Category: E E Cummings

Norman Friedman « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Norman Friedman’ Category

Entry 1627 — Norman Friedman, RIP

Monday, November 10th, 2014

A day or two ago I got the sad news that Norman Friedman died on the 6th of November.  He for many years was probably the foremost critic of E. E. Cummings, one of my three favorite pre-1960 American poets.  Certainly I learned more than a little about Cummings (and poetics) from his writings over the years.  He was also a very nice man, as I found out when I met him at a literary conference where I presented a paper on Cummings several years ago.

This  morning curiosity about him sent me to Wikipedia where, to my shock, I was unable to find an entry on him.  Along the way, though, I found an essay of his on Cummings at jstor.org, a site you can read academic writings at for a fee. The fees are way more than I can afford but I took advantage of an offer allowing me to read three essays for free, so am now midway through Friedman’s “E. E. Cummings and His Critics,” (1962).

In his essay, Friedman is making an excellent case for Cummings as what academics should consider a serious poet–i.e., one with a serious outlook on life that he expresses in his poetry.  I suppose he is right but for me, “all” Cummings did was celebrate existence, using all the verbal means he could think of in order to able to do that maximally.

Oh, sure, he was diverted from this central concern to take on collectivism (which I applaud) and science (which I don’t applaud) but at his best he did the only thing I believe poets should do, which is use the whole of their language to celebrate existence–which I think requires them at the same time to show by contrast what’s wrong with it.  I think what I mean is that a poet should side with, and celebrate, beauty in his poetry, which he can’t do without opposing, and condemning, ugliness (at least implicitly) as when Basho celebrates the beauty of the many moments existence’s best moments combine in his old pond haiku while at the same time implicitly rejects–and I should have used “rejecting: instead of “condemning” earlier in this sentence–existence’s lesser moments, the one’s with only the present in them, or–worse–only some solely intellectual or solely unintellectual present in them.  Or nothing at all, unless the nothing that includes all isn’t what many of the greatest minimalist poems are about.  (Yeah, I’m going a little over-mystical there.)

You’re in luck.  I don’t have time right now to knock out several thousand words on the poetic moment I’m talking about.  The traditional haiku moment is an instance of it, but only one instance, whatever the wacked-out anti-Western idolizers of the Far East maintain.
.

AmazingCounters.com

Posted in Announcements, E E Cummings, Norman Friedman, Poetics | No Comments »

Gertrude Stein « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Gertrude Stein’ Category

Entry 470 — Thoughts about Language Poetry

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

I define on the basis of material details: what is materially
done in a poem, so I have trouble with statements like,
language poets are those poets “engaged pretty self-
consciously with the problematics of signification.”  What
problems?  How are they engaged–that is, how is their
engagement manifested in their poems?

I ignore who claims or is claimed by others to be or not be a
language poet.  My concern is with poems that use what I
consider language poetry devices.  Which I’m trying
haphazardly to list.

I’m gonna jump on you for this, Jerry–because I don’t think
you’ll take offense, and because you might say something
back that ain’t dumb.  What’s “languagey” about Lauterback
or C. D. Wright’s work?  I’m not baiting you or New-
Poetry.  I’ve have trouble pinning down what language
poetry is, or should be, since my (belated) first exposure to
it around 1980.  I’ve long since decided the jump-cut poetry
I think many poets have been doing since “The Wasteland”
is in any sense, “language” poetry.

Vaguely, I think of a language poem as something that
makes you consider the poetic effect of the non-prose, or
unconventional, punctuation, spelling, grammar of
something in a text.  Cummings, for instance, when he
writes, “What if a much of a which of a wind,” or Gertrude
Stein when she wrote “rose is a rose is a rose.”  Each
forcing a reader to consider what grammar is and does–
more than a poet using a noun as a verb as Dylan Thomas
beautifully does, say.   Language-centering versus
language-heightening.  To say a start to what I hope
someday about language poetry.

Saroyan’s “lighght” is, for me, a perfect example of a
language poem, although called a visual poem.  What it
means as language is secondary; what counts is what it does
as language–to wit: make metaphoric use of the strange
fact that “gh” can be silent.

Another thought: that a language poem uses language for
more than denotation and connotation.  It goes beyond what
can be done with those two things.

Hey, that may be my definition of language poetry: poetry
whose central aesthetic effect depends not of what its
language denotes or connotes but what it does.

> what it does?
> which leaves us what?
> diagraming sentences?

Diagramming sentences was one of the very few things I
liked doing in school.  You wouldn’t need to do it here
unless your understanding of sentence structure is really
bad.

I think I can’t explain it to you, at least now, if my “lighght”
example doesn’t make sense to you.  Think about what
makes it work as a pooem, if not for you, then for others
like me for whom it definitely works.

What makes it for me is what its “gh” is as a fragment of
language, not what it denotes or connotes (which is zero).
Think about Cummings’s “What if a much of a which of a
wind” and Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose.”  Neither is
anything without its abuse of syntax, and that abuse does
much more than simply distort a text sufficiently to slant it
interesting–the way the sentence I just typed does, or tries
to do–or the way an impressionistic painting distorts a
pretty scene enough to make it appealing to those capable
of appreciating it.

I think Stein’s passage does something important
neurophysiologically (according to my post-Chomskian
theory of linguistics): it disrupts the brain’s reception of
what the passage denotes in such a way as to let it start
again out of a blank context, which will give a reader (or
some readers) a feeling of the word, “rose,” which is much
closer to what most persons’ first experience of an actual
rose was than to something more conventional, like Burns’s
“My love is like a red, red rose” (although his expression
has other virtues).

I’m not sure about the Cummings passage, which I haven’t
thought about too deeply.  I first made an intense analysis
of the Stein passage 30 years ago–in what I believe was my
first published piece of criticism, in my college literary
magazine.

The fact that this way of considering language poetry seems
to stymy you suggests to me that I may be on to something
of consequence (which is not to say I’m saying anything
original).  A genuine poet or serious engagent of poetry
would be thrilled to discover words might be used to do
something more than denote, connote, appeal to the ears,
appeal to the eyes.  A Philistine would feel threatened.  Too
threatened to ask questions the way you are, Stephen.  For
which, I thank you.

I believe many poets called language poets just assaulted
grammar in their poems for the sake of problematizing
language, which they took to be a way to opposing the
political status quo.  Many didn’t have any aesthetic
motives, being (I strongly suspect) almost bereft of
aesthetic sensitivity.  Not that their accidents, like many of
the accidents of the Dadaists, couldn’t be put to far betters
uses than they were able to.

Posted in Aram Saroyan, E E Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Language Poetry, Literary Taxonomy | 1 Comment »

Entry 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a « POETICKS

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Entry 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a

According to Billy Collins, E. E. Cummings is, in large part, responsible for the multitude of k-12 poems about leaves or snow

But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere.  Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at.  Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem:  suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend.  For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness.  That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once  I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.

To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much.  But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story.  Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine.  I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to.  It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.

I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory.  It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often.  Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:

But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly–  one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once.   Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness.  For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.

Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:


In this poem the F suggests to me  a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point.  So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text.  Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives.  And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been.  Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world.  In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.

So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.

Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory.  It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often.  Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under E E Cummings, Marton Koppany, Poetics, Poetry Criticism, visual poetry, Visual 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 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a”

  1. endwar says:
    10 June 11 at 11:40 PM

    Hmmm . . . . all leaves in fall.

    Was this one of the response to Dan Waber’s “Fall leaves” project?

    – endwar

  2. Bob Grumman says:
    11 June 11 at 11:00 AM

    I’m away from the files in my main computer so can only tell you it was a response to one project of Dan’s, probably the one you mention. Not sure, though, It had to do with work by bp Nichol, though.

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Entry 43 — Old Blog Entries #689 and #690 « POETICKS

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Entry 43 — Old Blog Entries #689 and #690

Today I’m reproducing #689 and #690 in full–because I think they’re pretty good discussion, but not too long.

21 December 2005: I’ve been thinking a little about varieties of infraverbality. (By “infraverbality,” the reader should remember, I mean concern with what goes on in poetry beneath the level of words; it is mainly intentional misspelling for poetic effect.) I originally listed four: fissional, fusional, microherent and alphaconceptual.

In the first, one or more words are spelled with spaces–e.g., Karl Kempton’s “g u i dance.” In the second, one or more words consist of a combination of two or more words, or near-words–e.g., Lewis Carroll’s “slithy,” which combines “sli(m)y” and “lithe.” “Portmanteu words” are what they’re usually called.

In microherent infraverablity, words are mangled almost beyond recognition for poetic effect–e.g., my own just-created “pjkoenn” to suggest a jumble with the potention to become a poem.

In alphaconceptual infraverbality, something is altered in one or more words, or near-words, to add a conceptual effect of poetic importance. It is so rare I consider the term probably superfluous. A prime example is Aram Saroyan’s, “lighght,” which depends for its main poetic effect on the concept of silent letters. Ed Conti’s “galaxyz” is another example–since it has to do with the concept of alphabetical ordering.

