I’m really cheating today: I’m using part of a review or column for Small Press Review that I’ve been working here. The work I’m reviewing is Richard Kostelanetz’s Ouroboros (see Entry 1535):
An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tale, so an excellent title for this collection of 188 words like, well, “ouroboros,” swallowing their tails, each time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, “sour,” in the case of “ouroboros.” They are set in a highly appropriate, highly dramatic font called “Wide Latin”—very bold and jabbingly pointed at all extremities. It’s definitely fun to find smaller words inside Kostelanetz’s specimens of “circular writing,” as he terms it: “tea,” “pet,” and “petite,” for example, in “appetite,” as well as “appetite” itself, which one discovers rather than automatically sees, or “tin,” “descent,” and, most important,” “scent” in “incandescent” (because of the poetic jolt light as an immaterial scent, or a scent as immaterial light suggest to those sensitive to connotation). But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities” .
I told Chris Lott that I would explain why I thought certain arrangements of numbers Richard had made were more than curiosities, and that I’d soon explain why I thought that. Here, quickly, using Richard’s circular words, I’ll give the gist of my reasoning that some of them are, the ones that: accentuate connotative value, a virtue of poems although not necessarily a defining quality, and in the process create an image complex of aesthetic value, the way I think “appetite” turns eating into a very feminine tea party, and “incandescent” makes “scent” and “incandescence” plausible metaphors for each other; that they also sslow the reading of them, as any effective poem must (although I do not consider that a defining characteristic, either, but the result of defining characteristics, like the flow-breaks line-breaks serve as in free verse, and the extreme flow-break of a word being spelled into a circle); and, least important, but still important, they are decontextualized from prose, both by simply being called poems and by not being visually rose.
Richard’s number poems are somewhat different. I hope to discuss them, too, before long.
One further note. Many of Richard’s circular words combine into interesting narratives full of “heightened cross connotativeness,” by which I mean, one word’s mundane connotation turning vividly into a related connotation due to a similiarly mundane connotation in an adjacent circular word. For more on that, you’ll have to wait for my column, as I now see this text will become. You will be able to do that by subscribing to Small Press Review, which I wish a few of you would do; or by waiting for me to post the column in my Pages here a few months after it is published.
Note #2: I do not consider circular words to be visual poems; for me, they are visually-enhanced infra-verbal poems–the poetic value lies almost entirely on what goes on inside them verbally. Although you might say their visual sspin flicks connotations into view . . .
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