Archive for the ‘Poem Critique’ Category
Entry 1488 — Correction
Wednesday, June 18th, 2014
Anny Ballardini recently posted a haiku at NowPoetry about red cherries by Richard Wright with a second haiku about cherries under it that I took to be by Wright when I wrote about it there, and then posted that here, but which was actually by Anny. Fortunately, I said nice things about it:
stole two red cherries expensive in plastic baskets under the electric light me
Might as well say a little more about it. I claim a haiku should try for a haiku moment, and a haiku moment should have archetypal resonance. That brings us into subjectivity, I’m afraid. But a critic should be able to show how a haiku he rates as effective as I consider this one to achieve a haiku moment of archetypal resonance. Then the critic’s readers can decide for themselves whether he’s right or not.
(1) (to go through it again because Sound Practice can never be illustrated to many times!) I consider this haiku’s two images to be . . . well, it’s not that easy to sort it out; one image is a store’s expensive cherries bright lit; a second is the haiku’s speaker’s stealing two of them; but there is a third, the shoplifter all by herself, under an electric light (for me, “electric” in this crime scene, connotes the chair). I would combine the first two–in tension with “me” because: (1) a physical act versus (suddenly) a psychological state; (2) a scene versus the tiny focal point of the scene (which I see as tinily inside the scene, the perpetrator seeing herself stealing).
(2) The tension is resolved almost instantly with the reader’s empathetic realization of an archetypal fear: the fear of being found out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about instinctive human drives lately, and one of them I’m still trying to work out an effective description of is the need for the world’s approval. Or the need, as here, to avoid sustaining the world’s disapproval. I consider all major human drives to be archetypal, and this one is. It’s what makes us such conformists, even the most eccentric of us behaving like everyone else at least 97% of the time.
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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).
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.
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.)
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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Entry 1059 — Break from MATO Analysis
Sunday, March 31st, 2013
I had a slush-brained day yesterday, so only did a little work on my discussion of Manywhere-at-Once. Then, while doing a little putting of mine house in order, I came across this. It wasn’t till I got to the word “aesthcipient,” which no one uses but me that I recognition the piece as mine. At that point I was wondering who else had written so insightfully about Basho’s old pond haiku, which it clearly concerned. I’m not sure where it’s from, but I’m sure it was written more than twenty years ago. Nice to know I could sometimes write so well even way back then!
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Entry 948 — Pronouncements & Blither, Part 9
Monday, December 10th, 2012
Would any of you who have been contributed to this thread (or only read portions of it) be willing (be brave enough) to carry out the following experiment:.(1) Select two poems, one you consider significantly better than the other;.(2) Support your view with references to what is explicitly in each poem, bad and good (in your opinion)?.Second challenge to those unwilling to do this because it would be meaninglessly subjective: be honest enough to go on record with the view that all poems are equally good..I’ve already half-done this with a very flawed quick reaction to the Sondheim poem indicating why I consider it at least not bad. (I now consider it a superior poem, having found more virtues in it by thinking of it more focusedly as a conceptual poem.) I will now say why—objectively, because supported by what’s objectively in or not in each of the two poems as opposed to anything that may be subjectively in them like sincerity.) I will now compare it with the other poem posted:PHOTOSYNTHESISby Banana JonesYou have a head,mountain goats eat fudge,I spread toe jelly on my wrist,Concrete angel,You ain’t got nothing on me,Oh right…Babies come from vagina’s..Sondheim inserts (_) into his poem, as I’m now sure it is, in accordance with a logical plan—i.e., after every word or phrase in order that a person doing the task of reading it will be able to check off each read bit of the poem. This slows the read (a virtue in the opinion of most I’m fairly sure) and also almost forces a reader to pay more than normal attention to each bit, and think about the task of reading. The poem explicitly tells the reader to take extra pains while he’s reading, so the claim that pressure to pay more than normal attention to one’s journey through the text seems to me objectively true. I feel I could support most of my reactions to the poem similarly, but am not up to doing that right now. My aim now is simply to compare this one thing the Sondheim text objectively does I believe any reasonable person would agree to what seems to me an absence of any thing like it..The Jones poem does nothing according to any logic I can see. It jump-cuts from one clause-length narrative to another entirely unconnected to it in any meaningful sense (I say with a fair confidence that I am here being objective in the reasonable sense that (verbal) meaninglessness can be objectively defined as words arranged in such a way as to confuse a large majority of readers or listeners, and no defense of their meaningfulness will change any but a very few minds about that)..The Sondheim contains one fresh element, or perhaps can be said to carry out a fresh design; and every poem needs something fresh–objectively. If we start with the dogma that a poem needs to move one, and know objectively from a study of the effects of poetry on human beings that a poem that does absolutely nothing new will rarely move anyone, even those who claim to like some such poem..The Jones poem is not fresh—because although its particular images are wildly different from the images in conventional poems—they lack all coherence and therefore result in chaos—objectively result in it, I say, using the same argument I previously used—and chaos is never fresh however different its elements, one chaos being perceived by the sane as just about entirely the same as any other chaos. I think this observation important (and especially like it because it just occurred to me as I was writing this): the Sondheim is not chaos (although possibly not cohering here and there..I think I could find some virtues in the Jones poem if I tried, but I’m sure they wouldn’t equal the virtues in the Sondheim I’ve already written about in this thread, and I’ve found more since then. I claim they are objectively superior to any virtues in the Jones I’m now intuitively aware of, but that’s admittedly just an assertion, but one made because I’m not up to a full dissertation on the two poems—here..Frankly, I think that I’ve shown beyond reasonable doubt that the Sondheim is the better of the two poems. Which makes me think maybe my challenge would have been that someone show why they are equal. Or of what value any discussion of the merits of any poem is if we agree in advance than nobody’s opinion means anything..
Entry 824 — Critique, Continued
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012
Here’s my sonnet, again, back for further dissection
Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.
The first question of the day is whether or not the “mis-used” words are virtues or defects. They are “miracled” and “synapsed,” two nouns used as verbs. The noun-to-verb change happens all the time in English, yet there seem still to be people peopling the outskirts of provincialism whom it dismays. Of course, when one comes on a noun that’s been used as a verb for the first time in the one’s experience, it is bound to seem slightly wrong. In a poem, though, no one should object to this practice if the object is freshness. Which it almost always is in my poems. Still, one can over-do it. Whether I have with these two, and with the later “re-morninged,” which is both a noun used as a verb and a word given an unexpected prefix. “Re-morninged” may be strained, but I like it (and used it in all my versions of this poem) because it is also a metaphor for the particular way Pound brought the past “to life again.”
Then there are my coinages, “lolli-skied,” which I’ve already discussed, and “underhue,” which may well not be a coinage. If a coinage, it uses “under” as a prefix the same way Wordsworth did, so I consider it a plus. (If I were an academic, I’d quote the passages where Wordsworth used it, but I’m not–’cause I got more important things to do.) Again, whether these are plusses or minuses is a to each his own proposition.
I’m not sure what “seem” and “are” are the way they are used here. Verbs as nouns, I guess–“seem” meaning “things as they seem,” “are,” “things as they are.” So, verbs as noun preceded by ellipses? In any case, they are appropriate here for indicating one constant theme of Stevens’s poetry, usually specifically with the difference between reality and our metaphors for it. On the other hand, “are” is inserted for the rhyme. It should be evident by the fourth line that I could have used fewer words, and sometimes shorter words, to say what I have, but didn’t because I had to have so many syllables per line, and get the meter right. The fourth line should be just “burned to found.” And “found” seems a bit of a strained effort to make a rhyme. Poets don’t “found” poetic worlds so much as “fashion,” “create,” or “form” them. Sometimes such a not-quite right word works beautifully, though–I’m thinking of Blake when he asked “who could frame” the “fearful symmetry of the tyger.
I remember, too, never liking the way “to” followed “too,” but I couldn’t think how elsewise to write that part. Lines 6 and 7 are downright bad due to the padding I’m speaking of “to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,/ and earthlife synapsed in the underhue . . .” This ultimately became, “to where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps/ toward high-hued sensibility begin . . .” which is superior (I believe) though not perfect because all four of the adjectives in first of the two lines adds something to the picture the dirt in spring using seeds to ascend to color (and “sensibility,” which I won’t defend here). Does such padding kill a poem? Not unless overdone, in formal verse, where I believe padding nearly always happens–but pays off in the best poems with in a smooth rhythm and rhyme (and rhyme is a wonderful thing, so what if great poems can eschew it). Does padding kill this poem? I frankly don’t know. Certainly “the fading fragments of the past,” wounds it, not only as padding but as cliche–i.e., fragments of the past are pretty sure to be “fading.”
