Category: Criticism

Conrad Didiodato « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Conrad Didiodato’ Category

Entry 862 — What’s A Literary Critic?

Saturday, September 15th, 2012

There’s a discussion at leafepress.com the title of which is, “What is Literary Criticism? What is a Literary Critic?” It’s mainly between Conrad DiDiodato and John Bloomberg-Rissman, but Ed Baker takes a few potshots at the others, basically reiterating the standard belief of the romantic poet that criticism is irrelevant to poets.

The discussion annoyed me because it made no references to my criticism. Of course, I didn’t really expect it to, although Conrad knows a little of my work, but I have trouble listening to people taking tenth-rate critics seriously when my work is available. Yes, I am that arrogantly convinced of the value of my criticism. Not that I’m all that sure it’s any good, but that I am positive that it’s many orders of magnitude better than Derrida’s, say, or DeMan’s, or that moron Foucault, which these guys seem to admire (although they do seem to be familiar with a wide range of critics, some of whom I don’t take as tenth-rate, like Cleanth Brooks.

The discussion annoyed me more because, like so many such discussions, it starts nowhere, really, and splathers inconclusively severalwhere. Its central defect is absence of defined axiom-setting terms—due to the standard belief of its participants that “artworks . . . can NEVER be fully unpacked.” The truth is that any artwork can be unpacked sufficiently to satisfy any sane person. Just as the distance from my house to yours can be measured sufficiently to satisfy any sane person although it can never be measure perfectly.

This absence of defined terms allows them to say sometimes interesting things, and not worry about contradiction. And it satisfies the political need of the naïve to feel certain all beliefs are equally true/false, just as all persons are equally good/bad. The only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. This is a problem, because false beliefs are much more likely to lead to grief than true beliefs—as every knows intuitively but intellectuals keep out of their verbal awarenesses. For example, an intellectual won’t make a fifty-foot swan dive into a pool whose water he knows is frozen because his reptile brain will give him nausea at the thought of doing so. But the nausea will never work its way up into his verbal awareness and bother him with the possibility that a belief that a fifty-foot dive into a pool of solid ice is harmful is true whereas a belief that it is not harmful is false.

I know. Simplistic. But in the final analysis, true.

I began this expecting simply to answer the questions in the title of the leafepress.com discussion. No, not answer them, just scatter a few thoughts concerning them. I’ve elsewhere answered the questions pretty well, I believe, although I’m not sure when or where. Right now, however, I have one new thought (for me) about the subject: that there is an important difference between a literary critic and a literary appreciator. A literary critic tells you—make that, “tries to tell you”—everything important to know about a particular literary work based on its expressive elements alone. Which will include what is denoted, what connoted and what is explicitly alluded to. It will, I believe, also include what is implicitly alluded strongly enough for most knowledgeable engagents of the work under analysis to connect to. “Fourscore and ten years ago,” for instance, with “Lincoln’s “fourscore and ten years ago” being an explicit reference.

Hmm, I see that I’ve defined a literary critic, except that I left “literary work” undefined. So be it, for now, although it’s easy to define; it’d take too many words for me to bother doing that here (and I’ve done it elsewhere). Oh, one other minor omission: I didn’t say what it is important to know about a literary work. I’ve defined that, too. It wouldn’t take all that many words, but too many for me to bother with here.

Let me turn to what a literary appreciator is. I decided I needed the term because it seems to me my definition of the literary critic is almost identical to any new critic’s. But new critics opposed going beyond the artifact on the page or pages in analyzing it. I believe them correct to dos, but only strictly speaking. I want someone telling me about a poem, say, to tell me things about its maker, including things having little or nothing to do with the poem. Like, Wow, a guy like Ezra Pound could believe in a totally loony economics theory yet write “In a Station of the Metro!” A literary appreciator is a literary critic who also is willing to discuss all kinds of things about a poem beyond what it is as literature. He is not someone who slights literary analysis to do this. He must also avoid finding implicit allusions that aren’t there for any normal person and building wacky psychiatric interpretations out of them the way Freud did and has followers have. As basically all the French critics and their allies have in diverse ways.

Not that there isn’t a place for, say, someone who focuses on what forces in society may have influenced the final form of a poem. Such a person is neither a literary critic nor a literary appreciator; he is a sociological critic of literature.

