From My Poetry Workshop « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘From My Poetry Workshop’ Category

Entry 1747 — Some Bedside Notes

Monday, March 9th, 2015

Some notes from a week or so ago that I hoped to make a long division poem of.  I keep scrap paper at my bedside in case I have enough ideas I feel the need to record them while lying in bed at night.  The second sheet are my notes about the previous notes.  The poem I was preparing these notes for was to be the second in the set begun with the poem in Entrymy second long division of boyhood.  Nothing further has come of these.  Until now, when I’m having too tired a day to be able to think of anything else to put here.

BedsideNotesEarlyMarch2015Asharpened

BedsideNotesEarlyMarch2015sharpened

For Easy Reading:

all the climbable trees and bushes for hiding in the hill our house was on

I like this but it is not worded properly and I still can’t see how to fix it–without simply sticking a second “on” into it.

a summer day three wishes more distant than Atlantis

This I find wonderful, the one really nice term I came up with.

faereality–actually a version in code that I didn’t want to take the time to work out, knowing I’d remember to later.

A continuing favored image of mine I want one day to have a cluster of poems about (and already have several).

a decoder disk fresh from the cereal box

I never had such a disk but wanted something about the making of codes that was so important to me as a boy.

secrecy (used as an exponent, an idea I dropped because–fancy this–it didn’t make mathematical sense to me)

Nothing more wonderful in boyhood than this.

an ancient tale-spinner’s path dreaming into a yes with mountains in it

A second fairly inspired term, particularly the “yes with mountains in it”

a boy’s book

Just a possible term if needed, and chosen because books were the ur-source of the best adventures of my boyhood.

I’m not bothering with the second page’s notes because none of them seem good to me–except the use of “secrecy” as a multiplier rather than as an exponent.  The idea of a map of something ridiculous to have a map of, except in a poem.

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Entry 1735 — A Visiopoetic List

Wednesday, February 25th, 2015

Here’s a list I threw together for a group show in Minneapolis last year that Harriet Bart curate(or co-curated, I can’t remember which). I got my copy back a few days ago. I think the items in the show were all for sale. If so, I forget what price I put on it. Not the ten dollars that someone might have paid not because he liked it but because he thought someday some nut might be willing to pay a lot for it for some reason.

I consider it an interesting rough draft that there’s a chance I could make something of inspired. Aside from that, it’s a genuine list of ideas. I need to start making visiomathematical poems again, so have it nearby in hopes I’ll idly look it over and suddenly want to follow through on one of the ideas. Meanwhile, even though I may have posted it here already, it’s here today, which is another day on the edge of my null zone. If it gets me to make anything, I’ll post it here. Unless it’s so terrific I fear someone will steal it and make a bundle offa it. (Note, I never worry that anyone will steal anything from me: I may be wrong but I believe no one intelligent enough to think anything of mine worth stealing would steal anything of mine. Aside from that, maybe such a person could actually get something of mine to a reasonably large audience. Even if no one knew the True Author of it, I would enjoy knowing that something of mine was reaching more than my friends and relatives.

List4Minneaplois

Later note: I’ll be very upset with myself if I don’t soon make something of the one with “qbfsfbkhsz” as its dividend–or should have that that since it looks like I wrote it wrong.

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Entry 1730 — Fooling With Another Of My 39

Friday, February 20th, 2015

Here’s what I had:

               Q Quaverful of Deedle                   Although he knew he wasn't                 responsible for the summer's cymbular round                 decline to words, Poem flickered ever-                 inxiously prior.                   The pure blue churches paying his rent                 reasingly beyond the sky,                       failed to comfort him.                 And all the science myraculously                       shimmyred more than blue in the zeal                 of their covenant with the clouds.                                  The rain laughed but did not fall.                 The ocean revised the prayer it had                      formed a small wharf of just to the left                          of Poem.

Here’s what it is at the moment:

               A Summer Day's Ascent to Words                   Poem was barely a flicker in                 the summer day's cymbularical ascent                 to words.                   The ocean began revising                 the prayer it had                      formed a small wharf of just to the left                          of Poem                   and fourteen sciences myraculously                       shimmyred more than blue in the zeal                 of their covenant with the clouds.                   Was he being epiphanied again Poem wondered.  

