From a May 2009 blog entry (because, again, I have nothing better to post):
This pretty exactly shows how a long division example strikes me: that is, I see it, in motion, rather than read it. I feel it. Hence, it’s automatically more meaningful to me than it is to most others. I find it wonderful how the dividend shed can take two terms and chunk out one meaningful way they relate to each other.
A brand-new mathemaku I got the simple idea for a few days ago and made on my computer yesterday. One thing I dislike a great deal about it is that it is an opinion poem–worse, the opinion is a political one. But it has a nice graphic taken from my Long Division of Poetry series to which a photograph of outer space taken by the Hubble telescope has been added. A central meaning of its remainder, which I stole from the fourth frame of my “Suite for Odysseus” is “mystery.” As you all should know, its dividend, which I use in lots of poems, is from a poem by Wallace Stevens.
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Thursday, 8 December 2011, 3 P.M. I’m in a good mood. The poem above came out reasonably well, and smoothly–and gave me something for this blog entry. It will probably be in my show, so counts as work done for that. But I also got one of my piece for that into a frame that can be set on a counter, which counts indisputably as work for the show. Meanwhile, I’ve disconnected completely from my Shakespeare book. Next, I have to get a press release for the show done. Should be easy but I’m having trouble pumping myself up to do it.
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This I posted in my previous blog. I don’t know why I like it, but I liked it right after doing it, and each of the two subsequent times I happened to encounter it, so here it is.
Saturday, March 21st, 2015
Ooops, the above is not my final version, this is:
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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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Saturday, October 18th, 2014
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Here’s my “light” poem again:
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I felt that “faereality” was strained as my divisor. I wanted light becoming Apollo, whom I consider a god of rationality, times a kind of reverse of rationality, and faereality was certainly that, but it felt wrong. I believe now that what was wrong with it was that it opposed reality as well as rationality, and I don’t think of Athens as being significantly unreal. I considered using “intuition” or “intui-tiveness,” but felt they were to abstract. Then I thought of “X,” representing the unknown. It could stand for anything, which made it an easy choice–but also a kind of cop-out. So I made it a window on a part of faereality, or (happy) magic. I could take Athens as being to a degree magical, but only to the small degree I thought my fragment of faereality would give it. As I write this, I’m no longer sure I was right.
In any case, I soon felt my “X” was too lazy a choice. At that point, I remembered the version of “mystery” I’d used in my “Odysseus Suite,” and re-used elsewhere. I thought I might use it times X as my divisor. When I found it, though, I saw it already had an “x!” I changed it slightly to what it is here. It worked pretty well, I thought, for the amazing rise of Athens was as mysterious as it was magical. And both opposed rationality. The rest of my term worked, too–the combination of “idea” and “dream,” the hint of “yesterday, ” and the allusion to my poem about Odysseus, specifically the portion of it about his homecoming was a lucky bonus.
I now think I was right about including magic in my divisor. No great event is without that. The allusion back to several poems of mine that “faereality” is part of, is a nice extra, too. Speaking of that, I began to make more of the fact that I was using so many things in this poem from other poems of mine: just about the whole of the divisor, but also the idea of stacked terms from more than one poem of mine, including in particular the one with the swans in it the preceded this one. I began to think that I might by now, without thinking about it, have developed a sort of set visiopoetic mathematical terms. What, I wondered, if I were to begin consciously making such terms and repeating them through a sequence as a way of knitting it more effectively together. Inter-textuality. Something to think about . . .
As for this particular poem, it still needs a background, and I probably need to color “Athens.” I may have all its essential components right, though.
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Note: Yesterday I saw my GP and he felt my problems with the my legs were due to various back problems we already knew about but considered minor. He still feels my problem is minor but no longer so minor as to ignore, so he prescribed physical therapy. I’ll be signing up for it on Monday. I’m to go back to him if there are no signs of its helping in two weeks.
