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Entry 1759 — A Possibly Finished Poem

Saturday, March 21st, 2015

Ooops, the above is not my final version, this is:

Posted in Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1755 — Robert Frost

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

The best English-language poets are named Robert, but Robert Frost would have been a favorite poet of mine even if he’d been named Adolph. I consider his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” the best straitverse poem I’ve encountered. So it was nice to see a review of a newly available volume of his letters in the latest issue of The New Criterion–although no surprise, considering how little interest to it poets younger than dead for forty years, figuratively if not literally, are. It was good, too, to learn that the reviewer, Andrew Hamilton, feels this collection of letters “should serve as a thorough corrective to (the view of Frost’s main biographer, Lawrence) Thompson as a “monster”–although I never have thought of him as anything but a sometimes cranky decent man, myself . . . although he’d be on my list of great poets however bad a human being I agreed he was, and that comes close to all that counts with me.

I bring him up not only to get another blog entry out of the way so I can go back to bed but because the quite interesting review of his letters mentions his writing in one of them about how appropriate the language of his poetry’s is “to the virtues I celebrate.” “Virtues.” Didacticism. Poetry with a moral. Horace’s stupid pronouncement that poetry should teach as well as please–although it usually comes up in reverse to the way I have it, reminding people that poetry should please as well as teach. I’m an extremist here although I contend I usually seek the middle between extremes–unless I go for both extremes simultaneously. I believe poetry should give pleasure, period. Any teaching it tries to do will only distract from that.

But the first poem of my own I thought okay (the one in my 14 and 15 March entries) pushed the virtue of wilderness versus ordered sterility. My one about “tr,af:fi;c.” had nothing to with any virtue, though. Which doesn’t mean someone trying to force it into everything could charge it with celebrating the virtue of winter serenity or something. It does that. A higher virtue it can be said to honor is the simple virtue of sensual awareness. Perhaps at an even higher level it expresses my own religion’s highest virtue, reverence of the universe. Urp.

But all this indicates is that virtue is a part of any poem to some degree. Ergo, to permit discussion of virtue in a poem to be of value, one must distinguish explicit references to standard abstract virtues like honesty and tolerance (two of my favorites) from implicit references, implicit reference, that is, which the context of the poem fails explicitly to suggest may be there. Only poems concerned with the first kind of virtue should count as moral poems.

I use the same kind of reasoning to justify my contempt for the frequent declaration that all poems are political.

By this reasoning, I consider my favorite Frost poems “lyrical,” which I use for poems the main intent of which is to give aesthetic pleasure, and little or no moral improving. Ergo, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is not a moral poem–although it does convey a moral meaning: duty before pleasure, or something about the importance of fulfilling responsibilities. Frost’s use of this moral message is brilliant, though: it’s only a frame to attach his much more interesting characterization of his persona to, whereas that characterization is only a ladder to a scene (in a [mood]) . . . in Time. But it’s all also in a poem, a poem that is a box of sounds as another sense that poem makes.

My traffic poem goes directly to the scene, with a box of punctuation taking the place of Frost’s box of sounds, and my poem as a whole doing less than Frost’s–but, I would argue, more for poetry.

Actually, my poem has a persona, too. He just isn’t physically in the poem the way Frost is in his. Nor is he brought anywhere near alive. But he’s watching the sky’s descent. He’s punctuating along with the traffic. . . .

* * *

Hey, everybody, wasn’t that a nice essay?! Well, except for the snide remark about the provincialism of the The New Criterion. Someday maybe I’ll write a little essay like this that’s all nice. It may be a while, though.

Posted in Poetry, Robert Frost | No Comments »

Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

In my little-selling Of Manywhere-at-Once, Keats was one of the six canonized poets I wrote a chapter about. Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Cummings and Roethke were the others. I suddenly realize that Stevens was the last of them to become a hero in poetry of mine–around 35 years ago. None since. Nor, that I can think of, any literary heroes of any kind since then. Heroes of verosophy? Perhaps. More likely, no: because I don’t think I have any genuine verosophical heroes. The one who comes closest is Nietzsche, but I consider him a literary hero. I’ve greatly admired a lot of verosophers–Archimedes, Aristotle, Darwin, Newton, Dalton, Faraday, to mention a few–but not the way I’ve idolized and drenched myself in the works and lives of writers like Keats. And a number of visimagists like Cezanne and Klee. But no composers. I guess the reason for this is obvious: I’ve become a writer, and (to a degree) a visimagist, but not a composer. I consider myself a verosopher, but one unlike any I’m familiar with, except–possibly–Pierce.

It may be that I’ve had no cultural heroes since my thirties due to some flaw of mine, but I suspect one grows . . . not beyond, but off to the sides, of hero-worship. Into too much of one’s own work toward becoming a cultural hero oneself to have as much time new ones. One also will eventually have a number of contemporaries to take the place of heroes, albeit differently–as co-heroes rather than as worship-worthies.

In any case, in my chapter about Keats, I spent over four pages on his sonnet to Chapman’s Homer, which was one of the few poems I’d memorized by then (around the age of 18)–and, for that matter, one of the few I have ever memorized. I wish I’d memorized many more, but I also wish I knew more than one language. I tend to think I’ve stored all the data I’ve been capable of (as has everyone), so it doesn’t bother me inordinately. Just a little wishfulness that a few things were not impossible. Except when I’m in my null zone and realize that nothing really good is possible.

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Note Keats’s glorification of “high-piled books” here and another poet’s accomplishment in the Chapman poem–his raw young poetic ambitions as a young man obvious, so just the thing to capture me at 18–besides the level of the writing. Although poetry was never at the center of my writing ambitions until the past decade or so, by default.

(Aside: after going through my edition of Keats’s poems to make sure I remember the poem above correctly–actually to fix parts I knew I hadn’t–the level of his writing bothered me: in less than 26 years he composed more effective poems than I have in almost 75. This is not false humility. But I feel I have added to the poet’s tool-kit, which he did not, and ranged beyond poetry into a theory pf psychology, which he did not, and which I think beyond doubt an accomplishment of sorts. Yes, competitiveness is an enduring part of my character. I still consider more a virtue than not.)

Okay, back to my dictum about reading poetry to the extent that you devour everything you can of the life and work of at least one of them as I devoured Keats. This resulted in several (but not a flood) of defective poems until I wrote the following in my twenties:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

This is a fair derivative poem, I now think, but indicative only that when I wrote it, I had reached the basement of the poet’s vocation–thanks to all the reading I did. I’m afraid I have to admit that this lesson of mine isn’t much of a lesson, for if you need someone urging you to read poems and writings about poets before you’ll do it, all the reading you do will be a waste of time for you. I did the reading I did because I had to. and I had made a hero of Keats I had to find out as much as possible about, because of my genes, which made me search for a hero, then in effect become a sort of apprentice of his. The real lesson is that you should save time by dropping the idea of becoming a poet if you aren’t already automatically doing this. I suppose a minor implicit value of the lesson is to confirm you in your vocation if you have found your Keats–and encourage you to keep going if you have not, but are deeply involved with some kind of poetry.

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry, Poetry Lesson, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1752 — Break-Time

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

I was hoping to continue my lesson with an entry as good as I feel my one yesterday (mostly) was, but got involved in a duel of interpretations of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24 with Paul Crowley at HLAS. I still was planning to come here and work up a storm but Shirley took care of that. Just as I finished my post for Paul and was about to cut&paste a copy of it in the flash drive I use for things like it, she hopped up on my computer desk, casually walked across my keyboard, then hit the floor again and walked out of the room. In the process, she deleted everything in my post. So I have to do it all over again. I need to because I feel I said a few good things about the poem–and several important things about my discussion of it, which I first called an “explication” but which was not quite that, but–I eventually concluded–the beginning of what I call a “pluraphrase,” and now to make for the poem. So maybe Shirley helped me.

