Skip Fox « POETICKS-

Archive for the ‘Skip Fox’ Category

I’m always harping on the importance of a poetry critic’s quoting passages or whole poems by the poets he discusses. This is not revolutionary: it’s taught, I believe, in most college courses on the subject. A critic should also zero in on quoted material at times, too. I sometimes fail to do both myself, so am re-posting to the following excerpt from a poem from Sheer Indefinite, by Skip Fox, in order to say a little about it:

Neither does the world answer but

          in mute response. Cold

            wind this morning before

                  dawn, cold

            rock in its eye,

                                 frozen

             dream in its mind.

First, here’s what Patrick James Dunagan said about it at his blog here, where I got it: “This is from a poem titled ‘sic transit’—one of several of the same title included here. (It’s on page 100–BG) These breezy markers of reoccurrence give a slight whimsy brokered through its scattering lines spread across the page expressing a moment’s hesitation before the onslaught of another day’s beginning. Fox utilizes this serial approach often in his more recent books, spreading throughout each a few poems which usually share a title, form, movement of line, and/or tone, allowing for the spreading of ongoing concerns beyond the single book, such that no single collection is ever final, or complete.”

The text begins “sic transit,” which surprised me a little, but should not have, since Fox likes to jump into the midst of things, then let his readers fumble for orientation, which tends to help them find more, sometimes a lot more, of where the poem has put them than a poem trying harder to be accessible. That is, you will learn more about an unfamiliar forest you have no easy-to-find path into if forced inside it to search for a way through it. Moreover, this poem begins in answerlessness, so the tactic is all the more appropriate. The poems then goes on to what seem to me Roethkean-level lyrical heights about the beauty of the night sky (moon, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, etc.) whose “wanderers” seem “endlessly searching . . . each sign a station pronounced/ sentence or dance of mythos, fluent/ within/ what?” Which gives us a better but far from complete idea of the question “the world answer(s) but/ in mute response.”

The passage is improved by its context–but I love it as a stand-alone, too, for its haiku-sharp evocation of coldness–in a still-dark morning, which is upped dramatically, first by the rationally-wrong, surrealistically-right cold rock, second by its eye–and, hence, sentience which personalizes its effect on the unidentified Everyman looking for an answer– and third (and fourth) by the “frozen dream in its mind,” which–almost wittily–outdoes the cold rock (as a colder version of it) in rational-wrongness/surrealistic-rightness.

Note: I like what I’ve written here–right now, just after writing it. Who knows how I’ll feel about it tomorrow or a month from now. But I like it now, which I mention because I notice that more often than not when I write close criticism like it, I have to really push myself to begin, because I feel empty. But something always seems to come–in this case helped by what another critic, Patrick James Dunagan, had said.

Inspiron 17R Laptop

Tags: Skip Fox
Posted in Bill DiMichele, Linguexpressive Poetry, Patrick James Dunagan, Skip Fox | No Comments »

Entry 853 — Criticism Criticism and Other Stuff

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Seth Abramson’s latest group of Huffington Post reviews is now up here. It includes a few words about Skip Fox’s Sheer Indefinite. It may be the first time Abramson has reviewed a book I have a copy of. He may have reviewed other poets whose work I liked, though. I learned of the review at New-Poetry, where Skip is a fellow participant. As for Abramson, I not too long ago said some negative things about him here. Here’s what I wrote about Abramson’s column at New-Poetry earlier today:

I don’t think I’ve read a complete review of Abramson’s before today—since so few of the poets he’s interested in interest me. But today I read the one that was half on Skip’s book. Lots of generalities about the two books under review, with no supporting quotations, and blather about the small portion of the poetry scene Abramson is familiar with. Lots of gush, e.g.: “in poetry, as Charles Olson once wrote, every element must be at once a high-energy construct and a high-energy discharge.” This, supposedly, is better than 19th-Century poetry critics’ calls for “beautiful language.” He knows what poetry should and should not be, and spends most of his time telling his readers, with tripe like the Olson quotation. In one of the reviews in his latest entry, he quotes a poet under review, but more for texts that indicate how the poet thinks than how he writes. More typically, he makes statements like, “Nguyen is a master of the poetic line, a distinction considerably rarer in these times than it ought to be,” without telling us just what makes Nguyen that, and why it’s good for a poet to be that.

