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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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.
Friday, January 30th, 2015
The following is an accident, whether a happy one or a disappointing one, who knows. What happened was that I was looking through my digital files for a poem for Bill Michele and came across the divisor and dividend of this one in a folder labeled, “Long Division Problems Worth Attacking.” I immediately wanted to attack it. What’s below is the result (so far–I’m not sure whether it needs more work or not):
I think I was in the mood to work on it because of my thinking about HSAM yesterday. It may be my first autobiographical long division poem. The only unauthentic thing in it is the divisor. Actually, they may well have been there, hard to imagine they would not have been. But they’re not in my memory of the episode. Extremely sentimental, yes? It’s very simple but perhaps still “difficult” for many . . . Will it nonetheless make me famous?
I’d sorta like to do more poems like it, but have no ideas for any yet.
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Monday, December 22nd, 2014
Did too much busywork in my practiceptual awareness today to be able to provide anything more here than a poem of mine I just came across that was in Harry Burrus’s O!!Zone 98, one of a series of O!!Zones that featured a lot of good work, much of it at a higher level than my poem–which isn’t to say that my poem ain’t pretty good. I had been writing Poem poems by 1998, so am not sure why this one wasn’t one. Possibly I later put Poem into it. If not, I may yet.
A Bukowski Poem
Because it’s been nearly a
year since I last wrote
anything remotely like a poem I’ve
decided to try my
hand at just jotting down
what would be unpunctuated
agrammatical prose except
for its linebreaks what I
call a Bukowski Poem after its
inventor William Carlos O’Hara it might
be fun and who knows it
might also get me going
again or even turn out worth
while of itself in a minor
way as such poems can for
instance if after awkwarding
to the final drab of flatness you go
for just a little more like
say the alley side
of a North Hollywood delicatessen
awning just the way the shade’s
turned its red to rust
can by contrast bridegroom
a reader to oceanic
expansions at which point you
should end your poem unless you go
in for anti-climaxes which can
be effective too.
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Friday, December 5th, 2014
I was having a great time commenting on an article in yesterday’s issue of the online magazine, Aeon, then pasting my comments, with further comments into this entry when my computer managed to lose one of my comments at Aeon and everything I had written here–in spite of my having remembered twice to save what I had here. So I’m in a sour mood now, and just posted a poem I just composed followed by Marton Koppany’s preliminary Hungarian translation not of it, but of my first draft of it:
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Sunday, October 5th, 2014
Here’s the poem I made the “tyger” image for yesterday:
I made the original, in black and white, a little over a decade ago.
Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that my new poem of a couple of days ago with the swans is screwed up. I must change both its remainder and its subdividend product. I have a good idea, I think, for the latter, and a vague one for the remainder.
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2014
View from a Small Bridge water water rippling nowhere in particular but everywhere in general
This poem is based on my crossing a small bridge over a canal and for some reason finding the canal water especially restful. I thought out a haiku about it that included the present title of the poem and its first three lines, in slightly different words. Then I added “but everywhere in general”–mainly, I have to admit, because it gave the poem, I thought, a feeling of portentously mysterious but essentially vacuous depth. But I’ve gradually come to think it also an answer to my wondering where the water would ripple if not to nowhere. So it makes rational sense once one considers where water might go when made more than water (or the word , “water,” made more than a straight-forward denotation).
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
Here are the original versions of two of the Poem poems I posted two entries ago:
Poem is my alter-ego, so sometimes me, but sometimes an imaginary me. The first poem in some strange surrealistic way (my intuition tells me) sums up my attempt to become a known writer, of plays mostly, during the fifteen years I spent from 1968 to 1983 in Los Angeles. I think maybe the ocean of the poem is Poem’s alter ego . . .
The second poem is about my life from 1983 in Florida, where I still am and will probably be for the rest of my life. The scene is more or less real; the heron is definitely real. My mood and thoughts (authentic) are from more than one different scene.
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Monday, August 25th, 2014
I wasn’t sure what poem of mine was the bottom one in the set of Hungarian versions I posted yesterday, so had Google translate “vecen.” It gave “plumbing” for that. I thought the poem concerned was probably one I remembered with “toilet” in the title but couldn’t find it in my book, Of Poem (dbqp press, 1995), which I thought all three of my poems were from. So I had the first line translated. “Verse engineering sectors during?” That didn’t help. By then, however, I thought it’d be fun to have Google translate the whole poem back to English and put the result here:
The Toilet
Verse engineering sectors during
almost bllinding certainty recognize
o the greatest lines in the poem
the history of the universe.
