K.S. Ernst « POETICKS-

K.S. Ernst « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘K.S. Ernst’ Category

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:

Posted in E E Cummings, K.S. Ernst, Poetry Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 900 — The Anthology from Fantagraphics

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

I got my contributor’s copy of this yesterday. I don’t love every work in it but I think there are almost no works in it that I’d call poor, and many that I think terrific. My highest rating is always for works I want to steal from, or steal completely, and I’ve already come across more than ten of these, in just a few fast skims. My favorite so far in one by Kathy Ernst, “Viole(n)t,” which is . . I was just about to say unstealable because anything you could use it or a part of it in would look stupit compared with it. Then I thought of one way you could steal from it, or from any work: steal just a detail, or–better–a fraction of a detail, just enough so a viewer knowing Kathy’s work wiykd recognize it; this way you could use it as an allusion that might make everything near it seem minor, but not the whole work it was in due to how small it was. Hey, I think I could make it work!

Note: I think every good poem has stolen elements in it. It may be the the more stolen elements it has, the better it is. No, make that the best poems have the most stolen elements, but some bad poems have a lot of stolen elements, too.

DSL Providers

Posted in K.S. Ernst, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Aram Saroyan « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Aram Saroyan’ 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 »

E E Cummings « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘E E Cummings’ Category

Entry 1751 — Lesson 1

Friday, March 13th, 2015

I have an excuse to avoid truly beginning my lesson in how to compose an otherstream poem: another medical procedure, this one a sound scan of my thyroid. Routine, I guess because I’m hypo-thyroidal. Only took ten minutes. Errands followed. So, I’m barely unnull. Nonetheless, I will try to get my lesson in today, beginning with lead-in excerpts of poems by Cummings, then the original (and now final) version of my (full) ooem:

* * *

If I were in a high school or college teaching this lesson (which, nota bene, is for absolute beginners, although I hope anyone reading it will learn from it), I would pass out hand-outs with the poems above on them to the students (student?). Then:

IF YOU WANT TO COMPOSE ANY KIND OF POETRY:

Dictum 1: READ POETRY!!!

(I’m tempted to end my first lesson there, but–heck–you’re all my good friends! I can’t cheat you.)

Listening to poetry is okay, but reading it means you have it continuingly in front of you, so seems to me better. It’s also difficult to attend readings or buy recordings compared to getting books or magazines with it, or going online after it. In any case, I will be referring to printed poetry only.

I suspect anyone teaching a how-to-course in any kind of literature will tell you the same thing. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, it’s received wisdom, and received wisdom is right much more often than not. This bit of received wisdom is maxolutely valid–i.e., it could not be more valid.

The more you read poetry, the more of an idea of what it is you will get. Beyond some dictionary’s probably inept, and certainly incomplete definition of it. But by far the most important reason for reading poetry is to find poems you like! And you will find a few before long, even if you read only publications recommended by college professors or other authorities if you seriously intend to compose poetry–as either a hobby (and there’s nothing wrong with that) or a vocation.

If you get through a few hundred poems and find none that genuinely excite you, ask someone who’s been around (like me) where to go for poetry different from what you’ve been reading. If that doesn’t help–if, that is, you sincerely explore a reasonable wide variety of poems and are not excited by any of them, accept that you’re simply incapable of appreciating poetry–as I am incapable of appreciating gymnastics. So what.

I should think anyone who knows enough about poetry to want to compose it will find poems that he really likes. When this happens, as common sense would indicate, he must find out who wrote them, and look up that poet’s other poems. If this goes well, he will automatically be strongly attracted to one or more, enough to become at least temporarily addicted to his work.

SubDictum 1: When you have found a poet whose work you are extremely drawn to, read everything you can about his life. If you feel like it. I add that, and make this rule a “SubDictum,” because I followed it with great enjoyment and, I think, got a useful push from my vicarious identification with various literary heroes of mine. But it won’t make a poet of you, and I suspect there are those without my interest in poets rather than their work, or literary history. In short, ignore this SubDictum if you have little urge to follow it.

Dictum 2: This is my first teaching that a lot of poets and not all that few teachers of poetry will reject. In fact, I would agree that it is not necessary for one wanting to become a poet; however, it is necessary, in my opinion, for one who wants to become among the best poets. Those I therefore direct to read as much commentary on the poets whose works you most enjoy as you can. Poetry criticism be Good! So what if much of it, maybe most of it, is not too good; 90% of poetry is mediocre or lousy, too. So read as much as you can, and zero in on those whose commentary you enjoy the way you zeroed in on poets whose poems you enjoyed.

One important thing they should do for you is path you to other poets writing work like the ones you like do. Negatively-Positively, they may expose you to flaws in a favorite of yours that helps you to appreciate up to a higher level of enjoyment. They should introduce you, in their negative commentary, to poets whose poor work will increase your appreciation of inferior work, which it is important to learn. Or perhaps make you realize there’s poetry out there the critic doesn’t like but you do. And you will begin developing a critical view of your own.

Dictum 3: WRITE POEMS!!!