.

One good thing Abramson’s review has is a link at the end to another review of Skip’s book. It’s not much better than Abramson’s but quotes several passages from Sheer Indefinite, including this:

.

Neither does the world answer but

in mute response. Cold

wind this morning before

dawn, cold

rock in its eye,

frozen

dream in its mind.

–which is just about exactly the kind of thing I like best in linguexpressive (entirely verbal) poetry.

.

I love the boxes the Huffington has put above Abramson’s tripe for people to click on, by the way. Each has one of the following words in it: “Inspiring,” “Funny”,”Typical,” “Important,” “Outrageous,” “Innovative,” “Beautiful.” Great set of choices.

Two things about Abramson I wonder. One is whether he’s capable of breaking out of the small box he’s in–and he’s fairly young, so has time to. The other is how it is he can sometimes like the same poets I do. Which leads to the question of how it is that any two critics with practically opposite points of view can sometimes agree on the value of a given poet or poem. It’s probably not much of a question. The simplest explanation is that my opposite likes a poet for different reasons than I do, the most common being choice of subject matter. Unless it’s the poet’s reputation that charms my opposite while it’s his actual talent that attracts me.

It is possible, too, that an opposite of mine may share my liking for fresh locutions and be more or less as sensitive to them as I am. Or a truly fine poet may do whatever he does so well that almost anyone must like him.

Other Things: I have to report something of Major Importance that I did a few hours ago. To understand the magnificence of my achievement, you must know that I tend to save things. Not quite everything. I’m able to throw out newspapers as soon as I’ve read them, and some magazines. Clothes I can no longer wear. (Underwear with more than three large rips in them, for example.) Standard food-related garbage. Junk mail. It’s hard to think of anything else, but I’m sure there are other things. My house is cluttered but not ridiculously. And I have gotten rid of a lot of old video equipment I had–an editing something-or-other, stuff like that. I set a few dead bicycles out for pick-up, too, and just a few days ago moved five bicycles I know I could get into running condition again if I only had time from my lanai to my carport. Three of them are now squeezed between the shed at one end of the carport and the defunct car that’s been parked in it for more than twenty years, serving as a storage shed for correspondence (which I have four filling cabinets in the car for). Two are against the house. I sort of hope someone will steal them. But I may learn of someone I can give one or more of them to. Or maybe someone will pay me something for spare parts or salvageable metal. In any case, they are now out of the way, so I have room on the lanai for a few more things.

My Major Achievement was throwing out over a hundred packing envelopes, and the like, that things had been mailed to me in and I thought I could re-use. Not completely unreasonable, for I have re-used a number of such things. But it was obvious that I was adding to my supply regardless of how often I used something from it. I also had a bunch of unused packing envelopes I’d bought in large quantity when I thought my press would have mail order customers. Several times I’d thought it might be wise to throw a few envelopes out, but never did. Today, though, I threw all of them out except a box with perhaps twenty of them in it that there was a good place for on the lanai. (I couldn’t possibly throw all of them out! Some of them had interesting stamps on them–or mail art scribbles.)

About a week ago I vowed for the fifteenth or twentieth time to put mine house in order. I was going to spend two hours a day at it. That quickly became one hour a day. Now it’s five minutes a day. The problem is that I got the real clutter taken care of pretty quickly, but couldn’t figure out what to do next. I think I have now: be cruel to a lot of books. I have over a thousand, I’m sure, and I expect to want to read no more than ten of the many I haven’t yet read. It’s emotionally near impossible for me to throw them out, and I doubt the local library would want any of them–or anybody I know locally would. so the plan is to box them. I’m speaking of non-vocation-related books. I have boxed a lot of poetry books, and will try to box a few more, but I can’t be sure I won’t ever again want to look at them, or need to, to check on something, or have a friend interested in one of them.