Before I end I want to mention that I would divide literary critics into two kinds: the practical literary critic and the theoretical literary critic (unless I think of a better name). The first deals with works of literature, each mostly by itself, although he may (and usually should) connect a work to other works of its author, and to like works by others; the second does this also, but presents some kind of theory for the nature and value of a literary work—not just that rhyme is pleasurable, for instance, but why it is. Along the way he will provide a taxonomy of the kinds of literary works he deals with, and a continuing list of the techniques used in them with detailed descriptions of them, and why they are effective.

Above the two kinds of literary critics is the literary philosopher. Such a person is a serious seeker of significant final truths about literature. He will probably also be a philosopher of aesthetics, one seriously seeking significant final truths about all the arts, not just literature. My taxonomy continues upward, finally arriving at the neurophysiological theorist—who is one step below the Total Verospher, who seriously seeks significant final truths about everything!

Urp.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Conrad Didiodato, Criticism, Ed Baker, John Bloomberg-Rissman | No Comments »

Entry 153 — A Second Announcement

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

An interesting discussion of “vispo” and visual poetry that includes careful discussions of my poetic practice by Conrad Didiodato is now among this blog’s “Pages” under the category of “Discussions Of Bob Grumman’s Poetry.

Posted in Announcements, Conrad Didiodato | No Comments »

Found Poetry « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Found Poetry’ Category

Entry 387 — 2006 Discussion of a Poem by Crag Hill

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Recently, I’ve been going through the files with the graphics but not the texts of entries I made to my previous blog in search of mathemaku of mine.  I want to number them all, so need a complete list of them.  I think I posted just about all of them to my blog.  In any event, yesterday I brought up a file for an entry (Blog959) whose visits was recorded as close to 200.  Rarely did my old entries get more than 20 visits.   Curious to see what was in the blog, I then brought up the file that had its text, which I think worth quoting here:

17 September 2006: Among the many intriguing items at Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard is this found poem of Crag’s that he posted 3 September:

From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson

.     I come back to the geography of it,
.     I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
.     I have been an ability–a machine–up to
.     I have had to learn the simplest things

.     I live underneath
.     I looked up and saw
.     Imbued / with the light
.     I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s

.     In cold hell, in thicket, how
.     In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
.     is a monstrance,
.     I sing the tree is a heron

.     I sit here on a Sunday
.     It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
.     it was the west wind caught her up, as

Amazing poem, this. I’m not a big fan of Olson’s, though I believe he is a major poet, and that some of his poems are A-1. Surely, these lines could only have been from a poet, though. I recognize one or two, but in this discussion will not look up any of them. (Oops, I realize I couldn’t look up very many of them; I do have The Maximus Poems, and several of my anthologies have poems by Olson, but I don’t have the Selected Poems.)

“I come back to the geography of it,”

Anyway, what a beginning, this return to some geography. Olson was probably only returning to a genuine geography, of the locale I feel he jabbered too much about, but here–dislocated by the line-break–“geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., everything having a geography. Less surlogically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . .

What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.

“I don’t mean, just like that, to put down”

Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation is broken off before getting anywhere, which effectually explains all the better his state of being at loose ends. A main interest is in whether he has just dropped one activity to return to the geography of whatever he’s involved in, and/or inadvertantly “put down” whatever he was doing because superficial or the like compared to geographical questions. “I have been an ability–a machine–up to”

The narrator continues trying to explain himself without finishing any of his ventures into self-analysis. I take this line to mean he’s not been personally/emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).

“I have had to learn the simplest things”

Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero.

“I live underneath”

We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).

“I looked up and saw”

This line seems planned to follow the one before it. This sudden strong logic out of the chaos of existence as if to reassure us that life does make sense is one of the virtues of found poetry. Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life. No big deal if the context set us up for this sort of heightened seeing, but something of a (good) jolt in this zone of reduced context.

“Imbued / with the light”

Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.

“I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s”

The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named who-cares-where.

“In cold hell, in thicket, how”

After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way. “In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–”

Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . I don’t know the meaning of “meubles” but assume it’s some kind of furniture. Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.

“is a monstrance,”

I guess we aren’t meant to sit on the chairs or put anything on the tables in the poem. We are definitely in a darkness and a confusion. “I sing the tree is a heron”

But the narrator can sing. He sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:

“I sit here on a Sunday”

The tone has gone quiet, conventional–but implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services. “It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death”

The chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.