As for the lesson under way, I found the poem of mine that I thought, and am still pretty sure, was the first poem I wrote that, as I put it in Of Manywhere-at-Once, I thought anything of:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife              I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams.

* * *

The “nothingness” is from the sonnet by Keats that ends, “. . . then on the shore/ of the wide world I stand alone and think/ Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.” To make sure my lesson has a good poem in its entirety in it, I will quote the Keats poem in full in it. He’s been dead long enough for the imbecilic copyright laws to allow me to do that.

One other thing I have to report is that I came up with a term for “haiku-sensitivity,” which has come to seem too specific for what I want a term to represent. “Minificance,” (mih NIH fih kehnts) is the new term–to represent “a sensitivity to something in poetry of minimlistic significance.” “Haiku-sensitivity” would be a subset of this.

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1751 — Lesson 1

Friday, March 13th, 2015

I have an excuse to avoid truly beginning my lesson in how to compose an otherstream poem: another medical procedure, this one a sound scan of my thyroid. Routine, I guess because I’m hypo-thyroidal. Only took ten minutes. Errands followed. So, I’m barely unnull. Nonetheless, I will try to get my lesson in today, beginning with lead-in excerpts of poems by Cummings, then the original (and now final) version of my (full) ooem:

* * *

If I were in a high school or college teaching this lesson (which, nota bene, is for absolute beginners, although I hope anyone reading it will learn from it), I would pass out hand-outs with the poems above on them to the students (student?). Then:

IF YOU WANT TO COMPOSE ANY KIND OF POETRY:

Dictum 1: READ POETRY!!!

(I’m tempted to end my first lesson there, but–heck–you’re all my good friends! I can’t cheat you.)

Listening to poetry is okay, but reading it means you have it continuingly in front of you, so seems to me better. It’s also difficult to attend readings or buy recordings compared to getting books or magazines with it, or going online after it. In any case, I will be referring to printed poetry only.

I suspect anyone teaching a how-to-course in any kind of literature will tell you the same thing. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, it’s received wisdom, and received wisdom is right much more often than not. This bit of received wisdom is maxolutely valid–i.e., it could not be more valid.

The more you read poetry, the more of an idea of what it is you will get. Beyond some dictionary’s probably inept, and certainly incomplete definition of it. But by far the most important reason for reading poetry is to find poems you like! And you will find a few before long, even if you read only publications recommended by college professors or other authorities if you seriously intend to compose poetry–as either a hobby (and there’s nothing wrong with that) or a vocation.

If you get through a few hundred poems and find none that genuinely excite you, ask someone who’s been around (like me) where to go for poetry different from what you’ve been reading. If that doesn’t help–if, that is, you sincerely explore a reasonable wide variety of poems and are not excited by any of them, accept that you’re simply incapable of appreciating poetry–as I am incapable of appreciating gymnastics. So what.

I should think anyone who knows enough about poetry to want to compose it will find poems that he really likes. When this happens, as common sense would indicate, he must find out who wrote them, and look up that poet’s other poems. If this goes well, he will automatically be strongly attracted to one or more, enough to become at least temporarily addicted to his work.

SubDictum 1: When you have found a poet whose work you are extremely drawn to, read everything you can about his life. If you feel like it. I add that, and make this rule a “SubDictum,” because I followed it with great enjoyment and, I think, got a useful push from my vicarious identification with various literary heroes of mine. But it won’t make a poet of you, and I suspect there are those without my interest in poets rather than their work, or literary history. In short, ignore this SubDictum if you have little urge to follow it.

Dictum 2: This is my first teaching that a lot of poets and not all that few teachers of poetry will reject. In fact, I would agree that it is not necessary for one wanting to become a poet; however, it is necessary, in my opinion, for one who wants to become among the best poets. Those I therefore direct to read as much commentary on the poets whose works you most enjoy as you can. Poetry criticism be Good! So what if much of it, maybe most of it, is not too good; 90% of poetry is mediocre or lousy, too. So read as much as you can, and zero in on those whose commentary you enjoy the way you zeroed in on poets whose poems you enjoyed.

One important thing they should do for you is path you to other poets writing work like the ones you like do. Negatively-Positively, they may expose you to flaws in a favorite of yours that helps you to appreciate up to a higher level of enjoyment. They should introduce you, in their negative commentary, to poets whose poor work will increase your appreciation of inferior work, which it is important to learn. Or perhaps make you realize there’s poetry out there the critic doesn’t like but you do. And you will begin developing a critical view of your own.

Dictum 3: WRITE POEMS!!!

Start by imitating the poems you’ve found you like. Remember that you are just beginning and that it takes time to become anything of a poet. In the meantime, it should not take too long for you to experience the happiness of effectively imitating something a hero of yours has done. The chances are 999 to 1 that it will be part of a sub-mediocre poem, but that’s of no consequence. Every poet’s first attempts are poor. Regardless of the mothers or friends or teachers who praise them.

At this point I was going to show the value of imitation using the four texts above. While writing my way to here, however, I realized that I should have used an earlier example of my own work. I wrote a fair amount of bad imitative poetry when I began, and nothing any good until I was around 25 and wrote my “traffic” poem above. It’s a bad example, though, because (in my opinion) quite good, although imitative. There are special reasons for its success. One is that it’s based on the simplest poetic form, the Classical American haiku form (which is derived from the form the Japanese invented–apparently–but significantly different from that in ways I won’t go into right now). What’s more, the Classical American Haiku form is extremely explicit, and therefore easy to get technically right.

* * *

I feel I could keep going for at least a few more full paragraphs but I also think I’ve reached a good stopping point, and have a topic to discuss which may take a while to get through: haiku-sensitivity, which I think a person is either born with or will never have, and I have it. Urp.

Posted in Autobiographica, E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1750 — Found Original

Thursday, March 12th, 2015

Sorta interesting story about the above: it turned up yesterday in an email from Germany! Remember, I was hunting all over for it in vain, then remembered it together–I thought. Actually, I remembered “descent,” but changed it to “development.” I forgot “mix.” I think the original better than my revision.

To get back to the sorta interesting story, the email it arrived in–more accurately, the email that had a link to it–was from Kurt Henzel, a German who has suddenly discovered concrete poetry, and wanted to buy two books by Irving Weiss that I had published–and stuff of mine. In his email, he asked for signed copies of two of my poems, the one above and “the poem r,” one of my favorite visual poems although never before mentioned by anyone.

Here’s the other:

Here’s something else from the Internet:

resipiscence /res-ə-PIS-əns/. noun. Originally, repentance and recognition of one’s misdeeds. Now the act of coming to one’s senses, a change of heart. The Shorter OED’s formulation: “return to a better mind.” From Latin resipiscere (to recover one’s senses), from from sapere (to taste, to be wise).

From yesterday’s Katex–click here to find out about it. (It’s a newsletter or the equivalent put out by Chris Lott often has interesting odd words. I posted this because it seems so much like many of my coinages–in other words, I’m not alone in my love of coining mouthfuls. I also think I might find a use for this one.

* * *

Apologies, but that’s it for today. Again, a tough day for me: a loss in tennis in the morning, both for me and my partner is one match, and for our team in all three of our matches. Oh, well, we should not finish last, and the season will soon be over. In the afternoon, two hours at my dentist’s (that increased my credit card debt by another thousand).

