Entry 29 — A Short Poem
Category: Linguexpressive Poetry
Skip Fox « POETICKS
Posts Tagged ‘Skip Fox’
Entry 854 — “sic transit”
Friday, September 7th, 2012
I’m always harping on the importance of a poetry critic’s quoting passages or whole poems by the poets he discusses. This is not revolutionary: it’s taught, I believe, in most college courses on the subject. A critic should also zero in on quoted material at times, too. I sometimes fail to do both myself, so am re-posting to the following excerpt from a poem from Sheer Indefinite, by Skip Fox, in order to say a little about it:
Neither does the world answer but
in mute response. Cold
wind this morning before
dawn, cold
rock in its eye,
frozen
dream in its mind.
First, here’s what Patrick James Dunagan said about it at his blog here, where I got it: “This is from a poem titled ‘sic transit’—one of several of the same title included here. (It’s on page 100–BG) These breezy markers of reoccurrence give a slight whimsy brokered through its scattering lines spread across the page expressing a moment’s hesitation before the onslaught of another day’s beginning. Fox utilizes this serial approach often in his more recent books, spreading throughout each a few poems which usually share a title, form, movement of line, and/or tone, allowing for the spreading of ongoing concerns beyond the single book, such that no single collection is ever final, or complete.”
.
The text begins “sic transit,” which surprised me a little, but should not have, since Fox likes to jump into the midst of things, then let his readers fumble for orientation, which tends to help them find more, sometimes a lot more, of where the poem has put them than a poem trying harder to be accessible. That is, you will learn more about an unfamiliar forest you have no easy-to-find path into if forced inside it to search for a way through it. Moreover, this poem begins in answerlessness, so the tactic is all the more appropriate. The poems then goes on to what seem to me Roethkean-level lyrical heights about the beauty of the night sky (moon, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, etc.) whose “wanderers” seem “endlessly searching . . . each sign a station pronounced/ sentence or dance of mythos, fluent/ within/ what?” Which gives us a better but far from complete idea of the question “the world answer(s) but/ in mute response.”
.
The passage is improved by its context–but I love it as a stand-alone, too, for its haiku-sharp evocation of coldness–in a still-dark morning, which is upped dramatically, first by the rationally-wrong, surrealistically-right cold rock, second by its eye–and, hence, sentience which personalizes its effect on the unidentified Everyman looking for an answer– and third (and fourth) by the “frozen dream in its mind,” which–almost wittily–outdoes the cold rock (as a colder version of it) in rational-wrongness/surrealistic-rightness.
.
Note: I like what I’ve written here–right now, just after writing it. Who knows how I’ll feel about it tomorrow or a month from now. But I like it now, which I mention because I notice that more often than not when I write close criticism like it, I have to really push myself to begin, because I feel empty. But something always seems to come–in this case helped by what another critic, Patrick James Dunagan, had said.
.
Entry 28 — Old Blog Entries 652 through 660 « POETICKS
Entry 28 — Old Blog Entries 652 through 660
#652 had some gadgets by Richard Kostelanetz that I thought fun but trivial–4-letter words in squares, one letter in each quadrant. The gimmick is that three of the letters, in upper-case, spell a word that becomes a second word with the addition of the fourth (lower-case) letter, as in
. G O
. o D
The anti-gimmick is the fact that very few of the too words disconcealed in each specimen relate enough to each other to achieve metaphoricality, or anything poetic else. The above is the best one I could find among the bunch he sent me (and others of his literary friends). Another problem is that such words are too easy to find–although I applaud Kosti for bringing their existence to our attention because they do provide word-game fun.
Several nice poems in #653 that I got from the June 2005 issue of Haiku Canada Newsletter, including this, by John M. Bennett:
. Clou
. laem
. foam
. d
and these two haiku gems, the first by Cor van den Heuvel, the second by Grant Savage:
. end of August-- . a crinkled elm-leaf falls . and rocks once
. on the park bench . this spring afternoon . a new old man
#654 featured wonderful pwoermds from LeRoy Gorman like “marshush,” “rainforust” and “riverb”; but I complained that powermds as pwoermds rather than as climaxes in longer lyrics had become boring for me. I returned to my quest for a decent word to represent “partaker of artwork” in 655, reporting that I’d just coined “aesthimbiber” for that purpose. I seem to have dumped it soon after that but think I should not have. I like it right now.
