I’m still having “creative ideas” but having trouble bothering to put them on paper, even ones as easy to do that with as the ones that led to the following:
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Good ideas (inspired by Marton Koppany’s recent Otoliths book) not yet finding their best presentation, it seems to me.
Tags: haiku
Wednesday, June 6th, 2012
I had a headache two hours ago (at 10 A.M.) so I took two APC’s, which have caffeine in them, and one of the pills I have with an opiate in it. So now I feel very good. I suspect I’m a bit looped, too, bcause of the second passage below. (The first I wrote last night shortly after posting my blog for the day.)
One other reason textual elements are valuable in a design that I forgot to mention yesterday, maybe because so really really obvious, is that they are familiar to everyone, and familiar things will automatically give pleasure, unless too familiar. In a textual design, though, non-representational imagery that is not familiar will generally rule, so the familiar shapes of letters and the like will provide welcome relief from that.
At Poetryetc, Chris Jones wrote: ” . . . and in my identity papers file I found another draft, a sonnet, which I thought I had lost. It is not a good move to keep poetry drafts with your ID papers in Australia… this way leads to jail. But all the same, the first draft of this sonnet was given as a wedding present to two lesbian friends (which was nice, as she kept stealing my fountain pens I used to write poetry while at work in a paid job. Okay, so they hired a poet. Get over it!)”
I was inspired to respond: “This is really stoopit, but I thought somebody at poetryetc might get a laugh out of it: when I read this post with ‘sonnet’ in its title, and came to the text, ‘my fountain pens,’ I read it as ‘my fourteen pens.’ Maybe my subconscious mind is telling me that I, as a visual poet, should compose sonnets using a different pen for each line? More likely, I as a hard-nosed poetry critic who believes a sonnet must have fourteen lines, can’t think of anything else but that for hours after seeing the word, ‘sonnet.’”
I’m feeling good for other reasons. One is that I learned that I can wear a soft contact on my right eye; I had thought it was too astigmatic for any kind of contact but a hard one that I didn’t want because grit from the dirty Florida air gets too easily under it when I’m riding my bike. So I’m now wearing a soft contact lense on my right eye, and my far vision has been really sharp, after being just adequate for six or more months. A second is that I may have attained urological normalcy after having leakage problems due to the raadddiiiiaaaaattttttiiiiiiioooooooonnnnnnnnn I got for my prostate cancer 14 years ago thanks to a device I just bought. A third is that I found a gift from Spain in my post office box this morning–a book of visual poems and textual designs by J. M Callejo, This one took my fancy becauseI do a lot with cut-outs from dictionaries, too.who was the one who sent it to me. Here’s one of his pieces:
I’m monolingual, so don’t know what any of words in the piece mean. I tried working something out using a Spanish-to-English dictionary but could find almost none of those words in it. Something to do with thinking? Pensive reflection? All I can say is the idea of a beetle, or whatever it is, coming on three scraps of paper, each with the same dictionary definition on it intrigues me.
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I continue to be more out of it than not, so have just this for today:
Guess who composed it.
Sunday, January 19th, 2014
The masterpiece is my Of Manywhere-at-Once. I suddenly had the brilliant thought of taking care of blog entries for the next few days with full pages of the third edition of it (the Runaway Spoon Press, 1998–the first edition was published eight years earlier, with this section the same as it is here). For once, laziness is not my reason for doing this. What is, is a need to concentrate of an essay I’m working on whose deadline will soon be on me. So: here are three consecutive pages from my book, left as is:
I think I have one or two copies of my available for sale, but they are now collectors’ copies, so I have to ask for a hundred bucks for one. But I will sign it. Its buyer will also have the satisfaction of having helped a poet keep from bankruptcy. (I’m serious–otherstreamers ought to ask for compensation at least equal to a thousandth of what celebrated tenth-raters get for absolute crap. And what can we lose since we can’t get even the cost of our raw materials for anything?)
As I posted the second of my three pages, I thought to myself (as opposed to thinking to someone else–ain’t the Englush lingo funny at times?) I really ought to save my second and third pages for my next two entries. Being nice to my readers triumphed, though, so they are all here. I do plan to use them again tomorrow. I have second thoughts about at least one part of my text, and first thoughts about what I think about it, and what was going on in my life at the time I wrote it.