Kuncognia had to, because he thought
how much
hold for what everyone
I admit that.
By adding “a” before “vecen,” I got an accurate translation of the title, but most of the rest of the text was a bit off. Close enough, however, for me to find the poem in my second collection of Poem poems, Poem Demerging (Phrygian Press, 2010):
On the Toilet
Between movements, it occurred to Poem
with an almost bllinding certainty
that his were the most superb works of any art
or science
in the history of the cosmos.
He chuckled as he thought of how long
it would take the rest of the world
to realize this.
Much thanks to Geof Huth and Arnold Skemer for publishing, respectively, Of Poem, and Poem Demerging.
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Sunday, August 24th, 2014
I’ve actually been semi-productive lately, getting nine reviews, two columns and an editorial done for Small Press Review, and some work on an essay that may turn into a book about boredom. Consequently, after Here are three of my Poem poems in Koppanaical Hungarian:
They are from Kalligram, March 2010, with sundry visual poems by such as Geof Huth, Endwar, Nico Vassilakis, Dan Waber, Karl Young (also in Hungarian) . . . Marton Koppany’s doings, needless to say.
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Saturday, August 16th, 2014
Just an announcement today as I ccontinue to try to get my current reviews out of the way (and do seem to slowly be succeeding in doing so). Go here to see “An Evening in June, 1952,” a nostalikuical long division about (sob) my lost boyhood, mostly the part of it spent in boys’ adventure books, but also actual times camping out. Click once on my poem to see a better version of it.
The codes are simple, but I’ve put hints that help down at the far right, if you need them. Further hints available for $12 apiece at HINTS, 1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952. (Note, for those of you keeping score: yes, it is a Major Poem.) (Note, for any knownstreamer accidentally here who laughs at the presumption of my declaration, I dare you to present a cogent argument against it. Not that my declaration isn’t intended as a joke, but only in part. I absolutely believe it. I don’t think all or even most, of my poems are major, but if–at my age–I didn’t feel some were it would indicate that I’ve completely wasted my life.)
(((b=a, 5=e)))
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Saturday, March 15th, 2014
Below I prove that what many poet-teachers tell those wanting to become poet is 100% valid: if you want to become as good a poet as you can be, write poetry every day. This is easy to do is you are willing to write anything. Be willing! You can destroy the bad stuff later. And you’ll be surprised to find that soon you’ll occasionally write something pretty good even if you had absolutely no desire to write anything, so just scribbled enough words to be able fulfill your daily requirement. More often you’ll write crap . . . but stumble into something with potential.
I suspect that if you do this long enough–five or ten years–you’ll start automatically writing good, sometimes great, poems almost every day. John M. Bennett does. I can’t verify this from my own experience, because I’ve never written a poem or more a day. In fact, I think I’ve gone several months without writing a single all-text poem–until today. I’m not sure why this is. I once wrote a novel over 200,000 words in length, daily writing two or three thousand words–except a couple of times. (I do think breaks of a day or weekend are a good idea.) And I’ve written a daily diary entry for years, finally getting too disgust with how wretchedly dull they were that I stopped for several months. I’m back to doing them now.
I may have too deep a null zone to be able to do more than a bit of prose when I’m at its bottom, which seems to occur more frequently as I age. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I specialized in playwriting, and pretty much did the equivalent of a poem-a-day. I think one reason I never got into the habit (except for a few short periods of maybe a month or two) is that I didn’t consider myself primarily a poet until my forties. Even then, I considered myself as much a critic and theoretical psychologist as poet. After today, though, I’m going to try to take my advice and be a poet, however horrible, at least once a day.
Okay, here’s the poem I forced myself to write for this blog entry because I had no desire to write anything whatever for it but felt dutybound to:
Is it much of a poem? I sure don’t think so, although I hope someone will tell me it is, and–frankly–something in me tells me it may be. I just threw it together out of thoughts I had regarding the website I wrote about in yesterday’s entry. It was so extremely unheightened that I changed “thought” to “thoughghghghghght” to allow my little joke about making the poem more specialized. Later I shifted the gh‘s and changed an i to Y. I had gone from just typing words to minor involvement as a poet in what they were doing. That will almost always happen, at least when you’ve been writing poems long enough.