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Friday, October 17th, 2014
The following is from an email I sent to Karl Kempton in reply to a thoughtful response of his to my entry of today, the 16th:
Still walking on partial legs. Being the kind of person I am, I’m thinking maybe what’s screwing me up is polio: in fact, I’m hoping it’s that instead of what I’m sure it is: brain cancer–although I had some kind of scan of my brain when I went to the hospital a month or so ago about this same problem and it was negative.
One interesting thing: I’ve sort of given up on myself–and it’s a kind of release: I’m just doing things I like to do, the heck with the things I think I should do. Fortunately most of the things I like best to do may be worth doing, like an essay I’m writing about my “Mathemaku No. 10,” which is on the cover of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. I’m calling the essay, “The Story of My One Almost-Famous Poem” (“almost-famous” because it got into a college textbook, then into a hard-cover mathematics poetry anthology and finally into the JMA). I’m trying to depict the lot of the invisible poet.
Here’s the essay I was working on–which I find too cut and dry, so I guess it’s a rough draft:
The Story of my One Almost-Famous Poem
by Bob Grumman
The poem above was first published in a micropress publication containing just 7 poems of mine called, simply, Mathemaku 6-12. The press (which I term a “micropress” because too small in readership to be considered a “small press”) was “tel-let,” the publisher was John Martone, the poems involved were what I considered to be mathematical haiku—i.e., short lyrical poems in which a metaphorically significant mathematical operation, like the long division of “Mathemaku No. 10,” was carried out.
John had previously published the first five of my mathemaku in 1992 in a collection called, yes, Mathemaku 1-5. Mathemaku 13-19 came out in 1996. Like me, John was what people call “an experimental poet”—and I call “an otherstream poet,” meaning basically a poet seeking poetic fulfillment in a different stream than the one most poets do. Hence, we were both getting published in the same very few magazines receptive to unconventional poetry. I don’t remember now how it came about, but a correspondence developed between us. Soon after that, I used my micropress, the Runaway Spoon Press, to publish some of his poems, and he reciprocated by publishing some of mine . . . or vice versa. Such is the way it generally is in the micropress: it’s either self-publication or publication by colleagues who like what one is doing.
During the next ten or fifteen years, “Mathemaku No. 10” got re-published a few times, mostly at my poetry blog, poeticks.com, or elsewhere on the Internet. Eventually, came its publication (as a visual poem, which it is not) in the college textbook the half-page I’ve reproduced is from. Interestingly, I was supposed to get paid for my contribution with a copy of the book, but never did, nor did anyone replay to the letters I sent the publisher about what I thought was a minor mix-up. I eventually bought a second-hand softcover copy of the thing from Amazon.
It’s not a visual poem in my view, incidentally, because the heart and the two pieces of arithmetical paraphernalia are the only things in it that are not purely verbal, and they are all symbols with specific meanings, just like words, much more than suggestive visual images, so I consider them to be acting primarily as words, albeit pictorial.
The textbook was printed in an edition of over a hundred thousand, I believe. And one student actually wrote me about my poem! A year later it was included in the only other hardbound book I’ve ever had anything in: an anthology called Strange Attractors, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney, who were among the poets writing mathematics-related poems that I had recently met at a conference for such people in Washington, D.C., having by then encountered some of them on the Internet.
As a result of my friendship with Sarah, my poem made its final splash (so far!) with an appearance on the cover of the March-June 2014 issue of Journal of Mathematics and the Arts (with an essay on “visiomathematical poetry and a book review by me inside!) that Sarah had been the guest-editor of.
And here, in this essay, is my poem yet again. But it can’t possibly make me more almost-famous, can it?