I don’t remember if the version of this sonnet I consider the final one still “has “windily” in it. I wanted to refer to the brisk weather I thought rule many of Pound’s best poems, but “windily,” alas, also suggests the windy speaker that he too often was.
Finally, there’s the repetition of “How vain they’ve been,” which I confess was due to the need to fill out the line–although one can argue that it helps emphasize the strong feeling of the couplet it’s in. As I’ve said before, however, when I read this poem after not having read it for probably more than ten years, I did like it, not noticing the problems I’ve now found in it. I’m convinced it’s not a mjor poem, but it may not be a bad one.
Incidentally, I’ve not yet mentioned the poem’s subject. It is a simple, conventional one: the desire of a poet to write great poetry–with explicit praise to the side of three poets, and implicit praise of a fourth (Keats). I claim that no poem’s subject is important, unless it’s unclear or ridiculously stupid (e.g, raw toads taste better spread with peanut butter). It’s how the subject is treated that counts. What kind of monument to it does the poem’s words create? Most import for me has always been how well it gets an engagent to Manywhere-at-Once (which is where an effective metaphor takes you, but not only metaphors), how often, how deeply, and how richly. Oh, and archetypal depth is crucial for the best poems. This one has to do with its speaker’s needs for greatness, and that’s are archetypally significant as any subject can be.
I never bothered to mention my poems “melodation,” either. That’s what I call the many ways poems can give auditory pleasure: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, even cacophony in the right place; and meter. I claim that even poor poems usually have effective melodation. There’s always the danger of too much of one kind–alliteration, most commonly; and of cliche–in choice of rhymenants (which is what I call words that rhyme), for example, “love/above.” My sonnet avoids cliched rhyming through the use of my bow-rhymes, and I don’t think any of my melodations is overdone. Most of them, by the way, came naturally. I think few people who have composed enough poems think about melodation while making a poem: it just comes. Every once in a while, you may have to think about it when not sure which of two or more words is right for a line–usually one will make the best sense but not sound as well as a second.
Did anyone notice how I ran out of gas toward the end of the above. For a while yesterday I really thought this would turn into a Terrific Example of New Criticism at its Best. Oh, well, I don’t yet think it’s wretched.
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Entry 823 — A Lesson in Critiquing a Poem
Tuesday, August 7th, 2012
Here’s “Sonnet from my Forties, No. 2,” again:
Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.
I mentioned when I posted it two days ago that it had flaws. Struggling as almost always to find something to do a blog entry on, I thought of how good it would be to use as a lesson on critiquing poetry on. Good because it does have a lot of flaws to point out and comment on. It has a fair number of excellences, too, I must assert. A good critique will mention them, as well. What makes the poems much better than most poems for me to critique is that it’s mine. Hence, I probably know more about it than anybody else who might try to critique it. Much more important, I don’t have to worry that I’ll hurt its author’s feelings if I’m too rough on it: I know he doesn’t have any, and is too much of a jerk for it to matter if he did.
To start with, let me say that his rhyming is among the greatest virtues of his poem. Blockheads, of course, will have already given it thumbs down for having what they consider three near-rhymes. If it did, I would agree with them that they were defects, for my reactionary belief is that every line in a sonnet should rhyme with some other line, fully rhyme. Well, although “are/art,” “earth/urge” and “past/path” are not conventional full rhymes, their rhymnants rhyme as much as conventional rhymnants by the following logic: “are” is as close in sound to “art” and “are” is to “far.” In each case, one syllable is different in over-all sound from the syllable it rhymes with in one sound only, but the same in the other two syllables (and I take all syllables to have three sounds, including the ones which once or twice contain the sound of silence). Those claiming, as many opposed to my idea are, that “are”/”art” is just an alliteration are clearly wrong–as wrong as declaring “are”/”far” just a consonance. To my ear, the new kind of rhyme sounds as pleasantly echoic as the old. I can’t see any reason to disapprove of it than simply the fact that it’s different from received rhymes. Wilfred Owens’s “rim-rhymes,” as I named them many years ago, such as “blade/blood” and “flash/flesh,” which are from his “Arms and the Boy,” seems to have gained some acceptance but few poets are making much use of it. My impression, in fact, is that only poets using Dickinson near-rhymes as full rhymes, are–and I don’t think much of near-rhymes, though I do think some poets have used them quite well. (I always feel Dickinson used them because she couldn’t come up with a real rhyme rather than for some aesthetic reason. I’m not up to researching it, but I wonder if anyone hating what I’ve just said could see if he can find an instance of Dickinson’s using a near-rhyme when a real rhyme would have worked but not been as aesthetically effective?)