Posted in E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1749 — Lesson One Begins

Wednesday, March 11th, 2015

I was hoping to make a complete lesson for this entry–the one I discussed yesterday for a how-to book for beginning otherstream poets. I had so much trouble scanning the poems by Cummings I wanted to use in it that I’m too worn-out to try to write much of the lesson.

But here is my piece for the lesson again, followed by 4 excerpts of poems by Cummings that I stole the core-technique my poem depends on from Cummings, my lesson being about the necessity to steal from other poets:

            sky's piecemeal white                                development down buildings'                            dark sides into                                   tr;af:fi,c.

* * *

Posted in E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1712 — Ground Hog Day

Monday, February 2nd, 2015

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

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

Posted in Karl Kempton, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1709 — I Done A New Math Pome!!!!

Friday, January 30th, 2015

The following is an accident, whether a happy one or a disappointing one, who knows. What happened was that I was looking through my digital files for a poem for Bill Michele and came across the divisor and dividend of this one in a folder labeled, “Long Division Problems Worth Attacking.” I immediately wanted to attack it. What’s below is the result (so far–I’m not sure whether it needs more work or not):

I think I was in the mood to work on it because of my thinking about HSAM yesterday. It may be my first autobiographical long division poem. The only unauthentic thing in it is the divisor. Actually, they may well have been there, hard to imagine they would not have been. But they’re not in my memory of the episode. Extremely sentimental, yes? It’s very simple but perhaps still “difficult” for many . . . Will it nonetheless make me famous?

I’d sorta like to do more poems like it, but have no ideas for any yet.
.

Posted in Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1699 — More Scraps

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

Scrap #1: Yesterday’s mail included another chapbook from Mark Sonnenfeld, Check Check Done and Done, half of it devoted to poems by Mark and half to poems by Dory L. Williams. Good reading but one thing in it by Dory L. Williams really knocked me out: to me, it’s an epigram, because a statement of an opinion, so according to my taxonomy a work of informrature. Be that as it may, it’s as good an epigram as I’ve come across in years, if ever:

Covetness

If you want fame and money without real
achievement behind it, you’re not greedy enough.

Scrap #2: After I posted yesterday’s entry, I remembered a central feature of Iowa Workshop Poetry I’d intended to mention before any other, but then forgot: it’s the recognition of the potential of ordinary subject matter for tranfiguringly successful poetry–as in Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and in all the best haiku. I am all for ordinary subject matter . . . but it can’t do much unless connected to archetypal matter one needs to be in one’s magniceptual awareness to be able to employ. Williams’s poem is, finally, not about a wheelbarrow anywhere near as much as it is about Beauty.

Lesson for poets: keep explicit abstracts and generalities out of your poems as Ezra tells you to, but build you poems on them as I tell you to. This, incidentally, you don’t necessarily have to consciously strive for, but you must be able to recognize when something worthily archetypal begins to show under your poem’s words so as to strengthen those words’ connection to it–and/or weaken the visibility of their path to it. The archetypal foundation of the best poems is much more often understood in their engagents’ marrow long before it’s dealt with the reasoning parts of their higher faculties, if it ever is. (Few poets have very large reducticeptual awarenesses or scienceptual awareness, which are where analysis is carried out.)

Possibly more important than the connection to the archetypal is the technique, the freshness of the technique employed to make that connection, which is usually metaphorical.

I’m just repeating old thoughts of mine, disorganizedly. Jus’ tryin’ to make it through another blog entry.
.

Posted in Dory L. Williams, Mainstream, Mark Sonnenfeld, Poetics, William Carlos Williams | No Comments »

POETICKS

Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress

May 29th, 2011

I continue to believe someday people will be interested in how various poems of mine came about. Hence, the following three stages of my unfinished “Cursive Mathemaku, No. 2″:

I scribbled notes for version one, then took weeks to draw my ideas at Paint Shop, and more weeks to put them together in a work something like version one, which is probably the third version of the finished base of the poem. Almost two months went by before I dared add the final cursive lines I always meant the work to have to make version two. Over a week went by before I made (today) the more well-thought-out third version. I’m pretty sure both that the third version (already revised two or three times–modestly) is the one I’ll go with. I’m looking forward to adding colors, with a good idea of what they’ll be, although I never go with all or even most of the colors I use in a work.

Posted in Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | 2 Comments »

Entry 453 — My Improved Piddle

May 28th, 2011

I’ve just about finished my latest column for Small Press Review. A few days ago I finished a solid rough draft of what will be Chapters 13 and 14 of my book on the Shakespeare authorship question. At one point, I thought it was brilliant but as I finished it my opinion changed. I still think it pretty good, but I no longer think it something that will make everyone who reads it kneel to me in admiration. I’ve been trying for years to pin down the major cause of irrationality, and I think I’m close. I’d call it simply narrow-mindedness at a cocktail party level, but in the book I call it “Hyperconvergency.” More important, I explain how it comes about. Or try to. It’s all a matter of having too much “cerebral potency”–and lacking the accommodance to lower it and thus let extra needed information in. You’ll have to buy a copy of my book to find out more. (Or look up what I’ve said about it here.)

Amy King is saying bad things about me again. Whoops, not about me, since that would be “personal abuse,” but about my poetry. She says the reason no bigShot critics deign to denigrate my work the way they denigrate Bill Knotts’s is that my work isn’t a minuscule fraction as interesting as his. I was whining about my inability to get the level of scorn Knotts does. I said I thought “his poetry is much easier for mediocrities to deal with than mine.” Actually, I’m sure it’s because they really are too hyperconvergent to be aware of poetry like mine. Exposed to it, though, they’d be afraid to try an assault on it.

Nice to get insulted by King, but I’d prefer something lengthier from someone better-known. Something that actually said something about my poetry would be best, but it’s unrealistic to hope for that.

Posted in Autobiographica | No Comments »

Entry 452 — Myth

May 27th, 2011

When reading at Geof’s blog that he considers “greatness” a “myth,” I was reminded of my sadness at the nullinguists’ destruction of the word, “myth.” It used to mean the achievement of something beyond the power of mortals, but gloriously true beyond the empirically real that those without imaginations are stuck in. Jason’s winning of the golden fleece that I read about in one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, a copy of The Golden Book of Myths (or some such) that my brother Bill gave me when I was around ten, for example. Now “myth” only means some view of life the person using the word doesn’t accept.

Putting together a dictionary of wonderful words lost to nullinguism like “marriage,” “gay,” “impact,” “poetry,” “genius” would be a worthwhile project–except that I suppose, although it seems like they outnumber the good words retained (so far), there really aren’t very many such words.

As for “greatness,” it is by definition unarguably a fact, the definition being some person’s achievement of something people admire, enjoy and celebrate centuries after the person has died. It may make me look sadly unrealistic but it’s something I’ve striven for since I was six or seven, although I wouldn’t have known enough to describe it as such until my middle teens. The only reason I didn’t strive for it before then was that I hadn’t yet learned I didn’t already have it.

Confession: I have not given up, probably can’t give up, the notion that I may yet gain it, or already have.

Excelsior!

Posted in Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

Entry 451 — My Latest Idiocy

May 26th, 2011

It’s not really important: I can ask Arnold for another copy. But that I lost it drives me almost mad with rage at my continuing stupidity. I feel like there’s just no sense in going on. Once again, you see, I’ve lost something. This time it was a copy of a long piece of . . . surrealistic mathematics, I guess. By someone French. Arnold Skemer was kind enough to send it to me, with the french text translated. I have the envelope it came in and the letter that came in that envelope with it. They are right where they should be, on the table to my right as I type this. Why the surrealistic mathematics isn’t with it, I JUST CAN’T understand.

