Category: E E Cummings

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.

.

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