Archive for the ‘Literary Thoughts’ Category
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.)
* * *
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
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.
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 Section I: The Metamodernist
from “a. Against Expression”
from {KOST 99.1 Osterville. The song “We’re An American Band”}
KOST 99.1 Osterville
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.
“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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