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Entry 150 — More Discussion with Gregory

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino and I are continuing our discussion about mathematical poetry at his blog. Below is the reply I made to his latest comment (with a little minor editing), him in regular type, me in italics:

You say you are “speaking of the set of language-objects used to represent the real world and that you and I differ in what those objects are.”

Would you explain that, please. And, by “language objects” do you mean words and symbols? Are numbers language objects? Are the names we call numbers by language objects?

The things used to express oneself with language: words, punctuation marks, numerals, whatever things like ampersands are called, square root symbols, etc.  Numbers if you mean numerals–that is, written numbers.  But there are also the numbers in the environment the words for numbers, and numerals, represent.

You say, “poets can be ungrammatical and not wrong but logicians, using words, can’t. You’re just finding users of language who use certain rules and ignore others, and other users whose use and non-use is different.” Would you explain that, please.

All great animals are male.  George is a green animal.  Therefore George is male.  Those are a logical statements.  They have to be grammatical.  Mathematicians similarly have to abide by their rules–their “grammatical” rules if you want to call them that.  Actually, anyone using words has to be reasonably grammatical in order to communicate.

A point of difference between “math grammar” and poetry grammar is that in the case of poetry grammar we can be ungrammatical and still be poetical — and not only that, we can still be meaningful — while if we are “mathematically ungrammatical” we then fall into error. I wish you had addressed this more fully.

I’m afraid I don’t see how I could have discussed it more fully.  I’m saying so what if a poet can be ungrammatical and still be meaningful, and a mathematician can’t.  A logician can’t, either.  I’m saying different specialists use different parts of the grammar of a language, and use it with different degrees of rigor.  Actually, I would say that poetry grammar is specialized grammar and that poets don’t break the rules when they break schoolroom grammatical rules.

I wonder:

Is the correctness of math but a matter of the correctness of “grammar”?

Is the correctness of math but a matter of the correctness of operation (of application of operational principle)?

I don’t know.  I don’t see what this has to do with your definition of mathematical poetry.

(Axiomatical?)

When I write math I am “doing” math. (So to be “mathematically ungrammatical” would apply here.)

When I read math I am “doing” math. (How could it apply here? Or does it: what if I don’t know the rules?)

Sorry, Gregory, dunno where you’re going.

So according to you “mathematical poetry” is a sub-category of “visio-textual art”?

I can’t imagine where you get that.

According to me, “mathematical poetry” is a sub-category of poetry.  It has

no more connection to visio-textual art than to music.

Sometimes you make up your own terms (“texteme”) and other times you use common terms or combining forms like “visio” and “textual.”

Why don’t you use, for example, “semanteme,” “sememe,” “morpheme,” “phoneme” and so on?

I try to use the available terms I know.  I believe there is no term for what I mean by “texteme.”  I’m not understanding why you are bringing this up.

You say, “no analogy need be involved.” How then do your math poems work, how do they signify, how do they function? Or are they, in the end, just pictures? (Visio-textual pictures.)

When I said no analogy need be involved, I meant–as the context, I think, makes clear–an analogy between the “mathematical sentence” and the “linguistic sentence.”  My mathematical sentences don’t act LIKE linguistic sentences, they ARE linguistic sentences.  Or so I claim, and that’s why I (at this point) don’t fully accept your definition of mathematical poems.

My mathematical poems work, signify, function just like any poem: they provide a reader with words and symbols (and sometimes other elements, when, for example, they are also visual poems) which the reader decodes just as he would a conventional poem.

How would you describe the grammar of your math poems?

One side of an equation has to equal the other.  I don’t know.  Some of my math poems use verbal grammar.  The “grammar” of mathematics is very simple, for the most part–at the mostly sub-calculus level of my math poems.  You follow algebraic rules like multiply both x and y by z in the expression z(x + y).  These rules, for me, are just an extension of “normal” grammatical rules, like putting an adjective next to the noun it modifies, using a pronoun in such a way as to make clear what its referent is, etc.  I don’t think of them as I use them.

My brain may not be working well, which may be why I’m having a little trouble following what you’re saying here and there.  (My doctor thinks I may be anemic.  It’s being checked.  In the meantime, I’m using that as my excuse.)

all best, Bob

Entry 149 — Considering What Numbers Ultimately Are

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Talking about mathematics with Gregory has gotten me wondering confusedly about the ultimate stimuli of mathematics, so I thought I’d spend a little time in this entry trying to get a start on that.  I think it begins with a brain’s awareness of “one” and “more than one.”  My guess right now is that this depends on a fairly sophisticated mechanism or set of mechanisms in the brain that notify the brain’s owner (in a manner of speaking) of a repeated stimulus–a dot in the environment, say.  As the eye scans what’s out there, it sees dotX1 when the eye is looking in direction A, so records the sighting as dotX1/A in the pre-visual awareness, and in the repetition-center, but only as dotX1 in the latter.  If  the eye then sees dotX1 (i.e., not really dotX1 but a twin of it) when the eye is looking in direction B, a record of  dotX1/B will go into the pre-visual awareness.  Meanwhile, the nervous system will try to record dotX1 again in the repetition-center, but fail, because the m-cells activated by the dot’s twin are still active.   Sensory-cells sensitive to such a failed attempt to activate will reflexively cause a tag meaning “two dotX1s” to be added to the person’s record of the moment.  Or some such operation will be carried out.

Result: the person experiences the visual perception of dotX1 at A and at B, and a numerical feeling of twoness related to dotX1, or a feeling of 2 times dotX1.  This, I should think, would come about fairly early in the evolution of animals, probably long before mammals evolved.  And it could easily be auditory, too–except the same sound in two close-together moments rather than in the same visual space.

With the coming of speech, true elementary numeracy would have begun, with the splitting off of twoness from particular dots or the like,  abetted by language in ways I’ve shown using my theory of knowlecular psychology (I hope) for similar epistemologic events.