I realized my list was too short after Michael Rothenberg asked me to make a selection of certain kinds of infraverbal poems for his webzine. The poems were to be like Richard Kostelanetz’s “ghost-poems,” which are single words each of which contains a second single word in consecutive letters within it as “ghosts” contains “host.” I got the idea of repeating my standard ploy of doing an essay on such poems that would use so many specimens as to act as an anthology. But what to call Richard’s poems? In a sense, they are fusional in that they consist of more than one word–but extra words are not merged with them–they occur within them naturally. I consider them enough different from words like “slithy” to have their own category. It took me a while to give it a name: it’s “natural.” (How’s that for creative neologizing?)

A sixth category of infraverbality I feel would be helpful is anagrammatical–for texts with words that contain all their proper letters but are jumbled. It could be argued that they are merely a variety of microherent infraverbality, but I prefer to restrict microherence to texts that have wrong letters but are not necessarily out of order. I’ve seen examples of anagrammatical infraverbal poems. I think I’ve made a few myself. But I can’t rememember any. An obvious way to use anagrammatical material would be–Ah, I now remember that Cummings uses it famously in his grasshopper poem (where, starting with “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” he goes in three spellings to “grasshopper”). No doubt that’s why I have come to want a separate category for it.

22 December 2005: Something that has always seemed indicative of the insularity of both formal poets and language poets is how little they steal from each other. I see no reason a strict sonnet couldn’t be written using langpo “missyntacticality” or misspellings (like “lighght”). In fact, E. E. Cummings made many langpoetic sonnets that had the right meter and rhymed. I don’t think any contemporary language poet has made any kind of formal poem using langpoetic devices. Nor has a formal poet used a langpoetic device in one of his poems, although the freeversers more and more are availing themselves of langpo tricks.

I thought of one exception: rewritten classic poems that are garbled in one way or another, e.g., my own silly, just-now-written “Shawl-eye crumbpair (the 2!) as under daze.”  It’s not uncommon for poets to use computer programs to do this.

One of my conclusions seems to hold: that formalist poets ignore the devices of language poetry, even though those devices could easily be used in their poetry without compromising the latter’s adherence to meter and other formal requirements.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 1:31 AM and is filed under E E Cummings, 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.

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Entry 43 — Old Blog Entries #689 and #690 « POETICKS

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»

Entry 43 — Old Blog Entries #689 and #690

Today I’m reproducing #689 and #690 in full–because I think they’re pretty good discussion, but not too long.

21 December 2005: I’ve been thinking a little about varieties of infraverbality. (By “infraverbality,” the reader should remember, I mean concern with what goes on in poetry beneath the level of words; it is mainly intentional misspelling for poetic effect.) I originally listed four: fissional, fusional, microherent and alphaconceptual.

In the first, one or more words are spelled with spaces–e.g., Karl Kempton’s “g u i dance.” In the second, one or more words consist of a combination of two or more words, or near-words–e.g., Lewis Carroll’s “slithy,” which combines “sli(m)y” and “lithe.” “Portmanteu words” are what they’re usually called.

In microherent infraverablity, words are mangled almost beyond recognition for poetic effect–e.g., my own just-created “pjkoenn” to suggest a jumble with the potention to become a poem.

In alphaconceptual infraverbality, something is altered in one or more words, or near-words, to add a conceptual effect of poetic importance. It is so rare I consider the term probably superfluous. A prime example is Aram Saroyan’s, “lighght,” which depends for its main poetic effect on the concept of silent letters. Ed Conti’s “galaxyz” is another example–since it has to do with the concept of alphabetical ordering.

I realized my list was too short after Michael Rothenberg asked me to make a selection of certain kinds of infraverbal poems for his webzine. The poems were to be like Richard Kostelanetz’s “ghost-poems,” which are single words each of which contains a second single word in consecutive letters within it as “ghosts” contains “host.” I got the idea of repeating my standard ploy of doing an essay on such poems that would use so many specimens as to act as an anthology. But what to call Richard’s poems? In a sense, they are fusional in that they consist of more than one word–but extra words are not merged with them–they occur within them naturally. I consider them enough different from words like “slithy” to have their own category. It took me a while to give it a name: it’s “natural.” (How’s that for creative neologizing?)

A sixth category of infraverbality I feel would be helpful is anagrammatical–for texts with words that contain all their proper letters but are jumbled. It could be argued that they are merely a variety of microherent infraverbality, but I prefer to restrict microherence to texts that have wrong letters but are not necessarily out of order. I’ve seen examples of anagrammatical infraverbal poems. I think I’ve made a few myself. But I can’t rememember any. An obvious way to use anagrammatical material would be–Ah, I now remember that Cummings uses it famously in his grasshopper poem (where, starting with “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” he goes in three spellings to “grasshopper”). No doubt that’s why I have come to want a separate category for it.

22 December 2005: Something that has always seemed indicative of the insularity of both formal poets and language poets is how little they steal from each other. I see no reason a strict sonnet couldn’t be written using langpo “missyntacticality” or misspellings (like “lighght”). In fact, E. E. Cummings made many langpoetic sonnets that had the right meter and rhymed. I don’t think any contemporary language poet has made any kind of formal poem using langpoetic devices. Nor has a formal poet used a langpoetic device in one of his poems, although the freeversers more and more are availing themselves of langpo tricks.

I thought of one exception: rewritten classic poems that are garbled in one way or another, e.g., my own silly, just-now-written “Shawl-eye crumbpair (the 2!) as under daze.”  It’s not uncommon for poets to use computer programs to do this.

One of my conclusions seems to hold: that formalist poets ignore the devices of language poetry, even though those devices could easily be used in their poetry without compromising the latter’s adherence to meter and other formal requirements.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 1:31 AM and is filed under E E Cummings, 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.

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Entry 470 — Thoughts about Language Poetry « POETICKS

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Entry 470 — Thoughts about Language Poetry

I define on the basis of material details: what is materially
done in a poem, so I have trouble with statements like,
language poets are those poets “engaged pretty self-
consciously with the problematics of signification.”  What
problems?  How are they engaged–that is, how is their
engagement manifested in their poems?

I ignore who claims or is claimed by others to be or not be a
language poet.  My concern is with poems that use what I
consider language poetry devices.  Which I’m trying
haphazardly to list.

I’m gonna jump on you for this, Jerry–because I don’t think
you’ll take offense, and because you might say something
back that ain’t dumb.  What’s “languagey” about Lauterback
or C. D. Wright’s work?  I’m not baiting you or New-
Poetry.  I’ve have trouble pinning down what language
poetry is, or should be, since my (belated) first exposure to
it around 1980.  I’ve long since decided the jump-cut poetry
I think many poets have been doing since “The Wasteland”
is in any sense, “language” poetry.

Vaguely, I think of a language poem as something that
makes you consider the poetic effect of the non-prose, or
unconventional, punctuation, spelling, grammar of
something in a text.  Cummings, for instance, when he
writes, “What if a much of a which of a wind,” or Gertrude
Stein when she wrote “rose is a rose is a rose.”  Each
forcing a reader to consider what grammar is and does–
more than a poet using a noun as a verb as Dylan Thomas
beautifully does, say.   Language-centering versus
language-heightening.  To say a start to what I hope
someday about language poetry.

Saroyan’s “lighght” is, for me, a perfect example of a
language poem, although called a visual poem.  What it
means as language is secondary; what counts is what it does
as language–to wit: make metaphoric use of the strange
fact that “gh” can be silent.

Another thought: that a language poem uses language for
more than denotation and connotation.  It goes beyond what
can be done with those two things.

Hey, that may be my definition of language poetry: poetry
whose central aesthetic effect depends not of what its
language denotes or connotes but what it does.

> what it does?
> which leaves us what?
> diagraming sentences?

Diagramming sentences was one of the very few things I
liked doing in school.  You wouldn’t need to do it here
unless your understanding of sentence structure is really
bad.

I think I can’t explain it to you, at least now, if my “lighght”
example doesn’t make sense to you.  Think about what
makes it work as a pooem, if not for you, then for others
like me for whom it definitely works.

What makes it for me is what its “gh” is as a fragment of
language, not what it denotes or connotes (which is zero).
Think about Cummings’s “What if a much of a which of a
wind” and Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose.”  Neither is
anything without its abuse of syntax, and that abuse does
much more than simply distort a text sufficiently to slant it
interesting–the way the sentence I just typed does, or tries
to do–or the way an impressionistic painting distorts a
pretty scene enough to make it appealing to those capable
of appreciating it.

I think Stein’s passage does something important
neurophysiologically (according to my post-Chomskian
theory of linguistics): it disrupts the brain’s reception of
what the passage denotes in such a way as to let it start
again out of a blank context, which will give a reader (or
some readers) a feeling of the word, “rose,” which is much
closer to what most persons’ first experience of an actual
rose was than to something more conventional, like Burns’s
“My love is like a red, red rose” (although his expression
has other virtues).

