Category: Terminology

Entry 606 — The Other Day at Spidertangle « POETICKS

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Entry 606 — The Other Day at Spidertangle

The other day at Spidertangle, Nico Vassilakis asked, “Is this acceptable as one of the many definitions of ‘vispo?’”

When art and text convene, the resulting blur is “vispo,” a portmanteau of “visual” and “poetry.” It’s where alphabet morphs into image and language is reinvented into visual experience.

My reply:
Seems to me we need a term meaning something like “partial loose definition.” That’s what the above seems to me—which does make it acceptable as one of many such definitions. Hyperlogical as I am, though, I believe there is only one acceptable verosophical definition of vispo (if we take it as a nickname for “visual poetry,” as I do, because is unproductively confusing to consider vispo different from visual poetry)—although I wouldn’t disagree with anyone who said we haven’t yet expressed it. Substitute “scientific” for “verosophical,” if the latter bothers you. A verosophical definition would be a rigorous definition as near complete as it is possible to be. Not an exploratory definition however useful that can be, but a final definition. Not something blurred, but something distinct one can go to the blurred from. I rather like the idea of vispo as a locus where visimagery (not “art” since music and other non-visual things are art) and language (because text alone is not language and language has always been considered necessary for poetry, and if we decide it isn’t, then what isn’t poetry) fuse (rather than merely convene) and increase the expressive potency of the other without any loss of whatever expressive potency each would have by itself.
Maybe a good distinction would be between a conversational, and a verosophical, definition of a term.

NICO: Bob, you are probably right – that distinction can be made, but I sometimes wonder if the uninitiated wouldn’t end up confused with somewhat exacting neologist definitions. I’m not inferring that what I said captures the true nature of vispo, but think simplicity, be it conversational or not, is useful. I should also say i do appreciate your work in mapping out the verbo-visual permutations that exist and the time and effort you put into it.

Thanks, Nico. I tried my best to show that what I call conversational definitions are definitely useful. Verosophical ones are, too, but probably only to verosophers—i.e., the very few seriously concerned with the search for truth.

Karl Kempton then chimed in with:

perhaps first usage or the coining of the term vispo / vizpo can add to this discussion. as far as i know, if i was not the first i was among the first in the 1970′s to use this term as a short hand in my correspondence with national and international visual poets. at that time we were freeing ourselves from the term concrete poetry to define our works. also at that time, my spelling was phonetically inclined. some have said i was texting before texting. it was an automatic follow through.

vispo / vispo was a short hand for visual poetry, the first usage of which was of european origin. “visual poetry” there, as a term, was used to free themselves from the restricted and discredited field of concrete poetry, a minimalist fission poetics blowing up language to create new patterns. this process paralleled minimalist painting and minimalist and electronic music. visual poetry was a fusion process taking these new and then newer patterns and textures wedding them with another art form or other forms.

in my opinion, demanding “recognizable” language word(s), part or parts erases, or worse censors, the possibility(ies) of wordless poetic gesture(s) and poetic aesthetic(s), rhythms, lines, pictorial metaphor(s) and countless other poetic terms that can be made visual without words. this part of the arena is border blur or the soft membrane or tissue between rigid classically drawn demarcation “scientific” lines separating classifications in the assumption each defined field is as if a dead noun and hence incapable of fluid movement or evolution.

I replied to parts of this as follows:

K: in my opinion, demanding “recognizable” language word(s),

B: As no one I know of does. I, for instance, simply ask for something called “poetry” to consist of words, as poetry always has. All this “demands” is that one not call something with no recognizable words in it “poetry.” And here we meet the bizarre belief of many that if “visual poetry” requires recognizable words, one cannot make a work of art without recognizable words. But I’m here with the good news that one can do that. One need only call what one creates something other than visual poetry!

K: part or parts erases, or worse censors, the possibility(ies) of wordless poetic gesture(s) and poetic aesthetic(s), rhythms, lines, pictorial metaphor(s) and countless other poetic terms that can be made visual without words.

B: They can be made musical without notes, too, so let’s call them vismoo.

K: this part of the arena is border blur or the soft membrane or tissue between rigid classically drawn demarcation “scientific” lines separating classifications in the assumption each defined field is as if a dead noun and hence incapable of fluid movement or evolution.

B: Right, Karl. You live in the ocean because there’s no exact way to tell where the ocean ends and land begins.

I’m afraid it comes down to an unending struggle between Snow’s two cultures.

Karl’s response:

not wanting to get into a long history as i have just been hit with a nasty cold, the long and short of it has to do in part with a generational difference as well as o so many single glance, so what concrete works and cliches, some even winding up on greeting cards.  the generation difference is building upon what was done and taking it to the fusion process. there was a possibility of a real jump in multimedia but concrete in general turned off lexical poets, calligraphers, book artists, etc., a ready made audience if there ever was one. there was no embrace because the works failed to match the quality of the painters, musicians, sculptors, calligraphers, book artists, etc. not that there were exceptions such as finlay. phillips, dencker, xenakis and others made the jump to aid in the formation along with the lettrists of visual poetry.

for japan, see karl young’s intro on kitasono . having already run his run of concrete many years before concrete was coined, he did not participate in concrete be rehashing his previous concrete before concrete, but submitted his plastic poems. then the rerun story of mine and others re patchen having composed concrete before concrete then being stiff armed. others as well.

i think dencker edited the first or one of the first visual poetry anthologies, 1972. techen was published in 1978 a year before i switched kaldron from a lexical and visual poetry mix to visual poetry only. concrete works were not excluded from any of this but concrete excluded visual poets, esp the lettrists.

the ocean has no fixed line. where the chumash lived 15,000 to 20,000 years ago now under water. soon homes and cites adjacent to the ocean will receive the same fate because fools thought boundaries fixed. boundaries change. worse than building in flood plains. the wise remain on high ground. we are at 70 feet on what is an old sand dune soon to be an island. but my body will have been turned to ash by then.

out of energy,

karl

What Cathy Bennett then said, and I replied to, was:

1- “increase the expressive potency of the other without any loss of
whatever expressive potency each would have by itself. ”
Bob,
The above section*** is where you are completely wrong… and by saying
it is a “scientific” approach, still doesn’t make it right.

Can’t my (very tentative) definition be okay as a scientific one, Cathy? Do you not agree that a scientific one might have some use? In any case, I was just giving a different take on the long-difficult struggle of our language to produce a definition of vispo.

2- “because text alone is not language and language has always been
considered necessary for poetry, and if we decide it isn’t, then what
isn’t poetry”
is a problem when it comes to “asemic” vispo. “Visual Poetry” is not so self-limiting.

You lost me here. If something consisting of textual elements but no words is called visual poetry, how does that not raise the question of what is not visual poetry? Or not poetry. Or do you agree that something consisting of textual elements but not words should not be called “visual poetry?” Which, by the way, is the one thing I am far from alone in believing.

So you want to limit “text” to “language” and you also want to limit “art” to one media/ I say “NO” to both ideas.

It just seems to me that all poetry, including visual poetry (or vispo) should be limited to language, and that text is not language until it becomes words. I’ll never understand the problem so many have with this simple idea. As for “art” as both visual art and all forms of art, no one agrees with me that that can be confusing, or that it’s demeaning to visual art not to have a name of its own. It’s not at all important, though.

3- The “search for truth” is fine, except when approached in your
narcissistic manner…

Well, you have to admit that at least I don’t think we should call the search for truth “Bobgrummanism” although I have to admit that sometimes I think I’m the only one pursuing it.

you have created your mathemaku and now your definition to define it, but “in truth”-that definition*** can only be applied to your mathemaku, which you have decided to limit to your “balanced two elements”.

So, as far as your posited questions: “Is this acceptable as “one” of the many definitions”– Yes… for Bob Grumman’s mathemaku perhaps, but your mathemaku should not be held up as the highest scientific principle of “visual poetry” towards which we all must strive.

Next, Cathy’s husband, John, said, “ANY ‘definition’ of a phenomenon is necessary a definition or description of that phenom. in the past. As soon as it is made, someone comes along and does something that requires the definition be changed, in order to include it.”

But the new thing done need not be included. It may, in fact, not be a new thing: for instance, Klee and many other painters included text but not words in their paintings; their paintings are still considered paintings the subject matter of which is letters—The Villa R, for instance. No one saw, or even now sees, any need to call Klee a visual poet. The word, “chariot,” still means what it did to the Romans even though we now have the automobile. In the arts, even when definitions change, they keep some main part—e.g., the term “music” is now used for works people a hundred years ago called “noise,” but it retains its main part, which is “an art concerned with sound.” Similarly, “poetry” has come to include free verse—but hasn’t, except among certain visiotextual artists—stopped being consider an art of words. I simply don’t see why it should be. Think what mathematics would be if it were decided that numbers no longer had to be part of its definition.  –Bob

In this particular case, and I believe Karl referred to this issue, is that large body of work called “visual poetry” that has NO explicitly linguistic or lettristic elements in it at all. There is a lot of work being done in this mode in Spain now. It seems to use images as concepts, or “words”; it’s a kind of picture writing.  –John

If the pictures do something explicitly verbal—do more than make a gesture some consider linguistic, that is—then it would seem reasonable to call the works involved “visual poetry.” The big problem is a definition so broad or subjective as to be meaningless. Why, for instance, should ballet not be considered visual poetry? (Except metaphorically, which is completely something else.)  –Bob

Joel Lipman added:

To stir & nurture, not resolve, this periodic thread, here’s Willard Bohn’s definition, suitably the opening couple sentences of his Modern Visual Poetry, Chapter 1:

“For all intents and purposes visual poetry can be defined as poetry that is meant to be seen — poetry that presupposes a viewer as well as a reader. Combining visual and verbal elements, it not only appeals to the reader’s intellect but arrests his or her gaze.”

Bohn’s second paragraph particularizes further distinctions: “Where visual poetry differs from ordinary poetry is in the extent of its iconic dimension, which is much more pronounced, and in the degree of its self-awareness. Visual poems are immediately recognizable by their refusal to adhere to a rectilinear grid and by their tendency to flout their plasticity.”

I find this definition grounding and useful, informed about the suggestions and nuances of its language. Its application enables Bohn to write a fine book on the subject, one which is pretty up-to-date, closing a chapter that discusses Perloff’s observations and compositions that explore digitalization’s “multidimensional realm of their own making.”

At some point, Bobbi Lurie and John had the following exchange:

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 1:49 PM, bobbi luriewrote:

Do you consider a piece of visual art, any piece of visual art, visual poetry?
No
Or are there limitations to the definition?
Doubtless, yes. But definitions really don;t interest me very much; I never have anything I can use them for.

If I’m writing an intro to or selecting material for an anthology of something, I’ll use some kind of rule-of-thumb “definition” of what it is I’m selecting, tho it’s often pretty ad hoc, a matter of practicality or limited resources, not something I find very interesting.

Re some of what Bob & Cathy were talking about, I don;t think a “scientific” definition of art is possible or makes any sense. Science is a method, not a matter of absolute categories. A scientific study of the process of artistic creation, however, is quite possible, and could be very interesting indeed.

I couldn’t let that go by unshot at:

As an artist, I care very little about definitions; as a critic, I find them essential, and I need them to be what I consider “scientific”—i.e., objective, logical and reasonably complete (only “reasonably complete” because no definition can be absolutely complete, although the best definitions will be complete enough to satisfy any sane person).

