Entry 1766 — The New York Review of Books

Entry 1766 — The New York Review of Books

When I got an offer of four free issues of The New York Review of Books, I accepted it, remembering that it occasionally had good stuff in it in spite of being a standardly totalitarian leftist rag.  It has a particularly interesting review in its 19 March issue by H. Allen Orr of a book on altruism that I want to discuss at length eventually but am too screwed up physically right now to.  (I was deteriorating, by the way, but suddenly seem a bit better for some reason–an  Excedrin besides a hydrocodone?  Or is the prednisone finally kicking in?  Not that I’m not still pretty screwed up, but not agonizingly, the was I was yesterday, and early today.)

Anyway, duty-bound to write something here, I brought up the NYRB because the Orr review had what I think a near-perfect example of the way a great many liberals automatically think.  After quoting something from the book under review, Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, by David Sloan Wilson, about “how well,religions, economics and everyday social units, such as city neighborhoods function  to improve the welfare of their members,” Orr writes, “Importantly,in each of these cases, we’re confronted with the potentially conflicting goals of groups (say, to save the planet) and individuals (say, to maximize profits by dumping toxic waste).”

The NYRB has continued sending me issues even after I wrote, “cancel,” on the statement I got after receiving one or two of my freebies.  I figured they might be going to charge me for a year’s subscription even though I’d rejected it.  More likely, they figure the more free issues they send me, the more chance I will break down and become a subscriber–which I’ve now decided to do.

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Literary Thoughts « POETICKS

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Entry 1516 — The State of American Poetry, 2

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014

Having no idea of a plan of attack on my essay on the state of American poetry yet, I’m going to scatter thoughts I may include here.

1. A very standard thought of mine (although it may not have been when I first put it in print years ago, although I doubt I was the first to have it, is that serious poetry’s audience is relatively small for the same reason serious music’s is, and the research and development department of poetry is virtually ignored by the media and academia for the same reason music’s research and development department is.

2. Another standard thought of mine is that poetry has always been very popular and still is.  Who, for instance, can’t quote with enjoyment at least one portion of some poem that serves as a popular song’s lyrics?  Limericks, nursery rhymes and folk doggerel are continuingly popular (and doggerel may be a crude kind of poetry but it’s still poetry, at least for sensible people who prefer an objective to a subjective definition of the art).  People noting the limited interest of the masses in “poetry,” mistake serious poetry for poetry as a whole.

3. Very few people have the abilities required to work in poetry’s research and development department.  Most of them have no idea what they’re doing.  Academics need reports on it they can understand before they can bring it to the public’s attention, and to be an academic requires more love of received knowledge of a field than will leave room for much of an exploratory drive, particularly a strong enough one to nudge the academic into an interest in the field’s r&d operations.

4. Academics generally have an innate need to protect the received knowledge of their field from any significant enlargement that will complicate it beyond their meagre ability to understand it.  Ergo, academia is the enemy of R&D.

5. Academics will deny they hate R&D, and support their support of it in poetry by alluding to their interest in poets writing about subjects or points of views never getting into poems before, or inventing new metrical schemes for poems or the like, but by R&D, I mean significant R&D, which means entirely new kinds of poetry, not variations of old kinds of poetry.

6. Academics will deny the existence of R&D, too, claiming the people involved in it are not doing anything more than those making up new rhyme schemes.  They’ll find poets making visual poems hundreds of years ago trying to prove visual poetry is old hat, for instance, instead of poetry’s second great R&D discovery in modern times, the first being free verse.  Visual poetry has by now become too standard although still a minority kind of poetry to be considered at the R&D stage, but there much more chance that continued R&D work on it will yield tools for the poet of importance than R&D work on the poetry of Wilshberia will.

7. Genuine language poetry is the third great achievement of modern poetry R&D, and is continuing without being much noticed because ersatz language poetry is now acadominant, ersatz language poetry being jump-cut poetry like Ashbery’s going back to The Waste Land,” and most of Ron Silliman’s (much of which is admirable but not what I’d call “language-centered”–“language-centered” to a greater degree than all the poetry of the past was, I need add for the literal-minded).

8. The main poetries still almost entirely the concern of R&D departments are various kinds of computer-related poetry, my own cryptographic and mathematical poetry, sundry conceptual poetries and non-non-poeties miscalled poetry but nevertheless under fruitful development in the wrong R&D department.  So far as I know.

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Entry 1515 — Sonnet Revision

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

My adventures trying to get the following sonnet the way I wanted it was a major strand of my first full-length book, Of Manywhere-at-Once, 23 years ago:

Sonnet from my Forties     Much have I ranged the major-skyed suave art   The Stevens shimmered through his inquiries   Into the clash and blend of seem and are   And volumes filled in vain attempts to reach     The heights that he did. Often, too, I've been   To where the small dirt's awkward first grey steps   Toward high-hued sensibility begin   In Roethke's verse, or measured the extent     Of hammered gold and wing-swirled mythic light   That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds   That Pound re-morninged windily to life,   And struggled futilely to match their works.     Yet still, nine-tenths insane though it now seems,   I seek those ends, I hold to my huge dreams.

The last chapter alone has five versions of it.  I reworked it at least ten times in the next four or five years.  Since then, I fiddled with at every few years and, for some unknown reason, took a stab at it again a few nights ago, ending yesterday with the version above.  Who knows whether it will be my final version.  Right now I dislike it slightly less than I dislike the other versions.   I consider it a fascinating failure.  If I ever finally finish the second volume of Of Manywhere-at-Once that I planned to have published a year after the first edition of volume one, I’ll explain in detail why I rate it as I do.  (I also consider it brilliant, by the way.)

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Here are two more entries to the list I posted yesterday:

No poetry written after the year X is any good.

No poetry written before the year X is any good.

A thought of my own: the popularity of serious poetry depends much more on what the people in it are doing than, say, what the language in it is.  I elitistly believe that the more unanthrocentric (people-centered)  a poem is, the better is it–and the less it will appeal to philistines. Sometimes.

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Entry 1287 — From a Post to New-Poetry

Monday, December 2nd, 2013

Unrevised comments to a thread at New-Poetry 1 December:
On 12/1/2013 1:37 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I see the delight and the surprise, and the insight (no pun tendered) and the craft it takes. I wish I could see the end product as more than a novelty. Nice to have Shakespeare (or Milton) as one’s background text. But I’m sure others have worked with more mundane materials like a Chilton’s Auto Repair Manual or Mutual of Omaha Life Insurance Policy, and had equally intriguing results.
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I tend to feel I have too much to say about this general subject for me to enter a thread like this where the need for brevity is sure to make whatever I say seem trivial.  Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts: any art-invention becomes less exciting as more and more people use it; I think a proper evaluation of a poetic device is how effective it is once conventional poets are using it TIMES how brilliant it was when first being used Times how effectively it was used when best used.  In this case, d. a. levy’s use of it in the sixties (I’m thinking of erasure although there are many names for it, one of which I got from Geof Huth then promptly forgot seems to be the accepted one) times Ruefle’s times, ahem, mine in frame three of my “Triptych for Tom Phillips.”  Okay, i would complain if you substitute something else for my third term.  But I really like the poem I disconcealed from a page in a calculus textbook in my triptych.  (Note to Mark Weiss, I will always think of you when I type that word, remembering your confession that you, too, had to think a bit about how to spell it at times.  It should be easy, “tri” meaning “3” but I think “typography” and orthographically-related words sneak confusion in.)

Doris Cross, one of the earliest to do this, chose, I think, the best base text for it: a dictionary–an old dictionary.  Tom Phillips’s base text, a Victorian novel, so not just a narrative but an era, was a wonderful choice, too.

To me, what’s important in these kinds of poems is (1) making a good poem out of the words, extracted from the base text, and (2) making a poem that provides a kind of resonance or tension between the base text and the context the poem establishes.  For instance, in my triptych, the poem I make is a lyricopoetic expression, so I get the resonotension twixt anti-lyrical extreme abstraction/science/super-exactness; more important, the poem is mainly about a somewhat complex journey ending safely in “port”–thus serving (at least connotatively) as a metaphor for the journey of calculus to answers.

Apologies for “resontension” and the like, which I’m using for fun (because–don’t tell anyone–I’m in my Coleridge zone, by which I mean I took one of my part opiate pain pills an hour-and-a-half ago, and it makes me happily verosloppy (vehr AH sluh pee) or truth-seeking/truth-expressing.

