Entry 376 — An Ultimate Definition of Poetry « POETICKS-

Entry 376 — An Ultimate Definition of Poetry « POETICKS

Entry 376 — An Ultimate Definition of Poetry

First, to get my latest coinage out of the way before I forget it: “urentity.” I’m not keen on it but need something for more or less fundamental things like photons and electrons–both larger like atoms, and smaller like quarks; for light, too, and maybe gravity. There may be good term for this already out there; if so, I’m not aware of one, and I’ve often wanted one. “Bit of matter” would be good enough if there weren’t some things not considered material, like light.

Maybe “fundent.” “Urentity” is pissy my ear now tells me.

What follows are notes written yesterday toward a discussion of how to define poetry.

Last night I felt I was putting together a terrific monograph on the subject but now, around 3 in the afternoon, I’ve found I haven’t gotten anywhere much, and am out of gas, so will add a few thoughts to what I’ve said so far, without keeping it very well organized.

The best simple definition of poetry has for thousands of years been “literary artworks whose words are employed for substantially more than their ability to denote.” With “literary artworks” being defined as having to have words making some kind of sense whose purpose is to provide aesthetic pleasure to a greater degree than indoctrination or information, the other two things words can provide.

A more sophisticated definition would list in detail exactly what beyond denotation poetry’s words are employed for, mainly kinds of melodation (or word-music), figurative heightening, linguistic heightening (by means of fresh language, for instance) and connotation. Arguments have always risen about what details a poem should have to qualify as a poem–end-alliteration, the right number of syllables, meter, end-rhyme, etc., with philogushers almost always sowing confusion by requiring subjective characteristics such as beauty, high moral content, or whatever.

Propagandists work to make salient words ambiguous. They never provide objective, coherent definitions of their terms. Diana Price, the anti-Shakespearean, for instance, attacks the belief that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him but saying there’s no contemporary personal literary evidence for him, but in her few attempts to define what she means in her book against Shakespeare does so partially, and inconsistently. I bring this up because I hope someday to use her book in a book of my own on the nature and function of propaganda.

I’m not bothering with that right now. I’m intent only on establishing that poetry has always been, basically, heightened language used to entertain in some way and/or another, with different poetic devices being required by poets of different schools of the art. At present a main controversy (although now over a century old) is whether verbal texts using only the device of lineation (or the equivalent) can qualify as poetry, but it would appear that for the great majority of poets and critics, the answer is yes. The most recent controversy has to do with whether poetry making in which non-verbal elements are as important as verbal elements can be considered poetry. the outcome is uncertain but it would seem that another yes will result. Amazingly enough–to me, at any rate–is the belief of many visual artists who make letters and other linguistic symbols the subject of painting that such . . . “textual designs,” I call them . . . are poetry, “visual poetry.” The question has not reached enough people in poetry to be considered controversial yet, I don’t believe–however controversial in my circles.

My newest and best definition of visual poetry is: “poetry (therefore verbal) containing visual elements whose contribution to its central aesthetic effect is more or less equally to the contribution to that of the poem’s words.”

It is constantly claimed how blurry and ever-changing language is, but I’m not sure it is. It seems to me that most of our language is quite stable, and that only language about ideas, which are forever changing, is to any great extent capricious. Sure, lots of terms come and go, but only because what they describe comes and goes. “Poetry,” was reasonably set for millennia, and uncertain only now because for the first time a significant number of artists are fusing arts, thus requiring new terms like “visual poetry,” and amendments to definitions like “poetry.”

A precise, widely agreed-on definition of “poetry” is essential not only for critics but for poets themselves, no mater how little many of them realize it. They want to use it freely, and should if you believe with me that “poetry is the appropriate misuse of language.” A metaphor is a misuse of language, a lie. Calling me a tiger when it comes to defending the rational use of language is an example. I’m not a tiger. But I act in some ways like a tiger. A metaphor actually could be considered an ellipsis–words left out because understood, in this case saying “Bob is a tiger” rather than “Bob is like a tiger.” In any case, if we don’t accept the definition of tiger as a big dangerous cat, the metaphor will not work.

To say a word can have many meanings according to its context does not make it polysemous, although if provides the word with connotational potential the poet can take advantage of.

