Sayings of Mine « POETICKS-

Sayings of Mine « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Sayings of Mine’ Category

Entry 408 — The Pleasure of a Poem

Saturday, March 26th, 2011

One experiences the main pleasure of a poem the moment one recognizes the truth it is a misrepresentation of.

This may be my best saying about poetry. It came to me yesterday in response to a thread at New-Poetry. (Without “main,” which I just now added, remembering the simpler pleasures poetry can give one.

One experiences the main pleasure of a musical composition the moment one recognizes the old music it is a misrepresentation of. The statement’s logic holds for “a non-representational visimage,” too. And “a work of narrative art.”

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Entry 546 — I’m Back Home, and in Good shape « POETICKS

Entry 546 — I’m Back Home, and in Good shape

I walked to the hospital (about ) 2 miles from my home, getting there at a little after 5 AM. My appointment was for 5:30. My friend Linda got me home at a little after 10 AM, even though we made two small trips, one to the drugstore and one to Staples so I could buy cover stock for Marton’s book. My surgeon had told me he’d talk to me after the procedure, but he didn’t. I’m sure things went okay, though; otherwise, I’d not have been let go. One disappointment–I have to wear a catheter for six days rather than the two I’d been told I’d have to.

I’m pretty tired, this time for the legitimate reason that I only slept a half-an-hour last night. I didn’t feel particularly edgy, for I wasn’t anxious about the procedure. Maybe my body was. Stress affects it much more than it affects the part of my brain the brain calls “me.” As is often the case when I have insomnia, I had quite a few ideas. One of them was a refinement of my long-held belief that it’s unfair to hold an innovative poem to the same standards of clarity a conventional poem is held to since the former is likely only clear because one reading it has been educated in the reading of such poems since nursery school or earlier, and has (probably) not been exposed to anything like what he needs to have been to find an innovative poem clear.

The refinement is a new term: “the clarity-to-exposure ratio.” Or how clear a poem is to an engagent on a scale of, say, one to a hundred, and how much exposure he’s had to poems of its kind on the same scale. Hence, a poem by Frost may have a clarity rating of 95, but an exposure rating of 95, as well, because of what school teachers have taught him about formal verse, and his memory of nursery rhymes, and much else. One of my mathemaku may have a clarity rating of 8 (because it will have understandable words and recognizable mathematical symbols and, perhaps, recognizable graphic images). It may have the same c-to-e ratio as the Frost poem, though, if its exposure rating is only 8,which it could well be because no such poems will have been taught to its engagent.

Offhand, I would say a poem approaches ideal clarity to the degree its clarity-to-exposure ratio approaches point nine. After its exposure rating has reached 100. I make point nine (or some such figure) the ideal because perfect clarity is boring. That I consider a fact of aesthetics, not an opinion.

Western Union

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Autobiographica, Poetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Emily Sessions « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Emily Sessions’ Category

Entry 857 — A Crossword

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Stephen Dean: “Untitled (Crossword),” 1996–from http://www.artequalstext.com/stephen-dean.

I’m not sure what to say about this. Emily Sessions says interesting things about it and similar pieces by Dean at the website I stole the above from (which has two other Dean works–and, as I’ve mentioned here before, a large quantity of combinations of text and graphics that visual poets should definitely take a look at. The website, which is curated by Rachel Nackman, will soon be updated, I understand.

After reflection, I’ve classified this as a visimage (work of visual art). Whereas Emily Sessions thinks of it as an entrance to an underlying universe of colors, it seems to me an act of–well–desecration; Dean has stolen the crossword grid from anyone who wanted to solve it. His repayment, needless to say, more than makes up for the crime (the crossword, after all, will still be available in many other copies of the newspaper it’s in) by doing what Sessions says it does–although it seems more an overlaying of another universe than an entrance into one, for me. Klee seems to me the magician these magick squares are most in the tradition of. But they enter the day-to-day of social interactivity in a way Klee’s works do not (as Sessions points out).

My thought at this point, as I consider the work for the first time from my critical zone, is that it surprises one out of a readiness to obey rules, pursue a goal, use analysis–in the familiar context of a newspaper’s entertainment section–and into . . . colors, nothing more. Or, to elaborate, into a purely aesthetic experience one can flow unanalytically, goallessly, freely with. Yet, a final, numbered order remains ever-so-slightly visible . . . this newness is safe.

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Posted in Aesthetics, Curators mentioned in Entries, Emily Sessions, Rachel Nackman, Stephen Dean, Visimagery | No Comments »

Anthropology « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Anthropology’ Category

Entry 1386 — Coinebreation

Saturday, March 1st, 2014

The result of my latest fit of koi NEE bree AY shuhn

I am retiring one of my coinages: “Triumphancy.” I like it but the expression of “triumph” as the central goal of narrative poetry is sufficient. I’m not sure about “kinhood.” It’s a good word that I’ll keep. What I’m not sure of is whether it works as well as some other word may as what anthrocentric poetry seeks mainly to express.

