I did so much work on the revision of my article for the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts that I forgot all about posting this day’s entry. The article is now a little over 4,000 words in length, and finished except for one final run-through that will primarily be a copy edit.
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Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Nothing much going on in entries 717 through 720 from my old blog. The best thing in them was this aphorism of mine from #720:
. Sometimes my inferiority complex gets so bad, I think I’m God.
I was thinking about bi-polarism because an interesting chap calling himself “Bipolar Guy” had gotten in touch with me.
In #717 I listed the three major elements of intelligence in my knowlecular theory of psychology, accelerance, charactration (under its now obsolete name of “character”) and accommodance and defined them. In #718 I mumbled about how few visitors my blog gets and in #719 I mentioned an idea of Dan Waber’s–doing a character-sketch daily for a year, a fun idea but not something I thought I’d be able to do, and my latest Shakespeare Authorship Question experiences.
Nothing more, mainly because I’m wrecked, having played tennis for my senior men’s doubles team. Ordinarily coulbes woul dnever tire me, but I have a bad back, a bad knee, and a bad hip, all of which I’ve been trying to rest. Didn’t want to play but our team had only 6 players available, including me, for three matches, so I hadda. I gimped through a touch match against our opponents’ number three duo. It was thrilling. Really. We had the first set in the bag, 5 -1, but lost four in a row. Then we lucked out a victory, but lost the next game. I was shot by then, really hoping only to get the thing over with. But I actually ran in to get a few short shots that I hit for winners and we won the tie-breaker. Next set we lost the first game and were out of it from then on, losing 6-2. Because we’re old, we didn’t play a third set, instead bumbling through a ten-point tie-breaker. All I can say is that they were a little more eager to lose points than we, and we won–on a put-away by . . . tah dah, ME. The others on the team who had played and finished, plus several wives and players on our team unable to play but there to root, yelled, “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby!”
Our team is now 16 and 5, and either in second place or tied for first, depending on how the one team ahead of us in the eight-team league made out.
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014
Here’s something I posted yesterday to New-Poetry:
I just wrote a comment on Seth’s latest and it was immediately deleted! Is it Seth or the magazine or what? Here’s what I wrote: “Seth . . .” Oops, I can’t quote myself because my cut and paste of what I wrote for some reason didn’t take. Basically, I said that the data collected was only from mainstream magazines that knew very little about contemporary American poetry. One set consisted only of Poetry, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Rain Taxi, Bookslut, Coldfront, On the Seawall, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly. Their review of poetry collections indicated more such collections by women were reviewed in them. I suggested Seth refute my contention that such publications ignore visual poetry and other forms of otherstream poetry by citing a serious article in any of them on visual poetry. Then I commented on the excellent female otherstream poets I had written serious articles on in publications none of the people running the studies were aware of. I said these poets were having no more success getting recognition than male otherstream poets like me.
Actually, Bookslut, which I’ve heard of but don’t know much about, and On the Seawall, which I’d never heard of before, may have published a serious article on visual poetry, but I suspect not. The others almost certainly have not. Gender ratio is an incredibly trivial matter that I shouldn’t care about, the ratio of poetry that does something interesting to poetry that doesn’t is vastly more important, and that is my main subject most of the time. When writing about poetry–which I should be doing a lot more here.
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Sunday, September 15th, 2013
I wonder when I’ll remember to save everything I type at this wretched blog before typing more than fifty words. I just finished typing a hundred or so–they were not important, but a struggle to get down, and the entry was almost done, when I hit a wrong key an deleted everything except part of a word. This happens to me two or three times a month. I have no idea what causes it. TIME TO SAVE!!
My passing political thought, which was an old, unoriginal one I was posting only because I had nothing else to post, was an observation about Americans’ attitude toward slavery. I guessed that 90% of them believed the government should run every aspect of every American’s life–except theirs. I opined that most Americans didn’t think of themselves as enslaved to the degree that they are because almost all of the things they are forced to do they would do without being forced, and almost none of the things they are prevented from doing, they would never have any inclination of doing.
By the time I’d written my thought, I’d come up with a few other very minor things to increase my word-count with. One was that Seth Abramson never took me up on my invitation to participate in a dialogue with him, or even have the politeness to let me know he wouldn’t. So I will never learn he means by his term, “metamodernist poetry.” I suspect he realized how emptily bogus–and definable–it was. My real regret, though, is that I won’t make his list of One Thousand Important Poetry People on the Internet or whatever his next inane list is, when it comes out.
Okay, three paragraphs, three saves.
I also said something about things on the homefront: that I’ve been feeling more and more to be a non-participant in the world, or–at any rate–the cultural world, but am close to finishing my latest guest blog for Scientific American. Somehow I’ve managed to get one done every four weeks for fifteen months. I feel I’ve made a number of near-approaches to Important Understandings along the way, too. Not that it’s helped me any in the Big World that I know of. . . .
