George Swede « POETICKS-

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Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Arriving with the latest issue of Haiku Canada Review was a broadside containing the winners of several haiku contests run by the Haiku Canada organization. The best, I felt, was the winner (by Pamela Cooper) of the Canada division:

                                        hanami picnic–
                                        more blossoms
                                        than sky

A hanami picnic is a traditional Japanese way of celebrating the flower blossom season, the comments by contest judge an’ya tells us. The blossoms in question are generally cherry blossoms. When I first read, and liked, this haiku, I quickly decided it was not quite A-1. That’s because I failed to perceive any archetypal core, and I feel any haiku–any poem–requires that to be A-1. It was an expression of Nature in an unusual state, delightfully evoking multitudes of cherry blossoms–and patches of sky. Sensitivity, compactness (just six words), even a nice touch–for North Americans–of exotic foreignness. Too bad it hadn’t the depth an archetypal core would have given it.

A day later, thinking about what I was going to type here, I realized I’d again been off. Of course it had an archetypal core! It referred, in fact, to what I consider the absolute top such feature there is: the coming of spring.

Roland Packer’s Poem, “fantasea,” featured here yesterday, is a “pwoermd,” or one-word poem. Is it also a haiku? It seems to be presented as one, sharing a page with conventional haiku (in French) in a magazine specializing in haiku. It’s a juxtapositioning of two images in a sort of tension with each other, which is the best superficial description of what a haiku is, I think. It’s about nature, and extremely compact. Some would call it a senryu, taking it as a joke. Iwouldn’t be upset by that, but I find it serious. It reminded me of Keats’s “faery seas forlorn” (if I have that right), which those familiar with the Mind of Grumman will know is one of the few poetic ingots I continually return to in my poetry and criticism. The Packer poem verysimply tells us of the vast sea that fantasy is–for me, splendid sea, although it might also be a harmful sea for those lost in it rather than in command of it.

I think it worth noting that its last syllable brings what it mainly denotes out of the pure vague. A sea is not a very specific detail but it is real, and sensually rich in local particulars to just about anyone encountering the word for it. What most makes the poem a good one, though, is its freshness–the unexpectedness of its infraverbal twist. What about its archetypal core? I have to admit that a big problem with such a thing is that one can use ingenuity to find an example of it in almost any poem. So an archetypal core I find in a poem may not be there for another reader, who may be as right, or righter, than I. He may be wrong, too, for some covert archetypal cores will exist in poems their best readers find them in, as the one I found in the poem by Pamela Cooper. The one I claim for “fantasea” is simply “man’s inexhaustible imagination”–or “the power (for good) of the human imagination.” I suspect there are much better ways of putting that. Maybe I’ll find one of them someday.

Having to do with the same thing, for me, is the other haiku I posted yesterday, George Swede’s “bottomless, the well/ of dreams–a chickadee/ on the sill.” Its imagined portion is its “well,” its reality its “chickadee.” Fantasy and sea, imaginary garden and frog. One of the best things of this is the contrast of the chickadee with the ultimate size of the well of dreams. But also the suggestion of the fragility of life’s best partly dreamed, partly genuinely experienced moments–since the chickadee is apt to take flight at any moment. I find the well in it fascinating, too–real enough for a bird to perch on a tiny part of it–projecting, that is, into full reality. Note also that, as a well, it is something to draw from, which empasizes it as a source of the liquid from which the imagination creates the arts, without which life would not be worth living for most of us.

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Posted in George Swede, haiku, Linguexpressive Poetry, Pamela Cooper, Roland Packer | 2 Comments »

Entry 541 — Haiku Canada Review, Oct. Issue

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

I just got the latest issue of Haiku Canda Review, long edited by my friend LeRoy Gorman. The first poem in it that caught my eye was this, by Roland Packer:

And here’s a nice variation (it strikes me) on Yeats’s description of “imaginary gardens with real frogs in them” (and quoted by Marianne Moore):

                                       bottomless, the well
                                       of dreams–a chickadee
                                       on the sill

It’s by George Swede. Discussion tomorrow of both, and–perhaps–others.

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Posted in George Swede, haiku, LeRoy Gorman, Roland Packer | No Comments »

Entry 541 — Haiku Canada Review, Oct. Issue « POETICKS

Entry 541 — Haiku Canada Review, Oct. Issue

I just got the latest issue of Haiku Canda Review, long edited by my friend LeRoy Gorman. The first poem in it that caught my eye was this, by Roland Packer:

And here’s a nice variation (it strikes me) on Yeats’s description of “imaginary gardens with real frogs in them” (and quoted by Marianne Moore):

                                       bottomless, the well
                                       of dreams–a chickadee
                                       on the sill

It’s by George Swede. Discussion tomorrow of both, and–perhaps–others.

Cheap Airline Ticket

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under George Swede, haiku, LeRoy Gorman, Roland Packer. 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.

Criticism « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Criticism’ Category

Entry 1488 — Correction

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

Anny Ballardini recently posted a haiku at NowPoetry about red cherries by Richard Wright with a second haiku about cherries under it that I took to be by Wright when I wrote about it there, and then posted that here, but which was actually by Anny. Fortunately, I said nice things about it:

stole two red cherries  expensive in plastic baskets  under the electric light             me

Might as well say a little more about it. I claim a haiku should try for a haiku moment, and a haiku moment should have archetypal resonance. That brings us into subjectivity, I’m afraid. But a critic should be able to show how a haiku he rates as effective as I consider this one to achieve a haiku moment of archetypal resonance. Then the critic’s readers can decide for themselves whether he’s right or not.

(1) (to go through it again because Sound Practice can never be illustrated to many times!) I consider this haiku’s two images to be . . . well, it’s not that easy to sort it out; one image is a store’s expensive cherries bright lit; a second is the haiku’s speaker’s stealing two of them; but there is a third, the shoplifter all by herself, under an electric light (for me, “electric” in this crime scene, connotes the chair). I would combine the first two–in tension with “me” because: (1) a physical act versus (suddenly) a psychological state; (2) a scene versus the tiny focal point of the scene (which I see as tinily inside the scene, the perpetrator seeing herself stealing).

(2) The tension is resolved almost instantly with the reader’s empathetic realization of an archetypal fear: the fear of being found out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about instinctive human drives lately, and one of them I’m still trying to work out an effective description of is the need for the world’s approval. Or the need, as here, to avoid sustaining the world’s disapproval. I consider all major human drives to be archetypal, and this one is. It’s what makes us such conformists, even the most eccentric of us behaving like everyone else at least 97% of the time.

Posted in Anny Ballardini, haiku, Miscellaneous Thoughts, Poem Critique | 7 Comments »

Entry 1402 — Something From The Eighties

Monday, March 24th, 2014

Note: hold down your control button and punch + to be able to read the following more easily.

Once again I needed something to post here and grabbed this from 25 years or so ago. It didn’t get me into the BigTime. Note: “vizlation” was my word then for “visimagery,” which is my word now for “visual art.

Posted in Criticism, Taxonomy | No Comments »

Entry 1078 — An Analysis of a Mathexpressive Poem

Friday, April 19th, 2013

A few people have told me (I don’t know how seriously) that they have not been able to figure out all the pieces I have in my latest entry in my Scientific American blog, and a few of mine colleagues even claim I can’t multiply. Ergo, I have an excuse to blither about one of my poems. I’ve chosen one I think the easiest to defend. First, though, here’s Monet’s The Regatta at Argenteuil. It’s important for one trying to understand my poem to know of it because it is central to the poem (as the third poem in my triptych makes clear with a full reproduction of it).

Okay, to begin with the simplicities of the poem below, a person encountering it must be aware that it is a long division example. That is indicated by two symbols: the one with the word, “poem,” inside it, and the line under the sailboat. The first, so far as I’m aware, has no formal name, so I call it a dividend shed. The line is a remainder line. The two together, along with the placement of the other elements of the poem, one where a long division’s quotient would be, one where its divisor would be, one where the product of the two would be, and one under the remainder line where a remainder would be, clinch the poem’s definition as long division.

Now, then, anyone remembering his long division from grade school, should understand that the poem is claiming five things:

(1) that the text the painter who is unsleeping a day long ago multiplied times the scribbled sketch, or whatever it is to the left of the dividend shed equals the sailboat shown;

(2) that the sailboat is larger in value that either the painter or the sketch;

(3) that the addition of the letter fragments under the remainder line to the sailboat image makes the sailboat equal the poem referred to above it;

(4) that the the sailboat should be considered almost equal to the poem;

(5) that the letter fragments, or whatever it is that they represent must be less in value than any of the other elements of the poem with the possible exception of the quotient.

