Entry 452 — Myth « POETICKS-

Entry 452 — Myth « POETICKS

Entry 452 — Myth

When reading at Geof’s blog that he considers “greatness” a “myth,” I was reminded of my sadness at the nullinguists’ destruction of the word, “myth.” It used to mean the achievement of something beyond the power of mortals, but gloriously true beyond the empirically real that those without imaginations are stuck in. Jason’s winning of the golden fleece that I read about in one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, a copy of The Golden Book of Myths (or some such) that my brother Bill gave me when I was around ten, for example. Now “myth” only means some view of life the person using the word doesn’t accept.

Putting together a dictionary of wonderful words lost to nullinguism like “marriage,” “gay,” “impact,” “poetry,” “genius” would be a worthwhile project–except that I suppose, although it seems like they outnumber the good words retained (so far), there really aren’t very many such words.

As for “greatness,” it is by definition unarguably a fact, the definition being some person’s achievement of something people admire, enjoy and celebrate centuries after the person has died. It may make me look sadly unrealistic but it’s something I’ve striven for since I was six or seven, although I wouldn’t have known enough to describe it as such until my middle teens. The only reason I didn’t strive for it before then was that I hadn’t yet learned I didn’t already have it.

Confession: I have not given up, probably can’t give up, the notion that I may yet gain it, or already have.

Excelsior!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Thoughts. 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.

Entry 83 — MATO2, Chapter 1.05 « POETICKS

Entry 83 — MATO2, Chapter 1.05

About a week later I heard from one of my California writer friends, Moya Sinclair, who called me a little after eight in the evening sounding very cheerful and energetic. She, Annie Stanton, quite a good linguexpressive poet, Diane Walker, well-known as a television actress under her maiden name, Brewster, who had literary ambitions and was quite bright but never to my knowledge broke beyond the talented dabbler stage, and I had been a few years earlier the main members of a little writers’ group at Valley Junior College in the San Fernando Valley presided over by Les Boston, a professor there. Technically, we were doing independent studies with Dr. Boston, but in reality we friends who met weekly to discuss one another’s writing, mine at the time plays. Annie and Diane were about ten years older than I, Moya close to eighty by the time of her phone call, and she was in a convalescent home. Her circulatory system had slowly been wearing out. I fear she died there, for I never heard from her again. Both Annie and Diane died around then in their early sixties, huge unexpected losses for me.

Moya reported that Annie had been over for a visit and had left my book with her. Moya said she’d been reading parts of it and found it beautifully written, etc. She had a few adverse comments on it, too–on Geof’s word for one-word poem (“pwoermd”), for instance, but that was to be expected. Moya, for years working on an autobiographical novel, was pretty wedded to the old standards. We had a fine chat that boosted my spirits a good deal. She represented one of the main kinds of readers I hoped would like my book.

A day later I got a very positive letter from Jack Moskovitz about my book, and a lukewarm one about it from Geof. Geof, as I remember, felt I should have lightened up on the Grummaniacal coinages. I think he was right. I believe one of the things I tried to do in my two revisions of the book was to cut down on them.

The next day, according to my diary, I got lots of letters, mostly from people I sent my book to, and for the most part complimentary though Jody Offer, a California poet/playwright friend of mine, felt I got too advanced in parts–I’m sure in part because of my terminology. I was finding out, though, that my book was not as geared for non-experts as I’d hoped.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Bob Grumman, Geof Huth, Jack Moscovitz, Jody Offer. 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.

Entry 568 — Curriculum Vitae for Upcoming Show « POETICKS

Entry 568 — Curriculum Vitae for Upcoming Show

Bob Grumman

Bio: as of the beginning of 2012

Born 2 February 1941, Norwalk, Connecticut. Graduate of California State University, Northridge, with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Worked for about 13 years as a substitute teacher in Charlotte County, mainly at Charlotte High School in Punta Gorda, Florida. Previously worked as a factory worker and security guard in Norwalk, pharmacy helper (in the US Air Force), and computer operator in North Hollywood CA. Began composing visual poetry around 1965, and made his first mathematical poem sometime in the early 1970′s. Participant in international mail art since 1985. Represented in a number of university libraries and the Ruth and Marvin Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami. Considerations of his work have appeared in Meat Epoch, Factsheet Five, Taproot Reviews and elsewhere. Reference books concerned with him and his visual poetry include Volume 25 of the Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Essays series (Gale research, Detroit: 1996) and A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Schirmer Books, New York: 2000). Since around 2001 become more concerned with exhibiting his works as a visual artist than publishing them as a poet, and has contributed to a number of collective shows in visual art galleries.