Nico returned with:

you’ll find several responses to THAT question – and others who wont care at all. i think it’s about how you define language and poetry and looking. i wonder about my recent work sometimes, if it’s even vispo anymore. ive done past work where i imbue a piece or series with a kind of rosetta stone inorder to convey how the word can transform into parts of parts of letters. even snippets of letters, thus eliminating traditional MEANING by focusing on letters alone. then my interest shifted into staring my way through a word and into a letter – and that basically annihilated MEANING, and lead to the mere visual aspect of language. is there poetry there? is there meaning there? is it elements or the ingredients of language sitting there like a recipe waiting to be cooked? i think in some sense, yes. but there are other times that i am certain it’s vispo. as language is not only words. though i do relentlessly stare at letters – is a letter a poem? this gets into bob grumman territory. he’d say no. but i think every thing looked at is, why? because our brain does nothing but process what comes across our eyes-in-the-front face. or maybe it’s 2 letters that is the ultimate denominator of poetry. as to me, a letter is an atom and a word is a molecule – and letters are constantly in search of each other to create molecules. my interest in the past few years has been to stop the letter from huddling with other letters to form a word and focus on the letter itself. is that vispo? i dont know. im sure there will be a response. but JMB is right about the spaniards – picture writing – theyre pretty stunning, but is that vispo. does it matter. like hiessenberg – the more you try pinning it down the further down the road you find it.

That stumbled me into this:

I think ultimately it will be easy to categorize these different combinations of graphics and text. Possibly even now there are brain-scanning devices that can tell what part of the brain a person most experiences a work of art. I contend (and—I believe, the certified experts in the field would agree) that so far as visiotextual art is concerned, there are two brain areas involved, the visual and the verbal. I believe conventional poetry will light up the verbal area, conventional painting and sculpture will light up the visual area, visual poetry by my definition will light up both areas about equally, and the works Nico is talking about will do weird things that we need to break the verbal area of the brain into sub-areas to talk about; I think it will mainly light up the visual area but also light up a pre-verbal part of the verbal area. I think the brain (and probably part of the nervous system prior to the brain) subject stimuli to a long sorting procedure, first identifying letters, then words, then grammatical structuring, then the connections of the words to what they denote. The sorting procedure will break down after identifying Nico’s letters BUT certainly give them an aesthetic charge that will make them different from a conventional painting—but, I believe, not enough different to make them a form of poetry, or not painting. The subject matter of lots of paintings will also activate small areas of the brain besides the visual area. Perhaps most paintings do. Needless to say, it’s all a lot more complex than this. For instance, the presence or absence of people concerns in an artwork has a huge importance.

Which is where the discussion was today t around 3 in the afternoon here in Port Charlotte, Florida.

Diary Entry

Monday, 26 December 2011, 2 P.M.  About the first thing I did today was run a mile.  My time was again, over eleven minutes, which is horrible.  I can’t understand why I’m not getting better, although my not having run much for months, and not having run since last Friday (or was it Thursday?) may well have something to do with it.  Later in the morning I gave my latest SPR column a once-over and put in into an envelope with the reviews I had on hand.  That is now in my mailbox, awaiting delivery.  Just now I also wrote a new Poem poem.  I spent less than five minutes on it, but its central idea was one I’ve been thinking about for over a week.  It’s nothing much, at all, but probably worth keeping.  I used it to take care of my blog entry for today.  I haven’t gotten going on what I think of as my final major chore of the year, the response to Jake’s essay.  I think all I need to do is find a way to arrange what I’ve already have from what I wrote over a month ago, and several blog entries that seem relevant, and the little next matter I’ve written, and polish it, but . . .  I keep waiting for the surge I used to feel whenever I was really ready to tackle a writing project, but it’s no more anywhere in me than my ability to run a bad mile instead of a horrendous mile is.   

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Poetics, Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 607 — More from Spidertangle « POETICKS

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Entry 607 — More from Spidertangle

Later Vernon Frazer entered the discussion:

Thanks, John. I use “definitions” as a shorthand for conversational or descriptive purposes. As far as trying to work, I avoid the “prescriptions” suggested by definitions because they impose limits on my thinking and interfere with my working at my best. Without the work, nobody would have fodder for all the differing definitions. I’m flashing back to Wittgenstein and trying to define “game.” 

ME: Sorry, Vernon, but I’m (obviously) not a Wittgenstein fan.  Just because a few words are hard to define, at least for someone like Wittgenstein, doesn’t make the eternal struggle to define words (in order fully to understand what they denote) futile. As for the “prescriptiveness” of definitions, they are only prescriptive about how an artist can responsibly label his works, not—if he has a functioning brain—about how he can make them.  I am annoyingly repetitious about stating this, because it seems to me the main misunderstanding artists have about criticism.  (Which is dependent on what artists produce—but that is dependent on what prior artists have produced and, I believe, on what critics have said about it.  A work of art ultimately is not merely what it is by itself, but that and what others have said about it.   –Mr. Cantshuddup

Bobbi Lurie again:

wittgenstein fan or not–

what is this?

is this vispo or not?

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2011/10/bobbi-lurie-ludwig-wittgenstein.html

ME: I like your image a lot, Bobbi, but I have to be sarcastic in answering your question: it’s a musical automobile, so a branch of chempo, not of vispo.

Nico was less sarcastic:

I wouldn’t tag it as such, no.

There are these websites you find when doing a search of visual poetry that pertain to photography, wedding shots, naturescapes, etc. They use visual poetry as a descriptive for hallmark type sentiment.

Your drawing of Ludwig is very much reminiscent of egon’s stuff,

ME: Same response here.

which I like quite a bit. It’s not vispo tho. My own filter for such things usually entails the existence of a focus on alphabet. That’s primary to me, but not all on this list. I giggle at your use of
Sophistication. I think we’re still in the process of hammering it down – the ongoing sixty year process. The inability to pluck a satisfying set of terms by now – one that’d satisfy most practitioners just spotlights the fact that this practice is separate to separate people. That means nothing gets answered or gets answered in myriad ways.

ME: At one point I spent some time trying to determine how I thought works concerned with the alphabet should fit into my taxonomy.  I think I concluded that the alphabet is verbal—a peculiar sort of word meaning “these are the letters, in order.”  However, with the works you’re speaking of, Nico, letters are the subject, not the alphabet, so for me they are textual designage.

NICO: Anyway, I did apologize for bringing this up.

ME: As opposed to leaving Spidertangle as a no-discussion zone?

Bobbi replied:

Thank you, Nico. 

As I wrote to David, I really needed this description.

Yes. Sophistication meaning “I don’t know what these people are talking about. What is the secret?”

The fact that you’ve been struggling with terms….may I suggest you just say: “the alphabet must be included–this is in relationship to written language–the representation of something via language vs. via image” (clumsy this, i know, but that would have helped me in the several year search i’ve been on, asking vispo artists this question)

ME: Too bad you somehow missed me, your fellow Bobbi/Bobby, Bobbi.  I’ve been cranking out the dogma that poetry has to have significant words for years, and that it’s silly to consider “visual poetry” not to be a form of poetry. Very few in the visiotextual field (but probably everyone in conventional poetry) agree with me, even though I have a fairly broad idea of what “words” are—I accept word-fragments, punctuation marks, any typographical symbol (like @), mathematical symbols and even the alphabet or some section of it long enough to identify it as an alphabet, as “words”—and don’t dispute that at the border between the verbal and the visual there are activities going on of value that may also qualify as visual poetry (since no definition can have a sharp border—unless it’s of something not in the real world like odd numbers).  Seems to me an art should be defined first of all by what materials it explicitly uses in general (words or visual images, say), then by how it uses them, again in general (by pronouncing them or recording their sound, in one case; in the other, by recording their shape and color); a sub-art, like visual poetry, should be defined by what specific materials it uses and how, specifically, it uses them—words and visual images together by recording their sound, shapes and color.  And so forth, finally to capture even the subbest of arts like Shakespearean sonnets or visiopoetic maple solitextual (i.e., solely textual) sculptures . . . 

BOBBI to Nico: please do not apologize. i am so happy to read this–i didn’t know if i could legitimately send my art work to anyone other than Mark Young of Otoliths, who is tolerant with my experiments / does not define his journal in terms of vispo, unlike others here.

i will have to check closely on this, but from your definition, i’d say a lot of editors are letting a lot of things pass for vispo which isn’t vispo.

thank you, Nico.

ME: We need editors like Mark Young who publish art they like regardless of what it is, but it’d be nice if they could let what they want be known in precise language.  Almost everyone in the otherstream publishes anything.  Anyone who wants material of a specific kind has to carefully say so because “visual poetry” tends to mean anything.  Not just works that are visual but not verbal, but works that are verbal and not visual.  My press doesn’t get submissions anymore, but when it did, people would send me poetry about sunsets—hey, sunsets are visual!—and complain when I rejected it as not visual poetry, which my press was primarily looking to publish.

David Baratier was next up:

People who solely practice visual art or vispo
are verbose and vague
either due to lack of words in their art
or to leave open a potential name shift
to make themselves popular again.

Miro was before vispo, so he is a precursor.

From outside the gates it looks like the best known vizpoets
call themselves artists because vispo is an unknown term to them, or
a fringe term (as Karl pointed out, coming into being as an antithesis
to the concrete poetry movement rather than an art term). Vispo
also has movement qualities rather than just a name.
Ruscha, Jenny Holtzer, Robert Indiana and so on are artists.
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ME: Ruscha, Holzer and Indiana are all, in some of their works, visual poets, regardless of how they see themselves.  I haven’t seen anything by Miro that seems a visual poem to me, but a few paintings by Klee seem close to being visual poems.  Stuart Davis made some, and so did Magritte.  Picasso may have, too.  I’ve shown these at my blog where I’ve also shown images from ARTnews,, which has something I consider a visual poem in almost every issue.  Visual artists added typography naturally to their subject matter just as they added everything else previous visual artists disregarded, and the world was already set up to accommodate their work as visual art in galleries and museums, so they had no need to call it anything special.  Poets becoming visual did, because their visual poetry was much more radical (because generally a good deal more verbal) than that of artists like Ruscha—and the venues for conventional poetry had, and are still having, trouble with it. 

VERNON: I think the discussions—and Wittgenstein’s increased presence in them in more than one capacity—demonstrate what I was trying to get at. Nobody agrees on what vispo is, even when they look at the same work. If you worry too much about the definition, you won’t concentrate properly on what you’re doing. Some people say I’m a visual poet, some say I’m not. And I’m certainly not one all the time. But I might be one some of the time, depending on who’s forming the opinion.  What I gather from today’s debate about definitions is: do the work and let the definitions fall where they may. 

ME:  As I’ve already said, poets shouldn’t care.  For critics or people trying to work out a reasonable poetics, it’s a different story.  Unfortunately, too many in these two cultures see those in the one they aren’t in as enemies or fools.

No doubt there will be more. 

Diary Entry

Tuesday, 27 December 2011, 5 P.M.  I only played tennis for about an hour this morning, but got tired.  Went to Mcdonald’s for a sausage and egg sandwich.  Got a little marketing done at the Winn Dixie near the McDonald’s, then got a nap of maybe fifteen minutes in.  After that, I spent a lot of time in the Internet discussion I made the subject of the day’s blog entry, which I just made the last corrections to, at least for now.  I guess I contributed over a thousand words to it, some of them insightful and/or interesting.   So I can’t consider myself totally out of it.  I feel the discussion itself will interest, or should interest, scholars later in the century, if only for what it reveals of one group of creative artists yakking with/at each other.  I’ve done no Work of Consequence, though.  I am now going to work up a hand-out for my exhibition, then probably take the rest of the day off.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Language-Use, Terminology, visual poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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neologisms « POETICKS

Posts Tagged ‘neologisms’

Entry 440 — Support for My Hyperneologization

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

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I came across it by chance:

APODIZATION* literally means “removing the foot”. It is the
technical term for changing the shape of a mathematical function, an
electrical signal, an optical transmission or a mechanical structure.
An example of apodization is the use of the Hann window in the Fast
Fourier transform analyzer to smooth the discontinuities at the
beginning and end of the sampled time record.

