaves us primarily with only the fact that “sour” can be produced by it (and “our” and “rob” are in it.
Take on the other hand, “appetite,” which swallows its tail to deliver not only “tea,” and “eat” but leads us into and around to “pet” and “petite” to go along with “appetite” itself, to present a little tea party, with a strong suggestion of little girls. Then put “incandescent” swallowing its tail on the page opposite it to form “tin” while making us also aware of its “descent” and “scent”—due to its compelling us to read it letter by letter. “Scent” is particularly significant because of the metaphoric jolt of the3 suggestion of something incandescent as a material scent, or of a scent as something immaterially incandescent. The contrast of “tin” notwithstanding, the result is a fascinating scene occurring somewhere down Alice’s rabbit hole which, for me, makes the word a poem.
At this point I must contradict myself. I now believe all of Richard’s circular words are poems. I say this because I now feel that they do enlarge a reader’s experience of them significantly more than prose does, although some, like “ouroboros” do so to much less of an extent than others. More importantly, this collection as a whole, I’ve come to perceive, is a single poem, whose ssspinning wheelsss free connotations whose interaction with each other disconceal sometimes fairly complex image complexes—as I’ve shown “appetite” and “incandescent” do. The result is a loose collection of themes and counter-themes, occasionally next to each other, as with “appetite” and “incandescent,” but sometimes far apart—like “state, which amusingly becomes “estate,” where the tea party will take place, many pages from “incandescent.”
Kostelanetz’s sequence begins with “insurgent,” and as we go along, the presence of an insurgent, mainly, it comes to seem to me, a language insurgent miswriting words into circular revolts against monosemy establishes one of the sequence’s major themes (with the little girls’ tea party in feminine contrast to it). For example, “Esperanto,” representing a language in revolt against the Tower of Babylon our world has become, supports this “linguicentric” reading. Its disconcealment of “rant” backs up the tone of insurgence (in spite of “toes”—although that suggests “toe to toe,” for one really caught up with the sequence). On the page facing “esperanto” we have “astonish,” which is indicative, I think, of what artistic insurgence’s aim in this story will turn out to be. That the font Kostelanetz has chosen for his words, the highly dramatic “Wide Latin,” which is jabbingly pointed at all extremities, underscores this.
The book’s fourth word underscores this: “another,” or something other than. But then the narrative runs into “hesitant,” which contains “Sita,” the name of the central female character, a sort of Virgin Mary, in the Hindu epic, Ramayana, and the narrative goes strange among “the,” “he” “sit”, “it,” “tan,” “an,” “ant.” After the turn caused by “hesitant,” comes “entomb,” with its “bent” against something. By the “men” of the later “enthusiasm?” The first peak of this insurgent flow is reached with “outlawing,” which causes “gout,” making the act of outlawing things unhealthy, and the insurgence begins to have the feel of anarchism.
I agree with you if you’re thinking one must have quite an accommodating mind to make the kind of connections I’ve so far made—but a main function of poetry is to relax one into doing just that. I have to admit a lot of my interpretations are influenced by my knowledge of Kostelanetz as a long-time personal friend consumed (like me) with innovative insurgency in the arts and anarchistic distaste for political laws.
To get back to his sequence, it’s no surprise that “esoteric” forms the next spinning wheel with its esoteric lawless confusion of “ice,” “rice,” “sot.” Some kind of drunken wedding? Where are we going? The point is that we are going somewhere, or more than one where. And word-lovers who join us will be sure to enjoy the trip!
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Entry 1628 — The Lyricule
Tuesday, November 11th, 2014
The “lyricule” is my term for the peak moment I claim every poem, to be effective, must cause one engaged with it to experience. The haiku moment would be one, but only one, example of a lyricule. I think it deserves a fairly large-scale essay but haven’t worked out my understanding of it well enough to write very much intelligent about it here, or anything at all organized.
The lyricule is produced by a poem’s “lyricular center.”
I would consider Basho’s entire old pond haiku to be a lyricular center. To be coldly accurate about it, the words of the poem activate memories that combine to form the lyricule. It produces no perceptual data. It is thus entirely cerebral. That does not mean it will contain no visual or auditory data. It will almost certainly contain sounds, but they will be the sounds of the poem’s syllables seeing the poem’s text will cause the poem’s engagent to remember (assuming he reads it the way it ought to be read, pronouncing what he reads to himself). The engagent may also “see” visual images certain words denote, and certain images those words connote, if they do so strongly enough.