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Thursday, October 16th, 2014
Here’s my latest, unfinished:
The neato recreation of Ancient Athens in my poem was stolen from www.sikyon.com. It is copyrighted by Ellen Papkyriakou/ Anagnostou, with all rights reserved. If I’m still around in 2015, I’ll try to get permission from her to use it here. Still here, you wonder? Well, I think my nervous system is about to go. Lou Gehrig’s disease? I don’t know. I seem to only be half in touch with the lower part of my legs, especially after sitting for a half-hour or more. It’s as though they are on the way to being asleep. I can still walk on them, but if I jog a few paces, I feel the left one beginning to give way. I will be seeing my regular doctor Friday. A week or so after that I have an appointment with the surgeon who did my hip replacement. My hip now feels about the way it did when I went to him to get the replacement. Whether that’s related to my leg problem, I don’t know. It’s quite interesting. Needless to say, I give myself only a fifty-fifty chance to make it into 2015, but that’s just me, always sure of the worst when anything like this happens to me, but sure of the best when it happens to anybody else. Anyway, I’m proud of myself for finally converting my notes for the thing above into a semi-finished product. Gotta add color, and I may change the divisor, but don’t feel up to it right now (15 October, 2 P.M.).
Nota Morbeedissima: if I don’t never finish the above, I’d be grateful is someone else did, following how I done my swan one. Actually, I would not be able to be grateful, but you know wot I mean.
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Saturday, October 11th, 2014
I finished this at around 5 P.M, yesterday, and immediately stuck it here. I plan to comment on it tomorrow, when perhaps I’ve calmed down a little about how terrific it is.
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Friday, October 3rd, 2014
A month or two ago, I suddenly had ideas for poems that I took notes on. Seeing the notes yesterday when hunting for something else I never found, I saw enough of the poem below to work it out. I made the version below this morning. It’s not finished. I want to think a little more about it. I feel “reason” and “intuition” need inner colors. I hope an idea for a background occurs to me, although I wouldn’t say it needs one. The interior of “dreams,” by the way, consists of a fragment of “faereality” from other poems using that, with the coloring shown here. My clever little way of alluding faery magic into this poem’s idea of a dream.
Conclusion: my career as a poet ain’t over quite yet, I guess. The one thing that bothers me about my few recent works is how little visimagery counts in them.
Observation: whenever I get intensely into one project, I seem to flood with ideas for others. Nice, but the danger is my getting distracted into four or five completing projects. But I did finish the second-to-last draft (for some reason, I just don’t want to use “penultimate”) of my novel yesterday. And I swear I’ll get the final draft done before 2015.
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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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Friday, September 12th, 2014
After more reading of The Lonely Crowd, I’ve decided I’m very much inner-directed, according to Riesman’s description of the type. I got him wrong when I though his inner-directed type was similar to my rigidnik. I now an unsure how his autonomous type differs from his inner-directed type. According to Riesman, many of his readers, including colleagues of his, confused the two. I now see why–and Riesman himself seems to consider it a natural mistake. (He is excellently self-critical, it seems to me, but has surprising blind spots: for instance, about the possibility of innate psychological tendencies: he mentions such a possibility every once in a while, but quickly drops the subject, seeming to take social determinism the only important kind of determinism in the main body of his book–or so my impression is after not going very far in it.)
I’m also wondering how Riesman’s other-directed types ultimately differ from his tradition-directed types. Possibly, I just thought, because their memories coincide with their environmental input? They pray to whomever their tribal god is only partly because they’ve been trained to, but mostly because everyone else in the tribe is. The inner-directed person prays to his god because of his indoctrination entirely: he more or less has to because he is part of Riesman’s inner-directed society and thus not sure of having the right people to imitate.
The autonomous person will differ from the inner-directed person only in that he will be much more likely to question his indoctrination.
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Last night while lying in bed hoping for sleep to come, I suddenly had a few ideas for poems, two of which follow:
intuition + reason = moonlight + pond
I’m not sure whether they’re finished or not, or whether, if finished, they’re keepers or not.
