E.J. Hauser « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘E.J. Hauser’ Category

Entry 955 — 3 by E.J. Hauser

Monday, December 17th, 2012

Yesterday, I grabbed the three works below from Bomb, Fall, 2012, to put in this entry in case I still couldn’t get on the Internet from my home computer and had to borrow time on a friend’s (and didn’t want to tie up her computer for long.  Well, I can now get on the Internet from my home, but I’m posting the three pieces below, anyway, because they interest me as more specimens of the kind of art that seems to be doing fine in the BigWorld as visimagery, but is almost completely ignored there as visual poetry.

I’m not overwhelmed by the middle and bottom pieces, but like the top–mainly because of “FORESTT/HINKING” AND “FORES/TTHIN.”  The use of “SLOW/NATURE” as a unifying principle is nice, too.  Actually, the piece seems worth a full poem’s critical attention.

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LeRoy Gorman « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘LeRoy Gorman’ Category

Entry 1533 — Autobiographical Square Root

Saturday, August 9th, 2014

I seem to be recovering nicely from my accident although the bruise on my thigh remain disquieteningly black and blue (but seemingly not infected): I played tennis this morning for an hour.  Didn’t move all that well, but this morning wasn’t sure I’d be able to run at all, or use my left arm to make much of a toss for my serve (my shoulder has a lot of little strains and pains).  I actually was almost my self coming in for balls, but no good laterally.  My toss was adequate.

In spite of my physical improvement, I still feel too blah to do much Important Work, and even my sorry blog entries are a strain.  Hence the following, the cover of LeRoy Gorman’s recent little collection of splendid math poems, including the one of its cover:

AftermathsCover

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AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1510 — A Working Blog Again

Thursday, July 17th, 2014

As you can see, I can post graphics here again.  I have no idea why: I tried to do what I’ve always done yesterday, and got the Pollock below posted.  Then I posted a proper version of LeRoy Gorman’s wonderful poem.

LeRoyGormanZNumber1Jackson Pollock

My own self isn’t doing better, though.   So that’s it for this installment.

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AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1508 — “to die in one’s sleep”

Tuesday, July 15th, 2014

I finally came back to my blog and found I can’t post graphics anymore.  I suspect I have used up just about all my storage space.  I wanted to post one of the 19 terrific math poems in LeRoy Gorman’s aftermaths, a copy of which I just got in the mail from him.  Its title is “to die in one’s sleep.”  What’s below is my attempt to show it as accurately as I’m able to at this site–in other words, not too accurately:

                                                                 z

                                                             Z

Well, on the version of my entry I have here before posting it to the Internet, I have LeRoy’s poem as a big Z in the center of my screen and a little z above it to the right.  But when I’ve posted it and gone to the Internet to check what’s there, all that’s there is a little z way off to the right.  Meanwhile, I asked mIEKAL aND, whose site this blog is part of (as I feebly understand it), what he thought was going on.  He checked, and was able to post graphics here.  I’m allowed as much space as I need, he told me.  I tried a different browser with the same result. Evidentally, my computer has some kind of virus that keeps me from using html or posting graphics.  So I guess I’ll just make it a text-only blog–until I can’t do that anymore.

As I hope will be obvious, it’s supposed to be a z with an exponent of z.  Very funny at the comic-strip level . . . but deep, in my view, at the haiku-level.  The poem is best with a properly-placed exponent, but the version above has me wondering how to make a poem based on a distant exponent, as above–or a displaced exponent of any kind. . . .

A main reason I’ve been away is that my legs and a few other parts of me haven’t been right.  I guess the oest way to describe it is that I feel like I have some kind of five- or six-inch-wide band around each of my legs just above the ankle that’s a bit too tight.  My feet feel sort of swollen, but aren’t.  They feel heavy.  My heart seems not to be the cause, nor my brain, according to the cat-scan I got when I finally went in to a hospital.  The only thing not normal in the tests I got, including several blood-tests, was an abnormal reading of my urine specimen.  So I had to take Cipro, an anti-biotic with numerous side-effects, half of which I thought I suffered, for a possible urinary tract infection.

I took the Cipro for a week, and there was no real change in my symptoms, so today I saw my GP. He scheduled me for an MRI of my back (which has been feeling fine) and a sonar scan (or whatever) of my feet for next week.  My doctor felt the pulse around my ankles and said it was “not robust.” So it looks to be circulatory. I feel better about it–apparently it’s nothing I have to be rushed to the hospital about.

I still think it may be some kind of nervous breakdown.  Which wouldn’t embarrass me: you run too many miles and your knees give out; you chase ideas too long and your nerves and/or glands give out.  What’s the difference? Meanwhile, I’ve done less writing these past two weeks than I usually do even when in and out of the null zone, but I got some work done. As for this blog, what I hope to do is back-up this entire blog to an external hard drive, if I can find a way to do it that won’t take a hundred hours, then delete everything here except the last six months, say. I hope to have another entry tomorrow, but can’t guarantee it.  I feel okay right now, though.
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Entry 541 — Haiku Canada Review, Oct. Issue

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

I just got the latest issue of Haiku Canda Review, long edited by my friend LeRoy Gorman.  The first poem in it that caught my eye was this, by Roland Packer:

And here’s a nice variation (it strikes me) on Yeats’s description of “imaginary gardens with real frogs in them” (and quoted by Marianne Moore):

                                       bottomless, the well
                                       of dreams–a chickadee
                                       on the sill

It’s by George Swede.  Discussion tomorrow of both, and–perhaps–others.

