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David Riesman « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘David Riesman’ Category

Entry 1568 — Me ‘n’ Riesman, Part 2

Friday, September 12th, 2014

After more reading of The Lonely Crowd, I’ve decided I’m very much inner-directed, according to Riesman’s description of the type.  I got him wrong when I though his inner-directed type was similar to my rigidnik.  I now an unsure how his autonomous type differs from his inner-directed type.  According to Riesman, many of his readers, including colleagues of his, confused the two.  I now see why–and Riesman himself seems to consider it a natural mistake.  (He is excellently self-critical, it seems to me, but has surprising blind spots: for instance, about the possibility of innate psychological tendencies: he mentions such a possibility every once in a while, but quickly drops the subject, seeming to take social determinism the only important kind of determinism in the main body of his book–or so my impression is after not going very far in it.)

I’m also wondering how Riesman’s other-directed types ultimately differ from his tradition-directed types.  Possibly, I just thought, because their memories coincide with their environmental input?  They pray to whomever their tribal god is only partly because they’ve been trained to, but mostly because everyone else in the tribe is.  The inner-directed person prays to his god because of his indoctrination entirely: he more or less has to because he is part of Riesman’s inner-directed society and thus not sure of having the right people to imitate.

The autonomous person will differ from the inner-directed person only in that he will be much more likely to question his indoctrination.

* * *

Last night while lying in bed hoping for sleep to come, I suddenly had a few ideas for poems, two of which follow:

intuition + reason = moonlight + pond

MathemakuOceanaI’m not sure whether they’re finished or not, or whether, if finished, they’re keepers or not.
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Posted in Autobiographica, David Riesman, From My Poetry Workshop, Knowlecular Psychology, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Temperaments | No Comments »

Entry 513 — 11 Forebears « POETICKS

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Entry 513 — 11 Forebears

Is it possible, as I’m thinking right now, that the feeling of being importantly part of a “major adventure,” as my recent mathemaku has it, could be the only thing that can make life worthwhile?  Many things can cause such a feeling—for me, at any rate.  Being in the groove on the tennis court, as I wasn’t except for a point or two this morning, although I was on the winning side, thanks to my partners, in the only two sets I played. (I doubt if the feeling will be possible for me, except momentarily, in tennis until I get my left leg back.  It still can’t seem to give me the thrust I need to sprint, although I’m optimistic that it will.)

Mostly for me, being in the groove while composing a literary work—as I never quite was during the work I’ve recently done on my reaction to Jake Berry’s essay.  In fact, I’m in my null zone again because I couldn’t get into the groove working on that reaction yesterday in spite of a dose of APCs.  Nor could I get a major adventure going anywhere else, or even one planned and possible, if not begun.  On the other hand, toward the end of the day I did write a 240-word letter to Free Inquiry about the immortality of the consciousness.  It was pretty good, but didn’t excite me. 

It’s around one in the afternoon as I write this.  I haven’t felt like bothering with anything since returning from tennis around ten, but realized I hadn’t done a blog entry.  That I’ve done one a day for over a week now got me to the keyboard—gotta keep my streak going.  Who knows, maybe it’ll get me going.  I haven’t taken any drugs, by the way.  Nor do I right now plan to—don’t have any confidence they’d do me any good after yesterday.

Okay, now to what I thought I’d write about here, something I’ve thought about many times but most recently just a day ago: that I really don’t know the work of many poets well enough to believe I could be a knowledgeably good critic of their work.  I came up with a list of just eleven Anglophonic poetic forebears of mine—poets writing in English a generation or more before I that I feel I’ve studied enough to be an authority on.  Not that I couldn’t (and haven’t) said good things about many other poets, just that what I’ve said was about individual poems or lines, not oeuvres—and if valuably insightful, mostly so by luck alone.

My list has nothing but standard poets on it, all major in my view and the world’s: Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, Cummings, Roethke, Frost, Stevens, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Williams. Coleridge and Shelley just missed.  Maybe Emerson, too, except that he didn’t write very many superior poems.  The only foreign forebears who have been as important as these to me have been Issa, Buson, Basho.  I feel I can be, and have been, knowledgeably good about the Japanese haiku tradition as a whole.