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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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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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Thursday, August 14th, 2014
I’m really cheating today: I’m using part of a review or column for Small Press Review that I’ve been working here. The work I’m reviewing is Richard Kostelanetz’s Ouroboros (see Entry 1535):
An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tale, so an excellent title for this collection of 188 words like, well, “ouroboros,” swallowing their tails, each time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, “sour,” in the case of “ouroboros.” They are set in a highly appropriate, highly dramatic font called “Wide Latin”—very bold and jabbingly pointed at all extremities. It’s definitely fun to find smaller words inside Kostelanetz’s specimens of “circular writing,” as he terms it: “tea,” “pet,” and “petite,” for example, in “appetite,” as well as “appetite” itself, which one discovers rather than automatically sees, or “tin,” “descent,” and, most important,” “scent” in “incandescent” (because of the poetic jolt light as an immaterial scent, or a scent as immaterial light suggest to those sensitive to connotation). But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities” .
I told Chris Lott that I would explain why I thought certain arrangements of numbers Richard had made were more than curiosities, and that I’d soon explain why I thought that. Here, quickly, using Richard’s circular words, I’ll give the gist of my reasoning that some of them are, the ones that: accentuate connotative value, a virtue of poems although not necessarily a defining quality, and in the process create an image complex of aesthetic value, the way I think “appetite” turns eating into a very feminine tea party, and “incandescent” makes “scent” and “incandescence” plausible metaphors for each other; that they also sslow the reading of them, as any effective poem must (although I do not consider that a defining characteristic, either, but the result of defining characteristics, like the flow-breaks line-breaks serve as in free verse, and the extreme flow-break of a word being spelled into a circle); and, least important, but still important, they are decontextualized from prose, both by simply being called poems and by not being visually rose.
Richard’s number poems are somewhat different. I hope to discuss them, too, before long.
One further note. Many of Richard’s circular words combine into interesting narratives full of “heightened cross connotativeness,” by which I mean, one word’s mundane connotation turning vividly into a related connotation due to a similiarly mundane connotation in an adjacent circular word. For more on that, you’ll have to wait for my column, as I now see this text will become. You will be able to do that by subscribing to Small Press Review, which I wish a few of you would do; or by waiting for me to post the column in my Pages here a few months after it is published.
Note #2: I do not consider circular words to be visual poems; for me, they are visually-enhanced infra-verbal poems–the poetic value lies almost entirely on what goes on inside them verbally. Although you might say their visual sspin flicks connotations into view . . .
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Tuesday, December 24th, 2013
With thanks to Mark Sonnenfeld in whose whose latest Marymark Press broadside it appears:
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Saturday, October 26th, 2013
I was going to use the pwoermd, “mythstery,” inside the open letters of “the core of faereality,” which is the dividend of a set of long division poems I’ve been working on, but decided it was too frothily cute. But maybe not worthless? Anyway, here it is. And I’m outta here.
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Wednesday, March 6th, 2013
This is an extremely plural specimen of plurexpressiveness: an infraverbal, visual, mathmatical poem by the best composer of infraverbal light verse I know of, and among the best light verse poets of any kind, Ed Conti. To see some other great examples of his work, go here.
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Saturday, January 26th, 2013
The following is a pwoermd Kevin Kelly posted to Spidertangle the other day:
hearthththrob
I like the way it makes me, at any rate, close to simultaneously strongly, sympathetically identify with the one whose heart throb is involved, and laugh at the poor jerk. The lisp of the heartbeats is any excellent touch, too. Not to mention the stuttering attempt to say, “the,” but not be able to. Never has “heart throb” been so fully writ.
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
I got home yesterday afternoon after a very nice, mostly relaxing time at my niece, Laura’s, wedding (getting to which was the only unrelaxing time, because of my old man’s plumbing), and visiting my brother’s and sister’s families. I got a few things done once home, and this morning, but want to take the rest of the day off, so will only post the bit of light infraverbal poetry below–which I came up mwith last night and, believe it or not, don’t consider mathematical, unless you want to call understanding that the square root of minus one equals i in mathematics makes it so. Calling it mathematical would be like calling “1self” mathematical. Using math symbols does not make a text mathematical; only showing and using math operations does that. For me.
Note: in mathematics, i stands for imaginary, because solution, being impossible to determine, is “imaginary.” I expect to be using it in upcoming math poems, and possibly the entire piece above.
