Archive for the ‘Bob Grumman’ Category
Entry 1709 — I Done A New Math Pome!!!!
Friday, January 30th, 2015
The following is an accident, whether a happy one or a disappointing one, who knows. What happened was that I was looking through my digital files for a poem for Bill Michele and came across the divisor and dividend of this one in a folder labeled, “Long Division Problems Worth Attacking.” I immediately wanted to attack it. What’s below is the result (so far–I’m not sure whether it needs more work or not):
I think I was in the mood to work on it because of my thinking about HSAM yesterday. It may be my first autobiographical long division poem. The only unauthentic thing in it is the divisor. Actually, they may well have been there, hard to imagine they would not have been. But they’re not in my memory of the episode. Extremely sentimental, yes? It’s very simple but perhaps still “difficult” for many . . . Will it nonetheless make me famous?
I’d sorta like to do more poems like it, but have no ideas for any yet.
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Entry 1669 — “A Bukowski Poem”
Monday, December 22nd, 2014
Did too much busywork in my practiceptual awareness today to be able to provide anything more here than a poem of mine I just came across that was in Harry Burrus’s O!!Zone 98, one of a series of O!!Zones that featured a lot of good work, much of it at a higher level than my poem–which isn’t to say that my poem ain’t pretty good. I had been writing Poem poems by 1998, so am not sure why this one wasn’t one. Possibly I later put Poem into it. If not, I may yet.
A Bukowski Poem
Because it’s been nearly a
year since I last wrote
anything remotely like a poem I’ve
decided to try my
hand at just jotting down
what would be unpunctuated
agrammatical prose except
for its linebreaks what I
call a Bukowski Poem after its
inventor William Carlos O’Hara it might
be fun and who knows it
might also get me going
again or even turn out worth
while of itself in a minor
way as such poems can for
instance if after awkwarding
to the final drab of flatness you go
for just a little more like
say the alley side
of a North Hollywood delicatessen
awning just the way the shade’s
turned its red to rust
can by contrast bridegroom
a reader to oceanic
expansions at which point you
should end your poem unless you go
in for anti-climaxes which can
be effective too.
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Entry 1652 — 2 Laxian Repeater-Stack Poems
Friday, December 5th, 2014
I was having a great time commenting on an article in yesterday’s issue of the online magazine, Aeon, then pasting my comments, with further comments into this entry when my computer managed to lose one of my comments at Aeon and everything I had written here–in spite of my having remembered twice to save what I had here. So I’m in a sour mood now, and just posted a poem I just composed followed by Marton Koppany’s preliminary Hungarian translation not of it, but of my first draft of it:
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Entry 1591 — “The Night Times Who”
Sunday, October 5th, 2014
Here’s the poem I made the “tyger” image for yesterday:
I made the original, in black and white, a little over a decade ago.
Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that my new poem of a couple of days ago with the swans is screwed up. I must change both its remainder and its subdividend product. I have a good idea, I think, for the latter, and a vague one for the remainder.
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Entry 1566 — “View from a Small Bridge”
Wednesday, September 10th, 2014
View from a Small Bridge water water rippling nowhere in particular but everywhere in general
This poem is based on my crossing a small bridge over a canal and for some reason finding the canal water especially restful. I thought out a haiku about it that included the present title of the poem and its first three lines, in slightly different words. Then I added “but everywhere in general”–mainly, I have to admit, because it gave the poem, I thought, a feeling of portentously mysterious but essentially vacuous depth. But I’ve gradually come to think it also an answer to my wondering where the water would ripple if not to nowhere. So it makes rational sense once one considers where water might go when made more than water (or the word , “water,” made more than a straight-forward denotation).
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Entry 1550 — Back to the English
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
Here are the original versions of two of the Poem poems I posted two entries ago:
Poem is my alter-ego, so sometimes me, but sometimes an imaginary me. The first poem in some strange surrealistic way (my intuition tells me) sums up my attempt to become a known writer, of plays mostly, during the fifteen years I spent from 1968 to 1983 in Los Angeles. I think maybe the ocean of the poem is Poem’s alter ego . . .
The second poem is about my life from 1983 in Florida, where I still am and will probably be for the rest of my life. The scene is more or less real; the heron is definitely real. My mood and thoughts (authentic) are from more than one different scene.