I’m not sure about the Cummings passage, which I haven’t
thought about too deeply.  I first made an intense analysis
of the Stein passage 30 years ago–in what I believe was my
first published piece of criticism, in my college literary
magazine.

The fact that this way of considering language poetry seems
to stymy you suggests to me that I may be on to something
of consequence (which is not to say I’m saying anything
original).  A genuine poet or serious engagent of poetry
would be thrilled to discover words might be used to do
something more than denote, connote, appeal to the ears,
appeal to the eyes.  A Philistine would feel threatened.  Too
threatened to ask questions the way you are, Stephen.  For
which, I thank you.

I believe many poets called language poets just assaulted
grammar in their poems for the sake of problematizing
language, which they took to be a way to opposing the
political status quo.  Many didn’t have any aesthetic
motives, being (I strongly suspect) almost bereft of
aesthetic sensitivity.  Not that their accidents, like many of
the accidents of the Dadaists, couldn’t be put to far betters
uses than they were able to.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aram Saroyan, E E Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Language Poetry, Literary Taxonomy. 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 470 — Thoughts about Language Poetry”

  1. Ed Baker says:
    21 July 11 at 12:11 PM

    nothing ‘haphazard’ about this essay , Bob

    it posits a “fragmwent of a language-heightening much “to let it start out again out of a blank context” “content” ? which from I just
    got
    an entire page of notes in my own ‘scribble-script from which I will scan and send
    aux vous

    I too got ALL A s in my diagramming sentences course it was a full semester course.. 3-credits

    subject is always predicated upon its dangling participles with or without conjunctions or signifiers… or Points/Counterpoints ?

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Jason Guriel « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Jason Guriel’ Category

Entry 982 — A Philistine Versus Cummings

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

The following is from Poetry, America’s leading home of Philistines.  It’s part of a series of negative responses to canonized poets by mostly utter mediocrities (at best).  Guriel, author of this slam of Cummings, seems the most egregious, for the others bothered to find parts of their subject’s oeuvre worth praise, or at least not bad enough to scorn.  The author of one, on Stevens, forthrightly admitted not having the brains to appreciate him–although she may have been ironic.

It’s fitting that Cummings took the most abuse, for his best work is still a decade or more too advanced for Poetry.

Guriel may not be the most obtuse critic of Cummings ever–while Cummings was still alive, some halfwit whose name I failed to record parodied him by throwing letters on a page “almost as fast as (he) could hit the typewriter keys,” and calling the result, “Forest Fire.”  This he follows with a mock “critique” of the poem, praising its “typographically created impression of chaos, suggested by a broken word such as ‘hiss’ and by the skillfully misplaces letters and punctuation marks, all of which add eloquently to the complex simplicity and the dissociated unity of the whole.”  Ha ha, aren’t these avant garde critics dumb!

The philistine always assumes a poet he can’t appreciate is only doing one thing in his poetry, so has no problem parodying it since all he has to do is compose something that does nothing but that one thing, as here.  He, of course, disregards the fact that doing something another poet has invented is easier than inventing it.

Time now for Guriel, with my commments inserted:

Sub-Seuss

Reconsidering E.E. Cummings.

BY JASON GURIEL

Young people encounter many temptations on their way to adulthood: vampires, Atlas Shrugged, Pink Floyd, the acoustic guitar. Of course, such stuff, designed to indulge one’s sense of oneself as a unique individual, must eventually be repudiated. It’s not easy, growing up.

BG: Growing up requires one to accept that one is a sheep, and leave behind a child’s imaginativeness?

But I had no trouble saying no to the relentlessly quirky E.E. 
Cummings. Thank the high school teacher who required me to get Cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by heart. I labored over the poem for an afternoon, recited it to the wall, gave up. What was at stake if I misremembered the order of words like “up so floating many bells down?” Does it really matter it’s not “up so many floating bells down?” Would Cummings himself have applauded the mistake as a heartening sign of a maverick mind at play?

BG: Yes, Jason, it matters.  To understand that, you must first be able to imagine yourself not necessarily superior to a poet doing unconventional things with syntax, but assume that  maybe he’s trying to give pleasure by doing so rather than irritate his readers.  Here Cummings forces his readers to slow down, the first obligation of a poet, for a poet should want those encountering his work to take the time to let its full sensual effect to reach them.  The slight change of word-order is not pivotal, but “so floating many bells” is a more charged image, it seems to me, than “so many floating bells”; the syntax of the first jarring the reader into increasing attention, wondering about “so floating” ( a slant way of saying “so floatingly” to increase the meaning of floating?), and about a “floating many,” the syntax of the second doing nothing.  I would add that Cummings uses “up” and “down” simply to describe in a way that almost forces a reader to look up and down bells floating up (and) down.  Whatever they are.  Bell-sounds and bell-shaped flowers are what they made me think of.  They do make one muse into concrete imagery, which is an important duty of poems.

The poetry, I concluded, wasn’t just sub-Seuss; it was tantamount to a teaching tool of the most condescending kind: the last resort. (No, really, poetry is crazy fun was the point one was meant to 
internalize.) Cummings seemed to have been invented to convert that stubborn student the syllabus has failed to win over to verse — or, at least, to reacquaint the kid with his inner child, the id whose 
appetite for nonsense and nursery rhymes has been socialized away. When it came to Cummings (or unstructured playtime) resistance was supposed to be futile.

BG: Here Guriel its criticizing Cummings for what he thinks his teacher used his poem for.  I haven’t spoken with his teacher.  It would be interesting if Poetry contacted the teacher and learned the motive for forcing poor Guriel to memorize a poem he didn’t like.  (Guess what?  It’s far from my favorite Cummings poem.)  It’s good to expose students to the crazy fun that poems can be, including the very best.  But the teacher might have been thinking of language poetry, so many of whose best features Cummings’s poems were precursors of, the idea being that immersion in Cummings would help the right students later to appreciate the poetry many superior contemporary poets are composing.  There are several other possibilities.  I suspect, though, that the teacher simply liked the poem and wanted to give students a chance to like it, too.  

Randall Jarrell nearly said as much when he noted that “no one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader.” He should’ve said that “no one else has ever made a formula for avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to people who don’t actually read poetry but would like to think they can write it.” Even today, it’s enough to reject an institution or two — capitalism, grammatical English — to be mistaken for an innovator. Rebel, misspell, repeat:

v    o      i       c         e  o                ver  (whi!tethatr?apidly  legthelessne sssuc kedt oward  black,this    )roUnd ingrOundIngly rouNdar(round)ounDing                                            ;ball                                            balll                                            ballll                                            balllll    — From No Thanks, Section Two

The message Cummings communicates here — and which langpo
types and concrete poets continue to internalize — is remarkably 
unambiguous: words are toy blocks, and poems, child’s play. No one else has made making it new look so easy.

BG: Actually, this excerpt is from a long evocation of the moon.  Easy as rhyming to do, sure.  

But Cummings’s poems themselves were only superficially “new.” Beneath the tattoo-thin signifiers of edginess — those lowercase i’s, those words run together —  flutters the heart of a romantic. (Is there a correlation between typographically arresting poetry and emotional arrestedness?) He fancies himself an individual among masses, finds the church ladies have “furnished souls,” opposes war. He’s far more self-righteous, this romantic, than any soldier or gossip — and far deadlier: he’s a teenager armed with a journal.

BG: Guriel mentions flaws I also find in Cummings, although I favor individualism and my heart flutters with romanticism.  Guriel is an irresponsible critic, however, because he ignores the many poems of Cummings that transcend the attitudes Cummings had and Guriel is superior to.  As he would find if he read enough of him to be fair to him.

Recording his thoughts about sex or the female body, however, Cummings’s speaker is less a teenager than a child trapped in a man’s body, which is to say a man-child: a boob blinking at a pair of  breasts. In poem after poem, he can’t help but notice such curiosities as “sticking out breasts” and “uttering tits” and “bragging breasts” and “ugly nipples squirming in pretty wrath” and breasts that are “firmlysquirmy with a slight jounce” and “wise breasts half-grown.” (Hands off, ladies! He’s spoken for.) And when he shifts his attention to other parts of the beloved — and, worse, gropes for only the weirdest words to describe them — the boob makes an ass of himself:

              i bite on the eyes’ brittle crust
(only feeling the belly’s merry thrust
Boost my huge passion like a business

and the Y her legs panting as they press

proffers its omelet of fluffy lust)

How does one excuse such lines? Is it that you can’t write a poem without breaking some eggs? That you can’t make it new without making a mess?

boys w!ll be boyss, i guess….

BG: It’s easy to excuse, Jason.  You merely refer to the many many poor poems of Wordsworth, or to the large dead portions of Pound’s Cantos, and point out that the many world-class poems these two composed are a hundred times more important than any number of their bad ones a cherry-picker like you can find.