After posting two works of J. Michael Mollohan in #656, which I put on display in yesterday’s entry, I discussed them in my next two entries. A few lazy autobiographical paragraphs on my procrastination followed. This set of ten entries (from a zine called Dirt) ended with an example of what can be done with pwoermds used as I’d like to see them used, as parts of longer poems:
Ight nowhere lignt gnight lightninght thwords now here
It’s by none other than Geof Huth, who calls it “A Series of Pwoermds.”
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Michael Snider « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Michael Snider’ Category
Entry 433 — Graham vs. Grumman, Part 99999
Monday, April 25th, 2011
It started with David Graham posting the following poem to New-Poetry:
. Mingus at The Showplace
.
. I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
. and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
. and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
. poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
. literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
. defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
. casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
. the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
. other things, but as it happened they were wrong.
. So I made him look at the poem.
. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,
. and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He glowered
. at me but he didn’t look as if he thought
. bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
. If they were baseball executives they’d plot
. to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
. could be saved from children. Of course later
. that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
. and flurried him from the stand.
. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
. he explained, and the band played on.
.
. William Matthews
. Time & Money
. Houghton Mifflin Company
.
I Liked it for the same reasons I like many of Charles Bukowski’s poems, so I said, “Good poem. Makes me wonder if he was influenced or influenced Bukowski. Seems like something by Bukowski, Wilshberianized.”
Mike Snider responded that “Matthews was a far better poet than Bukowski thought himself to be, and he did indeed know his jazz. At the other end of some cultural curve, I love his translations of Horace and Martial.
“And I love your work, Bob, but ‘Wilshberia’ is getting quite a bit past annoying.”
I may be unique among Internetters in that when I post something and someone (other than a troll) responds to it, I almost always carry on the discussion. I did that here: “I think Bukowski at his rawest best was equal to Matthews, but extremely uneven. One of his poems about a poetry reading has the same charge for me that this one of Matthews’s has. I haven’t read enough Mattews to know, but suspect he wrote more good poems than Bukowski did.
“(As for my use of ‘Wilshberia,” I’m sorry, Mike, but it can’t be more annoying to you than Finnegan’s constant announcements of prizes to those who never work outside Wilshberia are to those of us who do our best work outside of it, prizelessly. Also, I contend that it is a useful, accurate term. And descriptive, not derogatory.”
At this point David Graham took over for Mike with some one of his charateristics attempts at wit: “Sorry, Mike, but I have to agree with Bob here. Just as he says, ‘Wilshberia’ is a useful, accurate term, in that it allows someone to see little important difference between the work of Charles Bukowski and William Matthews.
“Think how handy to have such a term in your critical vocabulary. Consider the time saved. Sandburg and Auden: pretty much the same. Shakespeare and Marlowe: no big diff. Frost and Stevens: who could ever tell them apart?
“It’s like you were an entomologist, and classified all insects into a) Dryococelus australis (The Lord Howe Stick Insect) and b) other bugs.”
Professor Graham is always most wittily condescending when he’s sure he has ninety percent of the audience behind him, which was sure to be the case here.
Needless to say, I fired back: “Seeing a similarity between those two is different from seeing “little important difference between” them, as even an academic should be able to understand.
“Wilshberia, for those who can read, describes a continuum of poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery. The sole thing the poets producing the poetry on it have in common is certification by academics.
“No, David, (it’s not like being an entomologist who “classified all insects into a} Dryococelus australis [The Lord Howe Stick Insect] and b} other bugs). Because visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, cyber poetry, mathematical poetry, cryptographic poetry, infraverbal poetry, light verse, contragenteel poetry, haiku (except when a side-product of a certified poet) and no doubt others I’m not aware of or that have slipped my mind are meaninglessly unimportant to academics as dead to what poems can do that wasn’t widely done fifty or more years ago as you does not mean they are the equivalent on a continuum of possible poetries to a Lord Howe Stick Insect in a continuum of possible insects.” Then I thanked the professor for “another demonstration of the academic position.”
My opponent wasn’t through: “A rather nice nutshell of my oft-expressed reservation about Bob’s critical habits above. Note how in his definition of Wilshberia above, ‘the sole thing’ that characterizes such poetry is ‘certification by academics.’ I think we all know what ‘sole’ means. OK, then, it has nothing whatsoever to do, say, with technical concerns. There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved. And thus it is obviously not definable according to whether it is breaking new technical ground, because “the sole thing” that defines it is whether academics ‘certify’ it, whatever that means. And as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.
“But look at the second paragraph above. What are academics being accused of? Oh, it seems we don’t appreciate poetry that breaks new technical ground or challenges our aesthetics. We don’t like poetry of various aesthetic stripes recognized as important by Bob.