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Visual Poetry Specimen « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Visual Poetry Specimen’ Category

Entry 621 — Evolution of Style

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

One of my works that I was particularly pleased with when I came across it while backing up blog entries was the following:

 

 

I have one problem with this: my only version of  it is a low-resolution jpg, which I don’t know how to convert to high-resolution tif, except by simply redoing it.  Any suggestions from anybody out there who knows more than I do about this kind of thing?

I didn’t re-post it only to ask for help, or because of how much I like it, but as an example of how my work as a poet has evolved.  Actually, I want to show that it has evolved.  That’s because Paul Crowley, the nut I most argue with on the Internet about who wrote the works of Shakespeare, seems not to believe that a poet’s style, or way of making art, evolved once he’s past his apprenticeship.  Of course, he will claim I’m not a poet, and that the evidence I’m about to produce to show my evolution indicates only trivial changes, not anything like genuine evolution.  I enjoy talking about my work, and analyzing any poem, so will go ahead with my demonstration, anyway.

First of all, I should state my claim: it is that over the past couple of years, my style as a poet has evolved appreciably, and that this poem illustrates it.

(1) I only began using cursive ten or fewer years ago, and never for more than a word or two.  This poem and two others have all or most of their texts in cursive.  Because the difference in expressiveness between print and cursive is visiopoetically meaningful to those who appreciate visual poetry, this wholesale use of cursive script counts as a significant evolution of style.

(2) My use of cursive is more elegant here than it is in mt other two recent poems making extensive use of cursive.  Note, for instance, the large O, and the increased gracefulness of all the letters compared with the letters in my other two cursive poems.

(3) Twenty years ago, I didn’t bother giving my poems backgrounds.  Since then I have, and have slowly been improving (but have plenty of room for further improvement).  Note the harmony of the background’s shape and colors with the text, especially the O. 

(4) The background has another important value–the connotations it picks up as a result of its being a variation (mostly through color changes) of the background in another poem of mine.  Connecting poems of mine with others’ poems and others of my own poems is another way I’ve evolved as an artist, not doing it until perhaps twenty years ago, then only very slowly doing it to a greater and greater extent.  This poem may be the first to re-use an entire background from another poem.  This is not trivial, for it allows this poem to suggest “dictionary-as-temple,” the main part of the foreburden of the poem its background is from.  It also should make this poem easier to enjoy, the same way the repetition in a new musical work of an old theme is usually pleasant to hear.  I believe the happiness of the colors of this version of the background gains from the reminder of the different, lower-key mood evoked by the other version.

(5) The use of color in tension with greyscale is another trick new to me twenty years ago that I exploit more and more in my present works, as here (though I’ve done more with it elsewhere).

(6) I think my language has evolved over the years, too–from fairly literal to metaphorical and/or surreal.  The “logic” of this piece and most of my recent pieces is not so easy to guess, which may be an unfortunate evolution, but an evolution nonetheless.

(7) You can’t tell from this image, which has been reduced in size to fit the normal computer screen, but the hard copy is larger than anything I did ten or more years ago, which is another result of evolution. 

Here’s my first or second mathemaku, done thirty or more years ago, to make the profound evolution of my style more inescapable. Yet I maintain this piece is at the level of later pieces; it is simply more condensed. For one thing, it is only linguistic and mathematical. Nothing visioaesthetic happens in it. The eye is used only to recognize the symbols it contains, not to enjoy colors or shapes the way my faereality poem compels it to–i.e., not a visual poem (except inthe mindlessnesses of those for whom just about everything is a visual poem). It is short, and printed. Its words are simple to an extreme.

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Entry 620 — Getting Enough Sleep

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

A little while ago (it is now around 9 P.M., 9 January)  I was feeling good.  I attributed this to my having gotten two naps today, one of an hour, the other of one or two hours.  And I had gotten six hours of sleep last night, which is about as much as I generally get.  I had just about finished backing up my blog entries and was very pleased at how good many of my poems seemed to me when I noticed them during the process.  Unfortunately, I got the dates up my upcoming entries wrong, and in correcting them, lost what I had written for this entry.  That pretty much wiped out my mood.  I can’t stand screwing up like that, but I do it all the time!

 

 

This is a pwoermd I stole from Geof Huth’s blog–because it has become too sophisticated to accept comments from dial-ups like my computer, and I wanted to comment on it.  It’s by Jonathan Jones, lately of Brussels, but a citizen himself of the United Kingdom.  What I like most about it is that it’s lyrical–as too many pwoermds are not.  It wouldn’t be a visual poem for me, but an illustrated poem, except that I subjectively feel “apri’ll” is producing the wonderful colors of spring it is slanted into a portion of (through sheer will-power).  Hence, in my taxonomy it is an infra-verbal visual poem.