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Saturday, August 24th, 2013
Okay, the title is a sarcastic joke: the dialogue is only between Seth Abramson and me. My part will be Very Serious, though–as is the paragraph from a comment Seth made to my blog of a week or so ago that I’ve made his part of the following, which I sincerely hope will become just the first exchange in a multi-part series (that will become a book that will make both of us rich–okay, no more of my dumb sarcasm . . . I hope).
Seth: “Metamodernism is a tendency that’s still emerging, much like postmodernism was in the mid-1960s.”
1. as far as I’m concerned, postmodernism (considering poetry only) never emerged because it never became significantly different from the kinds of poetry being called “modernist.” The great innovator, Ashbery, just used the jump-cut poetry of “The Waste Land” more in his poetry than Eliot had.
2. “Modernism” is a moronic tag because it is based not on what the poetry it covers is and does but on when it was composed. “Postmodernism” is worse.
3. At around 1910-1920 a true change in the arts finished occurring. It seems to me the change was simple, no more than the acceptance of significant innovation. In poetry perhaps two specific innovations dominated. One was the broadening of allowed linguistic practice that the acceptance of free verse initiated followed by tolerance of all possible registers, and then the loosening of attachment to prose grammar beginning (seriously) with jump-cut poetry. The second was the acceptance of pluraesthetic poetry, or the significant aesthetic use of more expressive modalities than words in poetry, visual poetry being the main example of this but far the only example.
4. The chronology is of course much ore complex and difficult to unravel than the above suggests, but I’m speaking of when each new kind of poetry came into prominence, not when it was first known (which in some cases may have been centuries ago).
5. I don’t consider “otherstream poetry,” mine or others’, to be any kind of important advance on anything called modernist. I do take pride in two kinds of it that I may be the inventor of, or at least the first serious proponent of: long division poetry and cryptographic poetry. The first of these, I have to brag, has great potential for poets because of it forces those making it to be multiply metaphoric as well as makes it more open to pluraesthetic adventure than any other kind of poetry I know of. I’m prouder of the second kind because I’m more certain I invented it. Alas, I do not believe it has any future: I may myself, with just ten specimens of it, done all that can be done with it.
Seth: “If you want to understand my own (present) take on it, which of course is just proto-, for it’s entirely fluid and still developing as a concept and a poetics (it was first written of in Europe in 2010), you can read my poems on Ink Node (two poems called ‘from The Metamodernist’).” I found the following two reviews at Ink Node:
Provincetown Center: The Fine Artworks
Jerry Sandusky has been performing his live act in the middle of the 600 block of Provincetown’s Main Street for six years. The act’s conceit is a simple one: Stravinsky stands naked on a street corner while painted head to toe in gold paint. The visual effect, given the artist’s meticulously-rendered 1821 “bobby” outfit, is to render Sandusky indistinguishable from a statue of a 1920s London policeman. He can often be seen in the middle of the 600 block of Provincetown’s Main Street waving his nightstick threateningly at passing children and posing playfully for photographs with healthy children. The one wrinkle in his now ten year-old routine is that he looks so convincingly statue-like that those who pose for pictures with him are wont to tell friends and relatives that photographs of Sandusky are in fact snapshots of a popular statute on the outskirts of Provincetown. It gets them every time! But then the joke is never revealed–unless, of course, it wasn’t fallen for in the first instance–meaning that for every enemy or stranger shown a photo of someone they hate or have never met standing with “Jimmy Sardoski” in Truro Center, at least ten hear the story of the famous “Jimmy Stravinsky” statue in Provincetown’s main square. And so it is that the statute has, over the last two decades, become one of Provincetown’s foremost law-themed attractions, though admittedly a difficult one to find. Jerry Sandusky Jr., who’s been performing his live act on the 600 block of Provincetown’s Curtain Street for five years, presently does a brisk trade imitating the statue in the middle of the 500 block of Provincetown’s Main Street; the requested donation per performance is five quid. You can donate to Jerry Sandusky Sr. here.
Seth: “Whether or not it’s something you admire or enjoy it is most definitely not something that’s ‘knownstream’–I have a library of over 2,000 contemporary poetry titles in my apartment right now that tell me so, inasmuch as 99.7% of them militantly exclude all metamodernistic indicia.”
Frankly, I find it hard to believe Seth considers the texts above to be poems. In fact, I think I’m missing something. Note: I vehemently oppose the belief that a poem can be anything anyone wants to call a poem. My definition is simple: a work of art in which meaningful words are centrally significant and a certain percentage of what I call “flow-breaks” (usually lineation, but anything having a comparable effect) are present. So-called “prose-poems” do not qualify. My definition is pretty conventional and probably more acceptable of poetry people than any other. My philosophy is that a definition of anything must distinguish the thing defined from everything that thing is not.