About all I’ve done has been to take out the stuff I don’t understand.

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Entry 1729 — “A Quanthrille of Grrr-rille”

Thursday, February 19th, 2015

I found another Poem poem from that batch of 39 I made early in 2014 and discovered I liked it quite a bit:

AQofGrrr-rille

There’s a large problem with this, though: it’s too much like this, which I posted back on the seventh:

               A Quadrille of Deedle                   The rain lifted, but over-churched                    somewhere by the glymmyr the first                          ocean's philosophy,                        Poem                                   fell into the West                                   lighk a thousand                                spandered leaves                   A prayer away, a cloud rose just behind the dis                   tant wharf and                 remained in place.                      A girl in pale blue loy                     tered on it.                   Wordsworth and       Shelley                     joined her.  The                    rain re                         turned.  Heavily.                                           The girl                                      dissolved to the left of the poets,                                                                                                      silently,                                            in an obsolete meaning of "the."

There’s at least one more variation on the above.  What to do?  I suppose just making a theme and variations set?  Or perhaps a splice of the two here with some of the repeated material changed?  The bottom one seems before the second.  I’ll have to think a while about them. . . .

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Entry 1725 — The Current Poem-in-Progress

Sunday, February 15th, 2015

Here’s what I had two days ago:

        At the First             At the first ocean-wisdom, the lazy questions of                               the dolphins, folooping around his starplug,                 centered what thoughts Poem had.              Gradually, his vocabulary wore away into warmth,             proud to the touch, and galleoned              to the top of the laughing April morning                          unnorming, unnorming, unnorming              every worn where a syllable was abled against.                  Poem was uninquiserentlyy delubricated about                  what the word,                                 “starplug”                                        meant.               Of        course he knew                                                   it wasn’t a word the way, “way” or “why” were, just a                nonciation of his high-blimeyed cre                                       ator.         Still                                    it whatted for him at the leastest least's fringe.                       Was that girl somewhere in it?  The one             in that poem of long                      ago                who was      not    at                            the whirlf?                   A potentially usable vocabulea far dis              tant but still in view, Poem              inquiserently salubricated the grrrlplug                into his deepest wayre                       duculently achime                                                          in the Agincourt of his widening kingship.                       True merry the celubriation now inned                              around the now full-faring flitter Titania                                         had choired about                                         the many-whatted girll, and all the long-agone                          youmth of a particular summmermurrrr                                                            dayyy              renorming into cockleblithe murmythry. . .

Here’s what I have now:

        Poem Among Dolphins             The lazy questions of                               the dolphins folooping around his starplug                 centered what thoughts Poem had.              Gradually, his vocabulary wore away into warmth,                    unnorming, unnorming, unnorming                     every worn where a syllable was abled against.                  But he spundered over                 what the word,                                 “starplug”                                        meant.               Of        course he knew                                                   it wasn’t a word the way, “way” or “why” were, just a                nonciation of his high-blimeyed cre                                       ator.         Still                                    it whatted for him at the leastest least's fringe.                       Was that girl somewhere in it?  The one             in that poem of long                      ago                who was      not    at                            the whirlf?                   A potentially usable vocabulea far dis              tant but still in view, Poem              inquiserently salubricated the grrrlplug                into his deepest wayre                       duculently achime                                                          in the Agincourt of his widening kingship.                       True merry the celubriation now inned                              around the now full-faring flitter Titania                                         had choired about                                         the many-whatted girll, and all the long-agone                          youmth of a particular summmermurrrr                                                            dayyy              renorming into cockleblithe murmythry    
                  galleoning up                          to the top of the laughing April morning

 

I only spent a few minutes with this.  My main change, the removal of the “galleon” passage from early in the poem to the end, was due to my thinking it was a proper climax to the poem as a whole, so inappropriate where it was.  I’ll have to let the poem sit for a few days.  My changes today were too abrupt, and I don’t have time to reflect on them.  (I have a neighbor coming over sometime to fix my oven, and not knowing when he’ll be here makes it hard for me to work on Important Things.  I need to feel I can use all the rest of a day exclusively on my writing in order to get anywhere with it.  Or, any excuse to avoid getting anywhere on it.)
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Entry 1724 — A Poet’s Self-Criticism

Saturday, February 14th, 2015

A day late with this, again because I thought I marked it “public” but had not.