James Joyce’s “cropse’ is a neat misspelling but useless if one does not accept the precise meanings of “crops” and “corpse.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 12th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Literary Taxonomy, Poetics, visual poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Discussion of a Poem « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Discussion of a Poem’ Category

Entry 1611 — Interpretation of Poems, Part 2

Saturday, October 25th, 2014

I came up with a few more possible layers:

13. The ethical layer. I at first thought ethics would be in the ideational layer, but am now not sure.

14. The anthroceptual, or the human relations layer: character, as opposed to plot. At this point it occurs to me that maybe I ought to link each layer to an awareness or sub-awareness in the cerebrum as I have here. I could also rename the ideational layer the “scienceptual layer.” Will think it over.

15. The allegorical layer, or the only layer those questioning the authorship of Shakepeare’s sonnets are really interested in, the one—if it exists—that arbitrarily attaches real people and places to objects in a poem. Perhaps I should make two layers out of this, the sane allegorical layer, for poems like Spenser’s Faery Queene that use straight-forward allegory, and the psitchotic allegorical layer for poems a lunatic has found to be allegorical.

Actually, this layer should be called the allegorical paraphrasable layer, because it is everything a poem is thought to be under its surface.

Because I have it readily at hand, here’s a rough full paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 I did to show Paul Crowley how sane interpretations of poems are made. Needless to say, I found no allegorically paraphrasable layer.

> 1. Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?

“Would it be a good idea to make a comparison of you to a day in the most pleasant of the four seasons?”

Note that my explication is a paraphrase of the line that takes the DENOTATION of every word into consideration and tries to make linguistic sense. It is concerned primarily with what the surface of the poem means. It ought to deal, too, with any clear-cut connotations of the text it concerns, as well as any secondary meanings, if any. In this case, I find no connotations worth mention, and there is nothing in the line (or, to my knowledge, outside the line–that is, in the background layer, which should be consulted by one making a paraphrase of a poem) to indicate it means anything more than it says.

> 2. Thou art more louely and more temperate:

“You are superior to the summer’s day mentioned in both beauty and temperament.” Ergo, In other words, there’s really no comparison between you and a summer’s day: you’re much the better of the two.
Again, there is nothing in the text to indicate it means anything more than it directly says.

> 3. Rough windes do shake the darling buds of May,
“Unruly, harmful movements of air upset the delicate early blossoms of summer flowers.” Note: May may have been thought a part of summer in Shakespeare’s time. Or May’s buds may still be present by the true beginning of summer.

> 4. And Sommers lease hath all too short a date:

“And that season does not remain in charge of nature for very long: its “contract” to do so is short-term.”
This line and the previous one point out in some detail the defects of a summer’s day, but, implicitly, not of the addressee. There is nothing in them to suggest they mean anything else.

> 5. Sometime too hot the eye of heauen shines,

“There are times when the sun is unpleasantly too high in temperature,”

> 6. And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,

There are also frequent times when the sun is overcast.”

Again, two lines providing further details of what makes the summer’s day inferior to the addressess, who–we are led to believe–has no equivalent of temperatures that are either too hot or not warm enough. And who is never “grey” in disposition.

> 7. And euery faire from faire some-time declines,

“Every good thing is subject to decay, and therefore must lose some of its best qualities. “In summation, each good thing in a summer’s day must eventually retreat from its peak, or lose its best qualities,”

> 8. By chance, or natures changing course vntrim’d:

“the victim of some random event (like being trodden on by some animal) or of the normal way the natural world behaves (turning stormy, for instance).

Ergo, we have two more lines finishing up telling the reader what is wrong with summer–and, it is strongly implied, NOT with the addressee. So far, not a hint that anything other than the surface meaning of the words (beautifully) used is intended.

> 9. But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade,

“Your never-dying prime season, however, won’t ever decline”

> 10. Nor lose possession of that faire thou ow’st,

“or surrender the beauty of appearance and disposition, and other excellences you are in possession of”

Two more straight-forward lines, these ones claiming the addressee will not fade in any manner the way a summer’s day inevitably will.

> 11. Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,

“Nor will the ruler of the realm those who die be able to boast that you have entered his realm”

> 12. When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st,

“when in ever-living lines of verse you continue to flourish and perhaps even improve,”

Again, a straight-forward set of lines, these bringing in the speaker of the poem’s second main thought, which is that poetry can make one who is its subject immortal. I admit to not yet knowing exactly what “to time” means, but I believe I have given the most plausible meaning to every one of the other words in the poem.

> 13. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

“Until such time as human beings are unable to keep alive by taking in air or there are organs sensitive to light,”

> 14. So long liues this, and this giues life to thee,

“the poem you have been reading or listening to will endure, and it will grant you immortality.”