(2) and (5) are decidedly less important than the other three, but can still be important.

I could easily claim that the poem is wholly accurate mathematically by giving the painter a value of 2, the sketch a value of 7, the sailboat a value of 14, the fragmented letters a value of 3 and the poem a value of 17. Arbitrary? Sure–but by definition as Grummanomical values of the elements mathematically correct however silly. (And I would contend that if I had time, I could given them Grummanomical poetic values most people would find acceptable, and–in fact–I believe one of the virtues of such a poem is that it will compel some to consider such things–at least to the extent of wondering how much value to give a painter’s activity, how much to a sketch, and whether a poem is genuinely better than either, or the like.)

I am including the above in my entry to help those a little fuzzy about long division (and I was definitely not unfuzzy about it when I began making long division poems, and still sometimes have to stop and think for more than a few minutes at times to figure out just what one of my creations is doing). My poem imitates it in every respect except that it does what it does with non-numerical terms rather than with numbers. I hope, however, that someone encountering it without knowing much or anything about such poems will at least find things to like in it such as the little poem about the painter, or the idea of the childish sketch as perhaps the basis of what would become a Grand Painting. Some, I believe, would enjoy recognizing the sailboat as the one in Monet’s masterpiece, too. But what is most important aesthetically about the work is what it does as a mathematical operation. That operation must make poetic sense if the work is to be effective. Needles to say, I claim it does.

To consider the question, we must break down the long division operation the poem depicts into its components. First of all, there is the multiplication of the sketch by what the painter is doing to get the sailboat–the painting of the sailboat, that is, sketch times something done by a painter almost having to yield a picture of some sort. Does this make sense? Clearly, a painter must carry out an operation on some initial sketch or idea or equivalent thereof to get into a painting, so I don’t see how one can wholly reject painter operating on sketch yields portion of painting as analogous to . . . 2 operating on 7 to yield 14. But there is more to it than that, if only to those of us who think of multiplication as magic, and are still in touch with the way we felt when the idea that 2 times 7 could make 14 was new to us. That is, just after we had internalized the remarkable mechanism for carrying out multiplication. For us, the poem’s painter is using his painting mechanism to hugely enlarge a sketch the way the operation of multiplication (usually) hugely enlarges a number. Doing so in a kind of concealed magical way unlike mere addition does. A three-dimensional way.

At this point, the question arises as to whether the sailboat nearly equal to a poem. That’s obviously a subjective matter. Those who like sailboats (and poems) will tend to say yes. Note, by the way, that “poem” here does not mean what I say it mean verosophically, but as what one of my dictionaries has it: “something suggesting a poem.” Here the context–a work of art–makes it impossible to take the word literally,–and moreover, of taking it to mean not just something suggesting a poem, but something suggestion a master-poem.

Well, not quite here: the penciled informality of the word, “poem,” counters the idea that a super-poem is being referred to, and the sailboat is only a black and white portion of a great painting, not a great painting by itself. We know it’s on its way to being that, but the multiplication is only telling us of it as a pleasant step, not anywhere close to being a realized goal.

The remainder, fragmented words, add very little to it, but we will later see that they are fragments of the phrase, “the faint sound of the unarrestable steps of Time.” Again, it’s a subjective matter as to whether these words could deepen anything sufficiently to enable it to suggest a poem. I say it does. But even if not, I think it would be hard to claim that the addition of such words to a visual image could not be called a plausible attempt to mathematically increase the image’s value.

In conclusion, I claim that the poem carries out the operation of long division in two steps, one multiplicative, the other additive, to valuable aesthetic effect. Elsewhere I have shown how, according to my thinking, it will put someone one appreciative of it into a Manywhere-at-Once partly in the verbal section of his brain and partly in the mathematical section of it. The next poem in the triptych goes somewhat further; the sequence’s final poem brings everything to a climax–I hope.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Claude Monet, Criticism, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poem Critique, Poetics, Visimagery | No Comments »

Entry 1059 — Break from MATO Analysis

Sunday, March 31st, 2013

I had a slush-brained day yesterday, so only did a little work on my discussion of Manywhere-at-Once. Then, while doing a little putting of mine house in order, I came across this. It wasn’t till I got to the word “aesthcipient,” which no one uses but me that I recognition the piece as mine. At that point I was wondering who else had written so insightfully about Basho’s old pond haiku, which it clearly concerned. I’m not sure where it’s from, but I’m sure it was written more than twenty years ago. Nice to know I could sometimes write so well even way back then!

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Posted in Basho, Criticism, Poem Critique | No Comments »

Entry 1008 — Evaluating Living Poets

Friday, February 8th, 2013

I was described at Wikipedia, by someone defending me as worthy of an entry, as a minor poet. That got me thinking, once again, how best to sort contemporary poets into okay; good; excellent; enough better than excellent o be considered minor poets, or poets specialists will or should be interested in a hundred years or more from now; and enough better than minor poets for all lovers of poetry to be aware of them. Can it be done? Most anti-evaluatory people say, oh, never. But it seems to me that at least half of those poets born in earlier eras that their times canonized have remained canonized until now. The problem is to find what makes them different from the ones their times canonized who are now forgotten.

Those not canonized by the world at large until after they were dead are another story. Some were just poor at self-publicity. My impression is that all of them were canonized by a few in their field not related to them, and regardless of whether or not they were friends with them.

To me, it should be easy enough for an intelligent person, knowledgeable of the field to quickly recognize the okay and good poets. They are the ones doing absolutely nothing different from what the poets who were active when they were born were doing, down to the cliches used. I’m speaking of veteran poets, poets who have had time to get beyond the received forms, techniques, subject matter, point of view and language. The cliches of language, subject matter and outlook will give them away. I think not even the poetry establishment will will give them high marks. Unless they are members of a certified victim group.

The excellent but ultimately not superior poets will be the hardest to pick out. I tend to believe that you can identify them by the recognition the establishment gives them, but history suggests the establishment isn’t wrong all the time. It’s best at identifying poets like Frost and Yeats who veer only slightly from the ways of the poets before them but equal, or even surpass, the best of them (as I believe the best critics can show in detail although it’s difficult, and fewer know enough about poetry to have any chance of recognizing valid criticism objectively than know enough, and have enough good albeit subjective intuition to recognize superior poetry). I would consider the poets of a time that the establishment rates as certain to be considered major by posterity to be probably at least minor and having a reasonable chance to be major. With the poets the establishment and most poetry-lovers would consider excellent, this is as far as one can go.

Then there are my kind of poets, otherstream poets, the best quick definition of is poets making kinds of poems ignored by the establishment of their time–unless it annoys them enough to say something negative but unhelpful about them. Such poets can be identified by (1) lack of recognition or (2) their composing non-Wilshberian poems as Merwin’s, say, or Jorie Graham’s, or someone in-between–from the Iowa Workshop school, for instance. (Wilshberian poets, by the way, can be different in many respects, just as automobiles can, but they are as different from otherstream poets as every automobile is from helicopters as a mode of transportation. Not that they and their admirers are capable of understanding this.

It seems to me that identifying otherstream poets should be easy, selecting the most important ones, not so easy. In fact, it is not possible for the huge majority of academics, and the journalists, publishers, awards-betowers and the like to do it. That’s because you must first know enough about what they are doing as poets to know which of them are doings things no other, or almost no other, otherstream poet, is doing. In many cases this is objectively possible. Take me as an example: if it’s true that I am the first one ever to compose a serious long division poem (a kind of poem easy to identify), and am still the only one who has made more than a handful of them, then I am such a poet.

Now, then, I suppose whether or not the use of long division in poetry is a significant new technique is a subjective matter. As a critic, I have presented arguments at length that it is. It remains for others to decide how good my arguments are. If they’re persuasive, then I would claim that I (and others who have broken beyond anything previously done like John M. Bennett, Karl Kempton, Scott Helmes, Kathy Ernst and others, should be considered probably at least minor and having a reasonable chance to be major–assuming, as I guess I too automatically do–that my poetry is reasonably free of the various cliches I’ve spoken of, and not hermetic, something else that’s a factor although I didn’t think to mention it till now.

Since I don’t believe innovativeness the only attribute of superior otherstream poetry, or even necessary for it, I would deem otherstream poets who at are the cutting edge of whatever specific kind of poetry they’re involved with but without significant innovations to their credit whom their otherstream peers and knowledgeable critics or fans of otherstream poetry rate as high as the establishment rates poets like Ashbery also to be probably at least minor, etc.