“Whether or not that accusation is even true (another argument), does anyone else see a certain logical problem here?”
I didn’t say much. Only that he was wrong that “There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved” involved in my characterization of Wilshberia because aesthetic distinctions are involved to the degree that they affect academic certifiability, which they must–as must whether the poetry of Wilshberia is breaking new technical ground.
I proceeded to say, “The meaning of academic certification should be self-evident. It is anything professors do to indicate to the media and commercial publishers and grants-bestowers that certain poems are of cultural value. Certification is awarded (indirectly) by teaching certain poems and poets–and not others; writing essays and books on certain poems and poets–and not others; paying certain poets and not others to give readings or presentations at their universities; and so forth. What (the great majority of) academics have been certifying in this way for fifty years or more is the poetry of Wilshberia.” “Only,” I would now add.
I also noted that I had I previously defined Wilshberia solely as academically certified poetry. “Implicitly, though,” I claimed, “I also defined it as poetry ranging in technique from Wilbur’s to Ashbery’s. Since that apparently wasn’t clear, let me redefine Wilshberia as “a continuum of that poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery which the academy has certified (in the many ways the academy does that, i.e., by exclusively teaching it, exclusively writing about it, etc.)”
Oh, and I disagreed that ” . . . as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.”
“My claim,” said I, “remains that the vast majority of them think when they say they like all kinds of poets from Wilbur to Ashbery that they appreciate all significant forms of poetry. I have previously named many of the kinds they are barely aware of, if that.”
That was enough for the professor. He retired to an exchange with New-Poetry’s nullospher, Halvard Johnson, about not having a certificate indicating he was a poet in good standing.
Entry 55 — 4 Sonnets by Mike Snider
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
In my old blog entry #695, I presented a new version
of a sonnet I’d long been trying to write for Dylan
Thomas, another failure. In my next two entries I
had much better sonnets, all by Mike Snider, which I
commented on:
28 December 2005: Several weeks ago, my sometime
poetics foe at New-Poetry, Mike Snider, was kind
enough to send me a (signed!) copy of his chapbook,
44 Sonnets. Its first poem is this:
.
Petulant Muse
Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! —
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!
You’ll be important when we’ve finished it —
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem tausht in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!
And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.
Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.
.
I’d call this a serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever
and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement
with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love
the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality
and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish,
the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all
using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the
muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator
I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of
playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard
to me, which I mean as a compliment.
29 December 2005: Here are three more sonnets from Mike
Snider”s chap, 44 Sonnets:
.
The Fall
When we’d pile in my great-aunt’s Chevrolet
And drive to see the trees turned red and gold,
Grandma would scowl. “Reminds me of death,” she’d say.
“It means that everything is getting old.”
“Now, Helen, ‘ after winter comes the spring.’”
But she’d have none of that. “It came and went
For you and me, Sister.” And then she’d sing
“Go, tell Aunt Rhody,” just for devilment.
I have her picture, nineteen, sure to break
The heart of every man she ever met —
Another from her fifties, in a fake
Nun’s habit sucking on a cigarette,
And both are faithful. Grandma, you were right.
There’s nothing grows in Fall except the night.
.
Homework
My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,
How even flaws in this numerical romance
Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.
Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
Than nudge her at her homework while I try
To master patterns made so long before
My birth that stars since then have left the sky?
I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.
.
What I know
Always, always, always, I know this first–
My dearest girl is gone, my daughter Lee
I loved not well enough to keep with me–
Of all the things I’ve failed to do, the worst.
Her poet mother’s supple brain was cursed
To learn the language of pathology.
When surgery failed they turned to drugs and she
Began to dream of torture, dreams she nursed
To memories of children murdered by
Her fathers and her mother and her will.
I could not hold her to the truth. She found
At Duke a doctor who decided I
Was fondling Lee. The judge said no, but still
She took my Lee and held her underground.
.
I posted these on the date of this entry, then wrote
over the entry, so lost it. I seem to do something like
that every three or four months, I don’t know why.
The remarks I lost were penetrating, I’m sure, but I
remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember
is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and
the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the
aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics–but employing rhymes
(note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s
octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal
sensitively with common human situations and end in
effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–
but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal
music that meter and rhyme can provide.
One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider
a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these,
is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation.
That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows
what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem
was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So
I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor)
of writing verse for astronomy (and the ones of either for
doing homework, or learning in general). And of poems for
the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All
this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the
father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s
toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional,
but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.”
Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the
others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character
studies, too.
In my lost comments, I mentioned the value of formal
verse to its engagents for finding an order for life’s
difficulties–and suggesting that they, like similar difficulties
timelessly made into similar art, will pass. I also referred
to the pleasure an engagent of a sonnet or other piece
of formal verse, when effective, will get from the poet’s
dexterity–like someone listening to a fine pianist playing
Rachmaninoff, say, getting both musical pleasure, and a
kind of (voyeuristic, sub-behavioral kinesthetic) pleasure
from his physical skill at the keyboard. I’m sure I came up
with a somewhat original third value, but now I can’t
remember what it was. No doubt, it will become famous
as Grumman’s lost insight the way Fermat’s lost proof did.
Entry 26 — The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney « POETICKS
Entry 26 — The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney
The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney
a book review for Amazon that Amazon won’t accept, so far, because it won’t accept my password.
As I read the 22 poems in JoAnne Growney’s Angles of Light (all but two a page in length), I quickly became aware of the wide range of subject matter they cover. The two poems facing each other on pages 12 and 13 are excellent examples of this. One, “Can A Mathematician See Red?” is about the mathematical representation of objects, and more “unemotionally” abstract than that it would be hard to get; the other; “Keeping Watch,” concerns a woman visiting her hospitalized mother, and gets about as emotionally unmathematical as you can get as it plumbs the depths of a complex human relationship.
In “Can a Mathematician See Red,” the poet considers a sphere “whose points seen outside/ are the very same points/ insiders see.” If red paint is spilled over this sphere, what color, the poet wonders, would the sphere’s interior be. Red? A mathematician’s answer, the poet tells us, would be, “No,/ the layer of paint/ forms a new sphere/ that is outside the outside/ and not a bit inside.” Conclusion: “A mathematician/ sees the world/ as she defines it.” But, she continues, “A poet/ sees red/ inside.”
Among the many things I like about this poem is its crisp contrast of mathematical reality with physical reality, an immaterial sphere with something able to take a coat of paint. It brings to life the magnitude of the most genuinely real world, which I take to be the physical world, with the mathematical world enmeshed in it, but perceptible only to asensual cognition. Even more, I love the way it provokes follow-up questions–at least from intellectual types like me–such as whether it would be possible to paint a mathematical sphere–as opposed to a glass sphere, say, which is emulating a mathematical sphere. In other words, it put me back in Athens with Socrates and Plato. . . .
Except for “Horizon,” which compares the universe before darkness was created, and ends, “Divided/ into complexity/ Eden disappears,” the other poems in the collection are concern people, or landscapes, rather than ideas, so do not require the specialized taste to appreciate that “Horizon” and “Can a Mathematician See Red?” may.
Not that they aren’t equally penetratingly thoughtful. In “Keeping Watch,” which concerns a visit to the mother’s hospital bed by the poet, for example, Growney movingly captures in a minimum of words the kind of person (considerate, courageous) her mother is, and wholly captures the love/opposition she feels for her, a woman able to bear her pain “because her Christian Faith/ holds Paradise against my dark resistance/ to believe in Hell or Christ.”
This poem, incidentally, is a near-sonnet, like three other poems in the collection–that is, it pretty much adheres to sonnet-form except near-rhyming or not rhyming more than traditionally rhyming, In general, Growney’s poems intriguingly skitter between technical formality and supple free verse.
“Thoughtful,” a word I’ve already used for them, may be the best adjective to describe the bulk of poems in this collection. With “wry” a close second. Take, for example,
9 syllables
Mock feelings
serve as well
as true ones.
Or:
11 Syllables
Obedience covers
with a thin layer.
The poet’s mother, according to the first poem in the book, “Write from the Beginning,” is a woman “who cries/ when she’s happy, who talks fast/ when she’s tired, who acts silly/ when she’s sad is a central subject of Growney’s poems. In “Present Tense,” Growney describes her as “a terrifying/ woman. She eats anything./ I dreamed when the sun rose/ she’d be a brick wall.// She is.” Her mother is in “Stories,” too, along with her father and her childhood on the family farm. She “loved God and Esther Williams” after her husband died, “Symmetry” tells us. The farm is the setting of “Things to Count On.” At its end, Growney writes that her “mother’s a good woman, worth three good women. For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said. I’ve stopped counting.” The final poem about Growney’s mother is the one already discussed, “Keeping Watch.”