That does it. My explication accounts for every word in the poem except “to” and “time,” and even those can be accounted for as having something to do with resisting what time does to all things. It is also completely plausible AND sufficient, for those with any ability at all to appreciate poetry. (Of course, there’s much more to any poem than an explication of its sanely paraphrasable layer.) To show it has an allegorically paraphrasable layer (or or any other layer containing further meanings of the kind just revealed) requires external evidence of it like the notes of the poet saying such meanings are there, or poems by other poets that seem on the surface like this one but have some significant hidden under-meaning, or permit a second explication that comes up with such a hidden under-meaning that is as smooth, coherent, and reasonably interesting as the primary meaning I’ve just shown the poem indubitably to have.

The third course is the only one you have available, Paul–because we have no notes or anything else relevant from the author or from anyone else to indicate any hidden meanings, nor are there any poems in the language (or any language, so far as I know) that are like the kind of poem you claim this is. I am absolutely sure that you cannot provide an explication that reveals a smooth, coherent, reasonable hidden meaning. In fact, I’m pretty sure you will claim it’s not necessary to–the poet was too complex for any academic or even you fully to explicate.

That would be nonsense, and clear evidence that your interpretation is defective. But not to you. Nor will you ever accept my claim that it is an argument against your interpretation
.

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1541 — Thoughts Concerning Entry 1540

Sunday, August 17th, 2014

Nice to see that more people are visiting my Journal of Mathematics and the Arts article than just the forty or fifty to whom I sent free links to it–75 yesterday morning. I’m hoping for a hundred!

A few follow-ups to yesterday’s entry. First about the poem. As some of you will realize, the quotient is one of my “poemns”–i.e., one of the haiku in my 1966 collection, poemns. Two questions occurred to me as I used it: (1) how does the poem’s existence now in two rendering affect its cultural value? and (2) should I make more long divisions using various poemns, perhaps all of them?

I hope having two versions of my poem is a plus. The first is still important as a stand-alone because a simplification toward intensification at the expense of complexity; the second manywheres far beyond but with, I believe, the loss of maximal intensification. In its relocation in a long division, the poemn’s connotative value is diminished, but certain of its specific connotative possibilities are strengthened. I think I would like them read far apart from each other, the poemn first, most happily without the reader’s being aware of its use elsewhere.

I just laughed a bit to myself at the thought that I might now make a third version.

Further note: I consider poemns a collection of visual haiku, but my little boy (me at Harbor View, age 11) is not in a visual poem, but a cryptographiku (my very first one), that being a kind of infra-verbal poem that makes significant aesthetic use of an encrypted text, and infra-verbal poem being (as you all know) a poem in which what counts is what happens inside words.

I also want to say a bit about my declaration that my poem is a major one (as is my poemn–a major poem within a major poem, by gum). That I need all the encouragement I can get, including self-encouragement is one reason for it. Another is the hope mentioned yesterday that some one would challenge, intelligently challenge, me on it. That would have the value of publicizing it, and perhaps educating some people about it. But–most important for me, I swear–I might find out something that helps me as a poet. (I almost never fail to learn something that helps me as a poet from thoughtful feedback, even very mistaken feedback, and am always surprised when that happens.) I would also get a better sense of how my poems are coming across to others, and I truly want to know that because while simply the satisfaction I when I make a poem I like is enough for me, I also want others to enjoy it–which is the main reason by far that I make my poems public. Benefiting materially from a poem would be very nice (I assume, from what little I know of it) but, as I often say, I’d a billion times prefer to make a poem and two or three others like without getting a cent for it than a poem I think tenth-rate but others like enough to give me–well, a Nobel prize for (the money that comes with it being about all that I’d be interested in).

Posted in Autobiographica, Discussion of a Poem, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1506 — Another Lesson in Poetics

Sunday, July 6th, 2014

I was thinking about the poem below after posting it yesterday, recalling that I was confused then, at the age of 25, and until I was in my late thirties about what a metaphor was, which is ironic, because my poem is, as a whole, a perfect metaphor:

Its metaphor (as I now define the term) is the sentence (and its overflow) which makes up the entire poem. The metaphor’s referent is the boy on the swing. The two together make up what I call a “metaphormation”–but am agreeable to having others call it a metaphorical expression. My long-time confusion about what metphors was due to my hearing or reading people calling both what I now call a metaphor and what I call a metaphormation metaphors.