It seems to me that I’ve described what does happen informally every generation, and that we do have a fair idea of who will be consider the minor and major poets of our time by posterity. I think it unlikely that in 2100 anyone will revere some poet of today who has not gotten even the contemporary recognition that Emily Dickinson did from the very few knowledgeable poetry people who knew of her work.

Note: after reading what I’ve written, I see that I made no attempt to distinguish the probably minor from the possibly major. I’ll leave that to some other time–if I have get to it. I think it will be extremely difficult to work out.

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Posted in Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 948 — Pronouncements & Blither, Part 9

Monday, December 10th, 2012

Back at New-Poetry someone advanced a silly poem as the equal of the Sondheim. At the same time a few shrugged off my case for the value of the latter as entirely subjective and thus of no importance. Others made comments I considered equally inane. So, yesterday evening, I responded with:

Would any of you who have been contributed to this thread (or only read portions of it) be willing (be brave enough) to carry out the following experiment:

.

(1) Select two poems, one you consider significantly better than the other;

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(2) Support your view with references to what is explicitly in each poem, bad and good (in your opinion)?

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Second challenge to those unwilling to do this because it would be meaninglessly subjective: be honest enough to go on record with the view that all poems are equally good.

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I’ve already half-done this with a very flawed quick reaction to the Sondheim poem indicating why I consider it at least not bad. (I now consider it a superior poem, having found more virtues in it by thinking of it more focusedly as a conceptual poem.) I will now say why—objectively, because supported by what’s objectively in or not in each of the two poems as opposed to anything that may be subjectively in them like sincerity.) I will now compare it with the other poem posted:

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

by Banana Jones

You have a head,

mountain goats eat fudge,

I spread toe jelly on my wrist,

Concrete angel,

You ain’t got nothing on me,

Oh right…

Babies come from vagina’s.

.

Sondheim inserts (_) into his poem, as I’m now sure it is, in accordance with a logical plan—i.e., after every word or phrase in order that a person doing the task of reading it will be able to check off each read bit of the poem. This slows the read (a virtue in the opinion of most I’m fairly sure) and also almost forces a reader to pay more than normal attention to each bit, and think about the task of reading. The poem explicitly tells the reader to take extra pains while he’s reading, so the claim that pressure to pay more than normal attention to one’s journey through the text seems to me objectively true. I feel I could support most of my reactions to the poem similarly, but am not up to doing that right now. My aim now is simply to compare this one thing the Sondheim text objectively does I believe any reasonable person would agree to what seems to me an absence of any thing like it.

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The Jones poem does nothing according to any logic I can see. It jump-cuts from one clause-length narrative to another entirely unconnected to it in any meaningful sense (I say with a fair confidence that I am here being objective in the reasonable sense that (verbal) meaninglessness can be objectively defined as words arranged in such a way as to confuse a large majority of readers or listeners, and no defense of their meaningfulness will change any but a very few minds about that).

.

The Sondheim contains one fresh element, or perhaps can be said to carry out a fresh design; and every poem needs something fresh–objectively. If we start with the dogma that a poem needs to move one, and know objectively from a study of the effects of poetry on human beings that a poem that does absolutely nothing new will rarely move anyone, even those who claim to like some such poem.

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The Jones poem is not fresh—because although its particular images are wildly different from the images in conventional poems—they lack all coherence and therefore result in chaos—objectively result in it, I say, using the same argument I previously used—and chaos is never fresh however different its elements, one chaos being perceived by the sane as just about entirely the same as any other chaos. I think this observation important (and especially like it because it just occurred to me as I was writing this): the Sondheim is not chaos (although possibly not cohering here and there.

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I think I could find some virtues in the Jones poem if I tried, but I’m sure they wouldn’t equal the virtues in the Sondheim I’ve already written about in this thread, and I’ve found more since then. I claim they are objectively superior to any virtues in the Jones I’m now intuitively aware of, but that’s admittedly just an assertion, but one made because I’m not up to a full dissertation on the two poems—here.

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Frankly, I think that I’ve shown beyond reasonable doubt that the Sondheim is the better of the two poems. Which makes me think maybe my challenge would have been that someone show why they are equal. Or of what value any discussion of the merits of any poem is if we agree in advance than nobody’s opinion means anything.

.

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Posted in Alan Sondheim, Conceptual Poetry, Poem Critique, Pronouncements & Blither | No Comments »

Entry 910 — My Bad Artwork Again

Friday, November 2nd, 2012

Here’s my bad artwork again. I’m dead in the head, again, and have had a busy day–5 hours helping set up a local Arts & Humanities council show–a bunch of tables for craftspeople and painters, etc., to display and try to sell wares, and organizations trying to sell tickets and/or memberships like our local theatre group. A way of circulating, and fun, but tiring. Anyway, I’m just going to say a few things about the work–which I’ll call “mp” for the time being.

First off, let me say that it’s as hard, and important, to show why an artwork is a failure as it is to show why it is a success. Against some views, I hold that one way to show that a work is bad is to point out what it does not have. This one, for me, does not have what I consider the most important thing any work must have, a unifying principle. Many artists sneer at the need for one, but their best works always have one, and I believe they recognize that intuitively. “MP” has no design focus that I can see. No conceptual center, either. If it had both, would they be in the same place? I don’t know.

This thing makes me think of golf, and I don’t like gold. What do the red lines say? Nothing, to me. I do like the 9 repeating in the nearby g but it’s momentarily interesting without connecting to the rest of the piece. I like the climb of the m’s, but–again–where are they going and why? I’m seeing random graphics, nothing more.

Pointing out what’s bad helps us better experience the absence of those thing in good art; having what a bad work lacks pointed out helps us better expreience what is in a good work that makes it good. Now, I am not contending that some bad in a work would be bad in any other work. Although some bads, like lack of a unifying princile, I consider universally bad. Tone is part of any good work’s unifying principle, and some elements of the work which seem bad in some respects may, if necessary for tone, prove good. A clumsy syntactical step in a formal poem becomes more good than bad if it is required by the meter.

Gad, I’m sleepy.

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Posted in Artwork Critique, Textual Designage | No Comments »

Entry 863 — LitCrit II

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

More Thoughts on What a Literary Critic Is.

Needless to say, a literary critic’s function is not only to analyze individual poems. He should also consider (albeit in less detail) a poet’s entire oeuvre, or some distinct portion of it—and take on larger groups of poets—up to as many of all the poets whose poetry is extant as he is able to.

Another single attribute any critic of value has to have is the ability to recognize superior new poets and bring them to the attention of his readers before anyone else does—and/or present the first good case for singling them out . A critic of the first-rank will go one step further: he will recognize superior new kinds of poetry, and describe its virtues before anyone else—and probably two to five decades before any academic critic does.

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Posted in Criticism | 2 Comments »

Entry 862 — What’s A Literary Critic?

Saturday, September 15th, 2012

There’s a discussion at leafepress.com the title of which is, “What is Literary Criticism? What is a Literary Critic?” It’s mainly between Conrad DiDiodato and John Bloomberg-Rissman, but Ed Baker takes a few potshots at the others, basically reiterating the standard belief of the romantic poet that criticism is irrelevant to poets.

The discussion annoyed me because it made no references to my criticism. Of course, I didn’t really expect it to, although Conrad knows a little of my work, but I have trouble listening to people taking tenth-rate critics seriously when my work is available. Yes, I am that arrogantly convinced of the value of my criticism. Not that I’m all that sure it’s any good, but that I am positive that it’s many orders of magnitude better than Derrida’s, say, or DeMan’s, or that moron Foucault, which these guys seem to admire (although they do seem to be familiar with a wide range of critics, some of whom I don’t take as tenth-rate, like Cleanth Brooks.

The discussion annoyed me more because, like so many such discussions, it starts nowhere, really, and splathers inconclusively severalwhere. Its central defect is absence of defined axiom-setting terms—due to the standard belief of its participants that “artworks . . . can NEVER be fully unpacked.” The truth is that any artwork can be unpacked sufficiently to satisfy any sane person. Just as the distance from my house to yours can be measured sufficiently to satisfy any sane person although it can never be measure perfectly.

This absence of defined terms allows them to say sometimes interesting things, and not worry about contradiction. And it satisfies the political need of the naïve to feel certain all beliefs are equally true/false, just as all persons are equally good/bad. The only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. This is a problem, because false beliefs are much more likely to lead to grief than true beliefs—as every knows intuitively but intellectuals keep out of their verbal awarenesses. For example, an intellectual won’t make a fifty-foot swan dive into a pool whose water he knows is frozen because his reptile brain will give him nausea at the thought of doing so. But the nausea will never work its way up into his verbal awareness and bother him with the possibility that a belief that a fifty-foot dive into a pool of solid ice is harmful is true whereas a belief that it is not harmful is false.

