A little while ago, Stephen Russell posted the following at New-Poetry:

Bob, they let me out of rehab to do a math poem: It’s very simple (after Basho). A Ven diagram. The frog: (small circle) enclosed within a (  larger circle ): the pond. & a tear between the intersecting circles, the s p l a s h. Text for all 3 words: frog/pond/splash. & perhaps a larger circle enclosing the 2 smaller circles: Universe. A math poem that approximates Basho’s vision … But I’m having problems getting it done in word instead of paintshop (much user friendly).

“Sounds fun,” I said back. ” I don’t do nothin’ graphic in word, but jpeg converts once done in paintshop.  I think where to go with Venn poetry would be surrealistic overlaps.  Having said that, I can’t think of an example, even a bad one. “

Because, in another post, Stephen had mentioned someone’s bewailing the death of the novel,  I wrote, “As for the death of the novel, I can’t see it.  Nor of poetry.  There’s the crucial importance of abstraction–experiencing reality sensually and abstractly.  Crucial for art and science. “

This led to a few further words about a third post of Stephen’s about getting people to appreciate poetry: “I don’t see any way of making serious poetry popular.  As I’ve always said, it’s like classical music or superior jazz or ballet or mathematics.  The only problem is getting people able to appreciate it to try it!  Which means, among other things, every once in a while giving a lot of money to a person making it (because the media only pays attention to things people get a lot of money for).  Maybe I’ve said things like this before?

“Meanwhile, I just had a one-man show at my local library, and drew four or five people to it, two of whom actually discussed any of the items in it.  Poeticks.com has photographs of it.  It wasn’t really a one-man show, but 17 or my 18 framed works hung in an event with many other tables for authors (and non-authors) celebrating the library’s 50th anniversary.  It made me think about why nobody was drawn to it.  Two thoughts on that: (1) I did nothing to promote it, like running around in a costume with visual poems on it–after getting the library to hang a few of my accessible poems up in advance (and I do have a few) and (2) creating a “lesson in visual poetry” like the one I’ve started work on which will consist of seven or eight posters, each showing some detail of the poem they are about, with commentary I attempt to make entertaining with personal comments, little jokes but also solid poetics; the whole idea would be to take someone encountering the work through the poem step by step.

“I hope to have it soon at my blog.  First I have to separate the purely graphic matter from the textual matter overlaid on it, which will take a while.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts. 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.

I walked four miles today. My physical therapist and my surgeon are agreed that I shouldn’t walk more than half a mile. But I had somewhere to go, and have this weird self-belief in my ability to walk. I don’t have the same self-belief in any other physical ability so haven’t done and won’t do anything else I’m not supposed to. I’m not sure what my point is–maybe something about  aconceptual knowledge versus conceptual expertise.

But also to explain why I’m too tired to say more, today, about William Logan in the latest issue of New Criterion except that he has finally actually written about a poet I consider avant-garde (albeit, barely), Rae Armantrout. I guess he had to since she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and has been a member of the Academy of American Poets and otherwise credentialed for quite a while. He pans her, of course. Ignorantly, of course. Okay, semi-ignorantly. The main thing is that he discusses her–for over a page. Bringing the New Criterion briefly up to 1980.

He also discusses Wilbur’s latest, but I only read the part about Armantrout. Tired. I’ll read the rest of Logan’s commentary, though–I read every word of every issue of the New Criterion. I figure it gives me a good anchor in 1950 to sail into newer things from. I truly wish there were a magazine around as good about 2000 as it is about 1950 (and cultural figures repeating it in 2011).

Later Note:  The book was Broken English, by Heather McHugh.  It showed up.  I had left it in the car of the friends who’d driven me home from the healthcare center with a lot of other stuff in a large shopping bag.  I guess I’m glad I found it.  I’m very glad of the stuff that turned up with it, which included some magazines and two other books that it would have driven me beserk to have looked for and not found.  I wasn’t totally stupid, by the way: I called Linda, my ride home, and asked her to check her car.

I actually got two-and-a-half brief reviews done yesterday.  None even started yet today although it’s a little after three in the afternoon.  Forty minutes ago I took two APCs, so maybe I’ll get going now. 

I have nothing much to write about today, just some old thoughts about world cultural peaks.  I think about them fairly often, mostly when comparing my country against others, with the low evaluation of it of so many liberals in mind.  While I do believe America is the greatest nation in the world right now, and has been for over a century, I feel it has only achieved one cultural peak, the period from around 1910 until 1960 in poetry.  Well, maybe also a technological one I’d call the Edison Era.  Getting back to the poetic period, it required many more people than England from around 1810 until 1840 had when England had its one great period of poetry.  (Elizabethan England achieved maximal greatness in the drama, not poetry, in my view.)   I don’t know of any other nations’ comparable poetic peaks but I’m not dumb enough to imagine that isn’t almost entirely due to my ignorance.   

Actually, I don’t really think of the recent peaking of anglophonic poetry in America as belonging culturally to America, but to the British Empire.  In any event, I always wonder in conjunction with my admiration of that period, how my period compares.  I don’t think anything much was going on in anglophonic poetry between 1960 and 1990, although the next period of superior poetry was shaping up then.  From 1990 til now, anglophonic poetry has been sizzling, I’m sure of that.  It’s been at least an orderof magnitude better than the poetry of the preceding 30 years.  Whether it has gotten or will get to the level or the early twentieth centure period, I can’t say.  Don’t know enough about it, and am too close to it to be as objective as I should be.  Certainly its poetry has been by far the most varied, the most valuably varied, poetry ever.  If it’s a lesser period, it will be because most of its best poets have been too esoteric.  It lacks its Yeatses and Frosts, although I hold Richard Wilbur in high esteem.  And the sonnets of Michael Snider.  In fact, there are probably many excellent “Frosts” out there I’ve been too busy with my own poetry to know much about.   And many of our most unconventional poets have composed first-rate, accessible (or reasonably accessible) conventional poetry, too.  The first name that occurs to me is Sheila Murphy.  Karl Kempton and Geof Huth, as well.  Who knows, too, how “accessible” posterity will find the now seemingly difficult work of others.  I must remember to live to the age of 130 to find out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts. 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.