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Entry 1645 — Part of Something from 1994

Friday, November 28th, 2014

I was going to write something new for today but it fell apart somewhere before its midpoint.  I have hopes for it, but . . .

So, in place of it, here’s commentary on poetry from an article published twenty years ago that I actually got paid for: 9 pages on all the neglected kinds of poetry then extant (just about all of which are still extant, and neglected).  As is the case with nearly all my poetry commentary/criticism, no one every wrote me about it.

I was going to use just what I said about Kathy Ernst’s “Philosophy,” then thought it might be interesting to present the whole page in media res.  Less work for me, at any rate.  So, here is page 6 from the November/ December issue of Teachers & Writers:

Page6Teachers&Writers.

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Entry 1453 — One of My Best SPR Columns

Tuesday, August 19th, 2014

When Marilyn emailed me about the publishworthiness of her bookwork, she mentioned that I had reviewed the page I reproduced here yesterday in an old Small Press Review column.  Wondering what I’d said, I looked it up (it’s in this blog’s “Pages” to the right), and like it well enough to post it here.

A New Vizlature Anthology

  Small Press Review, Volume 29, Number 2, February 1997

             Visuelle Poesie aus den USA, edited by Hartmut Andryczuk. 67 pp; 1995; Pa; Hartmut Andryczuk, Postlagernd D-12154, Berlin, Germany

Toward the end of 1995 a new anthology of vizlature, or verbo-visual art, came out of Germany. It was edited by Hartmut Andryczuk. I was sent a copy of it because I have a couple of pieces in it, but–alas–I got no details concerning its price.

Among the sixteen participants in Andryczuk’s anthology is Marilyn R. Rosenberg, quietly one of this country’s premiere vizlateurs for some two decades. She is represented by a landscape-sketch close enough to an outline to double as a map, thus exploiting the tension of the literal versus the abstract. Her piece is all in calligraphic lines of various degrees of thickness and delicacy that delineate clouds (or mountains) forming above water foaming into being among juts of a landmass. The latter includes an area that could be either a tilled field or a lined page, but in either case is a locus of creativity. At various points in the composition are a Q, and an A (to suggest question/answer), three X’s, a C and a T–and, right together, a W, an upside-down W (or M), and a sideways W (or E), to put us in a Japanese-serene country where a breeze can tilt West to East, and all hovers mystically just short of nameability.

In dramatically unbreezeful contrast to Rosenberg’s piece is John Byrum’s “Transnon,” which consists, simply, of “TRA/ NS/ NON” in large white conventional letters against a black background. With the two cardinal directions missing in Rosenberg’s composition (north and south) in it, and black & white . . . and a backwards rendering of the word, “art,” this work seems almost monumentally engaged with ultimate dichotomies.

Two more map/drawing/poems are presented by Richard Kostelanetz, from an early work of his using text-blocks of pertinent city impressions (e.g., “Boutiques,/ mostly in/ basements,/ their names/ as striking/ and transient/ as rockgroups:/ ‘Instant Pants’/ ‘Pomegranate’ . . .”) to represent various blocks of New York such as that defined by First and Second Avenues and St. Mark’s Place. Very local-feeling, intimate, accurate.

A similar kind of opposition is at the heart of one of Nico Vassilakis’s contributions to this volume, “foremmett” (“emmett” being famous visual poet, Emmett Williams). It consists of a square with two parallel lines drawn horizontally across it near its middle; just above the upper line is “BL”; just below the lower line is “RED”; in between them is “UR.” In the corners of the upper section of the diagram the word, “blue,” is repeated; the word, “red,” is repeated in the corners of the lower section, while “purple” is printed once at each end of the narrow middle section. Another minimalist, almost overlookable piece that teems with the blur of science and sensuality, or where blue analysis becomes, or arises from, a red mood. . . .

Three poems by Dick Higgins carry on this kind of letterplay in homage to Jean Dupuy, ina blom and wolf vostell. The first, just four lines in length, demonstrates the technique: “JEAN DUPUY/ NUDE JAY UP/ DUNE JAY UP/ PUN JAY DUE.” Then, following a charming mathematico-visual tribute to his daughter Amy, Karl Kempton does a lyrical take on the moon that includes a partial reflection of the moon as “wo u,” to magically suggest a fragment of “would,” or moon-distant wishfulness.

Chuck Welch, active in mail art since 1978 as “the Crackerjack Kid,” contributes a moving swirl of words enacting Gaea’s flow which ends with “this dream truss/ clerestory/ Gaea’s blueprint,” but also a medallion-sort of visual poem that I liked less well: it looks nice but too boiler-platedly condemns white C(IA)olonialism and genocide, for my taste.

A “cubistic” specimen of Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Go series is here, too, with a more clearly visual poem from the same series that evokes a rescue at sea, a flare filling the sky with o’s while the excitement of the situation fills it with oh’s. St. Thomasino, and many of the other artists in the volume, provide readers with a short artist’s statement, by the way, which are quite useful.

Others with first-rate pieces in this volume are M. B. Corbett, Harriet Bart, Harry Burrus, Spencer Selby, Stephen-Paul Martin, John M. Bennett (who does terrific things with near-empty frames of the tackily rubber-stamped kind well-known to those familiar with his work) and Paul Weidenhoff. All in all, Andryczuk’s anthology gives a valuable if rough idea of the terrain of current American vizlature.

* * * * *

How I wish someone would tell me (in reasonable detail) why in the sixteen years since then, no one in the BigWorld has ever asked me for a piece like it?!  Is it that inferior to the poetry-related pieces in magazines like the Atlantic?  Or too different?  Maybe too clearly politically-incorrect?   Or is it that there is absolutely no one on the look-out for fresh talent? I have little to add to what I said in my column about Marilyn’s piece except that my first impression on seeing it again was that it seemed to me strongly Chinese (which I mean as a Large Compliment) and I again felt enlarged by its Q&A, this time by the ocean seeming to query the land . . . which provided, or was the answer.  I was influenced a lot about some of Marton Koppany’s Q&A-related pieces that I’ve recently been enjoying and writing about.

Note: I corrected a typo or two in my column but left some of my now-obsolete terminology as is.

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Entry 1308 — Mine Review Continueth

Monday, December 23rd, 2013

I was going to celebrate the Winter Solstice with Zero Production, but then I found out yesterday, not today, was when it occurred, so I had to finish the review I was working on. I wrote over 1300 word, pretty good ones, I think. Below is one of the poems I dealt with, with my comments on it following it:

13January2009

Something of what seems to me at the frontier of math-related poetry that I hope will be further explored in the future is Sarah Glaz’s fascinatingly strange “13 January 2009.”  It consists of two texts side by side, one, “13,” with nothing in it but numbers (and equal signs), the other, “January 2009) devoted entirely to words about the dying of a man named Anuk whom I take to be an ancient Egyptian (in spite of the poem’s title!)  I feel ready to go on for another thousand words at least about this poem, but will limit myself here to telling you that, according to its author, its “structure follows The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which states that every positive integer greater than one may be expressed in a unique way as a product of powers of distinct prime numbers”—which (inexorable) process, I would add, is shown in “13.”  I hope to say more in an essay on mathematical poetry I have in the works for this periodical. Conclusion: when I began thinking about this review, I had visions of making an insightful taxonomical study of its poems, but their “multi-dimensional links to mathematics and . . . wide range of styles” as Glaz has it in her introduction, and wide range of techniques, I’d add, made that too difficult a task.  So all I have to say now is that I hope anyone still reading this has enjoyed my chatter as much as I’ve enjoyed indulging in it.

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Entry 1307 — “Portrait of Max Dehn”

Sunday, December 22nd, 2013

Below is a poem from an anthology I’m writing a review of.

PortraitofMaxDehn

It’s by Francisco Jose Craveiro de Carvalho as translated from the Portuguese by Manual Portela.  All it tells us (with a nice touch of surrealistic fantasy) is that Dehn was an emigrant–but it does so with the same kind of inspired empathy with which Keats famously described Ruth, amidst the alien corn. It’s here because I like it, but more because I wanted to say something about the Reviewer’s Delight I felt when, in writing about it, I saw my way to giving a poet what I feel is a high (and appropriate) compliment while also again praising my old favorite, Keats.  Such delights are what make reviewing worth doing no matter how difficult it is at times.