Start by imitating the poems you’ve found you like. Remember that you are just beginning and that it takes time to become anything of a poet. In the meantime, it should not take too long for you to experience the happiness of effectively imitating something a hero of yours has done. The chances are 999 to 1 that it will be part of a sub-mediocre poem, but that’s of no consequence. Every poet’s first attempts are poor. Regardless of the mothers or friends or teachers who praise them.

At this point I was going to show the value of imitation using the four texts above. While writing my way to here, however, I realized that I should have used an earlier example of my own work. I wrote a fair amount of bad imitative poetry when I began, and nothing any good until I was around 25 and wrote my “traffic” poem above. It’s a bad example, though, because (in my opinion) quite good, although imitative. There are special reasons for its success. One is that it’s based on the simplest poetic form, the Classical American haiku form (which is derived from the form the Japanese invented–apparently–but significantly different from that in ways I won’t go into right now). What’s more, the Classical American Haiku form is extremely explicit, and therefore easy to get technically right.

* * *

I feel I could keep going for at least a few more full paragraphs but I also think I’ve reached a good stopping point, and have a topic to discuss which may take a while to get through: haiku-sensitivity, which I think a person is either born with or will never have, and I have it. Urp.

Posted in Autobiographica, E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1750 — Found Original

Thursday, March 12th, 2015

Sorta interesting story about the above: it turned up yesterday in an email from Germany! Remember, I was hunting all over for it in vain, then remembered it together–I thought. Actually, I remembered “descent,” but changed it to “development.” I forgot “mix.” I think the original better than my revision.

To get back to the sorta interesting story, the email it arrived in–more accurately, the email that had a link to it–was from Kurt Henzel, a German who has suddenly discovered concrete poetry, and wanted to buy two books by Irving Weiss that I had published–and stuff of mine. In his email, he asked for signed copies of two of my poems, the one above and “the poem r,” one of my favorite visual poems although never before mentioned by anyone.

Here’s the other:

Here’s something else from the Internet:

resipiscence /res-ə-PIS-əns/. noun. Originally, repentance and recognition of one’s misdeeds. Now the act of coming to one’s senses, a change of heart. The Shorter OED’s formulation: “return to a better mind.” From Latin resipiscere (to recover one’s senses), from from sapere (to taste, to be wise).

From yesterday’s Katex–click here to find out about it. (It’s a newsletter or the equivalent put out by Chris Lott often has interesting odd words. I posted this because it seems so much like many of my coinages–in other words, I’m not alone in my love of coining mouthfuls. I also think I might find a use for this one.

* * *

Apologies, but that’s it for today. Again, a tough day for me: a loss in tennis in the morning, both for me and my partner is one match, and for our team in all three of our matches. Oh, well, we should not finish last, and the season will soon be over. In the afternoon, two hours at my dentist’s (that increased my credit card debt by another thousand).

Posted in E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1749 — Lesson One Begins

Wednesday, March 11th, 2015

I was hoping to make a complete lesson for this entry–the one I discussed yesterday for a how-to book for beginning otherstream poets. I had so much trouble scanning the poems by Cummings I wanted to use in it that I’m too worn-out to try to write much of the lesson.

But here is my piece for the lesson again, followed by 4 excerpts of poems by Cummings that I stole the core-technique my poem depends on from Cummings, my lesson being about the necessity to steal from other poets:

            sky's piecemeal white                                development down buildings'                            dark sides into                                   tr;af:fi,c.

* * *

Posted in E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1693 — Cummings’s Early Visual Poetry

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

Karl Kempton, who is in the process of writing a full-scale history of visual poetry, queried me about E. E. Cummings earlier today. “relooking at early cummings,” said he, “i can not say his work prior to & (and) could be considered visual, except for impression III, part of tulips and chimneys, publication date 1923.” Then he asked me for my take. The following notes were the immediate results:

I would accept “III’ of “Impressions” as, barely, a visual poem because the way it uses the parenthesis marks at the end of it as a visual metaphor for a sack. At the same time they are a conceptual metaphor for a shooting star’s being changed from something emphatic in the material world diminished into something parenthetical to reality–down a level from it.

“in Just-” (which i have an entry about in the Facts-on-File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry) is a highly effective visual poem for me, albeit its visiophors (visual metgaphors) are very simple. “hist whist” is borderline. “stinging” becomes super-simply a visual poem at its end, “-S.”

These poems are also infraverbal, for me; I consider Cummings more important for more or less inventing infraverbal poetry than for his visual poetry. The passage, “so/ drunG// k, dear,” in his “I” (first stanza: “nimble/ heat/ had”) in “Portraits,” one of the sections of Chimneys, becomes infra-verbal with “drunkG” and also visual when after a space comes “k, dear” because the G in “drunG” is a verbo-auditory metaphor for drunkenness as well as what I’d call a verbo-conceptual metaphor for it. It is the first because its mispronunciation acts as a metaphor for drunkenness; it is the second because its mistakenness is a conceptual metaphor for drunkenness.