But I do something like this at least monthly. More times than not, I find what was missing, sometimes in less than a couple of hours. I won’t find this. My house is less disorganized than it’s been in years, mainly because of the filing cabinet I freed up for current items–like this, or it should be. I recently did make a folder for just-answered snail mail, but not one for items like this. And I have several now–a letter from my Oakland poet friend Jody Offer; some great stuff just in from Marshall Hryciuk; Marton’s little booklet The Reader which I’ve had for two months and haven’t lost, who knows why; Arnold’s letter; a little packet of great stuff by himself Andrew Topel left with me during his visit a little while ago as well as wonderful full-color things his press published that he sent me a couple of months ago.

These are what are in plain view. Stored who knows where are many items like them previously in plain view. As I keep telling myself, I have to getmy house in better order. I’m sure I can, for I’m now able to chuck dead magazines–old copies of Discover or National Geographic, for instance. I proved that last year sometime when I threw out . . . I forget what, but it was a magazine I liked but hadn’t read all my issues of, which went back twenty years or more. I’m also ready to pack away old correspondence and zines and the like that I now have handy but never refer to. I may finally toss old paint brushes, broken crayons, and all kinds of painting supplies I once thought I could use to make masterpieces but never did.

Wish me luck. Before I started putting the house in order, I have to get my next column for Small Press Review done. Yesterday I finally finished a full draft of the two-chapter essay that will close my book on the Shakespeare authorship question that I wanted to finish before going to the hospital, so I can devote myself to the column during the next five days. Not today. Today I spend six killing hours at (1) my dentist’s spending $140 having another chipped tooth fixed (my teeth are crumbling at an alarming rate), (2) at the hospital where I’ll be getting operated on for a class in what to expect and pre-op filling out of forms and getting blood and an chest x-ray taken, and (3) at the supermarket getting bananas, milk and six bottles of Propel, the drink I’m trying to replace Mountain Dew with. It was too much for me.

Whee.

Posted in Autobiographica | No Comments »

Entry 450 — Visioverbal Visual Poetry

May 25th, 2011

I suppose, now that I’ve seen (most of–I haven’t been able to download all the images to my elderly, bottom -of-the-line computer) the collection of artworks Geof Huth curated here, I’ll have to make something of a retreat in terminology. Geof, probably the most influential authority on the definition of visual poetry around, seems to believe that artworks containing nothing but words can be poetry–if, apparently, it does something “visual” like use the fact that “hear” and “here” sound alike but mean different things–as well as artworks containing nothing whatever that is explicitly verbal or even textual are visual poetry. My impression is that they majority of people contributing to shows like this one are similarly against sane naming. Ergo, instead of using “visual poetry” to mean what I think it should mean, I’m going to try from now on to call what I think of as visual poetry (because it is both meaningfully visual and meaningfully poetry): visioverbal visual poetry. “Visioverbal” rather than “verbovisual” because “visioverbal,” for me suggests that what is verbal is more important than what is visual in what is being described. It’s an awkward phrase, but what else can I use?

If asked to curate a show of what others call “visual poetry” (don’t worry, I won’t be), I will simply call it, “stuff.” Why confuse things with any name more detailed?

I can see one virtue of the use of the name “visual poetry” for almost anything: a “visual poet” can do art of a kind done for decades, like collage, and feel original be giving it a name it hadn’t been called by. (Not that there aren’t some really fine works in Geof’s gallery.)

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Entry 449 — Pill-Popping

May 24th, 2011

Many times in the past, I’ve spoken of the pain pills I’ve taken, or the Mountain Dew I’ve drunk, often noting how one of the other, or both, have helped me out of the Null Zone. For at least four weeks I almost entirely avoided either. Once or twice taking a four-hour pain pill before trying to play tennis on my painfully bad left leg. I think in that time I was never fully out of the null zone, and probably half the time close to fully in it.

Well, I finally decided that I’m a hopeless addict. Proof is that I took two APCs, which have caffeine, a bit over two hours ago, then a pain pill with an opium-derivative in it a half-hour or so ago, and have done better work since the APCs on the important essay I’ve been slogging through for over a month than I have since beginning it. And I feel like I can do a full day’s work on it. Maybe more!

Once back home after the hip replacement operation I’ll be having (in a week), I plan to find some expert on my kind of drug addiction, and find out if I can somehow stay out of the null zone (a reasonable amount of the time) without drugs. If not, no big deal so long as I can keep having them prescribed for me, and I’m pretty sure I can. If it costs me a few years of life, so what? To continue to live as I’ve been living the past month of so would be ridiculous. In any case, it looks like I’ll have my essay done before I go into the hospital.

I’m feeling very good about it (and was even while in the null zone). It’s really coming together nicely. As usual when I’m knocking out material I have a good opinion of, I sing my way into fantasies of finally gaining recognition. One thing for sure, this time I’m going to keep on the attack with this essay until it is, or I am, done.

Meanwhile, what have I learned from my life that I can pass on to others? Nothing. I truly don’t know whether to advise the young to avoid caffeine and pain pills, or to consider them seriously if their energy levels are not as high as they feel they need to be for a satisfying life. Maybe some people are born with a need for pharmaceutical help, or with a flawed endocrine system that will eventually require it as I eventually required synthroid for my thyroid deficiency. Or was that caused by a use of caffeine that caused my thyroid to overwork and wear out? All I can say is that I hope genetic research will finally tell people enough about what they’ve been born with for them to make intelligent decisions about questions like these. If their genes have given them the capacity to make intelligent decisions. I don’t think mine did, I don’t think mine would have allowed me to choose suicide at the age of 15 or 24, the two ages at which it would have been best for me to do that.

Posted in Autobiographica, Pill-Popping | 2 Comments »

Entry 448 — Another Terminological Change

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 447 — Me Versus Academia, Again

May 23rd, 2011

David Graham made one of his always reasonable, never alarming posts to a thread on a 1993 book of Heather McHugh’s about the use of fragments in poetry, Broken English. He couldn’t keep from making what I took to be a crack at me, and was unable not to reply to.

. . . I think McHugh’s right–if I understand her point, what she’s talking about is not a particular technique but an effect reachable by various means at various times, one of those first principles that I referred to before. The high modernists, who were crazy about collage, were in this light not inventing anything entirely new so much as finding a fresh path to an age-old destination.

(All worthy destinations are age-old?)

This principle of disjunction, then, is visible in Whitman’s whip-saw juxtapositions, Stein’s fracturing of syntax, Eliot’s fragments shored against the ruins, the electric leap in a haiku, surrealist imagery, and so forth, right up through more recent instances such as Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox” and Ashbery’s ruminative ramblings.

I’m just thinking aloud here, and no doubt overgeneralizing, but it occurs to me that there is at least a kinship between poetry such as Dean Young’s and a lot of language-centered poetry with which it wouldn’t normally be compared. Rather like Ashbery, Young employs utterly conventional syntax, image, and figure; but the results are most slippery and unparaphraseable. He doesn’t fracture language itself, but there is plenty of disjunction and fragmentation at the conceptual level.

If you focus mostly on the easy binaries (style/theme; free verse/meter; traditional/experimental) you would naturally miss recognizing this sort of kinship. If, for example, all your definitions of poetry focused relentlessly on
purely technical matters such as the handling of syntax.