“it was the west wind caught her up, as”

Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.

Okay, that was a preliminary once-through I hope some reader will get something out of. I did! Don’t know if I’ll return to it. Probably, so I can use it in a book. Don’t know if I’ll have anything better to say about it then, though.

* * * * *

I’m not ready to say more about the poem now–except that I wondered when I looked at my entry whether I’d mentioned the importance of Crag’s poem’s foundness when I discussed it.  I saw I hadn’t.  In my megalomaniacal opinion, I think I may be the only critic who has ever discussed the full aesthetic value of foundness.  I did this in my discussion, possible two decades ago by now, of Doris Cross’s work–wonderful visual poems brought into being by painting or otherwise defacing, deleting, meddling with dictionary paintings.  (I love Nietzsche not only for all he said, brilliantly, that I agree with, but for the megalomaniacal boasts he made about his accomplishments that have turned out to be valid.)

What I said in my Cross piece isn’t handy, so my comments now will probably be a bit incomplete and not as sharply expressed as what I said in it.   First off, as anyone would agree and as many I’m sure have said, the quotations from Olson, add his life and writings to Crag’s poem. This is important.  But what I think effective appropriation of found materials most importantly does is celebrate the essential logic of the universe.  It reminds us that God is in his heaven allowing accidents to make affirmations–even for someone like I who doesn’t believe in God, and understands that accidents don’t really make affirmations, only happen so often that some of them, especially when a keen discoverer has an eye out for them, are bound to do what Crag’s collection does.  Another, better way of putting it, is that we are reminded of who wonderfully well the human brain finds ways to give existence meanings, meanings that suggest Meaning.

Okay, not a view you’d think anyone would feel like a demigod for having, but it’s more than anyone else has said about foundness that I know of.  And I can’t see how anyone could say it’s wrong.
.
.            Poem Consults the Vseineur
.
.            However seldom the vseineur
.            said “universe” in Poem’s hearing,
.            he accepted it,
.            however clear it always was
.            that it had misspoken.

.

Posted in Charles Olson, Crag Hill, Criticism, Found Poetry | No Comments »

Anthony Robinson « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Anthony Robinson’ Category

Entry 655 — A Response to a Blog Entry

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

 

It’s at Anthony Robinson’s blog here.

Here’s what I said:

“Inaccessible writing” as writing not like I do, yes–and the related “incomprehensible poetry” without a hint that others may find it comprehensible–even the critic himself if he really tried. I try never to label any poem inaccessible although I will confess I can’t figure out a poem when that’s the case.

Good words on the so-called “principal aim”–but I would add that I would like to know why a poetry for the few should be denigrated. Should no one compose operas because, in Crews’s words, “most audiences will have trouble wrestling (them) into meaning?” Or cook really far-out gourmet dishes? Crews should have said he couldn’t say anything intelligent about Miller’s book, and ended his “review.”

Can’t say I think much of Crews’s example of Miller, when he’s good. Wind does have a sound, it seems to me, since–as I understand it–sound is what happens when something causes the air to vibrate which in turn causes mechanisms in the ear to vibrate. The wind, being air, would do this directly. Or, in the poem, indirectly, by causing trees to vibrate which causes the air to vibrate which causes the auditory mechanisms to vibrate. But maybe I’m wrong. In any case, all the poet seems to me to be saying is that the room is silent except for the sound of the wind in the trees.

Good question, whose ear does it appeal to. Seems to me a competent critic would say what the lines do auditorily that will tend to seem musical to most people, such as repeat words and syllables, which this passage does; but it doesn’t seem to me to do much else. The critic need not point out what I call a poem’s “melodations” as good, just point them out, since some readers may miss them–or hear them but not fully appreciate them.

I do agree with Crews that a poem needs some kind of point of stability–what I call a unifying principle–to deviate interestingly from. I’m big on titles, too, but certainly don’t think lack of one can spoil a poem. I’m not confident that Crews can recognize the most interesting unifying principles, some of them quite delayed.

Like all critics with readerships (as I believe Crews may have, for I think I’ve heard of him), he seems not to say much about poetic technique–subject matter and points of view seem to be for him all that matters in a poem.

I think you captured him quite well, young Anthony. Thanks for a report that got me involved enough for all this.

