Archive for the ‘Linguexpressive Poetry’ Category
Entry 134 — Ellipsis-Haiku
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
I’m still having “creative ideas” but having trouble bothering to put them on paper, even ones as easy to do that with as the ones that led to the following:
.
.
.
Good ideas (inspired by Marton Koppany’s recent Otoliths book) not yet finding their best presentation, it seems to me.
Entry 133 — Somewhat Awake Again, I Think
Friday, May 21st, 2010
I simply disconnected from my blog–just didn’t think of it for about a week until a day or two ago. Then last night for some reason I started thinking about haiku and came up with the following poems that I thought worth making this entry for:
.
. early April night:
. barely a single haiku
. of moonlight in it
.
. the street’s cherry blooms,
. dazzling, yet almost grey
. besides the haiku’s
.
.
.
.
.
.
Entry 109 — An Old Sonnet
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
I was around twenty when I wrote this following sonnet. A few days ago, I changed its last two lines–and, just now, line one’s “eagle eyes” to “sharpened eyes.” I have all kinds of trouble evaluating it. It may be okay or even good, but it’s so much in a long-disused style, in spite of its backwards rhyming that halfwits won’t consider rhyming, that I can’t read it with much enjoyment.
John Keats
He read of Greece; and then with sharpened eyes,
espied its gods’ dim conjurations still
in breeze-soft force throughout his native isle–
in force in clouds’ remote allusiveness,
in oceanwaves’ eternal whispering,
in woodlands’ shadowy impermanence.
Once cognizant of earth’s allure, he sought
a method of imprisonment – a skill
with which to hold forever what he saw.
The way the soil and vernal rain converge
in carefree swarming flowers, Keats & Spring
then intersected quietly in verse.
The realms he had so often visted
at once grew larger by at least a tenth.
Entry 71 — A Broadside from the Past
Monday, January 11th, 2010
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I’m pretty sure this resulted from some contact I made in Chicago when there for an underground press conference. Not sure when that was. Maybe fifteen years ago. . . I’ve since lost touch with everyone named on the page. I do remember Ashley as a good kid and valuable undergrounder.
Entry 70 — More Poems from My Past
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
10 January 2010
One Poem poem I found while hunting for poems to add to my upcoming book that isn’t great but certainly expresses my opinion of those who believe poetry should be a servant of politics:
. Protest Poetry
.
. Poem was angry.
. He had just read
. yet another puritan’s denunciation
. of poets who declined to write protest poems
. about contemporary social ills, war, etc.
. To demand that a poet write such things
. made no more sense to him
. than to demand that a cook
. bake protest pies,
. or a shoemaker
. cobble protest
. boots.
.
. Let neurotic seekers of victims
. to pass their self-pity off
. as compassion for,
. in high and correct-
. in-all-the-best-circles profile
. take care of the protesting.
. All the social woe in the world
. was but a comma compared with
. that final enormous text
. it was the poet’s duty
. to add his yes to,
. however frailly.
.
. Or so Poem claimed
. in the protest poem
. he immediately wrote
.
A much different poem I found in my hunt was this:
I’d come across a poem or poems by Ezra using the horizontally-split word technique and at once wanted to try it myself. I don’t find the result satisfactory–but it has potential, I think.
Entry 57 — Minimalist Poem Sequence by Endwar
Monday, December 28th, 2009
#699 through #715 of my old blog are all about the anthology of visio-textual art Crag Hill and I co-edited ten years or so ago, Writing To Be Seen. I do an entry on one piece by each of the contributors and a few miscellaneous ones. Rather than run them again here, I’m going to put them all together as an essay in the Pages section to the right. It’ll start off being a jumble but eventually will get organized, as with several still-disorganized pages.
To make this entry more than just an announcement, here is the sequence of minimalist permutational infraverbal poems (subverse, in his jargon, which I believe he got from his and my pal, Will Napoli) by Endwar that I featured in #716:
Oh, and a second announcement: today I began, and almost completed, my column for the next issue of Small Press Review. No big deal except that it’s a chore I’ve tried to get to every day for at least two months. I feared I’d never do it! Really. I hope my getting to it means I’ll start being at least slightly productive again. There’s so much I need to get done.
.
. add
. read
. a lie
. realize
. a verb
. reverb
. a mind
. remind
. a vision
. revision
. apt
. repeat
. a sign
. resign
. all
. real
.