Obviously, a sense of threeness and higher numericalnesses would evolved the same was the sense of twoness did–but not get two high due to the law of diminishing returns.  Once there were words for twoness (and oneness) and higher quantities (hey, I’m talking about quantification here, I just now realize), arithmetic and high mathematics would have developed.

I think I can give just-so stories for most of them, but not today.

My conclusion, I think, is that “asensual” numbers exist “out there.”  We can sense quantities without feeling their material.

I would add that numerals and words for numbers like “seven” are all part of our verbal language.

Odd thought I had: the sounds representing for numbers and colors I just realized all stay the same as adjectives.  “Cold,” too.  There are others.  It makes intuitive sense to me that all the colors and numbers would do this, but I can’t make rational sense of it yet.

Entry 148 — Response to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Part 2

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

You say, “The ‘mathematical poem,’ if it is to be, or to contain, poetry, must have some poetic elements, as well as some formal symbols and operations of math.”

I don’t understand why you have, “if it is to be, or to contain, poetry.” If you call it a poem, claim I, you are saying that it is a poem, so much have poetic elements, however defined. That such a poem should have “some formal symbols and operations of math,” follows from its being called a “mathematical poem.” Ergo, I would rephrase your definition as “A mathematical poem is a poem containing mathematical elements.”

I would then ask you to say what you mean by “having” mathematical operations in a mathematical poem. That is, would a poem about a child who has to do five long division problems for homework “have” a mathematical operation in it?

Also, to be fastidious, I would want you to spell out whether the symbols and operations should be overtly in the poem. Some, as you probably know, seem to think a sonnet is a mathematical poem because the poet has to be able to count up to 14 to make one.

Which leads to the next important thing I think needs to be done: sort out all the kinds of math-related poems it seems reasonable to distinguish from one another. I would list the following five:

(1) poems that discuss math

(2) poems generated by mathematical operations.

(3) poems that use mathematical symbols but use them unmathematically: e.g., a poem with a square root sign next to the word “Sunday,” which is followed by seven plus-signs, whereupon the poem becomes standard verbal expression.

(4) poems that one or more persons claim arouse some kind of “mathematical feeling.”

(5) poems that perform one or more mathematical operation central to its aesthetic meaning.

Entry 147 — Post Awaiting Content

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Amazing how little I’m posting to this blog of mine of late.  It’s been a full week since my last post; I thought only a couple of days had gone by.

Entry 146 — Discussing Mathematics and Poetry

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino has been blogging about mathematics and poetry at his Eratio blog.  When he told me about it on the phone yesterday,  I said I’d check it out, which I’ve now done.  I left my first comment on it.  Fortunately, for once I cut what I said before hitting the button telling his blog to accept it, for my post got rejected.  I’ll try in a little while to post it again.  Meanwhile I want to post it here, to make sure it’s somewhere, and because maybe one of my two regular visitors doesn’t also read Gregory, or misses posts to it because it’s irregular, which is my excuse.

Hi, Gregory.  I’ve decided to tear into your commentary on mathematics and poetry Very Slowly, one idea at a time, to facilitate coherence.

I’ll begin with your statement that “Already (‘mathematical sentence’) (you’re) thinking analogically.”

This is where you and I first disagree, for (as revealed in our long & interesting phone conversation of yesterday) I believe numerals and mathematical symbols are part of our verbal language, just as, in my opinion, typographical symbols for punctuation or to abbreviate are.  The mathematical symbol, “+,” for instance, is just a different way of writing, “plus,” or “&.”  It therefore follows that for me, a mathematical equation is a literal sentence differing from unmathematical sentences only in the words in it.  “a – b = c,” for instance, is a very simple sentence and not significantly different from, “Mary cried when she lost her lamb.”

Obviously, it’s just a case of your opinion versus mine, but I think acceptance of my opinion makes more sense, because it keeps thing more simple than your does.  I would say that what most people mean by “words” are “general words,” while words like “sineA” or “=” are “specialized words” or mathematical words–like punctuation marks.

I think in my linguistics, these “words” are all called “textemes,” But it’s been a while since I read Grumman on the matter, so I’m not sure.

Hey, I found a glossary in which I define many terms like “texteme.”  It’s not a word but a typographical symbol: “any textual symbol, or unified combination of textual symbols–letters, punctuation marks, spaces, etc.–that is smaller than a syllable of two or more letters: e.g., ‘g,’ ‘&h(7:kk,’ ‘GH,’ ‘jd.’”  I coined the term for discussion of various odd kinds of symbols and symbol-combinations like some of those among my examples that not infrequently occur in visual or infraverbal poems.

So, I don’t have a special term for word, as I define it.  Yet.

To continue my argument in favor of my take on mathematical expression as an extension of verbal expression, not something different in kind, I would saimply ask what is special about mathematical symbols that should require us to think of them as elements of a special kind of expression?  They do nothing that ordinary verbalization can’t do, although they do it more clearly, compactly and elegantly.

Graphs would be mathematical expression–a form of visio-conceptual expression, as is written music.  Chemical diagrams but not chemical notation. . . .

I don’t see that there’s any difference between the syntax of mathematical expression (other than graphs and probably other similar things I’m not into Math enough to think of right now) and normal verbal expression.  There’s no inflection, I don’t think, in mathematical expression.  Which is a triviality.

Conclusion: we need a carefully formed taxonomy of human modes of expression.

Entry 145 — Poetry as a Profession

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Is there any profession that pays as little as poetry?

Is there any profession that scorns its most adventurous practitioners as much as poetry?

Entry 144 — Visual Poetry as a Serious Occupation

Friday, June 11th, 2010

I’m still in the null zone but will try to answer an important question for people starting out as visual poets who want to know how to get somewhere in the field, in whatever manner–because I often think about this, have written about it many times (albeit only semi-effectively), and was asked by someone about it recently.