Every poetic device begins as a “mere” novelty.  Rhyme has lasted and so will this.  Disconcealment I call the larger class erasure is a member of–with remEMBER, where it is used to disconceal “ember” with capitalization rather than erasure or one kind or another.  That may have been my first poetics coinage.  It’s from around 1980.  I think I used it for Gertrude Stein’s disconcealment of “arose” from “rose is a rose is a rose.”  In what may be my first published critical work, a short discussion of the Stein text for the Cal State, Northridge literary magazine, when–according to one theory of astrology, I achieved my second vocational peak.  My first was thirty years before that when I was ten or so.  That may have been when I took the IQ test that established me as a Gifted Child and made me forever the miserably conceited creep I am even today, although I was never told what my score was.  It was less than 200, though, so I eventually worked out a demolition of IQ tests as an indicator of genuine intelligence.  I tend to think they may indicate the opposite, a kind of pseudo-intelligence almost impossible to break upward out of–although I have, by gum.  (Although perhaps by golly as well.  Yes, my conceit does have its limits.)

Isn’t every poem a game in which the poet follows a rule or rules of word-selection to make a poem?  Hence, when he makes a sonnet he is limited to words that fit his metrical scheme, and seven of them must rhyme with seven others–at specified locations–without significantly screwing up prose syntax.

I’m writing for my blog now, needless to say–which means almost completely solipsistically.  No one’s forcing you to read this, however.

Erasure is a cousin of collage, which is closely related to jump-cut poetry.  Taking things out of one context and putting them in another, with indicators of the initial context kept.  The haiku is a distant cousin–two images of discordant contexts fused into a haiku-moment.

You’re saved–I just remembered that I want to lay down the law at a thread at a different discussion group (one concerning who wrote the works of Shakespeare where I am as hatefully in the camp of the Shakespeare Establishment as I am hatefully outside the camp of the Poetry Establishment), so will now leave this one.

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Entry 1192 — Dialogue Between Two Titans

Saturday, August 24th, 2013

Okay, the title is a sarcastic joke: the dialogue is only between Seth Abramson and me.  My part will be Very Serious, though–as is the paragraph from a comment Seth made to my blog of a week or so ago that I’ve made his part of the following, which I sincerely hope will become just the first exchange in a multi-part series (that will become a book that will make both of us rich–okay, no more of my dumb sarcasm . . . I hope).

Seth: “Metamodernism is a tendency that’s still emerging, much like postmodernism was in the mid-1960s.”

1. as far as I’m concerned, postmodernism (considering poetry only) never emerged because it never became significantly different from the kinds of poetry being called “modernist.”  The great innovator, Ashbery, just used the jump-cut poetry of “The Waste Land” more in his poetry than Eliot had.

2. “Modernism” is a moronic tag because it is based not on what the poetry it covers is and does but on when it was composed.  “Postmodernism” is worse.

3. At around 1910-1920 a true change in the arts finished occurring.  It seems to me the change was simple, no more than the acceptance of significant innovation.  In poetry perhaps two specific innovations dominated.  One was the broadening of allowed linguistic practice that the acceptance of free verse initiated followed by tolerance of all possible registers, and then the loosening of attachment to prose grammar beginning (seriously) with jump-cut poetry.  The second was the acceptance of pluraesthetic poetry, or the significant aesthetic use of more expressive modalities than words in poetry, visual poetry being the main example of this but far the only example.

4. The chronology is of course much ore complex and difficult to unravel than the above suggests, but I’m speaking of when each new kind of poetry came into prominence, not when it was first known (which in some cases may have been centuries ago).

5. I don’t consider “otherstream poetry,” mine or others’, to be any kind of important advance on anything called modernist.  I do take pride in two kinds of it that I may be the inventor of, or at least the first serious proponent of: long division poetry and cryptographic poetry.  The first of these,  I have to brag, has great potential for poets because of it forces those making it to be multiply metaphoric as well as makes it more open to pluraesthetic adventure than any other kind of poetry I know of.  I’m prouder of the second kind because I’m more certain I invented it.  Alas, I do not believe it has any future: I may myself, with just ten specimens of it, done all that can be done with it.

 Seth: “If you want to understand my own (present) take on it, which of course is just proto-, for it’s entirely fluid and still developing as a concept and a poetics (it was first written of in Europe in 2010), you can read my poems on Ink Node (two poems called ‘from The Metamodernist’).”  I found the following two reviews at Ink Node:

from The Metamodernist

from “A Brief Tour of the Cape”
from Section I: The Metamodernist
from “a. Against Expression”
from {KOST 99.1 Osterville. The song “We’re An American Band”}
KOST 99.1 Osterville
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The song “We’re An American Band,” a number-one hit for Grand Funk Railroad in 1973, spawned at least seventeen contemporaneous imitations, none of which achieved the critical or commercial heights of the Railroad’s chart-topper. The Rollers, a six-piece from East Detroit, scored a minor local hit with “We’re a Guatemalan Band” just six months after Grand Funk finished its European tour in 1972. Victor Five and the Quick Six, a duo from Decatur, Georgia, penned and released “We’re Session Musicians” the same week; the song made a minor stir in Germany upon its release in 1974, and was even used to play Grand Flunk offstage during their first-ever European tour in 1975. Later that year, Ginny Decatur, a German ingénue from Athens, Georgia, scored a minor local stir with “We’re a Band,” an instrumental for oboe and drum. Not long thereafter, Frank Zappa and his Mother of Invention recorded an album of duets, We’re Only In It for the Money; the album’s title song, “We’re Between Managers,” was in 1968 a minor imitation for fresh-faced proto-punks The Rollers, whose better-known “We’re An American Band” was inspired equally by their hometown of Decatur, Georgia and a 1963 tour of Greece. Ironically, “We’re An American Band” met with decidedly less success than its immediate predecessor on the then-defunct Fontana label, “We’re a Guatemalan Band,” the latter sung by five or six session musicians from Dunkirk, Germany. The names and origins of these four musicians are unfortunately lost to time, with one exception: the lovely and talented Negro spiritualist, Virginia Georgia, best known for her lead vocals on Grand Flunk’s first album, Coast, released in January of 1999. Coast went on to win five Peabodys in September of 2001. (The cost of the LP, as of December 1998, is just over $99; it can be found for $63 here.)

Provincetown Center: The Fine Artworks

Jerry Sandusky has been performing his live act in the middle of the 600 block of Provincetown’s Main Street for six years. The act’s conceit is a simple one: Stravinsky stands naked on a street corner while painted head to toe in gold paint. The visual effect, given the artist’s meticulously-rendered 1821 “bobby” outfit, is to render Sandusky indistinguishable from a statue of a 1920s London policeman. He can often be seen in the middle of the 600 block of Provincetown’s Main Street waving his nightstick threateningly at passing children and posing playfully for photographs with healthy children. The one wrinkle in his now ten year-old routine is that he looks so convincingly statue-like that those who pose for pictures with him are wont to tell friends and relatives that photographs of Sandusky are in fact snapshots of a popular statute on the outskirts of Provincetown. It gets them every time! But then the joke is never revealed–unless, of course, it wasn’t fallen for in the first instance–meaning that for every enemy or stranger shown a photo of someone they hate or have never met standing with “Jimmy Sardoski” in Truro Center, at least ten hear the story of the famous “Jimmy Stravinsky” statue in Provincetown’s main square. And so it is that the statute has, over the last two decades, become one of Provincetown’s foremost law-themed attractions, though admittedly a difficult one to find. Jerry Sandusky Jr., who’s been performing his live act on the 600 block of Provincetown’s Curtain Street for five years, presently does a brisk trade imitating the statue in the middle of the 500 block of Provincetown’s Main Street; the requested donation per performance is five quid. You can donate to Jerry Sandusky Sr. here.

Seth: “Whether or not it’s something you admire or enjoy it is most definitely not something that’s ‘knownstream’–I have a library of over 2,000 contemporary poetry titles in my apartment right now that tell me so, inasmuch as 99.7% of them militantly exclude all metamodernistic indicia.”

Frankly, I find it hard to believe Seth considers the texts above to be poems.  In fact, I think I’m missing something.  Note: I vehemently oppose the belief that a poem can be anything anyone wants to call a poem.  My definition is simple: a work of art in which meaningful words are centrally significant and a certain percentage of what I call “flow-breaks” (usually lineation, but anything having a comparable effect) are present.  So-called “prose-poems” do not qualify.  My definition is pretty conventional and probably more acceptable of poetry people than any other.  My philosophy is that a definition of anything must distinguish the thing defined from everything that thing is not.

From another example of metamodern poetry I found in an Internet search, I got the impression that for Seth it’s some kind of frenetic pluraesthetic performance art.  It didn’t seem to adhere to my definition of poetry though interesting-sounding.   can’t say I learned enough about it to reach any even semi-valid conclusion about it, though.