Lives at 1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952.

Professional Positions

Columnist for Lost and Found Times, 1994 to 2009, when the magazine ceased publication
Contributing Editor for Small Magazine Review, 1993 to present
Contributing Editor for Poetic Briefs, 1992-1997
Columnist for Factsheet Five, 1987-1992
Publisher, The Runaway Spoon Press (RASP), 1983 to present
Co-Editor with Crag Hill of two anthologies, Vizpo auf Deutsch (1995) and Writing to be Seen (2001)
Editor of 12 Colorborations (2004)
Editor of Visio-Textual Selectricity (2008)

Professional Affiliations

Member, the National Book Critics Circle, the National Coalition of Independent Scholars, the Peace River Writers Center, the Charlotte County Visual Art Center, the Port Charlotte Tuesday Writers’ Group

Representative Shows

IV Bienal Internacional de Poesia Visual/Experimental, 1993 Monterrey, Mexico
Paradise Mail Art Exhibition, Belfast, Ireland, c. 1995
V Bienal Internacional de Poesia Visual/Experimental, 1996, Mexico City
Visuelle Poesie, Berlin, 1997
VI Bienal Internacional de Poesia Experimental, 1999, Mexico City
02txt, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2002
An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, Ohio, 2002
Writing To Be Seen, New York Center for Book Arts, 2002
Writing To Be Seen, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis, February 2003
WordSeen Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami, March 2003
Others in Edmonton, Beacon NY, Port Charlotte FL, Miami, Australia . . .

Publication Credits:

Score, Kaldron, Lost & Found Times, Modern Haiku, The Experioddicist, Transmog, Meat Epoch, Industrial Sabotage, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, Juxta, The New Orleans Review, Kalligram (Budapest, 2000), Das Haupt (Kiel, Germany, 1995), Freie Zeit Art (Vienna, 1992), Sub Bild (HeidelBerg, 1991), Das Haupt (Kiel, Germany, 1995) and numerous other zines and magazines. Also poetry (mathemaku) and a critical essay (on contemporary minimalist poetry) on-line at Karl Young’s light&dust website.

Books and Chapbooks

Poemns (visual haiku), privately-printed, 1966; reprinted by RASP, 1997
A StrayngeBook (a children’s book), Score Publications, 1987
An April Poem (visual poetry), RASP, 1989
Spring Poem No. 3,719,242 (visual poetry), RASP, 1990
Of Manywhere-at-Once (memoir), RASP, 1990; 2nd edition, 1991; 3rd edition, 1998
Mathemaku 1 – 5 (mathematical poetry), Tel-let, 1992
Barbaric Bart Meets Batperson and her Indian Companion Taco (a play), Stage Whisper, 1992
Barbaric Bart Visits God (a play), Abscond Press, 1993
Rabbit Stew, an Excerpt (a play), Hairy Labs Publishing Company, 1994
Mathemaku 6 – 12 (mathematical poetry), Tel-let, 1994
Of Poem (conventional poetry), dbqp press, 1995
Mathemaku 13 – 19 (mathematical poetry), Tel-let, 1996
min. kolt., matemakuk (translation of mathematical poetry), Budapest: Kalligram, 2000
Xerolage 30 (visual and mathematical poetry), Xexoxial Editions, 2001
Doing Long Division in Color (mathematical poetry), RASP, 2001
Mathemaku 20 – 24 (mathematical poetry), Tel-let, 2003)
Cryptographiku 1- 5 (cryptographic poetry), Tel-let, 2003
Excerpts from Poem’s Search for Meaning (conventional poetry), Sticks Press (on the Internet), 2004
Greatest Hits 1966–2005 (mixture of poetries), Pudding House, 2006
Shakespeare and the Rigidniks (theoretical psychology), RASP, 2006
From Haiku To Lyriku (literary criticism), RASP, 2007
April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now (collection of mathemaku), Otoliths, 2007
This Is Visual Poetry (visual Poetry), chapbookpublisher, 2010
Poem Demerging (conventional poetry), Phrygian Press, 2010.
A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry (Poetics), RASP, 2011.