Not wanting my text to have no poetic interest, at all, I then went into my “high-poetic mode,” the mode I more or less consciously go into when trying for some kind of haiku-moment or the equivalent in a poem. Even an epiphany. I grab something with surrealistic potential and try to lapse into something unrelated to it that I somehow marry to it, anyway (to use an archaic form of “marry”). Since my Poem poems are automatically surrealistic in that they are about a “real” person” inside the words of a poem, it was easy to steal the crow from a poem of Roethke’s I especially like and just have it fly into the poem I was writing to give the poem an image, at least, and confuse it out of total dullness.
I ended the poem with the crow regionating into the exactly correct letter to give the poem what it needed. He at first regioned into the letter, but that didn’t sound quite right! By then I was in my poetry zone–which means I was feeling like I was a poet, but not necessarily composing anything worthwhile. Once I’m there, I tend to fiddle with a piece, sometimes for hours. This time I noticed my first line, then “Poem was amused to find out that the”. I tend to break lines at the “wrong place” now and then to keep a reader on his toes. Well, seeing another “the” at the end of one of my lines, the idea of the column of “the’s” occurred to me. That idea, extended to the “The.” at the end (from Stevens) made the whole exercise a Grand Success as far as I was concerned. I don’t think the “The-column” saved the poem, but I do think it has great potential that I hope to exploit–but feel others should be able to, too.
Note: various versions of the “The column” have no doubt been done by others, but it is excitingly new for me, and I suspect I am using it, or think I am using it, differently from anybody else. Not that it matters. Well, I guess it does to me. Any, the way I hope to use it is as a stack of repetitions of some single word that the body of a poem mostly ignores but sometimes goes through and ends at. A further idea: a second text like the body of the poem on the other side of the column. I have other ideas. (It just struck me that I’ve been influenced a lot by what Alan has been treating us to at New Poetry. Maybe stealing from him! I refuse to investigate the matter.)
Oh, one more thing. The “sur” in the poem was intended to be sure.” But when I saw it, I didn’t correct it (which would have involved going back to Paint Shop because it’s so hard to get the formatting of poems right as texts at this site) because of its meaning as part of “surreal.” So I got “making ‘above,’” which fit. Second piece of advice: be on the look-out for accidents to exploit.
Ha, I see I got a fourteen-liner, counting the title, so I could call this a sonnet, but will not–nor would even if I didn’t have to include the title to get fourteen lines.
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Monday, August 4th, 2014
Some more me in the null zone, so another page, the first page, of Robert Grenier’s First Proof, from Bomb:
I’m not sure what it spells. Two things to note to get a beginning idea of what’s what: 2 black, 1 red and 1 green text; a horizonal under or through each one most of the way across the page. This continues throughout the sequence. I think a 120-page book could be written on the sequence, without filler. And without interviewing the author. If one did, and he was forthcoming, you could get a 300-page book.
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Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
As two frames of Robert Grenier’s Sequence, First Proof, appears in the current issue of Bomb:
All I’ll say about it is that it’s terrific. I’m in my null zone again: can’t say more. Note: the the above is a single page, reproduced sideways as it appears in Bomb.
Much later note: “First Proof” is not the name of Grenier’s sequence; it is the name of the section of Bomb his poem was at the beginning of.
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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
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. JOE
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. JOE
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The poem above is by Robert Grenier. I quoted it in #661, with some words of Ron Silliman’s about it. Then in #662, I weighed in about it with much the same discussion that follows. During that discussion, I mentioned a weak parody of it by David Graham that charmed the other stasguards at New-Poetry, none of whom has much sensitivity to minimalistic poetry.
To write an effective parody, you have to understand the text, or kind of text, you are parodying, and Graham understood only the surface of this one–the fact that it consists of two words. His parody of the poem consisted of the single letter, O. It is a parody within a parody of Silliman’s text, though. This is somewhat better because he pretty much just repeats what Silliman said about “JOE,” but applied to “O.” He got one minor thing right: by raving about the O as also a zero, he indicated that he’s somehow learned that one frequently employed technique of minimalist poems is visual punning, or a text whose visual appearance can be interpreted as two different words, or the equivalent, that do not sound the same. But he didn’t demonstrate he really knew anything about minimalist poetry or about “JOE.”
Here’s what Silliman said about it: “One could hardly find, or even imagine, a simpler text, yet it undermines everything people know or, worse, have learned, about titles, repetition, rhyme, naming, immanence. If we read it as challenging the status of the title, then on a second level it is the most completely rhymed poem conceivable. & vice versa.