From another example of metamodern poetry I found in an Internet search, I got the impression that for Seth it’s some kind of frenetic pluraesthetic performance art. It didn’t seem to adhere to my definition of poetry though interesting-sounding. can’t say I learned enough about it to reach any even semi-valid conclusion about it, though.
Seth: P.S. The ‘psychoanalysis’ comment was re: your claim I do things to win friends–ever. That concept is foreign to me. But as you won’t believe me just saying so, look at it this way: If I’m merely ambition without courage, tell me, why do I have more enemies than you, and more powerful enemies, at that?”
I consider this outside the dialogue I’m trying to get going I want to reply to it, anyway–because I think poets are as interesting to discuss as poetry, and because I’d never thought much about my literary enemies. After thinking it over, I feel that while I have at least one hostile literary opponent, and am disliked by probably more than a handful of people, my only genuine poetry enemy is The Poetry Establishment. In short, I have fewer literary enemies than Seth, but one who is far stronger (and evil) than any of his. Evil: yes, because it has prevented me from making a living, or–actually–from making just about anything as a poet and poetry critic. The fact that it has done this unconsciously via its control of what’s published, critiqued and rewarded is irrelevant: it has done it.
As for Seth, I merely expressed the opinion that in making his list of 200 poetry people as important “advocates” of American poetry, all of them well-known members of the poetry establishment or younger people I strongly suspect (from having seen some of their work) writing and advocating nothing but the kind of poetry the establishment has certified–unless Seth can convince me that metamodern poetry is some kind of un- or anti-establishment poetry. It’s hard for me to think he’d do that unless he wanted the establishment to be his friend, but who knows?
At this point I have a question for Seth: what do you think of the idea of making a thorough list, with definitions, of all the contemporary schools of American poetry? I long ago started such a list. I asked readers to refine an add to it. Almost none did. Most who responded to it were against it. I believe because they want the public to remain ignorant of all the kinds of poetry being composed besides theirs–they want in other words, to maintain their monopoly. I on the other had think nothing could be of more value to poetry.
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Wednesday, August 21st, 2013
Ten Important American Othersteam Poets
John E. Bennett
Karl Kempton
Guy Beining
K.S. Ernst
Marilyn Rosenberg
Carol Stetser
John Martone
Scott Helmes
Karl Young
Michael Basinski
My list’s title demonstrates one reason I’m so little-known a commentator on poetry: it doesn’t scream that it’s of the ten best American Otherstream Poets, just a list of a few important ones. What makes them “otherstream?” The fact that you’ll almost certainly not find them on any other list of poets on the Internet.
This entry is a bit of a reply to Set Abramson–not because I want to add these names to his list but because two of the names on it have been doing what he calls metamodern poetry for twenty years or more, as far as I can tell from my hazy understanding of his hazy definition by example of metamodern poetry. Both are extraordinary performance poets mixing all kinds of other stuff besides a single language’s words into their works. I would suggest to Seth that he do a serious study of them, or maybe just Bennett, whose work is more widely available on the Internet, and who frequently uses Spanish along with English in it. It would be most instructive to find out how metamodern Seth takes Bennett to be, and what he thinks of him. Warning: Bennett’s range is so great that it’s quite possible one might encounter five or ten collections of his work that happen to be more or less in the same school, and less unconventional than it is elsewhere, so one might dismiss him as not all that innovatively different.
Which prompts me to e.mail John to suggest that he work up a collection that reveals something of his range by including one poem representative of each of the major kinds of poetry he composes. So, off am I to do just that
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
Seth Abramson has posted a new list at the Huffington Review. Basically it’s a list of those poetry people he wants to like him–al the main members of the American Poetry Establishment, and a sprinkling of other knownstreamers hoping t get into the Establishment one day. He calls it “The Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry.” Needless to say, no one who main poetry interest is visual poetry is on it. I was hoping Dan Schneider would be on it, but he wasn’t. It seems of close to no value to me, even from the point of view of knownstreamers. Everybody in the field knows who the bignames Abramson names are, and the no-names will make little impression among so many other names.
I posted a negative comment to Abramson’s blog that never appeared–because he’s a jerk as well as incompetent, or just due to some Internet glitch, possibly due to me? Can’t say.
I didn’t try to post another comment at Abramson’s blog but said a few things about it at New-Poetry, where it got the usual small flurry of attention Abramson’s lists always get there. After wondering what happened to my comment, I said, “Anyway, here’s my final opinion of (the list): a long, boring cheer for the status quo in American poetry that ignores the full range of contemporary poetry.”
As I later wrote at New-Poetry, if I were making a list like Abramson’s, I’d call it a list of people doing . . . a lot for contemporary American Poetry and limit it to ten names or so. Three on it would be Karl Young, Anny Ballardini and James Finnegan (who runs New-Poetry). I later remembered Geof Huth, who should certainly be on it. I thought maybe one or two that are on the other list deserved to be on it, but certainly not most of them–although probably just about all of them are doing good things for their small section of mainstream poetry.