I’m some kind of data-addict, I think. It’s not a serious affliction, just a bothersome one, particularly for someone as impoverished as I’ve always been. I have over a dozen, maybe over thirty, books on sub-atomic physics, of which I’ve read maybe one entirely, and three or four slightly. I’ve bought books like that always expecting I’ll finally read one and understand it! Math books, too. Many of my large collection of psychology books I have read but doubt I’ll look at again. I’ve read most of my history books, too, and would love to reread just about all of them, but never will. I have a lot of hard-bound plays, too, but stopped reading them when my hopes of becoming a performed playwright sputtered out 25 years or so ago. Some I would enjoy, but I prefer novels for escape reading. It’s absurd how many different subjects I have books about, most of which I never read–never truly realizing that I needed to focus, always wildly trying to expand my circle of knowledge until it enclosed all known data. I always set myself many more goals than I can ever accomplish, too. Ah, but my reading goals are just Enough. Time to fill this five-foot carton I have with more books. A few hours ago, I dumped four books in it. I can probably fill it up. Then I’ll have space to try to re-arrange my unboxed so I’ll know where each of them is for the rest of my life! Well, so that I won’t call myself horrible names as I totter through the house yet against hunting for a book of the highest importance, possibly even one I wrote myself, and not finding it more that once a year instead of once a week.

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Posted in Autobiographica, Linguexpressive Poetry, Seth Abramson, Skip Fox | No Comments »

Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku « POETICKS

Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku

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.

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.

language « POETICKS

Posts Tagged ‘language’

Entry 19 — Poems & Rotation Words

Friday, November 20th, 2009

In #625, I had a version of the following:

Poem’s Environmental Activism

Poem consistently declines all invitations to
write poetry against the destruction of
the environment, reconginzing
that no politician or voter
genuinely desires a world
less than 98% of which
is squared off
into residences, crops and industry highwayed eff
ficiantly together and (perhaps)
lightly peripheried with 100% undangerous
“recreational” areas. To launch
peotyr
against their attitude
is futile. Always,
ytorep
will, to the extent that it is
ytxorepz,
befuddle or anger (without profit)
politicians and voters–
and everybody else who does not
already side with
euxartnz
beyond any need of persuasion
against its extirpation.

I value this mainly because it’s one of the world’s
few cryptographic poems. After another of my
environmental poems in #626, I had a poem from
way back in scorn of American theatre, for so l
ong scorning me, but accurate nonetheless.

The American Drama

on the hillside
sparrows dart
from one dry clump
of tight-leaved scrub oaks
to another,
glittering for an instant
under a huge
unentered sky

#628 featured a short excerpt from one of my plays,
then came this, which is a fairly complete list of
the “rotation word” in English, a rotation word
being a word that can be transformed into a second
word by replacing each of its letters with the
letter coming after it in the alphabet.

ad -> be
add -> bee
admi -> benj
admix -> benjy
aha -> bib
ahint -> bijou
an -> bo
ana -> bob
ana -> bob
anan -> bobo
ann -> boo
ann -> boo
anna -> boob
anna -> boob
at -> bu
ata -> bub
aten -> bufo
atka -> bulb
ax -> by
azo -> bap
cha -> dib
char -> dibs
chlor -> dimps
cho -> dip
chud -> dive
dand -> eboe
dodd -> epee
dud -> eve
ed -> fe
edh -> fei
eh -> fi
en -> fo
end -> foe
ens -> fot
eta -> fub
han -> ibo
he -> if
hin -> ijo
in -> jo
ind -> joe
inks -> jolt
it -> ju
its -> jut
khu -> liv
mho -> nip
ne -> of
nee -> off
nod -> ope
odd -> pee
ods -> pet
odz -> pea
oh -> pi
ohm -> pin
oho -> pip
on -> po
ona -> pob
ona -> pob
ons -> pot
oto -> pup
rho -> sip
rox -> spy
sh -> ti
sha -> tib
shee -> tiff
sho -> tip
shod -> tipe
snee -> toff
snod -> tope
snog -> toph
snork -> topsl
st -> tu
tch -> udi
to -> up
ton -> upo
tst -> utu
uds -> vet
ut -> vu
yn -> zo
za -> ab
zad -> abe
zan -> abo
zat -> abu
zax -> aby

My favorite is “inks/jolt.” This group
of ten entries ended with some comments
about a hurricane threatening the area.
It missed us.

