Category: Linguexpressive Poetry

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Entry 12 — Line Breaks

Friday, November 13th, 2009

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.”

.

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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.

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 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.

 

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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.

Posted in Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

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Pamela Cooper « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Pamela Cooper’ Category

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.

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

Entry 55 — 4 Sonnets by Mike Snider « POETICKS

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Entry 55 — 4 Sonnets by Mike Snider

In my old blog entry #695, I presented a new version
of a sonnet I’d long been trying to write for Dylan
Thomas, another failure. In my next two entries I
had much better sonnets, all by Mike Snider, which I
commented on:

28 December 2005: Several weeks ago, my sometime
poetics foe at New-Poetry, Mike Snider, was kind
enough to send me a (signed!) copy of his chapbook,
44 Sonnets. Its first poem is this:
.

Petulant Muse

Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! –
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!

You’ll be important when we’ve finished it –
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem tausht in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!

And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.

Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.
.

I’d call this a  serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever
and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement
with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love
the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality
and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish,
the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all
using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the
muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator
I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of
playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard
to me, which I mean as a compliment.

29 December 2005: Here are three more sonnets from Mike
Snider”s chap, 44 Sonnets:
.

The Fall

When we’d pile in my great-aunt’s Chevrolet
And drive to see the trees turned red and gold,
Grandma would scowl. “Reminds me of death,” she’d say.
“It means that everything is getting old.”

“Now, Helen, ‘ after winter comes the spring.’”
But she’d have none of that. “It came and went
For you and me, Sister.” And then she’d sing
“Go, tell Aunt Rhody,” just for devilment.

I have her picture, nineteen, sure to break
The heart of every man she ever met –
Another from her fifties, in a fake
Nun’s habit sucking on a cigarette,

And both are faithful. Grandma, you were right.
There’s nothing grows in Fall except the night.
.

Homework

My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,

How even flaws in this numerical romance
Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.

Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
Than nudge her at her homework while I try
To master patterns made so long before
My birth that stars since then have left the sky?

I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.
.

What I know

Always, always, always, I know this first–
My dearest girl is gone, my daughter Lee
I loved not well enough to keep with me–
Of all the things I’ve failed to do, the worst.

Her poet mother’s supple brain was cursed
To learn the language of pathology.
When surgery failed they turned to drugs and she
Began to dream of torture, dreams she nursed

To memories of children murdered by
Her fathers and her mother and her will.
I could not hold her to the truth. She found
At Duke a doctor who decided I

Was fondling Lee. The judge said no, but still
She took my Lee and held her underground.
.

I posted these on the date of this entry, then wrote
over the entry, so lost it. I seem to do something like
that every three or four months, I don’t know why.
The remarks I lost were penetrating, I’m sure, but I
remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember
is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and
the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the
aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics–but employing rhymes
(note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s
octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal
sensitively with common human situations and end in
effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–
but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal
music that meter and rhyme can provide.

One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider
a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these,
is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation.
That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows
what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem
was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So
I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor)
of writing verse for astronomy (and the ones of either for
doing homework, or learning in general). And of poems for
the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All
this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the
father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s
toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional,
but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.”
Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the
others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character
studies, too.

In my lost comments, I mentioned the value of formal
verse to its engagents for finding an order for life’s
difficulties–and suggesting that they, like similar difficulties
timelessly made into similar art, will pass. I also referred
to the pleasure an engagent of a sonnet or other piece
of formal verse, when effective, will get from the poet’s
dexterity–like someone listening to a fine pianist playing
Rachmaninoff, say, getting both musical pleasure, and a
kind of (voyeuristic, sub-behavioral kinesthetic) pleasure
from his physical skill at the keyboard. I’m sure I came up
with a somewhat origianl third value, but now I can’t
remember what it was. No doubt, it will become famous
as Grumman’s lost insight the way Fermat’s lost proof did.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 10:04 PM and is filed under Linguexpressive Poetry, Michael Snider, sonnet. 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.