Tad Richards (who actually said at New-Poetry that I should be on the list!) wondered if “representing a small section (was) really a reason to be left off the list.” I replied, “Not a list of 200+ names, no. I was speaking of my own list of TEN people doing good work for contemporary American Poetry. Of course, we’re in an Internet discussion, so consisting of comments not necessarily thoroughly thought out, at least from me. I can see the value of promoting just one kind of poetry–IF few others are bothering with it. And, sure, even if someone is writing about Ashbery and able to say something new about him, that’s a contribution. BUT, I say, not enough by itself to put that person on my list.
“While speaking of my list, I would add that it would only be of publishers, editors and critics. They are the ones in positions to really do something for poetry. Of course, many of them can also be poets. And teachers–but only if they also are publishers, editors or critics. What we desperately need, I believe, are visible writers directing people not to poets but to schools of poetry they might enjoy, and not just pointing, but saying what the members of the schools are doing and how to appreciate it. Who on Seth’s list is doing that–for more than one or two schools?
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Thursday, September 6th, 2012
Seth Abramson’s latest group of Huffington Post reviews is now up here. It includes a few words about Skip Fox’s Sheer Indefinite. It may be the first time Abramson has reviewed a book I have a copy of. He may have reviewed other poets whose work I liked, though. I learned of the review at New-Poetry, where Skip is a fellow participant. As for Abramson, I not too long ago said some negative things about him here. Here’s what I wrote about Abramson’s column at New-Poetry earlier today:
I don’t think I’ve read a complete review of Abramson’s before today—since so few of the poets he’s interested in interest me. But today I read the one that was half on Skip’s book. Lots of generalities about the two books under review, with no supporting quotations, and blather about the small portion of the poetry scene Abramson is familiar with. Lots of gush, e.g.: “in poetry, as Charles Olson once wrote, every element must be at once a high-energy construct and a high-energy discharge.” This, supposedly, is better than 19th-Century poetry critics’ calls for “beautiful language.” He knows what poetry should and should not be, and spends most of his time telling his readers, with tripe like the Olson quotation. In one of the reviews in his latest entry, he quotes a poet under review, but more for texts that indicate how the poet thinks than how he writes. More typically, he makes statements like, “Nguyen is a master of the poetic line, a distinction considerably rarer in these times than it ought to be,” without telling us just what makes Nguyen that, and why it’s good for a poet to be that.
.One good thing Abramson’s review has is a link at the end to another review of Skip’s book. It’s not much better than Abramson’s but quotes several passages from Sheer Indefinite, including this:.
Neither does the world answer but
in mute response. Cold
wind this morning before
dawn, cold
rock in its eye,
frozen
dream in its mind.
–which is just about exactly the kind of thing I like best in linguexpressive (entirely verbal) poetry..I love the boxes the Huffington has put above Abramson’s tripe for people to click on, by the way. Each has one of the following words in it: “Inspiring,” “Funny”,”Typical,” “Important,” “Outrageous,” “Innovative,” “Beautiful.” Great set of choices.
It is possible, too, that an opposite of mine may share my liking for fresh locutions and be more or less as sensitive to them as I am. Or a truly fine poet may do whatever he does so well that almost anyone must like him.
Other Things: I have to report something of Major Importance that I did a few hours ago. To understand the magnificence of my achievement, you must know that I tend to save things. Not quite everything. I’m able to throw out newspapers as soon as I’ve read them, and some magazines. Clothes I can no longer wear. (Underwear with more than three large rips in them, for example.) Standard food-related garbage. Junk mail. It’s hard to think of anything else, but I’m sure there are other things. My house is cluttered but not ridiculously. And I have gotten rid of a lot of old video equipment I had–an editing something-or-other, stuff like that. I set a few dead bicycles out for pick-up, too, and just a few days ago moved five bicycles I know I could get into running condition again if I only had time from my lanai to my carport. Three of them are now squeezed between the shed at one end of the carport and the defunct car that’s been parked in it for more than twenty years, serving as a storage shed for correspondence (which I have four filling cabinets in the car for). Two are against the house. I sort of hope someone will steal them. But I may learn of someone I can give one or more of them to. Or maybe someone will pay me something for spare parts or salvageable metal. In any case, they are now out of the way, so I have room on the lanai for a few more things.
My Major Achievement was throwing out over a hundred packing envelopes, and the like, that things had been mailed to me in and I thought I could re-use. Not completely unreasonable, for I have re-used a number of such things. But it was obvious that I was adding to my supply regardless of how often I used something from it. I also had a bunch of unused packing envelopes I’d bought in large quantity when I thought my press would have mail order customers. Several times I’d thought it might be wise to throw a few envelopes out, but never did. Today, though, I threw all of them out except a box with perhaps twenty of them in it that there was a good place for on the lanai. (I couldn’t possibly throw all of them out! Some of them had interesting stamps on them–or mail art scribbles.)