Seth: P.S. The ‘psychoanalysis’ comment was re: your claim I do things to win friends–ever. That concept is foreign to me. But as you won’t believe me just saying so, look at it this way: If I’m merely ambition without courage, tell me, why do I have more enemies than you, and more powerful enemies, at that?”

I consider this outside the dialogue I’m trying to get going I want to reply to it, anyway–because I think poets are as interesting to discuss as poetry, and because I’d never thought much about my literary enemies.  After thinking it over, I feel that while I have at least one hostile literary opponent, and am disliked by probably more than a handful of people, my only genuine poetry enemy is The Poetry Establishment.  In short, I have fewer literary enemies than Seth, but one who is far stronger (and evil) than any of his.  Evil: yes, because it has prevented me from making a living, or–actually–from making just about anything as a poet and poetry critic.  The fact that it has done this unconsciously via its control of what’s published, critiqued and rewarded is irrelevant: it has done it.

As for Seth, I merely expressed the opinion that in making his list of 200 poetry people as important “advocates” of American poetry, all of them well-known members of the poetry establishment or younger people I strongly suspect (from having seen some of their work) writing and advocating nothing but the kind of poetry the establishment has certified–unless Seth can convince me that metamodern poetry is some kind of un- or anti-establishment poetry.  It’s hard for me to think he’d do that unless he wanted the establishment to be his friend, but who knows?

At this point I have a question for Seth: what do you think of the idea of making a thorough list, with definitions, of all the contemporary schools of American poetry?  I long ago started such a list.  I asked readers to refine an add to it.  Almost none did.  Most who responded to it were against it.  I believe because they want the public to remain ignorant of all the kinds of poetry being composed besides theirs–they want in other words, to maintain their monopoly.  I on the other had think nothing could be of more value to poetry.

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Entry 1031 — Poetic Accessibility

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

Two or three days ago Amy King brought the attention of New-Poetry to the flaccid essay by Joshua Marie Wilkinson at the Volta website. James Finnegan thanked King for the link, going on to say, “Largely I’m sympathetic with what he’s saying but I don’t entirely agree with his views. Accessibility is just is one side of a binary. Difficulty the other. Poetry is full of these binaries. Each poet, each poem, falls out on one side or another. Invoking Frank O’Hara is strange. Could there be a more accessible poet than Frank O’Hara? No one is prohibiting writing that is inaccessible. Have at it. Win the day by proving your poetry better than that other (accessible) poetry.

“And this particular line kind of struck me the wrong way: ‘”topics we are safe with (politics, death, family ) then we will avoid having to talk about what animates poetry (the language itself, of course).’ To write well about death is not safe. To write good political poetry isn’t easy (it may safe because poets aren’t considered a threat to the status quo). Family relationships are complicated to degree beyond any PhD in psychology. So ‘safe’, no. Uncertain, fluid, dynamic, complex, would be my description.

“Honestly, language is the easiest thing to talk about. But it may be the hardest to articulate…because it’s words explaining words.”

I pointed out that that writer probably meant ‘safe’ if you want to avoid being inaccessible, going on to say that “to write something safe has nothing to do with the topic chosen but what you say about it (and how you say it).”

I then said that “Inaccessiblity may be the best means to safety for a writer—who can criticize something he can’t fathom.”

“A ‘means to safety’ as opposed to what?” asked Chris Lott.

“Safety from being judged a lousy poet,” I responded, unintentionally answering a question different from the one he asked.

Chris went on to ask, “When is it simply a valid criticism? Ever? I could write a poem using all kinds of arcane technology terms, parallels, and tropes and I think inaccessibility would be a valid point of criticism. At what point does it cease to be?”

I tended to agree with Chris, for I’ve always maintained that a poem you find to be to be inaccessible is a failed poem–if no one can give a sensible pluraphrase of it. a pluraphrase beng simply a sort of super paraphrase that sums up not just what the poem says but how it says it and what’s good or bad about how it says it.

The inaccessible poet could still be right, but I for one would wonder why he doesn’t try just a little harder to be accessible.  Actually, in some cases, I know why: he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so can’t fix anything.

Later on, thinking about Finnegan’s remark about O’Hara’s accessibility, I was moved to write the following, which I consider quite good, although saying nothing I haven’t said numerous times before:

Someone found it strange that O’Hara defended inaccessibility, deeming him about as accessible as a poet can be. A thought: that when he was first making poems, his poems were not accessible. Because too accessible?

Haiku are often dismissed as being trivial, too—by people to whom in actuality they are not accessible! Now, pay attention, dimbulbs. I’m advancing news about poetry you won’t find many professors, or people at AWP conferences giving you. Some poetry takes you readily—”accessibly”—on trips through easily processed scenery but leaves you . . . nowhere.  Yes, you will be able to find your way back to where you started, but you will feel you’ve been lost, and you will have been lost for a short while. That’s because where the poem took you was not accessible to you. It may merely be due to your inexperience with such poems, and nothing to be ashamed about. Even I, the world’s number one poetry critic, have often been fuddled by such a poem—by O’Hara for far too long a time, for instance.

Alas, you may also lack the innate ability to connect to connect to what I call the haiku moment, which is the moment that one’s annoyance at being led by a poem to a . . . wuht-thuh changes in a tenth of a burst of sun-mirth full emotional and intellectual understanding of where you’ve been taken to. Just as some people simply cannot react fast enough to play goalie for a professional soccer or hockey team, some people can’t react fast enough to be able to enjoy this kind of understanding, this haiku-moment.

The poem I always use to illustrate this is “lighght,” when someone first encounters it. The misspelling causes the wuht-thuh, the understanding that the misspelling inserts a silence, and thus suggests the ongoing “nothingness” that light is (and much else), or enough of that understanding, as no good poem allows a complete such understanding of itself right away, converts the wuht-thus to a haiku moment.

A person not blessed with high haiku-sensitivity will eventually experience such a moment, especiallyafter reading my account of it, but still not be able experience the poetic logic of it, and the sensual effect of light, in one or more parts of his brain quickly enough after experiencing the misspelling of “light” in the lexical part of his brain. According to my poetics, the poem will not have succeeded in getting him to Manywhere-at-Once.

The same kind of thing happens when your are told a joke and not understood it until it was explained to you and you still don’t connect to the joke fast enough to laugh although no you will see that it is a joke. A haiku moment is the same as a joke’s pay-off except for the magnitude of the site it takes you to. Which is a subject for a fuller essay than my words here. Suffice it to say, a joke turns something that momentarily makes no sense into something that does make sense—the non-lady into one’s wife–and nothing more; the poems turns something that makes no sense into something that does—“lighght” into “light” because it sounds the same in spite of the misspelling, but also into what for some will be an archetypally-vast sense of warmth, brightness, the wonders of language, and so forth.

Not that a joke can’t sometimes do something of the like, but not nearly so fully.

 To conclude, my central point is that some poems can be mistaken for hyper-accessibility. This is certainly no new insight, but a fact that many too easily forget when evaluating a poem.  Now a fervent request: I believe I’ve written a piece of criticism that’s of major value in the field of poetics. My request is that someone who thinks it no better, or even not as good, as the piece by Wilkinson please say why. I promise to be kind in response, and I can be. I don’t feel I’ve ever gotten helpfully critiqued, and do not believe, in spite of my megalomania, that what I write is ever flawless. I also think that pointing out anything in my text that’s wrong or too obvious to be worth expression will help not only me, but others writing criticism, some of who must be wrong and/or too obvious in ways similar.

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Entry 1023 — My Escape Reading Weeping

Saturday, February 23rd, 2013

Possibly the number one readership-building element of popular escapist novels is the ugly duckling–the character who can’t get no respeck–until the very end.  Any reader must know, as I always know, that such a character is going to win the acclaim due him by the time the story ends–well, if he makes sure to avoid the easily detected sadistic enemies of yearners who author downers, or those too befuddled to know the difference between up and down wanting academics to take them as maximally serious by expressing the uncertainty one can’t be a modern academic without.  The healthy reader will automatically become the duckling however obvious his nature, assuming he is at least slightly otherwise interesting.  I bring this up because I’m now halfway through the fourteenth and final volume of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (brilliantly brought to a conclusion after Jordan’s death by Brandon Sanderson) and its many ducklings, now finally winning through to fame and glory, have me weeping (okay, not weeping, something I think only the death of loved ones can make me do, but coming very close to it).

Does this mean I’ve never grown up?  I don’t think so.  I firmly believe that a large proportion of the best of us want to be a god near-perfect at everything, or at the very least, at something major.  We understand the difficulty of that, so dive into the (ringlingly unrecognized) near-perfection of the heroes of escapist narratives (which can include the world’s best novels, poems or plays, like The Odyssey or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but not Ulysses (unless you think getting by some kind of admirable accomplishment–not to imply that not to want to be near-perfect at one or more things is contemptible, though it’s hard for me to take the side of my reasoning brain against my feeling brain on that).  Ergo, we’re slaves of escapism.