Tags: language
Posted in Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 12 — Line Breaks « POETICKS

Entry 12 — Line Breaks

I may know as much as anyone in the world about the nature and function of lines breaks. That’s not a major boast: there isn’t much to know about them, and understanding them doesn’t take research or study, just a little commonsensical thought. I’m making them the subject of this entry because of a thread at New-Poetry I got involved with. A few of the contributors to the thread seemed to me to be having trouble fully understanding the device. Anyway, I’ve decided to write a minor primer about it, bringing back my recent Poem poem to illustrate its simplest functions:

. Another Failure

.                                  For half the night
.                                  Poem struggled mightily
.                                  to sing himself a sleep
.                                that melted understandings into him
.                                as intricately deepening as April rain
.                                  dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;
.                                  but nowhere in it did
.                                  anything extend beyond
.                                its decimal point.

I will now repeat it, with a comment in purple under each of its lines:

. Another Failure

. For half the night

The poem’s first line-break notifies the reader that he’s in a poem, as does every poem’s first line-break; slows his read to force him to pay at least a little more attention to what’s going on in the language of the poem and what its expressing, particularly its imagery, as do all line-breaks; with the corroboration of the poem’s other lines, if the reader glances at them, informs him of the poem’s pace, in this case comparatively quick; gives his mind a resting place from the possibly difficult material of the poem (again, like all line-breaks); presents a hint (possibly misleading) of the kind of poem the will follow as to style, subject matter, rhythmic nature, technique, point-of-view, and the like, in this particular case, mainly suggesting quotidianness via a commonplace diction, and the representation of a highly standard image; and, finally, setting up a rhyme by leaving “night” in an emphazied location of the poem.

. Poem struggled mightily

The poem’s second line-break does most of the things its first one did but also pretty much establishes the poem as free-verse, and puts “might” near its end to rhyme with the final word of the previous line.

. to sing himself a sleep

The next line-break does little new, but the extra time it gives the reader may help prevent his reading “a sleep,” a key contributor to whatever value the poem has, too hurriedly.

. that melted understandings into him

Coming a little late compared to the other line-breaks, this one is responsible for giving its line a feel of magnitude, importance; I believe it will be welcomed for the pause it provides the reader to think about just what its line and the preceding one mean

. as intricately deepening as April rain

The next line-break lets its line extend even more.

. dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;

Then a line-break halting its line somewhat sooner than the previous line-breaks halted theirs–perhaps indicating the we’ve reached the poem’s peak and are now quieting.

. but nowhere in it did

Another short line, now, stopped before it says anything–stopped also on a word a more standard line-break would not have, to “merely’ keep the reader from being completely on balance.

. anything extend beyond

The penultimate line-break does little more than prevent the reader from too quickly learning where the sentence he’s reading is going.

. its decimal point.

The poem’s final line-break provides it with a sharp short clear end.

Any questions?

Additional comments: when I wrote this poem, I paid little attention to the line-breaks I was making–they came pretty much naturally. I’m sure that’s the way it wis with most composers of free verse. The “did” I thought about before going with, though, and I think I came back to one pair of lines that sounded wrong, and change the line-break between them.

A reader, too, if experienced, ought not pay much conscious attention to the lineation of a work of free verse–but, if effective, it will have a great deal of influence on his understanding of the poem.

One last comment: in the right hands–those of E. E. Cummings, for example–line breaks can be employed to do much more of value in a poem than they do in “Another Failure.”

DiscountContactLenses

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:07 PM and is filed under lineation, Linguexpressive Poetry, Of Poem, 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.

Elizabeth Bishop « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ Category

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 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued « POETICKS

Entry 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued

.    Sonnet 18
.
.       Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
.       Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
.       Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
.       And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
.
.       Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
.       And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
.       And every fair from fair sometime declines
.       By chance or Nature’s changing course untrimmed.
.
.       But thy eternal summer shall not fade
.       Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.
.       Nor shall Death brag thou wandr’st in his shade
.       When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
.
.       So long as men have breath and eyes to see,
.       So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
.

Shakespeare, 140 syllables, 116 words (because I count “sometime’ as two words) to give a semantic density of .83. That’s lower than I estimated yesterday because when I forgot that not all its words of more than one syllable had only one more than one. So Frost’s poem is quite a bit higher than Shakespeare’s.