Several of the poems have to do with love–“Today at the Grocery Store I met the Man I Loved,” for instance–which ends, “In the grocery aisle, we spoke of the weather/ in our separate parts. Floods and storms/ have abated. Nothing separates our hearts.” A few landscapes make it into the collection, snow, a night sky–and in the last poem in the book, its longest, “Three times the size of Texas,/ Alaska–with fewer living species/ and fewer miles of paved roads/ than Rhode Island.”
This poet clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot more.
Bob Grumman
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Roland Packer « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Roland Packer’ Category
Entry 542 — Thoughts about Haiku
Monday, October 24th, 2011
Arriving with the latest issue of Haiku Canada Review was a broadside containing the winners of several haiku contests run by the Haiku Canada organization. The best, I felt, was the winner (by Pamela Cooper) of the Canada division:
hanami picnic–
more blossoms
than sky
A hanami picnic is a traditional Japanese way of celebrating the flower blossom season, the comments by contest judge an’ya tells us. The blossoms in question are generally cherry blossoms. When I first read, and liked, this haiku, I quickly decided it was not quite A-1. That’s because I failed to perceive any archetypal core, and I feel any haiku–any poem–requires that to be A-1. It was an expression of Nature in an unusual state, delightfully evoking multitudes of cherry blossoms–and patches of sky. Sensitivity, compactness (just six words), even a nice touch–for North Americans–of exotic foreignness. Too bad it hadn’t the depth an archetypal core would have given it.
A day later, thinking about what I was going to type here, I realized I’d again been off. Of course it had an archetypal core! It referred, in fact, to what I consider the absolute top such feature there is: the coming of spring.
Roland Packer’s Poem, “fantasea,” featured here yesterday, is a “pwoermd,” or one-word poem. Is it also a haiku? It seems to be presented as one, sharing a page with conventional haiku (in French) in a magazine specializing in haiku. It’s a juxtapositioning of two images in a sort of tension with each other, which is the best superficial description of what a haiku is, I think. It’s about nature, and extremely compact. Some would call it a senryu, taking it as a joke. Iwouldn’t be upset by that, but I find it serious. It reminded me of Keats’s “faery seas forlorn” (if I have that right), which those familiar with the Mind of Grumman will know is one of the few poetic ingots I continually return to in my poetry and criticism. The Packer poem verysimply tells us of the vast sea that fantasy is–for me, splendid sea, although it might also be a harmful sea for those lost in it rather than in command of it.
I think it worth noting that its last syllable brings what it mainly denotes out of the pure vague. A sea is not a very specific detail but it is real, and sensually rich in local particulars to just about anyone encountering the word for it. What most makes the poem a good one, though, is its freshness–the unexpectedness of its infraverbal twist. What about its archetypal core? I have to admit that a big problem with such a thing is that one can use ingenuity to find an example of it in almost any poem. So an archetypal core I find in a poem may not be there for another reader, who may be as right, or righter, than I. He may be wrong, too, for some covert archetypal cores will exist in poems their best readers find them in, as the one I found in the poem by Pamela Cooper. The one I claim for “fantasea” is simply “man’s inexhaustible imagination”–or “the power (for good) of the human imagination.” I suspect there are much better ways of putting that. Maybe I’ll find one of them someday.
Having to do with the same thing, for me, is the other haiku I posted yesterday, George Swede’s “bottomless, the well/ of dreams–a chickadee/ on the sill.” Its imagined portion is its “well,” its reality its “chickadee.” Fantasy and sea, imaginary garden and frog. One of the best things of this is the contrast of the chickadee with the ultimate size of the well of dreams. But also the suggestion of the fragility of life’s best partly dreamed, partly genuinely experienced moments–since the chickadee is apt to take flight at any moment. I find the well in it fascinating, too–real enough for a bird to perch on a tiny part of it–projecting, that is, into full reality. Note also that, as a well, it is something to draw from, which empasizes it as a source of the liquid from which the imagination creates the arts, without which life would not be worth living for most of us.
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.
.
Entry 235 — JoAnne Growney’s Selected « POETICKS
Entry 235 — JoAnne Growney’s Selected
Beyond Reason Reasonable
I ended a previous review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry with the
observation that she “clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot
more.” I was referring to her fine “Can A Mathematician See
Red?” which is also in her latest collection, Red Has No Reason,
for it is a 79-page selected poems (available at Amazon), with most
of the best poems from previous collections (many of them
revised) as well as new ones. Red, and other colors, are important
for Growney again, as in her “April,” in which a “woodpecker
drums indigo into the poet’s blue days,” but she moves (with green
steps) through the colors, finally to “yield to the rainbow’s red
ending.”