I know. Simplistic. But in the final analysis, true.

I began this expecting simply to answer the questions in the title of the leafepress.com discussion. No, not answer them, just scatter a few thoughts concerning them. I’ve elsewhere answered the questions pretty well, I believe, although I’m not sure when or where. Right now, however, I have one new thought (for me) about the subject: that there is an important difference between a literary critic and a literary appreciator. A literary critic tells you—make that, “tries to tell you”—everything important to know about a particular literary work based on its expressive elements alone. Which will include what is denoted, what connoted and what is explicitly alluded to. It will, I believe, also include what is implicitly alluded strongly enough for most knowledgeable engagents of the work under analysis to connect to. “Fourscore and ten years ago,” for instance, with “Lincoln’s “fourscore and ten years ago” being an explicit reference.

Hmm, I see that I’ve defined a literary critic, except that I left “literary work” undefined. So be it, for now, although it’s easy to define; it’d take too many words for me to bother doing that here (and I’ve done it elsewhere). Oh, one other minor omission: I didn’t say what it is important to know about a literary work. I’ve defined that, too. It wouldn’t take all that many words, but too many for me to bother with here.

Let me turn to what a literary appreciator is. I decided I needed the term because it seems to me my definition of the literary critic is almost identical to any new critic’s. But new critics opposed going beyond the artifact on the page or pages in analyzing it. I believe them correct to dos, but only strictly speaking. I want someone telling me about a poem, say, to tell me things about its maker, including things having little or nothing to do with the poem. Like, Wow, a guy like Ezra Pound could believe in a totally loony economics theory yet write “In a Station of the Metro!” A literary appreciator is a literary critic who also is willing to discuss all kinds of things about a poem beyond what it is as literature. He is not someone who slights literary analysis to do this. He must also avoid finding implicit allusions that aren’t there for any normal person and building wacky psychiatric interpretations out of them the way Freud did and has followers have. As basically all the French critics and their allies have in diverse ways.

Not that there isn’t a place for, say, someone who focuses on what forces in society may have influenced the final form of a poem. Such a person is neither a literary critic nor a literary appreciator; he is a sociological critic of literature.

Before I end I want to mention that I would divide literary critics into two kinds: the practical literary critic and the theoretical literary critic (unless I think of a better name). The first deals with works of literature, each mostly by itself, although he may (and usually should) connect a work to other works of its author, and to like works by others; the second does this also, but presents some kind of theory for the nature and value of a literary work—not just that rhyme is pleasurable, for instance, but why it is. Along the way he will provide a taxonomy of the kinds of literary works he deals with, and a continuing list of the techniques used in them with detailed descriptions of them, and why they are effective.

Above the two kinds of literary critics is the literary philosopher. Such a person is a serious seeker of significant final truths about literature. He will probably also be a philosopher of aesthetics, one seriously seeking significant final truths about all the arts, not just literature. My taxonomy continues upward, finally arriving at the neurophysiological theorist—who is one step below the Total Verospher, who seriously seeks significant final truths about everything!

Urp.

Just My Shopping Coupons

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Entry 824 — Critique, Continued

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

Here’s my sonnet, again, back for further dissection

Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.

The first question of the day is whether or not the “mis-used” words are virtues or defects. They are “miracled” and “synapsed,” two nouns used as verbs. The noun-to-verb change happens all the time in English, yet there seem still to be people peopling the outskirts of provincialism whom it dismays. Of course, when one comes on a noun that’s been used as a verb for the first time in the one’s experience, it is bound to seem slightly wrong. In a poem, though, no one should object to this practice if the object is freshness. Which it almost always is in my poems. Still, one can over-do it. Whether I have with these two, and with the later “re-morninged,” which is both a noun used as a verb and a word given an unexpected prefix. “Re-morninged” may be strained, but I like it (and used it in all my versions of this poem) because it is also a metaphor for the particular way Pound brought the past “to life again.”

Then there are my coinages, “lolli-skied,” which I’ve already discussed, and “underhue,” which may well not be a coinage. If a coinage, it uses “under” as a prefix the same way Wordsworth did, so I consider it a plus. (If I were an academic, I’d quote the passages where Wordsworth used it, but I’m not–’cause I got more important things to do.) Again, whether these are plusses or minuses is a to each his own proposition.

I’m not sure what “seem” and “are” are the way they are used here. Verbs as nouns, I guess–“seem” meaning “things as they seem,” “are,” “things as they are.” So, verbs as noun preceded by ellipses? In any case, they are appropriate here for indicating one constant theme of Stevens’s poetry, usually specifically with the difference between reality and our metaphors for it. On the other hand, “are” is inserted for the rhyme. It should be evident by the fourth line that I could have used fewer words, and sometimes shorter words, to say what I have, but didn’t because I had to have so many syllables per line, and get the meter right. The fourth line should be just “burned to found.” And “found” seems a bit of a strained effort to make a rhyme. Poets don’t “found” poetic worlds so much as “fashion,” “create,” or “form” them. Sometimes such a not-quite right word works beautifully, though–I’m thinking of Blake when he asked “who could frame” the “fearful symmetry of the tyger.

I remember, too, never liking the way “to” followed “too,” but I couldn’t think how elsewise to write that part. Lines 6 and 7 are downright bad due to the padding I’m speaking of “to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,/ and earthlife synapsed in the underhue . . .” This ultimately became, “to where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps/ toward high-hued sensibility begin . . .” which is superior (I believe) though not perfect because all four of the adjectives in first of the two lines adds something to the picture the dirt in spring using seeds to ascend to color (and “sensibility,” which I won’t defend here). Does such padding kill a poem? Not unless overdone, in formal verse, where I believe padding nearly always happens–but pays off in the best poems with in a smooth rhythm and rhyme (and rhyme is a wonderful thing, so what if great poems can eschew it). Does padding kill this poem? I frankly don’t know. Certainly “the fading fragments of the past,” wounds it, not only as padding but as cliche–i.e., fragments of the past are pretty sure to be “fading.”

I don’t remember if the version of this sonnet I consider the final one still “has “windily” in it. I wanted to refer to the brisk weather I thought rule many of Pound’s best poems, but “windily,” alas, also suggests the windy speaker that he too often was.

Finally, there’s the repetition of “How vain they’ve been,” which I confess was due to the need to fill out the line–although one can argue that it helps emphasize the strong feeling of the couplet it’s in. As I’ve said before, however, when I read this poem after not having read it for probably more than ten years, I did like it, not noticing the problems I’ve now found in it. I’m convinced it’s not a mjor poem, but it may not be a bad one.

Incidentally, I’ve not yet mentioned the poem’s subject. It is a simple, conventional one: the desire of a poet to write great poetry–with explicit praise to the side of three poets, and implicit praise of a fourth (Keats). I claim that no poem’s subject is important, unless it’s unclear or ridiculously stupid (e.g, raw toads taste better spread with peanut butter). It’s how the subject is treated that counts. What kind of monument to it does the poem’s words create? Most import for me has always been how well it gets an engagent to Manywhere-at-Once (which is where an effective metaphor takes you, but not only metaphors), how often, how deeply, and how richly. Oh, and archetypal depth is crucial for the best poems. This one has to do with its speaker’s needs for greatness, and that’s are archetypally significant as any subject can be.

I never bothered to mention my poems “melodation,” either. That’s what I call the many ways poems can give auditory pleasure: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, even cacophony in the right place; and meter. I claim that even poor poems usually have effective melodation. There’s always the danger of too much of one kind–alliteration, most commonly; and of cliche–in choice of rhymenants (which is what I call words that rhyme), for example, “love/above.” My sonnet avoids cliched rhyming through the use of my bow-rhymes, and I don’t think any of my melodations is overdone. Most of them, by the way, came naturally. I think few people who have composed enough poems think about melodation while making a poem: it just comes. Every once in a while, you may have to think about it when not sure which of two or more words is right for a line–usually one will make the best sense but not sound as well as a second.

Did anyone notice how I ran out of gas toward the end of the above. For a while yesterday I really thought this would turn into a Terrific Example of New Criticism at its Best. Oh, well, I don’t yet think it’s wretched.

Cheap Desktop Computers

Posted in Bob Grumman, Poem Critique, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku « POETICKS

Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku

                                        hanami picnic–
                                        more blossoms
                                        than sky

Dell S2500 Printers

This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under George Swede, haiku, Linguexpressive Poetry, Pamela Cooper, Roland Packer. 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 542 — Thoughts about Haiku”

Conrad DiDiodato says:

24 October 11 at 5:31 PM

“What most makes the poem a good one, though, is its freshness–the unexpectedness of its infraverbal twist.”