Here, though I hope you don’t need it, is a paraphrase of the poem: a small boy at the height of his swings on a playground swing breaks the law of gravity like a sentence continuing beyond its period breaks the rules of grammar. The idea of making expressive us of punctuation marks I got from Cummings–although I’ve never decided whether he ever intentionally made linguistically-expressive use as well as visually-expressive use of them. I’d enjoy being the first to do this, if it’s possible I am, but would not consider it an accomplishment anywhere near the level of Cummings’s invention–certainly for America–of infraverbal poetry, by which I mean his being the first to make it, effectively, seriously, in more than a few scattered poems.

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, Poetics, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1585 — BG, Master American-Haiku-Critic

Sunday, June 15th, 2014

from a post to NowPoetry from Jesse Glass, whom I consider a superior knower of things Japanese although he is diffident about it, with my thoughts interspersed:

Hokku

Bits of song—what else?

I, a rider of the stream,

Lone between the clouds.

from an interesting old anthology titled The New Poetry eds. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson

* * *

Jesse: “I think the first line exhibits the Homer Simpson “d’oh!” factor to a high degree. The other two lines are fine.”

Me: “I discur about the first line, Jesse–my interpretation of this American haiku (because no longer in Japanese) is something like: ‘here I am again with nothing but a trivial poem–me–up there like a god, alone in the clouds.’ Ergo, the first line sets up the second: image of bits of anybody song in tension with some great stream in the sky only someone vastly above (in many senses) ‘bits of song’ can ride. Resolution of what seems to me a sort of metaphor: bits of song equal anything in Nature, however magnificent–with the implication that the speaker of the poem is a fool, or a slyly-ironic non-fool.

“Of interest to me is the fantasy of the second and third lines. Are traditional haiku allowed to indulge in sheer fantasy, Jesse? My impression is that they aren’t, but I’m not sure. I, of course, am all for allowing it. In any case, the rider in the sky’s is definitely metaphoric, and I know metaphors were banned–although I contend that just about all the best elderly haiku had juxtaphors, my name for implicit metaphors.

“Note: I take “hokku” to be a synonym for “haiku,” or too near to consider a different kind of poem. The Hokku above in American is a haiku, for me. But you might explain what the Japanese mean by ‘hokku,’ Jesse; I’m pretty sure you have a better idea of that than I.”

From: Anny Ballardini

Heaps of black cherries

glittering with drops of rain

in the evening sun

Richard Wright

Me: “This is a poor haiku because containing only one image, albeit a pleasant enough one.”

stole two red cherries

expensive in plastic baskets

under the electric light

me

Me: “This I like I lot. Either Wright caught on to hakuitry by the time he wrote it, or got lucky. It’s still very close to being just one image, but I interpret there to be two sets of images in effective hakuic tension with each other: the cherries under the bright light, and the boy, distant from them in space and mood, the cherries cheerful, the boy guilty–or proud; and the cherries in plastic baskets and the boy with two stolen cherries under the electric light, very visible to the authorities (standing out, ion fact, the way the printed word, ‘me,’ does on the page.

“Comments welcome, especially counter-comments. Show where I’m off, and you will qualify to be a master American-haiku-critic, first–or at least second-class.”

Note from BG, the racist: I wish there were fewer streets named after Martin Luther King and more named after Richard Wright. (If I weren’t a racist, I’d want streets named after George Washington replaced with streets named after Richard Wright. No, name those after E. E. Cummings or Wallace Stevens or Theodore Roethke. Actually, we need no streets named after greater writers, because books of their work, or the electronic equivalent, are more than streets-enough for them.

Question from my hydrocodoned mood: what other writer in our country has written as entertaining and interlekshoolly-valuable a little essay in the past decade as the above? Or is as lovable (on paper)?(I took the hydrocodone to assure I did meaningful work on the essay regarding beauty I’ve been working on for months! I haven’t yet gotten to it almost two hours after taking my hit. Now I may.*

*It’s lucky I’m as old as I am. It’s scary how fast my lovability is increasing nowadays. If I were only twenty, it’d explode before I was fifty, and kill millions.**

**Aren’t the opponents of drug-addiction lucky I’m giving them so much good evidence against hydrocodone with stuff like this?***

*** Note, too, how the hydrocodone is keeping me from my essay on Beauty. Hmm, maybe that’s what’s good about it. Except that it will not keep me from it any longer. Later!

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, haiku, Poetics | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, haiku, John Stevenson, Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

Entry 1348 — “Nymphomania”

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014

All I have to say about yesterday’s entry is that the work at the top of the uppermost page is by Harry Polkinhorn. It’s a frame from Summary Dissolutions, a sequence of his my Runaway Spoon Press published sometime in the eighties. I also wanted to note that the very rough taxonomy presented hasn’t changed except that I now call “illumagery,” by another name: “visimagery.” For this entry I just have something more from Of Manywhere-at-Once:

Note: the text above directly follows my comments on Jonathan Brannen’s poem.

