Entry 1761 — The Final Final & Other Stuff-

Entry 1761 — The Final Final & Other Stuff

On Sunday, March 22, 2015 12:04 PM, Bob Grumman <[email protected]> posted this at NowPoetry:

The first took me over a week, the second fifteen minutes, except for a spelling correction two hours later. The first is at /2015/03/21/entry-1759, the second one day later. I’m posting them because the first is autobiographical: Peach Island actually exists in Long Island Sound fifty yards or so from the shore of Harbor View where I spent my best years (from age 7 to 12), and my poem about it has zillions of epiphanies!

The rest of the poem and all of the second poem are autobiographical only to the extent of expressing my love of fantasy stories beginning with the Grimm’s tales my mother read to me. I was almost going to call the first poem an homage to JK Rowling but it only connects to the Potter series as fantasy. I think I may try for a specific poem about Harry if my subconsciousness can come up with the necessary ingredients. Confession: while I do regard Rowling’s series highly, I want to make a poem on it mainly as a way of enlarging my audience–maybe even double it to 16.

Feedback, of course, would be appreciated. Feedback, of course, not expected. Except possibly for the Superior Two whose names I will not divulge.

* * *
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 2:22 PM, ‘stephen russell’ via NowPoetry <[email protected]> wrote:

peach island, just offshore —
abondoned house
in the middle of the trees

Bob, I think you can delete a few words … still, fascinating ….

I’ve always thought that your work would appeal to bright pre-adolescents. I remember Bloom, in a snide remark on the Charley Rhodes show, refer to Harry Potter as “trash.” Apparently, because Potter did not measure up to E B White, the book was unworthy of his esteem.

* * *

Very interesting, Stephen–my immediate reaction to your suggestion was, doesn’t he realize I want to indicate the size of the little island? But I thought about it for a while and realized I didn’t have to! In fact, if I don’t, the reader can imagine the island any size he wants to! And the main purpose of the poem is to give the reader something to use his imagination on. So thanks!

As for Bloom, you know my opinion of him. Bloom’s contempt reminds me of Edmund Wilson’s for detective novels. As for me, the only genre novels I don’t like are romance novels, and that’s because I’m one of those horrible XY people. But I consider Rowling much better than White, even though he was an XY, she a double X.

Off to fix my poem, now.

–Bob

* * *

http://www.georgetown.edu/news/lannan-center-for-poetics-endowment-symposium-2015.html

MARCH 18, 2015 – GEORGETOWN HAS RECEIVED A $4 million gift to permanently endow its Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice as it celebrates its 25th anniversary and prepares for its annual spring symposium – featuring renowned poets, writers, intellectuals and activists – this month.

Aho, an almost perfect counter-post to mine about my new anti-social practice and unmillioned or hundreded poems. (Ain’t it turble way I takes everythin’ personal!)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2015 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Cryptographiku, From My Poetry Workshop, Infraverbal Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Entry 582 — Ten-Year Mathemakuical Triptych « POETICKS

Entry 582 — Ten-Year Mathemakuical Triptych

Kathy Ernst a long time ago was kind enough to commission a work of mine for to hang in her husband’s place of business. When I dawdled, she suggested I send them my “Mathemaku for Tom Phillips,” which I had done, partly in water color, at the Atlantic center of Art in 2011, and Kathy had taken a liking to. I wanted to send her something new, though, that would fit her husband’s scientific/technological business. So I worked up a triptych. There was one big problem with it: I had to make it in pieces because my computer was too small to hold an image the size I wanted this to be (eleven by seventeen inches). At length, I printed all the pieces involved, intending to make three collages. At that point I got collagist’s block. That lasted six or more years–until today. Today I got it on disk. It only took two or three hours of work. Ridiculous. Of course, I haven’t had it printed yet, but I feel optimistic that it will look okay. Here’s the third frame, which is what it originally looked like except for a few very small changes:

* * *

Friday, 2 December 2011, 9 A.M. The big news of today is that last night or this morning, while I was lying in bed between periods of sleep, I realized that now the I had a computer with much more storage space than my previous one had, I could make decent copies of the frames of my “Triptych for Tom Phillips” and have them printed from a CD at Staples. I’ve already made copies of the images I’ll be using–only to discover I already had better copies in a computer file. All that exhausted me. Time for a nap.