Passing note: nothing screws up a style like a desire to be thorough. Of course, nothing brings stylistic brilliance to a peak more than thoroughness elegantly captured. (I’m forever parenthetically excusing my style . . . as now. Stupid, this need to make my readers aware that I’m wonderfully self-aware/self-critical.)

“Kinfusion”: joyful recognition of being one with some other person regarding something of consequence, like who you want to win the super bowl. Wrong. It would be the state of being one with some other person. What about “kincognition?” Ridiculous word, but I may use it.

Posted in Aesthetics, Anthropology, Grumman coinage | No Comments »

Entry 1385 — Triumphancy

Friday, February 28th, 2014

Just a few random thoughts for this entry, my second of the day after finding out I was one day behind in entries and having had trouble enough doing the one for yesterday, although once I got going, I kept going. (Warning: some of the material is politically-incorrect.)

Triumphancy, is much more a male goal than a female one. Women, much more often than men, can be heard saying, “It’s only a game,” and they mean it. Men say the same thing fairly often, but non-wimps don’t really mean it. Men have always been the ones going off on quests. It goes back to the sexual division of labor that Nature gave our species, and most other species, one result of which, for us, was making males responsible for hunting, females responsible for gathering–and hunting is a much more questlike activity than gathering. But geographical exploration became primarily a male activity, too, the physique, temperament and kind of mental abilities that make males better hunters than females making them better for exploration, too.

In addition, and this seems always overlooked by feminists, wimps and academic anthropologists, males are much more biologically expendable than females, so it makes biological sense to fit them for much more risk than females, and make them desire the challenge of danger to a much greater extent. Males are much more physically courageous/foolhardy than females. Genetically. (Yes, there are exceptions, Nature never obliterating exceptions, and they are interesting but in a brief discussion not worth consideration.) Females have other equally valuable characteristics–such as a superior self-preservation instinct. And a stronger instinctive desire for kinhood, or at least a different desire for it than males’.

Here’s a test of that psychologists could carry out: gather some short stories emphasizing a character’s thoughts and feelings but hardly going anywhere narratively (some of Henry James’s, for instance) and the same number of “action stories”–stories high on plot but low on characterization. Then have fifty female and fifty male college students read them and rank them from most pleasurable to least pleasurable. I’m sure male and female ratings will be opposite each other.

One problem: action stories generally have male protagonists so it might be hard to make half of one’s selection of them concerning female protagonists; it would be easy, I think, to split the character studies into two equal groups according to sex of protagonist. Unfortunately, there are many other problems because of the many variables involved, like quality of writing, amount of violence, seepage of interesting characterization into action stories, and good plotting into character studies. But the rough idea makes sense. Probably just a study of who buys what kind of reading matter could decide the matter.

One thing seems clear to me: there’s no way one could claim that either of the two kinds of stories is superior to the others–although I suspect English professors would vote for character studies–which I would say proved my point in spite of the sex of the professors. I suppose it would be too difficult to categorize the greatest literary works, though, to settle the matter, most of them being complex mixtures of characterization and plot.

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Entry 457 — Off to the Hospital « POETICKS

Entry 457 — Off to the Hospital

I’ll be off to the hospital in another half hour or so. I feel good. Things should go well. If everything works out maximally well, I’ll be able to make a blog entry from the hospital tomorrow. Don’t bank on that, though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Autobiographica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Entry 457 — Off to the Hospital”

Geof Huth says:

5 June 11 at 9:12 AM

Bob, I didn’t bank on a posting from the hospital, but I’d hoped for some word by now. Get back to me (or the world in general) as soon as you can, so we know what’s up.

Geof

Natural Selection « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Natural Selection’ Category

Entry 1446 — Beginning of Essay

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

My essay on beauty has given me a lot of trouble. What was holding me up the past day or so was its beginning, I think because I wanted to use Mohan Matthen’s article for Aeon about it as a springboard into my thoughts about it, but didn’t understand him well enough properly to summarize his main point. So I finally got around that problem by prefacing my attempt to summarize his thought with “If I have Matthen right . . . ” I ended with the following two paragraphs:

“I began thinking my way toward this essay after reading an article about beauty at Aeon by Mohan Matthen about the possible evolutionary value of the (apparent) need of our species for it–to the point that some of us spend our lives making seemingly biologically valueless attempts to capture it in art. It had long been one of my (too numerous for a sane life) interests. But, although I’d written quite a bit about it, I was soon aware that I really had no good idea about its biological value, if any.