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Entry 618 — “Hungarian Vispo No. 2″

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

Marton Koppany’s latest visual poem may be the gentlest satire on a country’s government ever, if I’m interpreting it correctly. Note the boot on the head of one of the country’s citizens, for instance–and the complete insanity of the country the cloud with an umbrella suggests. Much more is going on that I’ll let you discover without help.

Hungarian Vispo No. 2

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Entry 613 — Vispo SpamAd

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

The following is a detail from a Spam ad that I got yesterday.   It’s a good example of a commercialized visual poem.  Effective as an eye-catcher, but not very good as a visual poem.

 

 Below is my improved version.  Certainly not yet a great work but better than the original.  If you can’t see why, I’m afraid you aren’t too perceptive about the art.  If you can’t see how the basic idea could be used in a far better piece, you probably aren’t an effective visual poet, or are tired.

 

Diary Entry

Monday, 2 January 2012, Noon.  I got up late because I stayed up late last night watching my Giants fall apart, but win anyway because Dallas fell apart just in time to keep from winning.  I don’t think the Giants have much hope of going far in the play-offs, but I’ll be rooting for them.  And the other teams are pretty inconsistent, too, except for San Francisco and Green Bay.

I began the day by forcing myself to run.  Actually, I slowly ran, then ran fast albeit not really fast, then walked.  Rrrrrruuuuunnnnnn, rruunn, walk over and over until I’d gone around the middle school field four times (two miles).  My stamina is still amazingly poor, but I actually genuinely sprinted when I went all out.  Which is to say, I was able to pump my legs all the way up and stretch out, the way one does when sprinting.  I didn’t do it fast enough to really sprint, but I did it.  I was worried that I no longer could.  Now it’s just a matter, I think, of getting enough stamina to push myself harder, and for longer periods.  My “sprints” were only for around twenty yards or so–but maybe a whole forty once or twice.  Since getting back, I posted my blog entry for today, which was easy because already done.  I corrected my latest Page, “How to Appreciate a Mathemaku,” after getting a list or errors I very much appreciated from John Jeffrey.  I have a lot more chores to do, but I’m already worn out.  Maybe after lunch and a nap I’ll be able to get more done.

5 P.M.  One more chore out of the way: filling in the size and price of my works on the exhibition contract and tags.  I’m asking $200 for most of them.  Highest price is $600.  Two I’ll accept $100 for.  I don’t expect to sell anything.

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Entry 598 — “Fifty”

Monday, December 19th, 2011

This is from Geof Huth’s blog:

 I liked this when I first saw it although I didn’t find it saying anything verbally.  When I finally realized it said, “fifty,” I thought it accidental because I couldn’t see why it would say that.  My slow mind eventually remember that Geof is now fifty-years-old, which makes this image a particularly effective representation of his present strange combination of freedom and awkward incompleteness . . . straining, yearning for something.  With his ego (“I,” as Karl Kempton would be sure to notice) lost or transcended.

Diary Entry

Sunday 18 December 2011, 6 P.M.  Another unproductive day.  Tennis in the morning, a fine meal at Linda’s in the afternoon.  A blog entry for today just taken care of a little while ago.  A little work done on my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” to count as “work on preparation for the A&H exhibition.”  And now I’d like to go to bed, but will probably read instead.

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Entry 597 — Chumpy Leg

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

John M. Bennett has another major collection of poetry out.  This one is called The Gnat’s Window.  78 poems.  Bilingual.  Closely inter-associating sequence.  Amazing.  I told John I’d try to do a critique of it, and I still hope to once my year-end chaos of chores is behind me, but–gah–John is one of the few poets I feel may be beyond my abilities as a critic, and he’s at his best–and therefore beyondest–in this book.  Part of one of the poems, which Diane Keys has found a way to, uh, fatten, in all the best senses, with color, a piece of cloth and some cursive annotations–and the circling of “crumpy leg, is below.  It’s from the back cover of John’s book.

 

Diary Entry

Saturday, 17 December 2011, Noon.  Wow, since getting back at eleven from tennis and a McDonald’s snack, I’ve already gotten the day’s blog entry posted, which was easy because it was already done, and made a finished copy of  the new version of “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” at Paint Shop.  It’s not the official copy: it’s too small, and the official version will include the original cut-out fragments of magazine ads.  There will also be the A&H framed version which will be in between the one I just made and the official version in size. 

8 P.M.  Since noon I haven’t done much.  I printed out two copies of “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” and scribbled annotations explaining the terms I will put on one that will be on display atthe exhibition.  Otherwise, I continued reading started yesterday of the magazines and books I will be reviewing for Small Press Review

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Entry 587 — “The Bells”

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

My friend, Richard Kostelanetz is writing (actually, revising) an essay dealing with, among other things, appropriated art.  When he asked something about Tom Phillips’s A Humument, I remembered other superior examples of appropriation art such as the work on a dictionary of Doris Cross, and the following appropriation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” by Michael Basinski, which I thought worth posting here:

   

Here’s the original:

Hear the sledges with the bells–
Silver bells–
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,–
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding-bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight
From the molten-golden notes!
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gust of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells–
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells–
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

In the essay I quoted Mike’s poem in, I called it “an amazingly loud-though-silent jangle of . . . Poe’s famous poem.”  I’d add here that Basinski’s version gave me the thrill that Poe’s version, I’m sure, gave many of its first readers.