The sonnet has a surprisingly low euphonic density: .09. It makes up for that in repenemic density. I have the figures somewhere to measure that with but am not up to finding them just now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Linguexpressive Poetry, Poetics, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare. 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.

Marton Koppany « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Marton Koppany’ Category

Entry 1652 — 2 Laxian Repeater-Stack Poems

Friday, December 5th, 2014

I was having a great time commenting on an article in yesterday’s issue of the online magazine, Aeon, then pasting my comments, with further comments into this entry when my computer managed to lose one of my comments at Aeon and everything I had written here–in spite of my having remembered twice to save what I had here. So I’m in a sour mood now, and just posted a poem I just composed followed by Marton Koppany’s preliminary Hungarian translation not of it, but of my first draft of it:

Note: according to the translator of my poem, a person’s first name in Hungarian is not first. I think that only half explains the problems with Hungarians, however. –BG

Posted in Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry, Marton Koppany, minimalist poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1539 — Koppany to the Rescue, Once Again

Friday, August 15th, 2014

This time it isn’t my deadness of brain that is making posting something here difficult but all the work I have to do with emails concerned with yesterday’s announcement. So I’m again grabbing something by Marton Koppany to take care of an entry. It’s called “Seer”:

Keep in mind that it is a Koppanaical ellipsis, so strongly implies an unending string of lenses . . . (That’s why I regard it as a pretty good likeness of ME.)
.

Posted in Marton Koppany, Visual Poetry Specimen | 1 Comment »

Entry 1534 — “Question For”

Sunday, August 10th, 2014

Those of you have have been more or less regular visitors to this blog will know at once who made the image below:

Question For

When its author (Marton Koppany, for those of you not regular visitors here), sent a copy of it to me yesterday, I wrote back: “I had my usual reaction to your piece: I laughed. Then I grew thoughtful . . . and have remained in that state every since. If I ever come out of it, I’m going to post your piece in my blog–with sixteen different interpretations, all contradicting each other.”

He replied, “That is exactly what I meant, Bob!!!” Which takes care of the matter. Except that I want to point out that the swirly cursive question mark was almost certainly powerfully influenced by MY use of visiopoetically-expressive cursiveness, and everything else in his work is secondary.

For those of you not regularly here, and perhaps some who are, the above was me being hilariously funny about my tendency to over-estimate myself. Actually, visiopoetically-expressive cursiveness was around long before I used it, and I suspect Marton used it before seeing my cursive pieces. I like to think he may have thought to fool around with it after thinking about a piece of mine he’s due to use in the issue of Truck he’ll be guest-editing in, I believe, October. In any case, he uses it brilliantly here to show what seems a quite ppersonal (because hand-written) question unable to complete itself because somehow too inept to know where to aim itself to find an answer. Yet in greater and greater awkward loops it tries to.

Meanwhile, the ellipsis . . . Unbegun answers to the uncompleted question . . . (Note: in the world of Koppellipsia, any trio of objects resembling dots in any way should be taken as an ellipsis.)

Posted in Marton Koppany, Visual Poetry Specimen | 3 Comments »

Entry 1526 — Something of Marton’s Again

Saturday, August 2nd, 2014

I stole it from Halvard Johnson’s highly interesting Facebook page. A meeting of Plato and Actuality. The backgraound I first thought consisted of ocean waves, but later decided were clouds, or maybe flames. That they are really all three is part of the fascination of the piece. I don’t know what it’s title but I suspect Marton will tell us, if it has one. His pieces usually do. I count him a Kleeic Titludical (TIGHT loo dihk ul) Poem-Expander, as I try to be. Or should I call him simply “titulyrical?”

My try at a title: “Reason Urging on its Sensory Subjects,” or “Apollo Supervises Some of his Dionysian Subjects.” No good–Not subtle enough. Maybe just “A Generality.”

Posted in Marton Koppany | 1 Comment »

Entry 1236 — “from The Adventures of Munchausen”

Monday, October 7th, 2013

Here’s the poem I received from Marton a day or two ago. I had hoped to provide you with A Full Discourse on it, but am in–not my null zone, but the slightly different cerebrotomized zone. Can’t get the thinker gears engaged. I will provide one comment on the poem, though. Pay attention: it is a terrific poem!