My response: “I suppose if you focused all your consideration of poetry on the techniques objectively distinguishing each kind from all others, you’d possibly miss as much as ten percent of the things you’d miss if you focused it only on the trivial kinships that can be found between any two kinds of poems. (Note: there is more to appreciating poetry than defining it, although that’s the most important part of intelligently appreciating it.)”

In a second post, I opined that “all worthy destinations are much more age-old than new, but never not-new in some significant way.”

Posted in Academia, David Graham, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 446 — A Question

May 22nd, 2011

Why do so few innovative poets discuss theirs and other innovative poets’ work? I think this is the most important reason we continue to be so marginal.

To repeat myself. Again.

Later Note: if I were to start an Internet discussion group, I would have only one rule: anyone could post a poem to it, but after a single poem has at any time been posted, no one else’s poem could be posted until at least five comments of substance have been made about the posted poem. I would guess it’d be the least popular such discussion group on the web.

Posted in Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts | No Comments »

Entry 445 — Vaudevillic Poetry

May 21st, 2011

I’ve coined another term, “Vaudevillic Poetry,” for what I’ve been calling “Jump-Cut Poetry.” This is a somewhat derogatory term inspired by my bias against short-attention span art, the kind of art that presents discontinuous acts. It reminds me of why I never much liked television variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s when young, and have rarely looked forward to visits to museums. Lots of fun stuff but within an hour I start getting a headache. I’m too much of a convergent thinker, I guess.

Lately I’ve decided that the “language poetry” now gaining Official Recognition is really not much different from Ashbery’s vaudevillic poetry, so really is not extending what the academy recognizes as poetry of value. Ergo, Wilshberia remains the only part of the contemporary American poetry continuum the Poetry Establishment has any really knowledge of.

Additional note: I’m renaming “Sprungrammatical Poetry” “Grammar-Centered Poetry.” Accessibility and all that. So: in my taxonomy, there are two kinds of Language poetry: grammar-centered and infraverbal. I’m thinking, too, that there are two kinds of vaudevillic poetry: phrase-length and sentence-length. “Jumbled-Text” may be a third–one beyond Wilshberia. But possibly beyond what I conceive as poetry, as well–i.e., hyperhermetic or Steinian, if you consider her short texts poems (although I feel I get some of them).

Posted in Grumman coinage, Kinds of Poetry, Literary Taxonomy | No Comments »

Entry 589 — A Spin-Off « POETICKS

Entry 589 — A Spin-Off

The poem below is something I spun off the mathemaku I posted yesterday. I made it mainly because I wanted to use a complete long divion poem as a term in a larger long division–something I’ve done once before but have never been satisfied with.

* * *

Friday, 9 December 2011, 8 A.M. Now that I’m starting to get things done, my luck has soured. A while ago I was getting ready to take the three framed works I now have for counter-display to the Arts&Humanities Council office. I could only find two. I was carrying the missing one around in my bicycle basket a few days ago. Looks like someone grabbed it. Unless I found a some incredibly stupid place to hide it from myself here. Luckily the frame was a cheap one, and the poem, which I’m sure the ones who stole it had not interest in (if they stole it for the poem, I’d be very pleased) is about the easiest of the ones I have to zap out another copy of. It’s the “Hi” one. But I’m out ten dollars or so, and have to ride out to get another frame, a wearying chore that upsets my plans for the day.

It is now a little after nine. Just as I was about to leave to get a new frame and take care of a few other errands, I found the “stolen” work. It was in a packing envelope (as I remembered it had been) and right in the chair I would naturally have put it in after getting back from the bike ride I’d had it with me on. My jacket was draped over it, but not entirely over it. I should have looked where it was as soon as I thought it lost. I’m not going senile–I’ve been doing things like that all my life. I must say, I feel a lot better. And something good came from it: needing another copy of the poem, I fooled around with it at Paint Shop and improved it. (Hey, that counts as my work for day on exhibition-related matters!)

It’s now eleven. I did some more work concerned with the exhibition: I went to the A&H office and talked to Judy, the lady in charge. I got a better idea of things from her–such as the date of the opening (3 January 2012).

5 P.M. and I’ve corrected my “A Christmas Mathemaku,” which I’ve always considered a potential crowd pleaser, and done a write-up on it. I plan to leave a framed copy of it at the Grumman Exhibition Center on Monday.

Order Flower Bouquet

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. 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.

Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2 « POETICKS

Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2

Note: the version of my sonnet above is not the final version of it.

Petsmart Coupons

This entry was posted on Friday, September 6th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Cryptographiku, haiku, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, minimalist 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.

Entry 34 — Yesterday’s Mathemaku Again, and Another « POETICKS

Entry 34 — Yesterday’s Mathemaku Again, and Another

Here’s the latest version of what I think I’m calling “Frame 17″ of The Long Division of Poetry:

17Aug07D-light

I didn’t like the background blue as dark as it showed here, so I lightened it. For some reason, that made a lot of difference to me. I also changed the quotient of the mathemaku below, another variation on the lead frame of The Long Division of Poetry that I composed in 2007 and have only touched up slightly since, mostly to increase its resolution. I feel it’s about as good as I’m capable of getting as a mathematical poet–although I do feel I’ve done a few mathemaku that are better than it.

20Nov09E

The divisor is hard to read on-site, I don’t know why. The image is much darker than it is on the screen of the computer where I do my Paint Shop work, even though I tried to lighten it. Oh, it’s tiff on my computer, jpeg here, which may explain it. Anyway, the divisor reads, “a memory of/ Harbor View, June 27, 1952″

Note: for those of you new to Grumman Studies, “manywhere-at-once,” which is usually capitalized, is where (according to my poetics) metaphors and other figures of speech send one. Two or more places in one’s brain at the same time. So this poem attempts to express the value of equaphoration–my term for any poetic device that in some way equates one thing with another, even irony, which equates the truth with its opposite.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 1:01 PM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen. 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.

Uncategorized « POETICKS

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

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

mindless x ( ) = less mind

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

old pond

frog

splash

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

* * *

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

easy approval

Posted in haiku, Karl Kempton, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Entry 450 — Visioverbal Visual Poetry

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

If asked to curate a show of what others call “visual poetry” (don’t worry, I won’t be), I will simply call it, “stuff.” Why confuse things with any name more detailed?

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Entry 101 — MATO2, Chapter 3.02

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I wasn’t finished with the revision of my book, just with getting a good rough draft of it done. My morale got a substantial boost on Thursday 3 January 1991 due to a letter from John Byrum. He asked if I’d consider letting him run a series of excerpts from my book in the newsletter he edits. I thought that a great idea and after my afternoon nap have spent quite a bit of time getting 12 excerpts ready for him. As I’ve gone along, I have also found places in my book in need of improvement and have thus taken up the book’s revision again. In fact, I’ve cut my final chapter by around 500 words.

9 P.M. Friday 4 January 1991 I made a few new changes in the book and in the excerpts as well.

8 P.M. Monday 7 January 1991 Got my Manywhere excerpts ready for John Byrum.

10:10 P.M. Tuesday 8 January 1991 The bank account is very low–I can’t publish more than a hundred copies of my revised edition of Manywhere without going below the minimum balance on my last account with anything at all in it. But I guess I’ll have enough to print 100 copies of the psychology book, assuming my Xerox holds up.

9 P.M. Thursday 17 January 1991 The mail included a nice letter from Carita (a member of the Tuesday Writers’ Group who’d bought a copy of my book before moving to Miami)–and the card I’d sent to James Kilpatrick for him to let me know if he’d gotten my letter about “vizlation” with. He had, and–more amazingly–will be quoting it in a column in February, he says.