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Saturday, September 8th, 2012
The following infraverbal masterpiece is the world’s first artwork given the title, “Untitled,” appropriately. It’s just one of the 78 pieces in Identities, a collection of work by Irving Weiss just out from Xexoxial Editions. It’s something to wonder through many more times than once, with a fantastic skitter through the arts, from low to high, 100% verbal to 100% visual, the comic to the largest ultimates (as well as a combination of both). I hope to say more about it here and elsewhere.
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Thursday, August 30th, 2012
Stephen composed this in a dream! I think that happened to me once.
I consider it primarily an infraverbal poem, because dependent on what happens inside it. But it is also a visual poem. What makes it terrific is that, as spelled, it is a double metaphor: for (1) shape-changing flexibility, and (2) a flood surging forward too quickly for its spelling to bother with correctness–but brilliantly describing it as well as denoting it. I got it from the Otherstream Unlimited site, where I called it “an instant classic.”
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I’m still pretty much too out of it to do a real blog entry, so here’s this from the 15 February 2009 entry to my previous blog:
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I did a series of 5/7/5 images inspired by Scott Helmes’s slightly different visual haiku. This one I like enough to send with two or three variations on it to Jeff Hansen, who is editing a selection of poetry for Mad Hatters’ Review.
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These are all from my previous blog. The top one is “Ellipsis No. 10,” by Marton Koppany. The second is my variation on that, and the third a second variation on it by me. There here partly because, again, I could not come up with anything else to post, and partly because today I finished buying bus tickets to and from Jacksonville, Florida, where I’ll be visiting with Marton Saturday, 2 April. Anyone who’ll also be there then, let me know. Especially if you have a bed I can sleep in on Friday!
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Title: Cryptographiku in Praise of the Imagination
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Sunday, January 19th, 2014
The masterpiece is my Of Manywhere-at-Once. I suddenly had the brilliant thought of taking care of blog entries for the next few days with full pages of the third edition of it (the Runaway Spoon Press, 1998–the first edition was published eight years earlier, with this section the same as it is here). For once, laziness is not my reason for doing this. What is, is a need to concentrate of an essay I’m working on whose deadline will soon be on me. So: here are three consecutive pages from my book, left as is:
I think I have one or two copies of my available for sale, but they are now collectors’ copies, so I have to ask for a hundred bucks for one. But I will sign it. Its buyer will also have the satisfaction of having helped a poet keep from bankruptcy. (I’m serious–otherstreamers ought to ask for compensation at least equal to a thousandth of what celebrated tenth-raters get for absolute crap. And what can we lose since we can’t get even the cost of our raw materials for anything?)
As I posted the second of my three pages, I thought to myself (as opposed to thinking to someone else–ain’t the Englush lingo funny at times?) I really ought to save my second and third pages for my next two entries. Being nice to my readers triumphed, though, so they are all here. I do plan to use them again tomorrow. I have second thoughts about at least one part of my text, and first thoughts about what I think about it, and what was going on in my life at the time I wrote it.
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Friday, October 4th, 2013
I was in bed for the night just now (at nine, my usual bedtime), when I realized I hadn’t posted an blog entry for today! I’ve been very absent-minded since my surgical procedure on Monday. I hope that’s due to the anaesthesia I was given. In any case, thank goodness I still have contributions to the SASE mail art show Crag Hill sent me to draw on, such as this one from Crag himself, his second in the show:
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Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
Here’s the SASE Crag Hill, who organized the project, had for it:
Is this his autobiography?
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Monday, February 4th, 2013
I thought the following worth an attempt at an appreciation, so here it is again:
Actually, I may have only one thing to point out, something I would hope everyone would notice without my help: the way each of the letters of “evolution” evolves. Nine little narratives of some letter’s journey to . . . who knows where. But notice, too, some of the wonderfully clever twists Crag adds to some of the processes: such as the different ways the two o’s evolve, and, expecially, the way the one on the left takes bloats into a chain containing two clones of itself on the way to what it eventually becomes. Meanwhile, the other o is help on its way by the n–which it in turn helps.