I take its capital G as auditory rather than visual (although, yes, the whole word is something visual, but not really visual in the sense of something seen, visual in the different sense of something read); hence it seems to me the G contributes to both its mispronunciation (since it indicates, to me, an accentual emphasis on the g-sound) and its conceptual mistakenness, since it is mistakenly capitalized, according to conventional spelling. The continuation of “drunG” after the line it occupies and a skipped line by a k, makes the “k, dear” a visual metaphor for the blank-minded mistakenness that drunkenness is, and the way drunkenness tries stumblingly to be “correct.”

“Buffalo Bill’s” is, of course, a visual poem.

The gaps in many of the Tulips I consider purely verbal since they simply indicate auditory pauses of various lengths.

So, I would claim the presence of five (-and-a-half) visual poems in Tulips and Chimneys.

It’d be nice to go one into a full-length study of Cummings’s evolution as an otherstream poet–i.e., a visual and an infraverbal poet as well as an adventurer in other kinds of language poetry besides infraverbalism, but I have too many other things on my plate right now.
.

Posted in E E Cummings | No Comments »

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 . . .

Posted in E E Cummings, K.S. Ernst, Poetry Criticism | No Comments »

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.
.

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

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.

Digital Cameras

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

Entry 1043 — A Revision

Friday, March 15th, 2013

I’m here again because the technician I called to help me with my computer won’t be to my house until later, so I can still come here. (I’m hoping the technician can take care of my computer’s problem or problems while here, but suspect h’ell have to take my cup away for a while.) Anyway, this poem is from a sequence of 4 I made that were published in the Cummings Society magazine, Spring.

I’m posting it because I’ll soon be posting it in my Scientific American guest blog so went to Paint Shop to get it ready, remembering that I wanted to make a short revision of its remainder. That had been “-(little lame balloonman).” It came to bother me because a remainder should not be a negative term. So I’d come up with “the absence of the little lame balloonman.” That was the first thing I changed it to earlier this morning. I liked the idea of a “positive” negativity like an absence of something. But before long I thought it strained. I changed it to “nothing else.” That cost the reference to the balloonman that I have in all peoms in the rest of the sequence. Result: the present remainder. I’m not sure it’s my best, or is as good a one as I could possibly come up with, but it works, and I’m sticking with it.

ShopNBC Coupon

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

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.

HSN.com Shopping

Posted in E E Cummings, Jason Guriel | 2 Comments »

Entry 904 — American Visiotextual Art

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

There’s an attempt at a discussion of the Fantagraphics anthology going on at Spidertangle that I’ve contributed to, once by growling that “just saying you don’t like the anthology, or posting blurbs in its favor, won’t get us anywhere.”

I then brought up an idea which I would be amazed if more than three other Spidertanglers thought was a good one: the publication of a companion to the Fantagraphics anthology. If possible, it would have an essay by either Crag of Nico, or both, describing their editorial intentions, and a history of the anthology. Then maybe one or two essays on the history of visiotextual art that discusses where this anthology fits into that history. The rest of the Companion would consist of critical reactions to it—a few from from vispo people, but many I would hope from conventional literary AND visual art people.

I followed that with a digression to a thought about The history of American Visiotextual Art: that with Andrew, we now have a fifth generation. The first generation consisted mainly of E. E. Cummings and Kenneth Patchen. The Pre-Concrete Generation, characterized by more or less standard free verse poems with visual details I’d call minifractional but which were responsible for a large percentage of the aesthetic effect of the poems they were in. An example is the famous Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill who is described as breaking “onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.” A small fraction of the poem but responsible for at least half of its aesthetic effect (however little that effect may seem to those with no understanding of the magnitude of such simple-seeming freshnesses when introduced to poetry). First generation poems were basically semantic poems with just enough significant visual material to make them visual poems.

Second generation American visiotextual art was dominated by concrete poetry—by my definition of it as verbally meaningful texts which are also fully, or near-fully, visual images, and whose verbal and visual content combine to produce the works’ aesthetic effect. In other words, works half verbal and half visual. Ron Johnson’s “moon,” with a third moon printed in between and above the word’s other two o’s. The Solt and Williams anthologies brought them to the attention of the public.

Then came a third generation of “visual poets,” the poets I think of as being published by Karl Kempton’s Kaldron or in close touch with poets who were. The important difference between them and the concrete poets, again by my definition (which ignores who did what where and believed in what politics or moral codes, etc.), was that they made works that included purely visual elements that interacted with their works’ semantic content to produce their aesthetic effect.

The fourth generation, now in power, consists of the asemic poets, who have basically forsaken textual elements for anything other than the way they look in designs. It seems to me that a good eighty percent of the work in the Fantagraphic anthology us if this nature. I have made only a few such works myself, but extremely like some specimens of it in the Fantagraphics anthology. In fact, it’s possible that seven of my ten favorite works in the anthology are asemic.

I believe there is a fifth generation in existence, but I don’t know what they’re up to.

All comments, as always, are welcome.

Don’t Pay Retail

Posted in E E Cummings, Ronald Johnson | 2 Comments »

Norman Friedman « POETICKS

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Entry 1627 — Norman Friedman, RIP

Monday, November 10th, 2014

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

Gertrude Stein « POETICKS

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Entry 470 — Thoughts about Language Poetry

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

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.

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.

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

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Category: E E Cummings