10 P.M. Monday 21 January 1991 I spent most of the rest of the day writing definitions for the words in Of Manywhere-at-Once’s glossary. It took me a surprisingly long time, but it was helpful, for I was able to improve several passages conerning those words in the main part of
the book. I was dismayed to find two or three spots where my definitions were quite confused. But now the only thing left to do to get the book completely ready for printing is a table of contents. (Aside from working out the margins and all that baloney.)

8:30 P.M. Wednesday 23 January 1991 I heard from John Byrum, okaying my Manywhere series except that he preferred to start with my second excerpt rather than the one telling about my beginning the sonnet and I decided he was right. So I withdrew the first excerpt and the last, which goes with it. Consequently, he’ll be running ten installments.

26 January 1991 I am now like a 25-year-old in quantity of accomplishments and social recognition, but like a 50-year-old in actual accomplishment. It also passed through my mind how extremely self-confident, even complacent, I am at the deepest level that things will eventually come out right for me. I think I get that from Mother. But I’ve always known, too, that I have to work hard if that’s to happen, as I have, for the most part.

Tuesday 29 January 1991 dbqp #101, which I found in the back of my mailbox when I put some letters to go in it this morning. Very interesting short history of dbqp and list of its first 100 publications with personal comments about them. He mentioned me a great deal which was flattering but made me a little self-conscious, too.

Friday 1 February 1991 I was full of intimations of apotheosis this morning. My feelings built till I got back from shopping and found rather null mail awaiting. They faded quickly, then. But I continue to feel pretty good. Actually, it was good mail–letters from Malok, Jonathan and Guy. Also material about 1X1 exhibit but no letter from Mimi, and a request for a catalogue. Lastly, a quotation for printing 100, 1000 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once from McNaughton (or something close to that, a company I’ve heard does good work): $1000, $2000. Second price not bad at all but 1000 copies too many at this time.

YEAR-END SUMMARY (of my fiftieth year): 9 minor reviews of mine appeared in 5 different publications; 7 pieces of vizlature of mine, all but one of them visual poems, appeared in 6 publications; 2 or 3 of my letters appeared here and there; I got 1 mailart piece off to a show; I got 8 textual poems into 4 magazines; I produced 2 or 3 unplaced visual poems; I wrote 3 not-yet-placed essays; I got my book, Of Manywhere-at-Once, published at last, then revised it in totum; I made and self-published SpringPoem No. 3,719,242.

In short, not much of a year, but not terrible, either.

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Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress « POETICKS

Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress

I continue to believe someday people will be interested in how various poems of mine came about. Hence, the following three stages of my unfinished “Cursive Mathemaku, No. 2″:

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 29th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. 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.

2 Responses to “Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress”

hyperpoesia says:

9 June 11 at 3:33 AM

i love these, bob!
Bob Grumman says:

9 June 11 at 2:42 PM

Hey, thanks for the good words, Maria. As soon as I saw them, I thought of your embroidered poems and how similar my scribbled poems have in common with them–a kind of looseness, different-colored threads, domesticity (?), sensitivity (I hope!). Main thing is how much fun they are!

–Bob

Entry 581 — My Most-Used Quotient « POETICKS

Entry 581 — My Most-Used Quotient

This is the quotient in just about all my twenty or more long divisions of “poetry.” It’s intended to convey the meaning of Dickinson’s lines about telling the truth, but telling it “slant,” so represents “superior poetic diction.” That’s all I took it for, for a long time. I was disturbed, however, that, as a general term that in my division of poetry, almost always multiplies another general term, like “words,” it should yield a general product, not the specific product I always had it yielding. Take the first division in the series:

My problem with this and the others would possibly never occur to anyone but me, but it bothered me for years: how could I say that slant-words times words (or whatever) should equal the very idiosyncratic graphic the long division claims it does. Just now, I thought of my way out. It was to recognize the image of the slant-words as one of an infinite number of such words! Big thrill, hunh. Well, to me it meant that there was nothing wrong with having this one instance of poetic diction multiplied by words (in-general) equal the particular instance of–not poetry, but of something almost poetry that needs “friendship” to make it poetry. (That latter, folks, is an attack on hermetic poetry–if no one gets anything out of your poetry but you, it’s not poetry, even though that may be the case with my poetry.)

If nothing else, you have now been exposed to the kind of nutty need I have to make my mathematical poems mathematically valid, at least in my own mind.(Note: the poem I have posted here is different from both what it was originally and what it was in its last published version. I think I have it in its final form now, though. I changed the graphic five or more times because it kept seeming to me that a goose was in it, and I didn’t want no goose in it!

* * *

Thursday, 1 December 2011 Not much to report. I attended a match my tennis team played, and won, 3-0. I was the back-up for this one. Very cold (for Florida). After I got home, I ran again, this time completing a mile. I went very slowly, finishing with a time about eleven-and-a-half minutes. I really do think I’ll be able to improve on that. I worked on “Frame No. 7″ of my long division of poetry series and put an black&white illustration of it on an exhibition hand-out but forgot to write a commentary on it. I did get this blog entry wholly done, and I consider the work I did on the mathemaku a reasonable day’s work for the exhibition.

Best Buy.com

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetry Criticism. 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.

Entry 1109 — Still Trying to Get People To Appreciate My Urine « POETICKS

Entry 1109 — Still Trying to Get People To Appreciate My Urine

The other day I was thinking about early childhood, how it is for most of us idyllic before we’re sent off to school. What particularly grabbed me was the simple fact that when you’re very young, everything is new. And important! And magical! Imagine a world in which one can enter a dark room, push a switch, and fill the room with light! What could possibly be more magical than that? For a while, I think my ability to fill a bottle with this beautiful yellow liquid that came so easily out of the thing hanging between my legs was a miracle–one, furthermore, that only I was capable of. I kept a jar of the liquid which I showed my sister and a friend of hers–because I thought they’d appreciate it. But my mother noticed. No mother around now to do the same for the following two poems, both of which are miracles:

I’m sure they’ve been on exhibit here before, but the second has been spruced up. Each represents, it seems to me, all I’ve learned over the years as a poet. Keats is a source for both, but especially the first. Does anyone read him anymore? The Grimms’ Fairy Tales my mother read to me and my sister are another. Poetry, I suspect, has been my way of trying to return not to the Faereality of my childhood but to the wonderful paths I was sure would lead into it. One of them (the most important?) pre-sleep bedtime when I got to within a tenth-of-a-poem of daydreaming all the way into the wonderful secret world story characters lived in, comic book characters soon prominent among them.

Country Inns and Suites

This entry was posted on Monday, June 3rd, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. 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.

Mathematical Poetry « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Mathematical Poetry’ Category

Entry 1425 — 2 Long Division Problems

Wednesday, April 16th, 2014

I was going to send a list to an art show in Minneapolis containing mathepoetic long division problems like the two below. I couldn’t come up with enough good ones, and my list wasn’t appropriate for the show, so I sent a list of quotidian shopping list on top of notes for the list of long division problems. Here are two of said problems:

CriesOfSeagullsIntoChildhood

I was intrigued by the way part of the lines of the letters I used as guide for my thicker-lined spelling of “coal mine” showed through. I’d been deleting them but decided to leave them in, then wrote the crude version of “woman” on top of the violet version. It makes some kind of emotional sense to me, but I haven’t figured out what.

The problems are just multiplication problems really: what times distant cries of seagulls equals childhood (fading) and what times a coal mine will equal woman, but making them long divisions suggests the answer will have a remainder. Anyway, the idea is to get an engagent using his imagination. Simpler ones would be good exercises for children. For boy, what’s 100 zombies into interesting Sunday afternoon at the beach, maybe.