By no means am I saying I have been or am capable of being academically erudite about any poets.  Able to quote reams of a given poet’s work, for instance, or say with much certainty when any of the poet’s works was written or published, or even instantly tell the poet’s work as his.  Knowing a poet’s work as a creative artist and/or as a critic is different from knowing it as an academic—and, no, not necessarily superior to it, although I prefer it.

I know a number of my contemporaries poetry quite well, but don’t believe one can be knowledgeably good on any poet until one has gone over just about all of it, which one can’t do with a living poet’s work. 

Before leaving, here’s an announcement: yesterday I posted the first of the ten visual poems I plan for my new page, “Ten Superior Visual Poems,” along with my commentary on it.  The poem is Marilyn R. Rosenberg’s “Drifts.”  Next will be something by some Hungarian.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 25th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Announcements, 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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Entry 699 — A Map of Mycenae « POETICKS

Entry 699 — A Map of Mycenae

This map should prove that no one can sink lower than I to post a blog entry;  I stole the map from a reference book for use as part of my “Odysseus Suite.”  I did make a few changes, removing labels and things that I didn’t want, and I will add something ever-so-slightly clever to it which I worked on earlier today but got too tired to finish.  I really wanted to finish the entire frame of the suite that it will be part of, but I’s so tired.  Anyway, the portion shown in orange on the map is the extent of the Mycenean empire around 1300 B.C. when the Trojan War is believed to have taken place.  Hurrah for history!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2012 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.

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Artists Mentioned in Entries « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Artists Mentioned in Entries’ Category

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Entry 659 — A Tribute to the Piano

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

I had high hopes for this one, which I composed yesterday.  I even thought I might work a sequence out of it, using the Klee ship “musical theme” as the first step of a visual symphony.  But I wasn’t satisfied with what I did with the ships.  As I worked with them, though, I came up with a lot of minor ideas I liked.  The main one was a suddenly conscious attempt to provide a metaphor for the coming of spring.  But I also liked breaking up what was originally as single framed image, and changing the sizes of each unit.  Grey-scaling the first two tiny ones seemed a nice touch, too.  And the escape of the final ship!  I didn’t like my dividend too well, either–after my initial enthusiasm for it (being a sucker for anything having to do with spring).  For some reason it doesn’t seem quite there, for me.  Maybe I’ll simplify it to, “a brook’s revived consideration of an April countryside.”  Yes, I think I was trying for too much. . . .

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Posted in Bob Grumman, From My Poetry Workshop, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 657 — My Motto as a Poetry Critic

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

 Thinking about what Tony Robinson had at his blog spurred me to this motto of my own (obnoxious) practice as a poetry critic: Try for maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I understand it, and expressed with the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage.  I originally continued with “–with no significant suppression of emotion, regardless of the tender feelings of the hyper-offendable,” but upon reflection found that nice to say but too secondary for this motto. 

Better: Using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, try to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I see it.  Ah, but I now see that “the value of what I’m critiquing” would include what the latter does to advance poetry.  Ergo:  Try, using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing. 

And here’s a copy (an imperfect one) of my motto as a poet:

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Entry 656 — A Clone of Shakespeare

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

To continue my argument that the arts progress just like verosophy does (and take care of this entry with minimal effort), here’s a question: if a clone of Shakespeare had been created in 1980 and he was now a professional actor writing plays for the stage and screen, would they not be better than the ones he wrote four hundred years ago?  Would he not be able to improve on what he composed then?

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Posted in Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts, William Shakespeare | No Comments »

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.

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Posted in Anthony Robinson, Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 653 — A Response to Hal Johnson’s Poem

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

 

Here’s Hal Johnson’s visio-infraverbal poem again:

 ”Lost in thought” is the simplest explication of this, but a better reading focuses on thought that is opposed, disrupted, damaged and finally sent in the wrong direction back to its futile beginning.  With “ugh” and “tough” being disconcealed in the process further to suggest the losing struggle for meaning expressed.   In short, a deft pwoermd.  A visuaol one as well as infraverbal because you can see the word’s letters metaphorically enacting the struggle.

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Entry 652 — An Infraverbal Poem by Hal Johnson

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

 

Here’s an infraverbal poem–actually a visio-infraverbal poem–Hal Johnson posted at New-Poetry:

    
 I’ll leave it for now as a puzzle.  Tomorrow I’ll reveal why it’s a first-rate poem.