Ah, but I’ve made a huge mistake, it seems to me. Because reading is generally from the top of a page down, I took this visualization of evolution to go from the top down. It makes much more sense to view it as beginning in uncertainty–as identical forms–and then changing upward.
I suppose it could go either way. I like it going up, though. No matter. I pronounce the poem a sure classic.
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Sunday, February 3rd, 2013
(Note: I had this entry ready a day or more early, then forgot to click the “public” button. I do that all the time!)
The following is another piece from Score 9; it’s called “Evolution”:
It’s one of a series of similar pieces that Crag Hill was turning out some twenty years ago he called transforms. I made a few of them myself, but no one else that I know of has, which I think a shame. It’s an excellent form he came up with, one with all kinds of possibilities–especially now that color can be added. I often lament that too few new visual poets either stick with standard concrete poetry practices, like visual onomatopoeia (forming words that look like what they denote), or leave words entirely for textual designs they call “asemic poems.” They don’t do anything with forms like Crag’s, or my long divisions.
Of course, there are problems with doing so: fear of stealing someone else’s invention, or being seen to; fear of degrading it by using it badly; a silly belief that everything one does must be 100% “new” (however ridiculously impossible that would be); or because one needs to keep up with what’s fashionable in the field. I suppose, too, there are those who just don’t connect with transforms or long division poems. I really really wish a few young poets would start seriously making long division poems. One reason for that is that I strongly suspect I’d learn from them, and maybe do a lot more with my own long divisions than I have been.
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Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
Recently, I’ve been going through the files with the graphics but not the texts of entries I made to my previous blog in search of mathemaku of mine. I want to number them all, so need a complete list of them. I think I posted just about all of them to my blog. In any event, yesterday I brought up a file for an entry (Blog959) whose visits was recorded as close to 200. Rarely did my old entries get more than 20 visits. Curious to see what was in the blog, I then brought up the file that had its text, which I think worth quoting here:
17 September 2006: Among the many intriguing items at Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard is this found poem of Crag’s that he posted 3 September:
From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson
. I come back to the geography of it,
. I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
. I have been an ability–a machine–up to
. I have had to learn the simplest things. I live underneath
. I looked up and saw
. Imbued / with the light
. I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s. In cold hell, in thicket, how
. In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
. is a monstrance,
. I sing the tree is a heron. I sit here on a Sunday
. It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
. it was the west wind caught her up, asAmazing poem, this. I’m not a big fan of Olson’s, though I believe he is a major poet, and that some of his poems are A-1. Surely, these lines could only have been from a poet, though. I recognize one or two, but in this discussion will not look up any of them. (Oops, I realize I couldn’t look up very many of them; I do have The Maximus Poems, and several of my anthologies have poems by Olson, but I don’t have the Selected Poems.)
“I come back to the geography of it,”
Anyway, what a beginning, this return to some geography. Olson was probably only returning to a genuine geography, of the locale I feel he jabbered too much about, but here–dislocated by the line-break–“geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., everything having a geography. Less surlogically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . .
What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.
“I don’t mean, just like that, to put down”
Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation is broken off before getting anywhere, which effectually explains all the better his state of being at loose ends. A main interest is in whether he has just dropped one activity to return to the geography of whatever he’s involved in, and/or inadvertantly “put down” whatever he was doing because superficial or the like compared to geographical questions. “I have been an ability–a machine–up to”
The narrator continues trying to explain himself without finishing any of his ventures into self-analysis. I take this line to mean he’s not been personally/emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).
“I have had to learn the simplest things”
Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero.
“I live underneath”
We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).
“I looked up and saw”
This line seems planned to follow the one before it. This sudden strong logic out of the chaos of existence as if to reassure us that life does make sense is one of the virtues of found poetry. Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life. No big deal if the context set us up for this sort of heightened seeing, but something of a (good) jolt in this zone of reduced context.
