POETICKS

Entry 465 — A Long Walk

July 8th, 2011

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.

Entry 464 — A Follow-Up Visit to the Surgeon

July 6th, 2011

I saw my surgeon yesterday.   He was very pleased with my progress.  But he said it’d be three or four more months before I would be a non-gimp.  He had told me before the operation that it’d take two to five months for me to reach that point, so I felt I’d make it in two with hard work, if the operation went well.  I’ve worked hard and the operation went well but am not considered likely to be able to do more than I’m doing now, which is walk fast in a straight line, and take care of myself in my home.  Sure doesn’t give me much motivation to continue going all-out on my exercise program.

Meanwhile, my old lethargy is still with me.  I’ve done a little work on my Shakespeare book since getting home, but not much else.   I’m hoping I’m just suffering from the stress any change in one’s circumstances tends to cause, even a good change like getting home from a care facility.

 

Entry 463 — I’m Home

July 2nd, 2011

Just a note to say I got back from the rehab center yesterday, and after putting the stuff I brought home with me away, walked a mile–at a blazing 3 miles and hour.  But I’m not allowed to go much faster.  Running will be forbidden for another week.  Not allowed to twist, either.  I’m supposedly ahead of schedule.  I feel good about my progress.  I feel good about most everything, in fact.

Had a therapist make a house call yesterday.  He gave me some exercises that seem good ones.  Gotta do two of them once an hour, though, so I’ve been busy.  Also walked another mile and did some writing.

More tomorrow, I hope.

 

 

Entry 462 — A New Saying

June 27th, 2011

Criticism of criticism: the mediocrity’s primary defense against being found out.

Entry 461 — The Latest from the Rehab Center

June 19th, 2011

I guess it’s about ime I posted another entry.  Not much going on here.  I had hoped to be home from now–was making good progress with my physical therapy.   The a setback: my surgical incision was infected.  Result: an IV anti-biotic has been administered to me each day for the past five days.  Five more round of it, then I get to go home, assuming it has worked, and all signs are that it will have.

I was pretty disgusted.  So much time going by with little or nothing accomplished, even compared to some of my recent poor days at home.  Then I remembered a chore I could do here: posting all my Small Press Review columns here at my new blog, something I’ve been meaning to do for some time.  It’s been hard getting them properly formatted, but I’m getting them much more quickly posted now than when I did four days or so ago when I started the chore.  They are in the Pages, under “Bob Grumman’s Small Press Review Columns,” 21 so far, but I hope to add a few more today.

I’ve read most of them as I posted them, relieved to find they seem pretty good to me.  I hope to published two books of them, with commentary.  They remain about the only published commentary on avant garde poetry anywhere in this country as far as I know.     

 

Entry 460 — I’m an Avant Garde Poet

June 18th, 2011

Geof  Huth recently claimed at his blog that there’s no such thing as avant garde poetry–because (as I understand him) all poetry issues from prior poetry.  He instantly persuaded me of the existence of avant garde poetry, about which I’d been previously skeptical because nothing significantly new seemed to have been happening or even capable of happening in the arts anymore.  I still believe the latter but what I suddenly realized is that “avant garde” means, or should mean, not significantly new but merely more new than the status quo.  As, for instance, my mathematical and cryptograhic poetry are.  I’m with Geof, though, in not thinking that considering onelf avant garde is that big a deal.  An avant garde poet is not necessarily superior to a status quo poet.

Supporting Note: if Finnegans Wake was not avant garde, what was it?  (I would add that it’s still avant garde.

 

 

Entry 459 — Week No. 2 at the Rehab Center

June 13th, 2011

I’m doing all the exercises I’ve been asked to do.   Today I got my own walker.  This means I’m allowed to walk everywhere in the building on my own–so long a s I use the walker.  I can walk, slowly, without it, but am not supposed to.  There are all kinds of movements I’m supposed to avoid (and do).  I seem in good shape but can’t walk naturally, or unnaturally without thinking about what I’m doing.  No word yet on when I’ll be able to go home.  I don’t mind being here much.  Not getting anything done, though–unless you count finishing reading beautiful & pointless, by David Orr, which may be the worst book about poetry ever written.  Orr thinks there’s no reason for poets to think they know anything more about using words than the man in the street does.  Granted, many do not.  Still . . .

Entry 458 — A Quick In&Out

June 7th, 2011

I’m okay.  Took me a long time to get access to a computer, and from it to the Internet.  Am now trying to delete items in my server’s inbox so as not to go over my limit and I apparently don’t know how to do it because I’m doing it one e.mail at a time.  I know I’ve at other times deleted many more at one time but can’t now.  When done, almost certainly not until tomorrow, will say more about my current situation.

Entry 457 — Off to the Hospital

June 1st, 2011

I’ll be off to the hospital in another half hour or so.  I feel good.  Things should go well.  If everything works out maximally well, I’ll be able to make a blog entry from the hospital tomorrow.  Don’t bank on that, though.

 

Entry 456 — My Latest Poem

May 31st, 2011

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I posted it at New-Poetry early this morning.  No comments back yet.  I was hoping someone would say, “Wow, that’s great!”  I really think it’s possible that few if anyone at New-Poetry–or maybe anywhere, can appreciate it as I do.  I really do think that few people are not segreceptual, or incapable of quickly darting from one sensual modality to another, in this case from verboceptuality to wherever we process spelling and the conceptual significance of spellings quickly enough to appreciate the poem.  A word-frame as the house of vowels, and then vacant.