I habitually claim that when reading a poem, and I’m solely concerned here with poems as read, the poem’s engagent will not “see” the words. By this I mean that the engagent’s eyes will take in the words but send the sight of them into the engagent’s lexiceptual sub-awareness (or reading center) not his visioceptual sub-awareness. In the former, he will read the words, not see them; in the latter, he will see them but not read them. (In normal reading, most of the time.) This is not important. I mention it merely to be complete. But also because visual poetry exploits the visual appearance of textual elements to cause an engagent to read and see at the same time, which can produce lyricules traditional poetry cannot.
Visual poetry can also add direct perceptions of shapes and colors to a lyricule. So, I suppose I should add, can visually-enhanced poetry, which is traditional poetry using calligraphy or the like as ornamentation.
The lyricule can be considered a moment but really isn’t. I conceive it as more a unified . . . knowlecule, to use the term its name comes from that will take more than a unit of consciousness (which I term an “instacon” in my theory of psychology) to experience. A knowlecule is some datum or combination of data that a person takes as a thing—a flower, or the petal of a flower, or a garden.
I think of a lyricule as seeming like a lengthily-arrested moment.
For me, the best lyricule must produce Manywhere-at-Once, as all effective metaphors do. Manywhere-at-Once, which I discussed in my first book about poetry, is what one experiences when two or more separate loci in the brain are activated simultaneously (or more or less simultaneously)—and fuse. For instance, when Romeo speaks of the rising sun as being Juliet, it should cause an engagent to experience some image of the rising sun and, incongruously, an image of a beautiful young woman at the same time, followed immediately by those connotations of each that are the same, such as “beauty,” “dominance,” “bringer of life” or “source of meaningfulness,” “cynosure,” and suffice to fuse the disparate denotations.
Needless to say, the Shakespearean lyricular center is more complex than here discussed—the whole of the plot preceding Romeo’s utterance, for just one element. There are also other ways of producing Manywhere-at-Once, like simple rhyme, one of the two cerebral sites it activates being one concerned with the sound of the rhymenants, the other with their denotations.
How effective a lyricule is depends on many things. A consequential one is the intensity of its elements. The number of its elements is another consequential one. Not surprisingly, the aesthetic strength of its elements is hugely important (and inordinately difficult to determine). The freshness of its elements and/or the freshness of their interinvolvment will be signally important in determining the aesthetic strength of its elements.
I’ve already discussed the various levels a poem can have, although I probably didn’t call them levels. In fact, I’ve probably discussed them more than once, each time with a different name. Anyway, the levels, or whatever they are, pertain to lyricules as well as poems. I believe that (in theory) a lyricule might be able to participate in all the ten (or eleven) awarenesses my theory (at this time) hypothesizes are in each healthy human brain.
And there is where I’ll leave my thoughts on this for now.
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Entry 1627 — Norman Friedman, RIP
Monday, November 10th, 2014
A day or two ago I got the sad news that Norman Friedman died on the 6th of November. He for many years was probably the foremost critic of E. E. Cummings, one of my three favorite pre-1960 American poets. Certainly I learned more than a little about Cummings (and poetics) from his writings over the years. He was also a very nice man, as I found out when I met him at a literary conference where I presented a paper on Cummings several years ago.
This morning curiosity about him sent me to Wikipedia where, to my shock, I was unable to find an entry on him. Along the way, though, I found an essay of his on Cummings at jstor.org, a site you can read academic writings at for a fee. The fees are way more than I can afford but I took advantage of an offer allowing me to read three essays for free, so am now midway through Friedman’s “E. E. Cummings and His Critics,” (1962).
In his essay, Friedman is making an excellent case for Cummings as what academics should consider a serious poet–i.e., one with a serious outlook on life that he expresses in his poetry. I suppose he is right but for me, “all” Cummings did was celebrate existence, using all the verbal means he could think of in order to able to do that maximally.
Oh, sure, he was diverted from this central concern to take on collectivism (which I applaud) and science (which I don’t applaud) but at his best he did the only thing I believe poets should do, which is use the whole of their language to celebrate existence–which I think requires them at the same time to show by contrast what’s wrong with it. I think what I mean is that a poet should side with, and celebrate, beauty in his poetry, which he can’t do without opposing, and condemning, ugliness (at least implicitly) as when Basho celebrates the beauty of the many moments existence’s best moments combine in his old pond haiku while at the same time implicitly rejects–and I should have used “rejecting: instead of “condemning” earlier in this sentence–existence’s lesser moments, the one’s with only the present in them, or–worse–only some solely intellectual or solely unintellectual present in them. Or nothing at all, unless the nothing that includes all isn’t what many of the greatest minimalist poems are about. (Yeah, I’m going a little over-mystical there.)