First of all, I need to admit that I’ve never come close to figuring out the answer to the question brought up by most would-be poets or artists of any kind, which is, “How do I make it as a visual poet?” meaning–usually–how do I get the reputation I merit, and possibly some financial reward for my visual poetry?

(Those of you who are well-enough off–probably as a tenured English professor–to be above money concerns, and in are satisfied with the esteem of those in your literary clique–need not read further.)

My preliminary answer: I have absolutely no idea despite having been a Serious Poet (i.e., a published poet) for forty, and a Serious Visual Poet for thirty years.  I have gotten a reputation as a visual poet, but only among other visual poets, and who knows how much they value my work.  Even in the minute world of poetry-as-a-whole, I remain close to unknown.  I’ve never gotten any kind of award for poetry, or paid more than a few dollars for a poem except for two framed, hangable poems–i.e., as a visual artist.

To continue discussing myself–because I think it the easiest way to answer the question, I began as a playwright.  Not getting anywhere in that field, and always having been a sometime poet of sorts, I thought it’d be much easier to break into poetry than into playwriting, and that perhaps I could establish myself as a poet, which should heop me be taken seriously as a playwright.  That’s LESSON NUMBER ONE: start at the bottom, poetry and short-story-writing seeming to me the bottom because poems and short stories are the easiest things to get published.

Among the easiest poems to get published in 1970 were haiku.  I’d always liked them, and had some on hand, so tried them on a few haiku magazine publishers.  LESSON NUMBER TWO is get a copy of the Dustbooks Directory of Small Presses.  Look up the publishers of your kind of poetry, buy copies of their magazines, and send work to the ones whose selections you like.  LESSON NUMBER THREE, is try to get into a correspondence with some of the editors of magazines you like.  Starting with a fan letter, preferably a sincere one, will help.  That’s something I did.  As a result, one haiku editor sent me comments on my rejected haiku, including suggestions for improvement.  I followed her suggestions, mostly agreeing with them, until established enough to go my own way when I thought I should.

Eventually, I found the addresses of a few publishers of concrete poetry, and started corresponding with the editor of one, sending him not poems but criticism of some poetry in his magazine.  We hit it off.  He asked for more essays.  At length, I tried some visual poems on him.  Meanwhile, he gave me the name and address of another visual poetry publisher.  I got into a good correspondence with him, too, but couldn’t break into his magazine for two or three years.  Both of these guys told me about others in the field, so I was soon corresponding with quite a few visual poets, many of whom also were editor/publishers.  I then went to a gathering of visual poets.  After that, I was an established visual poet.  In the BigWorld, that meant nothing, though.

Oh, I also early on started my own press, having been able to buy a Xerox with money a grandmother had left me.  I published a lot of stuff, which no doubt helped me make friends although I did it–really–because I wanted to get deserving things in print no other publisher would publish.

I still don’t understand why no visual poet has made it big, meaning gotten a reputation and access to money like Robert Haas, say.  Several people have made money from visual poetry–Jenny Holzer, for one–but as visual artists not visual poets (and with mostly poor work).

Anyway, I kept internetting.  One of my friends in the field had enough clout to help me get paying gigs as a critic once or twice, and into a reference book he edited; another got me into the Gale Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Essays series.

In the mid-nineties, I became active on the Internet, and got a few gigs all on my own by responding to announcements of exhibitions, anthologies, reference books needing entries.

Exhibitions.  For visual poets, that is important.  I’ve been in a few exhibitions, mainly because I knew the right people–fellow visual poets who were able to set up group shows.  It all boils down to INTERNETTING.  There are always mail art shows going on, too, that it’s worth contributing to if you’re more prolific than I.  They get the name around.

Now that the Internet is here, one should use it as much as possible.  Having a blog is inexpensive, and worthwhile for all kinds of reasons.  A few people may go to it.  The only poem of mine that ever got into a textbook (where it was mislabeled a visual poem) was seen at my blog.  (I was supposed to be paid with a copy of the textbook, but the creeps never sent me a copy or replied to my queries about the matter.)

A blog can also give you writing exercise, and let you try out rough drafts.

You might also join poetry discussion groups like Spidertangle, which is primarily for visual poets.  Good for internetting, for news of anthologies and shows, etc.

I’ve also tried local poetry readings and met some nice people, but haven’t furthered my career, at all.  I’ve found it a waste of time trying for grants like the Guggenheim.  No visual poet I know has gotten one for his poetry.  John M. Bennett managed for a few years to get a grant for his magazine, Lost & Found Times.  Canadians have made out pretty well with government grants, one of them getting two grants, one for himself as himself and one for himself under one of his many pseudonyms.

Of course, I’ve no doubt made things difficult for myself by being as combative as I’ve been in many of my essays, and posts to discussion groups.   I don’t believe in astrology but like to say I’m a victim of Moon in Aries, which makes me that way.  I’m a natural pop-off artist.  I do control myself much of the time, and am also naturally able to make fun of myself, so aren’t as loathed as I might otherwise be.  I actually thought that being outrageous might help me, as it has others.   It hasn’t.  Possibly because I’m often on everybody’s wrong side.  For instance, a vocifeorous believer in the value of visual poetry, which offends conventional poets, while also a vocifeous believer that textual designage is not visual poetry, which offends most visual poets.

Note: I’m much less aware of the current scene now than I was ten years ago.  I’m to the point where I’m more concerned with finishing Important Projects of mine than getting anywhere socio-economically.  I rarely publish anything anywhere but here at my blog–unless solicited by a friend.

I don’t think I’ve said much but can’t right now think of anything to add.  I hope what I’ve said is useful to someone.  I’ll be glad to answer any questions.  I’d particular like to hear from people with other ideas on how to get ahead.

Oh, and yes, it’s quite possible that one will get ahead automatically if one’s work is good enough.  Mine may not be.  However, I can’t accept that the entire field of visual poetry is deservedly as marginal as it’s been since ints inception–at least in the United States. In many South American countries and perhaps elsewhere, it seems to be taken much more seriously.