.

Posted in Anthony Robinson, Criticism | No Comments »

Criticism « POETICKS

Posts Tagged ‘Criticism’

Entry 58 — On the Value of Explicating Poetry

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

I seem to be in a minority among poets, especially visual poets (who are generally much more visual artists than verbal artists, or word-people) in that I enjoy explicating poetry.  The other day, while stuck on an explication of a poem by daniel f. bradley for Small Press Review, I e.mailed him asking him for help on it–although I’ve known for years that he’s not very interested is discussing poetry, his or anyone else’s.  So I was not surprised when he declined my appeal.  Nor that he thought a work should stand by itself, without explanations.

I think his attitude probably a good one for a poet to have.  Analysis can take up energy that could be used creatively.  On the other hand, it’s . . . inconsiderate.  Sometimes a hint about what an artist is up to in a work can make the difference between an engagent of the work’s taking away a lifetime’s appreciation from it and getting nothing out of it.  The hint may even open the engagent to a whole kind of art he never would otherwise have enjoyed.

I’ve always felt, too, that when an artist seriously tries to explain his work, the explanation may constitute a second work perhaps as valuable as the first.  Why should a poetic description of the moon necessarily be more valuable that a critical description of a poetic description of a moon?

I’ve said all this before.  But it was on my mind again.

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Entry 407 — “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Visited Yet Again « POETICKS

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Entry 407 — “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Visited Yet Again

I’m not sure how regular a blogger I’ll be for a while, but here’s another entry.

A number of years back, I did what I thought was a superior examination of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”  Yesterday, thinking again about it–because I had the sudden idea that maybe I’d written enough little essays like it for a book-length collection of essays (later finding out I was wrong)–a simple explication of it occurred to  me: “so much depends upon (the fact that the everyday world can contain such beauty as) a (simple) red wheel barrow, glazed with rain water, beside white chickens.”  After writing that, I wonder if I didn’t already have it in my original essay.  I certainly said that’s what the poem most simply said, but I don’t think I then so concisely got its meaning (for me–always remember that, kids; but also remember that some engagents’ meanings are much better than everyone else’s).

Yes, it has many further meanings.  But that’s its core meaning.

In any case, after coming up with the explication just given, I thought a while about how much I enjoy explicating and otherwise critically dealing with poems, and–for the millionth time–about my belief that a good critique is as valuable as the poem it critiques.  Is, in fact, a conceptual variation on the poem it critiques, almost as enrichingly like/unlike it as a musical composition like Scheherazade is enrichingly like/unlike the literary work that inspired it.  It “spoils” the poem only the way scientific knowledge of the moon robs nullosophers of its magic.

* * * * *

What’s better: to know a lot of poems by others reasonably well, or know just a few extremely well?  Probably neither, but I certainly hope that the few poems by others I know, I know extremely well.  Some of them, I’m sure I do.  And by “extremely well,” I mean as well as anyone.   It bothers me that I keep returning to them so often.  But every once in a while, I tackle a new poem or two.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Criticism, William Carlos Williams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 188 — Small Press Review « POETICKS

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Entry 188 — Small Press Review

Note: I just now made most of my columns for Small Press Review available in the Pages section to the right under “Bob Grumman’s  Small Press Review Columns.”  They go back to my first, published sometime in 1994, and continue up to my second-to-last for 2009.  I hope before too long to get them completely up-to-date.  Much thanks to the people at Reocities.com for making this possible.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at 1:25 PM and is filed under Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 387 — 2006 Discussion of a Poem by Crag Hill « POETICKS

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Entry 387 — 2006 Discussion of a Poem by Crag Hill

Recently, I’ve been going through the files with the graphics but not the texts of entries I made to my previous blog in search of mathemaku of mine.  I want to number them all, so need a complete list of them.  I think I posted just about all of them to my blog.  In any event, yesterday I brought up a file for an entry (Blog959) whose visits was recorded as close to 200.  Rarely did my old entries get more than 20 visits.   Curious to see what was in the blog, I then brought up the file that had its text, which I think worth quoting here:

17 September 2006: Among the many intriguing items at Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard is this found poem of Crag’s that he posted 3 September:

From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson

.     I come back to the geography of it,
.     I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
.     I have been an ability–a machine–up to
.     I have had to learn the simplest things