About a week ago I vowed for the fifteenth or twentieth time to put mine house in order. I was going to spend two hours a day at it. That quickly became one hour a day. Now it’s five minutes a day. The problem is that I got the real clutter taken care of pretty quickly, but couldn’t figure out what to do next. I think I have now: be cruel to a lot of books. I have over a thousand, I’m sure, and I expect to want to read no more than ten of the many I haven’t yet read. It’s emotionally near impossible for me to throw them out, and I doubt the local library would want any of them–or anybody I know locally would. so the plan is to box them. I’m speaking of non-vocation-related books. I have boxed a lot of poetry books, and will try to box a few more, but I can’t be sure I won’t ever again want to look at them, or need to, to check on something, or have a friend interested in one of them.
I’m some kind of data-addict, I think. It’s not a serious affliction, just a bothersome one, particularly for someone as impoverished as I’ve always been. I have over a dozen, maybe over thirty, books on sub-atomic physics, of which I’ve read maybe one entirely, and three or four slightly. I’ve bought books like that always expecting I’ll finally read one and understand it! Math books, too. Many of my large collection of psychology books I have read but doubt I’ll look at again. I’ve read most of my history books, too, and would love to reread just about all of them, but never will. I have a lot of hard-bound plays, too, but stopped reading them when my hopes of becoming a performed playwright sputtered out 25 years or so ago. Some I would enjoy, but I prefer novels for escape reading. It’s absurd how many different subjects I have books about, most of which I never read–never truly realizing that I needed to focus, always wildly trying to expand my circle of knowledge until it enclosed all known data. I always set myself many more goals than I can ever accomplish, too. Ah, but my reading goals are just Enough. Time to fill this five-foot carton I have with more books. A few hours ago, I dumped four books in it. I can probably fill it up. Then I’ll have space to try to re-arrange my unboxed so I’ll know where each of them is for the rest of my life! Well, so that I won’t call myself horrible names as I totter through the house yet against hunting for a book of the highest importance, possibly even one I wrote myself, and not finding it more that once a year instead of once a week.
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Friday, July 13th, 2012
I had a headache when I went to bed last night that I eventually took an Advil for, which didn’t help, so at 5 A.M. I took a stronger dose of pain-medication that included the pill with an opiate in it that is my equivalent of a steroid. I believe Seth Abramson’s attack on my term, “otherstream,” contributed to my headache. I felt his argument against the term was very weak and ill-stated, but I think I’ve been somewhat stressed out for a long time–years–by my need constantly to throw my little wooden arrows at some Poetry Establishment fortress–undentingly. Now I would have to throw my arrows a goddamned gain, with almost surely no more chance of making a dent in the status quo than ever. I had to take the zoom-dose, as I call the pill with the opiate in it plus two APCs (which have caffeine, which is as important for me steroidally as the opiate) to get myself going, anyway.
Even without pharmaceutical help, I’d gotten some good ideas to use against Abramson, and/or in the larger text I hope to write about the otherstream. They include a new (guess what?) . . . coinage! My best essays as a critic almost always begin with some coinage or other of mine. This time it’s “minorstream,” and not important, at all, except that it allows me to dump “knownstream”–an excellent term that never quite fit into my system for naming the main kinds of contemporary poetry–typologically. It is now about 8 A.M. I’ll finish this entry with either my response to Abramson, or my excuse for not having finished one.
* * * I’m back nine hours later with an essay of almost 3,000 words that I consider a good rough draft
For years I’ve been arguing rather passionately for recognition of what I’ve called “otherstream poetry.” Recently, an essay by Jake Berry in The Argotist Online put me fairly central in a discussion of what I view as the opposition of the poetry establishment to otherstream poetry because of my having coined “otherstream,” and because I was one of the sixteen people who accepted an invitation to respond to what Jake wrote. For over a week the essay and the responses to it got no significant attention. Finally Seth Abramson, who was in the process of writing a series of essays that seemed to have something to do with the establishment/otherstream opposition, was drawn to defend his series against two snipes at it. One was by Jeffrey Side, who, as editor of The Argotist Online, was responsible for the publication of Jake’s essay and the discussion of it, the other by me, neither of any consequence. Abramson writes for The Huffington Review. Who knows how influential he is. All I know is that he’s posted lists of “ten best poems” that I have written contemptuously of, and short essays showing little or no knowledge of the otherstream. An establishment hack, in other words—or perhaps only a sub-establishment hack.
Which gives me an excuse to give my definition of “the Poetry Establishment.” Make that “the current American Poetry Establishment,” which I will hereafter refer to as simply, “the Establishment.” There most assuredly is one, but its members and supporters scoff at references to it because it is not a formal institution. It is also difficult to define with precision. Moreover, to speak of any powerful “establishment” paints one a probable conspiracy nut.