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Entry 1549 — Translation Translation by Google
Monday, August 25th, 2014
I wasn’t sure what poem of mine was the bottom one in the set of Hungarian versions I posted yesterday, so had Google translate “vecen.” It gave “plumbing” for that. I thought the poem concerned was probably one I remembered with “toilet” in the title but couldn’t find it in my book, Of Poem (dbqp press, 1995), which I thought all three of my poems were from. So I had the first line translated. “Verse engineering sectors during?” That didn’t help. By then, however, I thought it’d be fun to have Google translate the whole poem back to English and put the result here:
The Toilet
Verse engineering sectors during
almost bllinding certainty recognize
o the greatest lines in the poem
the history of the universe.
Kuncognia had to, because he thought
how much
hold for what everyone
I admit that.
By adding “a” before “vecen,” I got an accurate translation of the title, but most of the rest of the text was a bit off. Close enough, however, for me to find the poem in my second collection of Poem poems, Poem Demerging (Phrygian Press, 2010):
On the Toilet
Between movements, it occurred to Poem
with an almost bllinding certainty
that his were the most superb works of any art
or science
in the history of the cosmos.
He chuckled as he thought of how long
it would take the rest of the world
to realize this.
Much thanks to Geof Huth and Arnold Skemer for publishing, respectively, Of Poem, and Poem Demerging.
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Entry 1548 — 3 Poems in Hungarian
Sunday, August 24th, 2014
I’ve actually been semi-productive lately, getting nine reviews, two columns and an editorial done for Small Press Review, and some work on an essay that may turn into a book about boredom. Consequently, after Here are three of my Poem poems in Koppanaical Hungarian:
They are from Kalligram, March 2010, with sundry visual poems by such as Geof Huth, Endwar, Nico Vassilakis, Dan Waber, Karl Young (also in Hungarian) . . . Marton Koppany’s doings, needless to say.
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Entry 1540 — A New Work of Mine at Truck
Saturday, August 16th, 2014
Just an announcement today as I ccontinue to try to get my current reviews out of the way (and do seem to slowly be succeeding in doing so). Go here to see “An Evening in June, 1952,” a nostalikuical long division about (sob) my lost boyhood, mostly the part of it spent in boys’ adventure books, but also actual times camping out. Click once on my poem to see a better version of it.
The codes are simple, but I’ve put hints that help down at the far right, if you need them. Further hints available for $12 apiece at HINTS, 1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952. (Note, for those of you keeping score: yes, it is a Major Poem.) (Note, for any knownstreamer accidentally here who laughs at the presumption of my declaration, I dare you to present a cogent argument against it. Not that my declaration isn’t intended as a joke, but only in part. I absolutely believe it. I don’t think all or even most, of my poems are major, but if–at my age–I didn’t feel some were it would indicate that I’ve completely wasted my life.)
(((b=a, 5=e)))
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Entry 1393 — Advice for Beginning Poet
Saturday, March 15th, 2014
Below I prove that what many poet-teachers tell those wanting to become poet is 100% valid: if you want to become as good a poet as you can be, write poetry every day. This is easy to do is you are willing to write anything. Be willing! You can destroy the bad stuff later. And you’ll be surprised to find that soon you’ll occasionally write something pretty good even if you had absolutely no desire to write anything, so just scribbled enough words to be able fulfill your daily requirement. More often you’ll write crap . . . but stumble into something with potential.
I suspect that if you do this long enough–five or ten years–you’ll start automatically writing good, sometimes great, poems almost every day. John M. Bennett does. I can’t verify this from my own experience, because I’ve never written a poem or more a day. In fact, I think I’ve gone several months without writing a single all-text poem–until today. I’m not sure why this is. I once wrote a novel over 200,000 words in length, daily writing two or three thousand words–except a couple of times. (I do think breaks of a day or weekend are a good idea.) And I’ve written a daily diary entry for years, finally getting too disgust with how wretchedly dull they were that I stopped for several months. I’m back to doing them now.
I may have too deep a null zone to be able to do more than a bit of prose when I’m at its bottom, which seems to occur more frequently as I age. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I specialized in playwriting, and pretty much did the equivalent of a poem-a-day. I think one reason I never got into the habit (except for a few short periods of maybe a month or two) is that I didn’t consider myself primarily a poet until my forties. Even then, I considered myself as much a critic and theoretical psychologist as poet. After today, though, I’m going to try to take my advice and be a poet, however horrible, at least once a day.