.     I live underneath
.     I looked up and saw
.     Imbued / with the light
.     I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s

.     In cold hell, in thicket, how
.     In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
.     is a monstrance,
.     I sing the tree is a heron

.     I sit here on a Sunday
.     It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
.     it was the west wind caught her up, as

Amazing poem, this. I’m not a big fan of Olson’s, though I believe he is a major poet, and that some of his poems are A-1. Surely, these lines could only have been from a poet, though. I recognize one or two, but in this discussion will not look up any of them. (Oops, I realize I couldn’t look up very many of them; I do have The Maximus Poems, and several of my anthologies have poems by Olson, but I don’t have the Selected Poems.)

“I come back to the geography of it,”

Anyway, what a beginning, this return to some geography. Olson was probably only returning to a genuine geography, of the locale I feel he jabbered too much about, but here–dislocated by the line-break–”geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., everything having a geography. Less surlogically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . .

What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.

“I don’t mean, just like that, to put down”

Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation is broken off before getting anywhere, which effectually explains all the better his state of being at loose ends. A main interest is in whether he has just dropped one activity to return to the geography of whatever he’s involved in, and/or inadvertantly “put down” whatever he was doing because superficial or the like compared to geographical questions. “I have been an ability–a machine–up to”

The narrator continues trying to explain himself without finishing any of his ventures into self-analysis. I take this line to mean he’s not been personally/emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).

“I have had to learn the simplest things”

Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero.

“I live underneath”

We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).

“I looked up and saw”

This line seems planned to follow the one before it. This sudden strong logic out of the chaos of existence as if to reassure us that life does make sense is one of the virtues of found poetry. Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life. No big deal if the context set us up for this sort of heightened seeing, but something of a (good) jolt in this zone of reduced context.

“Imbued / with the light”

Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.

“I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s”

The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named who-cares-where.

“In cold hell, in thicket, how”

After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way. “In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–”

Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . I don’t know the meaning of “meubles” but assume it’s some kind of furniture. Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.

“is a monstrance,”

I guess we aren’t meant to sit on the chairs or put anything on the tables in the poem. We are definitely in a darkness and a confusion. “I sing the tree is a heron”

But the narrator can sing. He sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:

“I sit here on a Sunday”

The tone has gone quiet, conventional–but implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services. “It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death”

The chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.

“it was the west wind caught her up, as”

Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.

Okay, that was a preliminary once-through I hope some reader will get something out of. I did! Don’t know if I’ll return to it. Probably, so I can use it in a book. Don’t know if I’ll have anything better to say about it then, though.

* * * * *

I’m not ready to say more about the poem now–except that I wondered when I looked at my entry whether I’d mentioned the importance of Crag’s poem’s foundness when I discussed it.  I saw I hadn’t.  In my megalomaniacal opinion, I think I may be the only critic who has ever discussed the full aesthetic value of foundness.  I did this in my discussion, possible two decades ago by now, of Doris Cross’s work–wonderful visual poems brought into being by painting or otherwise defacing, deleting, meddling with dictionary paintings.  (I love Nietzsche not only for all he said, brilliantly, that I agree with, but for the megalomaniacal boasts he made about his accomplishments that have turned out to be valid.)

What I said in my Cross piece isn’t handy, so my comments now will probably be a bit incomplete and not as sharply expressed as what I said in it.   First off, as anyone would agree and as many I’m sure have said, the quotations from Olson, add his life and writings to Crag’s poem. This is important.  But what I think effective appropriation of found materials most importantly does is celebrate the essential logic of the universe.  It reminds us that God is in his heaven allowing accidents to make affirmations–even for someone like I who doesn’t believe in God, and understands that accidents don’t really make affirmations, only happen so often that some of them, especially when a keen discoverer has an eye out for them, are bound to do what Crag’s collection does.  Another, better way of putting it, is that we are reminded of who wonderfully well the human brain finds ways to give existence meanings, meanings that suggest Meaning.