I was thinking about my Poems the other day after reading the three poems in the latest issue of The New Criterion, and wondering how my Poem poems compared with them. One was a landscape in rhymes at the end of some kind of 5-beat lines that was pretty good. The second by someone else but in shorter rhymed free verse lines about a more intimate landscape featuring a glove wedged in a tennis court fence that I also liked. The third was unrhymed free verse about two scenes with commentary I found a little overwrought. One of those poems I don’t much like but can’t say has much wrong with it.

Here’s the beginning of my poem from yesterday for comparison:

        At the first ocean-wisdom, the lazy questions of                               the dolphins, folooping around his starplug,                 centered what thoughts Poem had.              Gradually, his vocabulary wore away into warmth,             proud to the touch, and galleoned              to the top of the laughing April morning                          unnorming, unnorming, unnorming              every worn where a syllable was abled against.

 

 

With no particular Poem poem in mind and, needless to say, a desire to find a way of convincing myself that my Poem poems are significantly better than the three I’ve just mentioned, and the many other very much like them except not usually rhyming that I come across in just about all the poetry magazines I’ve been reviewing for Small Press Review, I quickly came up with (1) linguistic enlargement and (2) size of the reality created as the two ingredients of my Poem poems that mainstream poems lack.

Evidence from the above of (1): “folooping,” “starplug,” “galleoned,” “unnorming” and “abled”; or a Joyceation, some kind of nonce-word, a DylanThomic noun as verb, another nonce-coinage, and an adjective as verb.  A few Joyceans that seem superior ones to me like “nonciation” and “murmythry” occur later in the poem.  Such words say my poem new, which is much more important for me than whatever it is mainstream poems are doing (and one thing they are doing mine don’t try to do although it’s a virtue, is connecting fairly quickly and directly with the majority of their readers).  Such words also tend to say my poem more compactly, by combining more than one denotation in a single word, and compactness I consider as important as freshness in a poem.

That the language of my Poem poems increases their compactness means they say more per syllable than conventional poems do; that seems to me evidence that the reality each creates is larger than the reality poems of equal length like the ones in the latest issue of The New Criterion do.

Of course, how large the reality a given poem of mine creates is a subjective matter, although I feel it can be near-objectively argued (in part) by making a list of everything it speaks of plus what it ought to connote to most people.  For the list to indicate largeness, though, some kind of near-objective, or plausible, unifying factor needs to be advanced.  I had none, I have to say, when I wrote the three poems that became thhe single one I’m now discussing.  I had an under-glimmer of a unifying mood while making the present poem that I think fairly effective: the growth of Poem’s celebratory mood of various melodic strands, so to speak, harmonizing and contrasting with each other about . . . ?

Interesting.  I think I’m understanding the poem better now.  This may be a good thing, but may be a disaster, for I believe I need to revise it, to make it more emotionally logical

More about this tomorrow.

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Entry 1722 — A Trio of Poems-in-Progress

Thursday, February 12th, 2015

Today these three, composed on consecutive days during my 39 days of one spontaneous Poem poem daily:

        At the First             At the first flum of sequiserenity,             the ocean contacted Poem, wise in his aged gills as                        he was.              Folooping, inquiserenty far to                   the starboard, the silent questions of                               dolphins centered what thoughts he had.              The starplug had been breached,             so wherefore the full fare?  (Quoting elms,                   notwithstirring, as the centaurs unprimly                 maintained.                     The vocabulary wearing away into warmth,             proud to the touch, and galleoned              to the top of the laughing April morning                          unnorming, unnorming, unnorming              every worn where a syllable was abled against.                After the First             After the first flum of sequiserenity,             Poem was uninquiserenty delubricated about what              in the world the word  ,                                “starplug”                                          meant.               Of        course he knew                                                   it wasn’t a word the way, “way” or “why” were, just a                nonciation of his high-blimeyed cre                                       ator.         Still                                    it whatted for him at the leastest least.                       Was that girl somewhere in it?  The one who was      not    at                            the whirlf?     After After the First                   The vocabulea far dis              tant but still in view, Poem      inquiserently salubricated the grrrlplug         into his deepest wayre                       duculently achime                                                          in the Agincourt of his widening kingship.                       True merry the celubriation now inned                              around the now full-faring flitter Titania                                         had choired about him                                   Still                                                            the many-whatted girll, and all the long-agone                          youmth of a particular summmermurrrr    dayyy              unnorming into cockleblithe murmythry. . .