You’re in luck. I don’t have time right now to knock out several thousand words on the poetic moment I’m talking about. The traditional haiku moment is an instance of it, but only one instance, whatever the wacked-out anti-Western idolizers of the Far East maintain.
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Entry 1611 — Interpretation of Poems, Part 2
Saturday, October 25th, 2014
I came up with a few more possible layers:
13. The ethical layer. I at first thought ethics would be in the ideational layer, but am now not sure.
14. The anthroceptual, or the human relations layer: character, as opposed to plot. At this point it occurs to me that maybe I ought to link each layer to an awareness or sub-awareness in the cerebrum as I have here. I could also rename the ideational layer the “scienceptual layer.” Will think it over.
15. The allegorical layer, or the only layer those questioning the authorship of Shakepeare’s sonnets are really interested in, the one—if it exists—that arbitrarily attaches real people and places to objects in a poem. Perhaps I should make two layers out of this, the sane allegorical layer, for poems like Spenser’s Faery Queene that use straight-forward allegory, and the psitchotic allegorical layer for poems a lunatic has found to be allegorical.
Actually, this layer should be called the allegorical paraphrasable layer, because it is everything a poem is thought to be under its surface.
Because I have it readily at hand, here’s a rough full paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 I did to show Paul Crowley how sane interpretations of poems are made. Needless to say, I found no allegorically paraphrasable layer.
> 1. Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?
“Would it be a good idea to make a comparison of you to a day in the most pleasant of the four seasons?”
Note that my explication is a paraphrase of the line that takes the DENOTATION of every word into consideration and tries to make linguistic sense. It is concerned primarily with what the surface of the poem means. It ought to deal, too, with any clear-cut connotations of the text it concerns, as well as any secondary meanings, if any. In this case, I find no connotations worth mention, and there is nothing in the line (or, to my knowledge, outside the line–that is, in the background layer, which should be consulted by one making a paraphrase of a poem) to indicate it means anything more than it says.
> 2. Thou art more louely and more temperate:
“You are superior to the summer’s day mentioned in both beauty and temperament.” Ergo, In other words, there’s really no comparison between you and a summer’s day: you’re much the better of the two.
Again, there is nothing in the text to indicate it means anything more than it directly says.
> 3. Rough windes do shake the darling buds of May,
“Unruly, harmful movements of air upset the delicate early blossoms of summer flowers.” Note: May may have been thought a part of summer in Shakespeare’s time. Or May’s buds may still be present by the true beginning of summer.
> 4. And Sommers lease hath all too short a date:
“And that season does not remain in charge of nature for very long: its “contract” to do so is short-term.”
This line and the previous one point out in some detail the defects of a summer’s day, but, implicitly, not of the addressee. There is nothing in them to suggest they mean anything else.
> 5. Sometime too hot the eye of heauen shines,
“There are times when the sun is unpleasantly too high in temperature,”
> 6. And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
There are also frequent times when the sun is overcast.”
Again, two lines providing further details of what makes the summer’s day inferior to the addressess, who–we are led to believe–has no equivalent of temperatures that are either too hot or not warm enough. And who is never “grey” in disposition.
> 7. And euery faire from faire some-time declines,
“Every good thing is subject to decay, and therefore must lose some of its best qualities. “In summation, each good thing in a summer’s day must eventually retreat from its peak, or lose its best qualities,”
> 8. By chance, or natures changing course vntrim’d:
“the victim of some random event (like being trodden on by some animal) or of the normal way the natural world behaves (turning stormy, for instance).
Ergo, we have two more lines finishing up telling the reader what is wrong with summer–and, it is strongly implied, NOT with the addressee. So far, not a hint that anything other than the surface meaning of the words (beautifully) used is intended.
> 9. But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade,
“Your never-dying prime season, however, won’t ever decline”
> 10. Nor lose possession of that faire thou ow’st,
“or surrender the beauty of appearance and disposition, and other excellences you are in possession of”
Two more straight-forward lines, these ones claiming the addressee will not fade in any manner the way a summer’s day inevitably will.
> 11. Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,
“Nor will the ruler of the realm those who die be able to boast that you have entered his realm”
> 12. When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st,
“when in ever-living lines of verse you continue to flourish and perhaps even improve,”
Again, a straight-forward set of lines, these bringing in the speaker of the poem’s second main thought, which is that poetry can make one who is its subject immortal. I admit to not yet knowing exactly what “to time” means, but I believe I have given the most plausible meaning to every one of the other words in the poem.
> 13. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
“Until such time as human beings are unable to keep alive by taking in air or there are organs sensitive to light,”
> 14. So long liues this, and this giues life to thee,
“the poem you have been reading or listening to will endure, and it will grant you immortality.”