I haven’t come up with good names (like “rim-rhyme”) for the two other kinds of full rhymes I accept. One set I like but don’t really believe should be adopted are “chime-rhyme” and “rile-rhyme.” The first is okay although I would claim all three full rhymes chime equally; the second is a bit silly, since I never began using the kind of rhyme it names to rile anyone. My best attempt is “stern-rhyme” for rhymes of syllables sharing the same last two sounds, as “chime” and “rhyme” do; and “bow-rhyme” for rhymes of syllables sharing the same first two sounds, as “rile” and “rhyme” do.
While discussing my bow rhymes, I would critique them as not only not defects but as virtues, since they extend the possibilities of rhyme and are fresh elements of my poems, and freshness is a cardinal need of superior poetry. As long as it doesn’t go too far, as “lolli-skied” may. My intention was to indicate a sky glistening like a lollipop (and as tasty as one!), the way I feel Stevens’s skies, or the equivalent thereof, do. But “lolli” has connotations of juvenility and triviality which may make it inappropriate–although a hint from children’s worlds needn’t be a fault. I dropped this locution from what I considered my best versions of the sonnet–with sorrow. I’m still not sure I was right to.
Most things in any poem are bothersomely right/wrong. My first line, for instance, will sound awkward to moderns, but is an intentional allusion to the opening of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It immediately ignores one requirement of the sonnet-form, its meter’s being iambic. True, all formal verse is allow to break with its proper meter at times: most scholars claim it is necessary to prevent monotony. I don’t agree, especially for so short a poem as the sonnet. In fact, I would scan the first two words of my sonnet as “Much have” rather than “Much have,” for I believe forcing a meter on a formal poem is better than breaking meter. For one thing, it emphasizes another main feature of superior poetry, its not being prose. It also pounds the monotonousness of a poem into the mind of the poem’s engagent sufficiently to provide a counter-irritant to the more extreme breaks with prose expectations, and common sense, which I consider the best use of meter. A monotonous sky and ocean for a ship full of lunatics.
Boink. More to follow–tomorrow, I hope.
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Entry 792 — Analysis of an Iowa Workshop Poem
Saturday, July 7th, 2012
| Astronomy Lesson by Alan Shapiro The two boys lean out on the railing of the front porch, looking up. Behind them they can hear their mother in one room watching “Name That Tune,” their father in another watching a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs turned up high and higher till they each can’t hear the other’s show. The older boy is saying that no matter how many stars you counted there were always more stars beyond them and beyond the stars black space going on forever in all directions, so that even if you flew up millions and millions of years you’d be no closer to the end of it than they were now here on the porch on Tuesday night in the middle of summer. The younger boy can think somehow only of his mother’s closet, how he likes to crawl in back behind the heavy drapery of shirts, nightgowns and dresses, into the sheer black where no matter how close he holds his hand up to his face there’s no hand ever, no face to hold it to. A woman from another street The boys edge closer, shoulder
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THE IOWA WORKSHOP POEM:
1. involves quotidian, usually suburban subject matter, employing telling concrete details out of everyday life, accessibility being a key aim
the feel of the scene Shapiro depicts is suburban although sirens from “away deep in the city” can be heard, so the poem takes place either in suburbia or the outskirts of a city (and suburbia can have cities); its telling concrete details include tv programs, boys star-gazing, a woman in a street calling to her cat or dog
2. uses near-prose (i.e., free verse with few or no frills or unconventionalities of expression)
it has one simile, a nice one about “the black leaves of the maple/ where the street lights flicker/like another watery skein of stars.”
it also has a personification–“Ptolemies” as “astronomers”
no other figures of speech are in it, as far as I can make out
3. ends with a standard epiphany or anti-epiphany
here the epiphany is vague beyond subtlety but there: we human beans is just a “Name That Tune”-trivial flicker in the vastness of the universe. The poem is a haiku, really, extended for lines and lines.
