Entry 373 — “Cursive Mathemaku No. 1″ « POETICKS

Entry 373 — “Cursive Mathemaku No. 1″

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The past few days, I’ve been trying to get my mathemaku numbered and filed in order.  I’m up to Number 49.  Don’t know what Number 50 is.  It will take time to arrange the rest of my mathemaku.  I’ll have to go through a lot of diary and blog entries.  I rarely date finished print-outs, but often date rough drafts, especially the first ones.

For the heck of it, I rated my first 49: 16 of them I consider first-rate, 25 okay, and 8 not too hot.  I’ll probably keep them since sometimes others get something out of works one doesn’t think of oneself.

Anyway, the above turned up at position 34.  I’d forgotten about it and don’t think I ever posted it, so here it is.  It’s one of the ones I rate “okay.”  At the time I made it, I thought cursive mathemaku would be a fine vein for me to follow up on, but I did only this one–and my “Long Division of Haiku,” which is one of my 8 disappointing children.

Further notes about my first 49 mathemaku: they actually consist of probably something like 80 mathemaku since they include six or seven sequences, one of them quite long, The Long Division of Poetry.  I’m sure I’ve done over a hundred mathemaku by now, but I doubt that I’m up to “Mathemaku No. 100″ yet.

5 Responses to “Entry 373 — “Cursive Mathemaku No. 1″”

  1. nico says:

    this i like. keep it. do no touch ups.

  2. marton koppany says:

    A very beautiful piece!

  3. Bob Grumman says:

    Thanks:

    Nico–but I’m itching to make one very small change! I probably won’t. IF I do, I promise not to mess with it otherwise.

    Marton. Yours and Nico’s encouragement is much appreciated. Your eyes are as good as they come. I hope you get me to do a few more cursive poems. I’ve let some ideas wander in but they so far have all kept going.

    –Bob

  4. Kevin Kelly says:

    I like this. I think the cursive really flows well with the illustration. Would like to see more of these.

  5. Bob Grumman says:

    Thanks, Kevin. This one has now gotten three compliments. I did try to do another cursive but it turned off into something else. I do want to try more, though.

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Entry 621 — Evolution of Style « POETICKS

Entry 621 — Evolution of Style

One of my works that I was particularly pleased with when I came across it while backing up blog entries was the following:

 

 

I have one problem with this: my only version of  it is a low-resolution jpg, which I don’t know how to convert to high-resolution tif, except by simply redoing it.  Any suggestions from anybody out there who knows more than I do about this kind of thing?

I didn’t re-post it only to ask for help, or because of how much I like it, but as an example of how my work as a poet has evolved.  Actually, I want to show that it has evolved.  That’s because Paul Crowley, the nut I most argue with on the Internet about who wrote the works of Shakespeare, seems not to believe that a poet’s style, or way of making art, evolved once he’s past his apprenticeship.  Of course, he will claim I’m not a poet, and that the evidence I’m about to produce to show my evolution indicates only trivial changes, not anything like genuine evolution.  I enjoy talking about my work, and analyzing any poem, so will go ahead with my demonstration, anyway.

First of all, I should state my claim: it is that over the past couple of years, my style as a poet has evolved appreciably, and that this poem illustrates it.

(1) I only began using cursive ten or fewer years ago, and never for more than a word or two.  This poem and two others have all or most of their texts in cursive.  Because the difference in expressiveness between print and cursive is visiopoetically meaningful to those who appreciate visual poetry, this wholesale use of cursive script counts as a significant evolution of style.

(2) My use of cursive is more elegant here than it is in mt other two recent poems making extensive use of cursive.  Note, for instance, the large O, and the increased gracefulness of all the letters compared with the letters in my other two cursive poems.

(3) Twenty years ago, I didn’t bother giving my poems backgrounds.  Since then I have, and have slowly been improving (but have plenty of room for further improvement).  Note the harmony of the background’s shape and colors with the text, especially the O. 

(4) The background has another important value–the connotations it picks up as a result of its being a variation (mostly through color changes) of the background in another poem of mine.  Connecting poems of mine with others’ poems and others of my own poems is another way I’ve evolved as an artist, not doing it until perhaps twenty years ago, then only very slowly doing it to a greater and greater extent.  This poem may be the first to re-use an entire background from another poem.  This is not trivial, for it allows this poem to suggest “dictionary-as-temple,” the main part of the foreburden of the poem its background is from.  It also should make this poem easier to enjoy, the same way the repetition in a new musical work of an old theme is usually pleasant to hear.  I believe the happiness of the colors of this version of the background gains from the reminder of the different, lower-key mood evoked by the other version.

(5) The use of color in tension with greyscale is another trick new to me twenty years ago that I exploit more and more in my present works, as here (though I’ve done more with it elsewhere).

(6) I think my language has evolved over the years, too–from fairly literal to metaphorical and/or surreal.  The “logic” of this piece and most of my recent pieces is not so easy to guess, which may be an unfortunate evolution, but an evolution nonetheless.