* * *

Wednesday, 7 December 2011, Noon.  I’ve partly recovered from having accidentally deleted my blog entry for Monday.  A semblance of it is back up.  I also posted an entry for today.  I’ve done nothing else yet, but hope soon to go out to buy some frames and a pad of good-quality large paper.

Later note: I succeeded in finding two reasonably-priced frames of the kind I wanted (able to be stood up on a counter) that I bought.  That took care of my pledge to do something of value for my exhibition every day, barely.  Meanwhile, I sketched a new mathemaku.  Then took care of this entry.

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Entry 584 — An & & My Full Triptych

Monday, December 5th, 2011

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. 

 One item was this by Moribund Face:
 
 

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.

* * *

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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Entry 551 — John M. Bennett’s “Cardboard”

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

There’s a Penguin anthology of twentieth-century out. It’s edited by Rita Dove.  Here’s a list of the poets represented in it, with thanks to John Jeffrey for having alphabetized it:

Ai
Elizabeth Alexander
Sherman Alexie
Paula Gunn Allen
A.R. Ammons
John Ashbery
W. H. Auden
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Ted Berrigan
John Berryman
Frank Bidart
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Bly
Louise Bogan
Gwendolyn Brooks
Olga Broumas
Hayden Carruth
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Marilyn Chin
Sandra Cisneros
Lucille Clifton
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Billy Collins
Gregory Corso
Hart Crane
Robert Creeley
Victor Hernandez Cruz
Countee Cullen
E. E. Cummings
Carl Dennis
Toi Derricotte
James Dickey
Stephen Dobyns
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Mark Doty
Rita Dove
Norman Dubie
Alan Dugan
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
Robert Duncan
Stephen Dunn
Cornelius Eady
Russell Edson
T. S. Eliot
Louis Erdrich
B.H. Fairchild
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Annie Finch
Nick Flynn
Carolyn Forche
Robert Francis
Robert Frost
Alice Fulton
Tess Gallagher
Albert Goldbarth
Jorie Graham
Angelina Weld Grimke
Donald Hall
Barbara Hamby
Joy Harjo
Michael S. Harper
Robert Hass
Robert Hayden
Terrance Hayes
Anthony Hecht
Lyn Hejinian
Garrett Hongo
Marie Howe
Andrew Hudgins
Langston Hughes
Richard Hugo
Mark Jarman
Randall Jarrell
Robinson Jeffers
James Weldon Johnson
June Jordan
Weldon Kees
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Galway Kinnell
Carolyn Kizer
Joanna Klink
Etheridge Knight
Kenneth Koch
Yusef Komunyakaa
Maxine Kumin
Stanley Kunitz
Li-Young Lee
Denise Levertove
Philip Levine
Larry Levis
Audre Lorde
Adrian C. Louis
Amy Lowell
Robert Lowell
Thomas Lux
Nathaniel Mackey
Archibald MacLeish
Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)
David Mason
Edgar Lee Masters
William Matthews
Heather McHugh
Claude McKay
William Meredith
James Merrill
W. S. Merwin
Jane Miller
Marianne Moore
Paul Muldoon
Harryette Mullen
Carol Muske-Dukes
Marilyn Nelson
Howard Nemerov
Naomi Shihab Nye
Frank O’Hara
Sharon Olds
Mary Oliver
Charles Olson
Gregory Orr
Michael Palmer
Carl Phillips
Robert Pinsky
Ezra Pound
Dudley Randell
Adrienne Rich
Alberto Rios
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Theodore Roethke
Muriel Rukeyser
Kay Ryan
Sonia Sanchez
Carl Sandburg
Delmore Schwartz
Frederick Seidel
Anne Sexton
Brenda Shaughnessy
Laurie Sheck
Leslie Marmon Silko
Charles Simic
Louis Simpson
Gary Snyder
Cathy Song
Gary Soto
David St. John
William Stafford
A.E. Stallings
Gertrude Stein
Gerald Stern
Wallace Stevens
Susan Stewart
Ron Stilliman
Ruth Stone
Mark Strand
James Tate
Henry Taylor
Sara Teasdale
Melvin B. Tolson
Jean Toomer
Natasha Trethewey
Reetika Vazirani
Diane Wakoski
Derek Walcott
Margaret Walker
James Welch
Roberta HIll Whiteman
Richard Wilbur
C. K. Williams
Miller Williams
William Carlos Williams
C. D. Wright
Charles Wright
Franz Wright
James Wright
Kevin Young

After seeing this list, I said what I knew I’d be saying before seeing it in a comment at a blog where it had been given an “A”: “Close to worthless. The good poets in it are already amply anthologized. Whole schools of the best American poets of the last forty years of American Poetry are entirely ignored. The one with Robert Lax in it (minimalism) for just one example. The editors of POETRY will find little in it, or not in it, to complain about-–which is proof of how bad it is.” 