I will be leaving my house tomorrow morning around six for the hospital and my hip surgery, so may not post an entry then, or for a while.  I am not sure when I’ll next have access to the Internet.   So don’t be surprised if there’s nothing new here for a week or more.

Note: I got all the things written I felt I had to before going to the hospital–after dawdling on all of them for days or weeks.  Weird.  I just couldn’t get them done–until I had to.  Same thing happened most of the time with me in high school.

 

 

Entry 575 — A Half-An-Insight « POETICKS

Entry 575 — A Half-An-Insight

A thought regarding Ashbery’s admirers, which is probably very unfair (but possibly a half-truth): there are two kinds of poetry-lovers: those who want to take a ride in the mind of a poet who will take them to places they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten to, and those who want to get into the mind of a poet that they can take control of—because they can then drive it to places that are safe because they’ve already been to them.  In other words, lovers of poems with destinations like those of Frost, and lovers of anywhere-going poems like (most of) those of Ashbery.

Diary Entry for Friday, 25 November 2011, 1 P.M.: I got another entry posted (I wrote it yesterday but it still counts for today!), and did another exhibition hand-out, which was fun to do.  I needed a nap of about two hours, maybe more, to get the zip to do it, though.  I feel okay now, but haven’t yet started on my book.  I’ve posted to the Internet on the authorship controversy and the Dove anthology, read some more of the Clancy novel I’m reading, and continued the game of Civilization I’m playing where my Greeks are now at war with the Arabs–but America and the Maya are on our side, so we should win.

5 P.M., Mine quest continues.  I did some good clarification on my book, but the going has been painfully slow.  I have a headache.  I’m resisting taking pain pills of any kind.  I keep thinking I’ve gotten everything straight, then at once running into a problem.

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Entry 368 — Of Signifliture and Other Matters « POETICKS

Entry 368 — Of Signifliture and Other Matters

Yesterday, I posted the following snide comment to The Best American Poetry website: “It seems to me that a Worst American Poetry series would be beneficial–composing a kind of poetry ignored by the editors of the Best American Poetry series is not anywhere enough of an affirmation.”

Later I read that “Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. Famous for retelling that medieval dragon drama Beowulf, the Irish poet, 71, declared in 2003 that Eminem ‘”created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.’”  The subject header for the poet quoting the above was “Eminem becoming a force in the literary world.”

That inspired a new coinage: “signifliture,” for significant literature.  The adjective would be “signiflerary.”  Distinguished from “literary” because not including people like Eminem . . . and Nobel Prize Winners.

Meanwhile, I visited Geof Huth’s dbqp blog yesterday.  He does a piece on me every Groundhog Day.  This one was Very Nice–although he as usual said a few things I do not entirely agree with.   He also featured one of my mathemaku, one–in fact–that I changed after sending him the version he posted.  Now I more and more feel his version is better.  What I changed (or maybe it’s the main thing I changed–I’m too lazy to try to find my later version) was the quotient–from “soon” to (I think) “Persephone.”  I always liked “soon, but Geof told me that one of the Poetry editors who rejected it for their magazine dissed “soon” for rhyming with “June,” and I agreed that it shouldn’t for a while.  I can be very suggestible, however stubborn many think me.

Oddly, I hadn’t even noticed that “soon” rhymed with “June” when I picked it–I was revved up by the way I’d converted it from an adjective to an image.  I’m almost sure I’ll bring it back.  Should I cancel the other version or label it a variation?  I don’t know.

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Entry 572 — A Future for Poetry Anthologies « POETICKS

Entry 572 — A Future for Poetry Anthologies

I think there’s good cause to be optimistic about the future, for I believe the Internet will solve the poetry anthology problem before long. All that is necessary is a superior search engine, connected to a much better version of the software Amazon uses to tell its customers about books they would be interested in based on their buying histories. I foresee a person’s having a poetry-interest profile based on a questionnaire and all kinds of other information that would analyze all books and websites of poetry and rate how much the person would like each one on a scale of zero to a thousand. The person could enter critiques of material encountered, and the profile would be connected to other persons’ critiques to allow the system to be self-correcting. The person would still have the option of checking some poet whose rating is two on his scale, out of curiosity, and just in case. If he wanted an anthology, he could have the program find and transmit three to six pages of poetry by each of the 175 20th-century American poets he’d most like likely enjoy as in the recent Penguin anthology (or 20, as there’d be in mine, or 500, as there’d be in Ron Silliman’s). A teacher could have a separate teacher’s profile that would reflect not the teacher’s taste but the teacher’s idea of what poetry a student ought to be exposed to. (there are poets I don’t think much of, at all, but still believe everyone with an interest in poetry should be exposed to.)  There could even be totalitarian profiles listing poems people should avoid, or—in the kind of world the politically correct want—eliminating such poems and making people aware of the names of their authors.

Diary for Tuesday, 22 November 2011, 2 P.M.:  Tennis is the morning.  I’m still not running the way I feel I should, and my reactions are slow.  7 P.M.: I got this entry done, one exhibition hand-out done, and a little work on the book–but it was fairly consequential, for my section on the socioplex is now reasonably well-organized.  I did a lot of authorship arguing on the Internet, too, none of it at the highest level, I fear.  A little escape reading, a bit of Civilization.  Feeling sleepy all day.

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Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant « POETICKS

Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant

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.

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