Archive for the ‘Gerald L. Kaufman’ Category
Entry 873 — A New Kind of Sonnet?
Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
Two days ago, my guest blog editor, Bora Zivkovic, told me he’d selected the graphic below as the Scientific American Blog Network’s “Image-of-the-Week.” Quite pleased with that, I let New-Poetry know that there was “something for sonnet-lovers” here. I didn’t expect to stir up any controversy, but sonneteer Mike Snider attacked it as an insult to sonnets, and me for suggesting anyone who loved sonnets would enjoy it. I thought he’d gotten its tone completely wrong, which ended with his saying he understood sonnets and I didn’t. Meanwhile, we’d exchanged several posts about its status as a sonnet. I at first thought it was, then realized that its meter was way off, for a sonnet, which I admitted. He said it wasn’t “remotely” a sonnet. I replied that it had a sonnet’s rhyme-scheme, octave/sestet form, and number of lines, so was close enough to be a variation on a sonnet.
After the argument ended, I had a revelation: it was a sonnet! My reasoning: it was a sonnet in which the meter and line-length required for the form had been replaced by line-width, a formal requirement every bit as demanding as the iambic pentameter requirement was. Like those pentameters, each line had to participate in a rhyme at its end.
Thinking about that led me to thoughts about when it is legitimate to allow a set form to change, when not. I say it’s legitimate if something taken away is replaced by something which comes reasonably close to carrying out what that which was removed accomplished, or adds something new that seems equal to what was removed. Gerald Kaufman’s ellipsonnet does one of the two things iambic pentameter does for the sonnet by providing a formal challenge to the poet (which the poet success in overcoming–if he is successful–readers should enjoy along with what the sonnet otherwise does), and replaces the other, the sonnet’s meter, with a striking visual appearance–while still having a pleasurable meter of its own. But I’m willing to accept it as only an interesting variation on the sonnet. People like Mike would not be able to do even that, I don’t think.
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Entry 829 — Some Geo-Metric Verse
Monday, August 13th, 2012
While looking through my small collection of mathematical poetry, I came across a small hardbound book called Geo-Metric Verse, by Gerald L. Kaufman. It was a 1948 collection of what its author called “Poetry forms in mathematics/ Written mostly for fanatics.” Many of its pieces had earlier appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, a pleasantly middle-brow magazine that had a poetry column by John Ciardi that I liked when I was reading it in my teens. How innocent and warm those times feel now. There’s nothing like the Saturday Review now.
I have no idea where I got this book, by the way. I assume a poet friend gave it to me. I apologize for not remembering who, for it’s a Very Nice Gift. And I’ll be using poems from it in my guest blog (the bottom one here, for sure).
Note: research indicates the Kaufman was a distinguished architect–like Scott Helmes. That makes sense, architecture being the vocation the most achieves a balance between art and science–or so it seems to me.
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