A superb statement of haiku impact, Bob. And I, too, happen to see the haiku potential in pwoermds, especially of the Huth variety. Geof has a genius for them, and some of them have hit me with the same force as the very best haiku.

And thanks for promoting the Canada haiku scene: we usually get lost sometimes in the transborder discussions
Bob Grumman says:

25 October 11 at 11:57 AM

Thanks for the kind words, Conrad. I do think I’m pretty good as a haiku-commentator. And I’m always glad to publicize LeRoy Gorman’s excellent haiku review, which seems to me the best periodical around for haiku and haiku-related poems.

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

I wasn’t sure what to put in this entry, I’m so blah. Fortunately I remembered I had just gotten a package of poems from Karl Kempton, reflections, among which were many worthy of re-publication here, such as this:

mindless x ( ) = less mind

The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:

old pond

frog

splash

Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that. Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.

* * *

Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M. Tough day. A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40. I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago. Then marketing followed by the delivery of “The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present. After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore. I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much. But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore. Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty. Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.

easy approval

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Entry 450 — Visioverbal Visual Poetry

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

I suppose, now that I’ve seen (most of–I haven’t been able to download all the images to my elderly, bottom -of-the-line computer) the collection of artworks Geof Huth curated here, I’ll have to make something of a retreat in terminology. Geof, probably the most influential authority on the definition of visual poetry around, seems to believe that artworks containing nothing but words can be poetry–if, apparently, it does something “visual” like use the fact that “hear” and “here” sound alike but mean different things–as well as artworks containing nothing whatever that is explicitly verbal or even textual are visual poetry. My impression is that they majority of people contributing to shows like this one are similarly against sane naming. Ergo, instead of using “visual poetry” to mean what I think it should mean, I’m going to try from now on to call what I think of as visual poetry (because it is both meaningfully visual and meaningfully poetry): visioverbal visual poetry. “Visioverbal” rather than “verbovisual” because “visioverbal,” for me suggests that what is verbal is more important than what is visual in what is being described. It’s an awkward phrase, but what else can I use?

If asked to curate a show of what others call “visual poetry” (don’t worry, I won’t be), I will simply call it, “stuff.” Why confuse things with any name more detailed?

I can see one virtue of the use of the name “visual poetry” for almost anything: a “visual poet” can do art of a kind done for decades, like collage, and feel original be giving it a name it hadn’t been called by. (Not that there aren’t some really fine works in Geof’s gallery.)

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Entry 101 — MATO2, Chapter 3.02

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I wasn’t finished with the revision of my book, just with getting a good rough draft of it done. My morale got a substantial boost on Thursday 3 January 1991 due to a letter from John Byrum. He asked if I’d consider letting him run a series of excerpts from my book in the newsletter he edits. I thought that a great idea and after my afternoon nap have spent quite a bit of time getting 12 excerpts ready for him. As I’ve gone along, I have also found places in my book in need of improvement and have thus taken up the book’s revision again. In fact, I’ve cut my final chapter by around 500 words.

9 P.M. Friday 4 January 1991 I made a few new changes in the book and in the excerpts as well.

8 P.M. Monday 7 January 1991 Got my Manywhere excerpts ready for John Byrum.

10:10 P.M. Tuesday 8 January 1991 The bank account is very low–I can’t publish more than a hundred copies of my revised edition of Manywhere without going below the minimum balance on my last account with anything at all in it. But I guess I’ll have enough to print 100 copies of the psychology book, assuming my Xerox holds up.

9 P.M. Thursday 17 January 1991 The mail included a nice letter from Carita (a member of the Tuesday Writers’ Group who’d bought a copy of my book before moving to Miami)–and the card I’d sent to James Kilpatrick for him to let me know if he’d gotten my letter about “vizlation” with. He had, and–more amazingly–will be quoting it in a column in February, he says.

10 P.M. Monday 21 January 1991 I spent most of the rest of the day writing definitions for the words in Of Manywhere-at-Once’s glossary. It took me a surprisingly long time, but it was helpful, for I was able to improve several passages conerning those words in the main part of
the book. I was dismayed to find two or three spots where my definitions were quite confused. But now the only thing left to do to get the book completely ready for printing is a table of contents. (Aside from working out the margins and all that baloney.)

8:30 P.M. Wednesday 23 January 1991 I heard from John Byrum, okaying my Manywhere series except that he preferred to start with my second excerpt rather than the one telling about my beginning the sonnet and I decided he was right. So I withdrew the first excerpt and the last, which goes with it. Consequently, he’ll be running ten installments.

26 January 1991 I am now like a 25-year-old in quantity of accomplishments and social recognition, but like a 50-year-old in actual accomplishment. It also passed through my mind how extremely self-confident, even complacent, I am at the deepest level that things will eventually come out right for me. I think I get that from Mother. But I’ve always known, too, that I have to work hard if that’s to happen, as I have, for the most part.

Tuesday 29 January 1991 dbqp #101, which I found in the back of my mailbox when I put some letters to go in it this morning. Very interesting short history of dbqp and list of its first 100 publications with personal comments about them. He mentioned me a great deal which was flattering but made me a little self-conscious, too.

Friday 1 February 1991 I was full of intimations of apotheosis this morning. My feelings built till I got back from shopping and found rather null mail awaiting. They faded quickly, then. But I continue to feel pretty good. Actually, it was good mail–letters from Malok, Jonathan and Guy. Also material about 1X1 exhibit but no letter from Mimi, and a request for a catalogue. Lastly, a quotation for printing 100, 1000 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once from McNaughton (or something close to that, a company I’ve heard does good work): $1000, $2000. Second price not bad at all but 1000 copies too many at this time.

YEAR-END SUMMARY (of my fiftieth year): 9 minor reviews of mine appeared in 5 different publications; 7 pieces of vizlature of mine, all but one of them visual poems, appeared in 6 publications; 2 or 3 of my letters appeared here and there; I got 1 mailart piece off to a show; I got 8 textual poems into 4 magazines; I produced 2 or 3 unplaced visual poems; I wrote 3 not-yet-placed essays; I got my book, Of Manywhere-at-Once, published at last, then revised it in totum; I made and self-published SpringPoem No. 3,719,242.

In short, not much of a year, but not terrible, either.

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Entry 9 — Poetry Employing Irrational Language « POETICKS

Entry 9 — Poetry Employing Irrational Language

I have always wondered why anyone would make much of most Dada works. It was evident that a good number of reasonably intelligent, sensitive people have, though. Including friends of mine who have shown themselves quite capable of fashioning works I think vastly superior to their Dada works.

Then I came upon Geof Huth’s

. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there

in the recentest issue of Haiku Canada Review. Not Dada, but certainly nonsense, or so I at first thought. I would now term it nearsense. As

. the crab boils filge at blargets in the goamy fludge

it would have been nonsense, or a literary work which uses irrational language in order to amuse (in the view of most knowledgeable people encountering it). As

. car didn’t (e time)s into bleep blegg bllllg you

it would be constersense, or a literary work whose textual matter seems chosen for no other purpose than to cause consternation–by seeming to be nearsense but ultimately not making sense, or proving amusing.

Then there’s temporary nonsense such as Joyce’s “cropse,” which at first seems either nonsense or constersense (and will always seem constersense to Philistines) but, given time, will quite rationally if poetically say “corpse” and “crops” simultaneously in succinctly sum up all the important cycles of human existence.

I have more to say about this, particularly about why the poem by Geof Huth is nearsense, but I’m too worn-out from another tiring day to do so until (I hope) tomorrow.

Tags: haiku

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Geof Huth, haiku, James Joyce, Poetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 668 — A Visit to Haiku Canada Review

Monday, February 27th, 2012

Here’s a visual haiku I like from the latest issue of Haiku Canada Review (Volume 6, Number1):

Another haiku I liked was in a letter to Haiku Canada Review from Dina E. Cox:

                                             new snow
                                             I almost forget
                                             our quarrel

One last haiku I want to mention so I can make a negative remark is this, by Marshall Hryciuk:

                                    smudge of cloud
                                    boat’s murmur
                                    lost in the waves

My negative remark is not about Marshall’s poem, which I like a lot, but about the renku, an example of which Marshall’s poem begins. I can’t remember ever reading one that didn’t fairly quickly pall on me, although I’ve certain read ones which, like this one, were full of good and sometimes excellent material. I think it too difficult for a renku to stick closely enough to a particular topic (and it needn’t be a narrow one) for me to feel I have to hit my appreciation’s restart button too often. I believe, no doubt arrogantly, that the many people who like poems that jump around, lack the ability intensely to appreciate sufficiently to have trouble easing from one nice image to an unrelated nice image. Renku “stanzas” Of course, many of the best poems seem at first to lack what some would call inexorability and should be grazed at first rather than gobbled. A renku’s “stanzas,” if any good, are too strong too allow an engagent like me to do that for more than five or six of them.