Another ignored school, needless to say, is visual poetry, as represented by much of the work of John M. Bennett, such as this duo, “Cardboard,” that he posted just today (and he’s done scores as good):

 

 

 

I doubt anyone has more completely captured the essence of carboardedness–or the shuddery feel of decaying tenement rooms–than John has with these.  But with strangely joyful coloring in sharp contradiction of shuddering and tenements, but somehow absolutely right.  As with the poem by Gregory I seem to have abandoned, I find I need time before I’ll be able fully to appreciate these.

The Penguin anthology annoyed me, but after reflecting only briefly, it cheered me up: a comparison of its poets coming into their prime after 1950 to the poets in my crowd such as John M. Bennett could not more perfectly exemplify  academic art (including, I was amused to see, the least innovative portion of what’s being called “language poetry”) versus living art.  I may be deceived about the value of my work, but I know I’m not about that of my fellow visual poets.  We’re the Monets, Renoirs, van Goghs, Cezannes, they the French academics.

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Enter 550 — Marton’s “Cursive” Again

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Marton  got back to me about his “cursive” yesterday, giving me enough material for a full entry.

 
He pointed out the direction of the leaves is not consistent.  I had not noticed it.  Which is a good lead-in to one of my much-repeated dogmas: there’s more to every good poem, however seemingly simple, than even a good critic will find on his own.  Marton believes that “the first and the second leaf are connected in a way which is not possible in nature.”  Hence, for him, the poem is displaying “the surmounting (or appeasing) of that impossibility.”  This is a reading in addition tomine, not a counter-reading since it is does not contradict my reading.  (Dogma #2: there is more than one good reading of any good poem-but there is only one main reading–to which all the other readings must conform.  That said, I read the change of the direction of the ellipsis to suggest oneleaf’s rebelliousness.  It doesn’t want to be part of an ellipsis.  Or, in my main reading, it it is eager for winter, and the other two leaves are not?  as for the linkage of the leaves being impossible in Nature, I’m confused: I view their stems as touching.  But is the image of a vine?  These leaves don’t look like a vine’s leaves to me. 
 
They don’t look like autumn leaves, as my main reading of the poem has it, either.  But they are detached leaves, so can’t be summer or spring leaves.
 
Marton also reminded me that he had dedicated the poem to me.  That, he added, “is an important piece of information. :-) ”  I was being modest, but I see that the dedication actually is important, for it connects the poem to my series, “Cursive Mathemaku.”  Thinking about that connection, I thought of something else to mention about the poem–the fact that cursive writing is personal.  The Nature in the poem is not a machine typing out falling leaves but an individual writing a poem with her leaves.
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Entry 53 — Christmas Poem by Ted Warnell « POETICKS

Entry 53 — Christmas Poem by Ted Warnell

Received 4 years ago, exactly.   Still holding up!

Of course, it’s much better at about twice the size of the above, which would be, I believe, its proper size.

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Entry 1019 — Something from a Year Ago « POETICKS

Entry 1019 — Something from a Year Ago

I’m in the process of going through previous blogs to figure out what I managed to accomplish last year, if anything–strike that: I knowdid  accomplish a few things.  Anyway, I found this at the first entry I dipped into (which was posted 11 December 2011):

 

 

I copied the whole page of the anthology it’s on, hence the text below it.  As soon as I saw it again, I liked it as well as I liked it the first time I saw it.  Here’s what I said about it in my other entry: “I have a lot of trouble saying why I like this–extremely like this.   I do know that I am automatically attracted to anything with the word, “ur,” in it.  Beginnings, origins, the number one.  The work seems to me simultaneously some sort of alchemical diagram, a map of a section of an archaeological dig, a frame from a film of a dream, a “careworn and coffee-stained map” of a lost country (as bleed editor John Moore Williams muses in the text accompanying the full set of four pieces this one is the first of), maybe even a piece of square currency from some mystical secret nation . . .  Baker says of the set that “most of these pieces begin hand-drawn in ink, pencil crayon, watercolor, etc., and later are altered in a paint program”–much as the graphics in my work are.  My only gripe: he apparently doesn’t title his works–if he does, the titles have been omitted in the anthology I found it in.”

Do I have anything to add?  A little.  One is the importance visually and conceptually of the extremely un-organic elements: the rectilinear border, the three black symbols (two circles and a square, and black), the word, “ur” and the x.  The lines of dashes, too.  In short, a layer of conceptuality over a layer of Nature.  What would formerly be called a marriage of the perceived and the understood if “marriage” still meant what it used to.  So I’ll call it a wonderful dichotimfusion.

Amusing that I, the generally exclusive taxonomist, want to call it a visual poem (because of the word, “ur”) but its maker, Carlyle Baker, prefers the word, “graphism” for it.