I believe two of them, perhaps all of them, were here back in May. They are here again because I plan to make a single poem of them that I’ll post tomorrow–and because I’ve had a tiring, unhappy day with losing tennis in another senior men’s league match in the middle of it at distant courts. Our bad season is getting to me, although just playing with different guys (most of whom are fun to play against, win or lose, and today’s pair was definitely that) would more than make up for the losses, if there weren’t so many of them! We’ve now been shut out 3-0 three times in a row, after winning one of three.
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Entry 1710 — More Thinking About Zeus

Saturday, January 31st, 2015

A week ago, my blog entry began with:

A math poem that is resisting effectiveness (so far!): the sun times wonder, rhyming stairs up to a blazing need to be heroed over equals Zeus. Ah, I will replace the word, “sun,” with color. And “wonder” with “wUnder?”

I soon realized that either my dividend should be Apollo, the sky god, or my divisor should be the sky, which is the main thing Zeus is god of.  I preferred keeping the head god, so worked on a new divisor, coming up with versions of the following:

towering clouds nobling steepness into the latest sky

“Nobling” was in every version due to my being a sucker for make verbs of nouns and adjectives.  I haven’t gotten any further with it, but I now think that my working on it helped get me able to get a finished version of the poem in yesterday’s entry done.

Clearly, the poem’s quotient concerns the need of believers in a supreme being for a leader, so I’ve been reflecting on that lately.  Are believers born slaves?  Born partial slaves either fantasizing a supreme father for themselves, or wishing they could?  I feel I have such need, at all, but much of what I’ve read by believers seems explicitly to express a need for someone to follow.  It certainly accounts for the insane analogy of Jesus to a shepherd and his followers to sheep (insane because sheep in the real world are somewhat worse than slaves–but those able to believe nonsense rarely can think more than one step from any idea, in this case, Jesus is a shepherd, you are one of the [living] members of his flock).

Christianity abhorred self-reliance until the protestants finally allowed, then glorified, partial self-reliance–i.e., full reliance on the Good Book, but self-reliance on one’s interpretation of it.

Perhaps some cerebral mechanism activated at puberty that negates the mechanism responsible for full obedience to one’s father is a late feature of our species that so far only a small minority of us has.  Or maybe we all instinctively search for a god, but our instinct to be rational overcomes it.  Our life-view is a product of countless battles between conflicting instincts; our tribe’s life-view is the same–as is our species life-view.

My poem, so far, shows great sympathy for those instinctively desiring a sky-god to worship.  I think I do regard the sky as a god, but certainly not an anthropomorphic one–well, not a fully anthropomorphic one.  But not to worship or follow, although to revel in at times, and fear when appropriate . . . and compose poems to honor.   And the Greek gods have been subsumed in a genuine mythology, and mythology, as opposed to theology, and 700% opposed to opinions some clown doesn’t agree with, and mythology is wonderful.  So I’d love to come up with some image that is a near-approximation of my view of Zeus to use as my poem’s sub-dividend product.  Nothing even hints of occurring to me, though.

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Entry 1647 — “My Hunt for Poem”

Sunday, November 30th, 2014

I finished this draft of a new Poem I quite like, at the moment.  I believe it is the longest of my Poem poems I consider keepers.  And I hope to double its length eventually (as well as improve it here and there.  I had a lot of trouble formatting it, ever getting more than 50% of its indentations right, thanks to all of my beastly word-processors–except one I now realize I forgot about–the one on the oldest computer I’m still using.  Anyway, here it is:My Hunt for Poem.