There were a lot of other good haiku in the issue. Anyone interested in the form really should become a member of Haiku Canada. (Note: you don’t have to be Canadian.)

Adidas Shoe Store

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton « POETICKS

Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

mindless x ( ) = less mind

The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:

old pond

frog

splash

* * *

Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M. Tough day. A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40. I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago. Then marketing followed by the delivery of ”The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present. After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore. I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much. But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore. Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty. Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.

easy approval

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under haiku, Karl Kempton, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Uncategorized. 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.

haiku « POETICKS

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Entry 1560 — Just a Haiku

Friday, September 5th, 2014

It’s by John Elsberg & Erik Greinke–the last haiku of a 6-haiku sequence called “Basho’s Sandals” from Catching the Light (2009, Cervena Barva Press), a collection of 12 such sequences:

moonlight  on half the pond         I don't know  the splash beyond

Really nice extension of Basho’s old pond poem. A minor but perfect touch is “moonlight” all by itself to begin. Major is the huge light/dark, known/unknown dichotomy after that. I’d have this in any best poetry of 2009 anthology.
.

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Entry 1505 — “The Boy on the Swing”

Saturday, July 5th, 2014

I couldn’t think of anything to write here so went back to my early collection of visual/infraverbal haiku, poemns, for this, which is another I’ve no doubt posted before:

I believe the period in this sentence makes it an infraverbal master-piece. Yet it’s still not famous!

Posted in haiku, Visual Poetry Specimen | 7 Comments »

Entry 1502 — “A Snow-Effected Dream-Domain”

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014

Here’s a poem from my poems of 1966. I came across it while looking for the poem in the same collection that I’m re-cycling in my latest long division poem:

Rather nice, I think–though out of season, especially now down here in Florida where the temperature during the day is in the nineties.

Personal Medical Update, 10 A.M. , 2 July: I’m still a step or two from having trained medical personnel have a look at me. I took three aspirins a little while ago thinking they might help my circulation, which I think is the problem.

Posted in Autobiographica, haiku | 1 Comment »

Entry 1488 — Correction

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

stole two red cherries  expensive in plastic baskets  under the electric light             me

Posted in Anny Ballardini, haiku, Miscellaneous Thoughts, Poem Critique | 7 Comments »

Entry 1585 — BG, Master American-Haiku-Critic

Sunday, June 15th, 2014

from a post to NowPoetry from Jesse Glass, whom I consider a superior knower of things Japanese although he is diffident about it, with my thoughts interspersed:

Hokku

Bits of song—what else?

I, a rider of the stream,

Lone between the clouds.

from an interesting old anthology titled The New Poetry eds. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson

* * *

Jesse: “I think the first line exhibits the Homer Simpson “d’oh!” factor to a high degree. The other two lines are fine.”

Me: “I discur about the first line, Jesse–my interpretation of this American haiku (because no longer in Japanese) is something like: ‘here I am again with nothing but a trivial poem–me–up there like a god, alone in the clouds.’ Ergo, the first line sets up the second: image of bits of anybody song in tension with some great stream in the sky only someone vastly above (in many senses) ‘bits of song’ can ride. Resolution of what seems to me a sort of metaphor: bits of song equal anything in Nature, however magnificent–with the implication that the speaker of the poem is a fool, or a slyly-ironic non-fool.

“Of interest to me is the fantasy of the second and third lines. Are traditional haiku allowed to indulge in sheer fantasy, Jesse? My impression is that they aren’t, but I’m not sure. I, of course, am all for allowing it. In any case, the rider in the sky’s is definitely metaphoric, and I know metaphors were banned–although I contend that just about all the best elderly haiku had juxtaphors, my name for implicit metaphors.

“Note: I take “hokku” to be a synonym for “haiku,” or too near to consider a different kind of poem. The Hokku above in American is a haiku, for me. But you might explain what the Japanese mean by ‘hokku,’ Jesse; I’m pretty sure you have a better idea of that than I.”

From: Anny Ballardini

Heaps of black cherries

glittering with drops of rain

in the evening sun

Richard Wright

Me: “This is a poor haiku because containing only one image, albeit a pleasant enough one.”

stole two red cherries

expensive in plastic baskets

under the electric light

me

Me: “This I like I lot. Either Wright caught on to hakuitry by the time he wrote it, or got lucky. It’s still very close to being just one image, but I interpret there to be two sets of images in effective hakuic tension with each other: the cherries under the bright light, and the boy, distant from them in space and mood, the cherries cheerful, the boy guilty–or proud; and the cherries in plastic baskets and the boy with two stolen cherries under the electric light, very visible to the authorities (standing out, ion fact, the way the printed word, ‘me,’ does on the page.

“Comments welcome, especially counter-comments. Show where I’m off, and you will qualify to be a master American-haiku-critic, first–or at least second-class.”

Note from BG, the racist: I wish there were fewer streets named after Martin Luther King and more named after Richard Wright. (If I weren’t a racist, I’d want streets named after George Washington replaced with streets named after Richard Wright. No, name those after E. E. Cummings or Wallace Stevens or Theodore Roethke. Actually, we need no streets named after greater writers, because books of their work, or the electronic equivalent, are more than streets-enough for them.

Question from my hydrocodoned mood: what other writer in our country has written as entertaining and interlekshoolly-valuable a little essay in the past decade as the above? Or is as lovable (on paper)?(I took the hydrocodone to assure I did meaningful work on the essay regarding beauty I’ve been working on for months! I haven’t yet gotten to it almost two hours after taking my hit. Now I may.*

*It’s lucky I’m as old as I am. It’s scary how fast my lovability is increasing nowadays. If I were only twenty, it’d explode before I was fifty, and kill millions.**

**Aren’t the opponents of drug-addiction lucky I’m giving them so much good evidence against hydrocodone with stuff like this?***

*** Note, too, how the hydrocodone is keeping me from my essay on Beauty. Hmm, maybe that’s what’s good about it. Except that it will not keep me from it any longer. Later!

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, haiku, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1362 — A Haiku Review

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

For today, a haiku review first appearing in Modern Haiku, then reprinted in my From Haiku to Lyriku. It’s here because I needed something to post and pages 86 and 88 happened to be the pages I turned to when I opened that to grab something. But I like my haiku reviews, even though they never made me famous.

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, haiku, John Stevenson, Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2

Friday, September 6th, 2013

Note: the version of my sonnet above is not the final version of it.

Petsmart Coupons

Posted in Bob Grumman, Cryptographiku, haiku, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, minimalist poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1119 — Dead Poem

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

Poem-in-progress:

I struggled with this thing most of yesterday–in my head. Just couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t choose between having the private eye and the Atlantic as its center. This morning, I kept foundering, finally giving up: hence the title of this entry. I tried to cheer myself up by think how good an instructional failure it was. Then something close to the above occurred to me that seemed to make some sense. I’m not yet satisfied with it. but may accept it into Mine Oeuvre as is.

Meanwhile, I like my private eye image. Haven’t been able to think what to do with it, though. (Thanks, Conrad, for your positive comment on it, by the way. You see the image just the way I do!)

Lensmart Contact Lense

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop, haiku, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1118 — Floundering

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

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

rainy afternoon;
private eye (fictional)
exiting a cab

the Atlantic
before ships were anywhere on it
except its edges

9 faint winter poems
unseveraling
into long ago

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

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

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

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

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

rainy afternoon;
private eye (fictional)
exiting a cab

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

9 faint winter poems
unseveraling
into not yet

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

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

Lesson to be continued when I have more to say.

HP Scanner

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop, haiku, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1117 — 3 Haiku

Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

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

rainy afternoon;
private eye (fictional)
exiting a cab

the Atlantic
before ships were anywhere on it
except its edges

9 faint winter poems
unseveraling
into long ago

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

DSLR Camera Packages

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop, haiku | 1 Comment »

Linguexpressive Poetry « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Linguexpressive Poetry’ Category

Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku

Monday, October 24th, 2011

                                        hanami picnic–
                                        more blossoms
                                        than sky

Dell S2500 Printers

Posted in George Swede, haiku, Linguexpressive Poetry, Pamela Cooper, Roland Packer | 2 Comments »

Entry 541 — Haiku Canada Review, Oct. Issue

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

I just got the latest issue of Haiku Canda Review, long edited by my friend LeRoy Gorman. The first poem in it that caught my eye was this, by Roland Packer:

And here’s a nice variation (it strikes me) on Yeats’s description of “imaginary gardens with real frogs in them” (and quoted by Marianne Moore):

                                       bottomless, the well
                                       of dreams–a chickadee
                                       on the sill

It’s by George Swede. Discussion tomorrow of both, and–perhaps–others.