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Entry 1207 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.4

Sunday, September 8th, 2013

ExperioddicistPage4

Note: I consider Geof’s poem a masterpiece–one of more than a few he’s done I wish I’d done.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Geof Huth, language poetry specimen, Poetry Criticism, Robert Fitterman | No Comments »

Entry 1206 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.3

Saturday, September 7th, 2013

Sorry–once again your imbecile of a blogmaster forgot to hit the button changing this from a withheld entry to a public one.  Here it is two days late:

ExperioddicistPage3

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Entry 803 — Insulting BigName Critics

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

After Finnegan, sitemaster of New-Poetry, let New-Poetry members know that we could find essays by various critics commenting on the current state of American Poetry at the VQR Symposium yesterday, I visited the site, read some, skimmed some, then posted the following at New-Poetry:

Thanks much for this, Finnegan. All these critics and Perloff (whom I count as part of the VQR Symposium group although she withdrew from it because she has remained an important part of it, anyway) is the only one who mentions visual and performance poetry, and all she does is mention them. The most visible two poetries of the Otherstream. But that’s enough to keep me from judging her thoughts on the contem-porary poetry scene the worst in this collection. The others are too closely worthless to pick out one for worst effort.

I will admit one thing not too hard to admit: a few of these estabniks seem somewhat familiar with what they deem a new sort of poetry—conceptual poetry—a kind of poetry, if it’s poetry (and Perloff questions whether at least some texts called conceptual poetry are poems) with which I was unfamiliar. But I’ve always said in my lists of new and newish poetry that I was sure I’d missed some, and know I’ve fallen behind badly in keeping up with various kinds of cyber poetry, never felt comfortable with my take on sound poetry, and only now believe I’m coming to terms with language poetry (although I arrogantly also feel I’ve known more about it for twenty years than just about anybody writing it, or writing poetry called language poetry, including especially Ron Silliman).

From the few examples of conceptual poetry I’ve seen, I have what I think is Perloff’s view, that it’s too similar to dada to be new, and—as I said—possibly prose (of a kind I’ve named “conceprature” to go with similar taxonomical terms I’ve used for “poetry” that’s really prose, “evocature” for prose poems, and “advocature” for lineated propaganda texts. I also use “informrature” for lineated texts like names and addresses on envelopes that are clearly not poems). Having said all that, I do believe that conceptual poets-or-prosists (note: “prosists” is an ad hoc term; I want something better, preferably already in use) are cutting edge even though working in a variety of literature that’s been around a long time—because (1) they are still finding significantly new things to do in it (new to me, anyway) the same way I believe a few visual poets are still finding significantly new things to do in visual poetry, which—in its modern phase—has now been around a century, give or take a decade or two, its start being still controversial; and (2) only a very few visible critics know about them, and only one, Perloff, has so far written meaningfully about them.

I should be kinder to Perloff than I have been for the past 25 years, and will be from now on, I’m pretty sure. But nothing is harder for someone fighting against the status quo not to blow up at than another fighting against it differently (usually much less differently than its seems to both at the time).

Below is perhaps the best example of anti-Otherstream gatekeeping in the tripe Finnegan linked to, a passage from Willard Spiegelman’s hilariously-titled essay, “Has Poetry Changed? The View From the Editor’s Desk.” Its title is funny because it contains not one word about how American poetry has changed over the past 30 years or so. (Note, by the way, another change in my boilerplate: “30,” not “50” years as I so long contended. I finally realized that Ashbery and his followers were, when breaking into prominence, using techniques not in wide use at the time–although far from revolutionary.)

“Some years ago Helen Vendler said she was giving up reviewing or generally writing about new books of poetry by younger poets. She had not lost her acumen, her interest or her powers of perception; rather, she said that she lacked the right cultural frame of reference to be an appropriate audience, let alone a judge. She knew about gardens and nightingales, Grecian urns and Christian theology, but not about hip-hop or comic books, and these provide the material, or at least the glue, for many of today’s poems. Poetic subjects, voices, diction, and tone change. And forms, like subjects, change as well. She wanted to leave the critical field open to younger people like her colleague Stephen Burt, a polymath who knows the ancients and the moderns, the classics and the contemporary. He listens to indie bands and reads graphic novels. He flourishes amid the hipsters as well as the sonneteers.” Etc.

Why is this especially stupid, in my view? The idea that the main thing a critic needs to be familiar with to write about poetry is subject matter. Oh, and “voices, diction and tone.” Oops, “forms,” too. No mention of what Vendler has been drastically ignorant of since she was first writing about Ashbery: technique. Perhaps I’m wrong to consider it the most important component of poetry, but it most certainly is as important as “voices, diction and tone.”

Then there is her leaving the field open to people like Stephen Burt. A Harvard professor! And no more knowledgeable than Vendler about what’s going on in poetry now. Here’s one thing Wikipoo calls him recognized as a critic for, his definition of what I call jump-cut poetry (but long ago referred to it a few times as “elliptical”): “Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves.” I like his “all the verbal gizmos.” Does he mention even some of those invented way before his time by Cummings. I don’t know his criticism well enough to be sure the answer is no, but I’d be willing to bet ten bucks it is.

I’d be interested to know why what I’ve written here contributes less to the discussion in VQR of the current state of American Poetry than the essays in it. Anyone interested in telling me? Or even in telling me why I’m not worth telling? I’ve issued challenges like this before. No one’s yet answered one. At least one that doesn’t significantly misrepresent me, and escalate into ad hominem arguments and plain insults.

Note: I’m pretty sure that 15 or 20 years ago, one of the two times I was stupid enough to apply for a Guggenheim grant, Willard Spiegelman got one in the field I’d applied for one in. I can’t remember how he described his winning project except that it was lame, even for a mainstreamer. (Richard Kostelanetz, a former winner of a Guggenheim, had recommended me to the Guggenheimers, who then invited me to submit an application, so it wasn’t all my fault.)
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Posted in Literary History, Literary Squabbling, Poetry Criticism | 1 Comment »

Entry 657 — My Motto as a Poetry Critic

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

 Thinking about what Tony Robinson had at his blog spurred me to this motto of my own (obnoxious) practice as a poetry critic: Try for maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I understand it, and expressed with the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage.  I originally continued with “–with no significant suppression of emotion, regardless of the tender feelings of the hyper-offendable,” but upon reflection found that nice to say but too secondary for this motto. 

Better: Using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, try to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I see it.  Ah, but I now see that “the value of what I’m critiquing” would include what the latter does to advance poetry.  Ergo:  Try, using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing. 

And here’s a copy (an imperfect one) of my motto as a poet:

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Entry 583 — The Text of My Triptych

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

 (This is a day late but I had it done in time, honest!  I just forgot to change the “private” setting to “public.”)

For lack of anything else to post today, which is one of my null days, here’s the text of the poem in the sub-dividend product of the frame from “Triptych for Tom Phillips that was in yesterday’s blog entry:

          From is for every bound alled.
          Similarly, if is alled. {urthermore}.
          This is also the.
          + infinity (actually, the symbol for infinity) in port ever.

This is basically something about the allness of the state of from-ness and if-ness. “Urthermore” has something to do with final origins although right now I can’t think what. So does the the from Stevens that whatever “this” refers to is also. Positive infinity is said to be forever in port. All this is a close representation of “arrival,” needing only the graphic shown as the remainder to exactly represent it. The fore-burden of the text (for me) is that a poem is an arrival. Note, however, that this text has three different direction to turn into a departure into. To begin a consideration of one of my most ambitious and complex works that I will say a little more about, maybe, tomorrow.

* * *

Saturday, 3 December 2011, 5 P.M. Not a great day–the least productive since I started my attempt to be culturally methodical. I post my blog entry for the day, but had it done yesterday. The only thing I did so far as the exhibition is concerned is get my triptych printed at Staples, buy three frames for it, and frame one of the two sets I have. It does look nice. But I think I see how I can make another triptych that’s much better.

I also played tennis.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetry Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 581 — My Most-Used Quotient

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

  

This is the quotient in just about all my twenty or more long divisions of “poetry.”  It’s intended to convey the meaning of Dickinson’s lines about telling the truth, but telling it “slant,” so represents “superior poetic diction.”  That’s all I took it for, for a long time.  I was disturbed, however, that, as a general term that in my division of poetry, almost always multiplies another general term, like “words,” it should yield a general product, not the specific product I always had it yielding.  Take the first division in the series:

My problem with this and the others would possibly never occur to anyone but me, but it bothered me for years: how could I say that slant-words times words (or whatever) should equal the very idiosyncratic graphic the long division claims it does.  Just now, I thought of my way out.  It was to recognize the image of the slant-words as one of an infinite number of such words!  Big thrill, hunh.  Well, to me it meant that there was nothing wrong with having this one instance of poetic diction multiplied by words (in-general) equal the particular instance of–not poetry, but of something almost poetry that needs “friendship” to make it poetry.  (That latter, folks, is an attack on hermetic poetry–if no one gets anything out of your poetry but you, it’s not poetry, even though that may be the case with my poetry.)

If nothing else, you have now been exposed to the kind of nutty need I have to make my mathematical poems mathematically valid, at least in my own mind.(Note: the poem I have posted here is different from both what it was originally and what it was in its last published version.  I think I have it in its final form now, though.   I changed the graphic five or more times because it kept seeming to me that a goose was in it, and I didn’t want no goose in it!