(7) You can’t tell from this image, which has been reduced in size to fit the normal computer screen, but the hard copy is larger than anything I did ten or more years ago, which is another result of evolution. 

Here’s my first or second mathemaku, done thirty or more years ago, to make the profound evolution of my style more inescapable. Yet I maintain this piece is at the level of later pieces; it is simply more condensed. For one thing, it is only linguistic and mathematical. Nothing visioaesthetic happens in it. The eye is used only to recognize the symbols it contains, not to enjoy colors or shapes the way my faereality poem compels it to–i.e., not a visual poem (except inthe mindlessnesses of those for whom just about everything is a visual poem). It is short, and printed. Its words are simple to an extreme.

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4 Responses to “Entry 621 — Evolution of Style”

  1. marton koppany says:

    The unusual use of the punctuation marks (it was even more unusual at the time of the conception of the poem), the unusual emphasis on them (I read them, they’re meaningful, and I also see them: small plants, leaves of grass in the state of potentiality) has a strong “visioaesthetic” effect as well. There’s a playful and liric tension between the shorthand formula, and the suspense in slowing down the reading. It is still one of my favorites and I’m proud it has a Hungarian “translation”. :-)

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Ha, the fact that it was translated into nothing but symbols indicates it was not visual. I think subjective visual interpretations of symbols nice, but not enough, by themselves, to make a poem visual. Otherwise, Frost’s “Stopping by woods” is a visual poem because the o’s look like snowflakes.

    Hey, gotta defend my taxonomy to the very end.

  3. marton koppany says:

    No problem. (I tried to italize the “o” but couldn’t.)

  4. marton koppany says:

    I mean: italicize. The joke is the same. :-)

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Entry 48 — Full Effectiveness in Poetry « POETICKS

Entry 48 — Full Effectiveness in Poetry

I’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.

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Entry 32 — A Mathemaku from 2007 « POETICKS

Entry 32 — A Mathemaku from 2007

I continue to be more out of it than not, so have just this for today:

17Aug07B

Guess who composed it.

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Enter 382 — “Poem’s Intractability” « POETICKS

Enter 382 — “Poem’s Intractability”

.                               Poem’s Intractability
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.                               The rotund smell of electricity
.                               shimmered left of less
.                               as the maple syrup
.                               made up its mind
.                               in the Bearden colors
.                               wearing brighter against
.                               the kindergarten laughter
.                               Sambo was racing behind
.                               while, several darknesses
.                               in front of the scene,
.                               The tigered past
.                               dallied
.                               resolutely into the center
.                               of Poem’s intractability,
.                               permanently unrescuable.
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I had nothing else for this entry. The above, due–I’m sure–to a dumb discussion of a controversy recently in the news concerning whether a poem by Wilsberian poet, Tony Hoagland, that is insipidly slightly slighting of Venus Williams should be denounced as offensive, came very easily. Not much to it, and more a political point of view than I think poems should be, but it may not be too bad.

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Entry 374 — Me, in Color « POETICKS

Entry 374 — Me, in Color

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Falling behinder and behinder of the times, I nonetheless found out, via spidertangle, about a new venue sympathetic to visual poetry,Angel House Press, the other day. They had announced a gallery they were accepting visual poetry and related works for so yesterday I submitted them six of mine. Lady-in-Charge, Amanda Earl, then requested a photograph and bio, so I’m about to send her the photo above, which is now My Official Photograph at present.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make people look at it every time they visit my blog.

My bio is: Having recently turned 70, Bob Grumman is now the world’s oldest apprentice Force-to-be-Reckoned-With. He is most prominently an apprentice Force in three fields, poetry, literary criticism and theoretical psychology. In the first he specializes in visio-mathematical poetry although he also has two collections of more or less conventional linguexclusive poems in print about an alter ego named, “Poem, Of Poem (dbqp press) and Poem, Demerging (Phyrgian Press).  April to the Power of Pythagoras Times Now (Otoliths) contains most of his best visio-mathematical poems.

One Response to “Entry 374 — Me, in Color”

  1. Patrick Hartigan says:

    You found me once and so I return the favor. I do like your mathy items. Hope you are well.

    – Pat

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Entry 455 — Another Masterpiece « POETICKS

Entry 455 — Another Masterpiece

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Four Seasons Poem Number One Zillion Two

live

love

leve

lve

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I’ve done six or seven 4 season poems, I would guess. Now I’m thinking of trying to work up enough for a little book of them. I really do think this one is a masterpiece.
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2 Responses to “Entry 455 — Another Masterpiece”

  1. endwar says:

    Is the last one actually “I’ve”. Or you could have put in “lave” and just washed yourself of the whole thing. OK. I’ll stop with the lavatory humor now.

    – endwar

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Although the context makes it clear that the first letter of “lve” must be an l, I’ll make sure there’s no possibility of confusion when I make the final version of the poem. No comment on the outrageous lack of respect for a poem I consider a sacred (pantheistic) object your attempt at lavatory humor. But thanks for taking the time to sprinkle your recent comments on my blog, Endwar.