3 Responses to “Entry 55 — 4 Sonnets by Mike Snider”

  1. Holly Hayden Story says:
    25 January 10 at 7:38 AM

    Just want to say your article is striking. The clarity in your post is simply striking and i can take for granted you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the ac complished work. Excuse my poor English. English is not my mother tongue.

  2. Bob Grumman says:
    13 April 10 at 11:47 PM

    Hi, Holly. I’m only answering you now, late, because until today I didn’t know my blog was getting comments. I don’t yet know anything about rss feeds but feel free to grab mine! And thanks for your kind post. I do think I’m an expert about poetry but not very many other people agree with me!

    all best, Bob

  3. Bob Grumman says:
    4 May 10 at 12:20 PM

    Thanks for the kind words, Holly–and please excuse the long time it has taken for me to reply. I wasn’t being informed of comments at the time yours got here. Your certainly have permission to grab my rss feed (if you know how to! I don’t know anything about rss feeds.)

    all best, Bob

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Ed Conti « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Ed Conti’ Category

Entry 1211 — Ed Conti’s Hic Haiku Hoc

Thursday, September 12th, 2013

I wanted to use a poem from Ed Conti’s Hic Haiku Hoc but couldn’t fid my copy of the book.  That greatly irked me because I thought  my press had published it, and I have all its publications in labeled cartons stacked alphabetically in my living room/ warehouse.  Finally, I  e.mailed Ed asking for the text of the poem, which he sent back to me.  In his post he offered to send me a copy of his book.  Please do, I said.  It arrived today, and is as good as I remember.  In fact, I’ve added it to my little list of micropress books of major importance that I began as a contribution to a project Richard Kostelanetz invited me into but which I haven’t had time to do much about.  Make that, I’ve had the time but not the energy to do anything much about it, and probably never will.  I think I’ve listed ten or twelve books, though.  Richard has over a hundred on his list, I’m sure.  I don’t see the point in such a list unless accompanied by a serious essay on each book.  I’d love to do one on Ed’s book because I think light verse badly under-rated by the establishment, and because Ed–unconsciously, I’m pretty sure–has done a number of excellent humorous poems that I would call otherstream such as “The Party’s Over”:

galaxyz

There are also some fine conventional pieces in Hic Haiku Hoc like:

Anagrams

 DescartesMeanwhile, I continue to be crashingly unproductive.

.

Posted in Ed Conti, Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1034 — A Math Poem by Ed Conti

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

Million

This is an extremely plural specimen of plurexpressiveness: an infraverbal, visual, mathmatical poem by the best composer of infraverbal light verse I know of, and among the best light verse poets of any kind, Ed Conti. To see some other great examples of his work, go here.
.

Posted in Ed Conti, Infraverbal Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | 1 Comment »

Entry 378 — A Poem by Elizabeth Bishop « POETICKS

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Entry 378 — A Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

.

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!”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Elizabeth Bishop, 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.

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JoAnne Growney « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘JoAnne Growney’ Category

Entry 235 — JoAnne Growney’s Selected

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Beyond Reason Reasonable

I ended a previous review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry with the
observation that she “clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot
more.”  I was referring to her fine “Can A Mathematician See
Red?” which is also in her latest collection, Red Has No Reason,
for it is a 79-page selected poems (available at Amazon), with most
of the best poems from previous collections (many of them
revised) as well as new ones.  Red, and other colors, are important
for Growney again, as in her “April,” in which a “woodpecker
drums indigo into the poet’s blue days,” but she moves (with green
steps) through the colors, finally to “yield to the rainbow’s red
ending.”