That does it. My explication accounts for every word in the poem except “to” and “time,” and even those can be accounted for as having something to do with resisting what time does to all things. It is also completely plausible AND sufficient, for those with any ability at all to appreciate poetry. (Of course, there’s much more to any poem than an explication of its sanely paraphrasable layer.) To show it has an allegorically paraphrasable layer (or or any other layer containing further meanings of the kind just revealed) requires external evidence of it like the notes of the poet saying such meanings are there, or poems by other poets that seem on the surface like this one but have some significant hidden under-meaning, or permit a second explication that comes up with such a hidden under-meaning that is as smooth, coherent, and reasonably interesting as the primary meaning I’ve just shown the poem indubitably to have.
The third course is the only one you have available, Paul–because we have no notes or anything else relevant from the author or from anyone else to indicate any hidden meanings, nor are there any poems in the language (or any language, so far as I know) that are like the kind of poem you claim this is. I am absolutely sure that you cannot provide an explication that reveals a smooth, coherent, reasonable hidden meaning. In fact, I’m pretty sure you will claim it’s not necessary to–the poet was too complex for any academic or even you fully to explicate.
That would be nonsense, and clear evidence that your interpretation is defective. But not to you. Nor will you ever accept my claim that it is an argument against your interpretation
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Entry 1610 — The Interpretation of Poems
Friday, October 24th, 2014
Essay on the Interpretation of Poems
(First Draft)
One way of dividing verosophers, it seems to me, is into those who are able to construct permanent understandings of a given subject, and those who constantly construct understandings that they immediately forget. Well, they don’t wholly forget them, but fail to remember any of them well enough to grasp it. That’s me. I continually re-construct my various theories, only to make them pretty much all over again six months, a year . . . or five years later. My incredible defectiveness as an organizer helps. More often than not, I can’t find previous versions of understandings. That seems the case right now.
There is an advantage to this, I believe: it is that I, at least, do remember a sort of underunderstanding that returns each time I build a new version of a given understanding. This, I claim, makes me superior to those whose first construction of an understanding is more or less permanent in the long run due to my not being able to restrain myself from wobbling often into substantial improvements of my understandings they are locked out of. I would not call them rigidniks, just perhaps too close to being that. Meanwhile, I doubtlessly am too far from being that, at least some of the time.
The freewending verospher versus the academic verosopher. Then there is the psitchotic verosopher. Such a character can be either excessively prone to freewendry or to academicality. The one I’ll be introducing here is one who is amusingly anti-academic—but nevertheless himself the victim of an academicality of almost unbelievable magnitude. One thing I’m sure of is that if I am psitchotic (and I will never rule out the possibility), it is due to my being excessively freewendrical.
Note: I am here speaking of the “sane insane.” Both I and the psitchotic you’ll be meeting are sane enough to stay out of mental institutions, and seem rational enough to others. Both of us are normal—but possibly normal to an excess. That is, according to my theory of psychology, everyone is a mixture of three normal character-types, the rigidnik, the milyoop and the free-wender, and becomes a neurotic or psitchotic due to being too entirely one of these types but does not become psychotic, or nuts across the board. To put it simply, psitchosis results from a single gland’s being under- or over-active; psychosis from greater defects spread throughout the brain.
There. 400 words and I haven’t gotten to my topic, the interpretation of poems. I will now, with a list of what I’m calling the layers of a poem until I can come up with a better name for them. For now, I’ll stick them on my list as they occur to me. I hope in my return to my understanding
I may at least be able to find this list and better organize it. Anyway, here goes:
1. The background layer. This consists mainly of what the person analyzing a given poem knows of its author, the poem’s form and . . . the poem’s title, if it has one. Its presentation—as an inscription on a monument rather than on a page in a book, for instance—may be part of this layer, too. (Oops, before I forget, I must tell you that this essay will be concerned with poems one encounters in a book, not oral poems. What I say can be readily applied to oral poems, I believe, but I am not up to showing how over and over again.)
2. The sensory surface of a poem: what it looks like to the eye, sounds like to ear, and perhaps feels to the tactile sense, or even smells—meta-verbally. I distinguish the sound and visual appearance of words acting as words from their sensory effect beyond that, which I call their meta-verbal appearance. For instance, the word, “oh,” is heard verbally as a long o, but may be heard meta-verbally as a shriek, grown, mumble or any of numerous other enunciations; similarly it may seem visually just an o or, in a visual poem, be (meta-verbally) ten times larger than the rest of the poem’s letters, and orange instead of black.
3. The melodational layer, or how a poem sounds verbally. The sound of “oh” as “oh” spoken normally. Alliteration, rhyme, assonance, euphony, etc.