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Entry 1342 — My Latest Poem

Thursday, January 16th, 2014

I’m going to spend the rest of the day reading a Len Deighton novel, the second in a trilogy that I’ve been reading with enjoyment this past week. I just don’t feel like any megalospiel, or even hohenspiel of any kind. Ergo, it’s pure recreospiel for me (Is that what I named it?) Nonetheless, I must post a daily blog entry, so I grabbed my latest poem for today’s:

I’m going to postpone my comments on this till tomorrow as I feel pretty sure I’ll again need something for that day’s entry, and am confident I can then at least tell you the name of the poem the above is a detail of–the remainder, actually.

Christmas Deals

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Entry 1308 — Mine Review Continueth

Monday, December 23rd, 2013

I was going to celebrate the Winter Solstice with Zero Production, but then I found out yesterday, not today, was when it occurred, so I had to finish the review I was working on. I wrote over 1300 word, pretty good ones, I think. Below is one of the poems I dealt with, with my comments on it following it:

Something of what seems to me at the frontier of math-related poetry that I hope will be further explored in the future is Sarah Glaz’s fascinatingly strange “13 January 2009.” It consists of two texts side by side, one, “13,” with nothing in it but numbers (and equal signs), the other, “January 2009) devoted entirely to words about the dying of a man named Anuk whom I take to be an ancient Egyptian (in spite of the poem’s title!) I feel ready to go on for another thousand words at least about this poem, but will limit myself here to telling you that, according to its author, its “structure follows The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which states that every positive integer greater than one may be expressed in a unique way as a product of powers of distinct prime numbers”—which (inexorable) process, I would add, is shown in “13.” I hope to say more in an essay on mathematical poetry I have in the works for this periodical. Conclusion: when I began thinking about this review, I had visions of making an insightful taxonomical study of its poems, but their “multi-dimensional links to mathematics and . . . wide range of styles” as Glaz has it in her introduction, and wide range of techniques, I’d add, made that too difficult a task. So all I have to say now is that I hope anyone still reading this has enjoyed my chatter as much as I’ve enjoyed indulging in it.

Online Coupons

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Entry 1298 — “The Long Division of Creativity”

Friday, December 13th, 2013

Whee, as the year draws to a close, I finally made another long division poem:

I’ve already sketched a variation on it in which creativity is divided by summer. I hope to make a 4-season set of it.
.

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Posted in Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | 5 Comments »

Enter 1266 — A Boast

Monday, November 11th, 2013

Today, mainly once again to save work, just a short entry, this, which is from the Schirmers 2000 edition of Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant Gardes, page 397:

My boast about this is that, so far as I know, it is the world’s first definition of mathematical poetry to appear in a reputable reference. I believe it is still the only such definition to do that, certainly in the United States.

Dating Waukegan

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Entry 1259 — The Dead Career Goes On

Monday, November 4th, 2013

My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:

What the heck, here’s another wall:

Money making surveys

Posted in Autobiographica, Mathematical Poetry, visual poetry | 3 Comments »

Entry 1253 — Guest-Blog Non-Entry

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

M@h*(pOet)?ica　– (A Lesson in Poetic Logic–First Draft of Essay for Scientific American, if I haven’t been fired.)

This entry will be a short one in defense of the poetic logic of mathexpressive poems. By poetic logic I mean a kind of connotative, or indirect, logic as opposed (in some cases, rather extremefully) to the denotative logic of strictly scientific prose and all pure mathematics. Loose, but making intuitive sense. To show as exactly as I can what I mean, I am going to use my latest work, “Four-sided Investigation of the Core of Faereality” as an example. It consists of four long divisions of “the core of faereality.”

Before getting into my discussion of this, I think the following labeled long division example may make things go smoother (if only for me, as I still have trouble with the terminology involved!)

According to the above, a long division the multiplication of a long division poem’s divisor by its quotient yields what I call its “sub-dividend product” (because I’ve never been able to find its official name, if it has one). I consider this the most important operation the poem carries out because of the metaphor it makes the sub-dividend product for the multiplication of divisor and quotient, and the partial metaphor it makes it for the dividend. It is, in fact, the main point of a long division poem.

Hence, in the first long division poem in my quartet, “science,” the poem’s divisor, is multiplied by “poetry,” its quotient, to yield the sub-dividend product depicted below:

Does this make sense? It certainly does not make rigorously scientific sense, which is why mathematicians have trouble with such poetry. As a poet, though, my only concern, as previously stated, is poetic logic. I claim that science taken poetry times equals: (1) fragments of various mathematical statements because—and here you must bear with me—because poetry is in effect less that one, science more; (2) a peculiar irregular shape, because poetry is a deconstructive element; (3) a pleasurable flow of colors because of the sensually pleasing matter poetry, as a form of art, provides; and (4) the extraction from the piece’s mathematical statements a poetic text, “From is for every bound alled,” in the process uncovering a wonderful detail in a formidable set of generalizations (the definitions of elementary calculus the background text is from).

The poetic text is the most important feature of the sub-dividend product; note well, though, that it is entirely provided by the divisor; the quotient merely works out one of the many ways it can achieve poetic significance. Because of its dominance, the poetic text must be more than the weird apparently unintelligible splash of words the one here is, for the poem to give pleasure to those not aesthetically satisfied by meaninglessness. Ergo, I will try to make sense of it.

To begin with, the reader must tolerate syntactical misbehavior; to do this, he must assume that a linguistic integrity on the part of the text’s author that assures him that the author is breaking with normal syntax for some higher, poetic purpose. As that author, I claim he is! And that the reader must drop out of linguistic standardness into exploratory maples semi-dreaming. Hopefully, he will bump into the possibility that “From” not a preposition but a noun meaning “from-ness”; from there the ascent (or descent) its being for “every bound” “alled.” Paraphrase: No matter where one is coming from the result is alled, or everything possible.

At this point I need to tell you that the poem’s dividend is “the core of faereality.” Therefore, “From is for every bound alled,” according to the rules of long division, comes close to equaling that. The “bound” or territory within the core of faereality, which I use to suggest the world of the imagination, and/or the subconscious and/or where Alice went, et cetera, is what is alled.

Add the remainder, a fragment of the word, “poetry,” to the sub-dividend product and you get the core of faereality exactly. In other words, the full result of sciences taken poetry times needs a fragment of poetry to exactly equal the core of faereality. (And we have a second metaphor—one that indicates two components of the dividend, so a fuller metaphor than the ones in most ordinary poems.

There is more to the poetic text extracted than I indicated, by the way. “From” also works as a preposition, with “is” becoming a noun, and “a bound is also a leap. I hope readers will find more routes to the core of faereality (and from faereality to realms like childhood, science fantasy, dreaming, mythology, poetry (as opposed to poems), and even physics, religion and philosophy, since all of them are in some final way forms of faereality, however much else they also are.

* * *

In the quartet’s three later long divisions mathematics, poetry, and music are multiplied by poetry to yield different approximations of the core of faereality. Here’s the result of the last of poetry times music:

The only comment I’ll make about this is that I carefully removed all indications of the mathematical under-text from this (and the one resulting from poetry times poetry), since neither music nor poetry are explicitly mathematical, although both are a little mathematical, music (which has fractions!) more so than poetry. But lo, the undertext still refers back to the definitions required for calculus—the same way everything at bottom is mathematical.