Okay, not a view you’d think anyone would feel like a demigod for having, but it’s more than anyone else has said about foundness that I know of.  And I can’t see how anyone could say it’s wrong.
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.            Poem Consults the Vseineur
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.            However seldom the vseineur
.            said “universe” in Poem’s hearing,
.            he accepted it,
.            however clear it always was
.            that it had misspoken.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Charles Olson, Crag Hill, Criticism, Found Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 58 — On the Value of Explicating Poetry « POETICKS

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Entry 58 — On the Value of Explicating Poetry

I seem to be in a minority among poets, especially visual poets (who are generally much more visual artists than verbal artists, or word-people) in that I enjoy explicating poetry.  The other day, while stuck on an explication of a poem by daniel f. bradley for Small Press Review, I e.mailed him asking him for help on it–although I’ve known for years that he’s not very interested is discussing poetry, his or anyone else’s.  So I was not surprised when he declined my appeal.  Nor that he thought a work should stand by itself, without explanations.

I think his attitude probably a good one for a poet to have.  Analysis can take up energy that could be used creatively.  On the other hand, it’s . . . inconsiderate.  Sometimes a hint about what an artist is up to in a work can make the difference between an engagent of the work’s taking away a lifetime’s appreciation from it and getting nothing out of it.  The hint may even open the engagent to a whole kind of art he never would otherwise have enjoyed.

I’ve always felt, too, that when an artist seriously tries to explain his work, the explanation may constitute a second work perhaps as valuable as the first.  Why should a poetic description of the moon necessarily be more valuable that a critical description of a poetic description of a moon?

I’ve said all this before.  But it was on my mind again.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 8:57 PM and is filed under Criticism. 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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Claude Monet « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Claude Monet’ Category

Entry 1078 — An Analysis of a Mathexpressive Poem

Friday, April 19th, 2013

A few people have told me (I don’t know how seriously) that they have not been able to figure out all the pieces I have in my latest entry in my Scientific American blog, and a few of mine colleagues even claim I can’t multiply.  Ergo, I have an excuse to blither about one of my poems.  I’ve chosen one I think the easiest to defend.  First, though, here’s Monet’s The Regatta at Argenteuil.  It’s important for one trying to understand my poem to know of it because it is central to the poem (as the third poem in my triptych makes clear with a full reproduction of it).

TheRegattaAtArgenteuil

Okay, to begin with the simplicities of the poem below, a person encountering it must be aware that it is a long division example.  That is indicated by two symbols: the one with the word, “poem,” inside it, and the line   under the sailboat.  The first, so far as I’m aware, has no formal name, so I call it a dividend shed.  The line is a remainder line.  The two together, along with the placement of the other elements of the poem, one where a long division’s quotient would be, one where its divisor would be, one where the product of the two would be, and one under the remainder line where a remainder would be, clinch the poem’s definition as long division.

MonetBoats1-FinalCopy
Now, then, anyone remembering his long division from grade school, should understand that the poem is claiming five things:

(1) that the text the painter who is unsleeping a day long ago multiplied times the scribbled sketch, or whatever it is to the left of the dividend shed equals the sailboat shown;

(2) that the sailboat is larger in value that either the painter or the sketch;

(3) that the addition of the letter fragments under the remainder line to the sailboat image makes the sailboat equal the poem referred to above it;

(4) that the the sailboat should be considered almost equal to the poem;

(5) that the letter fragments, or whatever it is that they represent must be less in value than any of the other elements of the poem with the possible exception of the quotient.

(2) and (5) are decidedly less important than the other three, but can still be important.

I could easily claim that the poem is wholly accurate mathematically by giving the painter a value of 2, the sketch a value of 7, the sailboat a value of 14, the fragmented letters a value of 3 and the poem a value of 17.  Arbitrary?  Sure–but by definition as Grummanomical values of the elements mathematically correct however silly.  (And I would contend that if I had time, I could given them Grummanomical poetic values most people would find acceptable, and–in fact–I believe one of the virtues of such a poem is that it will compel some to consider such things–at least to the extent of wondering how much value to give a painter’s activity, how much to a sketch, and whether a poem is genuinely better than either, or the like.)

7into17

I am including the above in my entry to help those a little fuzzy about long division (and I was definitely not unfuzzy about it when I began making long division poems, and still sometimes have to stop and think for more than a few minutes at times to figure out just what one of my creations is doing).   My poem imitates it in every respect except that it does what it does with non-numerical terms rather than with numbers.  I hope, however, that someone encountering it without knowing much or anything about such poems will at least find things to like in it such as the little poem about the painter, or the idea of the childish sketch as perhaps the basis of what would become a Grand Painting.  Some, I believe, would enjoy recognizing the sailboat as the one in Monet’s masterpiece, too.  But what is most important aesthetically about the work is what it does as a mathematical operation.  That operation must make poetic sense if the work is to be effective.  Needles to say, I claim it does.