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, Harry Polkinhorn, Poetics, Richard Kostelanetz, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1347 — Another Late Entry

Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

My absentmindedness is getting worse, it would seem, although it was pretty bad to begin with. Anyway, here is yesterday’s entry, just thrown together a day late. It’s some pages from Of Manywhere-at-Once that I don’t have time to comment on:

Lily of the Valley

Posted in Aesthetics, Discussion of a Poem, Jonathan Brannen, Poetics, Taxonomy, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1345 — Excerpts from a Masterpiece

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

The masterpiece is my Of Manywhere-at-Once. I suddenly had the brilliant thought of taking care of blog entries for the next few days with full pages of the third edition of it (the Runaway Spoon Press, 1998–the first edition was published eight years earlier, with this section the same as it is here). For once, laziness is not my reason for doing this. What is, is a need to concentrate of an essay I’m working on whose deadline will soon be on me. So: here are three consecutive pages from my book, left as is:

I think I have one or two copies of my available for sale, but they are now collectors’ copies, so I have to ask for a hundred bucks for one. But I will sign it. Its buyer will also have the satisfaction of having helped a poet keep from bankruptcy. (I’m serious–otherstreamers ought to ask for compensation at least equal to a thousandth of what celebrated tenth-raters get for absolute crap. And what can we lose since we can’t get even the cost of our raw materials for anything?)

As I posted the second of my three pages, I thought to myself (as opposed to thinking to someone else–ain’t the Englush lingo funny at times?) I really ought to save my second and third pages for my next two entries. Being nice to my readers triumphed, though, so they are all here. I do plan to use them again tomorrow. I have second thoughts about at least one part of my text, and first thoughts about what I think about it, and what was going on in my life at the time I wrote it.

Ridgid Power Tools

Posted in Bob Grumman, Crag Hill, Discussion of a Poem, Poetics, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1343 — “(Music Ahead)”

Friday, January 17th, 2014

“The Quantity, Music Ahead, to the Power of Balloons,” as I call the little graphic I posted here yesterday, is a recently-revised visiomathematical detail from my “Long Division of Creativity.” It had been just “balloons.” I’m about to write a commentary on the poem it’s in for an essay I’m doing for the Journal of Mathematics and Art, that will make my reputation. This detail, added to a graphic I made to represent the blossoming of spring–although it can be many other things as well, or instead, equals “Creativity.” By itself, it’s “music:” with an exponent representing good cheer, celebration, buoyancy, etc., not to mention balloons. Note the colon: the G-clef does not quite represent music, but music coming up. This particular G-clef is taken from another poem, of mine, and is an often-used symbol of mine for “music:” (and I don'[t mind its being taken to symbolize music as well, in fact, prefer it to be).

A poem-within-a-poem . . . that itself contains a (very minor) poem-within-a-poem, the word, “balloons,” in color. I put it there mainly because I wanted something in the poem that was highly accessible.

Trencianske Teplice

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Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress « POETICKS

Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress

If I ever come to be seen worth wide critical attention as a poet, I should be easy to write about, locked into so few flourishes as I am, such as “the the” and–now in this piece, Basho’s “old pond.” I was wondering whether I should go with “the bookshop’s mood or “a bookshop’s mood” when Basho struck. I love it!

Just one word and a trivial re-arrangement of words, but I consider it major. (At times like this I truly truly don’t care that how much less the world’s opinion of my work is than mine.)

We must add another allusion to my technalysis of this poem, describing it as solidifying the poem’s unifying principal (and archetypality), Basho’s “old pond” being, for one thing, a juxtaphor for eternity. Strengthening its haiku-tone, as well. But mainly (I hope) making the mood presented (and the mood built) a pond. Water, quietude, sounds of nature . . .

Oh, “old” gives the poem another euphony/assonance, too.