Entry 143 — Taxonomical Update

Friday, June 11th, 2010

I toppled back into my null zone a couple of days ago.  Don’t feel like writin’ nuttin’ but have something too important not to make public right now.  It has to do with my recent taxonomy.  I want to add that “propaganda” is now a rank under “Sociodominance,” and “information” a rank under “Utilitry.”  I want also to put “war” and  “politics” under “Sociodominance,” and add “play” to my Phylum.

“Play,” by the way, breaks down into “games” and “pretense.”  “Games” I define as activities without connection to any other member sharing the category “games” is in whose participants follow rules and pursue some goal the attainment of which is considered victory.  I can’t remember the details of Wittgenstein’s demonstration that “games” could not be defined, but believe I have definied it.  Metaphoric use, or misuse of the term notwithstanding.   “Pretense” is unserious participation in any of the activities in my Phylum, by “unserious,” meaning that no knowledgeable person would consider the activity to be in any significant way the “real thing”–children playing house, for instance.

I also have a new long division mathemaku to bring to the world’s attention.  I won’t even draw it, it’s so lame: actual salt (glued to the page) divided into “NaCl” gives you “naming” with a subdividend product ot “salt” and a remainder of “science.”  This is lame because it’s just the statement of an opinion, to wit: “By naming the real substance, salt, you get the word, “salt,” which is equal, when “science” is added to it, to was salt esentially is, which, it is implied, is more than what it is as a substance.   The only reason I bother to post the poem at all is because it reverses the standard belief that real things are more than the words for them.  For me, words are more than their referents.

Entry 142 — Notes on Yesterday’s Entry

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Here’s yesterday’s entry again, with explanatory notes added in Italics:

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Anthrocentric Reality

It’s up to each individual taxonomist what he wants to classify.  In this case,  it was the universe we human beings are at the center of–and there is such a universe.  I had at first thought to taxonomize all of reality, but gave up after all the problems I ran into–for instance,
What to do with biological taxonomy, which takes many ranks to get down to where I more or less start.

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Universe: Matter

Other Universe Member: Mind

Yes, Children, the universe consists of two things, mind and matter (or matter/energy).  But there are two ways of saying this: one is to say the two are two things; the other is to say the two are two aspects of one thing.  The meaning of each way of putting it is identical.  (I assume that mind and matter are inseparable since a universe of mind not in contact with matter in some way would be empty, and for all practical matters non-existent.)
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Domain: Life

Other Domain Member: Non-Life

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Kingdom: Human Life

Other Kingdom Member: Non-Human Life

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Phylum: Mentascendancy

Other Phylum Members: Survival, Utilitry, Reproduction, Sociodominance

By “mentascendancy,” I mean basically the pursuit of meaningfulness.  Utilitry is the endeavor to make survival easier and more secure–medicine, roadmaking, farming . . .  Sociodominance my bias against politics causes me to consider not a form of mentascendancy; it’s a combination of most human beings’ need to either tell others what to do or be told what to do.  (Warmaking, incidentally, can be either a form of sociodominance or of utilitry–or a combination of both.)

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Class: Art

Other Class Members: Verosophy, Religion

Verosophy is the search for significant truths.  So is Religion my bias against religion caused me to make verosophy the use of reason and one’s senses in the search for significant truths, and religion the use of reason and one’s sense’s and faith in things beyond reason and one’s senses in the search for significant truths.

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Order: Literature

Other Order Members: Visimagery, Music, Viscerexpression

“Visimagery” is my term for visual art; by “viscerexpression,” I mean all forms of giving sensual pleasure other than literature, music and visimagery, such as cooking (where it is not a form of utilitry), perfume-making, and so on

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Family: Poetry

Other Family Member: Prose

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Genus: Plurexpressive Poetry

Other Genus Member: Linguexpressive Poetry

“Plurexpressive” is a shortening of “plurally expressive,” “linguexpressive” of “linguistically expressive.”

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Species: Visual Poetry

Other Species Members: Sound Poetry, Mathematical Poetry, Performance Poetry, Others

I’ll need help with the other members of this species, such as cyber poetry.


Entry 141 — The Location of the Species, Visual Poetry

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

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Anthrocentric Reality


Universe: Matter

Other Universe Member: Mind
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Domain: Life

Other Domain Member: Non-Life

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Kingdom: Human Life

Other Kingdom Member: Non-Human Life

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Phylum: Mentascendancy

Other Phylum Members: Survival, Utilitry, Reproduction, Sociodominance

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Class: Art

Other Class Members:  Verosophy, Religion

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Order: Literature

Other Order Members: Visimagery, Music, Viscerexpression

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Family: Poetry

Other Family Member: Prose

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Genus: Plurexpressive Poetry

Other Genus Member: Linguexpressive Poetry

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Species:  Visual Poetry

Other Species Members: Sound Poetry, Mathematical Poetry, Performance Poetry, Others

Entry 1259 — The Dead Career Goes On « POETICKS

Entry 1259 — The Dead Career Goes On

My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:

100_0085[1]

What the heck, here’s another wall:

 100_0087[1]

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3 Responses to “Entry 1259 — The Dead Career Goes On”

  1. Márton Koppány says:

    They look great, Bob! Good to see them exhibited.

    All the best,
    Márton

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Thanks, Marton. Who knows, maybe some nut will notice them and be so impressed by them that he’ll scrawl, “Wow!” in chalk on the wall!

  3. Bob Grumman says:

    Actually, if I were really ambitious, I’d sneak in and vandalize them, at last thereby getting press coverage.