Cheap Airline Ticket

Posted in George Swede, haiku, LeRoy Gorman, Roland Packer | No Comments »

Entry 433 — Graham vs. Grumman, Part 99999

Monday, April 25th, 2011

It started with David Graham posting the following poem to New-Poetry:

.        Mingus at The Showplace
.
.            I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
.              and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
.        and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
.        poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
.    literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
.              defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
.              casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
.    the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
.        And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
.          other things, but as it happened they were wrong.
.    So I made him look at the poem.
.    “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,
.              and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He glowered
.              at me but he didn’t look as if he thought
.    bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
.        If they were baseball executives they’d plot
.        to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
.    could be saved from children. Of course later
.        that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
.    and flurried him from the stand.
.    “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
.    he explained, and the band played on.
.
.               William Matthews
.               Time & Money
.            Houghton Mifflin Company
.
I Liked it for the same reasons I like many of Charles Bukowski’s poems, so I said, “Good poem. Makes me wonder if he was influenced or influenced Bukowski. Seems like something by Bukowski, Wilshberianized.”

Mike Snider responded that “Matthews was a far better poet than Bukowski thought himself to be, and he did indeed know his jazz. At the other end of some cultural curve, I love his translations of Horace and Martial.

“And I love your work, Bob, but ‘Wilshberia’ is getting quite a bit past annoying.”

I may be unique among Internetters in that when I post something and someone (other than a troll) responds to it, I almost always carry on the discussion. I did that here: “I think Bukowski at his rawest best was equal to Matthews, but extremely uneven. One of his poems about a poetry reading has the same charge for me that this one of Matthews’s has. I haven’t read enough Mattews to know, but suspect he wrote more good poems than Bukowski did.

“(As for my use of ‘Wilshberia,” I’m sorry, Mike, but it can’t be more annoying to you than Finnegan’s constant announcements of prizes to those who never work outside Wilshberia are to those of us who do our best work outside of it, prizelessly. Also, I contend that it is a useful, accurate term. And descriptive, not derogatory.”

At this point David Graham took over for Mike with some one of his charateristics attempts at wit: “Sorry, Mike, but I have to agree with Bob here. Just as he says, ‘Wilshberia’ is a useful, accurate term, in that it allows someone to see little important difference between the work of Charles Bukowski and William Matthews.

“Think how handy to have such a term in your critical vocabulary. Consider the time saved. Sandburg and Auden: pretty much the same. Shakespeare and Marlowe: no big diff. Frost and Stevens: who could ever tell them apart?

“It’s like you were an entomologist, and classified all insects into a) Dryococelus australis (The Lord Howe Stick Insect) and b) other bugs.”

Professor Graham is always most wittily condescending when he’s sure he has ninety percent of the audience behind him, which was sure to be the case here.

Needless to say, I fired back: “Seeing a similarity between those two is different from seeing “little important difference between” them, as even an academic should be able to understand.

“Wilshberia, for those who can read, describes a continuum of poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery. The sole thing the poets producing the poetry on it have in common is certification by academics.

“No, David, (it’s not like being an entomologist who “classified all insects into a} Dryococelus australis [The Lord Howe Stick Insect] and b} other bugs). Because visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, cyber poetry, mathematical poetry, cryptographic poetry, infraverbal poetry, light verse, contragenteel poetry, haiku (except when a side-product of a certified poet) and no doubt others I’m not aware of or that have slipped my mind are meaninglessly unimportant to academics as dead to what poems can do that wasn’t widely done fifty or more years ago as you does not mean they are the equivalent on a continuum of possible poetries to a Lord Howe Stick Insect in a continuum of possible insects.” Then I thanked the professor for “another demonstration of the academic position.”

My opponent wasn’t through: “A rather nice nutshell of my oft-expressed reservation about Bob’s critical habits above. Note how in his definition of Wilshberia above, ‘the sole thing’ that characterizes such poetry is ‘certification by academics.’ I think we all know what ‘sole’ means. OK, then, it has nothing whatsoever to do, say, with technical concerns. There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved. And thus it is obviously not definable according to whether it is breaking new technical ground, because “the sole thing” that defines it is whether academics ‘certify’ it, whatever that means. And as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.

“But look at the second paragraph above. What are academics being accused of? Oh, it seems we don’t appreciate poetry that breaks new technical ground or challenges our aesthetics. We don’t like poetry of various aesthetic stripes recognized as important by Bob.

“Whether or not that accusation is even true (another argument), does anyone else see a certain logical problem here?”

I didn’t say much. Only that he was wrong that “There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved” involved in my characterization of Wilshberia because aesthetic distinctions are involved to the degree that they affect academic certifiability, which they must–as must whether the poetry of Wilshberia is breaking new technical ground.

I proceeded to say, “The meaning of academic certification should be self-evident. It is anything professors do to indicate to the media and commercial publishers and grants-bestowers that certain poems are of cultural value. Certification is awarded (indirectly) by teaching certain poems and poets–and not others; writing essays and books on certain poems and poets–and not others; paying certain poets and not others to give readings or presentations at their universities; and so forth. What (the great majority of) academics have been certifying in this way for fifty years or more is the poetry of Wilshberia.” “Only,” I would now add.

I also noted that I had I previously defined Wilshberia solely as academically certified poetry. “Implicitly, though,” I claimed, “I also defined it as poetry ranging in technique from Wilbur’s to Ashbery’s. Since that apparently wasn’t clear, let me redefine Wilshberia as “a continuum of that poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery which the academy has certified (in the many ways the academy does that, i.e., by exclusively teaching it, exclusively writing about it, etc.)”

Oh, and I disagreed that ” . . . as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.”

“My claim,” said I, “remains that the vast majority of them think when they say they like all kinds of poets from Wilbur to Ashbery that they appreciate all significant forms of poetry. I have previously named many of the kinds they are barely aware of, if that.”

That was enough for the professor. He retired to an exchange with New-Poetry’s nullospher, Halvard Johnson, about not having a certificate indicating he was a poet in good standing.

Tags: Wishberia
Posted in David Graham, Linguexpressive Poetry, Michael Snider | No Comments »

Entry 426 — A New Chapbook by Beining

Monday, April 18th, 2011

There are a fair number of excellent visual poets who are excellent linguexpressive poets, as well: Karl Kempton, Sheila Murphy, Geof Huth, Crag Hill, to mention just a few. Another is Guy R. Beining, who is also a wonderful pure visimagist (i.e., maker of visual art), as my top image of his painting for the cover of nozzle 1 – 36, his recent collection of linguexpressive poems, proves. Following it are two of the poems in the book. As I always wonder, as practically the only one who has discussed his work (too seldom I fear, and too worn out to do so here), why he is not better known.

Posted in Guy R. Beining, Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 387 — 2006 Discussion of a Poem by Crag Hill

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Recently, I’ve been going through the files with the graphics but not the texts of entries I made to my previous blog in search of mathemaku of mine. I want to number them all, so need a complete list of them. I think I posted just about all of them to my blog. In any event, yesterday I brought up a file for an entry (Blog959) whose visits was recorded as close to 200. Rarely did my old entries get more than 20 visits. Curious to see what was in the blog, I then brought up the file that had its text, which I think worth quoting here:

17 September 2006: Among the many intriguing items at Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard is this found poem of Crag’s that he posted 3 September:

From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson

.     I come back to the geography of it,
.     I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
.     I have been an ability–a machine–up to
.     I have had to learn the simplest things

.     I live underneath
.     I looked up and saw
.     Imbued / with the light
.     I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s

.     In cold hell, in thicket, how
.     In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
.     is a monstrance,
.     I sing the tree is a heron

.     I sit here on a Sunday
.     It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
.     it was the west wind caught her up, as

Amazing poem, this. I’m not a big fan of Olson’s, though I believe he is a major poet, and that some of his poems are A-1. Surely, these lines could only have been from a poet, though. I recognize one or two, but in this discussion will not look up any of them. (Oops, I realize I couldn’t look up very many of them; I do have The Maximus Poems, and several of my anthologies have poems by Olson, but I don’t have the Selected Poems.)