Anthologies

Visuelle Poesie aus den USA (Germany: 1995)
a haiku celebration of fall (Napanee, Ontario: Haiku Canada,1996)
WORD SCORE UTTERANCE CHOREOGRAPHY (London: Writers Forum, 1998)
Loose Watch (London: Invisible Books, 1998)
The Secret Life of Words (San Diego: Teaching Resource Center, 2000)
Another South (Tuscaloosa AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2002)

A Brief Artist’s Statement

I’ve long composed visual poems–poems, that is, that do things visually that are as important as what they say verbally. In the past few years, I’ve become almost exclusively a composer of mathematical visual poems–visual poems, that is, that are as mathematical as they are visual and verbal. My aim with these “mathemaku,” as I call them, is to play mathematical elements off the (hopefully rich) sensory effects of painted images and poetic phraseology. My main hope for them is simply that they come across as visually appealing. But it’d be great if they also jolted an observer or two into interesting new experiences beyond the visual alone–or the verbal or mathematical alone.

–Bob Grumman, 25 December 2002

Diary Entry for 18 November 2011, 9:30 A.M.: I just ran out of gas, but expect to get back in gear before too long. I listed my fifteen framed pieces. I thought I had seventeen but was probably counting three in those cardboard frames I can’t remember the name of–and forgot to count another. My next exhibition chore should be easy: just write at least one short commentary daily on each piece I’ll be using (I don’t expect to use all the ones presently framed–some I’ll replace, and I hope to frame a few more piece).

3 P.M.: I have now made two commentaries of framed mathematical poems. I feel good about them, and semi-ready to do more. But I have to work on my book at some point, and I don’t wanna. (I hate to admit it, but I’m playing Civilization daily again. I’ve won my last two games and am doing well in my latest. So far I’ve rarely done more than dip into it while waiting for downloads, or resting from some reall accomplishment like one of my poetry commentaries.)

Final note: I did get an adequate amount of work done on my book. I’m still not done with the socioplex, but should be in two days at the very most. Meanwhile, I have new term to announce: “conseplex” for “consequential knowleplex.” This I needed to represent a vocation or avocation that is at or near the center of a person’s life. Every conspiranoid has one, one the conspiranoid is attached with exceptional intensity to.

Overstock.com Online Store

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica. 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.

Entry 1454 — Thoughts about Saroyan’s Horses « POETICKS

Entry 1454 — Thoughts about Saroyan’s Horses

I’ve been thinking about how to say why I very much like Aram Saroyan’s addition example, ocean plus forest equals horses. (1) It forces me to try to wonder some sense into it. (2) I see a fence between the never-motionless huge ocean to the left of a quiet forest and . . . horses. Visual equalities. (3) To put it most mechanistically, the poem is saying that if we take all the connotations of the word, “ocean,” and mix them with all the connotations of the word, “forest,” we’ll get all the connotations of the word, “horses.” That takes us back to (1): and I get flow of ocean continually going somewhere but never getting there, flow of horses (and living creature), forever also going nowhere . . . the forest much more slowly flowing there, too. The gallop of horses, the slower gallop of the ocean toward land, the climb and spread of a forest. This suggests (4) the haiku’s clash of two strong images to produce a third. There’s a poem somewhere in the depths of my messy mind that has the image of the ocean’s surf consisting of numberless horses galloping ashore. I find it intuitively easy to link ocean and horses, but the forest? Perhaps needed because the horses would otherwise be all flow?

the “orse” of “horses” and the “ores” of “forest” intrigue me, too, but I have found a way to make them a meaningful part of what the poem is doing–i.e., they are coincidental.

I don’t feel I’ve done more than have fun in the poem–i.e., no definitive interpretation here, for sure.

* * *

For anyone interested in my Great Adventure, I have a sad announcement: after eighteen days of valiantly working on some project I consider important, I worked only a couple of minutes on one two days ago, then did not work at all on any of them yesterday. But it’s not over! I’m just toning down my vows. My latest is that I will do significant work on one or my of my Life’s Works daily for the next 21 days, or more!
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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2014 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Thoughts. 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.

Mesopotomia « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Mesopotomia’ Category

Entry 1028 — Halaf Culture

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

Halaf Culture

In about 6000 B.C. the Hassuna culture in northern Mesopotamia was replaced by the Halaf culture. Its origins are uncertain, but it seems to have developed in the same area as the Hassuna culture. The Halaf culture survived some 600 years and spread out to over all of present-day northern Iraq and Syria, exerting an influence that reached as far as the Mediterranean coast and the highlands of the central Zagros. In some ways, however, it was outside the mainstream of development.