4. is genteel in vocabulary and morality
unquestionably
5. strives for anthroceptual sensitivity (i.e., sympathetic awareness of other human beings)
Very much so, the scene depicted being entirely of inter-acting people almost but not enacting a narrative
6. acts as a means to self-expression, or bringing the self to life as opposed to capturing a scene, some object or idea–never as an end in itself, as a beautiful verbal artifact
This only somewhat applies. The self expressed is a distant observer; the scene–which includes both what’s going on and its emotional meaning–is more important than the observer.
7. the self brought to life is almost always a sensitive, politically-correct, average albeit cultured individual (the most extreme of Iowa Workshop Poems seem to be begging the reader to like the poem’s author)
Yes, behind the scene, sighing over the eternal meaninglessness of our life, but incompletely, slightly and certainly not intrusively
8. can be direct on the surface but aims for Jamesian subtlety in what its author would consider its most important passage
we know exactly what is going on; what is indirect is the meaning of it all, which I would not call Jamesianly expressed
9. is not controversial in thought or attitude, or–really–close to explicitly ideational
It doesn’t really convey a thought or attitude, simply reports, leaving it to the reader to interpret, as most good poems, and all Iowa Workshop Poems do.
10. is usually first-person
this one is not
11. is generally short–one page, although it can run to three pages.
this is a bit longer than most, but not long
12. wouldn’t be caught dead harboring a poetic technique not in wide use by 1950 at the latest
this could not be more the case.
I do not consider my analysis an evaluation of the poem, which I consider a good, appealing one, but one I think almost everyone interested in poetry will recognize as an Iowa Workshop poem. The best such poems are as good as the best poems of any other kind, I believe. But I distinguish between effective poems, like Shapiro’s, and important poems, like the best otherstream poems, because the latter add to the poet’s tool chest, as an Iowa Workshop does not. Not, I should add, that no poem can be both effective and important.
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Entry 778 — Back to “Fact”
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
I now have a reaction to the following:
Fact
By Craig Dworkin
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%. Reaction product of tall oil rosin: 12.5%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.5%. Pentaerythritol [C5H12O4]: 5%. Aliphatic C14 Hydrocarbon: 15%): 19.4%. Carbon Black (C: 92.8%. Petroleum: 5.1%. With sulfur, chlorine, and oxygen contaminates: 2.1%), used as a pigmenting agent: 18.6%. Tung oil (Eleostearic acid [C18H30O2]: 81.9%. Linoleic acid [C18H32O2]: 8.2%. Palmitic acid [C16H32O2]: 5.9%. Oleic acid [CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH]: 4.0%.), used as a reducer: 3.3%. Micronized polyethylene wax (C2H4)N: 2.8%. 3/50 Manganese compound, used as a through drier: 1.3%. 1/25 Cobalt linoleate compound used as a top drier: .7%. Residues of blanket wash (roughly equal parts aliphatic hydrocarbon and aromatic hydrocarbon): .2%. Adhered to: cellulose [C6H10O5] from softwood sulphite pulp (Pozone Process) of White Spruce (65%) and Jack Pine (35%): 77%; hardwood pulp (enzyme process pre-bleach Kraft pulp) of White Poplar (aspen): 15%; and batch treated PCW (8%): 69.3%. Water [H2O]: 11.0%. Clay [Kaolinite form aluminum silicate hydroxide (Al2Si2O5[OH]4): 86%. Calcium carbonate (CaCO3): 12%. Diethylenetriamine: 2%], used as a pigmenting filler: 8.4%. Hydrogen peroxide [H2O2], used as a brightening agent: 3.6%. Rosin soap, used as a sizer: 2.7%. Aluminum sulfate [Al2(SO4)]: 1.8%. Residues of cationic softener (H2O: 83.8%. Base [Stearic acid (C18H36O2): 53.8%. Palmitic acid (C16H32O2): 29%. Aminoethylethanolamine (H2-NC2-H4-NHC2-H4-OH): 17.2%]: 10.8%. Sucroseoxyacetate: 4.9%. Tallow Amine, used as a surfactant: 0.3%. Sodium chloride [NaCl], used as a viscosity controlling agent: .2%) and non-ionic emulsifying defoamer (sodium salt of dioctylsulphosuccinate [C20H37NaO7S]), combined: 1.7%. Miscellaneous foreign contaminates: 1.5%.