“I come back to the geography of it,”

Anyway, what a beginning, this return to some geography. Olson was probably only returning to a genuine geography, of the locale I feel he jabbered too much about, but here–dislocated by the line-break–”geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., everything having a geography. Less surlogically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . .

What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.

“I don’t mean, just like that, to put down”

Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation is broken off before getting anywhere, which effectually explains all the better his state of being at loose ends. A main interest is in whether he has just dropped one activity to return to the geography of whatever he’s involved in, and/or inadvertantly “put down” whatever he was doing because superficial or the like compared to geographical questions. “I have been an ability–a machine–up to”

The narrator continues trying to explain himself without finishing any of his ventures into self-analysis. I take this line to mean he’s not been personally/emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).

“I have had to learn the simplest things”

Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero.

“I live underneath”

We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).

“I looked up and saw”

This line seems planned to follow the one before it. This sudden strong logic out of the chaos of existence as if to reassure us that life does make sense is one of the virtues of found poetry. Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life. No big deal if the context set us up for this sort of heightened seeing, but something of a (good) jolt in this zone of reduced context.

“Imbued / with the light”

Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.

“I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s”

The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named who-cares-where.

“In cold hell, in thicket, how”

After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way. “In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–”

Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . I don’t know the meaning of “meubles” but assume it’s some kind of furniture. Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.

“is a monstrance,”

I guess we aren’t meant to sit on the chairs or put anything on the tables in the poem. We are definitely in a darkness and a confusion. “I sing the tree is a heron”

But the narrator can sing. He sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:

“I sit here on a Sunday”

The tone has gone quiet, conventional–but implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services. “It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death”

The chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.

“it was the west wind caught her up, as”

Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.

Okay, that was a preliminary once-through I hope some reader will get something out of. I did! Don’t know if I’ll return to it. Probably, so I can use it in a book. Don’t know if I’ll have anything better to say about it then, though.

* * * * *

I’m not ready to say more about the poem now–except that I wondered when I looked at my entry whether I’d mentioned the importance of Crag’s poem’s foundness when I discussed it. I saw I hadn’t. In my megalomaniacal opinion, I think I may be the only critic who has ever discussed the full aesthetic value of foundness. I did this in my discussion, possible two decades ago by now, of Doris Cross’s work–wonderful visual poems brought into being by painting or otherwise defacing, deleting, meddling with dictionary paintings. (I love Nietzsche not only for all he said, brilliantly, that I agree with, but for the megalomaniacal boasts he made about his accomplishments that have turned out to be valid.)

What I said in my Cross piece isn’t handy, so my comments now will probably be a bit incomplete and not as sharply expressed as what I said in it. First off, as anyone would agree and as many I’m sure have said, the quotations from Olson, add his life and writings to Crag’s poem. This is important. But what I think effective appropriation of found materials most importantly does is celebrate the essential logic of the universe. It reminds us that God is in his heaven allowing accidents to make affirmations–even for someone like I who doesn’t believe in God, and understands that accidents don’t really make affirmations, only happen so often that some of them, especially when a keen discoverer has an eye out for them, are bound to do what Crag’s collection does. Another, better way of putting it, is that we are reminded of who wonderfully well the human brain finds ways to give existence meanings, meanings that suggest Meaning.

Okay, not a view you’d think anyone would feel like a demigod for having, but it’s more than anyone else has said about foundness that I know of. And I can’t see how anyone could say it’s wrong.
.
.    Poem Consults the Vseineur
.
.            However seldom the vseineur
.            said “universe” in Poem’s hearing,
.            he accepted it,
.            however clear it always was
.    that it had misspoken.

Posted in Charles Olson, Crag Hill, Criticism, Found Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 378 — A Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

Monday, February 14th, 2011

Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance

Thus should have been our travels:
serious, engravable.
The Seven Wonders of the World are tired
and a touch familiar, but the other scenes,
innumerable, though equally sad and still,
are foreign. Often the squatting Arab,
or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,
against our Christian empire,
while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand
points to the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher.
The branches of the date-palms look like files.
The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,
is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits
are vast and obvious, the human figure
far gone in history or theology,
gone with its camel or its faithful horse.
Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds
suspended on invisible threads above the Site,
or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads.
Granted a page alone or a page made up
of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles
or circles set on stippled gray,
granted a grim lunette,
caught in the toils of an initial letter,
when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves.
The eye drops, weighted, through the lines
the burin made, the lines that move apart
like ripples above sand,
dispersing storms, God’s spreading fingerprint,
and painfully, finally, that ignite
in watery prismatic white-and-blue.

Entering the Narrows at St. Johns
the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship.
We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs
among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs.
And at St. Peter’s the wind blew and the sun shone madly.
Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines,
crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants.
In Mexico the dead man lay
in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes
glistened like Easter lilies.
The jukebox went on playing “Ay, Jalisco!”
And at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies
splitting the mosaics; the fat old guide made eyes.
In Dingle harbor a golden length of evening
the rotting hulks held up their dripping plush.
The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us
that the Duchess was going to have a baby.
And in the brothels of Marrakesh
the littel pockmarked prostitutes
balanced their tea-trays on their heads
and did their belly-dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees,
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all:
A holy grave, not looking particularly holy,
one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin
open to every wind from the pink desert.
An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid
with exhortation, yellowed
as scattered cattle-teeth;
half-filled with dust, not even the dust
of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there.
In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
–the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets,
–and looked and looked our infant sight away.

1955

I like this poem. I especially like the line, “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’” The book sounds like a wonderful one. Too bad that Bishop is negative about so much in the book. But I love the homage to “andness” that I consider her poem best to be–so much and more and more is out there!”

Posted in Elizabeth Bishop, Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 323 — Rhyming Fun, Part 10

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

.
.             A Visit to Poem, Continued
.
.             Except, of course, appealing to
. a different taste than these,
.       which lack an edifying view
.
.             of tortured sinners’ agony
.             and like felicities
.             of serious morality.

This is probably my dumbest set of stanzas, but I really don’t like Dante very much.

Posted in Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 322 — Rhyming Fun, Part 9

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

.
.             A Visit to Poem, Continued
.
.             My age was two times greater than
.             the Florentine’s had been
.             when his peculiar climb began
.
.             in three-line stanzas similar
.             to these I now was in
.             for who knows how damned long a tour.

Click this to visit The Pedestal Magazine where the review I had to do this month is. I found it difficult to write, and–chee, I keep wanting to keep everything in this paragraph iambic; that dumb rhyme of mine has really gotten to me–and I don’t think I did a terrific job. I hope it’s not too bad, though, and that the poet treated doesn’t get too upset with me.

I should be in good spirits now. My hip is no longer keeping me from playing tennis reasonably well, for my age, and my health seems otherwise okay. My financial picture has improved, for I’ve recently been able to consolidate some of my debts and lower my interest rates a good deal. I got the review done, and my latest column for Small Press Review. My booklet about the taxonomy of poetry is ready for printing. Yet, I’m weary, and can’t seem to get anything consequential done. Oh, well, maybe it’s just holiday blues. And the continuing cold weather (in a house with a heating system barely able to keep the house at sixty when it’s less than that outside–except here in my computer room where I have a space heater). And I no longer have a cat . . .

Posted in Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 321 — Rhyming Fun, Part 8

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

. A Visit to Poem, Continued
.
.             He spat, then shimmered more surreal
.             than he had been before,
.             his torso now a golden wheel,
.
.             his his my dead cat burning bright,
.             his her an open door
.             to Blake’s most cruelly tygered night,

These two were tough to write. I tried to add to the poem twice, once before tennis, once after, and got nowhere. Only after a nap, and sitting at my keyboard for a half-hour, did I get anything down. I’d been close to taking my first day off from the poem. The secret to continuing, of course, is constantly to increase one’s irresponsible as a narrator. But the latest stanzas, believe it or not, seem to me to be going somewhere seriously interesting.

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Entry 320 — Rhyming Fun, Part 7

Monday, December 20th, 2010

.             A Visit to Poem, Continued
.
.           The farmer laughed
.             at my unhappiness,
.             then quickly shot a feathered shaft
.
. that passed completely through my head.
. He shrugged off my distress
.       “Naught I’d not do to rhyme,” he said.
.
.             “Too much of that is going on!”
.             I screamed. “This text is vile!”
.             “Not so,” the farmer lisped, “for Khan
.
.             it hath, from distant Xanadu,
.             and other marks of style
.             not evident to fools like you.”
.
.
Dang, rhyming is easy if you don’t care what you’re saying.

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Archive for the ‘George Swede’ Category

Entry 541 — Haiku Canada Review, Oct. Issue

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Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku

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Entry 9 — Poetry Employing Irrational Language

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

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