“If I have Matthen right, and I’m not sure I do, he considers the pursuit of beauty to lead to heightened powers of sensory discrimination. Our enjoyment of it would also cause us to try to make art objects that would provide us with it–and take the utilitarian objects we make beautiful as well as useful. The growing creativity involved in making things beautiful would have to spill over into creative ways of increasing their usefulness. The beneficial effects would spiral upward–beautiful art and decorated . . . utilitry, as I term the making of utilitarian objects (and utilitarian activities, thinking, etc.) would inspire new kinds of beautiful things, which would increase sensory discrimination, which would increase the need to be creative, which would keep the spiral ascending. So, for Matthen, if I understand him, the pursuit of beauty has been selected not for itself but for its utilitarian worthwhile by-product: enhanced sensory discrimination and creativity which has resulted in humankind’s ultimately foremost cultural–and biologically advantageous–virtue–the ability to interact constructively with the material universe.”

Does I make sense? Matthen’s article, by the way, is here.

Posted in Aesthetics, Natural Selection | No Comments »

Stephen Dean « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Stephen Dean’ Category

Entry 857 — A Crossword

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Stephen Dean: “Untitled (Crossword),” 1996–from http://www.artequalstext.com/stephen-dean.

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Posted in Aesthetics, Curators mentioned in Entries, Emily Sessions, Rachel Nackman, Stephen Dean, Visimagery | No Comments »

Entry 491 — Rough Sketch of Another Poem « POETICKS

Entry 491 — Rough Sketch of Another Poem

This one I call “Cursive Mathemaku No. 3.”

This is another one that, so far, I like a lot. I even think it should be popular! In any event, there’s a lot more work I have to do–color the writing (I’m pretty sure) and work out background. The latter will be a combination, I think, of what I did with my preceding poem, and what I’ve done with my other two cursive mathemaku. I’m looking forward to playing with it, but also fearing to.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 491 — Rough Sketch of Another Poem”

marton koppany says:

4 September 11 at 2:59 AM

It is beautiful, Bob! One question though: what is the first letter of the divident (before “aereality”?)? I can’t dechiper it.
marton koppany says:

4 September 11 at 9:46 AM

Ok, sorry for my old English.
(And thanks for the clue, Bob, that you sent me in a email message.)

Sound Poetry « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Sound Poetry’ Category

Entry 1291 — AT Art, Part 2

Friday, December 6th, 2013

Note: a “lavalier” is a kind of microphone, something I had to look up on the Internet so out of it I am in this territory. But I didn’t feel I had the trouble with “Sound Poem for Emile Berliner” that I thought I would when I listened to it for the first time this morning.

Here’s what I just wrote to Mark about his piece:

Yikes, Mark, I’m sure how to break it to you, but . . . I liked your Berliner piece and felt COMFORTABLE with it the very first time I heard it! Before I knew it, I was listening to and enjoying your second piece. I’ll be trying to figure out what happened over the next few days. I think maybe just exposure to things like language poetry, conceptual poetry, even popular movies sometime use of dramatically-expressive noise effects, and an increased ability to be tolerant of new kinds of art due to a fair amount of contact with it as critic and maker, and possibly the thought I’ve given to what music is–for instance, in trying in some of my visual poems to make graphic metaphors of it–have set me up to be able to appreciate what you’re doing–assuming I really am! More in due course, but who knows when, considering how erratically I function.

Oh, you should know I listened to it a second time, and found more things in it to like. So I expect it to be continuingly interesting, and look forward to where your sequence of pieces will go! By the way, if I were to characterize the piece as a kind of found art, how would you react? It really isn’t, although inventive art is always “found art” in the sense that a finished piece is a specimen of art you’ve found in the result, or maybe found the result to be. Especially the way recording feedback from a microphone will give your a field to find things in that recording chords played on a piano won’t.

(I bet I couldda made lots of money as a PR man if I’d been able sincerely to like crap the way I like Mark’s work. I’m so perhaps overboard because I really feel like I have tripped into what is a major new field for me. Oh, because I don’t know how to include audio in my entries, and actually would prefer not to, so those interested in Mark’s work would buy a set from whomever is selling it, and because I will have the challenge of describing something very hard to convey, I should tell you–roughly now, but better tomorrow, I hope, that it begins with sandpaper-scratching sounds but soon includes random musical tones, single and chordal, sort of falsetto-sounding to me, but not human, and–for me–feels like it’s going somewhere.)