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Entry 1634 — “Poem’s Triumph”

Monday, November 17th, 2014

Here’s “Poem’s Attempt to Return,” again, with some changes, including a new title:

                             Poem's Triumph  
                      o                        o                        o                        o                        o                        o                        oe                                             Poem at long last remembered himself out                          of where he had been not.                                            He was all stamens, gristle and flames,                          an archelectrical counter-sun                          circusing angrily back to his origins,                             yearning to cleanse its sky of thought                      and all the discordant music that caused it.                              And it came to pass that he succeeded, wherepon                                      Poem                        oe                        o                        o                        o                        o                        o                        o                        o

I think it’s improved but needs more work.  For one thing, the “Poem/ oe/ o,” etc., at the end is a brilliant movte, but seems to me to be using the rest of the poem rather than emerging as a result of it.  Perhaps more has to happen between “whereupon” and “Poem/ oe/ o,” etc.
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Entry 535 — My Latest Variation on a Work by Koppany « POETICKS

Entry 535 — My Latest Variation on a Work by Koppany

Today I’m getting work done on the little chapbook I’m publishing of Marton Koppany’s The Reader.  One of its pages, tentatively is the one below, without the extra instances of “change.”  They are my additions, which I impulsively added because I thought them terribly clever and witty.  As a variation by Me, certainly not to be included in the book.  Adequate to fill an entry I would have trouble filling otherwise.  And it will give Marton an idea of what I’m doing to his poor manuscript (i.e., what I’m doing to crowd its lines so the book will be affordably short to publish.

 

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Note: I rarely encounter anything by Marton that I don’t want to do some variation on.   I’m sure I’ve done more than five or six, maybe as many as ten.  I think one or two have been not completely lame.
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Entry 506 — Long Division by Death « POETICKS

Entry 506 — Long Division by Death

In my latest long division poem I divide “death” into “the mind” and get “1″ with a remainder of “motion.”  The most important feature is the sub-division product.  It’s “ex(         )ce” or b(      )g,” I’m not yet sure which.

Okay two announcements I made at Spidertangle yesterday:

 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS #1

I’ve noticed here and there in my viewings of visio-textual art pieces that I would call visio-musical poems.  It struck me just now, after I came on one I really like by Carol Stetser at Andrew Topel’s scriptjr.nl show, that there may be enough of these that feature the musical staff (the five lines used in writing scores–are they called a “staff?” if not, what?) for a pleasant little anthology.  I’ve done at least one, John Veiera and Andrew Topel have, too.  Others, I’m sure.  In any case, if you have any, please consider e.mailing a copy to me.  Actually send me, or let me know about, anything visio-musical, although I want the anthology to be staffs or parts of staffs only–that is, unarguably concerned with music.  I’m serious about an anthology, probably a small one with payment of five copies to each contributor.  Printed by some print-on-demand outfit like Lulu, but probably not Lulu.  Color will be fine.  I will use every “scored poem” submitted, up to four from a single submitter.  I will also post them in a gallery at my blog if I don’t get enough submissions for a book.

Please let me know how the idea strikes you even if you have nothing to submit. ”poetry scores.”  

 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS #2

Okay, I had a couple of APCs an hour ago, so I’m a shade manic instead of nine-tenths asleep in my galoshes.  Result: I’m having these things that seem like ideas to me.  The one I think worth posting about is a collection of little essays from Spidertanglers and others who do vispo and related stuff.  Their subject would be favorite painters–and why, hopefully with something about the influence of the painter on the writer.  Mine is Paul Klee.  Like all of you, no doubt, I like a lot of different painters and it’s sort of ridiculous to try to pick out just one, so feel free to mention more than one.

I know: it’s the gossip hound in me that would love to hear back on this, but I should think it’d be fun. 

Another possible anthology suggests itself.  Poems in homage to visual artists like my own “Mathemaku for Paul Klee,” with an artist’s commentary on background.  Don’t think about how little you may want to talk about your work but about how much you have enjoyed reading what others have said about their work.  Surely you have!

 

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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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Entry 513 — 11 Forebears « POETICKS

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.

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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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Artists Mentioned in Entries « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Artists Mentioned in Entries’ Category

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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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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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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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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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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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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Entry 624 — A Change of Mind « POETICKS

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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Entry 1141 — A Final Version? « POETICKS

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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