 

* * *

Thursday, 1 December 2011  Not much to report.  I attended a match my tennis team played, and won, 3-0.  I was the back-up for this one.  Very cold (for Florida).  After I got home, I ran again, this time completing a mile.  I went very slowly, finishing with a time about eleven-and-a-half minutes.  I really do think I’ll be able to improve on that.  I worked on “Frame No. 7″ of my long division of poetry series and put an black&white illustration of it on an exhibition hand-out but forgot to write a commentary on it.  I did get this blog entry wholly done, and I consider the work I did on the mathemaku a reasonable day’s work for the exhibition. 

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Entry 1645 — Part of Something from 1994

Friday, November 28th, 2014

I was going to write something new for today but it fell apart somewhere before its midpoint.  I have hopes for it, but . . .

So, in place of it, here’s commentary on poetry from an article published twenty years ago that I actually got paid for: 9 pages on all the neglected kinds of poetry then extant (just about all of which are still extant, and neglected).  As is the case with nearly all my poetry commentary/criticism, no one every wrote me about it.

I was going to use just what I said about Kathy Ernst’s “Philosophy,” then thought it might be interesting to present the whole page in media res.  Less work for me, at any rate.  So, here is page 6 from the November/ December issue of Teachers & Writers:

Page6Teachers&Writers.

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Entry 1453 — One of My Best SPR Columns

Tuesday, August 19th, 2014

When Marilyn emailed me about the publishworthiness of her bookwork, she mentioned that I had reviewed the page I reproduced here yesterday in an old Small Press Review column.  Wondering what I’d said, I looked it up (it’s in this blog’s “Pages” to the right), and like it well enough to post it here.

A New Vizlature Anthology

  Small Press Review, Volume 29, Number 2, February 1997

             Visuelle Poesie aus den USA, edited by Hartmut Andryczuk. 67 pp; 1995; Pa; Hartmut Andryczuk, Postlagernd D-12154, Berlin, Germany

Toward the end of 1995 a new anthology of vizlature, or verbo-visual art, came out of Germany. It was edited by Hartmut Andryczuk. I was sent a copy of it because I have a couple of pieces in it, but–alas–I got no details concerning its price.

Among the sixteen participants in Andryczuk’s anthology is Marilyn R. Rosenberg, quietly one of this country’s premiere vizlateurs for some two decades. She is represented by a landscape-sketch close enough to an outline to double as a map, thus exploiting the tension of the literal versus the abstract. Her piece is all in calligraphic lines of various degrees of thickness and delicacy that delineate clouds (or mountains) forming above water foaming into being among juts of a landmass. The latter includes an area that could be either a tilled field or a lined page, but in either case is a locus of creativity. At various points in the composition are a Q, and an A (to suggest question/answer), three X’s, a C and a T–and, right together, a W, an upside-down W (or M), and a sideways W (or E), to put us in a Japanese-serene country where a breeze can tilt West to East, and all hovers mystically just short of nameability.

In dramatically unbreezeful contrast to Rosenberg’s piece is John Byrum’s “Transnon,” which consists, simply, of “TRA/ NS/ NON” in large white conventional letters against a black background. With the two cardinal directions missing in Rosenberg’s composition (north and south) in it, and black & white . . . and a backwards rendering of the word, “art,” this work seems almost monumentally engaged with ultimate dichotomies.

Two more map/drawing/poems are presented by Richard Kostelanetz, from an early work of his using text-blocks of pertinent city impressions (e.g., “Boutiques,/ mostly in/ basements,/ their names/ as striking/ and transient/ as rockgroups:/ ‘Instant Pants’/ ‘Pomegranate’ . . .”) to represent various blocks of New York such as that defined by First and Second Avenues and St. Mark’s Place. Very local-feeling, intimate, accurate.

A similar kind of opposition is at the heart of one of Nico Vassilakis’s contributions to this volume, “foremmett” (“emmett” being famous visual poet, Emmett Williams). It consists of a square with two parallel lines drawn horizontally across it near its middle; just above the upper line is “BL”; just below the lower line is “RED”; in between them is “UR.” In the corners of the upper section of the diagram the word, “blue,” is repeated; the word, “red,” is repeated in the corners of the lower section, while “purple” is printed once at each end of the narrow middle section. Another minimalist, almost overlookable piece that teems with the blur of science and sensuality, or where blue analysis becomes, or arises from, a red mood. . . .

Three poems by Dick Higgins carry on this kind of letterplay in homage to Jean Dupuy, ina blom and wolf vostell. The first, just four lines in length, demonstrates the technique: “JEAN DUPUY/ NUDE JAY UP/ DUNE JAY UP/ PUN JAY DUE.” Then, following a charming mathematico-visual tribute to his daughter Amy, Karl Kempton does a lyrical take on the moon that includes a partial reflection of the moon as “wo u,” to magically suggest a fragment of “would,” or moon-distant wishfulness.

Chuck Welch, active in mail art since 1978 as “the Crackerjack Kid,” contributes a moving swirl of words enacting Gaea’s flow which ends with “this dream truss/ clerestory/ Gaea’s blueprint,” but also a medallion-sort of visual poem that I liked less well: it looks nice but too boiler-platedly condemns white C(IA)olonialism and genocide, for my taste.

A “cubistic” specimen of Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Go series is here, too, with a more clearly visual poem from the same series that evokes a rescue at sea, a flare filling the sky with o’s while the excitement of the situation fills it with oh’s. St. Thomasino, and many of the other artists in the volume, provide readers with a short artist’s statement, by the way, which are quite useful.

Others with first-rate pieces in this volume are M. B. Corbett, Harriet Bart, Harry Burrus, Spencer Selby, Stephen-Paul Martin, John M. Bennett (who does terrific things with near-empty frames of the tackily rubber-stamped kind well-known to those familiar with his work) and Paul Weidenhoff. All in all, Andryczuk’s anthology gives a valuable if rough idea of the terrain of current American vizlature.

* * * * *

How I wish someone would tell me (in reasonable detail) why in the sixteen years since then, no one in the BigWorld has ever asked me for a piece like it?!  Is it that inferior to the poetry-related pieces in magazines like the Atlantic?  Or too different?  Maybe too clearly politically-incorrect?   Or is it that there is absolutely no one on the look-out for fresh talent? I have little to add to what I said in my column about Marilyn’s piece except that my first impression on seeing it again was that it seemed to me strongly Chinese (which I mean as a Large Compliment) and I again felt enlarged by its Q&A, this time by the ocean seeming to query the land . . . which provided, or was the answer.  I was influenced a lot about some of Marton Koppany’s Q&A-related pieces that I’ve recently been enjoying and writing about.

Note: I corrected a typo or two in my column but left some of my now-obsolete terminology as is.

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Entry 1405 — Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Off-the-top-of-my-head (although I’ve given the matter lots of thought on&off over the years), something I just wrote for the Shaksper Internet discussion group:

A problem I think interesting, and serious, is what should guide a  reader of a poem to his reading of a poem (or any work of art).  I claim there are four things he should consider: (1) the author’s intention; (2) how closely the poem may follow some fashion in poetry-composition of his time; (3) whether or not the poem is part of a sequence, and how, if that is the case, that affects the reading; and (4) what reading makes the poem best as a work of art for the given reader.

For me, a die-hard new critic, the author’s intention is irrelevant, except insomuch he explicitly reveals it in his work. If known, though, one should certain consult it to see if it helps one discover thing in the poem that one would have missed if not looking for them.

For me, it makes sense to investigate the compositional fashions of the time a poem was composed and use what one finds out about it that can be applied to one’s reading of the poem.

For me, a poem’s being explicitly, or even weakly implicitly, part of a sequence (as well as part of a poet’s ouevre) should also be taken in consideration.  I as a poet, for instance, am almost obsessed with celebrating the coming of spring; so it would make sense for someone finding an ever-so-slight connotation of that in a poem I recently wrote about Columbus to accept it as in that poem (if he wants to).

For me as a reader of a poem, though, what is most important is what the poem’s text by itself can plausibly be said  to say by itself that will maximize my aesthetic experience of it.  If for instance, Milton tells me his poem justifies Jehovah’s treatment of the rebellious Lucifer (or whatever the devil is called in the poem [I haven’t read it for a while and have a lousy memory for names and the like] but I go along with Blake in finding Lucifer justified, and Jehovah a tyrant, I have no trouble ignoring Milton.  I don’t find any explicit authorial intent behind Sonnet 18, so have no trouble taking the poem as what it on the surface is–a celebration of summer.  (That’s a joke, but only here; in truth, I argue just that in the book I began but left hanging a while ago on Sonnet 18; I accept that the poem is doing other things, but consider them less important in the poem than summer.)

I vaguely know that nutty Platonic allegorical sequences were in vogue when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, but don’t find inflicting allegor on sonnet 18, which is hard to do, for the most part, without straining worth doing–because, to my taste, the sonnet works much better as a lyrical poem taken for what it is on the surface.  Similarly, church steeples work best for me not as glorifications of some god, or as avenues to Heaven–or as phallic symbols–but as celebrations of mountains or simple height and of Man’s ability to create.