Now, then, is this a pompous, unpronounceable, superfluous term?  It was once a coinage, you know.  Why not “foot-removal?”  I suspect because whoever coined it wanted it quickly to narrow the mind into mathematics, i.e., a particular system or discipline–which I also want most of my terms though not “Wilshberia” to do.  I know: there’s a difference between a certified subject like mathematics and the theoretical psychology I try to link my terms to.  I understandably (I should think) don’t consider that relevant.  Why should someone be discouraged from systematic naming of terms to fit interactingly into a theory he’s creating just because he’s a crank.

I think one reason for my lack of recognition is that the sort of people who might be in sympathy with my hyperneologization are not generally the sort of people with an interest in poetics.  As I’ve often declared, I may well be too much of an abstract thinker to be a poet and too much of an intuitive thinker to be a scientist.  You’d think that would help me with both groups but it does the opposite.  About the only “real” mathematician who appreciates my mathematical poems is JoAnne Growney.

The other day, after my “anthrocentricity’ and “verosophy” had been subjected to the usual reactionary jibes, I asked why “egocentricity” was an acceptable word for “self-centeredness,” but “anthrocentricity” not an acceptable word for “people-centeredness.”  Needless to say, no one answered me.

Far too many many academics are so locked into their received understandings that they are blind to how those understandings might be revised or extended in ways that require the coinage of new terms.

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Entry 410 — Miscellaneous Thoughts, No. 14

Monday, March 28th, 2011

It seems to be I ought to give all my random or miscellaneous thoughts entries the same name, and number them, so I’m going to do that from now on.  This is number 14, because–after going through my previous such posts–my guess is that thirteen of them consisted of genuinely miscellaneous thoughts.

First, an e.mail of mine to the National Book Critic Circle that I’m a member of:

Not sure where to send this, so it’s to you:

Several times I’ve gone to the NBCC blog and wanted to comment on something there only to find I wasn’t allowed to, as just now, when I visited the entry about the Iranian-American poet’s book.  I’m curious why you bar comments to certain texts.  It seems rather against the idea of criticism and open debate that an organization like ours should favor.

As one who devotes probably too much time to Internet discussions, I’m well aware of the negatives of unmoderated comment threads, but (being pretty immoderate) I’m on the side of open discussions, anyway.  One suggestion would be to close comments that got too extreme, but having an external free-for-all place to go to continue the discussion.  And/or maybe a limit on number of posts to a given thread by one person.  3 to 5? That might force each of the person’s posts to be better thought-out.

Since I’m imposing on you already, I may as well tell you that I thought the interview I wasn’t allowed to comment on was interesting.  I merely wanted to express a hope that the series highlight a few micro-presses, which university presses and the small presses winning NBCC awards never are, although in your introduction to the series you lump all of these together.  The small press (which includes the university presses) publishes the same sort of poetry (which, as a poet, is all I really know about–but which, as a long-time poetry critic, I feel I know a lot about) the “major” presses publish; ditto many micro-presses, at least some of the time, but micro-presses, so far as I’m aware, are the only presses that publish what I call “otherstream” poetry (almost, since a few times a decade a maverick professor will get a university press to publish it).

Next a reply to something Geof said the other day at his blog:

I’ve always thought, “the only reader that must matter to the poet is the poet,” but have long believed that part of what gives pleasure to me as a poet is my vicarious enjoyment of the pleasure I believe others will get from my poem.”  In fact, I think perhaps I could not make poems without a belief that somewhere someone will enjoy it.

Later clarification: “To clarify what I said, I consider the only engagent of a poem of mine who counts is me, but that my me includes the selves of all whom I hope will visit my poem.”

Finally, my opinion of a text in one of Emerson’s journals, Napoleon’s name with it re-spelled one line below it in Greek letters, than re-spelled line by line under that, each line losing the first letter of the previous line:

I think it’s a trivial word game.  So trivial that I’m close to defining a new classification of verbal expression: “frivoliture,” for verbal works that don’t attempt to advocate proper behavior, express beauty or state truth, but are for fun only.  Crossword puzzles.  Pat, pit, put, pot, pet.  Acrostics.  Yes, some works called concrete poems.

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Entry 68 — Verosofactuality

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Some of my most boring and infuriatingly frustrating arguments over the yearshave been over what poetry is, mainly with those who refuse to accept any definition of it.  The worst are the Philistines who find it impossible to accept anything as a poem that they don’t like.   Having gotten into another such argument this week with a Shakespeare Authorship Wack who won’t let me define poems objectively as little lineated verbal constructions intended to give aesthetic pleasure (to give the quickest, simplest definition) because then I would be able to call myself a maker of poems and thus more likely to know what went on in Shakespeare’s head when he made a poem than the wack, who is not a poet.  For him a poem is something indefinably wonderful made out of words that only a few persons are capable of making–Shakespeare and perhaps one or two others (He mentions Donne and Milton, but really believes only one poet ever existed, Oxford, the author of Shakespeares Sonnets and other works), but no one later than Milton, and most certainly not I.

What can I say?  Nothing.

Stewing about it after vacating the argument, I came up with my solution for any difficult intellectual problem: a coinage.  This one was, “verosofact.”  I do agree with the subjectivists that nothing is 100% objectively true, but don’t care.  That’s because, for me, there exist what I’ve just dubbed, “verosofacts,” which are close enough to being 100% objectively true to be taken as 100% objectively true.  True beyond reasonable doubt.  Of course, there are degrees of verosofactuality–as I believe I discussed in this blog of mine recently: scientific verosofactuality is closer to absolute certainty that historical verosofactuality, but the latter is still close enough to absolute certainty to be considered true beyond reasonable doubt.  Like the verosofact that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him.

My coinage comes from my earlier coinage, “verosophy,” of the search for significant truths that science, history, philosophy and like endeavors are.  A verosofact is a verosophical absolute truth.

I don’t see how one can make any effort to find any even semi-consequential truth about existence without granting the eixstence of verosofacts.  I think almost everyone, for instance, accepts cause and effect as an absolute, although many do so only unconsciously.  Ditto the laws of logic.  And that there is a difference between material reality (for me, a verosofact) and other kinds of hypothesized realities, none of them capable of being verosofacts though not necessarily non-facts.

Sciences is not uncertain, only not absolutely certain, only verosofactual.  Well, a mixture of verosofactuality and uncertainty not yet classified as either verosofactual or contrafactual.

The ultimate verosofacts, the existence of material reality, and the validity of logic and cause and effect, are givens–the axioms that make verosophy possible.

Am I a child writing for infants?  Maybe.  I do believe everything I’ve said extremely simple and obvious.  It’s difficult to achieve such final simplicity, though.

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Entry 1162 — Ergodic Literature

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Today I came across a new literary term I think as dopey as any of mine: “ergodic literature.”  What follows  what Wikipedia says about it, which I found especially intriguing because I know so much less about this kind of stuff than I’d like to.

Ergodic literature is a term coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his book Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, and is derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning “work”, and hodos, meaning “path”. Aarseth’s book contains the most commonly cited definition:

In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

Cybertext is a subcategory of ergodic literature that Aarseth defines as “texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons” (Cybertext, page 75). The process of reading printed matter, in contrast, involves “trivial” extranoematic effort, that is, merely moving one’s eyes along lines of text and turning pages. Thus, hypertext fiction of the simple node and link variety is ergodic literature but not cybertext. A non-trivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, as the reader must constantly select which link to follow, but a link, when clicked, will always lead to the same node. A chat bot such as ELIZA is a cybertext because when the reader types in a sentence, the text-machine actually performs calculations on the fly that generate a textual response. The I Ching is likewise cited as an example of cybertext because it contains the rules for its own reading. The reader carries out the calculation but the rules are clearly embedded in the text itself.

It has been argued that these distinctions are not entirely clear and scholars still debate the fine points of the definitions. ]

One of the major innovations of the concept of ergodic literature is that it is not medium-specific. New media researchers have tended to focus on the medium of the text, stressing that it is for instance paper-based or electronic. Aarseth broke with this basic assumption that the medium was the most important distinction, and argued that the mechanics of texts need not be medium-specific. Ergodic literature is not defined by medium, but by the way in which the text functions. Thus, both paper-based and electronic texts can be ergodic: “The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users” (Cybertext, p 179).

The examples Aarseth gives include a diverse group of texts: wall inscriptions of the temples in ancient Egypt that are connected two-dimensionally (on one wall) or three dimensionally (from wall to wall or room to room); the I Ching; Apollinaire’s Calligrammes in which the words of the poem “are spread out in several directions to form a picture on the page, with no clear sequence in which to be read”; Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, Roman, a novel with shuffleable pages; Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems; B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates; Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted with Tea; Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA; Ayn Rand’s play Night of January 16th, in which members of the audience form a jury and choose one of two endings; William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter’s Racter; Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: a story; Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s Multi-User Dungeon (aka MUD1); and James Aspnes’s TinyMUD.

All these examples require non-trivial effort from the reader, who must participate actively in the construction of the text.

The concepts of cybertext and ergodic literature were of seminal importance to new media studies, in particular literary approaches to digital texts and to game studies.

Note: I found the term, “scripton,” interesting, so googled it until I was give this: “Aarseth suggests the terms scripton and texton to describe the ontological dualism of a cybertext: Scriptons are ‘strings (of signs) as they appear to readers’ and those parts of a cybertext that are not directly accessible to the reader/user are termed textons and defined as ‘strings (of signs) as they exist in the text’ (Aarseth, 62). In conventional literature, the scriptons equal the textons because the immobility of the signifiers ensure that there can be no divergence between the text that is stored on the page and the text that is displayed on it.”  I use the term, “texteme,” to indicate the smallest unit of text in print.  Quite a bit different.

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Entry 784 — Using the Reasoning of Roberts

Friday, June 29th, 2012

I’m really excited by the way Chief Justice Roberts reads the constitution, for it gives me a great idea to use for the benefit of poets.  Here’s what we have to do, and I’m sure Barry will go along with it: pass a law requiring everyone in the country over the age of 12 to present their local IRS office receipts showing the purchase of ten new books of poetry every year or pay a tax of $10,000.  There’s only one problem: we have to make sure that a law defining poetry, using my definition, is passed with it.  Otherwise, the novelists, self-help authors and all kinds of other writers will get all the benefits.   My latest definition of poetry, by the way, is: “any group of words that, when written, are written in lines (i.e., lengths of words across a page that end and/or begin at a pre-set margin, and/or are internally interrupted by spaces or any kind of unsemantic matter such as dollar signs), with or without other elements such as graphic images, and possess a semantic meaning which is of central importance to the group’s aesthetic meaning.”

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Entry 698 — An E.Mail from South America

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Desparate once again for something to blog about, I’m reporting today on an e.mail I got a little while ago from Jorge

Dear Bob Grumman

I hope you are fine.

While reading Writing To Be Seen, I came across your concept of visio-textual art and found it interesting in order to include in my postdoctoral research report. In Permutoria: Visio-Textual Art, the same term and concept appeared. I have bought these books when I was in the II Avant Writing Symposium held in Columbus, Ohio, where I met Crag Hill, Nico Vassilakis, John M. Bennett, Miekal And, and many others. It was a great meeting. It was a pity you couldn´t come, for it was an opportunity to meet and talk with you.

I would like you to send a copy of the text of yours where you explain your concept of visual-text art. The explanation in Writing to be seen is not complete.
Best regards from Brazil

I answered quickly. (I’m pretty good about quick answers to questions about visual poetry.)