No nap. Little done until I finally went back to work on the Phillips piece. I finished it at just after two. When I started putting it together, I thought it a dazzling summation of my whole life. Halfway through it, I told myself I ought to finish it despite how worthless it was. It’ll probably look okay framed, though.

Relationship Website

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, From My Poetry Workshop, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1127 — True Poetic Experimentation « POETICKS

Entry 1127 — True Poetic Experimentation

I’m almost giddy about the following after working for about an hour on it:

I’m giddy about it not because I think it’s any good (I sincerely have no opinion of it yet), but because I took what I had yesterday an truly experimented with it. That is, I just tried out little design ideas as they hit without consideration of what thy’ do to the work as a whole. For instance, I thought, “I’ll try a lighter blue in this area an see what happens,” rather than “If I made the blue here lighter, would it help produce the effect I want, which is to express the joy of escape reading?”

Not that I didn’t abruptly notice how some change might help me get the poem headed where I thought I wanted it to go. I am also pretty sure my unconscious oversaw everything. The big surprise for me was that the Very Clumsy, Wrong dividend and sub-dividend product I had ended seeming possibly right!

One other nice thing: I’m seeing new experiments to try with it. None brilliant but all seeming worth a try. I fear the poem’s experimental feel is fading, though: most of my new thoughts have to do with further exploitation of what’s there as opposed to just trying any old thing.

Inkjet Ink

This entry was posted on Friday, June 21st, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 596 — A Final Version of my Sonnet, Again « POETICKS

Entry 596 — A Final Version of my Sonnet, Again

I couldn’t stay way from it. I kept running it through my mind since posting the previous version here a week or two ago, finally coming up with the version below the night of 15 December. Note, each line should be pronounced as an iambic pentameter, including the third.

Sonnet from My Forties

     Much have I ranged the kingdoms Stevens forged
     Of deeply penetrating inquiries
     Into, and deft use of, the metaphor,
     And volumes filled in vain attempts to reach

     The heights that he did. Often, too, I’ve been
     To where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps
     Toward high-hued sensibility begin
     In Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

     Of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
     That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
     That Pound re-morninged splashingly to life,
     But failed as dismally to match their works.

Yet still, nine-tenth insane though it now seems,
I seek those ends; I hold to my huge dreams.

Diary Entry

Friday, 16 December 2011, 11:30 A.M. I have a few small exhibition-bookkeeping chores yet to do that I’m letting go for this weekend so I can concentrate on the stack of reviews for Small Press Review I have to do. One of them will be of I, a novella by Arnold Skemer that I find excellent but a very slow read, in the best sense of the description.

Toy store discount

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop, sonnet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1126 — Poem-in-Progress « POETICKS

Entry 1126 — Poem-in-Progress

The past few days I’ve been thinking about how t do something with my private eye. I haven’t gotten very far, but at least have a full rough draft. I have a zero from the last long division as my divisor, and my private eye as quotient. The dividend and sub-dividend product show below are both just very vague notes as to where I want to go. I have what I think are good ideas for improving my layering, too. And the colors.

More discussion tomorrow–with, I hope, a better version.

Fast Payroll Advances

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 20th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 567 — Multiplication & Long Division « POETICKS

Entry 567 — Multiplication & Long Division

What follows is a piece it took me practically a week to get done, if it is indeed now done. It’s the first lesson hand-out for my exhibition.

THE JOY OF MULTIPLICATION AND LONG DIVISION

Multiplication is the best of the arithmetical procedures we learned in grade school for use in poetry because of something you might not expect of it: its richness. Consider something as simple as the poetic idea that “sunlight + soil = flowers.” Add sunlight to soil and you get flowers. (Well, you need more than that in real life, but not in poetry!) A nice enough idea that makes a pleasant poem because it expresses an old idea in a somewhat new way. But now try multiplication: “sunlight x soil = flowers” and think of the richness of what then occurs: each particle of the soil is now multiplied by the sunlight, not just the soil as a whole added to by the sunlight. Each particle of soil and each photon of sunlight interact to form something new!