The plants grown were the same as in the preceding Hassuna and Samarra periods: einkorn, emmer and hexaploid wheat, two-row hulled and six-row naked and hulled barley, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas and flax. The distribution of Halaf settlements lay within the
area of dry farming so that most of the agriculture was probably
carried out without the aid of large-scale irrigation. Domestic animals included the typical five species-sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and dogs-but also wild animals were hunted.

During the Halaf period people abandoned the rectangular many-roomed houses in favor of a return to round huts, called tholoi. These varied in size from about 3 to 7 meters in diameter and are believed to have housed families of one set of parents and their children. The entrance was through a gap in the outer wall, but the design varied. Often a rectangular annex was added to the circular structure. At Arpachiyeh, round buildings with long annexes formed keyhole-shaped structures almost 20 meters long with stone walls over 1.5 meters thick.

Originally the Arpachiyeh buildings were believed to be special and used for some religious ritual. However, excavations at Yarim Tepe II have suggested that most of the tholoi were used as domestic dwellings, as the rectangular chambers were entered from the circular room and did not serve as an entrance passageway as in an igloo. The tholoi were made of mud, mud-brick or stone and possibly had a domed roof. However, those at Yarim Tepe II had walls that were only 25 centimeters thick and may have been roofed using timber beams.

Tholoi have been found throughout the range of the Halaf culture, from the upper Euphrates near Carchemish to the Hamrin basin on the Iraq-Iran border. As well as having circular dwelling houses, however, the earliest and latest Halaf levels at Arpachiyeh included rectangular architecture. One such building at the latest level had been burned, with its contents left in situ. On the floor were numerous pottery vessels, many of them beautifully decorated. There were also stone vessels, jewelry, figurines and amulets as well as thousands of flint and obsidian tools. Much of the pottery and jewelry lay beside the walls, on top of charred wood that had probably been shelves. The building was at first thought to be a potter’s workshop, but that did not explain the presence of all the precious materials. It might have been a storeroom for the community’s wealth or the treasury of a local chief. In any event, there was a remarkable concentration of wealth in this one building. Yarim Tepe also had some rectangular buildings, some of which were storerooms or houses while others, which had no distinctive plan and contained no domestic debris, had possibly been public buildings.

* * * * *

I suspect some of you will be wondering why I posted the above. One reason for it is my standard quickness to post anything that’s easy to post. But I also posted it because, as I was reading it (on pages 48 and 49 of Michaell Roaf’s Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East), I was filled with near-religious combination of awe and pleasure–just like when connecting to one of Marton Koppany’s poems, in fact!!! I thought it an excellent example of the value of what I call informrature, and the fact that is is not necessarily inferior to poetry, just different. Although, yes, the best poetry takes much more skill to create than the informrature I quote here, which is only journalism. Informrature at the level of The Origin of Species can produce as much pleasure as the best poetry, though. More exactly, I would claim that Darwin’s book caused its earliest prepared readers to enjoy it as much as Wordsworth’s The Prelude caused its earliest prepared readers.

That “prepared” is essential to the truth of what I am saying: I got what I did from the passage from the atlas because it read it during a peculiar moment of High Preparation (slightly helped by a caffeine pill I’d taken ten or fifteen minutes earlier because I felt so sleepy too many hours before bedtime). The High Preparation was caused by many different things. One of them was my having read 47 pages about Mesopotamia, and looked at the many neato photographs and drawings on them. Another was all that I’ve read about ancient civilizations. I was simply ready to feel the size and grandeur of the time and geography as both a moment and a period that I was reading about fusedly. Okay, let me try to express it more calmly. I suddenly felt the absolute banality of what I was reading about: the list of foodstuffs; the goats, sheep, etc; the ordinary families in ordinary dwellings; the trinkets, pottery, figurines, etc., all in a little piece of land, really, in a little almost static piece of time.

I absolutely believe in, and almost worship, Cultural Progress, and here, after reading of previous Near Eastern cultures to come upon one I’d never heard of, which was almost certainly very minor, but a tributary, thrilled me.