To consider the question, we must break down the long division operation the poem depicts into its components.  First of all, there is the multiplication of the sketch by what the painter is doing to get the sailboat–the painting of the sailboat, that is, sketch times something done by a painter almost having to yield a picture of some sort.  Does this make sense?  Clearly, a painter must carry out an operation on some initial sketch or idea or equivalent thereof to get into a painting, so I don’t see how one can wholly reject painter operating on sketch yields portion of painting as analogous to . . . 2 operating on 7 to yield 14.  But there is more to it than that, if only to those of us who think of multiplication as magic, and are still in touch with the way we felt when the idea that 2 times 7 could make 14 was new to us.  That is, just after we had internalized the remarkable mechanism for carrying out multiplication.  For us, the poem’s painter is using his painting mechanism to hugely enlarge a sketch the way the operation of multiplication (usually) hugely enlarges a number.  Doing so in a kind of concealed magical way unlike mere addition does.  A three-dimensional way.

At this point, the question arises as to whether the sailboat nearly equal to a poem.  That’s obviously a subjective matter.  Those who like sailboats (and poems) will tend to say yes.  Note, by the way, that “poem” here does not mean what I say it mean verosophically, but as what one of my dictionaries has it: “something suggesting a poem.”  Here the context–a work of art–makes it impossible to take the word literally,–and moreover, of taking it to mean not just something suggesting a poem, but something suggestion a master-poem.

Well, not quite here: the penciled informality of the word, “poem,” counters the idea that a super-poem is being referred to, and the sailboat is only a black and white portion of a great painting, not a great painting by itself.  We know it’s on its way to being that, but the multiplication is only telling us of it as a pleasant step, not anywhere close to being a realized goal.

The remainder, fragmented words, add very little to it, but we will later see that they are fragments of the phrase, “the faint sound of the unarrestable steps of Time.”  Again, it’s a subjective matter as to whether these words could deepen anything sufficiently to enable it to suggest a poem.  I say it does.  But even if not, I think it would be hard to claim that the addition of such words to a visual image could not be called a plausible attempt to mathematically increase the image’s value.

In conclusion, I claim that the poem carries out the operation of long division in two steps, one multiplicative, the other additive, to valuable aesthetic effect.  Elsewhere I have shown how, according to my thinking, it will put someone one appreciative of it into a Manywhere-at-Once partly in the verbal section of his brain and partly in the mathematical section of it.  The next poem in the triptych goes somewhat further; the sequence’s final poem brings everything to a climax–I hope.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Claude Monet, Criticism, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poem Critique, Poetics, Visimagery | No Comments »

Entry 931 — Continuing the Monet Sequence

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

Finally into my creative-flow zone this morning after thinking I never again would be, I produced the following, which is the fourth frame in a sequence devoted to Monet I hope to continue:

Here’s the frame just before the above one, to provide context:

I’ve had it here before, I’m pretty sure, but if you look carefully, you’ll see a few small changes I’ve made to it since then.  I still think it’s stupendously fine.  Urp.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Claude Monet, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

John Bloomberg-Rissman « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘John Bloomberg-Rissman’ Category

Entry 862 — What’s A Literary Critic?

Saturday, September 15th, 2012

There’s a discussion at leafepress.com the title of which is, “What is Literary Criticism? What is a Literary Critic?” It’s mainly between Conrad DiDiodato and John Bloomberg-Rissman, but Ed Baker takes a few potshots at the others, basically reiterating the standard belief of the romantic poet that criticism is irrelevant to poets.

The discussion annoyed me because it made no references to my criticism. Of course, I didn’t really expect it to, although Conrad knows a little of my work, but I have trouble listening to people taking tenth-rate critics seriously when my work is available. Yes, I am that arrogantly convinced of the value of my criticism. Not that I’m all that sure it’s any good, but that I am positive that it’s many orders of magnitude better than Derrida’s, say, or DeMan’s, or that moron Foucault, which these guys seem to admire (although they do seem to be familiar with a wide range of critics, some of whom I don’t take as tenth-rate, like Cleanth Brooks.