Growney’s poems celebrate many such “red endings,” as when, in
“Exercise,” her persona jogs around a warm-up track for harness
racers, then into city streets where, oblivious of bystanders’ stares,
and cars honking at her, she loses herself in regions “where words
draft/ themselves into swinging, ringing bells.”  Most important to
her, though, is not the beauty of colors, however important that
indeed is, but that they are beyond reason. Her forte, that is, may be
the unreasonablenesses truer than truth she surprises her readers
with–like the setting of her protagonist’s stroll in “Like a Cat,”
whose sky is “a creature as alive as rocks/ but not so warm.”  Or
like the whole of “Stress Remedy”:

From the barn
bring the cow
to your living room rug.
Sleep
when the cow sleeps.

On your porch
watch the ant
do a task seven times.
Quit
before the ant quits.

Walk out
to the field
where wild mustard waves.
Spend
that gold right away.

Only when I read her “Running,” which she describes as a response
to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” ” did I realize that Roethke
is a key influence on her, albeit fully absorbed and re-created.  A
villanelle, like Roethke’s poem, “Running,” builds its self-portrait
with “My sleep is brief.  I rise to run again” and “I live by going
faster than I can,” Roethke’s builds its with “I wake to sleep, and
take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Two beautifully executed formal poems, the later one with the
added richness of its connection to a portion of poetry’s best past.

Less direct but still potent is the connection of such poems of
Growney’s as “Stress Remedy” to the inspired babble of such
poems of Roethke’s as “Where Knock is Open Wide,” which
begins, “A kitten can/ Bite with his feet;/ Papa and Mama/ Have
more teeth.// Sit and play/ under the rocker/ Until the cows/ All
have puppies.”

I thought at times, too, of Emily Dickinson while reading this
collection: the wry sudden twists of thought or wording.  As in the
strangely deep wisdom of:

14 Syllables

A hen lays eggs,
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.

Growney has Dickinson’s interest in religion, too–but is much
more relaxed about it. Take, for instance:

I Don’t Know Much about Gods

but they don’t live in houses brightly painted
on narrow streets in small towns and don’t
celebrate the ordinary as I do and my friends.

I doubt Paradise.  I see mostly what is small
and not too far away, dislike to start
new things, will build on old foundations.

No river runs in me, no sea surrounds.
My corner is a tidy garden plot.
I plant and nourish, pick the crop–

with care I cook, enjoy my fare, wash up,
and sleep to rise another day.  Gods should
introduce themselves to girls like me.

What could be more Dickinsonian than the flat, “I doubt Paradise.”
I find Growney’s last sentence funnier than anything I remember of
Dickinson’s, though.  Such a mordant “polite” turn on almost every
skeptic’s wonder about why God, if He exists, refuses to show
himself.

Canny observations are one of Growney’s strengths, and self-
revelation–concerning situations most of us find ourselves in, but
also in mathematical ones rare in poetry, and therefore especially
appreciated, too.  This passage from her “A Taste of Mathematics”
particularly appeals to me: “Hot peppers/ are like mathematics–/
with strong flavor/ that takes over/ what they enter,.”  A wonderful
simile out of ordinary sensual life to capture the hold mathematics
can have on those in love with it–as well the magically (beyond-
reason) number-infused Universe, itself.

I don’t feel I’ve come close to doing full justice to this collection.  I
hope my comments have been at least preliminarily useful.

Posted in JoAnne Growney, Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 26 — The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney

Friday, November 27th, 2009

The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney

a book review for Amazon that Amazon won’t accept, so far, because it won’t accept my password.

As I read the 22 poems in JoAnne Growney’s Angles of Light (all but two a page in length), I quickly became aware of the wide range of subject matter they cover.  The two poems facing each other on pages 12 and 13 are excellent examples of this.  One, “Can A Mathematician See Red?” is about the mathematical representation of objects, and more “unemotionally” abstract than that it would be hard to get; the other; “Keeping Watch,” concerns a woman visiting her hospitalized mother, and gets about as emotionally unmathematical as you can get as it plumbs the depths of a complex human relationship.