“Nice hearing from you again, Jorge!” said I. (We’d talked a bit about visual poetry over the Internet before.) “Yes, I wish I could have been at the symposium in Columbus—I would have enjoyed meeting you.  And seeing Nico in person for the first time, although he’s an old friend.  I’ll try to find where I’ve discussed “visio-textual art and e.mail it to you.  It may take a while because I am not well-organized and I have discussed it and related terms in various places.

“Actually, though, my own definition of it is simple: it is any work of art that contains both textual matter and matter that is wholly visual.  By ‘wholly visual,’ I mean not visual merely in the way a conventional poem is since we must see it to read it, but in the way an image of a rose is.  It’s not an important term for me, except to emphasize my belief that ‘visual poetry’ is not a good name for anything with both textual matter, which can be non-verbal, and visual matter because it is too inclusive to be effective, and goes against the tradition of poetry for thousands of years as something containing words.

“Feel free to ask for clarification or whatever else you may need.”

Yes, this is my standard boilerplate, but I harp on it because no one else seems to take it seriously. Visual poets don’t like narrowing terms; the academy would agree with me if they paid any attention at all to visual poetry.
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Entry 607 — More from Spidertangle

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Later Vernon Frazer entered the discussion:

Thanks, John. I use “definitions” as a shorthand for conversational or descriptive purposes. As far as trying to work, I avoid the “prescriptions” suggested by definitions because they impose limits on my thinking and interfere with my working at my best. Without the work, nobody would have fodder for all the differing definitions. I’m flashing back to Wittgenstein and trying to define “game.” 

ME: Sorry, Vernon, but I’m (obviously) not a Wittgenstein fan.  Just because a few words are hard to define, at least for someone like Wittgenstein, doesn’t make the eternal struggle to define words (in order fully to understand what they denote) futile. As for the “prescriptiveness” of definitions, they are only prescriptive about how an artist can responsibly label his works, not—if he has a functioning brain—about how he can make them.  I am annoyingly repetitious about stating this, because it seems to me the main misunderstanding artists have about criticism.  (Which is dependent on what artists produce—but that is dependent on what prior artists have produced and, I believe, on what critics have said about it.  A work of art ultimately is not merely what it is by itself, but that and what others have said about it.   –Mr. Cantshuddup

Bobbi Lurie again:

wittgenstein fan or not–

what is this?

is this vispo or not?

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2011/10/bobbi-lurie-ludwig-wittgenstein.html

ME: I like your image a lot, Bobbi, but I have to be sarcastic in answering your question: it’s a musical automobile, so a branch of chempo, not of vispo.

Nico was less sarcastic:

I wouldn’t tag it as such, no.

There are these websites you find when doing a search of visual poetry that pertain to photography, wedding shots, naturescapes, etc. They use visual poetry as a descriptive for hallmark type sentiment.

Your drawing of Ludwig is very much reminiscent of egon’s stuff,

ME: Same response here.

which I like quite a bit. It’s not vispo tho. My own filter for such things usually entails the existence of a focus on alphabet. That’s primary to me, but not all on this list. I giggle at your use of
Sophistication. I think we’re still in the process of hammering it down – the ongoing sixty year process. The inability to pluck a satisfying set of terms by now – one that’d satisfy most practitioners just spotlights the fact that this practice is separate to separate people. That means nothing gets answered or gets answered in myriad ways.

ME: At one point I spent some time trying to determine how I thought works concerned with the alphabet should fit into my taxonomy.  I think I concluded that the alphabet is verbal—a peculiar sort of word meaning “these are the letters, in order.”  However, with the works you’re speaking of, Nico, letters are the subject, not the alphabet, so for me they are textual designage.

NICO: Anyway, I did apologize for bringing this up.

ME: As opposed to leaving Spidertangle as a no-discussion zone?

Bobbi replied:

Thank you, Nico. 

As I wrote to David, I really needed this description.

Yes. Sophistication meaning “I don’t know what these people are talking about. What is the secret?”

The fact that you’ve been struggling with terms….may I suggest you just say: “the alphabet must be included–this is in relationship to written language–the representation of something via language vs. via image” (clumsy this, i know, but that would have helped me in the several year search i’ve been on, asking vispo artists this question)

ME: Too bad you somehow missed me, your fellow Bobbi/Bobby, Bobbi.  I’ve been cranking out the dogma that poetry has to have significant words for years, and that it’s silly to consider “visual poetry” not to be a form of poetry. Very few in the visiotextual field (but probably everyone in conventional poetry) agree with me, even though I have a fairly broad idea of what “words” are—I accept word-fragments, punctuation marks, any typographical symbol (like @), mathematical symbols and even the alphabet or some section of it long enough to identify it as an alphabet, as “words”—and don’t dispute that at the border between the verbal and the visual there are activities going on of value that may also qualify as visual poetry (since no definition can have a sharp border—unless it’s of something not in the real world like odd numbers).  Seems to me an art should be defined first of all by what materials it explicitly uses in general (words or visual images, say), then by how it uses them, again in general (by pronouncing them or recording their sound, in one case; in the other, by recording their shape and color); a sub-art, like visual poetry, should be defined by what specific materials it uses and how, specifically, it uses them—words and visual images together by recording their sound, shapes and color.  And so forth, finally to capture even the subbest of arts like Shakespearean sonnets or visiopoetic maple solitextual (i.e., solely textual) sculptures . . . 

BOBBI to Nico: please do not apologize. i am so happy to read this–i didn’t know if i could legitimately send my art work to anyone other than Mark Young of Otoliths, who is tolerant with my experiments / does not define his journal in terms of vispo, unlike others here.

i will have to check closely on this, but from your definition, i’d say a lot of editors are letting a lot of things pass for vispo which isn’t vispo.

thank you, Nico.

ME: We need editors like Mark Young who publish art they like regardless of what it is, but it’d be nice if they could let what they want be known in precise language.  Almost everyone in the otherstream publishes anything.  Anyone who wants material of a specific kind has to carefully say so because “visual poetry” tends to mean anything.  Not just works that are visual but not verbal, but works that are verbal and not visual.  My press doesn’t get submissions anymore, but when it did, people would send me poetry about sunsets—hey, sunsets are visual!—and complain when I rejected it as not visual poetry, which my press was primarily looking to publish.

David Baratier was next up:

People who solely practice visual art or vispo
are verbose and vague
either due to lack of words in their art
or to leave open a potential name shift
to make themselves popular again.

Miro was before vispo, so he is a precursor.

From outside the gates it looks like the best known vizpoets
call themselves artists because vispo is an unknown term to them, or
a fringe term (as Karl pointed out, coming into being as an antithesis
to the concrete poetry movement rather than an art term). Vispo
also has movement qualities rather than just a name.
Ruscha, Jenny Holtzer, Robert Indiana and so on are artists.
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ME: Ruscha, Holzer and Indiana are all, in some of their works, visual poets, regardless of how they see themselves.  I haven’t seen anything by Miro that seems a visual poem to me, but a few paintings by Klee seem close to being visual poems.  Stuart Davis made some, and so did Magritte.  Picasso may have, too.  I’ve shown these at my blog where I’ve also shown images from ARTnews,, which has something I consider a visual poem in almost every issue.  Visual artists added typography naturally to their subject matter just as they added everything else previous visual artists disregarded, and the world was already set up to accommodate their work as visual art in galleries and museums, so they had no need to call it anything special.  Poets becoming visual did, because their visual poetry was much more radical (because generally a good deal more verbal) than that of artists like Ruscha—and the venues for conventional poetry had, and are still having, trouble with it. 

VERNON: I think the discussions—and Wittgenstein’s increased presence in them in more than one capacity—demonstrate what I was trying to get at. Nobody agrees on what vispo is, even when they look at the same work. If you worry too much about the definition, you won’t concentrate properly on what you’re doing. Some people say I’m a visual poet, some say I’m not. And I’m certainly not one all the time. But I might be one some of the time, depending on who’s forming the opinion.  What I gather from today’s debate about definitions is: do the work and let the definitions fall where they may. 

ME:  As I’ve already said, poets shouldn’t care.  For critics or people trying to work out a reasonable poetics, it’s a different story.  Unfortunately, too many in these two cultures see those in the one they aren’t in as enemies or fools.

No doubt there will be more. 

Diary Entry

Tuesday, 27 December 2011, 5 P.M.  I only played tennis for about an hour this morning, but got tired.  Went to Mcdonald’s for a sausage and egg sandwich.  Got a little marketing done at the Winn Dixie near the McDonald’s, then got a nap of maybe fifteen minutes in.  After that, I spent a lot of time in the Internet discussion I made the subject of the day’s blog entry, which I just made the last corrections to, at least for now.  I guess I contributed over a thousand words to it, some of them insightful and/or interesting.   So I can’t consider myself totally out of it.  I feel the discussion itself will interest, or should interest, scholars later in the century, if only for what it reveals of one group of creative artists yakking with/at each other.  I’ve done no Work of Consequence, though.  I am now going to work up a hand-out for my exhibition, then probably take the rest of the day off.

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Entry 606 — The Other Day at Spidertangle

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

The other day at Spidertangle, Nico Vassilakis asked, “Is this acceptable as one of the many definitions of ‘vispo?’”

When art and text convene, the resulting blur is “vispo,” a portmanteau of “visual” and “poetry.” It’s where alphabet morphs into image and language is reinvented into visual experience.

My reply:
Seems to me we need a term meaning something like “partial loose definition.” That’s what the above seems to me—which does make it acceptable as one of many such definitions. Hyperlogical as I am, though, I believe there is only one acceptable verosophical definition of vispo (if we take it as a nickname for “visual poetry,” as I do, because is unproductively confusing to consider vispo different from visual poetry)—although I wouldn’t disagree with anyone who said we haven’t yet expressed it. Substitute “scientific” for “verosophical,” if the latter bothers you. A verosophical definition would be a rigorous definition as near complete as it is possible to be. Not an exploratory definition however useful that can be, but a final definition. Not something blurred, but something distinct one can go to the blurred from. I rather like the idea of vispo as a locus where visimagery (not “art” since music and other non-visual things are art) and language (because text alone is not language and language has always been considered necessary for poetry, and if we decide it isn’t, then what isn’t poetry) fuse (rather than merely convene) and increase the expressive potency of the other without any loss of whatever expressive potency each would have by itself.
Maybe a good distinction would be between a conversational, and a verosophical, definition of a term.

NICO: Bob, you are probably right – that distinction can be made, but I sometimes wonder if the uninitiated wouldn’t end up confused with somewhat exacting neologist definitions. I’m not inferring that what I said captures the true nature of vispo, but think simplicity, be it conversational or not, is useful. I should also say i do appreciate your work in mapping out the verbo-visual permutations that exist and the time and effort you put into it.

Thanks, Nico. I tried my best to show that what I call conversational definitions are definitely useful. Verosophical ones are, too, but probably only to verosophers—i.e., the very few seriously concerned with the search for truth.

Karl Kempton then chimed in with:

perhaps first usage or the coining of the term vispo / vizpo can add to this discussion. as far as i know, if i was not the first i was among the first in the 1970’s to use this term as a short hand in my correspondence with national and international visual poets. at that time we were freeing ourselves from the term concrete poetry to define our works. also at that time, my spelling was phonetically inclined. some have said i was texting before texting. it was an automatic follow through.

vispo / vispo was a short hand for visual poetry, the first usage of which was of european origin. “visual poetry” there, as a term, was used to free themselves from the restricted and discredited field of concrete poetry, a minimalist fission poetics blowing up language to create new patterns. this process paralleled minimalist painting and minimalist and electronic music. visual poetry was a fusion process taking these new and then newer patterns and textures wedding them with another art form or other forms.

in my opinion, demanding “recognizable” language word(s), part or parts erases, or worse censors, the possibility(ies) of wordless poetic gesture(s) and poetic aesthetic(s), rhythms, lines, pictorial metaphor(s) and countless other poetic terms that can be made visual without words. this part of the arena is border blur or the soft membrane or tissue between rigid classically drawn demarcation “scientific” lines separating classifications in the assumption each defined field is as if a dead noun and hence incapable of fluid movement or evolution.