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Friday, October 4th, 2013
I was in bed for the night just now (at nine, my usual bedtime), when I realized I hadn’t posted an blog entry for today! I’ve been very absent-minded since my surgical procedure on Monday. I hope that’s due to the anaesthesia I was given. In any case, thank goodness I still have contributions to the SASE mail art show Crag Hill sent me to draw on, such as this one from Crag himself, his second in the show:
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Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
Here’s the SASE Crag Hill, who organized the project, had for it:
Is this his autobiography?
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Monday, February 4th, 2013
I thought the following worth an attempt at an appreciation, so here it is again:
Actually, I may have only one thing to point out, something I would hope everyone would notice without my help: the way each of the letters of “evolution” evolves. Nine little narratives of some letter’s journey to . . . who knows where. But notice, too, some of the wonderfully clever twists Crag adds to some of the processes: such as the different ways the two o’s evolve, and, expecially, the way the one on the left takes bloats into a chain containing two clones of itself on the way to what it eventually becomes. Meanwhile, the other o is help on its way by the n–which it in turn helps.
Ah, but I’ve made a huge mistake, it seems to me. Because reading is generally from the top of a page down, I took this visualization of evolution to go from the top down. It makes much more sense to view it as beginning in uncertainty–as identical forms–and then changing upward.
I suppose it could go either way. I like it going up, though. No matter. I pronounce the poem a sure classic.
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Sunday, February 3rd, 2013
(Note: I had this entry ready a day or more early, then forgot to click the “public” button. I do that all the time!)
The following is another piece from Score 9; it’s called “Evolution”:
It’s one of a series of similar pieces that Crag Hill was turning out some twenty years ago he called transforms. I made a few of them myself, but no one else that I know of has, which I think a shame. It’s an excellent form he came up with, one with all kinds of possibilities–especially now that color can be added. I often lament that too few new visual poets either stick with standard concrete poetry practices, like visual onomatopoeia (forming words that look like what they denote), or leave words entirely for textual designs they call “asemic poems.” They don’t do anything with forms like Crag’s, or my long divisions.
Of course, there are problems with doing so: fear of stealing someone else’s invention, or being seen to; fear of degrading it by using it badly; a silly belief that everything one does must be 100% “new” (however ridiculously impossible that would be); or because one needs to keep up with what’s fashionable in the field. I suppose, too, there are those who just don’t connect with transforms or long division poems. I really really wish a few young poets would start seriously making long division poems. One reason for that is that I strongly suspect I’d learn from them, and maybe do a lot more with my own long divisions than I have been.
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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, asAmazing 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.
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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.
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. Poem Consults the Vseineur
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. However seldom the vseineur
. said “universe” in Poem’s hearing,
. he accepted it,
. however clear it always was
. that it had misspoken.
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Sunday, February 12th, 2012
Here’s Hal Johnson’s visio-infraverbal poem again:
“Lost in thought” is the simplest explication of this, but a better reading focuses on thought that is opposed, disrupted, damaged and finally sent in the wrong direction back to its futile beginning. With “ugh” and “tough” being disconcealed in the process further to suggest the losing struggle for meaning expressed. In short, a deft pwoermd. A visuaol one as well as infraverbal because you can see the word’s letters metaphorically enacting the struggle.
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Saturday, February 11th, 2012
Here’s an infraverbal poem–actually a visio-infraverbal poem–Hal Johnson posted at New-Poetry:
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Thursday, September 4th, 2014
It is also from Prose Karen:
As I didn’t see for a few minutes, all the letters spell appropriate words. Another fun poem but not, for me, quite as appealing as “Marbles.” That’s because “Marbles” immediately maybe me visualize (and become) a small boy among friends towering over a carefree, primitive but centrally-important-to-us game.
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Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014
It’s by Thom Olsen from Prose Karen, published by Marshall Hryciuk’s Nietzsche’s Brolly (2007):
Another instant delight!
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It seems that almost every time I seem to be getting productive, something knocks me down. This time it’s only a lost entry–this one, that I was trying to correct some detail of and lost in the process–without realizing it, so was not able to try to find the lost material by backing up until it was too late. So now I have to spend an hour or so, restoring what I can recall of what was here two days ago.
And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:
About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.” I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever. I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white. The original frames are each eleven by seventeen. Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.
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Sunday, 4 October 2011. Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is. I played tennis early in the morning–badly. I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.