Qwest DSL Internet

Posted in Marton Koppany, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1123 — Guest Appearance

Monday, June 17th, 2013

One good thing that happened as a result of my recent foolery with an ellipsis is this from Marton Koppany, which he calls, “Hunch–for Bob”:

Meanwhile, I revised my ellipsis poem yet again. I believe I am now done with it:

Dell coupon number

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop, Marton Koppany, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | 3 Comments »

Entry 1026 — “The Last Ellipsis”

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

I’ve been putting together another of my columns for Small Press Review. Half of it is devoted to Marton Koppany’s Addenda, from which I took the piece below, “The Last Ellipsis.

I didn’t have room to be brilliant about it in my column, so brought it here. I won’t tell you what word it contains three writings of, just that the cursive does spell a word, one whose obviousness is a main reason the work is as funny as it is. It’s a tricky puzzle, but–solved–tells you what’s what almost stupidly. It shows you what’s what, too, in the process doing quite a bit more than what it tells you it’s doing, if you think–and feel–a proper way into its tile, for look at the ellipsis’s final sad struggle; reflect on its inability to state itself in some formal font. Beyond that, though, consider how barely it expresses itself–not showing itself as it is, but only weakly describing itself with abstract words. Alone, cut off from whatever it may have helping die into nothingness. BUT NOT GIVING UP! LEAVING PROOF THAT IT WAS HERE!

(Note, a primary reason I like Marton’s poems as much as I do is because of how much they make one think–but only after, and along with, how effectively they make you feel, both sensually and emotionally.)

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Posted in Marton Koppany, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 985 — One More Odd Thing About Me

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

No matter how unable I feel to write anything intelligent I seem always confident that I can write something hilariously funny. Why would that be, I wonder? The automatic laughter that almost always ensues when I say anything in public? Be that as it may, the subject allows me to introduce Marton’s latest:

When I received a copy of this earlier today, I immediately displayed my wit by responding, “Most amusing piece, but I must correct it! “INSURANCE” on the left should be printed in reverse.

Linguahohenprofessor Grumman

Marton replied, “It is not a mirror image, it is a pair of stamps. :-)” this inciting the following (which the dose of caffeine I had by then taken was partly to blame for):

“Gad (sputter), how tedious it is to have to explain things to poets! Of course (sputter) it’s a pair of stamps, my dear student–but one is the mirror image of the other, yes?

Of course, I hold the patent on reversed letters, so will require a royalty fee. The critical advice is free . . . this time.

(Note: I visualize legions of future poetry students taking sides in the matter of the Great Poetics Split between Grumman and Koppany that took place early in 2013, eventually culminating in a war between Florida and Hungary—Hungary supporting Grumman, Florida Koppany.)

Linguahohenprofessor Grumman

Marton hasn’t yet fired back. When he has, I’ll let him have the last word and post this.

* * *

Ah, and here it is: “You have much better chanches in Hungary, indeed, Bob, because you’ve become here a well-known poet ans essayist thanks to the translations of … (I don’t remember his name. Unless he was called Ellipsis.)

“And no, the stamps are not mirror images of each other. Please take a closer look and you will see that the perforations in the middle (the black dots) are not symmetrical. The rubber stamp is assymetrical too. It is fully handmade!!!

“Anyway, If I get any fee on it, I’ll use it to get back to Florida and try to convince you in this important matter in person. It will be easier because my pronounciation will be a Big Help.”

Fast Cash Pay Day Loan

Posted in Marton Koppany, Visual Poetry Specimen | 2 Comments »

Entry 952 — Pronouncements & Blither, Part 13

Friday, December 14th, 2012

First of all, something I posted at Argotist Online: “Here’s a good discussion point: why are poets so unwilling to discuss poetry on the Internet? Do they discuss it in some length elsewhere? Perhaps they do like talking about it, but not where what they say will become part of a permanent record?”

Another: ““Is it possible for someone whose poetry is at the level of Pound’s or Yeats’s to publish his poetry anywhere more than a few will see it? Or have it intelligently reviewed in a publication reaching more than a hundred readers?”