I find Ian Steere’s reading of the first 126 sonnets as a sequence easy to go along with,  I don’t find it a smooth sequence.  It does near-certainly make the addressee male.  But I don’t care.  The plausibility of the sonnets as a sequence (or haphazardly organized collection) about the poet’s relationship (when it was worshipful) with a young XY-chromosome girl simply indicates authorial intention.  But when what he wanted to say conflicts with what his poem just as plausibly can say (the celebration a a poet’s female opposite for her feminine physical beauty and feminine temperance, etc.),  I grant the reader the right, again, to ignore authorial intent.

Conclusion: there’s nothing wrong with trying to determine how the poet wanted his poem read, nor with determining how fashion may have influenced it, nor with fitting it to a sequence with a view of finding the author’s intentions for the over-all sequence, or finding what one can plausibly interpret the sequence to best mean.  But these ways of involvment with Sonnet 18, or any work of art should not keep one more interested in what it can do for him aesthetically from taking it only for the pleasure its words, by themselves, can give him.

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Entry 1396 — Honesty as a Literary Commentator

Tuesday, March 18th, 2014

Full honesty as a literary commentator is impossible, if friendship is as important to you as it is to me (because I’m an Aquarian)–and are a competent critic.  As a competent critic, you will have to find defects in even the best writer’s work.  I wish we all were totally honest, though.  I would very much like to learn the worst anyone can think of to say about my work.  As I’ve always said, if I consider a criticism invalid, it will reassure me that others are not understanding my work sufficiently to give it the credit they should; if I consider it invalid (and I am capable of doing that, and have done it, or tried to do it, in the past) it should help me.  It would also free me to be candid, or at least more candid, about my opinion of my critic’s work.

This is not to say I’m not reasonably honest, or actually ever dishonest.  I almost never praise someone for doing anything he does not do.  And my ratings of work are just about always absolutely sincere–that is, when I say my friend Richard Kostelanetz is the best big-picture critic of the literature of our time–make that, “the art” of our time, I mean it.  (I feel I have said that but perhaps never so explicitly.)  I mention Richard specifically here because he is one of the easiest writers to say negative things about because of his thick-skin.  He has agreed with some of my negative comments about his art or ideas and disagreed with others–and that’s it.  A few others of my friends are like that.  Even them I avoid hitting with 100% candor.

I do believe that it may not matter since I suspect they are enough like me to recognize my lack of full candor–and bright enough to know pick up on my hints–when, for instance, I say something like, “X may be close to excessive sentimentality here,” instead of ascending into full candor by saying, “X idiotically descends into the most insipid sentimentality I’ve ever had the misfortune to come upon here.”  And know when my praise goes over the top–as it does validly, I believe, when trying to make up for what I consider to b e the lack of appropriate recognition someone’s work is getting.  That is, if X, whom I consider as good a poet as there is, is being much too ridiculously under-rated by the Establishment, I might say he’s twice as good a poet as any member of the Academy of American Poets, when I actually consider him only slightly better than such a poet.  I do consider most of my friends in otherstream poetry to be doing better work than anyone in the Academy, but only because adding to the poets’ toolbox, perhaps not because truly superior.  There is also my partial dishonesty in many of my sweeping negative judgements of poetry I confess I’m not familiar enough with to be as sure about as I sometimes sound.

Of course, I am sure I sometimes utter something false, maybe even obviously false, without know it.  More often, but I hope not too often, I dishonestly ignore something pertinent that’s contrary to what I’m saying.  Usually, again, that is to make up for the strength of the Establishment’s opposition.  Or, I fear I must confess, to make friends who may help my career, or just to make friends.  I think I’ve committed more dishonesties in order to avoid revealing my extreme political incorrectness.  But that’s more a matter of avoiding areas I can’t be even half-candid in for areas that I can be, so really no more important than the fact that I avoid writing about higher mathematics because I know I can’t be even half-intelligent about it.  Most of the time: I’m more than half-right in considering Cantor’s transfinite numbers scientifically meaningless because nothing more than a mathematical artifact like linguistic paradoxes like “This sentence is wholly false.”

I’ve seldom written my Unvarnished Opinion of anyone’s work.  I may, if I live long enough, although I don’t think I have anything to say that will not be said by the time my generation has been gone long enough for near-total candor to be visited upon us.  “Near-total” because I doubt that total condor is possible.  For instance, how could anyone even a century from now say anything really mean about someone as nice as I am?  If I said all I have to say about the art and artists–and commentators on the arts and got it published tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t get into too much trouble–because most of my friends in the fields involved would pretty much agree with my opinions where not on themselves or their favorites–and because they would nowhere reverse rather than somewhat negatively modify anything I’ve said before.

Oh, one last comment–there may be a handful of my colleagues whose work I’ve been completely honest about, because it really is as good as I say it is!  And I’ve come close to complete honesty about those I consider Enemies of Poetry, albeit they have almost all been groups of unnamed individuals rather than individuals.  I don’t believe I’ve ever lied when saying something like, “X is an excellent critic of the poets she treats but still qualifies as an enemy of poetry by not only ignoring a vast array of important contemporary poets but writing as though they don’t exist.”

Main conclusion: I think it is not difficult to determine what literary commentators of the past truly thought of contemporary writers, so striving for candor is not particularly important.  I also think it won’t be long before all literature and commentary on literature will be done by computers, and the commentary will be completely candid.

There.  Have I said anything worth saying?  I only ask to get my word-count for this entry over a thousand.  It is ridiculous how much that means to me, as if 1,000 is a praiseworthy achievement, 964 not.

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Entry 1308 — Mine Review Continueth

Monday, December 23rd, 2013

I was going to celebrate the Winter Solstice with Zero Production, but then I found out yesterday, not today, was when it occurred, so I had to finish the review I was working on. I wrote over 1300 word, pretty good ones, I think. Below is one of the poems I dealt with, with my comments on it following it:

13January2009

Something of what seems to me at the frontier of math-related poetry that I hope will be further explored in the future is Sarah Glaz’s fascinatingly strange “13 January 2009.”  It consists of two texts side by side, one, “13,” with nothing in it but numbers (and equal signs), the other, “January 2009) devoted entirely to words about the dying of a man named Anuk whom I take to be an ancient Egyptian (in spite of the poem’s title!)  I feel ready to go on for another thousand words at least about this poem, but will limit myself here to telling you that, according to its author, its “structure follows The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which states that every positive integer greater than one may be expressed in a unique way as a product of powers of distinct prime numbers”—which (inexorable) process, I would add, is shown in “13.”  I hope to say more in an essay on mathematical poetry I have in the works for this periodical. Conclusion: when I began thinking about this review, I had visions of making an insightful taxonomical study of its poems, but their “multi-dimensional links to mathematics and . . . wide range of styles” as Glaz has it in her introduction, and wide range of techniques, I’d add, made that too difficult a task.  So all I have to say now is that I hope anyone still reading this has enjoyed my chatter as much as I’ve enjoyed indulging in it.

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Posted in Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetry Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 1307 — “Portrait of Max Dehn”

Sunday, December 22nd, 2013

Below is a poem from an anthology I’m writing a review of.

PortraitofMaxDehn

It’s by Francisco Jose Craveiro de Carvalho as translated from the Portuguese by Manual Portela.  All it tells us (with a nice touch of surrealistic fantasy) is that Dehn was an emigrant–but it does so with the same kind of inspired empathy with which Keats famously described Ruth, amidst the alien corn. It’s here because I like it, but more because I wanted to say something about the Reviewer’s Delight I felt when, in writing about it, I saw my way to giving a poet what I feel is a high (and appropriate) compliment while also again praising my old favorite, Keats.  Such delights are what make reviewing worth doing no matter how difficult it is at times.

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Posted in Francisco Jose Craveiro de Carvalho, Poetry Criticism, Traditional Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1207 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.4

Sunday, September 8th, 2013

ExperioddicistPage4

Note: I consider Geof’s poem a masterpiece–one of more than a few he’s done I wish I’d done.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Geof Huth, language poetry specimen, Poetry Criticism, Robert Fitterman | No Comments »

Entry 1206 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.3

Saturday, September 7th, 2013

Sorry–once again your imbecile of a blogmaster forgot to hit the button changing this from a withheld entry to a public one.  Here it is two days late:

ExperioddicistPage3

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Entry 1162 — Ergodic Literature

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Today I came across a new literary term I think as dopey as any of mine: “ergodic literature.”  What follows  what Wikipedia says about it, which I found especially intriguing because I know so much less about this kind of stuff than I’d like to.