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Comments are closed.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
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I may have it wrong, but I believe the college pond part of Clark’s installation began with the top image, then changed to “INKING/SENSATION” which, in turn, became the second image, finally becoming “SENSATION” by itself, then the bottom image, thereafter losing verbal meaning gradually until wholly gone. When I visited it, I saw the middle image. My memory is lousy but I remember it as the green of the bottom image. In any case, it was colored.
I will leave it here for now as an object of meditation as you might have happened on it walking to a class or the library of the college Clark teaches at. More tomorrow.
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
These are all from my previous blog. The top one is “Ellipsis No. 10,” by Marton Koppany. The second is my variation on that, and the third a second variation on it by me. There here partly because, again, I could not come up with anything else to post, and partly because today I finished buying bus tickets to and from Jacksonville, Florida, where I’ll be visiting with Marton Saturday, 2 April. Anyone who’ll also be there then, let me know. Especially if you have a bed I can sleep in on Friday!
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Friday, March 4th, 2011
I’m still pretty much too out of it to do a real blog entry, so here’s this from the 15 February 2009 entry to my previous blog:
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I did a series of 5/7/5 images inspired by Scott Helmes’s slightly different visual haiku. This one I like enough to send with two or three variations on it to Jeff Hansen, who is editing a selection of poetry for Mad Hatters’ Review.
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Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
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Taken from my Comprepoetica blog entry of 30 April 2008. And here’s something from my 8 May 2008 entry I like:
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. After a Long Day
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. Slop slap.
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. Poem weigh 186,
. but his sleep weighed
. (slip slope sleep)
. the color of algebra,
. mastered.
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. sloop
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Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
Shortly after putting together yesterday’s entry (two days ago), I did a little work on the second of the two poems that entry featured (as I then had them). I was only going to change the quotient. I changed my mind about that, but made what I thought a terrific improvement to the sub-dividend product. With my mind on text coming out of a frame, I saw how in the first poem, I could get “understorm.” I liked that, so I changed the frame of the other poem, thus completing (I’m pretty sure) the two poems three years after throwing them together, and marveling at my ability still to be able to find little changes to make that are (for me) devastating! I’m pleased, too, with my finding new uses for old tricks, like what I do with Aram Saroyan’s “gh.”
I’m naming the poems, “Diptych in Praise of Western Civilization.” At least for now.
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I hope to add more colors to these eventually.
Sunday, February 27th, 2011
To get this entry out of the way, this, which is from the 11 March 2008 entry to my previous blog:
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Thursday, February 24th, 2011
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This I posted in my previous blog. I don’t know why I like it, but I liked it right after doing it, and each of the two subsequent times I happened to encounter it, so here it is.
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
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First, to get my latest coinage out of the way before I forget it: “urentity.” I’m not keen on it but need something for more or less fundamental things like photons and electrons–both larger like atoms, and smaller like quarks; for light, too, and maybe gravity. There may be good term for this already out there; if so, I’m not aware of one, and I’ve often wanted one. “Bit of matter” would be good enough if there weren’t some things not considered material, like light.
Maybe “fundent.” “Urentity” is pissy my ear now tells me.
What follows are notes written yesterday toward a discussion of how to define poetry.
Last night I felt I was putting together a terrific monograph on the subject but now, around 3 in the afternoon, I’ve found I haven’t gotten anywhere much, and am out of gas, so will add a few thoughts to what I’ve said so far, without keeping it very well organized.
The best simple definition of poetry has for thousands of years been “literary artworks whose words are employed for substantially more than their ability to denote.” With “literary artworks” being defined as having to have words making some kind of sense whose purpose is to provide aesthetic pleasure to a greater degree than indoctrination or information, the other two things words can provide.
A more sophisticated definition would list in detail exactly what beyond denotation poetry’s words are employed for, mainly kinds of melodation (or word-music), figurative heightening, linguistic heightening (by means of fresh language, for instance) and connotation. Arguments have always risen about what details a poem should have to qualify as a poem–end-alliteration, the right number of syllables, meter, end-rhyme, etc., with philogushers almost always sowing confusion by requiring subjective characteristics such as beauty, high moral content, or whatever.