I would add that there are many levels of escapism, the best being sometimes subtle but almost always complex.  The duckling in the latter case is three-dimensional, as just about all Jordan’s ducklings are, their victories maximally difficult–and complex, more than just winning a sword fight, for instance–again, as the victories of Jordan’s ducklings almost always are.  No dei ex machina–which isn’t always the case with Jordan’s ducklings (and is too often the case with Harry Potter and his friends, although not enough for them to capture me pretty fully–as did Pooh-Bear’s victories, because major for the child I was in good part when reading him although I was close to or past twenty when I read about him), but it’s almost impossible to avoid a deus ex machina or two in any full-scale escapist narrative–just as it is to win any major victory in life without luck, however ardently some fools swear they’ve reached the eights they have completely on their own.

Without fictional–and  factual–heroes allowing on vicariously to achieve greatness, life for those of us achieving it would be impossible.

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Entry 935 — Aca . . .

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

An article concerned with an apparently new practice of having “hospital poets,”poets as sort of visiting professors at hospitals, which is being discussed at New-Poetry, gave me a great idea: having genuine poets visit universities and reading—and/or–exhibiting their work!  Sorry, I’m just annoyed about what I’ve heard regarding the latest edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

I firmly believe that there are good academics as well as bad ones, but the bad ones have much more power, certainly in the poetry world, than the latter, so I have a name for them: “acadumbots.” From “ACADeMics,” “DUMB” and “roBOTS.”  Pronunciation: aahk uh DUHM bahts. Definition: mediocrities who memorize the received understanding of their discipline in youth and never go beyond it for the rest of their lives.

Then there are those I call “acapuppets,” which I don’t think I need to define.  Almost never does an acadumbot deign to defend his understanding of his field anywhere, particularly at an Internet discussion group, but he will almost always have plenty of acapuppets to do that for him, however unskillfully.

A second thought:  that academics who specialize in the past are not acadumbots if they come up with new slants on the old, as Vendler has to a minor degree done.  But they are much less important than academics capable of dealing with the contemporary cutting edge of their field such as . . . anyone in mainstream poetry?  Not that I’m aware of, but Marjorie Perloff has dealt with a small portion of it, possibly as tellingly as Vendler has dealt with the old, and slightly new, as Ashbery may have been when he first became a Known Poet.

I think I would therefore divide academics into three groups, starting with the largest and worst, ending with the best and rarest: (1) the acadumbots, (2) the . . . acriocraties . . . no; they are mediocrities, but superior mediocrities, valuable mediocrities who don’t deserve to be called “mediocrities” . . .   So, what to call them?  I know: “scholars!” And we can use an old coinage of mine for the very best of them, the ones who are original scholars of their field all the way up to where it is at its newest: “culturateurs,” “academic culturateurs.”  People who make significant contributions to world culture.  Wait, I would divide academics into two groups: “acadumbots” and “scholars,” and simply use the adjectives “minor” and “major” to distinguish the worse acadumbots from the better and the excellent scholars from the culturateurical scholars.

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Entry 927 — The Characterization of Poem

Monday, November 19th, 2012

I have to entries to take care of in, I hope, no more than three hours.  I couldn’t think of anything to write about until it occurred to me to discuss Poem, the protagonist of almost all my linguexpressive (i.e., verbal-only) poems for the past twenty years or so.  When I began my series about him, I considered him “just” my alter ego, as shown in his origin poem, which wasn’t my first about him but one of my first:

His Origin

He was just fragmentary echoings
of Stevens, Roethke, Hughes
some misslept vagrant thought one day set racketing
through Crazy Jane’s untrellised ardors,
shedding feathers and farting
as he faltered into words princed
eventually, with occasional fingers,
genitals, and voice struggling always
to light up
with silence.

He was just something to write surrealistic lyrical poems around.  But I did want him to have the kind of life I believe Berryman’s Henry (is it?) has, and Hughes’s Crow, and Yeats’s Crazy Jane.  A character who clear states that he is his author’s alter ego.   As he is here what is there for a reader to identify with?  Well, me.  And the reader would almost have to be another poet wanting to say profound things.

Here are the next two in my first collection of Poem poems, Of Poem, that Geof Huth’s dbqp press published in 1995:

At the Border of When

Once Poem tried to ascend
his syntax dependency
fraying a subway preconcepted
to lungs against the thus
the car starts princesses into
the disciplinary axis
yet spoken in willow so unurgent
that the all-yestering lyricule of April
yellows Poem all the way down Sappho,
laughing.

A Summer Afternoon

Whose yawn it was Poem didn’t know,
but it wasn’t his
and he couldn’t get out or it.

In the distance the cats’ deepest night-thoughts,
more active now the cats were gone,
crackled redly along the seams
where afternoon and the city joined:

Out of sight,
a traffic light clicked.

These seem to me almost evasions of characterization.  The first is about its author’s trying to write a language poem, so again for some other poem able to identify with such an attempt.  Once Poem serves to introduce the poem’s theme, he is abandoned’ the poem goes on into some sort of surrealistic lyricism.  But, wait: he returns to enjoy that lyricism, and display his quite broad feel for the history of lyric poetry, and the ability to laugh, to perceive lyric poetry as capable of laughter-provoking beauty.  He’s sensitive!

He’s much more a person in the third poem, but the poem is mostly about anybody’s universal feeling of dreamy lethargy.

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Entry 926 — Literarer Chawreck, Number 77777

Sunday, November 18th, 2012

Ridiculous.  I just spent two hours writing 1190 words of one of the four blog entries I feel duty-bound to take care of today.  Surely I could have broken them up into four entries.  But I was on an opiated roll.  I hope it continues.

The idea I was going to use in my previous entry but never did was simple: would a my list of awareness-selves help a writer with his characterizations?  I’ve never made and used such a list myself, but maybe I should start doing so.  Here’s the list again:

1. The Fundaceptual Self, which I described as being one’s sensually feeling self.  Actually, a better description of it would be as one’s sensually perceiving self, for what one feels about what one perceives comes from one’s evaluceptual self.   But it will always accompany one’s perceptions, so I guess it’s not wrong to call the fundaceptual self one’s sensual self.  While being corrective, I think I ought to drop the idea of there being an evaluceptual self.  The evaluceptual awareness now seems to me wholly a data-contributing self, contributing sensual feelings to the sensual self and “emotional” feelings to many other selves.  I’ll have to reflect on that more. Certainly both one’s introverted and extroverted selves will automatically make use of such emotional data.  I suddenly wonder if they sometimes do not–maybe only in dysfunctional people. . . .

Anyway, I want to start my list again:

1. The Sensual Self, which directly perceives and has feelings about existence.
2. The Inward Self (tentative name), which is concerned with what one is when alone, making significant use of “emotional” data from the evaluceptual awareness.
3. The Outward Self, which is concerned with how one interacts with others, and thinks of others, making significant use of “emotional” data from the evaluceptual awareness.
4. The Physical Self, the self that walks, talks, sleeps, et cetera–again, with its own “physical” I tentatively hypothesize.
5. The Fixed Self (another tentative name), which tells us where we are in space, and perhaps elsewhere.
6. The Questing Self (tentative name), which underlies a person’s compreceptual self, which I think I’ll be calling the person’s “central” self, when in pursuit of something–a hot dog or dream, for instance–or trying to escape something. Always “unconscious,” it seems to me. Partaking of strong data from the evaluceptual awareness posssibly unlike the similar data from that awareness other selves get, another area I need of which I need to work out a better understanding.
7. The Central Self, which may always be present, and depends on data from all the awarenesses but especially the verbal sub-awareness of the reducticeptual awareness which provides it with its internal monologue, and–often (perhaps always?) on the accompaniment of whole other selves.

I do feel these should help a writer’s delineation of characters, if only in getting him to consider what he may have missed in the blur and excitement of his character’s birth and and development.
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Entry 924 — Selves

Friday, November 16th, 2012

This series on literary characterization got me back into an area I’ve spent a lot of time in, not just my own self, but the many selves it consists of–and that almost anyone’s self consists of.  It is thus necessary for me to go back, yet again, to my theory of different awarenesses (what Howard Gardner calls “intelligences:), for most of a person’s awarenesses have some sort of self representing it.  At this point, a confession: I often write here and elsewhere (mostly privately) about my theory of awarenesses, and related hypotheses concerning what I call urceptual personae (I think) such as the urceptual mother and father, and those urceptual personae that act as various selves.  I usually quit after feeling I have an understanding of my subject between fifty and seventy percent valid.  Than I come back to it after bumbling through ten to thirty other fields and find my understanding of it to have dropped by a minimum of thirty percent.  That’s where I be now.  So, to get myself going again, I must first list the awarenesses.  Which will take some time, because the idiots supposedly interested in subsidizing genius don’t care about super-genius–or do, but misread it as sub-mediocrity.  Hence, I don’t have the huge house I need, with a different large room for each of my specialties, the one for psychology having a list of my awarenesses on the wall.  In a flat-screen, in fact, so I could push a button in the central room where my main computer is and have the list uploaded into a blank monitor in from of my computer desk.