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Entry 33 — Yesterday’s Poem « POETICKS

Entry 33 — Yesterday’s Poem

Here’s yesterday’s image again:

17Aug07B

It’s one of my mathemaku, of course.    I’ve actually been working industriously  on it, trying get it right enough to submit to some sort of  anthology Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill are putting together.   The version above is a recent revision of my first draft of 2007, a variation on “Frame One” of my Long Division of Poetry series.

17Aug07D-light

“Frame One” is similar to the top image except that its divisor is “words.”  It had long bothered me because (and make sure to write this down, students, because it’s an excellent example of the way I think about my poems) its claim was that “words” squared (basically–although it’s really distorted words, or words told slant. times regular words) happened to equal an image having to do with summer rain.  Why that and not, say, a Pacific sunset?   Obviously, the quotient times the divisor could equal anything.  That, I didn’t want.  Off and on I thought about this, but could think of no way to take care of it.  Until a couple of days ago, when I finally concentrated for more than a few minutes on it.  I came up with several pretty good solutions, one of them changing everything in the poem but the sub-dividend product (the image).

My final solution (I hope) resulted in the above poem.  All I did was add “memories of a long-ago summer day” to the quotient.  That assured that the sub-dividend product would have to do with summer–that it would be, that is, a visual poem about summer.  And, as a poem, it would be poetry.

No doubt in due course I’ll think of something else I find illogical about it and want to revise it again.  For now, though, I’m happy with it.

Oh, I’ve made several changes to the main image in it, too.  One was to combat the darkness in the top version (which wasn’t in it until I put it out here).  I’m as fussy about getting my graphics looking the way I want them as I am about everything else in a poem–except the choice of font, and things I can’t do anything about with my equipment, like density of resolution.

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Entry 380 — Slowly Getting Somewhere, I Hope « POETICKS

Entry 380 — Slowly Getting Somewhere, I Hope

What I’m trying to somewhere with is “Mathemaku for a Vacant Lot.”   What follows is its subdividend-product-in-progress.  I think it’s almost there but I want to let it sit for a while.  The rest of the poem is fairly set.  I may fuss a bit with the look of the texts but not their content.

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Entry 366 — An Extra Value of Long Division Poem « POETICKS

Entry 366 — An Extra Value of Long Division Poem

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I just realized something I should have realized long ago but didn’t: a huge virtue of the long division poem is that one can use it to indicate the value of its images to each other.  In a long division poem I was working on last night, I suddenly saw how important the size of the remainder was.  I’ve done other long division poems in which in which I consciously exploited the remainder’s small size, and I’ve often worried that my dividend might be smaller than my divisor or sub-dividend product or quotient, or even remainder.  But I’ve never thought of the abstract aesthetic value of the characteristic.  It’s something no other poem than a math poem can have, and that few math poems can have as clearly as a long division poem.  So: hurray for me.

That’s all for today.  I had hoped to post a new mathemaku, the one I sketched last night, and was very proud of.  But a day of tennis then a long dental procedure–a tooth implant–did me in, and I started the day sluggish.  And no longer think much of the poem.

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Entry 368 — Notes for a Mathemaku « POETICKS

Entry 368 — Notes for a Mathemaku

Tuesday night in bed, I scribbled the notes for a new mathemaku on my bedside pad (which I had to get out of bed to go find!)  I filled the page below.  I expect to get a quite good poem out of it but haven’t gotten to converting the notes to anything yet.

I didn’t get much sleep last night, nor made up for it with a nap today although I’ve tried three times to nap without success, which is ridiculous considering I can barely keep my eyes open.  I’m also all tuckered out due to a grueling tennis match.  Doubles, in the senior tennis league I’m in.  An hour-and-a-half.  We won but just about every point was a tough one.  It and my sleepiness is why the notes above are it for this entry.

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Kaz Maslanka « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Kaz Maslanka’ Category

Entry 40 — #675 through #670

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

In #675, I posted Endwar’s “Ten X Ten,” having liked it so much, I assume, that I’d forgotten I’d posted it a week of so before at my blog.  Under the Endwar piece, I had three mathematical poems by Kaz Maslanka, one of which is also a visual poem but too large to reproduce here without losing most of the text.  One of the others has the same problem, but the one below should be readable:

a-mans-intelligenceOops, you may need a magnifying glass.  My choice of reproduction seems to be the size above, or four times as large.  Anyway, it’s called “A Man’s Intelligence” and may be more informrature–a specimen of informratry–than poetry.  Let me quote what it says: “A man’s Intelligence” equals “intelligence Quotient” divided by the product of “The measurable level of Dionysian blood transfused in a saffron masseuse boasting whispers through the cool crystal shot glass of the finest golden tequila” times “The amount of passion fueled by a young pink Venus–her hand wandering in slow circular patterns, a seemingly aimless whistle up the man’s inner thigh.”

#677 and #678 are about the Christmas mathemaku I’d done a draft of the previous year, and worked some more on at this time (December 2005), and have worked on since then, finishing it, I believe.   Then a reproduction and revision of a long division poem I used in the autobiographical essay in the mainstream series of such things I got it into many years ago, without its making any difference whatever in my vocational reputation.  I don’t like it well enough to reproduce it here.  I had another of my mathematical poems in #680 that I don’t like enough to reproduce here.

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Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress

May 29th, 2011

I continue to believe someday people will be interested in how various poems of mine came about.  Hence, the following three stages of my unfinished “Cursive Mathemaku, No. 2″:

.

.

.

.

I scribbled notes for version one, then took weeks to draw my ideas at Paint Shop, and more weeks to put them together in a work something like version one, which is probably the third version of the finished base of the poem.  Almost two months went by before I dared add the final cursive lines I always meant the work to have to make version two.  Over a week went by before I made (today) the more well-thought-out third version.  I’m pretty sure both that the third version (already revised two or three times–modestly) is the one I’ll go with.  I’m looking forward to adding colors, with a good idea of what they’ll be, although I never go with all or even most of the colors I use in a work.