To start with, the Establishment consists of (1) a great many junior college, college and university English departments. I’m tempted to say it consists of all such departments, but there may be some, in junior colleges or very small colleges, that are too uninfluential to qualify as part of the Establishment. Add to this (2) all trade publications publishing poetry and/or commentary on poetry, plus all junior college, college and university presses’ staffs, again with the proviso that some may be too minor to count—those with a circulation of little over a hundred, say. One must also include (3) the few visible commentators on poetry such as Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom—those whose readership is a thousand or more. There are also (4) the members of formal establishment institutions such as the American Academy of Poets, and (5) whoever it is at significant grants- and awards-bestowing formal establishment institutions such as the Pulitzer Prize Committee; the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Book Foundation, and so on, that pick the recipients of their prizes. That few or none of these groups are formally affiliated with each other is irrelevant: together they act in unison (instinctively, I believe) to favor the status quo over what I call “the Otherstream.” (I’d be surprised if I haven’t overlooked any others, so would welcome additions to my list.)
In the eighties, when I coined the term, “the Otherstream,” I only intended it to apply to poetry. Later, because I believe it covers all the arts (all the sciences, too), I replaced “poetry” with “arts,” as it is in the version I wrote for Jake’s essay, without really thinking about it. It was a bad move, because complicating the issue and because I don’t know enough about any art but poetry to be able to argue for the validity of my term’s application to it. Ergo, from now on. consider the term to apply only to contemporary American poetry.
Note well, that my term refers to kinds of poetry, not to individual poets. In other words, just because John Blank and Samantha Wicker have published collections of standard free verse that the Establishment has ignored does not make them “otherstream.” Nor does the Establishment’s brief, accidental or token recognition of a poet whose specialty is a kind of otherstream poetry such as sound poetry, make him suddenly “mainstream”—“mainstream” being those kinds of poetry recognized (more than tokenly or accidentally) by the Establishment as having value.
Defining major generalities like whatever I mean by “otherstream poetry,” is not easy. Hence, over the past twenty-five years, I’ve re-defined it many times. My attempt to get it right for Jake’s essay was the following:
‘Otherstream’ is my adjective for works of art the great majority of arts academics, well-known critics, commercial publishers and commercial magazine editors know little more than the names of, if that. A brief definition: art of a kind that’s not taught in college courses. For me, it means approximately, but only approximately, the opposite of ‘mainstream.’ What it’s the exact opposite of is ‘knownstream.’ That’s because some art is knownstream, like certain kinds of very formal verse–the sestina, say, is well known to most literature professors but is not what you’d call a kind of ‘mainstream’ poetry.”
It is this definition that Seth Abramson takes on, with the claim that “we need to point out from the outset that it’s not at all functional, for five reasons.” Three of his reasons concern terms not of hardly importance to what my definition is about. He finds genuine faults in them, but not faults that would keep anyone but a ridiculously literal-minded reader from know what I meant. He then claims my main definition is a tautology, which is preposterous, as I will show. He then has trouble with my term, “knownstream,” due to his excessive literal-mindedness. He never addresses what my term is centrally about, the difference between certified poetry and the poetry otherstream. My definition definitely had a few slight flaws, but it was still definitely functional.
I will soon get to Abramson’s objections. First, though, I would like to thank him sincerely for taking up Jake’s, Jeff’s, and my issue, and taking it up at some length (although I fear he could use an editor specializing in cutting). I may finally get my definition of the otherstream completely right, and take care of the problem I’ve always had with poetry which, in my view, is neither otherstream nor mainstream, thanks to what he wrote.
Abramson’s first reason for considering “otherstream” non-functional is that my term,
“Arts academics” (his emphasis) is not restricted to (and definitionally cannot be restricted to) English departments, so it could include a lot of people Grumman couldn’t possibly be speaking of. Yet there are also many within English departments who we wouldn’t term “arts” academics, so it doesn’t include them either. Then there are those outside “the academy” who consciously and consistently and conspicuously “academicize” discourse on and surrounding poetry (particularly avant-garde poetries) through the use of specialized terminology (often misuse, like the avant-garde’s bastardization of the term “parataxis”). Like Grumman himself. Are these folks “arts academics” also? No one knows.
I admit that my term is a muddy one, but quite innocent and of little account. (Nonetheless, it won’t be in my revised definition.) I contend that just about any of my readers will have an idea of what an arts academic is that’s reasonably close to mine. It’s basically professors and professor-types, to be no less vague—because there’s no need for great clarity in a definition the aim of which is merely to convey gists.
Next Abramson cites my “great majority” as a weasel word. Sure, it’s a weasel word, but I contend that it’s an appropriate, necessary one. I suppose I could have used “90% or more,” but it seems to me someone less ridiculously exacting than Abramson would know I meant that, or something near that. Remember, the context is a paper arguing that a great portion of the contemporary American poetry continuum has been slighted. Would “great majority” mean 51% in such a paper?