So, I had to look through computer files for what I want.  I found a version of it, but am not sure it’s the up-to-datest one.  But it’s close enough for this entry:

1. The Fundaceptual Awareness  Where we experience all the stimuli we encounter in either our internal or external environment.

2. The Behavraceptual Awareness  Where our voluntary motor actions are initiated, and we experience a sense of carrying out actions as they take place.

3. The Evaluceptual Awareness  Where we experience pain and pleasure, or the “moral” value of anything else we experience–the good being in the final analysis that which causes pleasure, the bad being the opposite.

4. The Cartoceptual Awareness  Where we experience our sense of location, up/down, forward/backward, east/west, then/now, being in chapter 2/chapter 9, etc.

5. The Objecticeptual Awareness  Where we experience specifically those stimuli in our internal or external environment that are inanimate objects, or seem to be such.

6. The Reducticeptual Awareness  Where we experience numbers, numbering, concepts, words (spoken and written)

7. The Sagaceptual Awareness  Where we experience out sense of destiny, of going somewhere meaningful, of life as a saga

8. The Anthroceptual Awareness  Where we experience ourselves as beings separate from the rest of existence, and other human beings–as well as social interactions

9. The Scienceptual Awareness  Where we perceive existence scientifically, primarily it is where we recognize cause and effect

10. The Compreceptual Awareness (formerly the “combiceptual awareness”)  Where we experience everything we are aware of at any given instant–in other words, our consciousness

 This is tentative; in fact, I just made changes to it as I formatted it.

The Fundaceptual Awareness contributes the “feeling” self to our set of selves–the sensually feeling, not the emotionally feeling self.  The Behavraceptual Awareness contributes the physical self, the self that walks, talks, sleeps, et cetera.  The emotionally feeling self is the contribution of the Evaluceptual Awareness, but this awareness may also contribute other selves.  As I recall, it will contribute an urceptual judge responsible for morally judging us and others.  As for the Cartoceptual Awareness, I tend (now, for the first time thinking about it) to believe it contributes no selves, just providing locational data to the physical self.  Similarly, the Objecticeptual, Reducticeptual, and Scienceptual Awarenesses contribute data rather than selves, in all three cases to the compreceptual self.

I’m vague about the selves the Anthroceptual Awareness contributes; there have to be at least two: the introverted and the extraverted selves, one where one is when all alone with one’s self–as opposed to being alone but working math problems or playing solitaire, and one for functioning with people.

I’m just now trying more than previously to develop a reasonably full idea of what the compreceptual self is.  I’m toying with considering its basis the “thinking self,” of the self which uses subliminal speech to comment on what’s going on.  I don’t think this is our “true” self, or the self a person feels is his “me.”  That, I think, is his physical self.  But the physical self may share dominance of the compreceptual self with the thinking self.

Certainly, to get back to literary characterization, it’s the thinking self who narrates first-person fiction and non-fiction.  But often telling us about other selves of his.

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John Stevenson « POETICKS

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Entry 1362 — A Haiku Review

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

For today, a haiku review first appearing in Modern Haiku, then reprinted in my From Haiku to Lyriku.  It’s here because I needed something to post and pages 86 and 88 happened to be the pages I turned to when I opened that to grab something.  But I like my haiku reviews, even though they never made me famous.

StevensonPage86StevensonPage87Fixt

StevensonPage88fixt

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Entry 1198 — Václav Havel, Concrete Poet « POETICKS

Entry 1198 — Václav Havel, Concrete Poet

I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician.  Well, no–Havel was an artist.  He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.

Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:

My-Biography

 

Philosophy

An early visiopunctuational poet.  The first such?  Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know.  Wait–of course not.  My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964.  I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though.  Terrific poem, in any case.  It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.”  That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry.  I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.

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Entry 1656 — Davinciation « POETICKS

Entry 1656 — Davinciation

Today I have another new word: “davinciation.”  I came up with it after reading an essay about mathematicians before around 1900 who were also poets.  Only two seemed to me major poets: Omar Khayam and Lewis Carroll, but a few in other languages than English that I’d never heard of may have been, too.  As for Omar Khayam and Lewis Carroll, Khayam was definitely both a major poet and major mathematician: the poems of his Rubaiyat are still widely read, and his Demonstration of Problems of Algebra presents the first definition of algebra in the history of mathematics.  I believe he was the first to find a method for solving third-degree equations, a geometric method that anticipated Descartes’s analytical geometry.  I consider Carroll a major poet although he wrote only “light” verse because I see no reason to consider light verse inferior to “serious” verse, although only at its rare very best.  But Carroll was merely a highly talented mathematician so far as I can tell.

Thinking about major poets who were also major mathematicians like Khayam, I wondered how many major poets were geniuses in some other significantly different field (unlike T. S. Eliot, for instance, who was a genius in both poetry and literary criticism).  Leonardo immediately jumped to mind.  But I had problems with him that I doubt many others, if any, have.  I tend toward denying visimagists preceding  the advent of non-representational painting genius.  To me they seem just skilled craftsmen, basically repeating reality rather than significantly adding to it.  I suppose some of them have to be consider geniuses as a sort of engineer: the first to use perspective (Brunelleschi, the architect), and Leonardo’s invention of sfumato (or is it only something he used very well?)

While thinking about Leonardo, I wondered what his second field of genius might be.  It didn’t seem to me quite science, and not too close to philosophy.  That’s when “davinciation” occurred to me: a field of versosophy that covers a great deal of varied subjects without unifying around any central organizing principal for any of its major subjects—as the pre-occupations of da Vinci seem to me to have been—and to have included his sculpture and painting.  Francis Galton seems a similar sort of genius although possibly not at da Vinci’s level.  Another might be Charles Sanders Pierce, but I haven’t been able to connect to his work well enough to know.  Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are best thought of, it seems to me, a lesser geniuses in the field of davinciation.  Goethe, too—but he differed from Franklin and Jefferson in being a definitely major genius in literature.  Liebniz?  Possibly.  Descartes?  Anyone care to add a name or two?

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2 Responses to “Entry 1656 — Davinciation”

  1. karl kempton says:

    Omar Khayyám
    Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Abu’l-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām Nīshāpūrī (/ˈoʊmɑr kaɪˈjɑːm, -ˈjæm, ˈoʊmər/; Persian: ‏غیاث ‌الدین ابوالفتح عمر ابراهیم خیام نیشابورﻯ‎, pronounced [xæjˈjɒːm]; 18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131), commonly known as Omar Khayyám, was a sufi mystic, Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, and Islamic theology.[3]

    Born in Nishapur in North Eastern Iran, at a young age he moved to Samarkand and obtained his education there. Afterwards he moved to Bukhara and became established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period. He is the author of one of the most important treatises on algebra written before modern times, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle.[4] He contributed to a calendar reform.
    Born: May 18, 1048, Nishapur, Iran
    Died: December 4, 1131, Greater Khorasan

    yogananda has a wonderful rendering and unraveling of his major opus, his Rubáiyát.

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Thanks for the additional info on a Major Davinciator, Karl.

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Commercial Art « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Commercial Art’ Category

Entry 1596 — My Cover Poem

Thursday, October 9th, 2014

Directly below is the cover featuring the design Craig Kaplan and I came up with for the latest issue of The Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.  Beneath it, from the bottom up, are my initial rough draft for the cover, then two drafts of mine (from several) combining ideas of Craig’s and mine.  The poem is my “Mathemaku No. 10.”