Growney’s poems celebrate many such “red endings,” as when, in
“Exercise,” her persona jogs around a warm-up track for harness
racers, then into city streets where, oblivious of bystanders’ stares,
and cars honking at her, she loses herself in regions “where words
draft/ themselves into swinging, ringing bells.” Most important to
her, though, is not the beauty of colors, however important that
indeed is, but that they are beyond reason. Her forte, that is, may be
the unreasonablenesses truer than truth she surprises her readers
with–like the setting of her protagonist’s stroll in “Like a Cat,”
whose sky is “a creature as alive as rocks/ but not so warm.” Or
like the whole of “Stress Remedy”:
From the barn
bring the cow
to your living room rug.
Sleep
when the cow sleeps.
On your porch
watch the ant
do a task seven times.
Quit
before the ant quits.
Walk out
to the field
where wild mustard waves.
Spend
that gold right away.
Only when I read her “Running,” which she describes as a response
to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” ” did I realize that Roethke
is a key influence on her, albeit fully absorbed and re-created. A
villanelle, like Roethke’s poem, “Running,” builds its self-portrait
with “My sleep is brief. I rise to run again” and “I live by going
faster than I can,” Roethke’s builds its with “I wake to sleep, and
take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Two beautifully executed formal poems, the later one with the
added richness of its connection to a portion of poetry’s best past.
Less direct but still potent is the connection of such poems of
Growney’s as “Stress Remedy” to the inspired babble of such
poems of Roethke’s as “Where Knock is Open Wide,” which
begins, “A kitten can/ Bite with his feet;/ Papa and Mama/ Have
more teeth.// Sit and play/ under the rocker/ Until the cows/ All
have puppies.”
I thought at times, too, of Emily Dickinson while reading this
collection: the wry sudden twists of thought or wording. As in the
strangely deep wisdom of:
14 Syllables
A hen lays eggs,
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.
Growney has Dickinson’s interest in religion, too–but is much
more relaxed about it. Take, for instance:
I Don’t Know Much about Gods
but they don’t live in houses brightly painted
on narrow streets in small towns and don’t
celebrate the ordinary as I do and my friends.
I doubt Paradise. I see mostly what is small
and not too far away, dislike to start
new things, will build on old foundations.
No river runs in me, no sea surrounds.
My corner is a tidy garden plot.
I plant and nourish, pick the crop–
with care I cook, enjoy my fare, wash up,
and sleep to rise another day. Gods should
introduce themselves to girls like me.
What could be more Dickinsonian than the flat, “I doubt Paradise.”
I find Growney’s last sentence funnier than anything I remember of
Dickinson’s, though. Such a mordant “polite” turn on almost every
skeptic’s wonder about why God, if He exists, refuses to show
himself.
Canny observations are one of Growney’s strengths, and self-
revelation–concerning situations most of us find ourselves in, but
also in mathematical ones rare in poetry, and therefore especially
appreciated, too. This passage from her “A Taste of Mathematics”
particularly appeals to me: “Hot peppers/ are like mathematics–/
with strong flavor/ that takes over/ what they enter,.” A wonderful
simile out of ordinary sensual life to capture the hold mathematics
can have on those in love with it–as well the magically (beyond-
reason) number-infused Universe, itself.
I don’t feel I’ve come close to doing full justice to this collection. I
hope my comments have been at least preliminarily useful.
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Entry 433 — Graham vs. Grumman, Part 99999 « POETICKS
Entry 433 — Graham vs. Grumman, Part 99999
It started with David Graham posting the following poem to New-Poetry:
. Mingus at The Showplace
.
. I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
. and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
. and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
. poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
. literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
. defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
. casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
. the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
. other things, but as it happened they were wrong.
. So I made him look at the poem.
. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,
. and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He glowered
. at me but he didn’t look as if he thought
. bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
. If they were baseball executives they’d plot
. to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
. could be saved from children. Of course later
. that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
. and flurried him from the stand.
. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
. he explained, and the band played on.
.
. William Matthews
. Time & Money
. Houghton Mifflin Company
.
I Liked it for the same reasons I like many of Charles Bukowski’s poems, so I said, “Good poem. Makes me wonder if he was influenced or influenced Bukowski. Seems like something by Bukowski, Wilshberianized.”
Mike Snider responded that “Matthews was a far better poet than Bukowski thought himself to be, and he did indeed know his jazz. At the other end of some cultural curve, I love his translations of Horace and Martial.