THE POETIC POSSIBILITIES OF MULTIPLICATION AND LONG DIVISION

I imagine it in visual terms, addition versus multiplication:

Is not the rectangle not only a larger but a richer instance of flowers than what addition yields (even if they’re only square flowers in this case)?

And then there’s long division. As a mathematical poet, I love this procedure more than any other mathematical procedure, for look what it allows me to do with soil and sunlight:

The form allows me not only to show the effect of multiplying “soil” times” sunlight to get “flowers,” but also to show that by adding “robins” to “flowers,” I can get “spring.” The overall image is still simple but has more details than a simple multiplication could provide. And the form keeps the person engaging the poem in it longer, and the longer one is exposed to a poem, the more one should get out of it.

I imagine it in visual terms, addition versus multiplication:

Is not the rectangle not only a larger but a richer instance of flowers than what addition yields (even if they’re only square flowers in this case)?

And then there’s long division. As a mathematical poet, I love this procedure more than any other mathematical procedure, for look what it allows me to do with soil and sunlight:

The form allows me not only to show the effect of multiplying “soil” times” sunlight to get “flowers,” but also to show that “robins” added to “flowers” will result in “spring.” The overall image is still simple but has more details than a simple multiplication could provide. And the form keeps the person engaging the poem in it longer, and the longer one is exposed to a poem, the more one should get out of it.

Diary Entry for 17 November 2011, 7 P.M.: Sort of a crappy day, for me and my partner in doubles got clobbered in a league match this morning. The team as a whole won two of three, though. I actually felt pretty good on the court for a change, but made a lot of unforced errors. As for my cultural productivity, it was about the same as it has been. I got the thing above done, then used it to get this entry done. Then I worked a while on my book, finally getting the part about what I’m calling the brain’s “Anthroceptual Management Center,” or “AMC,” right, although the rightness is very badly expressed. I’m hoping to pick up speed on this section of the book tomorrow.

Petsmart.com Coupons

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1118 — Floundering « POETICKS

Entry 1118 — Floundering

I felt very good about my three haiku and how well they’d work in the long division I was hoping soon to get done. Then almost as though I were purposely trying to make a lesson out of the thing, I had second thoughts about it. Here are the haiku I had again:

rainy afternoon;
private eye (fictional)
exiting a cab

the Atlantic
before ships were anywhere on it
except its edges

9 faint winter poems
unseveraling
into long ago

These made up what I would call the second draft of the poem, the first being the notes I displayed a few entries ago. I’m not counting the apeiron draft–the draft (really, drafts) in my head before I scribbled my first draft. (Love that word, “apeiron!” Thanks, Irving–for using it in one of the works of his I had in my latest Scientific American blog entry, as you all should very well know, having gone to it at least nine times since it was posted! It means the emptiness from whence everything came. More or less.)

Okay, first point I’m attempting with this lesson to instill in all those what wants to know what’s what when it comes to Poetry is that what I had when I’d scribbled my notes was a wholly unconsolidated item-cluster poem. I have no term for it, yet. There are those who prefer such a thing to any other kind because it lets the reader go pretty much wherever he wants to. Many tiny pleasures versus a large single pleasure that consolidation can yield.

My second draft, if we include the long division elements I spoke of that would go with it in the form I once thought it was headed for is a semi-consolidated item-cluster poem. I thought it was a fully-consolidated item-cluster poem but the unifying principle I’d worked out for it failed to effectively unify it, I thought. Still, there would be those who would prefer this version above any others–because reducing the risk of tedious wandering for meanings, but not forcing a quickly tedious single meaning on one–by allowing, that is, the reader to be creative.

My initial unifying principle was zero times private eye equals poems that put one into the past, and the mood the latter image suggests comes close to the mood suggested by the image of the Atlantic prior to Columbus’s voyages. Moreover, the 9 poems image will cause exactly the same mood the ocean image does if an ellipsis is tacked on to the text expressing it. I think my haiku excellently connotative but fail to lead to a mood that makes sense.