Dell XPS 15 laptop

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Entry 1228 — Protozoa, Part 2

Sunday, September 29th, 2013

Here is the corrected version of my piece in Shadows of the Future (it’s now in the latter, too, thanks to Jeff Side):

I’m still too blah to say why the change was (vitally) necessary, but I told Jeff, when asking him if he could switch versions, that, for me, it would be like changing “5 x 10 = 2″ to “5 x 2 = 10″–which should give you a huge clue as to my thinking.

And now, from Wikipedia, to make this the first blog in history to contain an entry on mathematical poetry and protozoa, is some information about the flagella of protozoa:

Types

Three types of flagella have so far been distinguished; bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic.

The main differences among these three types are summarized below:

Bacterial flagella are helical filaments, each with a rotary motor at its base which can turn clockwise or counterclockwise.They provide two of several kinds of bacterial motility.
Archaeal flagella (Archaella) are superficially similar to bacterial flagella, but are different in many details and considered non-homologous.
Eukaryotic flagella – those of animal, plant, and protist cells – are complex cellular projections that lash back and forth. Eukaryotic flagella are classed along with eukaryotic motile cilia as undulipodia to emphasize their distinctive wavy appendage role in cellular function or motility. Primary cilia are immotile, and are not undulipodia; they have a structurally different 9+0 axoneme rather than the 9+2 axoneme found in both flagella and motile cilia undulipodia.

Bacterial

Physical model of a bacterial flagellum

Structure and composition. The bacterial flagellum is made up of the protein flagellin. Its shape is a 20 nanometer-thick hollow tube. It is helical and has a sharp bend just outside the outer membrane; this “hook” allows the axis of the helix to point directly away from the cell. A shaft runs between the hook and the basal body, passing through protein rings in the cell’s membrane that act as bearings. Gram-positive organisms have 2 of these basal body rings, one in the peptidoglycan layer and one in the plasma membrane. Gram-negative organisms have 4 such rings: the L ring associates with the lipopolysaccharides, the P ring associates with peptidoglycan layer, the M ring is embedded in the plasma membrane, and the S ring is directly attached to the plasma membrane. The filament ends with a capping protein.

The flagellar filament is the long helical screw that propels the bacterium when rotated by the motor, through the hook. In most bacteria that have been studied, including the Gram negative Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Caulobacter crescentus, and Vibrio alginolyticus, the filament is made up of eleven protofilaments approximately parallel to the filament axis. Each protofilament is a series of tandem protein chains. However in Campylobacter jejuni, there are seven protofilaments.

The basal body has several traits in common with some types of secretory pores, such as the hollow rod-like “plug” in their centers extending out through the plasma membrane. Given the structural similarities between bacterial flagella and bacterial secretory systems, it is thought that bacterial flagella may have evolved from the type three secretion system; however, it is not known for certain whether these pores are derived from the bacterial flagella or the bacterial secretory system.

Motor. The bacterial flagellum is driven by a rotary engine (the Mot complex) made up of protein, located at the flagellum’s anchor point on the inner cell membrane. The engine is powered by proton motive force, i.e., by the flow of protons (hydrogen ions) across the bacterial cell membrane due to a concentration gradient set up by the cell’s metabolism (in Vibrio species there are two kinds of flagella, lateral and polar, and some are driven by a sodium ion pump rather than a proton pump). The rotor transports protons across the membrane, and is turned in the process. The rotor alone can operate at 6,000 to 17,000 rpm, but with the flagellar filament attached usually only reaches 200 to 1000 rpm. The direction of rotation can be switched almost instantaneously, caused by a slight change in the position of a protein, FliG, in the rotor.

The cylindrical shape of flagella is suited to locomotion of microscopic organisms; these organisms operate at a low Reynolds number, where the viscosity of the surrounding water is much more important than its mass or inertia.

The rotational speed of flagella varies in response to the intensity of the proton motive force, thereby permitting certain forms of speed control, and also permitting some types of bacteria to attain remarkable speeds in proportion to their size; some achieve roughly 60 cell lengths / second. Although at such a speed it would take a bacterium about 245 days to cover a kilometre, and although that may seem slow, the perspective changes when the concept of scale is introduced. In comparison to macroscopic life forms it is very fast indeed when expressed in terms of number of body lengths per second. A cheetah for example, only achieves about 25 body lengths / sec.

Through use of their flagella, E. coli are able to move rapidly towards attractants and away from repellents. They do this by means of a biased random walk, with ‘runs’ and ‘tumbles’ brought about by rotating the flagellum counterclockwise and clockwise respectively.

Assembly. During flagellar assembly, components of the flagellum pass through the hollow cores of the basal body and the nascent filament. During assembly, protein components are added at the flagellar tip rather than at the base. In vitro, flagellar filaments assemble spontaneously in a solution containing purified flagellin as the sole protein.

Evolution. The evolution of bacterial flagella has been used as an argument against evolution by creationists. They argue that complex structures like flagella cannot evolve from simple structures. In other words, flagella are “irreducibly complex” and need all of their protein components to function. However, it has been shown by numerous studies that a large number of proteins can be deleted without (complete) loss of function. Moreover, it is generally accepted now that bacterial flagella have evolved from much simpler secretion systems, such as the Type III secretion system.

* * *

Danged inneresting, I think!

Order Corporate Gifts

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Entry 1227 — A New Anthology

Saturday, September 28th, 2013

Yesterday Jeff Side announced the e.publication of Shadows of the Future, an anthology of otherstream poetry (or, in some cases–in my possibly excessively picky opinion–almost otherstream poetry) edited by Marc Vincenz, and published by Argotist Ebooks. So I’m going to use this entry for some words about it instead of going on to the second part of my investigation of protozoa. That I will do tomorrow, assuming I choose to continue my investigation (and I hope I do–nothing more valuable for the ol’ brain than a plunge into something you don’t know hardly nothin’ about).

Interesting. When looking for what categories to assign this entry to, I found I had none for “Poetry.” I do now. So I can bring up that subject to tell you the anthology has 120 works, almost all of them poems by my definition, on 166 pages . . .

and here a digression to complain about my stupid computer (or, yeah, my stupid inability to know how use it): I would like to be able to click from here to the anthology the way I can click from here to a file on my word processer or anywhere else but totally out of it. There must be a way to save it as a regular file I can access on my word processer; if so, I’m ignorant of it. So I have a second copy of this entry on the slot (can’t remember its name) with everything I can click to on it. To get to the anthology, I go to that entry, and click the link in it to the anthology. Very annoying.

Back to the anthology now. Marc has a nice one-page forward in it. Following it is a page-and-a-half introduction to it by me which is just my standard boilerplate about the refusal of the Establishment to so much as acknowledge the existence of the Otherstream. Basically it’s a polemic intended to annoy estabniks enough to make them reply to it. It has little chance of doing that but what else can I do? I think it presents a good definition of the establishment, though.

My only real disappointment with the anthology is how little visual poetry is in it–but that was because, for some reason, few visual poets submitted anything to it. There were visual poems by seven people–and textual poems by five people like mIEKAL aND who often do visual poetry. In all, 37 had works in the anthology. When going through it doing my counts, I spent a few minutes with my own poems. One of them disturbed me: I decided it was wrong! Here is the wrong version:

I doubt anyone but I would see what is wrong (crucially wrong, in my view) with this, but just for the fun of it, I won’t say more about it, nor show the corrected version for a while.

I’m too worn out from being too worn out to say much more about the anthology. Before signing off, though, I want to recommend it strongly. It’s an excellent tour of what’s going on in the vast countryside beyond the borders of the mainstream. The vispo cover by David Chirot is worth the trouble of clicking to it alone! That one work will give you more to wander through thoughts and feelings about by itself than the entirety of most mainstream anthologies of contemporary poetry.