Entry 1290 — AudioTextual Art, Part 1

Thursday, December 5th, 2013

One of my many problems as a would-be culturateur is biting off more than I can chew. Today, for instance, I needed something for this entry. My laziness struck first, telling me to just use the graphic immediately below:

It’s from Mark Sutherand’s Sonotexts, a 2-DVD set he recently sent me–with a copy of Julian Cowley’s user’s guide to sound poetry from Wire. As soon as I saw what Mark had sent me, I went into one of my yowie-fits, perceiving it, as I wrote Mark, as a sort of class in sound poetry, something I’d been wanting to come to terms with for years. I had visions of taking a fifteen-minute class in the subject based on Mark’s package–something I’ve followed through on for four or five days now, except my requirement isn’t fifteen minutes daily of immersion, just a significant immersion that might last only a few minutes–like the amount of time it took me to read the text and above and study the graphics.

I had a second yowie-fit concerning my use of the above here, which I suddenly saw as the first step in a Great Adventure, Bob Grumman’s Quest to Assimilate Audio-Texual Art. (Not “sound poetry” because I had already realized my subject would cover more than sound poetry.) I would write a book here, one Major Thought per daily entry that would not just describe my attempt to learn about sound poetry and advance the World’s understanding of the whole range of audio-textual art, but expose the World to my theory of aesthetics–down to its Knowlecular foundation. All while working on three or four other not insignificant projects daily. But I was not wholly unrealistic: my aim was “merely” a good rough draft, not a perfect final draft.

Well, maybe I’ll keep going for more than a few days. Perhaps I’ll even write something of value. For . . . ? One of the reasons I probably won’t get far is my belief, strengthening daily–if not hourly–that there are not more than a dozen people in the world able to follow me at this time, nor will there ever be, so I’ll be wasting my time. Yes, I do recognize that the reason for this may not be how advanced my thoughts are but how badly expressed and/or obtuse they are. No matter, I myself will enjoy writing about my adventure, and having it to write about may be enough to keep me in it until I’ve actually accomplished my main aim, an understanding of audio-textual at that makes sense to me.

Ergo, here’s lesson one, which an enlargement of the text above from the booklet that comes with Mark’s set will facilitate:

Its words, of course, are Mark’s.

Student Assignment: two words or more concerning “Sound Poem for Emile Berliner”–prior to listening to it. Not much to say except for taxonomical remarks unsurprising to anyone who knows me. First off, since there can be nothing in the composition anyone will be able to recognize as verbal, as far as I can now see, I would term it “linguiconceptual music,” “linguiconceptual” being my term for asemic textual matter in an artwork that conceptuphorically (or provides a concept that metaphorically) adds appreciably to the work’s aesthetic effect. I will say more about this after hearing the composition. Right now I don’t see how its textual content can be evident without a listener’s simply being told that it is there.Unless the tracing is exhibited as the composition is being played, as it seems to me it ought to be, and maybe is! The tracing IS a visual poem, albeit a simple one that serves the work as a whole as its caption.

No, it’s more than that–the textual music is metaphorically its voice, which makes it an integral part of the composition that is secondarily a caption for it.

So much for lesson 1. (I think I passed.)

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Posted in Aesthetics, Autobiographica, Poetics, Sound Poetry, Taxonomy, Visual Poetry Specimen, W. Mark Sutherland | No Comments »

Aesthetics « POETICKS

Posts Tagged ‘Aesthetics’

Entry 123 — Kinds of Words

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

In a shift in my way of describing varieties of visio-textual artworks, I’m trying out a taxonomy of words and wordlike, uh, expressitons. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll change the latter to something better. I threw it onto the screen within a second or two of reaching where it put it in my sentence. What I’m talking about are things that act in an artwork the way words act in standard poems. It would include a brush-stroke in a painting, say, or a dot of paint, or maybe an entire shape. I got the idea of calling such a thing a kind of word, by the way, when I thought I might send Geof a pwoermd consisting of a scribble of paint, using the logic that since a visual poem, for him, need not have words, a visual pwoermd need not, either.

Here are the kinds of words I thought of:

1. word — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically rational context; e.g., “gulp” in “I gulp water just before playing tennis.”

2. nullword — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically incoherent context; e.g., “gulp” in “water I just tennis before gulp playing.”

3. unword — a nonsense word; e.g., ” gspp”

4. fragword — a fragment of a word incapable of easily being read as a word, and in a context in which it would be incoherent even if read as some word; usually intended to represent language, never to be language.

5. preword — something in a photograph or work of visual art that a word exists for–for instance, a tree.

6. visword — an element in a visual artwork like some of Scott Helmes’s visual haiku that is wholly atextual but intended, it would seem, to represent a word. Helmes’s visual haiku generally consist of three shapes, each suggesting a line in the classical three-line haiku; hence, each shape must contain a set of words adding up to five or seven syllables.

The use of these terms: I can now call poetry that is significantly visual visual word art; I can call visual art with semantically meaningless words in it, visual nullword art; visual art with nonsense words visual unword art; and three other kinds of visual n-word art. Then I will be able to communicate with the five or six people in the world who would are capable of telling the difference between these forms of art effectively.

Tags: Aesthetics
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