Propagandists work to make salient words ambiguous. They never provide objective, coherent definitions of their terms. Diana Price, the anti-Shakespearean, for instance, attacks the belief that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him but saying there’s no contemporary personal literary evidence for him, but in her few attempts to define what she means in her book against Shakespeare does so partially, and inconsistently. I bring this up because I hope someday to use her book in a book of my own on the nature and function of propaganda.
I’m not bothering with that right now. I’m intent only on establishing that poetry has always been, basically, heightened language used to entertain in some way and/or another, with different poetic devices being required by poets of different schools of the art. At present a main controversy (although now over a century old) is whether verbal texts using only the device of lineation (or the equivalent) can qualify as poetry, but it would appear that for the great majority of poets and critics, the answer is yes. The most recent controversy has to do with whether poetry making in which non-verbal elements are as important as verbal elements can be considered poetry. the outcome is uncertain but it would seem that another yes will result. Amazingly enough–to me, at any rate–is the belief of many visual artists who make letters and other linguistic symbols the subject of painting that such . . . “textual designs,” I call them . . . are poetry, “visual poetry.” The question has not reached enough people in poetry to be considered controversial yet, I don’t believe–however controversial in my circles.
My newest and best definition of visual poetry is: “poetry (therefore verbal) containing visual elements whose contribution to its central aesthetic effect is more or less equally to the contribution to that of the poem’s words.”
It is constantly claimed how blurry and ever-changing language is, but I’m not sure it is. It seems to me that most of our language is quite stable, and that only language about ideas, which are forever changing, is to any great extent capricious. Sure, lots of terms come and go, but only because what they describe comes and goes. “Poetry,” was reasonably set for millennia, and uncertain only now because for the first time a significant number of artists are fusing arts, thus requiring new terms like “visual poetry,” and amendments to definitions like “poetry.”
A precise, widely agreed-on definition of “poetry” is essential not only for critics but for poets themselves, no mater how little many of them realize it. They want to use it freely, and should if you believe with me that “poetry is the appropriate misuse of language.” A metaphor is a misuse of language, a lie. Calling me a tiger when it comes to defending the rational use of language is an example. I’m not a tiger. But I act in some ways like a tiger. A metaphor actually could be considered an ellipsis–words left out because understood, in this case saying “Bob is a tiger” rather than “Bob is like a tiger.” In any case, if we don’t accept the definition of tiger as a big dangerous cat, the metaphor will not work.
To say a word can have many meanings according to its context does not make it polysemous, although if provides the word with connotational potential the poet can take advantage of.
James Joyce’s “cropse’ is a neat misspelling but useless if one does not accept the precise meanings of “crops” and “corpse.”
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
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?’”
Saturday, November 27th, 2010
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This is my favorite of Guy’s three. I didn’t get the game the text plays right off. Even without it, the piece is major–one of those works that make me think I’m in some non-human species so little do I understand why so much trash wins adulation and works like this hang nowhere but in galleries like this, at best.
Saturday, May 4th, 2013
I suppose the minimalist artwork below is not bad, but seeing it in the latest issue of ARTnews depressed me, reminding me that minimalist painters, even mediocre ones like Hanne Darboven seemed from this one example to be, were continuing to make big bucks forty or more years after the birth of minimalism while someone like me is making the most money of his life after fifty years or so of adulthood because of food stamps. . . .
Note from 1 February 2014 when I was reviewing the past year. Apparently the computer problem mentioned in my next entry screwed up this entry. The reproduction of the Darboven visimage got deleted and all my further comments. No doubt they had to do with the following specimens of much better specimens of minimalism I found by bp Nichol (the top one) and Irving Weiss the other two:
I’m sure I had fascinating things to say about them.
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Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
I had all kinds of trouble getting the following images into this post, and I’m exhausted, so won’t say much about them until tomorrow. I will say that I consider the top one an example of what has been wrong with the arts world for the past 40 or more years.
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Here’s yesterday’s image again:
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.
“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.
Hello,
Interesting idea to leave out the last few syllables and replace with a visual iinstead. But the yellow ellipses need to be more vivid. I suggest darkening the background and increasing the saturation and brightness of the yellow. Also, the second line needs more description, less laundry list, I think. (Forsythia do not grow in California–I miss them. People not from the East or midwest may have trouble with the poem. Would the daff… work?)
I like the second one , but kind of want a little more hint. I first put in “unknown immense” in my head then realized you may have meant “unknown expanse.” Would “the unknown immense…..” work?