“And I love your work, Bob, but ‘Wilshberia’ is getting quite a bit past annoying.”
I may be unique among Internetters in that when I post something and someone (other than a troll) responds to it, I almost always carry on the discussion. I did that here: “I think Bukowski at his rawest best was equal to Matthews, but extremely uneven. One of his poems about a poetry reading has the same charge for me that this one of Matthews’s has. I haven’t read enough Mattews to know, but suspect he wrote more good poems than Bukowski did.
“(As for my use of ‘Wilshberia,” I’m sorry, Mike, but it can’t be more annoying to you than Finnegan’s constant announcements of prizes to those who never work outside Wilshberia are to those of us who do our best work outside of it, prizelessly. Also, I contend that it is a useful, accurate term. And descriptive, not derogatory.”
At this point David Graham took over for Mike with some one of his charateristics attempts at wit: “Sorry, Mike, but I have to agree with Bob here. Just as he says, ‘Wilshberia’ is a useful, accurate term, in that it allows someone to see little important difference between the work of Charles Bukowski and William Matthews.
“Think how handy to have such a term in your critical vocabulary. Consider the time saved. Sandburg and Auden: pretty much the same. Shakespeare and Marlowe: no big diff. Frost and Stevens: who could ever tell them apart?
“It’s like you were an entomologist, and classified all insects into a) Dryococelus australis (The Lord Howe Stick Insect) and b) other bugs.”
Professor Graham is always most wittily condescending when he’s sure he has ninety percent of the audience behind him, which was sure to be the case here.
Needless to say, I fired back: “Seeing a similarity between those two is different from seeing “little important difference between” them, as even an academic should be able to understand.
“Wilshberia, for those who can read, describes a continuum of poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery. The sole thing the poets producing the poetry on it have in common is certification by academics.
“No, David, (it’s not like being an entomologist who “classified all insects into a} Dryococelus australis [The Lord Howe Stick Insect] and b} other bugs). Because visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, cyber poetry, mathematical poetry, cryptographic poetry, infraverbal poetry, light verse, contragenteel poetry, haiku (except when a side-product of a certified poet) and no doubt others I’m not aware of or that have slipped my mind are meaninglessly unimportant to academics as dead to what poems can do that wasn’t widely done fifty or more years ago as you does not mean they are the equivalent on a continuum of possible poetries to a Lord Howe Stick Insect in a continuum of possible insects.” Then I thanked the professor for “another demonstration of the academic position.”
My opponent wasn’t through: “A rather nice nutshell of my oft-expressed reservation about Bob’s critical habits above. Note how in his definition of Wilshberia above, ‘the sole thing’ that characterizes such poetry is ‘certification by academics.’ I think we all know what ‘sole’ means. OK, then, it has nothing whatsoever to do, say, with technical concerns. There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved. And thus it is obviously not definable according to whether it is breaking new technical ground, because “the sole thing” that defines it is whether academics ‘certify’ it, whatever that means. And as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.
“But look at the second paragraph above. What are academics being accused of? Oh, it seems we don’t appreciate poetry that breaks new technical ground or challenges our aesthetics. We don’t like poetry of various aesthetic stripes recognized as important by Bob.
“Whether or not that accusation is even true (another argument), does anyone else see a certain logical problem here?”
I didn’t say much. Only that he was wrong that “There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved” involved in my characterization of Wilshberia because aesthetic distinctions are involved to the degree that they affect academic certifiability, which they must–as must whether the poetry of Wilshberia is breaking new technical ground.
I proceeded to say, “The meaning of academic certification should be self-evident. It is anything professors do to indicate to the media and commercial publishers and grants-bestowers that certain poems are of cultural value. Certification is awarded (indirectly) by teaching certain poems and poets–and not others; writing essays and books on certain poems and poets–and not others; paying certain poets and not others to give readings or presentations at their universities; and so forth. What (the great majority of) academics have been certifying in this way for fifty years or more is the poetry of Wilshberia.” “Only,” I would now add.
I also noted that I had I previously defined Wilshberia solely as academically certified poetry. “Implicitly, though,” I claimed, “I also defined it as poetry ranging in technique from Wilbur’s to Ashbery’s. Since that apparently wasn’t clear, let me redefine Wilshberia as “a continuum of that poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery which the academy has certified (in the many ways the academy does that, i.e., by exclusively teaching it, exclusively writing about it, etc.)”
Oh, and I disagreed that ” . . . as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.”