Ergodic literature is a term coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his book Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, and is derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning “work”, and hodos, meaning “path”. Aarseth’s book contains the most commonly cited definition:

In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

Cybertext is a subcategory of ergodic literature that Aarseth defines as “texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons” (Cybertext, page 75). The process of reading printed matter, in contrast, involves “trivial” extranoematic effort, that is, merely moving one’s eyes along lines of text and turning pages. Thus, hypertext fiction of the simple node and link variety is ergodic literature but not cybertext. A non-trivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, as the reader must constantly select which link to follow, but a link, when clicked, will always lead to the same node. A chat bot such as ELIZA is a cybertext because when the reader types in a sentence, the text-machine actually performs calculations on the fly that generate a textual response. The I Ching is likewise cited as an example of cybertext because it contains the rules for its own reading. The reader carries out the calculation but the rules are clearly embedded in the text itself.

It has been argued that these distinctions are not entirely clear and scholars still debate the fine points of the definitions. ]

One of the major innovations of the concept of ergodic literature is that it is not medium-specific. New media researchers have tended to focus on the medium of the text, stressing that it is for instance paper-based or electronic. Aarseth broke with this basic assumption that the medium was the most important distinction, and argued that the mechanics of texts need not be medium-specific. Ergodic literature is not defined by medium, but by the way in which the text functions. Thus, both paper-based and electronic texts can be ergodic: “The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users” (Cybertext, p 179).

The examples Aarseth gives include a diverse group of texts: wall inscriptions of the temples in ancient Egypt that are connected two-dimensionally (on one wall) or three dimensionally (from wall to wall or room to room); the I Ching; Apollinaire’s Calligrammes in which the words of the poem “are spread out in several directions to form a picture on the page, with no clear sequence in which to be read”; Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, Roman, a novel with shuffleable pages; Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems; B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates; Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted with Tea; Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA; Ayn Rand’s play Night of January 16th, in which members of the audience form a jury and choose one of two endings; William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter’s Racter; Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: a story; Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s Multi-User Dungeon (aka MUD1); and James Aspnes’s TinyMUD.

All these examples require non-trivial effort from the reader, who must participate actively in the construction of the text.

The concepts of cybertext and ergodic literature were of seminal importance to new media studies, in particular literary approaches to digital texts and to game studies.

Note: I found the term, “scripton,” interesting, so googled it until I was give this: “Aarseth suggests the terms scripton and texton to describe the ontological dualism of a cybertext: Scriptons are ‘strings (of signs) as they appear to readers’ and those parts of a cybertext that are not directly accessible to the reader/user are termed textons and defined as ‘strings (of signs) as they exist in the text’ (Aarseth, 62). In conventional literature, the scriptons equal the textons because the immobility of the signifiers ensure that there can be no divergence between the text that is stored on the page and the text that is displayed on it.”  I use the term, “texteme,” to indicate the smallest unit of text in print.  Quite a bit different.

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Entry 803 — Insulting BigName Critics

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

After Finnegan, sitemaster of New-Poetry, let New-Poetry members know that we could find essays by various critics commenting on the current state of American Poetry at the VQR Symposium yesterday, I visited the site, read some, skimmed some, then posted the following at New-Poetry:

Thanks much for this, Finnegan. All these critics and Perloff (whom I count as part of the VQR Symposium group although she withdrew from it because she has remained an important part of it, anyway) is the only one who mentions visual and performance poetry, and all she does is mention them. The most visible two poetries of the Otherstream. But that’s enough to keep me from judging her thoughts on the contem-porary poetry scene the worst in this collection. The others are too closely worthless to pick out one for worst effort.

I will admit one thing not too hard to admit: a few of these estabniks seem somewhat familiar with what they deem a new sort of poetry—conceptual poetry—a kind of poetry, if it’s poetry (and Perloff questions whether at least some texts called conceptual poetry are poems) with which I was unfamiliar. But I’ve always said in my lists of new and newish poetry that I was sure I’d missed some, and know I’ve fallen behind badly in keeping up with various kinds of cyber poetry, never felt comfortable with my take on sound poetry, and only now believe I’m coming to terms with language poetry (although I arrogantly also feel I’ve known more about it for twenty years than just about anybody writing it, or writing poetry called language poetry, including especially Ron Silliman).

From the few examples of conceptual poetry I’ve seen, I have what I think is Perloff’s view, that it’s too similar to dada to be new, and—as I said—possibly prose (of a kind I’ve named “conceprature” to go with similar taxonomical terms I’ve used for “poetry” that’s really prose, “evocature” for prose poems, and “advocature” for lineated propaganda texts. I also use “informrature” for lineated texts like names and addresses on envelopes that are clearly not poems). Having said all that, I do believe that conceptual poets-or-prosists (note: “prosists” is an ad hoc term; I want something better, preferably already in use) are cutting edge even though working in a variety of literature that’s been around a long time—because (1) they are still finding significantly new things to do in it (new to me, anyway) the same way I believe a few visual poets are still finding significantly new things to do in visual poetry, which—in its modern phase—has now been around a century, give or take a decade or two, its start being still controversial; and (2) only a very few visible critics know about them, and only one, Perloff, has so far written meaningfully about them.

I should be kinder to Perloff than I have been for the past 25 years, and will be from now on, I’m pretty sure. But nothing is harder for someone fighting against the status quo not to blow up at than another fighting against it differently (usually much less differently than its seems to both at the time).

Below is perhaps the best example of anti-Otherstream gatekeeping in the tripe Finnegan linked to, a passage from Willard Spiegelman’s hilariously-titled essay, “Has Poetry Changed? The View From the Editor’s Desk.” Its title is funny because it contains not one word about how American poetry has changed over the past 30 years or so. (Note, by the way, another change in my boilerplate: “30,” not “50” years as I so long contended. I finally realized that Ashbery and his followers were, when breaking into prominence, using techniques not in wide use at the time–although far from revolutionary.)

“Some years ago Helen Vendler said she was giving up reviewing or generally writing about new books of poetry by younger poets. She had not lost her acumen, her interest or her powers of perception; rather, she said that she lacked the right cultural frame of reference to be an appropriate audience, let alone a judge. She knew about gardens and nightingales, Grecian urns and Christian theology, but not about hip-hop or comic books, and these provide the material, or at least the glue, for many of today’s poems. Poetic subjects, voices, diction, and tone change. And forms, like subjects, change as well. She wanted to leave the critical field open to younger people like her colleague Stephen Burt, a polymath who knows the ancients and the moderns, the classics and the contemporary. He listens to indie bands and reads graphic novels. He flourishes amid the hipsters as well as the sonneteers.” Etc.

Why is this especially stupid, in my view? The idea that the main thing a critic needs to be familiar with to write about poetry is subject matter. Oh, and “voices, diction and tone.” Oops, “forms,” too. No mention of what Vendler has been drastically ignorant of since she was first writing about Ashbery: technique. Perhaps I’m wrong to consider it the most important component of poetry, but it most certainly is as important as “voices, diction and tone.”

Then there is her leaving the field open to people like Stephen Burt. A Harvard professor! And no more knowledgeable than Vendler about what’s going on in poetry now. Here’s one thing Wikipoo calls him recognized as a critic for, his definition of what I call jump-cut poetry (but long ago referred to it a few times as “elliptical”): “Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves.” I like his “all the verbal gizmos.” Does he mention even some of those invented way before his time by Cummings. I don’t know his criticism well enough to be sure the answer is no, but I’d be willing to bet ten bucks it is.

I’d be interested to know why what I’ve written here contributes less to the discussion in VQR of the current state of American Poetry than the essays in it. Anyone interested in telling me? Or even in telling me why I’m not worth telling? I’ve issued challenges like this before. No one’s yet answered one. At least one that doesn’t significantly misrepresent me, and escalate into ad hominem arguments and plain insults.

Note: I’m pretty sure that 15 or 20 years ago, one of the two times I was stupid enough to apply for a Guggenheim grant, Willard Spiegelman got one in the field I’d applied for one in. I can’t remember how he described his winning project except that it was lame, even for a mainstreamer. (Richard Kostelanetz, a former winner of a Guggenheim, had recommended me to the Guggenheimers, who then invited me to submit an application, so it wasn’t all my fault.)
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Posted in Literary History, Literary Squabbling, Poetry Criticism | 1 Comment »

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Entry 1314 — Just-Spring

Sunday, December 29th, 2013

It crossed my mind earlier today that a flair for the use of fresh language might be the most important attribute of a superior poet.  Certainly E. E. Cummings had it, which is why he rates so high with me.  In particular, I think the invention of new words or phrases, or the use of a word in a way it was  never before used, like Cummings’s melding of “just” and “spring” in his famous poem about the balloonman, is about the most important thing a superior poet can do.  Hopkins and Dylan Thomas are two others I quickly think of who did this.  If I were fading out, I’d try to find examples, and mention more poets of fresh language.  I might even come up with a Grummaniacal name for them.

For now, I just say that one way of recognizing mediocrity in a poet is his total conventionality of word-choice and use.  You can recognize the subj-mediocrity by his used of dead poeticisms.

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Posted in Aesthetics, Dylan Thomas, E E Cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetics | No Comments »