I replied to parts of this as follows:

K: in my opinion, demanding “recognizable” language word(s),

B: As no one I know of does. I, for instance, simply ask for something called “poetry” to consist of words, as poetry always has. All this “demands” is that one not call something with no recognizable words in it “poetry.” And here we meet the bizarre belief of many that if “visual poetry” requires recognizable words, one cannot make a work of art without recognizable words. But I’m here with the good news that one can do that. One need only call what one creates something other than visual poetry!

K: part or parts erases, or worse censors, the possibility(ies) of wordless poetic gesture(s) and poetic aesthetic(s), rhythms, lines, pictorial metaphor(s) and countless other poetic terms that can be made visual without words.

B: They can be made musical without notes, too, so let’s call them vismoo.

K: this part of the arena is border blur or the soft membrane or tissue between rigid classically drawn demarcation “scientific” lines separating classifications in the assumption each defined field is as if a dead noun and hence incapable of fluid movement or evolution.

B: Right, Karl. You live in the ocean because there’s no exact way to tell where the ocean ends and land begins.

I’m afraid it comes down to an unending struggle between Snow’s two cultures.

Karl’s response:

not wanting to get into a long history as i have just been hit with a nasty cold, the long and short of it has to do in part with a generational difference as well as o so many single glance, so what concrete works and cliches, some even winding up on greeting cards.  the generation difference is building upon what was done and taking it to the fusion process. there was a possibility of a real jump in multimedia but concrete in general turned off lexical poets, calligraphers, book artists, etc., a ready made audience if there ever was one. there was no embrace because the works failed to match the quality of the painters, musicians, sculptors, calligraphers, book artists, etc. not that there were exceptions such as finlay. phillips, dencker, xenakis and others made the jump to aid in the formation along with the lettrists of visual poetry.

for japan, see karl young’s intro on kitasono . having already run his run of concrete many years before concrete was coined, he did not participate in concrete be rehashing his previous concrete before concrete, but submitted his plastic poems. then the rerun story of mine and others re patchen having composed concrete before concrete then being stiff armed. others as well.

i think dencker edited the first or one of the first visual poetry anthologies, 1972. techen was published in 1978 a year before i switched kaldron from a lexical and visual poetry mix to visual poetry only. concrete works were not excluded from any of this but concrete excluded visual poets, esp the lettrists.

the ocean has no fixed line. where the chumash lived 15,000 to 20,000 years ago now under water. soon homes and cites adjacent to the ocean will receive the same fate because fools thought boundaries fixed. boundaries change. worse than building in flood plains. the wise remain on high ground. we are at 70 feet on what is an old sand dune soon to be an island. but my body will have been turned to ash by then.

out of energy,

karl

What Cathy Bennett then said, and I replied to, was:

1- “increase the expressive potency of the other without any loss of
whatever expressive potency each would have by itself. ”
Bob,
The above section*** is where you are completely wrong… and by saying
it is a “scientific” approach, still doesn’t make it right.

Can’t my (very tentative) definition be okay as a scientific one, Cathy? Do you not agree that a scientific one might have some use? In any case, I was just giving a different take on the long-difficult struggle of our language to produce a definition of vispo.

2- “because text alone is not language and language has always been
considered necessary for poetry, and if we decide it isn’t, then what
isn’t poetry”
is a problem when it comes to “asemic” vispo. “Visual Poetry” is not so self-limiting.

You lost me here. If something consisting of textual elements but no words is called visual poetry, how does that not raise the question of what is not visual poetry? Or not poetry. Or do you agree that something consisting of textual elements but not words should not be called “visual poetry?” Which, by the way, is the one thing I am far from alone in believing.

So you want to limit “text” to “language” and you also want to limit “art” to one media/ I say “NO” to both ideas.

It just seems to me that all poetry, including visual poetry (or vispo) should be limited to language, and that text is not language until it becomes words. I’ll never understand the problem so many have with this simple idea. As for “art” as both visual art and all forms of art, no one agrees with me that that can be confusing, or that it’s demeaning to visual art not to have a name of its own. It’s not at all important, though.

3- The “search for truth” is fine, except when approached in your
narcissistic manner…

Well, you have to admit that at least I don’t think we should call the search for truth “Bobgrummanism” although I have to admit that sometimes I think I’m the only one pursuing it.

you have created your mathemaku and now your definition to define it, but “in truth”-that definition*** can only be applied to your mathemaku, which you have decided to limit to your “balanced two elements”.

So, as far as your posited questions: “Is this acceptable as “one” of the many definitions”– Yes… for Bob Grumman’s mathemaku perhaps, but your mathemaku should not be held up as the highest scientific principle of “visual poetry” towards which we all must strive.

Next, Cathy’s husband, John, said, “ANY ‘definition’ of a phenomenon is necessary a definition or description of that phenom. in the past. As soon as it is made, someone comes along and does something that requires the definition be changed, in order to include it.”

But the new thing done need not be included. It may, in fact, not be a new thing: for instance, Klee and many other painters included text but not words in their paintings; their paintings are still considered paintings the subject matter of which is letters—The Villa R, for instance. No one saw, or even now sees, any need to call Klee a visual poet. The word, “chariot,” still means what it did to the Romans even though we now have the automobile. In the arts, even when definitions change, they keep some main part—e.g., the term “music” is now used for works people a hundred years ago called “noise,” but it retains its main part, which is “an art concerned with sound.” Similarly, “poetry” has come to include free verse—but hasn’t, except among certain visiotextual artists—stopped being consider an art of words. I simply don’t see why it should be. Think what mathematics would be if it were decided that numbers no longer had to be part of its definition.  –Bob

In this particular case, and I believe Karl referred to this issue, is that large body of work called “visual poetry” that has NO explicitly linguistic or lettristic elements in it at all. There is a lot of work being done in this mode in Spain now. It seems to use images as concepts, or “words”; it’s a kind of picture writing.  –John

If the pictures do something explicitly verbal—do more than make a gesture some consider linguistic, that is—then it would seem reasonable to call the works involved “visual poetry.” The big problem is a definition so broad or subjective as to be meaningless. Why, for instance, should ballet not be considered visual poetry? (Except metaphorically, which is completely something else.)  –Bob

Joel Lipman added:

To stir & nurture, not resolve, this periodic thread, here’s Willard Bohn’s definition, suitably the opening couple sentences of his Modern Visual Poetry, Chapter 1:

“For all intents and purposes visual poetry can be defined as poetry that is meant to be seen — poetry that presupposes a viewer as well as a reader. Combining visual and verbal elements, it not only appeals to the reader’s intellect but arrests his or her gaze.”

Bohn’s second paragraph particularizes further distinctions: “Where visual poetry differs from ordinary poetry is in the extent of its iconic dimension, which is much more pronounced, and in the degree of its self-awareness. Visual poems are immediately recognizable by their refusal to adhere to a rectilinear grid and by their tendency to flout their plasticity.”

I find this definition grounding and useful, informed about the suggestions and nuances of its language. Its application enables Bohn to write a fine book on the subject, one which is pretty up-to-date, closing a chapter that discusses Perloff’s observations and compositions that explore digitalization’s “multidimensional realm of their own making.”

At some point, Bobbi Lurie and John had the following exchange:

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 1:49 PM, bobbi luriewrote:

Do you consider a piece of visual art, any piece of visual art, visual poetry?
No
Or are there limitations to the definition?
Doubtless, yes. But definitions really don;t interest me very much; I never have anything I can use them for.

If I’m writing an intro to or selecting material for an anthology of something, I’ll use some kind of rule-of-thumb “definition” of what it is I’m selecting, tho it’s often pretty ad hoc, a matter of practicality or limited resources, not something I find very interesting.

Re some of what Bob & Cathy were talking about, I don;t think a “scientific” definition of art is possible or makes any sense. Science is a method, not a matter of absolute categories. A scientific study of the process of artistic creation, however, is quite possible, and could be very interesting indeed.

I couldn’t let that go by unshot at:

As an artist, I care very little about definitions; as a critic, I find them essential, and I need them to be what I consider “scientific”—i.e., objective, logical and reasonably complete (only “reasonably complete” because no definition can be absolutely complete, although the best definitions will be complete enough to satisfy any sane person).

Nico returned with:

you’ll find several responses to THAT question – and others who wont care at all. i think it’s about how you define language and poetry and looking. i wonder about my recent work sometimes, if it’s even vispo anymore. ive done past work where i imbue a piece or series with a kind of rosetta stone inorder to convey how the word can transform into parts of parts of letters. even snippets of letters, thus eliminating traditional MEANING by focusing on letters alone. then my interest shifted into staring my way through a word and into a letter – and that basically annihilated MEANING, and lead to the mere visual aspect of language. is there poetry there? is there meaning there? is it elements or the ingredients of language sitting there like a recipe waiting to be cooked? i think in some sense, yes. but there are other times that i am certain it’s vispo. as language is not only words. though i do relentlessly stare at letters – is a letter a poem? this gets into bob grumman territory. he’d say no. but i think every thing looked at is, why? because our brain does nothing but process what comes across our eyes-in-the-front face. or maybe it’s 2 letters that is the ultimate denominator of poetry. as to me, a letter is an atom and a word is a molecule – and letters are constantly in search of each other to create molecules. my interest in the past few years has been to stop the letter from huddling with other letters to form a word and focus on the letter itself. is that vispo? i dont know. im sure there will be a response. but JMB is right about the spaniards – picture writing – theyre pretty stunning, but is that vispo. does it matter. like hiessenberg – the more you try pinning it down the further down the road you find it.

That stumbled me into this:

I think ultimately it will be easy to categorize these different combinations of graphics and text. Possibly even now there are brain-scanning devices that can tell what part of the brain a person most experiences a work of art. I contend (and—I believe, the certified experts in the field would agree) that so far as visiotextual art is concerned, there are two brain areas involved, the visual and the verbal. I believe conventional poetry will light up the verbal area, conventional painting and sculpture will light up the visual area, visual poetry by my definition will light up both areas about equally, and the works Nico is talking about will do weird things that we need to break the verbal area of the brain into sub-areas to talk about; I think it will mainly light up the visual area but also light up a pre-verbal part of the verbal area. I think the brain (and probably part of the nervous system prior to the brain) subject stimuli to a long sorting procedure, first identifying letters, then words, then grammatical structuring, then the connections of the words to what they denote. The sorting procedure will break down after identifying Nico’s letters BUT certainly give them an aesthetic charge that will make them different from a conventional painting—but, I believe, not enough different to make them a form of poetry, or not painting. The subject matter of lots of paintings will also activate small areas of the brain besides the visual area. Perhaps most paintings do. Needless to say, it’s all a lot more complex than this. For instance, the presence or absence of people concerns in an artwork has a huge importance.

Which is where the discussion was today t around 3 in the afternoon here in Port Charlotte, Florida.

Diary Entry

Monday, 26 December 2011, 2 P.M.  About the first thing I did today was run a mile.  My time was again, over eleven minutes, which is horrible.  I can’t understand why I’m not getting better, although my not having run much for months, and not having run since last Friday (or was it Thursday?) may well have something to do with it.  Later in the morning I gave my latest SPR column a once-over and put in into an envelope with the reviews I had on hand.  That is now in my mailbox, awaiting delivery.  Just now I also wrote a new Poem poem.  I spent less than five minutes on it, but its central idea was one I’ve been thinking about for over a week.  It’s nothing much, at all, but probably worth keeping.  I used it to take care of my blog entry for today.  I haven’t gotten going on what I think of as my final major chore of the year, the response to Jake’s essay.  I think all I need to do is find a way to arrange what I’ve already have from what I wrote over a month ago, and several blog entries that seem relevant, and the little next matter I’ve written, and polish it, but . . .  I keep waiting for the surge I used to feel whenever I was really ready to tackle a writing project, but it’s no more anywhere in me than my ability to run a bad mile instead of a horrendous mile is.   