FrontCover

LastHalf

BottomSequence2

 

Mathemaku-No10Illuminated04

From down&dirty to fairly high-grade commercial art, it seems to me.  Two equal but different expressions of aesthetic taste.  If we had gone with my initial version, I would have wanted to boost its resolution and possibly made the heart-sequence more like the sequence in the one just above it–i.e., made the upward movement less predictable.  I hadn’t realized when I made my first version that the lay-out of the cover was rigidly the way it is in the top image: image in square to top right, name of publication, image in square to bottom right.  I’d have a single image take up the entire page with the publication data on top of it around two thirds of the way up.    Different strolks for different fokes.  Also a good demonstration of why I’ve never made any money from what I’ve done in the arts.
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Entry 1160 — Commercial Art Specimen

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013

I’ve always said that many commercial artists do work as good as “real artists.”  The difference is simply their central goal, which is to persuade someone to buy something, however much they may at times also want to create a thing of beauty.  So they are not making art, they are making advocature.  I find the label below a wonderful specimen of advocary visiotextual art, but not of advocary visual poetry.  A main reason I’m posting is to again make a point about what visual poetry is and is not.  This is just an ornamented word.  Excuse please, I should say that this is a beautifully-ornamented word, and one should be grateful for it, but that a visual poem, even an advocary visual poem, will do much more.  Now if my creative brain hadn’t blown all sixteen of its fuses last year, with no new shipments of fuses due from Uranus until my next life, I’d show you what the melloyello logo would look like as a genuine advocary visual poem.  That not being possible, I’ll just say it’d do something to make its visual appearance a metaphor for its text.

melloyelloX

On the other hand, the lemon and orange slices seem pretty close to o’s–citrically mellowing beyond the o’s ending the text’s two words . . .  Note: I think I couldda made a lot of money in advertising.

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Entry 1455 — A Day Late « POETICKS

Entry 1455 — A Day Late

I did so much work on the revision of my article for the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts that I forgot all about posting this day’s entry.  The article is now a little over 4,000 words in length, and finished except for one final run-through that will primarily be a copy edit.

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Václav Havel « POETICKS

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Entry 1198 — Václav Havel, Concrete Poet

Friday, August 30th, 2013

I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician.  Well, no–Havel was an artist.  He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.

Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:

My-Biography

 

Philosophy

An early visiopunctuational poet.  The first such?  Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know.  Wait–of course not.  My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964.  I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though.  Terrific poem, in any case.  It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.”  That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry.  I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.

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Pill-Popping « POETICKS

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Entry 1471 — A Tweet?

Saturday, May 31st, 2014

The Following is from my diary entry for today.  Have my blog entries now sunk to the level of tweets?

I took my now-standard zoom-dose (a caffeine pill and a hydrocodone pill) a little while ago and am now (11 A.M.) feeling pretty good.  My Civilization game is going well, I finally won two straight games of Hearts when playing it around seven, and just got a string of 11 straight FreeCell wins going.  What more could a boy want?  I’m going to go through my essay on Beauty methodically now.  I need a unifying principle.  I also need something to write about in my blog entry for the day.  Something will come.  “Off to the races!” I think, then recall my father, who—in similar circumstances, albeit quotidian, like starting off on a car trip, not of High Importance like mine—would have said the same thing.  Maybe for my blog I’ll talk about how nice it was of God to make cats for us, but how vile of him to leave so many of us with no parents to show off in front of when we finally make it—or even, as now, happily think we may.  I truly believe I’ll be able to sell this essay to someone if I can just get it right.  That means smooth, right now.  Okay, now—really—off to the races.  (Hey, I think I just wrote my blog entry.)

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Entry 1414 — Azoom

Saturday, April 5th, 2014

Prologue, from my diary entry for 4 April 2014: “In five minutes it will be 2 o’clock.  I, as usual, don’t feel like writing anything.  I can’t think of anything to write.  So, I’m going to give the small zoom-dose a big test.  I haven’t taken one for five or more days.  I will take it at two and see what it makes me write.  I will start with my blog entry for the day, and just write any old thing if nothing else occurs to me.”

My small zoom-dose consists of half of one of my hydrocodone-acetaminophen 10-660 tablets and a caffeine pill supposed to be the equivalent of a cup of coffee (but I can’t remember a cup of coffee doing much for me–probably because the few I’ve had, have been more than half cream  [I never developed a taste for it]).  If I’m addicted to it, I must be a weird addict be cause I avoid taking one as much as I can–just the way I avoid all forms of work!

It seems to be working.  The brilliant title of this entry was the first indication of that.  But I’ll consider it a failure if it doesn’t get me writing something of importance to me, like one of the many reviews I need to get done for Small Press Review.  Or my July/August SPR column.  Maybe that.  It should be easy, for it’s just a continuation of my previous one, a review of a Seattle zine from 25 years ago called Skyviews that I barely got begun, thanks to my introductory remarks.  (Note: it’s 2:22 and I’m already zinging along happily.  But haven’t whirred very close to anything I can use my mood to spout megalomaniacal huzzahs about.  Unless it’s that sentence.  [Note-within-a-note: when I’m in my pharmaceutically-aided zone, I constantly remember friends high on mary j. in my younger days who thought themselves aflow with creativity that I saw no sign of, and wonder if that’s where I am; but I later like what I’ve done.  Biggest symptom is gushfulness–as soon as I finish a sentence, another suggests itself–or several do.  I veer into what I think are either clever or witty asides.  I feel confident, though, that that is what I am at my best, and that dues to old age, I need pills {most of the time} to get there.]  There–proof that I have not gone excessively linguoblivious: I just closed every one of my parenthesized parenthetical expressions.  And now closet this one>)!  Stagoo!

I strongly suspect that the ability to produce yelps of triumph is one of our innate mechanisms.  And with that my zoom seems to have ended.  I have nothing more to say!   453 words only to this point.  But my zoom has not entirely ended: I don’t care!  However many words I’ve done is enough!  Stagoo!

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Entry 1389 — “Cerebrogovernance”

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014

Yeah, another coinage, this one finishing off my full definition of the “G-factor” (or, in my psychology, general cerebreffectiveness component–or full-scale intelligence as opposed to what most credentialed psychologists consider it) as a combination of four cerebral mechanisms: charactration, accommodance, accelerance and–now–cerebrogovernance.  Mechanism in charge of basal cerebral energy level; mechanism in charge of reducing cerebral energy level; mechanism in charge of increasing cerebral energy; and supervisory mechanism in charge of directing cerebral energy (which is effectually the same as directing attention) to and from various awarenesses (or areas of the cerebrum such as the auditory or verbal awarenesses–e.g., the cerebrogovernance might turn off all the awarenesses of a person silently reading except his verbal awaresness and verbal/visual and verbal auditory association areas, then switch him out of all three to his auditory awareness if someone suddenly screams his name).

I think of cerebrogovernance as “little g” and all four cerebreffective mechanisms “big G.”  All the major awarenesses are “big S’s” (for big specific “intelligences”), and their many sub-awarenesses (e.g., the reducticeptual awareness’s matheceptual and linguaceptual sub-awarenesses) are “little s’s.”

I’m gearing up for a Major little essay on my theory of cerebreffective- ness.  But, first I have to finish the first blog entry to the continuation of my Scientific American blog.  I’ve almost finished it, honest, but I keep finding spots to repair, delete or expand, and seem to be avoid what I believe is the thing’s final section (where I went off on a tangent about tragedy, then realized what I had to say about it was too confuse to try to add to my entry).

Meanwhile, I had my cystoscopy.  It went very well, but my problem turned out to be due to a bladder stone the doctor couldn’t removed for some reason so I’ll have to go back next Monday for, I guess, a similar procedure to remove it.  Will find out more Thursday.  Meanwhile, I’ll have to endure another week of sometimes painful difficulty urinating.  Right now I’m in a good mood, though–even though I’m not on hydrocodone.

Speaking of that, I just read in the paper that I’m a hydrocodone-abuser because I sometimes take “just to feel better”–instead, apparently, for a headache back-ache or the like that other pain remedies don’t do much for, which is what my hydrocodone was prescribed for.  It’s so stupid.  A person semi-incapacitated because of a headache should be given a pill but a person unable to do anything that will give his life meaning because he’s in the kind of null zone I get into at times should not be given a pill–unless, I gather, worse off than I am.

My doctor can no longer prescribe the dosage of Hydrocodone he used to, so my latest prescription from him is for half the dosage.  A little silly, since it only means I have to take two pills instead of one to get the effect one was giving me.  I’m going to see how the half-dosage works, though.  I suspect I don’t really need any dosage; I think I only need the caffeine pills.  But who knows, I may end up seeing a shrink to get genuine anti-depressive pills, legitimately.

Of course, the thing that most disgusts me is that I’m not allowed to buy the pills from anyone who wants to sell them to me without a prescription, and take them as I see fit, on the grounds that I should make all final decisions about my body.  Which, of course, could include my decision to put one of my doctors in charge of my thyroid gland, for instance, as I’ve done.