The discussion annoyed me more because, like so many such discussions, it starts nowhere, really, and splathers inconclusively severalwhere. Its central defect is absence of defined axiom-setting terms—due to the standard belief of its participants that “artworks . . . can NEVER be fully unpacked.” The truth is that any artwork can be unpacked sufficiently to satisfy any sane person. Just as the distance from my house to yours can be measured sufficiently to satisfy any sane person although it can never be measure perfectly.

This absence of defined terms allows them to say sometimes interesting things, and not worry about contradiction. And it satisfies the political need of the naïve to feel certain all beliefs are equally true/false, just as all persons are equally good/bad. The only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. This is a problem, because false beliefs are much more likely to lead to grief than true beliefs—as every knows intuitively but intellectuals keep out of their verbal awarenesses. For example, an intellectual won’t make a fifty-foot swan dive into a pool whose water he knows is frozen because his reptile brain will give him nausea at the thought of doing so. But the nausea will never work its way up into his verbal awareness and bother him with the possibility that a belief that a fifty-foot dive into a pool of solid ice is harmful is true whereas a belief that it is not harmful is false.

I know. Simplistic. But in the final analysis, true.

I began this expecting simply to answer the questions in the title of the leafepress.com discussion. No, not answer them, just scatter a few thoughts concerning them. I’ve elsewhere answered the questions pretty well, I believe, although I’m not sure when or where. Right now, however, I have one new thought (for me) about the subject: that there is an important difference between a literary critic and a literary appreciator. A literary critic tells you—make that, “tries to tell you”—everything important to know about a particular literary work based on its expressive elements alone. Which will include what is denoted, what connoted and what is explicitly alluded to. It will, I believe, also include what is implicitly alluded strongly enough for most knowledgeable engagents of the work under analysis to connect to. “Fourscore and ten years ago,” for instance, with “Lincoln’s “fourscore and ten years ago” being an explicit reference.

Hmm, I see that I’ve defined a literary critic, except that I left “literary work” undefined. So be it, for now, although it’s easy to define; it’d take too many words for me to bother doing that here (and I’ve done it elsewhere). Oh, one other minor omission: I didn’t say what it is important to know about a literary work. I’ve defined that, too. It wouldn’t take all that many words, but too many for me to bother with here.

Let me turn to what a literary appreciator is. I decided I needed the term because it seems to me my definition of the literary critic is almost identical to any new critic’s. But new critics opposed going beyond the artifact on the page or pages in analyzing it. I believe them correct to dos, but only strictly speaking. I want someone telling me about a poem, say, to tell me things about its maker, including things having little or nothing to do with the poem. Like, Wow, a guy like Ezra Pound could believe in a totally loony economics theory yet write “In a Station of the Metro!” A literary appreciator is a literary critic who also is willing to discuss all kinds of things about a poem beyond what it is as literature. He is not someone who slights literary analysis to do this. He must also avoid finding implicit allusions that aren’t there for any normal person and building wacky psychiatric interpretations out of them the way Freud did and has followers have. As basically all the French critics and their allies have in diverse ways.

Not that there isn’t a place for, say, someone who focuses on what forces in society may have influenced the final form of a poem. Such a person is neither a literary critic nor a literary appreciator; he is a sociological critic of literature.

Before I end I want to mention that I would divide literary critics into two kinds: the practical literary critic and the theoretical literary critic (unless I think of a better name). The first deals with works of literature, each mostly by itself, although he may (and usually should) connect a work to other works of its author, and to like works by others; the second does this also, but presents some kind of theory for the nature and value of a literary work—not just that rhyme is pleasurable, for instance, but why it is. Along the way he will provide a taxonomy of the kinds of literary works he deals with, and a continuing list of the techniques used in them with detailed descriptions of them, and why they are effective.

Above the two kinds of literary critics is the literary philosopher. Such a person is a serious seeker of significant final truths about literature. He will probably also be a philosopher of aesthetics, one seriously seeking significant final truths about all the arts, not just literature. My taxonomy continues upward, finally arriving at the neurophysiological theorist—who is one step below the Total Verospher, who seriously seeks significant final truths about everything!

Urp.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Conrad Didiodato, Criticism, Ed Baker, John Bloomberg-Rissman | No Comments »