“Imbued / with the light”
Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.
“I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s”
The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named who-cares-where.
“In cold hell, in thicket, how”
After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way. “In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–”
Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . I don’t know the meaning of “meubles” but assume it’s some kind of furniture. Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.
“is a monstrance,”
I guess we aren’t meant to sit on the chairs or put anything on the tables in the poem. We are definitely in a darkness and a confusion. “I sing the tree is a heron”
But the narrator can sing. He sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:
“I sit here on a Sunday”
The tone has gone quiet, conventional–but implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services. “It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death”
The chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.
“it was the west wind caught her up, as”
Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.
Okay, that was a preliminary once-through I hope some reader will get something out of. I did! Don’t know if I’ll return to it. Probably, so I can use it in a book. Don’t know if I’ll have anything better to say about it then, though.
* * * * *
I’m not ready to say more about the poem now–except that I wondered when I looked at my entry whether I’d mentioned the importance of Crag’s poem’s foundness when I discussed it. I saw I hadn’t. In my megalomaniacal opinion, I think I may be the only critic who has ever discussed the full aesthetic value of foundness. I did this in my discussion, possible two decades ago by now, of Doris Cross’s work–wonderful visual poems brought into being by painting or otherwise defacing, deleting, meddling with dictionary paintings. (I love Nietzsche not only for all he said, brilliantly, that I agree with, but for the megalomaniacal boasts he made about his accomplishments that have turned out to be valid.)
What I said in my Cross piece isn’t handy, so my comments now will probably be a bit incomplete and not as sharply expressed as what I said in it. First off, as anyone would agree and as many I’m sure have said, the quotations from Olson, add his life and writings to Crag’s poem. This is important. But what I think effective appropriation of found materials most importantly does is celebrate the essential logic of the universe. It reminds us that God is in his heaven allowing accidents to make affirmations–even for someone like I who doesn’t believe in God, and understands that accidents don’t really make affirmations, only happen so often that some of them, especially when a keen discoverer has an eye out for them, are bound to do what Crag’s collection does. Another, better way of putting it, is that we are reminded of who wonderfully well the human brain finds ways to give existence meanings, meanings that suggest Meaning.
Okay, not a view you’d think anyone would feel like a demigod for having, but it’s more than anyone else has said about foundness that I know of. And I can’t see how anyone could say it’s wrong.
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. Poem Consults the Vseineur
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. However seldom the vseineur
. said “universe” in Poem’s hearing,
. he accepted it,
. however clear it always was
. that it had misspoken.
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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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Thursday, August 14th, 2014
I’m really cheating today: I’m using part of a review or column for Small Press Review that I’ve been working here. The work I’m reviewing is Richard Kostelanetz’s Ouroboros (see Entry 1535):
An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tale, so an excellent title for this collection of 188 words like, well, “ouroboros,” swallowing their tails, each time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, “sour,” in the case of “ouroboros.” They are set in a highly appropriate, highly dramatic font called “Wide Latin”—very bold and jabbingly pointed at all extremities. It’s definitely fun to find smaller words inside Kostelanetz’s specimens of “circular writing,” as he terms it: “tea,” “pet,” and “petite,” for example, in “appetite,” as well as “appetite” itself, which one discovers rather than automatically sees, or “tin,” “descent,” and, most important,” “scent” in “incandescent” (because of the poetic jolt light as an immaterial scent, or a scent as immaterial light suggest to those sensitive to connotation). But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities” .
I told Chris Lott that I would explain why I thought certain arrangements of numbers Richard had made were more than curiosities, and that I’d soon explain why I thought that. Here, quickly, using Richard’s circular words, I’ll give the gist of my reasoning that some of them are, the ones that: accentuate connotative value, a virtue of poems although not necessarily a defining quality, and in the process create an image complex of aesthetic value, the way I think “appetite” turns eating into a very feminine tea party, and “incandescent” makes “scent” and “incandescence” plausible metaphors for each other; that they also sslow the reading of them, as any effective poem must (although I do not consider that a defining characteristic, either, but the result of defining characteristics, like the flow-breaks line-breaks serve as in free verse, and the extreme flow-break of a word being spelled into a circle); and, least important, but still important, they are decontextualized from prose, both by simply being called poems and by not being visually rose.