Entry 453 — My Improved Piddle

May 28th, 2011

I’ve just about finished my latest column for Small Press Review.  A few days ago I finished a solid rough draft of what will be Chapters 13 and 14 of my book on the Shakespeare authorship question.  At one point, I thought it was brilliant but as I finished it my opinion changed.  I still think it pretty good, but I no longer think it something that will make everyone who reads it kneel to me in admiration.  I’ve been trying for years to pin down the major cause of irrationality, and I think I’m close.  I’d call it simply narrow-mindedness at a cocktail party level, but in the book I call it “Hyperconvergency.”  More important, I explain how it comes about.  Or try to.  It’s all a matter of having too much “cerebral potency”–and lacking the accommodance to lower it and thus let extra needed information in.  You’ll have to buy a copy of my book to find out more.  (Or look up what I’ve said about it here.)

Amy King is saying bad things about me again.  Whoops, not about me, since that would be “personal abuse,” but about my poetry.  She says the reason no bigShot critics deign to denigrate my work the way they denigrate Bill Knotts’s is that my work isn’t a minuscule fraction as interesting as his.  I was whining about my inability to get the level of scorn Knotts does.   I said I thought “his poetry is much easier for mediocrities to deal with than mine.”  Actually, I’m sure it’s because they really are too hyperconvergent to be aware of poetry like mine.  Exposed to it, though, they’d be afraid to try an assault on it.

Nice to get insulted by King, but I’d prefer something lengthier from someone better-known.  Something that actually said something about my poetry would be best, but it’s unrealistic to hope for that.

 

Entry 452 — Myth

May 27th, 2011

When reading at Geof’s blog that he considers “greatness” a “myth,” I was reminded of my sadness at the nullinguists’ destruction of the word, “myth.”  It used to mean the achievement of something beyond the power of mortals, but gloriously true beyond the empirically real that those without imaginations are stuck in.  Jason’s winning of the golden fleece that I read about in one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, a copy of The Golden Book of Myths (or some such) that my brother Bill gave me when I was around ten, for example.   Now “myth” only means some view of life the person using the word doesn’t accept.

Putting together a dictionary of wonderful words lost to nullinguism like “marriage,” “gay,” “impact,” “poetry,” “genius” would be a worthwhile project–except that I suppose, although it seems like they outnumber the good words retained (so far), there really aren’t very many such words.

As for “greatness,” it is by definition unarguably a fact, the definition being some person’s achievement of something people admire, enjoy and celebrate centuries after the person has died.  It may make me look sadly unrealistic but it’s something I’ve striven for since I was six or seven, although I wouldn’t have known enough to describe it as such until my middle teens.  The only reason I didn’t strive for it before then was that I hadn’t yet learned I didn’t already have it.

Confession: I have not given up, probably can’t give up, the notion that I may yet gain it, or already have.

Excelsior!

 

 

Entry 451 — My Latest Idiocy

May 26th, 2011

It’s not really important: I can ask Arnold for another copy.  But that I lost it drives me almost mad with rage at my continuing stupidity.  I feel like there’s just no sense in going on.  Once again, you see, I’ve lost something.  This time it was a copy of a long piece of . . . surrealistic mathematics, I guess.  By someone French.  Arnold Skemer was kind enough to send it to me, with the french text translated.  I have the envelope it came in and the letter that came in that envelope with it.  They are right where they should be, on the table to my right as I type this.  Why the surrealistic mathematics isn’t with it, I JUST CAN’T understand.

But I do something like this at least monthly.  More times than not, I find what was missing, sometimes in less than a couple of hours.  I won’t find this.  My house is less disorganized than it’s been in years, mainly because of the filing cabinet I freed up for current items–like this, or it should be.  I recently did make a folder for just-answered snail mail, but not one for items like this.  And I have several now–a letter from my Oakland poet friend Jody Offer; some great stuff just in from Marshall Hryciuk; Marton’s little booklet The Reader which I’ve had for two months and haven’t lost, who knows why; Arnold’s letter; a little packet of great stuff by himself Andrew Topel left with me during his visit a little while ago as well as wonderful full-color things his press published that he sent me a couple of months ago.

These are what are in plain view.  Stored who knows where are many items like them previously in plain view.  As I keep telling myself, I have to getmy house in better order.  I’m sure I can, for I’m now able to chuck dead magazines–old copies of Discover or National Geographic, for instance.  I proved that last year sometime when I threw out . . . I forget what, but it was a magazine I liked but hadn’t read all my issues of, which went back twenty years or more.  I’m also ready to pack away old correspondence and zines and the like that I now have handy but never refer to.  I may finally toss old paint brushes, broken crayons, and all kinds of painting supplies I once thought I could use to make masterpieces but never did.

Wish me luck.  Before I started putting the house in order, I have to get my next column for Small Press Review done.  Yesterday I finally finished a full draft of the two-chapter essay that will close my book on the Shakespeare authorship question that I wanted to finish before going to the hospital, so I can devote myself to the column during the next five days.  Not today.  Today I spend six killing hours at (1) my dentist’s spending $140 having another chipped tooth fixed (my teeth are crumbling at an alarming rate), (2) at the hospital where I’ll be getting operated on for a class in what to expect and pre-op filling out of forms and getting blood and an chest x-ray taken, and (3) at the supermarket getting bananas, milk and six bottles of Propel, the drink I’m trying to replace Mountain Dew with.  It was too much for me.

Whee.

 

 

Entry 450 — Visioverbal Visual Poetry

May 25th, 2011

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

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

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

Entry 449 — Pill-Popping

May 24th, 2011

Many times in the past, I’ve spoken of the pain pills I’ve taken, or the Mountain Dew I’ve drunk, often noting how one of the other, or both, have helped me out of the Null Zone.  For at least four weeks I almost entirely avoided either.  Once or twice taking a four-hour pain pill before trying to play tennis on my painfully bad left leg.  I think in that time I was never fully out of the null zone, and probably half the time close to fully in it.