“My claim,” said I, “remains that the vast majority of them think when they say they like all kinds of poets from Wilbur to Ashbery that they appreciate all significant forms of poetry. I have previously named many of the kinds they are barely aware of, if that.”
That was enough for the professor. He retired to an exchange with New-Poetry’s nullospher, Halvard Johnson, about not having a certificate indicating he was a poet in good standing.
Tags: Wishberia
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minimalist poetry « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘minimalist poetry’ Category
Entry 1652 — 2 Laxian Repeater-Stack Poems
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:
Note: according to the translator of my poem, a person’s first name in Hungarian is not first. I think that only half explains the problems with Hungarians, however. –BG
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Entry 1250 — Rejected Pwoermd
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
I was going to use the pwoermd, “mythstery,” inside the open letters of “the core of faereality,” which is the dividend of a set of long division poems I’ve been working on, but decided it was too frothily cute. But maybe not worthless? Anyway, here it is. And I’m outta here.
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Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2
Friday, September 6th, 2013
Entry 732 — Sloops
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
sloops
I’m super-lethargic again, and this time nor willing to take a dose of APCs. That’s because I fear my body is too screwed up to meddle with pharmaceutically–any more than my doctors are already meddling that way with it. So just a word today–“spools” spelled backwards. It’s the longest word I’ve come up with so far that is a word in both directions. I bother publicizing it so I can pontificate a bit on my belief in the value of going conceptual as a poet. I would call the above a poem if printed “sloops spools.” But it would be an extremely trivial poem because amusing only; “god dog” is much better (putting aside how many times we’ve all seen it) because it has a conceptual interest: the fact that a dog can be considered the antithesis of a god. Hence, its backwards spelling is a metaphor for its “backwards” meaning. The images conveyed by the two spellings also interact more interestingly than the images conveyed by “sloops” and “spools” One set of words is amusing; the other amusing and interesting. Too many pwoermds and related poems are only amusing.
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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 to mine, 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 one leaf’s rebelliousness. It doesn’t want to be part of an ellipsis. Or, in my main reading, 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 modestly took what he said as a joke, but then I saw 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.
Note to Koppany fans: I have other entries on Marton’s work–click on his name below to see them.
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Entry 57 — Minimalist Poem Sequence by Endwar
Monday, December 28th, 2009
#699 through #715 of my old blog are all about the anthology of visio-textual art Crag Hill and I co-edited ten years or so ago, Writing To Be Seen. I do an entry on one piece by each of the contributors and a few miscellaneous ones. Rather than run them again here, I’m going to put them all together as an essay in the Pages section to the right. It’ll start off being a jumble but eventually will get organized, as with several still-disorganized pages.
To make this entry more than just an announcement, here is the sequence of minimalist permutational infraverbal poems (subverse, in his jargon, which I believe he got from his and my pal, Will Napoli) by Endwar that I featured in #716:
Oh, and a second announcement: today I began, and almost completed, my column for the next issue of Small Press Review. No big deal except that it’s a chore I’ve tried to get to every day for at least two months. I feared I’d never do it! Really. I hope my getting to it means I’ll start being at least slightly productive again. There’s so much I need to get done.
.
. add
. read
. a lie
. realize
. a verb
. reverb
. a mind
. remind
. a vision
. revision
. apt
. repeat
. a sign
. resign
. all
. real
.
Oh, and a second announcement: today I began, and almost completed, my column for the next issue of Small Press Review. No big deal except that it’s a chore I’ve tried to get to every day for at least two months. I feared I’d never do it! Really. I hope my getting to it means I’ll start being at least slightly productive again. There’s so much I need to get done.
Entry 48 — Full Effectiveness in Poetry
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.
Entry 31 — Old Blog Entries 663 through 670
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
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:
As 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:
Hey, it’s mathematical, too. The next entry, whose number I fear to state, concerned this:
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.
Entry 30 — Discussion of a Short Poem
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
.
.
. JOE
.
.
. JOE
.
.
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.
Entry 426 — A New Chapbook by Beining « POETICKS
Entry 426 — A New Chapbook by Beining
There are a fair number of excellent visual poets who are excellent linguexpressive poets, as well: Karl Kempton, Sheila Murphy, Geof Huth, Crag Hill, to mention just a few. Another is Guy R. Beining, who is also a wonderful pure visimagist (i.e., maker of visual art), as my top image of his painting for the cover of nozzle 1 – 36, his recent collection of linguexpressive poems, proves. Following it are two of the poems in the book. As I always wonder, as practically the only one who has discussed his work (too seldom I fear, and too worn out to do so here), why he is not better known.