Richard’s number poems are somewhat different. I hope to discuss them, too, before long.
One further note. Many of Richard’s circular words combine into interesting narratives full of “heightened cross connotativeness,” by which I mean, one word’s mundane connotation turning vividly into a related connotation due to a similiarly mundane connotation in an adjacent circular word. For more on that, you’ll have to wait for my column, as I now see this text will become. You will be able to do that by subscribing to Small Press Review, which I wish a few of you would do; or by waiting for me to post the column in my Pages here a few months after it is published.
Note #2: I do not consider circular words to be visual poems; for me, they are visually-enhanced infra-verbal poems–the poetic value lies almost entirely on what goes on inside them verbally. Although you might say their visual sspin flicks connotations into view . . .
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Tuesday, December 24th, 2013
With thanks to Mark Sonnenfeld in whose whose latest Marymark Press broadside it appears:
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Saturday, October 26th, 2013
I was going to use the pwoermd, “mythstery,” inside the open letters of “the core of faereality,” which is the dividend of a set of long division poems I’ve been working on, but decided it was too frothily cute. But maybe not worthless? Anyway, here it is. And I’m outta here.
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Wednesday, March 6th, 2013
This is an extremely plural specimen of plurexpressiveness: an infraverbal, visual, mathmatical poem by the best composer of infraverbal light verse I know of, and among the best light verse poets of any kind, Ed Conti. To see some other great examples of his work, go here.
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Saturday, January 26th, 2013
The following is a pwoermd Kevin Kelly posted to Spidertangle the other day:
hearthththrob
I like the way it makes me, at any rate, close to simultaneously strongly, sympathetically identify with the one whose heart throb is involved, and laugh at the poor jerk. The lisp of the heartbeats is any excellent touch, too. Not to mention the stuttering attempt to say, “the,” but not be able to. Never has “heart throb” been so fully writ.
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
I got home yesterday afternoon after a very nice, mostly relaxing time at my niece, Laura’s, wedding (getting to which was the only unrelaxing time, because of my old man’s plumbing), and visiting my brother’s and sister’s families. I got a few things done once home, and this morning, but want to take the rest of the day off, so will only post the bit of light infraverbal poetry below–which I came up mwith last night and, believe it or not, don’t consider mathematical, unless you want to call understanding that the square root of minus one equals i in mathematics makes it so. Calling it mathematical would be like calling “1self” mathematical. Using math symbols does not make a text mathematical; only showing and using math operations does that. For me.
Note: in mathematics, i stands for imaginary, because solution, being impossible to determine, is “imaginary.” I expect to be using it in upcoming math poems, and possibly the entire piece above.
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Saturday, September 8th, 2012
The following infraverbal masterpiece is the world’s first artwork given the title, “Untitled,” appropriately. It’s just one of the 78 pieces in Identities, a collection of work by Irving Weiss just out from Xexoxial Editions. It’s something to wonder through many more times than once, with a fantastic skitter through the arts, from low to high, 100% verbal to 100% visual, the comic to the largest ultimates (as well as a combination of both). I hope to say more about it here and elsewhere.
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Thursday, August 30th, 2012
Stephen composed this in a dream! I think that happened to me once.
I consider it primarily an infraverbal poem, because dependent on what happens inside it. But it is also a visual poem. What makes it terrific is that, as spelled, it is a double metaphor: for (1) shape-changing flexibility, and (2) a flood surging forward too quickly for its spelling to bother with correctness–but brilliantly describing it as well as denoting it. I got it from the Otherstream Unlimited site, where I called it “an instant classic.”
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Thanks for posting these, Bob!
Hopefully see you soon,
Marton