I found it hard to make the yellow show enough from the beginning. I didn’t like my “list,” either. My problem is that I like the idea of colored dots for an ellipsis, and yellow for forsythia is good, too, but not enough. I would keep forsythia, by the way, even knowing there are people not familiar with it. They can look it up. Or look at the footnote my editors will surely provide (you know, fifty years from now when I’m dead and finally world-famous). I think I’ll just have to let the yellow dots sit in my brain until I get lucky and a way properly to use them occurs to me.
Ditto the second idea. Would “uni . . . rse” work better. My problem here is that it is either not easy enough to decode or too easy. No matter. I felt from the outset that my use of the ellipses within a ellipsis did work here.
Thanks for the comments, COnnie. They strengthened my misgivings about the poems.
–Bob
I hope the misgivings do not cause you to drop them entirely. Do you have Adobe Photoshop Elements? It is not cheap and takes awhile to learn to use, but is very powerful regarding color changes. I believe you could definitely get the first poem to work well with just a bit of tweaking. Darken the background, choose a different contrasting color for the words and use bright yellow for dots. Change mistiness to mist and you’ve got two more syllables to play with in the second line.
(And yes, forsythia is more interesting than daffodil. I had to rely on the footnotes for “oleander” before I knew they grew all over out here!)
Universe is the wrong syllable count for a haiku. I actually prefer the ellipses to stand for an unkown something in this haiku. Whatever… Good luck.
Cheers,
Connie
Good thinking, Connie–since they’re the same as ones I had, myself, but didn’t mention! (Really!)
I hope the misgivings do not cause you to drop them entirely.
I hope so, too, but don’t think they will.
Do you have Adobe Photoshop Elements?
I have Paint Shop, which I consider the Kmart version of Photo Shop, which I’ve used but can’t afford for myself.
It is not cheap and takes awhile to learn to use, but is very powerful regarding color changes.
Paint Shop does color changes nicely.
I believe you could definitely get the first poem to work well with just a bit of tweaking. Darken the background, choose a different contrasting color for the words and use bright yellow for dots.
Good thinking that I did not have is to change the color of the words. Only consideration is that I may want the words to be absolutely standard, to make the unstandardness of the ellipsis more pronounced. Changing the background is essential but difficult. I did make it a pale grey to try to help the yellow. A pale blue is another possibility. I don’t want dark grey or blue because it would start the poem already (possibly) too unstandard. Also, I want some kind of natural sky background for the ellipsis.
Change mistiness to mist and you’ve got two more syllables to play with in the second line.
Humorously, I changed “mist” to “mistiness” to get my syllable count, not able to find two syllables to add that I though worked.
(And yes, forsythia is more interesting than daffodil. I had to rely on the footnotes for “oleander” before I knew they grew all over out here!)
Hey, I don’t know what oleander is! For a haiku poet, I’m terrible with names of trees, bushes and flowers.
Among the possibilities I’ve come up with for repairing the forsythia poem are to forget forsythia and just go with something a better color for this idea. Another simply to use bigger textemes (if that’s my word for letters and similar elements, like punctuation marks). One thing I feel I’ll almost certainly use is bigger textemes and some kind of scenery inside the dots, like a close-up of forsythia in bloom.
Hmmm, how about “It’s April and the forsythia is in bl o o o” with the o’s filled in and yellow? Rhetorical question. I do think that idea has possibilities, though. . . . A poem in bl o o o
all best, Bob
Universe is the wrong syllable count for a haiku.
I know. Couldn’t think of a way to make that line five syllables. Gave up, knowing I only had a rough draft.
I actually prefer the ellipses to stand for an unkown something in this haiku. Whatever… Good luck.
My problem is that I really don’t know how I want to use it. Most of my ideas for visual poems begin with a gadget like colored ellipses that I play with until I suddenly see what I can make the gadget mean. Then I work on the text until I think it makes that meaning reasonable clear.
Thanks for your comments. With mine, they provide a good demonstration of what should be going on in the head of a poet but seems not often to. A danger is making a rationale for a poem too overt, but the reverse danger, not bothering to connect a poem to a rationale, is worse, I think.
–all best, Bob
Yes, I see why you want to keep a black text in the first haiku. A bright sky blue should contrast well with yellow.