I think, too, I’m a bit burned out as an artist and verosopher. After my reading in the atlas, my mind drifted into a daydream of taking a year off from all mental endeavors and just reading books like it. I can’t. But maybe a compromise is possible. I’ll probably have to keep a good supply of caffeine pills on hand. I have to keep telling myself there’s nothing wrong with countering an obviously endocrinological deficiency with them, the way I take thyroid pills to aid my deficient thyroid gland.

Staples Office Supply

Posted in Autobiographica, History, Mesopotomia | No Comments »

Entry 1757 — My New Blog Set-Up « POETICKS

Entry 1757 — My New Blog Set-Up

My new blog’s homepage, which I hope will allow you a choice of four blogs, is here. It is operational, but the three new blogs have nothing in them yet. I consider it an achievement that I even have it to the stage it is now at.

I’d appreciate it if you would click “here” and then go to any of the three new blogs you think you may bisit again when there’s something at them. That will give me at least a little idea of what kind of nuts come here. Thanks!

A second entry point can be found in my Pages to the right as “Bob Grumman BLOGS.”

Now to celebrate the first day of my Blog-Quartet, below is my latest visual poem, thought of and rendered in full yesterday. Not very original, but it won’t be a stand-alone but the dividend of a long division poem now complete but for the rendering. It uses the notes I had here a few days ago . . . no, almost two weeks ago.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2015 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Announcements, Autobiographica, BOBGRUMMANBLOGS. 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.

Commercial Art « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Commercial Art’ Category

Entry 1596 — My Cover Poem

Thursday, October 9th, 2014

Directly below is the cover featuring the design Craig Kaplan and I came up with for the latest issue of The Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. Beneath it, from the bottom up, are my initial rough draft for the cover, then two drafts of mine (from several) combining ideas of Craig’s and mine. The poem is my “Mathemaku No. 10.”

From down&dirty to fairly high-grade commercial art, it seems to me. Two equal but different expressions of aesthetic taste. If we had gone with my initial version, I would have wanted to boost its resolution and possibly made the heart-sequence more like the sequence in the one just above it–i.e., made the upward movement less predictable. I hadn’t realized when I made my first version that the lay-out of the cover was rigidly the way it is in the top image: image in square to top right, name of publication, image in square to bottom right. I’d have a single image take up the entire page with the publication data on top of it around two thirds of the way up. Different strolks for different fokes. Also a good demonstration of why I’ve never made any money from what I’ve done in the arts.
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Posted in Autobiographica, Commercial Art, Miscellaneous Thoughts, Visimagery | No Comments »

Entry 1160 — Commercial Art Specimen

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013

I’ve always said that many commercial artists do work as good as “real artists.” The difference is simply their central goal, which is to persuade someone to buy something, however much they may at times also want to create a thing of beauty. So they are not making art, they are making advocature. I find the label below a wonderful specimen of advocary visiotextual art, but not of advocary visual poetry. A main reason I’m posting is to again make a point about what visual poetry is and is not. This is just an ornamented word. Excuse please, I should say that this is a beautifully-ornamented word, and one should be grateful for it, but that a visual poem, even an advocary visual poem, will do much more. Now if my creative brain hadn’t blown all sixteen of its fuses last year, with no new shipments of fuses due from Uranus until my next life, I’d show you what the melloyello logo would look like as a genuine advocary visual poem. That not being possible, I’ll just say it’d do something to make its visual appearance a metaphor for its text.

On the other hand, the lemon and orange slices seem pretty close to o’s–citrically mellowing beyond the o’s ending the text’s two words . . . Note: I think I couldda made a lot of money in advertising.

LLbean.com Store

Posted in Commercial Art | 2 Comments »

Entry 443 — I’m Still Here « POETICKS

Entry 443 — I’m Still Here

Just a little news bulletin to let people know I’m still around.

1. I’m scheduled for hip replacement surgery 1 June.

2. I just popped off at the Poetry magazine site against a review of recent books by Marjorie Perloff and Reginald Shepherd, Unorginal Genius and A Martian Muse, ” which–according to Robert Archabeau, Poetry’s fatuous reviewer– “have wonderful moments, and at their best each shows us a remarkable critical mind at work.” I aired my usual gripe, that the Establishment is ignoring my kind of poetry. I seem to have a need to do this every month or so–to become at least a smudge on the Surface of American Culture. I can’t simply ignore it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica. 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.