Well, I finally decided that I’m a hopeless addict.  Proof is that I took two APCs, which have caffeine, a bit over two hours ago, then a pain pill with an opium-derivative in it a half-hour or so ago, and have done better work since the APCs on the important essay I’ve been slogging through for over a month than I have since beginning it.  And I feel like I can do a full day’s work on it.  Maybe more!

Once back home after the hip replacement operation I’ll be having (in a week), I plan to find some expert on my kind of drug addiction, and find out if I can somehow stay out of the null zone (a reasonable amount of the time) without drugs.  If not, no big deal so long as I can keep having them prescribed for me, and I’m pretty sure I can.  If it costs me a few years of life, so what?  To continue to live as I’ve been living the past month of so would be ridiculous.  In any case, it looks like I’ll have my essay done before I go into the hospital.

I’m feeling very good about it (and was even while in the null zone).  It’s really coming together nicely.  As usual when I’m knocking out material I have a good opinion of, I sing my way into fantasies of finally gaining recognition.  One thing for sure, this time I’m going to keep on the attack with this essay until it is, or I am, done.

Meanwhile, what have I learned from my life that I can pass on to others?  Nothing.  I truly don’t know whether to advise the young to avoid caffeine and pain pills, or to consider them seriously if their energy levels are not as high as they feel they need to be for a satisfying life.  Maybe some people are born with a need for pharmaceutical help, or with a flawed endocrine system that will eventually require it as I eventually required synthroid for my thyroid deficiency.  Or was that caused by a use of caffeine that caused my thyroid to overwork and wear out?  All I can say is that I hope genetic research will finally tell people enough about what they’ve been born with for them to make intelligent decisions about questions like these.  If their genes have given them the capacity to make intelligent decisions.  I don’t think mine did, I don’t think mine would have allowed me to choose suicide at the age of 15 or 24, the two ages at which it would have been best for me to do that.

 

 

 

Entry 448 — Another Terminological Change

May 24th, 2011

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Although many of my coinages sound pretentious, I always aim for ordinariness.  It’s not that easy to achieve.  Hence, “xenological poetry” as one of my main categories of poetry.  Well, I suddenly saw yesterday that “dislocational poetry” could takes its place.  Ironically, that was the very first name I gave such poetry–surrealistic and jump-cut poetry–thirty or forty years ago.  I don’t know why I dropped it.  I see no reason not to use it now, though, so will.

Meanwhile, I also realized that “vaudevillic” as a term for all varieties of jump-cut poems is unfair since some of them cohere quite nicely.  So I’m bringing back “jump-cut” to its previous position, and demoting “vaudevillic” to a secondary position as an adjective describing one kind of jump-cut poems, the other kind being, “convergent jump-cut poems.”  Be sure to update your copies of A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry,” students.

I’ve made a change in what constitutes aesthetic pleasure, too: one of two things, fundaesthetic pleasure or pleasure due to fundaceptual stimuli, and anthraesthetic pleasure, or pleasure due to anthroceptual stimuli.  Then there’s a sort of new word, “osmoticism,” for the ability to learn osmotically, and its antonym, “unosmoticism,” which I use to represent one of the many intellectual dysfunctions of people who don’t believe in Shakespeare.

Last, and close to least is, “lifage,” my word for anything a person uses to trade when attempting to  increase the pleasure-to-pain ratio of his life.  An economics term.  There are two kinds of lifage, “inborn” and “acquired,” the latter of which is a person’s private property.  I came up with it because I needed some such term for what one trades to another when one rents a house to the latter in return for (the lifage) of money.  It’s not the lifage of the house (assuming for the sake of argument that it is as good after the rental period as it was before it) but the actual hours of life the landlord gives up, hours he could have used enjoying the house himself and which are permanently lost.  In other words, the term, “unearned income,” is nonsense.

Entry 447 — Me Versus Academia, Again

May 23rd, 2011

David Graham made one of his always reasonable, never alarming posts to a thread on a 1993 book of Heather McHugh’s about the use of fragments in poetry, Broken English.  He couldn’t keep from making what I took to be a crack at me, and was unable not to reply to.

.  .  . I think McHugh’s right–if I understand her point, what she’s talking about is not a particular technique but an effect reachable by various means at various times, one of those first principles that I referred to before.  The high modernists, who were crazy about collage, were in this light not inventing anything entirely new so much as finding a fresh path to an age-old destination.

(All worthy destinations are age-old?)

This principle of disjunction, then, is visible in Whitman’s whip-saw juxtapositions, Stein’s fracturing of syntax, Eliot’s fragments shored against the ruins, the electric leap in a haiku, surrealist imagery, and so forth, right up through more recent instances such as Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox” and Ashbery’s ruminative ramblings.

I’m just thinking aloud here, and no doubt overgeneralizing, but it occurs to me that there is at least a kinship between poetry such as Dean Young’s and a lot of language-centered poetry with which it wouldn’t normally be compared.  Rather like Ashbery, Young employs utterly conventional syntax, image, and figure; but the results are most slippery and unparaphraseable.  He doesn’t fracture language itself, but there is plenty of disjunction and fragmentation at the conceptual level.

If you focus mostly on the easy binaries (style/theme; free verse/meter; traditional/experimental) you would naturally miss recognizing this sort of kinship.  If, for example, all your definitions of poetry focused relentlessly on
purely technical matters such as the handling of syntax.

My response: “I suppose if you focused all your consideration of poetry on the techniques objectively distinguishing each kind from all others, you’d possibly miss as much as ten percent of the things you’d miss if you focused it only on the trivial kinships that can be found between any two kinds of poems.  (Note: there is more to appreciating poetry than defining it, although that’s the most important part of intelligently appreciating it.)”

In a second post, I opined that “all worthy destinations are much more age-old than new, but never not-new in some significant way.”