 

.

Posted in Poetics, Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again!

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

 

Yeah, for almost forty years now I’ve been defining and re-defining visual poetry, often returning to old definitions.  Believe it or not, I’m trying to come up with one others will accept–without letting it go as “undefinable,” or–worse–infinitely-definable.  I think I may
have it now–but I always think that when I advance a new definition.  This one is only slightly new.  What’s new is the sub-categories I split it into.  Okay, here goes:

Visual Poetry is an artwork containing a verbal and a graphic constituent in which part or the whole of the semantic meaning of the verbal constituent and part or the whole of the representa-tional meaning of the graphic constituent each makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

It comes in two varieties: visiophorical and visiocollagic poetry.  Visiophorical Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent acts as a metaphor for part or the whole of what its verbal constituent denotes that makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

Visiocollagic Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent combines ametaphorically with part or the whole of the semantic meaning of its verbal element in such a
manner as to make a centrally significant contribution (in the view of a consensus of informed observers) to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

An awkward set of definitions but necessarily so.

I’ve decided a main reason it’s taken me so long to get a final set of poetics definitions is that I’m treating poetics as a verosophy–or attempt to come to a rational, objective understanding of some consequential large-scale aspect of existence sufficiently close to full for any reasonable person–and there are very few people (especially in the arts) interested (or, probably, qualified for) such an undertaking.  Those few who are, are off in their own wilder-nesses, not mine, or involved in a group effort as most of the sciences are.   In short, I’m basically without help–although occasionally I have gotten useful feedback.  I’m also over-extended–which is my fault.

Posted in Poetics, Taxonomy, Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 448 — Another Terminological Change

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

.

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

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

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

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

Posted in Aesthetics, Literary Taxonomy, Philosophy, Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 440 — Support for My Hyperneologization

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

.

I came across it by chance:

APODIZATION* literally means “removing the foot”. It is the
technical term for changing the shape of a mathematical function, an
electrical signal, an optical transmission or a mechanical structure.
An example of apodization is the use of the Hann window in the Fast
Fourier transform analyzer to smooth the discontinuities at the
beginning and end of the sampled time record.

Now, then, is this a pompous, unpronounceable, superfluous term?  It was once a coinage, you know.  Why not “foot-removal?”  I suspect because whoever coined it wanted it quickly to narrow the mind into mathematics, i.e., a particular system or discipline–which I also want most of my terms though not “Wilshberia” to do.  I know: there’s a difference between a certified subject like mathematics and the theoretical psychology I try to link my terms to.  I understandably (I should think) don’t consider that relevant.  Why should someone be discouraged from systematic naming of terms to fit interactingly into a theory he’s creating just because he’s a crank.

I think one reason for my lack of recognition is that the sort of people who might be in sympathy with my hyperneologization are not generally the sort of people with an interest in poetics.  As I’ve often declared, I may well be too much of an abstract thinker to be a poet and too much of an intuitive thinker to be a scientist.  You’d think that would help me with both groups but it does the opposite.  About the only “real” mathematician who appreciates my mathematical poems is JoAnne Growney.

The other day, after my “anthrocentricity’ and “verosophy” had been subjected to the usual reactionary jibes, I asked why “egocentricity” was an acceptable word for “self-centeredness,” but “anthrocentricity” not an acceptable word for “people-centeredness.”  Needless to say, no one answered me.

Far too many many academics are so locked into their received understandings that they are blind to how those understandings might be revised or extended in ways that require the coinage of new terms.

Tags:
Posted in Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 439 — A Textual Design by Max Ernst

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

.

.

This is Erectio sine qua non, by Max Ernst, 1919.  I copied it out of Surrealst Drawings, with text by Frantisek Smejkal.  I view it as letters taking shape, with other forms, to eventually result in an erection that can be taken to be “meaning” formed of language.  Other interpretations of equal validity can be made.  Although I made out two words under the faucet, they seem to me much to minor to make this pice a visual poem.  Nor, of course, does the book it’s in call it that.  Remember, kids, as Uncle Bob keeps telling you, a word should always mean something, but it should always indicate something that it isn’t, or it’s useless.  So, if you want to call this neato visimage a visual poem, fine–but Uncle Bob, and maybe one or two other people, will want to know what isn’t a visual poem.

Posted in Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 438 — Fun with the Nullinguists

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

And just one more language note, since we are poets and poetry readers. . .

Unlike many academics, bureaucrats, or military officials, I don’t think it’s necessary to invent pompous, unpronounceable and superfluous synonyms for simple terms that already exist.  At best it’s comic relief.  At worst, well, see George Orwell. . . .  About the only one of good old Bob’s prolific stream of coinages that strikes me as worth keeping is “burstnorm.”  That actually does improve on the other available words, seems to me, and has the advantage of simplicity and poetic power.

–David Graham


Okay, David, tell me what’s wrong with “infraverbal poetry”

–Bob

A guess, “Bob” (& I didn’t even take any pills!) —

M: rigid, defensive tribal and national identities, ungiving hierarchical principles, concentrated authority, reflexive aggression in a repetition compulsion that overrides desires for peace …

–Amy King

Thanks, Amy.  It’s good for my morale to know you can’t find anything of consequence wrong with my term.

But this may be a fate not worse than the memento mori of the progeny of Aristotelian logic which remain eternally fixed in delusions of universal absolutes and therefore empty of useful meaning. To wit, Wittgenstein’s remark, “But in fact all propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing…”

–Amy King

Spoken like a true absolutist.  Nothing to do with me, though, for I believe in maxilutism, the belief that while no absolutes exist (except in logic and mathematics, I now realize), many maxilutes, or understandings close enough to absolutely true to be treated as absolutes, do exist.

–Bob

* * * * * * *

This kind of nullinguistics is not entirely worthless: when Professor Graham later said “misspelled poetry” was what “infraverbal poetry” should be called, it made me say why he was wrong: “‘Misspelled poetry’ clearly doesn’t work.  For one thing it does not indicate whether the misspelling is intended or not.  Another is that ‘misspelledly’ doesn’t work very well (I don’t think) as an adverb.  Probably most important, there are many examples of infraverbal poems that have much more going on inside them than what most people would think of as misspellings–a letter on its side, for instance.  Actually, some infraverbal words are correctly spelled.  ‘Misspelling,’ for instance–which I just made up and is certainly not much of an infraverbal poem but is one.”  I count the realization that infraverbal words can be correctly spelled a nice addition to my knowledge of them.

Posted in Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 438 — Fun with the Nullinguists « POETICKS

«
»

Entry 438 — Fun with the Nullinguists

And just one more language note, since we are poets and poetry readers. . .

Unlike many academics, bureaucrats, or military officials, I don’t think it’s necessary to invent pompous, unpronounceable and superfluous synonyms for simple terms that already exist.  At best it’s comic relief.  At worst, well, see George Orwell. . . .  About the only one of good old Bob’s prolific stream of coinages that strikes me as worth keeping is “burstnorm.”  That actually does improve on the other available words, seems to me, and has the advantage of simplicity and poetic power.

–David Graham


Okay, David, tell me what’s wrong with “infraverbal poetry”

–Bob

A guess, “Bob” (& I didn’t even take any pills!) –

M: rigid, defensive tribal and national identities, ungiving hierarchical principles, concentrated authority, reflexive aggression in a repetition compulsion that overrides desires for peace …

–Amy King

Thanks, Amy.  It’s good for my morale to know you can’t find anything of consequence wrong with my term.

But this may be a fate not worse than the memento mori of the progeny of Aristotelian logic which remain eternally fixed in delusions of universal absolutes and therefore empty of useful meaning. To wit, Wittgenstein’s remark, “But in fact all propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing…”

–Amy King

Spoken like a true absolutist.  Nothing to do with me, though, for I believe in maxilutism, the belief that while no absolutes exist (except in logic and mathematics, I now realize), many maxilutes, or understandings close enough to absolutely true to be treated as absolutes, do exist.

–Bob

* * * * * * *

This kind of nullinguistics is not entirely worthless: when Professor Graham later said “misspelled poetry” was what “infraverbal poetry” should be called, it made me say why he was wrong: “‘Misspelled poetry’ clearly doesn’t work.  For one thing it does not indicate whether the misspelling is intended or not.  Another is that ‘misspelledly’ doesn’t work very well (I don’t think) as an adverb.  Probably most important, there are many examples of infraverbal poems that have much more going on inside them than what most people would think of as misspellings–a letter on its side, for instance.  Actually, some infraverbal words are correctly spelled.  ‘Misspelling,’ for instance–which I just made up and is certainly not much of an infraverbal poem but is one.”  I count the realization that infraverbal words can be correctly spelled a nice addition to my knowledge of them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 440 — Support for My Hyperneologization « POETICKS

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»

Entry 440 — Support for My Hyperneologization

.

I came across it by chance:

APODIZATION* literally means “removing the foot”. It is the
technical term for changing the shape of a mathematical function, an
electrical signal, an optical transmission or a mechanical structure.
An example of apodization is the use of the Hann window in the Fast
Fourier transform analyzer to smooth the discontinuities at the
beginning and end of the sampled time record.

Now, then, is this a pompous, unpronounceable, superfluous term?  It was once a coinage, you know.  Why not “foot-removal?”  I suspect because whoever coined it wanted it quickly to narrow the mind into mathematics, i.e., a particular system or discipline–which I also want most of my terms though not “Wilshberia” to do.  I know: there’s a difference between a certified subject like mathematics and the theoretical psychology I try to link my terms to.  I understandably (I should think) don’t consider that relevant.  Why should someone be discouraged from systematic naming of terms to fit interactingly into a theory he’s creating just because he’s a crank.

I think one reason for my lack of recognition is that the sort of people who might be in sympathy with my hyperneologization are not generally the sort of people with an interest in poetics.  As I’ve often declared, I may well be too much of an abstract thinker to be a poet and too much of an intuitive thinker to be a scientist.  You’d think that would help me with both groups but it does the opposite.  About the only “real” mathematician who appreciates my mathematical poems is JoAnne Growney.

The other day, after my “anthrocentricity’ and “verosophy” had been subjected to the usual reactionary jibes, I asked why “egocentricity” was an acceptable word for “self-centeredness,” but “anthrocentricity” not an acceptable word for “people-centeredness.”  Needless to say, no one answered me.

Far too many many academics are so locked into their received understandings that they are blind to how those understandings might be revised or extended in ways that require the coinage of new terms.

Tags:

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 7th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 439 — A Textual Design by Max Ernst « POETICKS

«
»

Entry 439 — A Textual Design by Max Ernst

.

.

This is Erectio sine qua non, by Max Ernst, 1919.  I copied it out of Surrealst Drawings, with text by Frantisek Smejkal.  I view it as letters taking shape, with other forms, to eventually result in an erection that can be taken to be “meaning” formed of language.  Other interpretations of equal validity can be made.  Although I made out two words under the faucet, they seem to me much to minor to make this pice a visual poem.  Nor, of course, does the book it’s in call it that.  Remember, kids, as Uncle Bob keeps telling you, a word should always mean something, but it should always indicate something that it isn’t, or it’s useless.  So, if you want to call this neato visimage a visual poem, fine–but Uncle Bob, and maybe one or two other people, will want to know what isn’t a visual poem.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 4:42 PM and is filed under Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 440 — Support for My Hyperneologization

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

.