He cites “well-known” as a similar weasel word. Baloney. I’m willing to let each individual reader use his own definition of “well-known,” for I’m pretty sure he won’t use it to mean someone like me, whose blog may have a hundred readers—especially, again, in the context of an essay arguing what Jake’s argues.
Later Abramson has trouble with what I mean by “commercial publisher.” He himself answers the question with “trade press,” which is what I meant, but which “commercial publisher,” a near-synonym, got into my head first. In my improved definition I will more carefully describe which kind of publisher I mean, although I don’t think it’s possible to pin it down exactly. Again, though, almost anyone reading me would know that I mean publisher of the kinds of books that you’ll find in places like Books-a-Million.
Abramson has trouble with “knownstream,” too:
The term “knownstream,” like the term “otherstream,” depends entirely for its definition upon a term Grumman does not define–the “mainstream.” The “mainstream” is defined in a you-all-know-what-I-mean kind of way, yet that’s hardly good enough — as if we look at high-school level instruction (at least up until the mid-1990s) we’d probably say that received forms like sonnets are exactly what high school teachers teach. So when did the sonnet become non-mainstream, if it’s still the form of poetry most Americans are familiar with (I’d frankly speculate) as compared to any other? Whose mainstream are we speaking of?
I feel I don’t have to define “mainstream” in my definition of “otherstream.” If the reader has no good idea what I mean, it’s his responsibility to look it up, which he could in any standard dictionary, or he could consult other works of mine. But I do define it: it’s the approximate opposite of “otherstream.” That makes it what is taught in colleges. And I repeat that it isn’t important for the reader to know precisely what’s mainstream, otherstream or knownstream, only have a rough idea that there are three important kinds of poetry extant, and one of them is being unfairly ignored by the Establishment.
Abramson’s silliest argument against my term was calling my short definition of it a tautology:
The “brief definition” of “otherstream” art is “art that’s not taught in college courses”? Isn’t that a tautology? (Q: What’s the “otherstream”? A: Art that’s not taught in college courses. Q: How do you know it’s not taught in college courses? A: Because it’s the “otherstream,” dummy!).
This seems outright insane to me. If someone asked me what the otherstream was, and I told him it’s art that’s not taught in college courses, and he asked me how I knew it wasn’t, I would never tell him it wasn’t because it was the otherstream. After stating that I was really speaking only of poetry, which I knew something about, admitting that I really meant that less than one percent of all college courses devoted to literature had to do with otherstream poetry. I would go one to tell him I knew this because of my amazing able to infer it from: (1) the near-total absence of otherstream poetry in the books used in college classes such as the various Norton anthologies; (2) the near-total absence of otherstream poetry appearing in the books and magazines published by college and university presses; (3) the near-total absence of any mention in books about poetry written by English professors that I’d read, or read reviews of, or browsed the table of contents of; (4) my never having heard from any of the many poets I know who produce otherstream poetry that they’d been invited to read at any college; (5) my having written many times in Internet discussion groups about the Establishment’s ignorance of the otherstream without anyone’s ever denying my argument (who had the slightest idea what kind of poetry otherstream poetry is); and much else of the same sort, such as Abramson’s own long dissertation-in-progress that seems to posit a war between opposing college and university faculties as having had something of consequence to do with the state of American poetry, but says just about nothing concerning otherstream poetry, which has grown and flourished in spite of its having been ignored by both faculty-groups Abramson seems to be talking about.
My final and greatest annoyance with Abramson is with his suggestion that “quite possibly Grumman designed his terms that way (“poorly”) –and with that intention (assuring that “no one can ever quantify which poets or poetries or poems are ‘otherstream,’ so all cultural capital accruing to that term stays with Grumman”). Now it happens that I am fanatically in favor of total freedom of speech, so I would never take poor Seth to court for his allegation. I have to say, however, that statements like it are about the only verbal abuse that offends me. In this case, if Abramson had read my response to Jake’s essay, he would have seen that I state with more than reasonable clarity pretty precisely what kinds of poetry my term refers to (i.e., a list of them “would include . . . visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, contragenteel poetry, mathematical poetry, infra-verbal and grammar-centered poetry (the two main schools of genuine language poetry, cruptographic poetry, cyber poetry, and others I’ve forgotten about or missed”). But even in my general definition I define what I mean with enough objectivity for anyone likely to read my writings or Abramson’s to know what poets or poetries or poems are “otherstream.” I say otherstream poetries are poetries “of a kind that are not taught in college courses.” How can anyone not know from this what I mean? Go to a few colleges and list what kinds of poetry are taught there. Compare it to a list of all the varieties of poetry currently composed in America. If you find anything on your second list that is not on your first list, it is probably otherstream. True, you would have to get samples of kinds of poetry taught from a great many colleges to be sure any particular kind of poetry was indeed otherstream.