Oh, and a second announcement: today I began, and almost completed, my column for the next issue of Small Press Review. No big deal except that it’s a chore I’ve tried to get to every day for at least two months. I feared I’d never do it! Really. I hope my getting to it means I’ll start being at least slightly productive again. There’s so much I need to get done.
Entry 55 — 4 Sonnets by Mike Snider
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
In my old blog entry #695, I presented a new version
of a sonnet I’d long been trying to write for Dylan
Thomas, another failure. In my next two entries I
had much better sonnets, all by Mike Snider, which I
commented on:
28 December 2005: Several weeks ago, my sometime
poetics foe at New-Poetry, Mike Snider, was kind
enough to send me a (signed!) copy of his chapbook,
44 Sonnets. Its first poem is this:
.
Petulant Muse
Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! –
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!
You’ll be important when we’ve finished it –
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem tausht in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!
And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.
Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.
.
I’d call this a serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever
and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement
with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love
the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality
and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish,
the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all
using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the
muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator
I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of
playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard
to me, which I mean as a compliment.
29 December 2005: Here are three more sonnets from Mike
Snider”s chap, 44 Sonnets:
.
The Fall
When we’d pile in my great-aunt’s Chevrolet
And drive to see the trees turned red and gold,
Grandma would scowl. “Reminds me of death,” she’d say.
“It means that everything is getting old.”
“Now, Helen, ‘ after winter comes the spring.’”
But she’d have none of that. “It came and went
For you and me, Sister.” And then she’d sing
“Go, tell Aunt Rhody,” just for devilment.
I have her picture, nineteen, sure to break
The heart of every man she ever met –
Another from her fifties, in a fake
Nun’s habit sucking on a cigarette,
And both are faithful. Grandma, you were right.
There’s nothing grows in Fall except the night.
.
Homework
My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,
How even flaws in this numerical romance
Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.
Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
Than nudge her at her homework while I try
To master patterns made so long before
My birth that stars since then have left the sky?
I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.
.
What I know
Always, always, always, I know this first–
My dearest girl is gone, my daughter Lee
I loved not well enough to keep with me–
Of all the things I’ve failed to do, the worst.
Her poet mother’s supple brain was cursed
To learn the language of pathology.
When surgery failed they turned to drugs and she
Began to dream of torture, dreams she nursed
To memories of children murdered by
Her fathers and her mother and her will.
I could not hold her to the truth. She found
At Duke a doctor who decided I
Was fondling Lee. The judge said no, but still
She took my Lee and held her underground.
.
I posted these on the date of this entry, then wrote
over the entry, so lost it. I seem to do something like
that every three or four months, I don’t know why.
The remarks I lost were penetrating, I’m sure, but I
remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember
is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and
the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the
aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics–but employing rhymes
(note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s
octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal
sensitively with common human situations and end in
effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–
but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal
music that meter and rhyme can provide.
One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider
a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these,
is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation.
That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows
what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem
was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So
I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor)
of writing verse for astronomy (and the ones of either for
doing homework, or learning in general). And of poems for
the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All
this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the
father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s
toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional,
but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.”
Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the
others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character
studies, too.
In my lost comments, I mentioned the value of formal
verse to its engagents for finding an order for life’s
difficulties–and suggesting that they, like similar difficulties
timelessly made into similar art, will pass. I also referred
to the pleasure an engagent of a sonnet or other piece
of formal verse, when effective, will get from the poet’s
dexterity–like someone listening to a fine pianist playing
Rachmaninoff, say, getting both musical pleasure, and a
kind of (voyeuristic, sub-behavioral kinesthetic) pleasure
from his physical skill at the keyboard. I’m sure I came up
with a somewhat origianl third value, but now I can’t
remember what it was. No doubt, it will become famous
as Grumman’s lost insight the way Fermat’s lost proof did.
Entry 52 — Some Conventional Haiku
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Today’s entry is a repeat of one from Christmas day, 2005, with a few comments from today at the end of it:
25 December 2005: “clenched sky.” That’s one of the scraps in the notebook yesterday’s entry was about. Circa 1983. Never got into any poem of mine but may yet. Another scrap is the start in fading cursive of a sonnet I completed somewhere else on Dylan Thomas. I was momentarily quite taken by what the word, “steepled” did to its fifth line, “by his construction of a steepled truth,” for it took a while for me to realize the word was not “stupid.”