NOTES: “Fact” is an exact list of ingredients that make up a sheet of paper, hence the blunt title of the work. It’s a self-reflexive, deconstructed meditation on the act of writing and of publishing, with an emphasis on the materiality of language. Each time Dworkin displays the poem, he researches the medium on which it’s being viewed, changing the list of ingredients. It’s a flexible work in progress, sometimes manifesting itself as a list of the ingredients that make up a Xerox copy, other times listing the composition of an lcd display monitor.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2009).
I read it as a lyrical evocation of language turning into communicated meaning, leaving behind the mere physical ink which had held it on a sheet of paper whose materiality is emphasized to a magnificent extreme by a dense list of its chemical ingredients (and, in highly technical terminology, their purposes), thus connecting the reader to such final dichotomies as content/form, motion/stasis, creativity/ sterility, metaphysics/science, ethereality/plainness, emotionality/ passiveness, adventure/stagnation, and–most of all–spirituality/ corporeality . . . Under all of it at the same time is an expression of the glorious complexity of the universe, one sheet of which is depicted as the ground of the meaning that the ink contains. Or: the huge reality which is all matter in balance with the huge meaningfulness language magicks out of it.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the materiality of language–the material ink and paper aren’t language, they just contain language.
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Entry 763 — More on “Vege Moco”
Friday, June 8th, 2012
John let me know that the title of the work of his I featured yesterday, “veg moco,” means “vegsnot.” “Moco” being something like Mucus? In any event, it reminded me of something about John’s poetry that I am very well aware of but almost always forget when in my Deft Critic Mode: his sense of humor–and inclination to be “anti-poetic” when “poetic” is thought of as sunny days, sunsets, and flowers in bloom. I think the critic in me is so wedded to the rather extreme lyrical poet I tend to be that I find my kind of poetry in any poem by another that I like. But I also have trouble as a critic in working out a rationale for the effectiveness of his work in spite of his what he does seemingly to sabotage it! Here’s my rough, hot off the griddle, attempt to come to terms with this: his humor, and dada rejection of pretentiously high, “beautful” art–two different aspects, I believe, though often fusing–are just extra flavors in an art struggling through, or out of, the kind of pre-human zone (a source-wound?) I believe most of Bennett’s works begin in. Ink/muck bleeding toward some uncertain goal, constantly running into rocks or ideas that scrape colors or squelched symbols or hostile/genial jokes or even possible understandings off them, but celebrating, finally, the quest to get somewhere by any means.
Do I know what I’m talking about? You got me.
Personal news: I recently bought some more books at my local library’s used bookstore. One was Anthony Adverse, for the heck of it becauwse I’d heard of it for many years, and it was only a dollar. On the back were blurbs not about the novel but about reading, by famous writers. One was By Edward Gibbon: “The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.” I immediately thought, “The use of thinking is to aid us in reading.” It then occurred to me that, when reading an aphorism, I almost always at once want to contradict it. Are others like that? You can’t step in the same river more than once; every river you step into is the same one.
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Entry 762 — “Vege Moco”
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
I’m sneaking through my vow of a daily blog entry by copying in a new work by John M. Bennett that happened into my Inbox a little while ago–as many works by Dr. Bennett do. This is just another work of his–I like it quite a bit, but no more than I like probably 463 others of his every year, when I have time to give them a proper look/read. Many are like this one: pen&ink, with cut-outs from newspapers and magazines; usually fragments of words. Callugriphy inimitably Bennettical. The origin of almost all he does seems at the bottom of his reptilian brain, or lower, but ascending, struggling to express Final Thoughts. I’ve more than once called him the Jackson Pollock of American Poetry, but–alas–with no Peggy Guggenheim, and only me as a Clement Greenberg.
This is life–seaweed, maybe. I perceive a distribution of seeds going on. It’s definitely loco. For the second day in a row my inability to read Spanish limits me. But I suspect the Spanish texts are no closer to normal meaningfulness than “Vege Moco” is. But this incompolete meaninfulness (conventional meaningfulness) feels serene to me–quietly, biologically transcending attempts of languages to grasp parts of it. On a pleasant summer day, I’m sure. Something that finds a mood in you you didn’t know you had. And is different from the mood it finds in just about anybody else.
Note: Bennett’s art is so much his life, from the minorest to the majorest parts of it, that few units of it aren’t significantly enhanced by their context–each is almost a frame from an incredibly long-running movie, so contains much of the preceding frame and the one to come–is itself and what it was and will be.
I seem to have written a blurb. Just trying again to pin the sucker down, folks. Someday I will!!!
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