    –Bob

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Entry 623 — My Decline « POETICKS

Entry 623 — My Decline

Well, according to astrology, I’ve begun to decline vocationally after reaching my peak a week or two ago.  It wasn’t much of a peak.  I got my art on display, but doubt that more than a handful of people have looked at it, and probably no more than one or two has really looked at it.  I haven’t been very productive, either.  I’m going to return to my Shakespeare book today (after a little head-start last night).  My intention is to either finish it, or–if I have significant trouble with it–switch to another project of mine, a non-fiction book that may be of general-interest but I’ll say no more about–to keep its theme, which is original, I think, and will be its main selling point, a secret.  I will say that it’s about life in general, not about Shakespeare, psychology or poetics. 

To make this entry more than a diary entry, here’s a poem of mine from a year or so ago.   I posted it then, but just now made a slight change to it, making a whole new poem.  I changed “full” to “certain.”  I decided the implication that I’d come to understand everything was dumb.  Now what kind of understanding I’d achieved is unclear, but should come across as Important.  I don’t know whether this poem became visual later; I don’t think it did.  I think it may work best as is, but who knows.

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Entry 83 — MATO2, Chapter 1.05 « POETICKS

Entry 83 — MATO2, Chapter 1.05

About a week later I heard from one of my California writer friends, Moya Sinclair, who called me a little after eight in the evening sounding very cheerful and energetic.  She, Annie Stanton, quite a good linguexpressive poet, Diane Walker, well-known as a television actress under her maiden name, Brewster, who had literary ambitions and was quite bright but never to my knowledge broke beyond the talented dabbler stage, and I had been a few years earlier the main members of a little writers’ group at Valley Junior College in the San Fernando Valley presided over by Les Boston, a professor there.   Technically, we were doing independent studies with Dr. Boston, but in reality we friends who met weekly to discuss one another’s writing, mine at the time plays.  Annie and Diane were about ten years older than I, Moya close to eighty by the time of her phone call, and she was in a convalescent home.  Her circulatory system had slowly been wearing out.  I fear she died there, for I never heard from her again.  Both Annie and Diane died around then in their early sixties, huge unexpected losses for me.

Moya reported that Annie had been over for a visit and had left my book with her.  Moya said she’d been reading parts of it and found it beautifully written, etc.  She had a few adverse comments on it, too–on Geof’s word for one-word poem (“pwoermd”), for instance, but that was to be expected.  Moya, for years working on an autobiographical novel, was pretty wedded to the old standards.  We had a fine chat that boosted my spirits a good deal.  She represented one of the main kinds of readers I hoped would like my book.

A day later I got a very positive letter from Jack Moskovitz about my book, and a lukewarm one about it from Geof.  Geof, as I remember, felt I should have lightened up on the Grummaniacal coinages.  I think he was right.  I believe one of the things I tried to do in my two revisions of the book was to cut down on them.

The next day, according to my diary, I got lots of letters, mostly from people I sent my book to, and for the most part complimentary though Jody Offer, a California poet/playwright friend of mine, felt I got too advanced in parts–I’m sure in part because of my terminology.  I was finding out, though, that my book was not as geared for non-experts as I’d hoped.

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Entry 33 — Yesterday’s Poem « POETICKS

Entry 33 — Yesterday’s Poem

Here’s yesterday’s image again:

17Aug07B

It’s one of my mathemaku, of course.    I’ve actually been working industriously  on it, trying get it right enough to submit to some sort of  anthology Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill are putting together.   The version above is a recent revision of my first draft of 2007, a variation on “Frame One” of my Long Division of Poetry series.

17Aug07D-light

“Frame One” is similar to the top image except that its divisor is “words.”  It had long bothered me because (and make sure to write this down, students, because it’s an excellent example of the way I think about my poems) its claim was that “words” squared (basically–although it’s really distorted words, or words told slant. times regular words) happened to equal an image having to do with summer rain.  Why that and not, say, a Pacific sunset?   Obviously, the quotient times the divisor could equal anything.  That, I didn’t want.  Off and on I thought about this, but could think of no way to take care of it.  Until a couple of days ago, when I finally concentrated for more than a few minutes on it.  I came up with several pretty good solutions, one of them changing everything in the poem but the sub-dividend product (the image).

My final solution (I hope) resulted in the above poem.  All I did was add “memories of a long-ago summer day” to the quotient.  That assured that the sub-dividend product would have to do with summer–that it would be, that is, a visual poem about summer.  And, as a poem, it would be poetry.

No doubt in due course I’ll think of something else I find illogical about it and want to revise it again.  For now, though, I’m happy with it.

Oh, I’ve made several changes to the main image in it, too.  One was to combat the darkness in the top version (which wasn’t in it until I put it out here).  I’m as fussy about getting my graphics looking the way I want them as I am about everything else in a poem–except the choice of font, and things I can’t do anything about with my equipment, like density of resolution.

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