As language, this is actually quite beautiful in a plainspoken manner, the two words hovering without ever resolving into a static balance, never fully title & text, nor call & response, neither the hierarchy of naming nor parataxis of rhyme.”
I have a confession to make: I said in #661 that “It sounds like Grenier’s work . . . which surely is a point in its favor–that is, despite being minimalist, and–in the view of stasguards–worthless, there’s something about it that makes it recognizable as a particular poet’s.” It is by Robert Grenier, but my recognition of it as his wasn’t as close to being a point in its favor as I said. I not only had seen it before, but recently more or less studied it, for it was among the poems from Grenier’s Sentences that Silliman had in In the American Treethat I carefully read over and quoted parts of in an essay I’d been working on. I probably had read about it in Silliman’s blog, too. As well as read it years ago when I first got Silliman’s anthology.
I still claim my recognition of who composed the poem is evidence that there’s something to it, something identifiably unique to its author, which a poem of no value at all would not likely have. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have connected it to any particular poet.
I must confess, too, that I now remember not thinking much of “JOE” when I first saw it. Indeed, my reaction to it wasn’t much different from that of the stasguards. However, annoyed by their ignorant dismissal of it, I reflected on it more. It hasn’t become a super favorite of mine, but I now perceive its virtues.
Silliman’s comments helped me, although I also thought little of them, too, at first–I thought he liked the poem for the wrong reasons. I still have major differences with what Silliman says, but no longer feel he’s so much wrong as simply not coming at the poem from the slant I am.
My main problem with what he said was that I didn’t see the first “Joe” as a title. According to the look of the poem in the Silliman anthology, though, it would seem to be a title. There, it is among a sequence of poems excerpted from Sentences with a little row of asterisks between each poem. Most of the poems start with a short line of word without caps, but every once in a while one of them has an all-capital word above the rest of its text that seems to be a title. While I would never agree that the poem therefore “undermines everything people know or, worse, have learned, about titles,” I agree that the first “JOE” is a title–and maybe the second is, too. Grenier treats his title more interestingly than most poets treat theirs, but where does he under- mine the notion that a poem’s title tells you what it’s about, or anything much else about titles? Silliman ought to have spelled out just what he thinks titles are, and how Grenier undermines everything people know about them.
I reject Silliman’s assertion that Grenier’s text “undermines everything people know or, worse, have learned, about . . . repetition, rhyme, naming, immanence.” That it rhymes is nonsense. If it did, then substituting “Gwendolyn” for “Joe” would result in a much greater rhyme than Joe/Joe is.) That it repeats, and that that is the source of its effect is clear, but I can’t see that it is undermining any view of repetition I, for one, have ever had. What it does is make more poetic use of repetition than a poem by anyone I know of since Stein told us what a rose is. Grenier names like anyone else, too. No undermining there. Immanence may be a different story. Silliman uses the word a lot, but I haven’t read him enough sufficiently to know what he means by it as a critic nor do I have time now to find out, so I’ll ignore it, for now.
Silliman is a revolutionary whereas I’m an aesthete. So he sees under- mining that he’d probably term political where I see poetic creativity. He finds this poem to “challeng(e) the status of the title”; I don’t. I suppose you could say, as he does, that the poem sounds good–“Joe” contains the euphonious long o, and j-words apparently are feel good to say for the English-speaking. It’s not hard to pronounce but it allows one to use a lot of one’s pronouncing equipment. Hints of “joy” may accompany “Joe,” too, particularly when unexpectedly repeated, with nothing after it, to give a mind lots of space to find such things as “joy” near it. I wouldn’t term it especially beautiful, though. Finally, to finish comparing my thoughts on the poem to what Silliman said about it, I wouldn’t describe the two instances of “Joe” as hoveringly avoiding “a static balance” between the opposites he names, but that’s probably only a vocabulary difference between us.
Now, because the stasguards at New-Poetry mocked minimalist poetry in general as well as Grenier’s poem, I feel I ought to say some words in defense of minimalism. Minimalism in art has to do with focusing on details that are generally lost in larger complexities in both art and existence but which produce aesthetic pleasure once properly attended to. A painting that’s nothing but two colors, for example, will minimalistically force a viewer not superior to such things into the purity of color against color–and out of whatever the colors involved are secondary qualities of. A painting in one color only will make the viewer attend to the brushstrokes and or the texture of the canvas or its equivalent. Which may be a bore, but may also be startling interesting.