Entry 546 — I’m Back Home, and in Good shape « POETICKS

Entry 546 — I’m Back Home, and in Good shape

I walked to the hospital (about ) 2 miles from my home, getting there at a little after 5 AM. My appointment was for 5:30. My friend Linda got me home at a little after 10 AM, even though we made two small trips, one to the drugstore and one to Staples so I could buy cover stock for Marton’s book. My surgeon had told me he’d talk to me after the procedure, but he didn’t. I’m sure things went okay, though; otherwise, I’d not have been let go. One disappointment–I have to wear a catheter for six days rather than the two I’d been told I’d have to.

I’m pretty tired, this time for the legitimate reason that I only slept a half-an-hour last night. I didn’t feel particularly edgy, for I wasn’t anxious about the procedure. Maybe my body was. Stress affects it much more than it affects the part of my brain the brain calls “me.” As is often the case when I have insomnia, I had quite a few ideas. One of them was a refinement of my long-held belief that it’s unfair to hold an innovative poem to the same standards of clarity a conventional poem is held to since the former is likely only clear because one reading it has been educated in the reading of such poems since nursery school or earlier, and has (probably) not been exposed to anything like what he needs to have been to find an innovative poem clear.

The refinement is a new term: “the clarity-to-exposure ratio.” Or how clear a poem is to an engagent on a scale of, say, one to a hundred, and how much exposure he’s had to poems of its kind on the same scale. Hence, a poem by Frost may have a clarity rating of 95, but an exposure rating of 95, as well, because of what school teachers have taught him about formal verse, and his memory of nursery rhymes, and much else. One of my mathemaku may have a clarity rating of 8 (because it will have understandable words and recognizable mathematical symbols and, perhaps, recognizable graphic images). It may have the same c-to-e ratio as the Frost poem, though, if its exposure rating is only 8,which it could well be because no such poems will have been taught to its engagent.

Offhand, I would say a poem approaches ideal clarity to the degree its clarity-to-exposure ratio approaches point nine. After its exposure rating has reached 100. I make point nine (or some such figure) the ideal because perfect clarity is boring. That I consider a fact of aesthetics, not an opinion.

Western Union

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Autobiographica, 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.

Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant « POETICKS

Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant

I actually got two-and-a-half brief reviews done yesterday. None even started yet today although it’s a little after three in the afternoon. Forty minutes ago I took two APCs, so maybe I’ll get going now.

I have nothing much to write about today, just some old thoughts about world cultural peaks. I think about them fairly often, mostly when comparing my country against others, with the low evaluation of it of so many liberals in mind. While I do believe America is the greatest nation in the world right now, and has been for over a century, I feel it has only achieved one cultural peak, the period from around 1910 until 1960 in poetry. Well, maybe also a technological one I’d call the Edison Era. Getting back to the poetic period, it required many more people than England from around 1810 until 1840 had when England had its one great period of poetry. (Elizabethan England achieved maximal greatness in the drama, not poetry, in my view.) I don’t know of any other nations’ comparable poetic peaks but I’m not dumb enough to imagine that isn’t almost entirely due to my ignorance.

Actually, I don’t really think of the recent peaking of anglophonic poetry in America as belonging culturally to America, but to the British Empire. In any event, I always wonder in conjunction with my admiration of that period, how my period compares. I don’t think anything much was going on in anglophonic poetry between 1960 and 1990, although the next period of superior poetry was shaping up then. From 1990 til now, anglophonic poetry has been sizzling, I’m sure of that. It’s been at least an orderof magnitude better than the poetry of the preceding 30 years. Whether it has gotten or will get to the level or the early twentieth centure period, I can’t say. Don’t know enough about it, and am too close to it to be as objective as I should be. Certainly its poetry has been by far the most varied, the most valuably varied, poetry ever. If it’s a lesser period, it will be because most of its best poets have been too esoteric. It lacks its Yeatses and Frosts, although I hold Richard Wilbur in high esteem. And the sonnets of Michael Snider. In fact, there are probably many excellent “Frosts” out there I’ve been too busy with my own poetry to know much about. And many of our most unconventional poets have composed first-rate, accessible (or reasonably accessible) conventional poetry, too. The first name that occurs to me is Sheila Murphy. Karl Kempton and Geof Huth, as well. Who knows, too, how “accessible” posterity will find the now seemingly difficult work of others. I must remember to live to the age of 130 to find out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts. 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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Category: Autobiographica