Okay, here’s the poem I forced myself to write for this blog entry because I had no desire to write anything whatever for it but felt dutybound to:
Is it much of a poem? I sure don’t think so, although I hope someone will tell me it is, and–frankly–something in me tells me it may be. I just threw it together out of thoughts I had regarding the website I wrote about in yesterday’s entry. It was so extremely unheightened that I changed “thought” to “thoughghghghghght” to allow my little joke about making the poem more specialized. Later I shifted the gh‘s and changed an i to Y. I had gone from just typing words to minor involvement as a poet in what they were doing. That will almost always happen, at least when you’ve been writing poems long enough.
Not wanting my text to have no poetic interest, at all, I then went into my “high-poetic mode,” the mode I more or less consciously go into when trying for some kind of haiku-moment or the equivalent in a poem. Even an epiphany. I grab something with surrealistic potential and try to lapse into something unrelated to it that I somehow marry to it, anyway (to use an archaic form of “marry”). Since my Poem poems are automatically surrealistic in that they are about a “real” person” inside the words of a poem, it was easy to steal the crow from a poem of Roethke’s I especially like and just have it fly into the poem I was writing to give the poem an image, at least, and confuse it out of total dullness.
I ended the poem with the crow regionating into the exactly correct letter to give the poem what it needed. He at first regioned into the letter, but that didn’t sound quite right! By then I was in my poetry zone–which means I was feeling like I was a poet, but not necessarily composing anything worthwhile. Once I’m there, I tend to fiddle with a piece, sometimes for hours. This time I noticed my first line, then “Poem was amused to find out that the”. I tend to break lines at the “wrong place” now and then to keep a reader on his toes. Well, seeing another “the” at the end of one of my lines, the idea of the column of “the’s” occurred to me. That idea, extended to the “The.” at the end (from Stevens) made the whole exercise a Grand Success as far as I was concerned. I don’t think the “The-column” saved the poem, but I do think it has great potential that I hope to exploit–but feel others should be able to, too.
Note: various versions of the “The column” have no doubt been done by others, but it is excitingly new for me, and I suspect I am using it, or think I am using it, differently from anybody else. Not that it matters. Well, I guess it does to me. Any, the way I hope to use it is as a stack of repetitions of some single word that the body of a poem mostly ignores but sometimes goes through and ends at. A further idea: a second text like the body of the poem on the other side of the column. I have other ideas. (It just struck me that I’ve been influenced a lot by what Alan has been treating us to at New Poetry. Maybe stealing from him! I refuse to investigate the matter.)
Oh, one more thing. The “sur” in the poem was intended to be sure.” But when I saw it, I didn’t correct it (which would have involved going back to Paint Shop because it’s so hard to get the formatting of poems right as texts at this site) because of its meaning as part of “surreal.” So I got “making ‘above,’” which fit. Second piece of advice: be on the look-out for accidents to exploit.
Ha, I see I got a fourteen-liner, counting the title, so I could call this a sonnet, but will not–nor would even if I didn’t have to include the title to get fourteen lines.
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Oops, you may need a magnifying glass. My choice of reproduction seems to be the size above, or four times as large. Anyway, it’s called “A Man’s Intelligence” and may be more informrature–a specimen of informratry–than poetry. Let me quote what it says: “A man’s Intelligence” equals “intelligence Quotient” divided by the product of “The measurable level of Dionysian blood transfused in a saffron masseuse boasting whispers through the cool crystal shot glass of the finest golden tequila” times “The amount of passion fueled by a young pink Venus–her hand wandering in slow circular patterns, a seemingly aimless whistle up the man’s inner thigh.”
You’re going to upset the feminists with that last comment, mister. By the way, the copy editor in me tells me there is some grammatical hell going on in your opening graph for this entry — i.e. “now” disguised as “not,” and read the first sentence out loud to yourself. Regarding the mathemaku, I think the first one is perfect already, and the others are unnecessary.
Well, thanks for the copy editing, Kevin. As for your literary criticism, I’m afraid I have over 30 other divisions of “poetry” logic would require you to say were unnecessary. But no problem: now that you’re a Californian, your literary opinions don’t count no more.
Note, despite your comment, I have approved you as a commenter here. Just shows what kind of person I am, right?
–Robbit
You seem to be implying that you can outperfect perfection. That’s so Grummanly of you.