A minimalist work is nearly always more than it seems. That is, it nearly always includes its usually ignored context–as a painting or poem. A minimalist painting needs its frame or its location on a wall or in a book or the like for it to be questioned, then recognized, as an artwork; a minimalist poem needs its page and, perhaps, its book. I know I’m expressing myself sloppily, and I’m tiring, so I’ll go to “Joe,” which should make what I’m saying clearer.
The poem is just two words without its being in a book of poetry. Located there, however, the reader has to ask what it is, and assume it’s intended to be a poem. It’s about someone named Joe, presumably, but the only information about him it provides is . . . his name, repeated. Since it’s a poem, the repeated name must be saying something poetic about Joe. A background in poetry should readily provide a clue–once the reader softens enough to accept that the poem is telling him something, is saying that the text, “Joe,” is a poem about Joe. And that it is also admitting that that is all it can say about him. A reader with a background in poetry should soon remember the theme much-used in poetry of something’s being beyond the power of words to express. Joe? What can I say about him? He’s just . . . Joe. (Joe is a Joe is a Joe.)
A poem all of the text but one word of which is invisible.
To this the unconventionality of the poem should add under-images like the word, “joy,” I mentioned earlier. The reader can’t flow unreflectingly into amplification; he is arrested in the full semantic value, whatever it is, of “JOE.” The caps add “titledness” to the image of Joe–he is thus a kind of poem. The caps also underscore his being too large for words.
Among the poem’s other minimalistically realized (mostly visceral) meanings is how hugely, and finally, significant names can be. It might be said that, among much else, the poem is a tribute to titling. But it is finally most massively about the magnitude of a simple human being, something that two O’s as a poem ignore (as such a poem ignores the difference in expectedness–in a poem–between a repeated O and a repeated name–of a person already named). Which, to get back to the attempt at a parody I began my discussion, is why Graham’s is close to worthless–for anyone with the ability and background to appreciate minimalism.
Friday, August 29th, 2014
Another simple post so I can quickly go to one of my Major Projects. It’s from Kalligram, the one at the top being Eugen Gomringer’s famous “Silencio”:
It is slowly inspiring as many variations, including several by me, as Basho’s “Old Pond.” Definitely one of the world’s majorest visual poems.
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Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
In my taxonomy a solitextual visual poem is a poem consisting solely of textual elements that are significantly visioaesthetic–that is, what their text is visually is necessary to the poem’s central aesthetic effect. A famous example is this, by Eugen Gomringer:
I’m posting it again to illustrate two points. One is that is has always been considered a “concrete poem,” because it consists of nothing but words, yet has a visual component absolutely necessary for it to have any appreciable aesthetic value–the visual appearance of the absence of text in one part of it. That, of course, is what makes the poem a classic by depicting a silence greater than the silence of printed words–by, that is, surprising one encountering the poem (with the ability to appreciate it) with a sudden poetic understanding of something central to existence.
My other point occurred to me when recently reading something by Richard Kostelanetz in which he speaks of finding “that with words alone (he) can make the most powerful images available to (him).” In context, he seems to be suggesting that these images are more powerful than those others get with works combining verbal and graphic elements. I can’t go along with that. However, on reflection, I saw how solitextual visual poems like Gomringer’s and Kostelanetz’s can be said to have a unique aesthetic punch compared to poems mixing graphics with text. That’s because of the increase in the unexpectedness of whatever it is a solitextual visual poem does visioaesthetically compared to what the other kind of visual poem does. I claim that both kinds of poems will, if successful, put an engagent in Manywhere-at-Once, or a part of the brain neither a conventional poem or conventional visimage (graphic image) is likely to put one, but the engagent will already be partway into that location upon first encountering a poem combining the visual and the verbal whereas he will only be in the verbal part of his brain until the pay-off in a purely solitextual poem, so the pay-off will come more forcefully, and probably be more intense. The mixture of graphics and text, however, will be able to make up for the reduced intensification by increased richness–by going to a larger Manywhere-at-Once or inter-connected Manywhere-at-Onces. Equal but different.