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Entry 650 — Some Anti-Philogushy

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Me Versus B. H. Fairchild and Others He quotes

Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry.  You can’t rescue any hidden life, whatever that is, with prose?  Or some other art?  Or science?  Why wouldn’t using language to drown certain aspects of unhidden life be equally or more valuable? 

Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet.   It sure isn’t everything to me.  It and serenity are only two of many pleasures it is the function of art to provide.   Its manner of providing them is what sets it apart from verosophy and other endeavors which can, and try, to lead to wonder and serenity, and other pleasures.

Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.”  Nice thought–but unattainable heavens to dream toward are a high good, too.

Seven propositions:

1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose).  I agree: a poem is a verbal construction different from almost all other verbal constructions.

2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego.  As does almost anything else I can think of, when it isn’t nothing but ego.

3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning.  Which the infinity of possible verbal meaning can express.

4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam.  All the arts, like all the sciences, have become vastly superior to what they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, but anti-progressives mistake the sentimentality that becomes more and more attached to the old because of their age for aesthetic rather than nostalgiacal value.  Compare the clumsy “novel” in the Bible about David with almost any competent commercial novel of today, for instance.  Consider how much more of existence the best art of today is about compared with earlier art.  For just one thing, today’s art has a vastly larger tradition to make allusions to than previous art had.  There have been artists in the past as great as our best, but what our best have produced is significantly better than what they did in part because of the what the artists of the past did.  (Note, this is a subject requiring a book.)

5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique–and, obviously, to learn it–is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.)  I more or less agree with all this, but I wonder how one can avoid using some technique.

6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief.  Every work of art requires a container; I call that container form; one calling it “an extension of subject matter,” if I understand him, needs to tell me what, then, is containing it and the subject matter it is an extension of.  I don’t know what ideology and religious belief have to do with it; how would they be not subject matter?

7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic.  I think meter is both natural and imposed–necessarily imposed to add predictability to balance the difficult-to-accept unpredictability of horses going beyond prose that poetry at its best is. 

A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings.  Just to be argumentative, I would say that a poet’s having to write for others (and he needn’t) greatly increases his field of play.  (Note that our Wilshberian’s poet writes rather than composes.  It never occurs to any Wilshberian that a poem might be more than words.)

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Posted in Aesthetics, B. H. Fairchild, Bob Grumman | No Comments »

Entry 649 — Some Philogushy from B.H. Fairchild

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

“Philogushy” is my term for “love of gush.”  It’s practiced a good deal by poets.  Once again I could think of nothing to post here, so I stole the excerpt below from 25 pages of journal entries by poet B.H. Fairchild that are in the latest issue of New Letters, a magazine I’m reviewing for Small Press Review.  I knew nothing about Fairchild but apparently he’s very well-known, and a grant-winner.   

Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry.

Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet.

Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.”

Seven propositions:

1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose).

2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego.

3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning.

4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam.

5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique-and, obviously, to learn it-is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.)

6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief.

7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic.

A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings.

* * * * *

Most of the other entries are at this level. some stupid, some interesting, none what I’d call a serious attempt to understand what poetry is, rather than what the effect of poetry the definer admires is.  Subjective philogushy rather than objective verosophy.  I’m not going to discuss any individual entries now so as to leave myself something to write about tomorrow.

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Entry 647 — “The Four Seasons”

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Here’s another of my earlier visual poems:

The clever bit was the upside-down m. 

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 646 — “Homage to Wordsworth”

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

Today a not-very-good copy of one of the visual poems I plan to have in my next show:

Not much to say about it except that it is inspired by one of the more famous of Wordsworth’s sonnets, which describes how the ocean, “with his eternal motion make(s)/ a sound like thunder–everlastingly.”

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Posted in Aesthetics, Bob Grumman, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

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Entry 624 — A Change of Mind « POETICKS

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Entry 624 — A Change of Mind

 

In Entry 536, I called the following a “misfire.” It made no sense to me. Coming across it again a week or so ago, I completely changed my mind: it makes perfect sense to me, now (if only meta-rationally). I now think of it as being as good as anything I’ve yet done. I also decided my “Cursive Mathemaku No. 2″ is probably better without the colored background I added to it.  Sometimes, though, I actually finish a piece permanently.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2012 at 12:00 AM and is filed under 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.