Other highlights include the following five unpublished haiku:
rain now as loud
against the northern side of the house
as the roof
rotting log
only part of forest floor
to show through melting snow
glimpsed tanned shoulder;
thin white string across it,
tied like a shoelace
bikini-bar dancer
showing off to her boy-friend,
me in between them
far enough from the storm
nearing the color-dotted beach
to see above it
I wrote these about the time I pretty much stopped writing conventional haiku. I quite like the storm one, probably because I still vividly remember the first Florida storm I saw from far enough away to see above–and to both sides–of it. I don’t think it’s a truly outstanding haiku, though. The one about the bikini dancer is fair in the wry sardonicism vein, I think. The one about the bikini string is nearly not a haiku, for it doesn’t really provide any haiku contrast; i.e., it’s a single-image description. On second thought, maybe it’s excitement versus the mundane: girl in bikini versus shoelace.
I dunno. The other two are very standard, but I’ve tried to improve them,anyway:
the rain now louder
against the house’s north side
than on the roof
rotting log:
only portion of the forest floor
to show through the snow
The first is slightly haikuish in the way it obliquely discusses a wind; the second re-uses a very over-done haiku theme, to wit: life goes on, or–more specifically–winter snow won’t win; but the theme is slightly warped toward freshness with the use of something a reader will take to represent a cohort of winter rather than a counter to it, until he realizes the cause of rotting.
Also in the notebook this bit of High Sagacity: “The Eastern Wise Man attempts to reduce his awareness to the size of his experience; the Western Wise Man attempts to increase the size of his experience to the size of his awareness.” Yep, I’ve always been Eurochauvinistic.
From today:
rotting log;
nothing else of the forest floor
showing through the snow.
Entry 51 — “Crackers”
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
A sloshily sentimental new Poem poem of mine:
Crackers
Sadness occasioned by the expensive crackers
she particularly liked and Poem
would have bought her because they were on sale
dissolving into the shimmer of the
supermarket parking lot’s cars, itself dissolving
in the reasons in the still-extant
memories of the first human beings
that our species shall endure.
It’s pure sincerity, and entirely based on reality–
the crackers part–but . . . ?
Entry 48 — Full Effectiveness in Poetry
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
I’m skipping ahead to old blog entry #796 today to make a point about my recent cryptographiku. #796 has Cor van den Heuvel’s poem:
. tundra
I go on in the entry to say I believe Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio,” of 1954, was the first poem to make consequential visiophorically expressive use of blank space:
. silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio
I finish my brief commentary but then opining that van den Heuvel’s poem was the first to make an entire page expressive, the first to make full-scale negative space its most important element. Rather than surround a meaningful parcel of negative space like Gomringer’s masterpiece, it is surrounded by meaningful negative space. I’m certainly not saying it thus surpasses Gomringer’s poem; what it does is equal it in a new way.
I consider it historically important also for being, so far as I know, the first single word to succeed entirely by itself in being a poem of the first level.
Then there’s my poem from 1966:
. at his desk
. the boy,
. writing his way into b wjwje tfdsfu xpsme
This claim to be the first poem in the world to use coding to significant metaphorical effect. Anyone who has followed what I’ve said about “The Four Seasons” should have no trouble deciphering this. I consider it successful as a poem because I believe anyone reasonably skillful at cyrptographical games will be able (at some point if not on a first reading) to emotionally (and sensually) understand/appreciate the main things it’s doing and saying during one reading of it–i.e., read it normally to the coded part, then translate that while at the same time being aware of it as coded material and understanding and appreciating the metaphor its being coded allows.
I’ve decided “The Four Seasons” can’t work like that. It is a clever gadget but not an effective poem because I can’t see anyone being able to make a flowing reading through it and emotionally (and sensually) understanding/appreciating everything that’s going on in it and what all its meanings add up to, even after study and several readings. Being able to understand it the way I do in my explanation of it not enough. This is a lesson from the traditional haiku, which must be felt as experience, known reducticeptually (intellectually), too, but only unconsciously–at the time of reading it as a poem rather than as an object of critical scrutiny, which is just as valid a way to read it but different.
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