In “Can a Mathematician See Red,” the poet considers a sphere “whose points seen outside/ are the very same points/ insiders see.”  If red paint is spilled over this sphere, what color, the poet wonders, would the sphere’s interior be.  Red?  A mathematician’s answer, the poet tells us, would be, “No,/ the layer of paint/ forms a new sphere/ that is outside the outside/ and not a bit inside.”  Conclusion: “A mathematician/ sees the world/ as she defines it.”  But, she continues, “A poet/ sees red/ inside.”

Among the many things I like about this poem is its crisp contrast of mathematical reality with physical reality, an immaterial sphere with something able to take a coat of paint.  It brings to life the magnitude of the most genuinely real world, which I take to be the physical world, with the mathematical world enmeshed in it, but perceptible only to asensual cognition.  Even more, I love the way it provokes follow-up questions–at least from intellectual types like me–such as whether it would be possible to paint a mathematical sphere–as opposed to a glass sphere, say, which is emulating a mathematical sphere.  In other words, it put me back in Athens with Socrates and Plato. . . .

Except for “Horizon,” which compares the universe before darkness was created, and ends, “Divided/ into complexity/ Eden disappears,” the other poems in the collection are concern people, or landscapes, rather than ideas, so do not require the specialized taste to appreciate that “Horizon” and “Can a Mathematician See Red?” may.

Not that they aren’t equally penetratingly thoughtful.  In “Keeping Watch,” which concerns a visit to the mother’s hospital bed by the poet, for  example, Growney movingly captures in a minimum of words the kind of person (considerate, courageous) her mother is, and wholly captures the love/opposition she feels for her, a woman able to bear her pain “because her Christian Faith/ holds Paradise against my dark resistance/ to believe in Hell or Christ.”

This poem, incidentally, is a near-sonnet, like three other poems in the collection–that is, it pretty much adheres to sonnet-form except near-rhyming or not rhyming more than traditionally rhyming,  In general, Growney’s poems intriguingly skitter between technical formality and supple free verse.

“Thoughtful,” a word I’ve already used for them, may be the best adjective to describe the bulk of poems in this collection.   With “wry” a close second.  Take, for example,

9 syllables

Mock feelings
serve as well
as true ones.

Or:

11 Syllables

Obedience covers
with a thin  layer.

The poet’s mother, according to the first poem in the book, “Write from the Beginning,” is a woman “who cries/ when she’s happy, who talks fast/ when she’s tired, who acts silly/ when she’s sad is a central subject of Growney’s poems.  In “Present Tense,” Growney describes her as “a terrifying/ woman.  She eats anything./ I dreamed when the sun rose/ she’d be a brick wall.// She is.”  Her mother is in “Stories,” too, along with her father and her childhood on the family farm.  She “loved God and Esther Williams” after her husband died, “Symmetry” tells us.  The farm is the setting of “Things to Count On.”  At its end, Growney writes that her “mother’s a good woman, worth three good women.  For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said.  I’ve stopped counting.”  The final poem about Growney’s mother is the one already discussed, “Keeping Watch.”

Several of the poems have to do with love–“Today at the Grocery Store I met the Man I Loved,” for instance–which ends, “In the grocery aisle, we spoke of the weather/ in our separate parts.  Floods and storms/ have abated.  Nothing separates our hearts.”  A few landscapes make it into the collection, snow, a night sky–and in the last poem in the book, its longest, “Three times the size of Texas,/ Alaska–with fewer living species/ and fewer miles of paved roads/ than Rhode Island.”

This poet clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot more.

Bob Grumman

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W. B. Yeats « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘W. B. Yeats’ Category

Entry 562 — First Day of Being Methodical

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

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.

 

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Entry 29 — A Short Poem « POETICKS

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Entry 29 — A Short Poem

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 11:56 PM and is filed under Linguexpressive Poetry, minimalist poetry, Robert Grenier. 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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Skip Fox « POETICKS

Posts Tagged ‘Skip Fox’

Entry 854 — “sic transit”

Friday, September 7th, 2012

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

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