Here’s what I think the meaning of draft #2 approximates: reading about a private eye multiplies the zero one’s life is when one begins reading into the thrill of an ocean awaiting to be discovered over. The problem is that the detective is not close to being a Columbus.

rainy afternoon;
private eye (fictional)
exiting a cab

ships for the first time
somewhere on the Atlantic
besides its edges

9 faint winter poems
unseveraling
into not yet

I’m not sure what I was up to when I changed my Atlantic haiku. I guess I thought my private eye was involved in a case, so wanted ships on the Atlantic that were involved in their equivalent. But their equivalent was much too consequential than whatever it was the private eye was involved in.

As for the poems, they were properly consolidating but ”into long ago?” The detective was into the future not the past. Hence my change there. But now I want a fourth draft that keeps the private eye. I still want the poem to celebrate escape reading and the search for truth, but a lesser truth than Columbus’s discovery of the trans-Atlantic route to the New World Columbus made. My “not yet” is poor–just a marker I will surely improve on. Meanwhile, I have to dump my Atlantic haiku. No, not dump, just remove for use somewhere else.

Lesson to be continued when I have more to say.

HP Scanner

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 12th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop, haiku, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 538 –At a Loss for Subject Matter « POETICKS

Entry 538 –At a Loss for Subject Matter

I’m so at a loss for subject matter for this entry that I am going to take care of it with two haiku-like texts of mine I scribbled sometime during the past month or so on scraps of paper. One is part of a long division poem I haven’t had the energy to convert into a finished product; when I wrote the one underneath it, I thought it might lead to a long division poem, but nothing yet has developed from it.

                          a sleepful
                          of cherry blossoms just
                        coming into their own

                          the mountains
                          where two continents are
                         learning into each other
.

Sierra Trading Post Coupon

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1117 — 3 Haiku « POETICKS

Entry 1117 — 3 Haiku

I’m pretty much out of it again, and have to pick up a new lawn mower then use it. So just the following haiku today:

rainy afternoon;
private eye (fictional)
exiting a cab

the Atlantic
before ships were anywhere on it
except its edges

9 faint winter poems
unseveraling
into long ago

They are from the scribbled notes I posted two days ago, the final versions of my still-not-done new long division poem’s quotient, dividend and sub-dividend product, respectively.

DSLR Camera Packages

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 11th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop, haiku. 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.

One Response to “Entry 1117 — 3 Haiku”

Conrad says:

12 June 13 at 7:47 AM

Bob,

love the first one: very film noir-ish

Entry 590 — Playing at Being an Abstract-Expressionist « POETICKS

Entry 590 — Playing at Being an Abstract-Expressionist

This is a third version of the subdividend product in my division of “the the” poem:

I quite like it. I experimented with quite a few different colors, none of them seeming to work until I added the maroon, which made a huge difference for some reason. Now I have to figure out how to use it in a poem.

* * *

Saturday, 10 December 2011, Noon. I have to get my Christmas chores–basically a Christmas letter and cards–out of the way. So I’ll be concentrating on that for a few days. I just posted my blog entry for today, and I arranged it so my second printer can print some copies of my “Christmas Mathemaku, No. 1,” which takes care of my pledge to work daily on something connected to the exhibition–but I hope to do more, like print out some copies of it. I want to try to sell a few signed copies at the A&H office. I lost the morning to tennis, and the after-tennis coffee session, this time at a Dunkin’ Donuts place. I sometimes think I should give up tennis–becauwse (1) I’m lousy at it and (2) it takes time from my cultural activities. But I’m pretty sure I need it–as a break from cultural activities, and for simply being with others. The exercise is probably good for me, too. I have to admit that it can be fun when I’m not too horrible (as I was this morning).

6 P.M. This afternoon I went out on my bike again. I got two more picture frames, some ink for my new printer ($100!) and had some things printed out–parts of my very large “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes.” Since then, I’ve put my “Christmas Mathemaku, No. 1″ into a frame. Haven’t done much else.

Fast Cash Advance Loan

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, From My Poetry Workshop. 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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