Entry 446 — A Question

May 22nd, 2011

Why do so few innovative poets discuss theirs and other innovative poets’ work?  I think this is the most important reason we continue to be so marginal.

To repeat myself.  Again.

Later Note: if I were to start an Internet discussion group, I would have only one rule: anyone could post a poem to it, but after a single poem has at any time been posted, no one else’s poem could be posted until at least five comments of substance have been made about the posted poem.   I would guess it’d be the least popular such discussion group on the web.

 

Entry 445 — Vaudevillic Poetry

May 21st, 2011

I’ve coined another term, “Vaudevillic Poetry,” for what I’ve been calling “Jump-Cut Poetry.”  This is a somewhat derogatory term inspired by my bias against short-attention span art, the kind of art that presents discontinuous acts.  It reminds me of why I never much liked television variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s when young, and have rarely looked forward to visits to museums.  Lots of fun stuff but within an hour I start getting a headache.  I’m too much of a convergent thinker, I guess.

Lately I’ve decided that the “language poetry” now gaining Official Recognition is really not much different from Ashbery’s vaudevillic poetry, so really is not extending what the academy recognizes as poetry of value.  Ergo, Wilshberia remains the only part of the contemporary American poetry continuum the Poetry Establishment has any really knowledge of.

Additional note: I’m renaming “Sprungrammatical Poetry” “Grammar-Centered Poetry.”  Accessibility and all that.  So: in my taxonomy, there are two kinds of Language poetry: grammar-centered and infraverbal.  I’m thinking, too, that there are two kinds of vaudevillic poetry: phrase-length and sentence-length.  “Jumbled-Text” may be a third–one beyond Wilshberia.  But possibly beyond what I conceive as poetry, as well–i.e., hyperhermetic or Steinian, if you consider her short texts poems (although I feel I get some of them).

Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress « POETICKS

Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress

I continue to believe someday people will be interested in how various poems of mine came about.  Hence, the following three stages of my unfinished “Cursive Mathemaku, No. 2″:

.

.

.

.

I scribbled notes for version one, then took weeks to draw my ideas at Paint Shop, and more weeks to put them together in a work something like version one, which is probably the third version of the finished base of the poem.  Almost two months went by before I dared add the final cursive lines I always meant the work to have to make version two.  Over a week went by before I made (today) the more well-thought-out third version.  I’m pretty sure both that the third version (already revised two or three times–modestly) is the one I’ll go with.  I’m looking forward to adding colors, with a good idea of what they’ll be, although I never go with all or even most of the colors I use in a work.

2 Responses to “Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress”

  1. hyperpoesia says:

    i love these, bob!

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Hey, thanks for the good words, Maria. As soon as I saw them, I thought of your embroidered poems and how similar my scribbled poems have in common with them–a kind of looseness, different-colored threads, domesticity (?), sensitivity (I hope!). Main thing is how much fun they are!

    –Bob

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Entry 360 — Thoughts about Definitions « POETICKS

Entry 360 — Thoughts about Definitions

Mathematical Poetry is poetry in which a mathematical operation performed on non-mathematical terms contributes significantly to the poem’s aesthetic effect.

Mathematics Poetry is poetry about mathematics.

Neither is a form of visual poetry unless a portion of it is significantly (and directly) visio-aesthetic.

The taxonomic rationale for this is that it allows poetry to be divided into linguexclusive and pluraesthetic poetry–two kinds based on something very clear, whether or not they make aesthetically significant use of more than one expressive modality, with the second category dividing cleanly into poetries whose definition is based on what extra expressive modality they employ–visual poetry, for example, employing visimagery; mathematical poetry employing mathematics; and so forth.

Directly.  I mentioned that because there are some who would claim that a linguexclusive poem about a tree so compellingly written as to make almost anyone reading it visualize the tree is a “visual poem.”  But it sends one to one’s visual brain indirectly.  A genuine visual poem about a tree, by my definition, would use a visual arrangement of letters to suggest a tree, or graphics or the like directly to send one to one’s visual brain.

A confession.  I’ve been using the pwoermd, “cropse,” as an example of a linguexlusive poem that muse be seen to be appreciated, but is not a visual poem.  Yet it is almost a visual poem, for it visually enacts the combination of “corpse” and “crops” that carries out it aesthetic purpose.  To call it a visual poem, however, would ignore its much more potent conceptual effect.  I claim that it would be experienced primarily in one’s purely verbal brain, and very likely not at all in one’s visual brain.  One understands its poetry as a conception not as a visimage.  When I engage it, I, at any rate, do not picture a corpse and crops, I wonder into the idea of the eternal life/death that Nature, that existence, is.  It is too much more conceptual than visual to be called a visual poem.

I had a related problem with classifying cryptographic poetry.  At first, I found it clearly a form of infraverbal poetry–poetry depending for its aesthetic effect of what its infraverbal elements, its textemes, do, not on what its words and combinations of words do.   It was thus linguexclusive.  But I later suddenly saw cryptography as a significant distinct modality of expression, which would make cryptographic poetry a kind of pluraesthetic poetry.  Currently, I opt for its being linguexclusive, for being more verbo-conceptual than multiply-expressed.  A subjective choice.  Taxonomy is difficult.

For completeness’s sake, a comment now that I made in response to some comments made to an entry at Kaz’s blog about my taxonomy: “Visual poetry and conventional poetry are visual but only visual poetry is visioaesthetic. The point of calling it ‘visual’ is to emphasize the importance of something visual in it. In my opinion, the shapes of conventional poems, calligraphy, and the like are not important enough to make those poems ‘visual.’ Moreover, to use the term ‘visual poem’ for every kind of poem (and many non-poems) would leave a need for a new term for poems that use graphics to their fullest. It would also make the term of almost no communicative value. By Geof’s logic we would have to consider a waterfall a visual poem because of its ‘poetry.’ Why not simply reduce our language to the word, ‘it?’”

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