Next, a corrected version of something I said in my last entry: “A poem is good in proportion to the ratio of the (unified) largeness of the beauty it evokes for its best engagents to the size of the poem.”

Finally, a work from Marton Koppany’s latest collection, Addenda–which I’m not yet ready to say anything about except that it’s terrific:

Addenda, by the way, is as certainly a major collection of poetry by a living author as any other collection I’ve seen in the past forty years.

make profiles sizzle

Posted in Conceptual Poem Specimen, Marton Koppany, Pronouncements & Blither | No Comments »

Entry 820 — “Still Life”

Saturday, August 4th, 2012

Something by Marton Koppany today, “Still Life”:

Works like these are what are going to make choosing works for discussion in my scientific American guest blog very difficult. Is it mathematical? Is it a poem? It shows the process of counting, or trying to count, so I think it just slips into the rubric, “mathematics.” It’s purty, so it’s art. Numerals are words, so it is verbal, and since these words are not proseated (my ad hoc term for lineation set by margins which I doubt I’ll again use), it’s a poem. In any case, I’m going to try my best to cover as many kinds of works as I can in the guest blog.
.

Crucial Coupons

Posted in Marton Koppany, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 71 — A Broadside from the Past « POETICKS

Entry 71 — A Broadside from the Past

I’m pretty sure this resulted from some contact I made in Chicago when there for an underground press conference. Not sure when that was. Maybe fifteen years ago. . . I’ve since lost touch with everyone named on the page. I do remember Ashley as a good kid and valuable undergrounder.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under collage, infraverbal poetry, Linguexpressive Poetry. 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 71 — A Broadside from the Past”

nico says:

12 January 10 at 2:14 AM

bob, you should put up yr short intro essay from that seattle small press sheet you did with joe keppler, trudy mercer, and ezra mark.
Bob Grumman says:

4 May 10 at 12:25 PM

I vaguely remember what you’re referring to, Nico. Red Lines is the magazine you’re referring to, yes? I have them carefully stored somewhere, but both my butlers quit, and they were the only ones who kept track of that sort of thing.

–Bob

Patrick James Dunagan « POETICKS

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Entry 854 — “sic transit”

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Neither does the world answer but

          in mute response. Cold

            wind this morning before

                  dawn, cold

            rock in its eye,

                                 frozen

             dream in its mind.

Inspiron 17R Laptop

Tags: Skip Fox
Posted in Bill DiMichele, Linguexpressive Poetry, Patrick James Dunagan, Skip Fox | No Comments »

Entry 562 — First Day of Being Methodical « POETICKS

Entry 562 — First Day of Being Methodical

It’s only 9 AM, but my first day of attempted methodicality isn’t working out very well. I have an idea for the exhibition, a page indicating why I think multiplication is neat, and long division arithmetic’s cleverest and best mechanism, but wasn’t able to build up the zip needed to sketch the illustrations required in Paint Shop. I spent a while with my Shakespeare chapter but only managed slightly to revise a few pages written long ago. I stopped when I got Very Confused about an important brain mechanism I hypothesize concerned with the Urceptual Self. I need to think about that.

In the meantime, though, I grabbed a poem Mark Weiss posted at New-Poetry for use here:

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

by: W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

“A great poem,” I said in a comment about it (which I’ve revised in the unnervingly many places it was needed), “not least for its being metrically the same throughout. At least to my generalizing sort of ear; anti-reductionists will find each line ever-so-gloriously-different from all the rest metrically–not that I am deaf to that, but I ignore it as aesthetically irrelevant. (Nice to see he starts almost as great a percentage of his lines with ‘And’ as I sometimes do.)”

Later note: I’m wrong about the meter: it is broken by “flickering,” “glimmering,” “brightening” and “wandering.” All of which are perfect where they are for other reasons.

Coupon for Vitacost

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Linguexpressive Poetry, W. B. Yeats. 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 542 — Thoughts about Haiku

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Entry 12 — Line Breaks

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Entry 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued

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Entry 71 — A Broadside from the Past

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Entry 562 — First Day of Being Methodical

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