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
I’m skipping ahead to old blog entry #796 today to make a point about my recent cryptographiku. #796 has Cor van den Heuvel’s poem:
. tundra
I go on in the entry to say I believe Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio,” of 1954, was the first poem to make consequential visiophorically expressive use of blank space:
. silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio
I finish my brief commentary but then opining that van den Heuvel’s poem was the first to make an entire page expressive, the first to make full-scale negative space its most important element. Rather than surround a meaningful parcel of negative space like Gomringer’s masterpiece, it is surrounded by meaningful negative space. I’m certainly not saying it thus surpasses Gomringer’s poem; what it does is equal it in a new way.
I consider it historically important also for being, so far as I know, the first single word to succeed entirely by itself in being a poem of the first level.
Then there’s my poem from 1966:
. at his desk
. the boy,
. writing his way into b wjwje tfdsfu xpsme
This claim to be the first poem in the world to use coding to significant metaphorical effect. Anyone who has followed what I’ve said about “The Four Seasons” should have no trouble deciphering this. I consider it successful as a poem because I believe anyone reasonably skillful at cyrptographical games will be able (at some point if not on a first reading) to emotionally (and sensually) understand/appreciate the main things it’s doing and saying during one reading of it–i.e., read it normally to the coded part, then translate that while at the same time being aware of it as coded material and understanding and appreciating the metaphor its being coded allows.
I’ve decided “The Four Seasons” can’t work like that. It is a clever gadget but not an effective poem because I can’t see anyone being able to make a flowing reading through it and emotionally (and sensually) understanding/appreciating everything that’s going on in it and what all its meanings add up to, even after study and several readings. Being able to understand it the way I do in my explanation of it not enough. This is a lesson from the traditional haiku, which must be felt as experience, known reducticeptually (intellectually), too, but only unconsciously–at the time of reading it as a poem rather than as an object of critical scrutiny, which is just as valid a way to read it but different.
The image above is from the catalogue of a show I co-curated in Cleveland that Michael Rothenberg was kind enough to give space to in Big Bridge #12–with two special short gatherings of pieces from the show, with commentary by me. I have it here to provide relief from my verosophizing (note: “verosophy” is my word for serious truth-seeking–mainly in science, philosophy, and history). It’s also a filler, for I’ve had too tough a day (doctor visits, marketing, phoning people about bills) to do much of an entry.
It’s not a digression, though–I will come back to it, as a near-perfect example of a pure visual poem.
Now, briefly, to avoid Total Vocational Irresponsibility, back to:
the Nature of Visual Poetry
The pre-awareness is a sort of confederacy of primary pre-aware- nesses, one for each of the senses. Each primary pre-awareness is in turn a confederacy of specialized secondary pre-awarenesses such as the visiolinguistic pre-awareness in the visual pre-awareness and the audiolinguistic pre-awareness in the auditory pre-awareness. Each incoming perceptual cluster (or “pre-knowlecule,” or “knowlecule-in-progress,” by which I mean cluster of percepts, or “atoms of perception,” which have the potential to form full-scale pieces of knowledge such as the visual appearance of a robin, that I call “knowlecules”) enters one of the primary pre-awarenesses, from which it is sent to all the many secondary pre-awarenesses within that primary pre-awareness.
The secondary pre-awarenesses, in turn, screen the pre-knowlecules entering them, accepting for further processing those they are designed to, rejecting all others. The visiolinguistic pre-awareness thus accepts percepts that pass its tests for textuality, and reject all others; the audiolinguistic pre-awareness tests for speech; and so on. More on this tomorrow, I hope.
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 the latest version of what I think I’m calling “Frame 17″ of The Long Division of Poetry:
I didn’t like the background blue as dark as it showed here, so I lightened it. For some reason, that made a lot of difference to me. I also changed the quotient of the mathemaku below, another variation on the lead frame of The Long Division of Poetry that I composed in 2007 and have only touched up slightly since, mostly to increase its resolution. I feel it’s about as good as I’m capable of getting as a mathematical poet–although I do feel I’ve done a few mathemaku that are better than it.
The divisor is hard to read on-site, I don’t know why. The image is much darker than it is on the screen of the computer where I do my Paint Shop work, even though I tried to lighten it. Oh, it’s tiff on my computer, jpeg here, which may explain it. Anyway, the divisor reads, “a memory of/ Harbor View, June 27, 1952″
Note: for those of you new to Grumman Studies, “manywhere-at-once,” which is usually capitalized, is where (according to my poetics) metaphors and other figures of speech send one. Two or more places in one’s brain at the same time. So this poem attempts to express the value of equaphoration–my term for any poetic device that in some way equates one thing with another, even irony, which equates the truth with its opposite.
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.