I came across it by chance:

APODIZATION* literally means “removing the foot”. It is the
technical term for changing the shape of a mathematical function, an
electrical signal, an optical transmission or a mechanical structure.
An example of apodization is the use of the Hann window in the Fast
Fourier transform analyzer to smooth the discontinuities at the
beginning and end of the sampled time record.

Now, then, is this a pompous, unpronounceable, superfluous term?  It was once a coinage, you know.  Why not “foot-removal?”  I suspect because whoever coined it wanted it quickly to narrow the mind into mathematics, i.e., a particular system or discipline–which I also want most of my terms though not “Wilshberia” to do.  I know: there’s a difference between a certified subject like mathematics and the theoretical psychology I try to link my terms to.  I understandably (I should think) don’t consider that relevant.  Why should someone be discouraged from systematic naming of terms to fit interactingly into a theory he’s creating just because he’s a crank.

I think one reason for my lack of recognition is that the sort of people who might be in sympathy with my hyperneologization are not generally the sort of people with an interest in poetics.  As I’ve often declared, I may well be too much of an abstract thinker to be a poet and too much of an intuitive thinker to be a scientist.  You’d think that would help me with both groups but it does the opposite.  About the only “real” mathematician who appreciates my mathematical poems is JoAnne Growney.

The other day, after my “anthrocentricity’ and “verosophy” had been subjected to the usual reactionary jibes, I asked why “egocentricity” was an acceptable word for “self-centeredness,” but “anthrocentricity” not an acceptable word for “people-centeredness.”  Needless to say, no one answered me.

Far too many many academics are so locked into their received understandings that they are blind to how those understandings might be revised or extended in ways that require the coinage of new terms.

Tags:
Posted in Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 439 — A Textual Design by Max Ernst

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

.

.

This is Erectio sine qua non, by Max Ernst, 1919.  I copied it out of Surrealst Drawings, with text by Frantisek Smejkal.  I view it as letters taking shape, with other forms, to eventually result in an erection that can be taken to be “meaning” formed of language.  Other interpretations of equal validity can be made.  Although I made out two words under the faucet, they seem to me much to minor to make this pice a visual poem.  Nor, of course, does the book it’s in call it that.  Remember, kids, as Uncle Bob keeps telling you, a word should always mean something, but it should always indicate something that it isn’t, or it’s useless.  So, if you want to call this neato visimage a visual poem, fine–but Uncle Bob, and maybe one or two other people, will want to know what isn’t a visual poem.

Posted in Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 438 — Fun with the Nullinguists

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

And just one more language note, since we are poets and poetry readers. . .

Unlike many academics, bureaucrats, or military officials, I don’t think it’s necessary to invent pompous, unpronounceable and superfluous synonyms for simple terms that already exist.  At best it’s comic relief.  At worst, well, see George Orwell. . . .  About the only one of good old Bob’s prolific stream of coinages that strikes me as worth keeping is “burstnorm.”  That actually does improve on the other available words, seems to me, and has the advantage of simplicity and poetic power.

–David Graham


Okay, David, tell me what’s wrong with “infraverbal poetry”

–Bob

A guess, “Bob” (& I didn’t even take any pills!) –

M: rigid, defensive tribal and national identities, ungiving hierarchical principles, concentrated authority, reflexive aggression in a repetition compulsion that overrides desires for peace …

–Amy King

Thanks, Amy.  It’s good for my morale to know you can’t find anything of consequence wrong with my term.

But this may be a fate not worse than the memento mori of the progeny of Aristotelian logic which remain eternally fixed in delusions of universal absolutes and therefore empty of useful meaning. To wit, Wittgenstein’s remark, “But in fact all propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing…”

–Amy King

Spoken like a true absolutist.  Nothing to do with me, though, for I believe in maxilutism, the belief that while no absolutes exist (except in logic and mathematics, I now realize), many maxilutes, or understandings close enough to absolutely true to be treated as absolutes, do exist.

–Bob

* * * * * * *

This kind of nullinguistics is not entirely worthless: when Professor Graham later said “misspelled poetry” was what “infraverbal poetry” should be called, it made me say why he was wrong: “‘Misspelled poetry’ clearly doesn’t work.  For one thing it does not indicate whether the misspelling is intended or not.  Another is that ‘misspelledly’ doesn’t work very well (I don’t think) as an adverb.  Probably most important, there are many examples of infraverbal poems that have much more going on inside them than what most people would think of as misspellings–a letter on its side, for instance.  Actually, some infraverbal words are correctly spelled.  ‘Misspelling,’ for instance–which I just made up and is certainly not much of an infraverbal poem but is one.”  I count the realization that infraverbal words can be correctly spelled a nice addition to my knowledge of them.

Posted in Terminology | No Comments »

Entry 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

According to Billy Collins, E. E. Cummings is, in large part, responsible for the multitude of k-12 poems about leaves or snow

But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere.  Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at.  Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem:  suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend.  For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness.  That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once  I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.

To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much.  But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story.  Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine.  I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to.  It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.

I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory.  It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often.  Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:

But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly–  one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once.   Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness.  For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.

Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:


In this poem the F suggests to me  a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point.  So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text.  Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives.  And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been.  Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world.  In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.

So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.

Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory.  It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often.  Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

Posted in E E Cummings, Marton Koppany, Poetics, Poetry Criticism, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen | 2 Comments »

Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

If I ever come to be seen worth wide critical attention as a poet, I should be easy to write about, locked into so few flourishes as I am, such as “the the” and–now in this piece, Basho’s “old pond.”  I was wondering whether I should go with “the bookshop’s mood or “a bookshop’s mood” when Basho struck.  I love it!

Just one word and a trivial re-arrangement of words, but I consider it major.  (At times like this I truly truly don’t care that how much less the world’s opinion of my work is than mine.)

We must add another allusion to my technalysis of this poem, describing it as solidifying the poem’s unifying principal (and archetypality), Basho’s “old pond” being, for one thing, a juxtaphor for eternity.  Strengthening its haiku-tone, as well.  But mainly (I hope) making the mood presented (and the mood built) a pond.  Water, quietude, sounds of nature . . .

Oh, “old” gives the poem another euphony/assonance, too.

It also now has a bit of ornamental pond-color.  Although the letters of the sub-dividend product are a much lighter gray on my other computer than they are on this one, the one I use to view my blog.

Posted in Basho, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, Poetics, Wallace Stevens | 2 Comments »

Entry 371 — My New Mathemaku, Updated

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Updated, but probably not finished, although I consider the dividend set:

Now to my pluraphrase of this poem I have to add that the dividend is a quotation from Wallace Stevens’s “On the Dump,” one of my all-time favorite poems, so brings that poem’s concern with the nature of metaphor, (sensual) fascination with the seasons and the final essence of existence to it.  It’s another fresh expression, too, because still a shock to most minds, and certainly unexpected in this poem.  It also provides the poem, I think, with a unifying principle, the idea of language’s being on the precipice or “soon” to (“:”) bring one to the the making, at least to me, enough sense for a poem.

Incidentally, one thing a pluraphrase should do that I neglected to mention is determine a poem’s level of archetypality.   Mine seems to me, with “the the” now in it, to do that at the highest level with the search for the meaning of existence.  Stars are archetypal.  The struggle to express oneself seems to me moderately archetypal.

Posted in Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 370 — A New Mathemaku

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

It’ll be “Mathemaku Something-or-Other” when I figure out how many mathemaku I’ve now composed.  Close to a hundred, I’m sure.

Frankly, I don’t know what to make of this.  Whether I keep it or not will depend on what others say about it.  I made it as an improvisation using “soon:,” so as not to lose the latter due to my revision of the poem it was in.  The sub-dividend product is a fragment of my standard Poem poem semi-automatic imagerying.

It is, in fact, a near-perfect candidate for a pluraphrase.  Which I’ll add later today.

* * * * *

Okay, here’s my pluraphrase (with thanks to Conrad Didiodato, whom made a comment to my entry for yesterday that I ought to “flesh out” my description of the pluraphrase by demonstrating its operation on some classical poem.  That didn’t appeal to me, classical poems having been more than sufficiently discussed, but doing it for a poem I’d just been working on did.  It ought to test as well as demonstrate the procedure–and maybe help me with my poem, which it may well have, it turns out.  Time to start it.

After a note to the fore: what follows is to be taken as an attempt, an intelligent attempt, to prove a definitive pluraphrase of the poem treated, not a claim to do so.

1. According to this poem, if you divide “nowhere” by “language,” you’ll get “soon:,” with a remainder of “stars,  eternally listened-to.”  The poem also indicates that multiplying “language” by “soon:” equals “lavender streets slowly asked further and further into the depths of the bookshop’s near-holy mood.”

2. “soon” is an adjective indicating an event that has not yet occurred, a what-will-happen in the near future.  An expectation of something interesting to come is thus connoted, a connotation emphasized by the use of the colon, a punctuation mark indicating something to follow.  “Language” is the main human means of expression, communicated expression, so the metaphor, “language” times “soon:” suggests some sort message of consequence that is on the threshold of appearing.  The arithmetic of the poem  equates this message-to-come with “lavender streets,” or a path not likely to be real because of its color so a fairyland or dream path–through a town or city because a “street,” which has urban connotations, and because entering in some way a bookshop’s mood, which places it in a center of trade.

The street does not go in the mood but is “slowly asked” into it, “asked” serving as a metaphor for “go.”  We are not told who or what is doing the asking, ever.  A feature of many of the best poems is details left to puzzle the reader into subjective but potentially intriguing never quite sure answers.  For instance, that here the draw of the books in the shop is strong enough to invite a street, and those on it, into the shop.  It’s subtle, though, or so its slowness suggests.  And a production is being made of the asking, since ordinarily to ask something takes but a moment.  It’s important.

The personification of the bookshop as a creature capable of experiencing a mood clearly makes “mood” a metaphor” for “ambiance.”  This ambiance is “near-holy” for some unspecified reason, probably having something to do with language, books, literature, the word.  Something complex since the street apparently goes quite deeply into the mood–and, as I’ve just pointed out, slowly.  With perhaps deliberation.  Not on whim.

In keeping with “soonness,” the street reaches no final point, it is in the process of going somewhere.  Something is building.

If “stars,  eternally listened-to” is added (and the addition needn’t be metaphors since additions are not confined to mathematics) to the image of the street descending into the bookshop (or bookshop’s “mood”), we somehow get “nowhere.”  Or so the arithmetic requires us to accept.  Stars are (effectually, for human beings) eternal, and ‘listened-to” must be a metaphor for attended to or the like.  Or a reference to the music of the spheres, making what’s going on a mystically experience.  It would seem to be intended to be awe-
inspiring.  Hence, for it to contribute, with a perhaps questing street, perhaps questioning street, to nowhere seems a severe anticlimax, or a joke.  Nothing makes sense except that the view expressed is that our greatest efforts lead nowhere.  Which I don’t like.  If I can improve the poem, from my point of view, by changing the dividend, which I may well do, it will demonstrate the value for a poet of a close reading of his work.

My pluraphrase is far from finished, though.  We have the technalysis to get through–and, in passing, I have to say that that is a beautiful term, I must say, even if no one but I will ever use it.  Melodation?  Well, the euphony of “nowhere,” “slowly,” “holy,” “soon:,” “into,” “shop’s” “mood,” “to” and “star,” with the first two carrying off an assonance, and the long-u ones possibly assonant with each other, too.  The “uhr”-rhymes, and backward rhyme of “lang” with “lav.”  A few instances of assonance, alliteration and consonance, but no more than you’d get in a prose passage of comparable length.  I would say that the pleasant sound of the sub-dividend product’s text adds nicely to its fairy-flow, but that melodation is not important in the poem.  No visio-aesthetic effects are present, or anything else unusual except, obviously, the matheasthetic effects.