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Entry 31 — Old Blog Entries 663 through 670 « POETICKS

Entry 31 — Old Blog Entries 663 through 670

In #663, I presented my Odysseus Suite–but the reproduction is too crude for me to re-post it here.   My next entry featured this, by Endwar:

TenByTenAs I announced when I first posted this, I am hoping to publish an anthology of mathematical poems, like this one, so if you have one or know of one, send me a copy of it, or tell me about it.

#665 had this by Marton Koppany, which I have to post here because it was dedicated to ME:

Odysseus

Hey, it’s mathematical, too.  The next entry, whose number I fear to state, concerned this:

Bielski-Haiku-BW

This is from Typewriter Poems, an anthology published by Something Else Press and Second Aeon back in 1972. It’s by Alison Bielski, An English woman born in 1925 whose work I’m unfamiliar with. I find this specimen a charmer . . . but am not sure what to make of it. Three lines, as in the classic haiku. The middle one is some sort of filter. Is “n” the “n” in so much mathematics? If so, what’s the poem saying? And where does the night and stars Hard for me not to assume come in? Pure mathematics below, a sort of practical mathematics above? That idea would work better for me if the n’s were in the lower group rather than in the other. Rather reluctantly, I have to conclude the poem is just a texteme design. I hope someone more clever sets me right, though. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen later visio-textual works using the same filter idea–or whatever the the combination of +’s. =’s and n’s is, but can’t remember any details.)

It was back to my lifelong search for a word meaning “partaker of artwork” in #667–but I now believe “aesthimbiber,” which I thought of in a post earlier than #667, I believe, but dropped, may be the winner of my search.

Next entry topic was about what visual poets might do to capture a bigger audience.  I said nothing worth reposting on a topic going nowhere because visual poets, in general, are downright inimical to doing anything as base as trying to increase their audience.   One suggestion I had was to post canonical poems along with visual poems inspired by them, which I mention because in my next entry, I did just that, posting a Wordsworth sonnet and a visual poem I did based on and quoting part of it–and don’t re-post here because of space limitations.  I wrote about the two in the final entry in this set of ten old blog entries.

 

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Tim Willette « POETICKS

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Entry 1112 — 2nd Thoughts about Katchadourian

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

My first thoughts about the artworks in Nina Katchadourian’s “Special Collections Revisited” series, was that it was just another instance of found art, pedestrianly-done.  True, there are many visual poets doing much more inspired art but not getting it into New York galleries–or the Akron Art Museum that Katchadourian’s series got into.  But on reflection (nudged by a note I got from Tim Willette) I applaud Katchadourian for  her choice of books as subject-matter, specifically book-titles.  Certainly it’s hard for one encountering them not to do more with them than can be done with the dead-headedly politically-predictable aphorisms that made Holzer famous.

Katchadourian-WhatIsArt

The following, a wry take on foundness in culture by Tim Willette, which Tim wrote me “sprang from a Federal Circuit opinion in Springs Windows Fashions v. Novo Industries,” in which the second company used an invention of the first company “de novo” (i.e., “over again”), is an order of rank superior to Katchadourian’s juxtapositions, I think–because you don’t just see it, read it and agree or disagree with it, but see it, reflect on it,–and find it.

fashions

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Karl Kempton « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Karl Kempton’ Category

Entry 1712 — Ground Hog Day

Monday, February 2nd, 2015

This morning, at 4:48 A.M., I turned 74.  My Facebook Timeline is swamped with birthday greetings, which is very nice, but it bothers me that Mary Worth hasn’t yet wished me well on my day.  The card below from Karl Kempton almost makes up for that, though:

BirthdayPoem

I was delighted with this when I first looked at it.  A gorgeous design, yes?  After a moment with it, I realized that the message at the top was in code, and quickly decoded it, now doubly delighted, for I love codes.  Moreover, this use of a code made Karl’s design not just a birthday card, but a veritable birthday poem!  Karl had secreted his message in an underground that had allowed it to wend its way back into sight as little flowers, celebrating their secret message’s meaning!  What’s more, the two lines of sheer garden swirled into a single, three-dimensional super-blossoming: I had been given a master-poem with three levels for my birthday.

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Entry 1344 — A Constellation

Saturday, January 18th, 2014

The piece below is the fourteenth frame of Karl Kempton’s sequence,  “Constellations,” which is from his Black Strokes White Spaces (Xerox Sutra, 1984), which is one of my favorites of his many books:.

Constellation#14

This piece is composed, like all the works in Black Strokes White Spaces, of repetitions of a single typographical symbol.  The symbol in this one is the comma, an ideal choice for so soothingly serene a nocturnal seascape, as I perceive it, at any rate) because of its verbal meaning as “pause here.”  Consider, for instance, the commas’ slowing of the wave depicted.  True, maybe what I’m calling a wave is something botanical.  But I like the idea of an ocean wave in slow motion better than the idea of a plant slowed in a downward curl. . . .   Karl would probably have made it in 1983, thirty years ago!  It still works.

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Entry 770 — “HA AM, 2″

Friday, June 15th, 2012

“HA AM, 2,” My favorite work from Karl Kempton’s gorgeous sequence, Chewed, avantacular press, 2012:

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

I wasn’t sure what to put in this entry, I’m so blah.  Fortunately I remembered I  had just gotten a package of poems from Karl Kempton, reflections, among which were many worthy of re-publication here, such as this:

mindless x ( ) = less mind

The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:

old pond

frog

splash

!

Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that.  Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.

 * * *

Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M.  Tough day.  A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40.  I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago.  Then marketing followed by the delivery of “The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present.  After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore.  I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much.  But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore.  Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty.  Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.

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Ali Znaidi « POETICKS

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Entry 1480 — Just a Few More Beach Thoughts

Tuesday, June 10th, 2014

Apologies, but once again I forgot to make this public until now, 2 days late.

I don’t have much more to say about the Beach (!!, !!).  Just that it makes me think of American Indians–the big M’s might be tepees, and the symbols Indian hierglyphics, although I have to say I know close to absolutely nothing about Indian writing, even if they had any.  But there are also puffs of smoke language in the work.The main thing I get from the work is how strongly it signifies . . . something, but something difficult to pin down.  The change from the stack of three instances of “OlM” (as I reduce it) to the swirl I found SMIW or SWIIM in seem especially meaningful–but why?  From print to cursive?  From solidity to a kind of organic. lazy, confused bolt of lightning?

Stop! It's the beach. An Asemic Writing by Ali Znaidi

Then there are the four domino 6’s.  The way they slightly slant toward the right, the leftmost one, the most, suggests to me some kind of footprints across flat land meeting a horizon where a sign triply announcing the beach rises.  The exclamation signs join in the perspective the 6’s are suggesting.  Since a beach is shore, this also suggests a higher adventure than a day of sandcastle fun–a place to leave for discoveries!

The work’s aesthetic value is almost entirely visual, but its text and near-text make it more than a scene–a scene within an attempt to translate it into words–i.e., a scene and something trying to be said about the scene that locates it, according to my long-held central view of poetry’s main goal, in a Manywhere-at-Once consisting of places in both the visual and linguistic parts of an observer’s brain causing a tension the resolution the challenge of which is what gives the work its main zing.  Possibly no two persons coming to it will get the same details from it, but everyone experiencing a superior appreciation of it will end in the same Manywhere-at-Once.
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Entry 1479 — Back to the Beach

Monday, June 9th, 2014

Stop! It's the beach. An Asemic Writing by Ali Znaidi

Here’s the comment I made about the above at Tip of the Knife yesterday: “Another great issue, Bill. I was taken with Ali’s “Stop! It’s the beach. An Asemic Writing,” too. In fact, I stole it for re-use at my blog. I like your take on it: mine so far is very nebulous, but I also see the same theme there as you. I think of Klee–especially the way a merely nice picture takes off because of its title!”

I have even more to say about it today because shortly after I wrote yesterday’s blog entry, and categorized this work as a “textual design,” I saw the word, “swim,” could be made of the lettersstacked to the right, which have extra M’s to their left.  There are one or two extra S’s, too.  So we have the very appropriate, “swimmmms” . . .  So it’s a visual poem.

I almost see it as a mathematical poem, too–because of how much it looks like an addition example.  All it needs is a plus sign.

I’m pacing myself in this analysis.  Don’t want to tire myself out.  So I’ll return for more Masterful Insights tomorrow.

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Entry 1478 — The Beach!!

Sunday, June 8th, 2014

The latest issue of Bill DiMichele’s always excellent netzine, Tip of the Knife, is out. Among my many favorites in it was this, by Ali Znaidi (who is new to me):

Stop! It's the beach. An Asemic Writing by Ali Znaidi

Stop! It’s the beach. An Asemic Writing

It swept Bill into “a seascape with shiny pebbles and beach umbrellas. There are sand castles rising from the shore, aiming for that Sunday blue sky above us all, for those playful children enjoying cotton candy and drawing pictures with driftwood.”  Bill goes on the speak of loving “the soul Ali empties into the depths of the ocean, the swimmers riding peaceful currents, doing a high dive, dallying with mermaids among their coral language homes,” and I know just what he means, although the details of my interpretation of this multi-interpretable work differ from his.  The work is clearly an inspired celebration of the beach as, well: “!!”

I hope to return to this tomorrow with a few better words for what I get from it than I have right now.

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Entry 551 — John M. Bennett’s “Cardboard” « POETICKS

Entry 551 — John M. Bennett’s “Cardboard”

There’s a Penguin anthology of twentieth-century out. It’s edited by Rita Dove.  Here’s a list of the poets represented in it, with thanks to John Jeffrey for having alphabetized it:

Ai
Elizabeth Alexander
Sherman Alexie
Paula Gunn Allen
A.R. Ammons
John Ashbery
W. H. Auden
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Ted Berrigan
John Berryman
Frank Bidart
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Bly
Louise Bogan
Gwendolyn Brooks
Olga Broumas
Hayden Carruth
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Marilyn Chin
Sandra Cisneros
Lucille Clifton
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Billy Collins
Gregory Corso
Hart Crane
Robert Creeley
Victor Hernandez Cruz
Countee Cullen
E. E. Cummings
Carl Dennis
Toi Derricotte
James Dickey
Stephen Dobyns
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Mark Doty
Rita Dove
Norman Dubie
Alan Dugan
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
Robert Duncan
Stephen Dunn
Cornelius Eady
Russell Edson
T. S. Eliot
Louis Erdrich
B.H. Fairchild
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Annie Finch
Nick Flynn
Carolyn Forche
Robert Francis
Robert Frost
Alice Fulton
Tess Gallagher
Albert Goldbarth
Jorie Graham
Angelina Weld Grimke
Donald Hall
Barbara Hamby
Joy Harjo
Michael S. Harper
Robert Hass
Robert Hayden
Terrance Hayes
Anthony Hecht
Lyn Hejinian
Garrett Hongo
Marie Howe
Andrew Hudgins
Langston Hughes
Richard Hugo
Mark Jarman
Randall Jarrell
Robinson Jeffers
James Weldon Johnson
June Jordan
Weldon Kees
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Galway Kinnell
Carolyn Kizer
Joanna Klink
Etheridge Knight
Kenneth Koch
Yusef Komunyakaa
Maxine Kumin
Stanley Kunitz
Li-Young Lee
Denise Levertove
Philip Levine
Larry Levis
Audre Lorde
Adrian C. Louis
Amy Lowell
Robert Lowell
Thomas Lux
Nathaniel Mackey
Archibald MacLeish
Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)
David Mason
Edgar Lee Masters
William Matthews
Heather McHugh
Claude McKay
William Meredith
James Merrill
W. S. Merwin
Jane Miller
Marianne Moore
Paul Muldoon
Harryette Mullen
Carol Muske-Dukes
Marilyn Nelson
Howard Nemerov
Naomi Shihab Nye
Frank O’Hara
Sharon Olds
Mary Oliver
Charles Olson
Gregory Orr
Michael Palmer
Carl Phillips
Robert Pinsky
Ezra Pound
Dudley Randell
Adrienne Rich
Alberto Rios
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Theodore Roethke
Muriel Rukeyser
Kay Ryan
Sonia Sanchez
Carl Sandburg
Delmore Schwartz
Frederick Seidel
Anne Sexton
Brenda Shaughnessy
Laurie Sheck
Leslie Marmon Silko
Charles Simic
Louis Simpson
Gary Snyder
Cathy Song
Gary Soto
David St. John
William Stafford
A.E. Stallings
Gertrude Stein
Gerald Stern
Wallace Stevens
Susan Stewart
Ron Stilliman
Ruth Stone
Mark Strand
James Tate
Henry Taylor
Sara Teasdale
Melvin B. Tolson
Jean Toomer
Natasha Trethewey
Reetika Vazirani
Diane Wakoski
Derek Walcott
Margaret Walker
James Welch
Roberta HIll Whiteman
Richard Wilbur
C. K. Williams
Miller Williams
William Carlos Williams
C. D. Wright
Charles Wright
Franz Wright
James Wright
Kevin Young

After seeing this list, I said what I knew I’d be saying before seeing it in a comment at a blog where it had been given an “A”: “Close to worthless. The good poets in it are already amply anthologized. Whole schools of the best American poets of the last forty years of American Poetry are entirely ignored. The one with Robert Lax in it (minimalism) for just one example. The editors of POETRY will find little in it, or not in it, to complain about-–which is proof of how bad it is.” 

Another ignored school, needless to say, is visual poetry, as represented by much of the work of John M. Bennett, such as this duo, “Cardboard,” that he posted just today (and he’s done scores as good):

 

 

 

I doubt anyone has more completely captured the essence of carboardedness–or the shuddery feel of decaying tenement rooms–than John has with these.  But with strangely joyful coloring in sharp contradiction of shuddering and tenements, but somehow absolutely right.  As with the poem by Gregory I seem to have abandoned, I find I need time before I’ll be able fully to appreciate these.

The Penguin anthology annoyed me, but after reflecting only briefly, it cheered me up: a comparison of its poets coming into their prime after 1950 to the poets in my crowd such as John M. Bennett could not more perfectly exemplify  academic art (including, I was amused to see, the least innovative portion of what’s being called “language poetry”) versus living art.  I may be deceived about the value of my work, but I know I’m not about that of my fellow visual poets.  We’re the Monets, Renoirs, van Goghs, Cezannes, they the French academics.

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2 Responses to “Entry 551 — John M. Bennett’s “Cardboard””

  1. Fred Viebahn says:

    Rita Dove’s response to Helen Vendler’s review, here:
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/defending-anthology/

    Also, I recommend reading her interview about the anthology in the current (Dec. 2011) AWP “Writer’s Chronicle”.

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Thanks, Fred. Thanks to the New-Poetry discussion group, I’ve already gotten to the New York Review of Books respnse by Dove. Not much to it but denial of the validity of what Vendler said–without saying what was wrong with it, as far as I could see. As I said at New-Poetry, it’s a shame that the New York Review of Books publishes poor articles about American poetry like Vendler’s and Dove’s when there are many who could write much better articles on the subject for it. Yes, folks, like me.

    all best, Bob

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