4. The narrative layer, or what story the poem tells, and I believe every poem must tell some story.
5. The symbosensual layer, or the sensual imagery the poem’s words denote (symbolically), generally the visual images they represent, but also at times sounds (“the clang of a bell”) or even smells, the taste of food, the feel of satin. I coined my awkward term for this because I feel it important to distinguish verbal images from actual images like the graphic ones that may turn up in visual poems.
6. The ideational layer, or all the ideas that may be in a poem.
7. The unificational layer, or everything in a poem that, en masse, acts as the poem’s unifying principal (if it has one).
8. The metaphorical layer, or what I call its metaphormations.
9. The archetypal layer, or everything in a poem that gives it archetypal depth.
10. The paraphrasable layer, or what a poem is, on the surface, about. It can be a repetition of the narrative layer, but will often be quite a lot more.
11. The allusional layer, or the sum of a poem’s allusions to other poems, or cultural material of any kind, and to parts of itself. Some of this will have been in the background layer, but some not . . . I think, but won’t be sure until I’ve worked entirely through a poem using this list.
12. The twelfth layer, which is the layer containing everything in a poem not in the other layers.
A proper full explication of a poem, or what I call a “pluraphrase,” will identify each of these layers in a poem, or a particular layer’s absence, and evaluate it.
TO BE CONTINUED
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Entry 1586 — “Moonlight Equation”
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014
intuition + reason = moonlight + pond
I’m bringing the poem above back from an earlier but recent entry because when I just happened to see it Sunday night, it made me realize a virtue of mathematical poetry I hadn’t thought of before: that an simple equation in the form a + b = c + d strongly suggests each of the terms has a different value than the others; hence a must be part c and part d, which means the reader has an extra meaning to muse about: in my poem, just how much moonlight, for instance, is intuition, and how much reason. Ditto for each of the others. In other words, “intuition + reason = pond” would be a nice poem, but not nearly as loaded as “intuition + reason = moonlight + pond.” To over-argue my point, the three-term poem consists of one mathematical idea, the other of five mathematical ideas.
No more for this entry. I’m having another tired of my tired days, but just got through another chapter of my book, one I don’t think I made more than two or three changes to.
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Entry 1541 — Thoughts Concerning Entry 1540
Sunday, August 17th, 2014
Nice to see that more people are visiting my Journal of Mathematics and the Arts article than just the forty or fifty to whom I sent free links to it–75 yesterday morning. I’m hoping for a hundred!
A few follow-ups to yesterday’s entry. First about the poem. As some of you will realize, the quotient is one of my “poemns”–i.e., one of the haiku in my 1966 collection, poemns. Two questions occurred to me as I used it: (1) how does the poem’s existence now in two rendering affect its cultural value? and (2) should I make more long divisions using various poemns, perhaps all of them?
I hope having two versions of my poem is a plus. The first is still important as a stand-alone because a simplification toward intensification at the expense of complexity; the second manywheres far beyond but with, I believe, the loss of maximal intensification. In its relocation in a long division, the poemn’s connotative value is diminished, but certain of its specific connotative possibilities are strengthened. I think I would like them read far apart from each other, the poemn first, most happily without the reader’s being aware of its use elsewhere.
I just laughed a bit to myself at the thought that I might now make a third version.
Further note: I consider poemns a collection of visual haiku, but my little boy (me at Harbor View, age 11) is not in a visual poem, but a cryptographiku (my very first one), that being a kind of infra-verbal poem that makes significant aesthetic use of an encrypted text, and infra-verbal poem being (as you all know) a poem in which what counts is what happens inside words.
I also want to say a bit about my declaration that my poem is a major one (as is my poemn–a major poem within a major poem, by gum). That I need all the encouragement I can get, including self-encouragement is one reason for it. Another is the hope mentioned yesterday that some one would challenge, intelligently challenge, me on it. That would have the value of publicizing it, and perhaps educating some people about it. But–most important for me, I swear–I might find out something that helps me as a poet. (I almost never fail to learn something that helps me as a poet from thoughtful feedback, even very mistaken feedback, and am always surprised when that happens.) I would also get a better sense of how my poems are coming across to others, and I truly want to know that because while simply the satisfaction I when I make a poem I like is enough for me, I also want others to enjoy it–which is the main reason by far that I make my poems public. Benefiting materially from a poem would be very nice (I assume, from what little I know of it) but, as I often say, I’d a billion times prefer to make a poem and two or three others like without getting a cent for it than a poem I think tenth-rate but others like enough to give me–well, a Nobel prize for (the money that comes with it being about all that I’d be interested in).
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