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Entry 884 — Ruminations on Caffeine Plus a Brush-Burr

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

I’ve now had two caffeine-boosted days in a row.  Once again, I’m into what looks to be a null day.  I can’t think of anything it’d be worth taking a caffeine pill, with or without a part-opium pain pill, to work on.  I’d very much prefer not taking anything, but I have so much to do.  So, drug-dependent Bobby has just taken both pills at 11:19 A.M. e.s.t. this 7 October 2012.  

It seems, according to an Internet site, that caffeine is an Once in the brain, the principal mode of action is “a nonselective antagonist of adenosine receptors”–it connects to these receptors, in the process blocking adensonie from them.  Since it has no affect on the receptors, they keep doing what you do, which seems to be keeping us awake, and boosting our apparent and actual energy, so we feel good and work hard.  Adenosine clamps down on wakefulness and energy.  It seems to me a life-extender inasmuch as it slows you down, keeping you from over-doing anything.  I’m sure my adenosine got too influential, I’m not sure why.  I may be that I got to drinking too much Mountain Dew, the caffeine content of which shut down so many adenosine receptors that my body manusfactured a huge number too many of them in compensation.  This is why drugs generally end increasing whatever problem they at first helped one with.  I hope old age is the culprit, screwing me up by intentionally slowing me down, and went too far.  In any case, I may well be headed toward a state in which now amount of caffeine can help me.  My dosage at the moment is pretty low, though–the quivalent of two cups of mosts kinds of coffee.  I don’t see that I have any alternative. 

Well, maybe I do: maybe there some way to poison my adenosine receptors and whatever mechanism builds new ones.  The probable problem with that is that creativity requires wakefulness followed by null zones during which one accumulates necessary new data. . . .

Hey, here’s something else asemic by Nancy Brush-Burr so you’ll get something out of this entry:

 

 

 

While waiting for this image to upload, I thought to myself what a wonderful good deed I was doing for nbb (with whom I’ve exchanged a few letters and/or e.mails but don’t know well–and am wondering if we are distant cousins, the Burr family being prominent in my genealogy [but Aaron is off to the side!]) by giving her work space here and making my everlastingly insightful comments on.  Up there on my peak, I credited her with deserving this favor.  From there my mind went to amusement on the way my drugs bring out my megalomania.  At once, I smiled at myself, observing that I was a megalmonai even without drugs, the difference being that with drugs I am a happy megalomaniac, without them an unhappy one.  A weird kind of manic-depressive, or so I’ve long believed.  Never darkening enough to overcome my instinct to stay alive, nor glistening Sol-levelly enough to go confront Obama in person for not shoveling a few billion of his pay-offs to the 47% to me.

Enough of me (if only for 2.3 minutes): this visimage of Nancy Brush-Burr’s is an absolutely zowwy picture of –hey, maybe my very own communicative excitement at times!  Not a poem, just a terrific representation of language thunder-storming into something glorious.

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Entry 681 — Why I Like Long Division Poetry

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

I think six people have now seen and commented on my Sequences.  17 in all have seen it, if the counter involved is only counting each person’s first visit.  The only slightly negative comment about it came from the one of the very few who made any meaningful comment on it, Endwar, who said he wasn’t all that taken with long division.  Which, I (Moon in Aries!) instantly responded to with a phooey directed at him followed by a description of (some of) my feelings about long division poems: “I don’t think of any of my long divisions as division, but one multiplication and one addition.  I love the idea of objects or images multiplying each other.  Also the complication of the metaphor resulting: the metaphor having three parts: the multiplier, the multiplicand and the process of multiplication.  My long division poems also bring me back to how wonderful I thought the process of long division was when I was first exposed to it.”

I also commented that my long divisions are much more poetic than conceptual, and Endwar leans more to the poeticoceptual than to the conceptipoetic.  As I’m sure I’ve mused before, I feel many people in science (like Endwar although this may not apply to him), are too conceptual to be able to break out of their analytical minds enough to flow into the weirdwhere my long divisions bobble into.

Ha, they may need the mix of APCs and opiated pain pills I sometimes take.  I say that because I took such a mix just twenty minutes ago after being dead-headedly uncreative for a week or more–and look how “creative” my weiords bobbled at the end of the previous sentence.  The lilt up into poeticonceptuality.  Actually, with me, it is an ascent into an energy level sufficient to express whatever poeticonceptuality I have–but others not naturally in the zone may well be helped by such a mix into it.  So, require visitors to my exhibts and readers of my books to take a dose prior to engaging my work?

Meanwhile, the mix continues working on me.  It’s got me into my semi-megalomaniacal zone. “Semi,” because I’m aware that I’m in it, or at least enough aware of my readers to pretend to think I’m in it when IT IS NOT ANY KIND OF MANIA FOR ME TO RECOGNIZE THAT I AM TO JEHOVAH WHAT HE IS TO KOOL-AID JONES.  I do get hilarious when in the zone, don’t I!  Anyway, as I was about to say, I once again wonder why hardly anyone bothers with writings of mine like this one.  So many others have large audiences for similar reflections whose plod is way lower than the deft snipper of mine.  Okay, I’m not quite a Thoreau or Emerson (the first two I can think of whom I hope have contributed to what I try for with my poetic prose–Robert Frost another), but surely, I keep believing (even when not in my possibly megalomaniacal zone, the difference being that I keep my belief to myself then), I’m close enough to them often enough to attract the attention of people who like that kind of writing more than I do.

Two possibilities: I’m more wildly out-of-phase with the zeitgeist than I feel I am–or I’m too boring repeating a long-dead zeitgeist.  I can’t tell, which is why I so much wish I could get feedback from my few readers.  But they are all as creatively other-occupied as I, who rarely am able to critique them!  What I need are academics, and academics are academics because they are innately behind and want to stay there–who can’t not stay there.

I just made up a new category for entries like this one: “Autobiosophy.”  Words about my, uh, wisdom, rather than words about me.  I feel I write a lot more about my thoughts than I do about me, a good reason for my claim that I ain’t no narcissiphist.  Another argument of mine against the latter tag, which has been applied to me, is that I don’t worship myself, I am aware of and point out flaws of mine all the time.  I am balancedly ego-postive and ego-negative.  Or so it seems to me. 

I could go on forever but will try to do it taking care of the reviewing I’m behind on.  Wish me luck.  You needn’t wish me contentedness: the pills have me ridiculously content with the whole universe.

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Entry 540 — My Urethra

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011

I betcha this  entry draw thousands of visitors!  What a compelling title!  What a fascinating topic! 

So, what’s going on?  What’s going on is I’m going to have an in&out urethra procedure carried out this coming Friday.  My surgeon will be using a laser to remove a calcium build-up that’s been giving me urinary problems.  He believes the radiactive seeds I was implanted with twelve or so years ago for prostate cancer caused the build-up. 

Why am I telling you this?  To explain why I’ve been so listless of late, and will be for a while.  I’ve been told not to take any aspirins until I’ve had and recovered from the procedure–to prevent excessive bleeding.  APCs, apparently my only source of zip, is part aspirin, so I can’t take them.

In spite of my listlessness, I have the book for Marton half done.  Two days ago I felt I needed a break from it, so pulled out the chapters I want to add to my book on the Shakespeare authorship question to work on.  It took me a full day to remember what I intended to do, and find the files I had done.  What I want to do is important: it’s to make my explanation of the anti-Shakespeare conspiracy theory thebasis of a general explanation of all conspiracy theories.  I’m hoping that will increase the salability of the book–although I think it important to do, anyway.  I may have all the ideas I need but organizing them is a bear.  And I’s so weary.

 

 

 

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Entry 509 — A Good Month So Far

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

If I count 31 August as part of September, I’ve come up with 9 new mathemaku in September.  Nine poems in a month isn’t much of an output for most poets, but it’s very good for me.    Actually I only have final copies of four or five, but the others are essentially finished.  I also have essentially have all the terms I jotted down in May for another that have to be written out the way I want them (many in cursive) and backgrounded, and notes for one or two others that are fairly complete.

I wrote the above last night.  It’s now around ten in the morning of the twenty-first of September and once again I’m high on drugs–2 APCs and one tablet of the pain pill with opium that I use on occasion.  As always, I find it unbelievable that a little bit of some chemical or chemicals could make such a difference in me.  I took them because I’m so far behind in my struggle to keep up with the things in my life I consider important, like my next column for Small Press Review, I feel I can’t come close to catching up without chemical help.  (The column, by the way, is now two columns–I did manage to pump far more than enough words into it over the past weeks, but at way too slow a rate, even with the occasional help of my pills.)

I’ll talk over what I’m doing to my body with my gp next time I see him, which should be in three months.  I fear I’ll reach a point at which time the chemicals no longer help me.  I’m concerned, but not as concerned, that I’ll have a heart attack or go crazy–although my usage is not at all high.  Bottom line: I’d rather have three or four more years high than twenty without the pills, or something else that can get me where they get me or close to it.  I can’t say it enough: they astonish me every time.   Without them, I’m almost a car with no gas in its tank; with them, I can operate. 