The mpoem’s being in the form of a long division example, the chief of these, allow the metaphors of multiplication and addition already described in the close reading–but also the over-all metaphor of a “long-division machine” chugging along to produce the full meaning of the poem.  This provides a tone of inevitability, of certainty, of this is the way things truly are.  The ambiance of mathematics caused by the remainder line, and what I call the dividend-shed, is in what should be a stimulating tension with the ambience of the poem’s verbal appearance–as a poem.  Extreme abstraction versus the concreteness of the poetic details, science versus art, reason versus intuition.  All of which makes an enormous contribution to the poem’s freshness, since very few poems are mathematical.

The final function of an artwork is to cause a person to experience the familiar unexpectedly, here with long division yielding an emotional image-complex some engagents of the poem will find familiar.  Too much unfamiliarity for those without some experience of poems like this one.  Which reminds me that since this poem has a standard form, at least for this poet’s work, a long-division example–and, more generally, an equation, it alludes to other poems of its kind.  No other allusions seem present.

Part of the poem’s freshification, too, are “lavender street” since few streets are lavender, the idea of a street’s being “asked” into something, the idea of stars as “listened-to,” or a bookshop’s having a mood.  The breaking up of the poem into five discrete images is easy enough to follow but different enough to be fresh.

That’s it for the pluraphrase.  I think I’ll make the dividend “the the.”  The only thing I have against that is that I’ve used that before more than once.  I’ll probably do more with the look of the thing, add colors.  I’ve had thoughts from the beginning of giving it a background, with words.

Posted in Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 369 — A Discussion of the Pluraphrase

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

In his kind blog entry on me the other day, Geof Huth pointed out a difference between the two of us that got me thinking.  It was that I need to know the meaning of each of my poems, whereas he doesn’t mind not knowing what a particular poem of his means, and sometimes doesn’t.  As is often the case, he was half right.  Certainly, I have a greater need to know the meaning of my poems than he has to know the meaning of his.  Never do I expect fully to know the meaning of a poem of mine, however.  Indeed, if I too quickly maxolutely grasp a poem’s meaning, I feel pretty certain it isn’t very good.

If by “understanding the meaning” we mean understanding the verbal meaning.  I mean far more than that by the term, though, for one can have only a very hazy verbal understanding of some poems but a visceral understanding of them that more than makes up for it.  Which I suspect Geof needs.  Does a poem make sense as an arrangement of elements?  Does it sound or look aesthetically pleasing in some important manner?

Zogwog.  I played tennis this morning.  On the way back on my bike I thought of how I was going to soar through this entry.  I had what I was going to say all figured out.  The result would be a description of something I call “the pluraphrase,” that I came up with twenty years or so ago.  It’s basically an analysis of a poem so full that, if carried out with skill, should permanently nail a poem.  I think no poem can be considered effective if no one can come up with a pluraphrase of it a reasonable number of others agree is sound and reasonably complete.   Effective as a poem, I mean.

For some reason, I’m swigging every whose where, not sure why.  Will try to get a grip on mineself and concentrate.

First there’s the paraphrase, which is a summary of what the poem’s words and graphics, if any, mainly denote,  connote and clearly allude to via quotations, symbols or other “advertances,” as I call them.  If you can’t make one for a given poem, either you or it is defective.  But there is much more to a poem than what a paraphrase tells you about it.

One thing is what a close reading uncovers.  Which should be everything a poem’s words and graphics, if any, denote,  connote and allude to.

Finally, and in my view most important, is the pluraphrase.  That’s the close reading plus the . . . technalysis, my new-today term for an analysis of what a poem does technically.  To wit: its melodation, or everything regarding what it does with sound–rhyme, meter, auditory shaping–and anything that contributes to the poem’s connotational or allusional ability (which can be great–for instance, what the sonnet-shape does as an advertance to the history of the sonnet in the West); its visio-aesthetic effects, or what its visual elements beyond the conventional shape of its letters, punctuation marks and other textemes do for it decoratively or visiopoetically; its audio-aesthetic effects, or what its auditory elements beyond the conventional sound of its syllables do for it decoratively or beyond that to make it a sound poem, if that’s what it is; its linguitechnics or its appropriate misuse of grammar for aesthetically meaningful language poetry effects; its freshification (I know, I need a better term for this, but I’m ad hoccing at the moment), which in conventional poetry is primarily its use of fresh diction or  subject matter–particularly in the case of surrealistic and jump-cut poetry, of fresh juxtapositions of images; mathaesthetic effects, or the use of mathematical operations on non-mathematical terms as in my mathemaku; miscaesthetic (miscellaneous aesthetic) effects or the contribution of its gustatory, olfactory, tactile, or the like in some aesthetically meaningful way.

No doubt there are elements of poetry I’ve overlooked.  Let me know about them, please.  I truly want to be complete.

My view, as stated, is that no poem that cannot be given a reasonably full and coherent pluraphrase can be effective.  My only evaluative uncertainty is whether or not a poem for which no reasonably full and coherent close reading exists can be considered effective–as a poem.  Such a text may prove sufficiently audio-aesthetically or visio-aesthetically pleasing to be considered effective as music (textual music) or visimagery (textual visimagery), but not as poetry, which needs to be verbo-aesthetically compelling to qualify as an effective poem.  For instance, Gertrude Stein’s buttons, which are not poems but short pieces of evocature, would be effective as prose if they could be shown to make verbal sense.  Stephen-Paul Martin did that for one of them to my satisfaction in a book whose title escapes me, and someone else did the same for another, I vaguely recall.  Marjory Perloff failed to do it for a number of them.  As is, the most you can say for them is that they may be somewhat effective pieces of music.

Getting back to how much a poet should know about his own poems, I don’t think he ought to make a pluraphrase of everyone of them.  I haven’t of mine.  But he ought to have some feel for whether a poem of his could be pluraphrased, and whether at least some of its elements were superior.  I’m sure that most poets know these things in some way.  Sometimes intense analysis is necessary, I think.  Unless a single pleasing effect is enough for you, and you don’t care about the unifying principle I believe every poem needs to make it to the top.

My temperament is such that I enjoy analysis.  I find it almost always useful.  True, sometimes one’s analysis can lead one astry.  More often it helps, I believe.  I now believe it has with regard to the mathemaku Geof posted of mine in his little celebration of my birthday the other day.  The version he posted almost convinced me I should have “soon:” as its quotient instead of “Persephone.”  Last night, thanks to analysis, to trying to fathom the full meaning of the poem, I concluded I was wrong.  “Persephone” is definitely better.  The quotient times “mystery” is supposed to equal the springlike effect of language on the world, according to my analysis, so multiplying it by “Persephone,” the goddess of spring, will clearly allow this while multiplying it by “soon:” will not clearly do it.  The idea of soon something will follow won’t suggest it to many, I don’t think.  And although I tried hard to think of how language could be thought to have anything to do with “soonness,” I couldn’t.  Nor did mystery.  If it had, then “soon:” wouldn’t have had to.  “Persephone” may be a tick too overt, but I’d rather be too clear than unclear.  Besides, it’s “Persephone” in its sole hard copy publication.

* * *

On my bike, I imagined I’d be able to make this entry a wonderful source for students of poetry that no college could be without.  It didn’t work out that way.  I do hope to return to it sometime and improve it.

Posted in Pluraphrase, Poetry Criticism | 3 Comments »

Entry 337 — A Quotation from Karl Young

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

I just happened on the following passage from Karl Young’s introduction at Light and Dust to his two early books, Cried and Measured, and Should Sun Forever Shine.  I had to post it here because it so exactly states what I’ve been saying for many years, with little effect, except occasionally to inspire hostile responses from the anti-intellectual  school of the Wordsworthian “We murder to dissect” variety.

“How best to provide the (engagent of unfamiliar, relatively new forms of art) with adequate context and background, I don’t know. I do know that the lack of it has crippled visual poetry, as it has other arts, and trying to find an answer to the problem is one of the reasons for writing essays like this one. Whatever the case, in the global world of information overload, the concept that ‘the work speaks for itself’ can be no more than nostalgia for a simpler time with a unified and unchanging cultural background. In the broadest context, what has now become the superstition that avant-garde work can be appreciated without context denies and blocks the possibilities of cooperative construction and understanding in an environment that no individual has the ability to completely comprehend, but which requires cooperation to appreciate.”

.                                                                         Karl Young

Posted in Karl Young, Literary Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 334 — One Reason I’m Not a Fan of Emily’s

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

A major problem I have with Emily Dickinson’s pieces is that they seem to me much more rhymed opinions than poems.

The reason people who eat lots of vegetables live longer than those who don’t is that they live much more slowly and non-productively.

Yes, another get-it-quickly-out-of-the-way entry.  I have a better than usual excuse, though: one of my teeth crumbled a week or so ago and the crown that was on it came off.  I couldn’t see my dentist till today because her office was closed for ten days for the holidays.  Today I saw her and found out that the tooth was too far gone for the crown to be re-cemented to it, as it had been twice during the past six months.  So the remains of the bad tooth were extracted.  That was six hours ago.  I’ve taken an idoprofen and it’s not bothering me, but I’m very tired.  I’m also unhappy because the cost of what next needs to be done, which will involve a crown and a false tooth, will cost me two grand, and I’m already scheduled for a crown that will cost me $1,300.

Oh, well, on the bright side, last night in bed I worked out three more mathemaku, one completely done, the other two close enough to being done that I’m sure they will be.  And just a little while ago I sketched another that I may complete this evening.   Needless to say, I’m pleased.  I don’t think I’ve had a creative outburst like this for two years.  Certainly I didn’t in the year just past.  Not that it’s all that amazing, as all six of the new mathemaku are inter-related, and share components, and the main graphic–the only graphic I’ve used so far–is an old graphic of mine, re-cycled.  (And it is a re-cycled version of my first large-scale abstract-expressionist visual poem, executed fifteen or more years ago.)

Posted in Autobiographica, Literary Criticism, Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

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Entry 448 — Another Terminological Change « POETICKS

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Entry 448 — Another Terminological Change

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

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

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

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Literary Taxonomy, Philosophy, Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again! « POETICKS

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Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again!

 

Yeah, for almost forty years now I’ve been defining and re-defining visual poetry, often returning to old definitions.  Believe it or not, I’m trying to come up with one others will accept–without letting it go as “undefinable,” or–worse–infinitely-definable.  I think I may
have it now–but I always think that when I advance a new definition.  This one is only slightly new.  What’s new is the sub-categories I split it into.  Okay, here goes:

Visual Poetry is an artwork containing a verbal and a graphic constituent in which part or the whole of the semantic meaning of the verbal constituent and part or the whole of the representa-tional meaning of the graphic constituent each makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

It comes in two varieties: visiophorical and visiocollagic poetry.  Visiophorical Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent acts as a metaphor for part or the whole of what its verbal constituent denotes that makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

Visiocollagic Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent combines ametaphorically with part or the whole of the semantic meaning of its verbal element in such a
manner as to make a centrally significant contribution (in the view of a consensus of informed observers) to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

An awkward set of definitions but necessarily so.

I’ve decided a main reason it’s taken me so long to get a final set of poetics definitions is that I’m treating poetics as a verosophy–or attempt to come to a rational, objective understanding of some consequential large-scale aspect of existence sufficiently close to full for any reasonable person–and there are very few people (especially in the arts) interested (or, probably, qualified for) such an undertaking.  Those few who are, are off in their own wilder-nesses, not mine, or involved in a group effort as most of the sciences are.   In short, I’m basically without help–although occasionally I have gotten useful feedback.  I’m also over-extended–which is my fault.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Poetics, Taxonomy, Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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