Otherstream poets are poets who compose poetry “of a kind that are not taught in college courses”; and otherstream poems are “of a kind that are not taught in college courses.” But, as previously stated, my definition is of kinds of poetries only.
Your biggest problem (and Abramson’s) is that the Establishment will keep you ignorant of all the varieties of poetry being composed so your list of all extant kinds of poetry will be defective.
Needless to say, I should not have said otherstream poetry is what’s “not taught in college courses,” but in my hurry to knock out my definition committed the common error of all-or-nothing. I should have said otherstream poetry is what’s very rarely taught in colleges. No, what I should have said is what I’ll be saying in my final definition, “To put it in brief, it is poetry that not more than twenty of our country’s junior college, college and university literature teachers devotes any significant attention to (i.e., as much as five minutes of an entire course).” I claim that almost any reasonable reader would have understood what I wrote to mean not what I said but what I must have meant if sane—since it wouldn’t be sane to claim no college taught any kind poetry however arcane.
It is now time to unveil my Final Definition of Otherstream Poetry:
“Otherstream” is my adjective for kinds of poetries that no more than twenty or thirty members of the contemporary American Poetry Establishment, as previous defined, have any significant knowledge of. To put it in brief, it is poetry that not more than twenty of our country’s junior college, college and university literature teachers devotes any significant attention to (i.e., as much as five minutes of an entire course). To specifically list the current kinds of otherstream literature is difficult because of their lack of recognition, but my best list at the moment is visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, contragenteel poetry, mathematical poetry, cyber poetry, infra-verbal and grammar-centered poetry (the two main schools of genuine language poetry), polylingual poetry almost certainly other I can’t think of at the moment or don’t know about. I might add that there are a number of varieties of some of these, particularly of visual poetry.
It is the opposite of “Mainstream,” which is mine and many others’ adjective for all the kinds of poetry sanctioned by the Establishment—in the words of Charles, Bernstein, it is our country’s “Official Verse Culture.” The mainstream, to go on, is the kind poetry that takes up 99% of the time devoted to the teaching of poetry at 99% of the junior colleges, colleges and universities in the U.S. It is the kind of poetry poetry critics more than 500 Americans have heard of write about 99.9% of the time. It is the kind of poetry 101%–ooops, I mean 99.99% of the money cultural foundations award poets. It is the kind of poetry that takes up 99.67% of the pages of every poetry anthology or poetry collection that is published in America that reaches more than 500 people.
Because there are kinds of poetry well-known to, or at least somewhat known to, but pretty much ignored by members of the establishment such as the haiku, I distinguish it from both the mainstream and the otherstream as the “minorstream.” I suspect, though that more American poets compose, and more people love, minorstream poetry, which includes narrative poetry in the tradition of Robert W. Service, than mainstream poetry.
One last bit of news: Jeffrey Side is also taking on Abramson, who attacked his introduction of the Berry essay. His thrashing of Abramson is here.
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I walked four miles today. My physical therapist and my surgeon are agreed that I shouldn’t walk more than half a mile. But I had somewhere to go, and have this weird self-belief in my ability to walk. I don’t have the same self-belief in any other physical ability so haven’t done and won’t do anything else I’m not supposed to. I’m not sure what my point is–maybe something about aconceptual knowledge versus conceptual expertise.
But also to explain why I’m too tired to say more, today, about William Logan in the latest issue of New Criterion except that he has finally actually written about a poet I consider avant-garde (albeit, barely), Rae Armantrout. I guess he had to since she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and has been a member of the Academy of American Poets and otherwise credentialed for quite a while. He pans her, of course. Ignorantly, of course. Okay, semi-ignorantly. The main thing is that he discusses her–for over a page. Bringing the New Criterion briefly up to 1980.
He also discusses Wilbur’s latest, but I only read the part about Armantrout. Tired. I’ll read the rest of Logan’s commentary, though–I read every word of every issue of the New Criterion. I figure it gives me a good anchor in 1950 to sail into newer things from. I truly wish there were a magazine around as good about 2000 as it is about 1950 (and cultural figures repeating it in 2011).
Later Note: The book was Broken English, by Heather McHugh. It showed up. I had left it in the car of the friends who’d driven me home from the healthcare center with a lot of other stuff in a large shopping bag. I guess I’m glad I found it. I’m very glad of the stuff that turned up with it, which included some magazines and two other books that it would have driven me beserk to have looked for and not found. I wasn’t totally stupid, by the way: I called Linda, my ride home, and asked her to check her car.
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!
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.
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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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hey
hang in, Man as,
I too spend most of my time (now) looking for things “lost”
&usually find them in the last place that I left them..
.
I wrote a poem/ a fragment back in 1968 I KNOW that
I did
as I remember it
is on a slip of yellow legal pad-paper
again
hang in & keepontruckin and
I’ll write again when I have less time…
look for me in the funnies !