So, it’s Grumman with his APCs and opium, Leary with his LSD, Freud with his cocaine and tobacco, Coleridge with his opium (Keats used it a bit, too, I believe, even before his tuberculosis), just about all the prominent American authors of the first half of the twentieth century and their alcohol, Balzac and his coffee . . .  Many others.  There are negative examples, too, such as Shaw (one of my greatest heroes) and his abstinence . . . and failure to ascend beyond wonderfully crisp and logical prose to poetry.   The only drug-free artist of the first order I can think of was Shelley–if he indeed was.  

It bothers me that I seem to need drugs no matter how many others in my field did, and regardless of the fact that human beings owe their place in the scheme of things to their being able to improve themselves significantly with external aids (why should we go along with the use of spiked shoes for athletes, say, but not steroids?)  My output is probably no more increased by the drugs I take than by the computer I use.  Still . . .

I am aware of certain negatives in the pill-popping life–lack of focus.  It is hard for me to leave this entry, for example.   Once I’ve managed it, I’ll have trouble choosing the right project to tackle next.  I believe, too, that my critical sense suffers.   No matter.   I will now go to the SPR  column-become-columns and finish them.   (Tarzan yell I’m not sure how to spell here, nor can I execute decently, although I do attempt to.)

Entry 482 — Different Knowings

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

I’ve often mammered here about the effect of pain pills on me.  Recently I’ve taken the one with an opium derivative in it and two APC’s.  The caffeine in the latter may help me.  The two drugs together allow me to act.  I have always found this extremely weird.  The most interesting thing about it (for me), though, is how always it reveals two of my many ways of knowing things to me.   Various portions of what I call my reducticeptual awareness tell me that all these pills do is give me a little extra stimulator-chemicals, or precursors to those–more dopamine, perhaps.  Or less whatever chemical in my brain is inhibiting me.  Simple neurophysiology.

The rest of my awarenesses will never understand this.  How can my brain be so helpless?  How can it sit in my head or do whatever it does wherever it is in me or near me and perceive me at my keyboard unable to type a single simple word that will get me going into a blog entry like this–until, ZING, Mr. Happy Pill and his wife come aboard and say, “Let the dolt type.”

Don’t tell me about placebos.   I don’t seem suggestible.  Marijuana never worked on me, for instance.  Nor chiropractry.  I wanted both to.  Ditto valium that a doctor once gave me for the dead-headedness I’ve experienced on and off for forty years.   Certain remedies for allergies failed while others worked, at least for a time. 

Ah, but I have been suggestible.  A few days after I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, my arms started to ache and became weak; I couldn’t lift them above my head.  My gp at the time, Dr. Hollinger, checked me out and told me he though I was experiencing an anxiety attack.  My symptoms almost immediately disappeared.  I didn’t bother getting the tranquilizer he prescribed for me. 

Still, it was ultimately neurophysiological.  My brain-cells were frantically trying to make new connections to deal with the extreme blow to my self-esteem getting cancer had given me, not to mention the fear of death it got started in me.  It broke down.  I haven’t studied medicine enough to know the details of what happened, but I don’t think my layman’s guess that the brain shifted too much attention from the normal working of my body, particularly in this case my arms, to dealing with the cancer crisis.  So my fundaceptual awareness wasn’t getting enough data to run my arms right.   More important, my execuceptual awareness didn’t have the energy to make my arms move properly–lift when necessary, for example. 

All kinds of distress would occur when they didn’t lift when they normally would, automatically.  Ergo, anxiety and further breakdowns.  Whereupon, my analytical intelligence multiplied the bad effect hugely by telling me I was going to drop dead.  After all, prostate cancer plus the beginnings of paraplegia. 

The simple reassurance my doctor gave me cancelled the anxiety.  I suspect that the relief I felt to hear the cancer hadn’t spread to my armpits, or whatever I feared, upped my endorphins as much as the pills I’m now taking do.  And the good effect held long enough form my brain to work out an effective way to deal with my changed circumstances. 

I took aspirins fairly regularly for headaches, some awfully bad, I thought, between the ages of eight and twelve.  The stress of dealing with people, I’m sure, was at the bottom of it.  Going to school, going to choir practice, things like that.  I don’t remember getting headaches during summer vacations when there was no school or choir practice. 

As I’ve written before, I spontaneously gave up headaches one day in the seventh grade when I vividly remember going down the stairs in the school and knowing that I was over my need for aspirins.  I remember nothing else.  Perhaps I had a headache and I’d suddenly told it to go away and it did.  Or maybe I just realized I hadn’t had a headache for quite a while.  Maybe I’d just experienced something that ordinarily would have given me a headache and it didn’t (although I had no cognitive theory as to why I had them, so could only have guessed I’d had an experience that should have given me one intuitively).  Anyway, I only had headaches a few times a year from then on–except when hung-over, as I occassionally was during my early thirties, when I occasionally went bar-hopping.

I forgot something in my pill-propelled paragraphs above: my bad eyes.  Too much reading, especially without enough light, and perhaps without exactly the right prescription lenses, probably contributed some to my susceptibility to headaches.

Final musing: that I’ve run out of natural endorphins, or a proper supply of them, due to how much I did use them over the years, often going close to genuine mania as a creative artist and thinker.  I keep thinking I shouldn’t use them now, I should let my endocrine system rebuild itself, without pharmaceutical interference.  But it might take too much time.  There’s also the fact that my thyroid gland doesn’t work the way it should anymore (which may well be due to my having been hyperthyroidal most of my life, which was responsible for what I like to think of as my genius, until the overwork the poor gland was doing finally caused it to have a breakdown).

Okay.  It’s six in the evening at this point.  I more or less did my duty as a physical therapy patient.  A forty-minute session at the center I go to.  The bike ride to and from.   A third of my home exercises–but I need only do half of them when I go to the center.  I should have done more but I was too worn out to.  I didn’t take the pills till a couple of hours ago.

I took care of one email this morning.  I got one or two more Small Press Review columns posted in the Pages section here.  (I have to boast, by the way, that I now have 82 columns there.  Four years more of them to go.  I feel proud of them–and did so even pilllessly.  They’re nothing compared with what I might have done–and have occasionally done here and elsewhere–but I continue not to understand, acognitively since my intellect understands, in what way they are inferior to the literary commentary of those getting national attention).

New subject, because of the remarks I’ve made above concerning my True Value to World-Culture.  As I may have said, now that I’m seventy, I’ve decided to be fully honest. I believe one of the things that has me on the margins is lack of social aggressiveness. I believe it’s what kept me from playing varsity basketball in high school, too.

Long story. Maybe I should save it till tomorrow. I have more pills.

Entry 449 — Pill-Popping

Tuesday, 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.

 

 

 

Entry 1454 — Thoughts about Saroyan’s Horses « POETICKS

Entry 1454 — Thoughts about Saroyan’s Horses

I’ve been thinking about how to say why I very much like Aram Saroyan’s addition example, ocean plus forest equals horses.  (1) It forces me to try to wonder some sense into it. (2) I see a fence between the never-motionless huge ocean to the left of a quiet forest and . . . horses.  Visual equalities. (3) To put it most mechanistically, the poem is saying that if we take all the connotations of the word, “ocean,” and mix them with all the connotations of the word, “forest,” we’ll get all the connotations of the word, “horses.” That takes us back to (1): and I get flow of ocean continually going somewhere but never getting there, flow of horses (and living creature), forever also going nowhere . . . the forest much more slowly flowing there, too.  The gallop of horses, the slower gallop of the ocean toward land, the climb and spread of a  forest.  This suggests (4) the haiku’s clash of two strong images to produce a third.  There’s a poem somewhere in the depths of my messy mind that has the image of the ocean’s surf consisting of numberless horses galloping ashore.  I find it intuitively easy to link ocean and horses, but the forest?  Perhaps needed because the horses would otherwise be all flow?

the “orse” of “horses” and the “ores” of “forest” intrigue me, too, but I have found a way to make them a meaningful part of what the poem is doing–i.e., they are coincidental.

I don’t feel I’ve done more than have fun in the poem–i.e., no definitive interpretation here, for sure.

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For anyone interested in my Great Adventure, I have a sad announcement: after eighteen days of valiantly working on some project I consider important, I worked only a couple of minutes on one two days ago, then did not work at all on any of them yesterday.  But it’s not over!  I’m just toning down my vows.  My latest is that I will do significant work on one or my of my Life’s Works daily for the next 21 days, or more!
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