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Entry 1141 — A Final Version? « POETICKS

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Entry 1141 — A Final Version?

Bad things have been happening with my house, so I thought I’d take the next few days off to recover.  After a simple nap this afternoon, though, I suddenly had an urge to finish the private eye poem I was working on a week or more ago.  Here’s the result:

PrivateEye4July2013a

I give it a B (rating it against my poems only).  I hope others will find it interesting.  What’s most interesting to me about it right now is how much it seems to me it could be improved, and/or some of its details employed more effectively in better poems.  I don’t want t fool with it anymore, though: I don’t think I have enough of a handle on it to know for sure what I have right in it, what not-so-right.  (I don’t think anything in it is flat-out wrong.)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 4th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under 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.

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Entry 585 — A Decorative Touch « POETICKS

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Entry 585 — A Decorative Touch

For me, one of the saddest things about my final years is how much I’m continuing to learn about making poems.  For instance, consider the value of simple decorative touches you can apply to a word in a visual poem, such as the ones in the remainder of my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes,” that I’m trying to put into exhibition-worthy shape:

Previously the letters were all black.  I changed them to brown.  That was all I thought I would do, but then I thought I might as well experiment with background colors in the manner above.  I had the change shapes a number of times, but eventually was satisfied with the above.    I didn’t learn to do this kind of thing when I worked up the remainder, but learned it more solidly–and I was old when I first learned, four or five years ago, when I did, “Mathemaku for Geof Huth”–if I remember its name correctly.  No big deal–in fact, it should be in this case since a remainder shouldn’t be to visiopoetic as to possibly detract from the core of a poem.  Just an added pleasure (if successful).

I think the reason so many old people want to teach is that, since they know they won’t have time fully to enjoy the little things they learn, they want to feel others, if they get to them early enough, will.  So listen to your elders, you young shits reading this!  (Oops, there I go again.) 

* * *

Monday, 5 December 2011, 8 A.M.  I feel a little blah but eager to get some work done.  I just finished breakfast–after getting the blog entry for today done, and setting this one up for tomorrow.  Now to the main chore of today: putting together some stuff to show Judy at Arts and Humanities.  I thought tomorrow, when I have a doctor’s appointment near her office, would be a good time to see her for details about my show.  I want to leave a specmen for advertisement–the “Hi!” one–and maybe something else–with commentaries.

It’s now two-and-a-half hours later.  I reframed my “hi” piece–to get it into a frame with a thing on the back allowing it to be displayed on a flat surface, in this case, a counter that’s in the middle of the room my exhibition will be in.  A trivial job but one I have all sorts of trouble getting myself to do generally.  This morning, I just did it.  I haven’t taken any pills, either!  I also revised the seventh frame of my “Long Division of Poetry,” printed it, then took care of a commentary on it.

Noon Report: I did some effective work of my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes,” then used a few comments on my revision of its remainder in my next blog entry, so that’s out of the way.  I’m really humming, but I won’t be able to keep it up.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 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.

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Entry 1121 — An Improvement « POETICKS

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Entry 1121 — An Improvement

When I happened to see my blog entry two before this one, I noticed I’d forgotten to finish my poem’s dividend-shed.  After I did that, I reformatted the dividend to have it going off the edge of the page, like the ellipsis.  This little trope has long been a favorite of mine–maybe it’s now a mannerism, but I refuse to stop using it.

14June-A-small

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 15th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under 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.

2 Responses to “Entry 1121 — An Improvement”

  1. karl kempton says:
    15 June 13 at 12:56 PM

    fine poem

  2. Bob Grumman says:
    15 June 13 at 2:34 PM

    Thanks, Karl! Maybe I’m not nuts for liking it myself.

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Entry 582 — Ten-Year Mathemakuical Triptych « POETICKS

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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.

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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.

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Entry 1127 — True Poetic Experimentation « POETICKS

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Entry 1127 — True Poetic Experimentation

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

OvalPrivateEye

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.

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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.

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