It also now has a bit of ornamental pond-color. Although the letters of the sub-dividend product are a much lighter gray on my other computer than they are on this one, the one I use to view my blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Basho, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, Poetics, Wallace Stevens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress”

Kevin Kelly says:

6 March 11 at 8:31 PM

I really like this one; it strikes me as very E.E. Cummings-inspired, and I love that guy. I think the use of gray is a good idea because it gives the “remainder” more punch at the end. I’m a bit confused on reading your description in which you keep talking about Basho’s pond, which I don’t see in evidence here … I’m thinking if I had seen an earlier version of this, or I was better versed in the Grummanverse, I would understand that. And finally, you won’t have to struggle between “the” or “a” bookshop’s mood soon, where there’s just one bookshop left. Just had to end that with a little (sad) humor!
Bob Grumman says:

6 March 11 at 9:20 PM

Oh, boy, I get to explain! Nothing I love more. Basho comes in because of his famousest poem, which I’ve made versions of and written about a lot, the one that has the “old pond” a frog splashes into. My poem has an “old bookshop” that has a mood with depths a street enters like (I think) the pond’s water with depths the frog enters. But now that you bring it up, I guess the allusion is pretty hermetic.

Glad you like it. I still do now that I’m looking at it again–although it strikes me as pretty weird.

Entry 8 — Thoughts on Haiku « POETICKS

Entry 8 — Thoughts on Haiku

A new Grummanism today, “constersense,” to go with an old one, “nonsense,” and one in between old and new, “nearsense.”

One item always worth taking a look at in the Haiku Canada Review is the page on which N. F. Noyes discusses haiku he likes. One of them got me thinking about nonsense

. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there

It’s by someone calling himself G. A. Huth. About this Noyes says, “From a fourteenth century poet I quote: ‘Generally speaking, a poet requires some understanding of emptiness.’”

(An amusing comment to make in a discussion of the World-Expert in the praecisio. See Geof’s blog for details on that if–shame on you–you don’t know what it is.)

Noyes goes on to say, “Here the sudden emptiness provides a strong “Aha!” experience, despite a seeming diregard for the haiku’s chief guideline of close observation, in ‘I didn’t notice.’”

(But I would contend that what the poet closely observed with his act of not noticing.)

Noyes was reminded of a haiku by Buson:

.              Tilling the field:
.           The cloud that never moved
.              Is gone.

The other two haiku Noyes liked (as did I) are:

.                  a kicked can
.            cartwheels
.                into its echo                  –Jeffrey Winke

.                  transplanting
.                  four rose bushes
.                  transplanting bees     –Liz fenn

More on nonsense and related matters tomorrow, if I’m up to it. (Final note: I at first mistyped Geof’ haiku as “the care I didn’t notice isn’t there.”)

Tags: haiku, praecisio

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 12:55 PM and is filed under Geof Huth, N. F. Noyes, Poetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1084 — Yet More Mathpo Thoughts « POETICKS

Entry 1084 — Yet More Mathpo Thoughts

In the March entry of my Scientific American blog, I praised a poem of Rita Dove’s–with chagrin, because she’s one of poetry’s enemies, in my view, due to her having the status to bring the public’s attention to poetry outside of Wilshberia but doesn’t. Here’s what I said about her “’Geometry,’ which wonderfully describes the poet’s elation at having proven a theorem: at once, her ‘house expands,’ becoming transparent until she’s outside it where ‘the windows have hinged into butterflies . . . going to some point true and unproven.’ Putting her in the almost entirely asensual beauty of the visioconceptual part of her brain where Euclid doth reign supreme.” I bring this up to illustrate an important reason for my emphasis on the idea of a mathexpressive poem’s doing mathematics. It is, that if one of my long division poems does not do mathematics, there is nothing to distinguish it from a poem like Dove’s. If that makes taxonomical sense to anyone, so be it, but it doesn’t to me.

Needless to say, I very much want it believed that my poems do something special, but that doesn’t make my belief that they do necessarily invalid.

Going further with the idea of the value of doing something non-verbal in a poem rather than just discussing some discipline in which non-verbal operations occur, the possibility of doing math in a poem simplies the possibility of doing other non-literary things in them. Like archaeology. I’ve tried that in a few of my visual poems (as have others, whether consciously or not, I don’t know). I’ve suggested archaeology sites to what I believe is metaphorical effect, but only portrayed archaeology, not carried out archaeological operations. Not sure yet how that can be done but feel it ought to be possible. Ditto doing chemistry–as some have, I believe (although I can’t think of the unusually-named poet who I believe has, right now).

I’ve read of choreographical notation and feel confident that it could be effectively used in poetry. Don’t have time to learn it, my self, though. I’ve done music in poems–only at the simple level that I’ve done mathematical poems, but made poems that require the pocipient to be able to read music to appreciate them. There are all kinds of wonderful ways to go as a poet for those believing other ways of interacting with the world besides the verbal can be employed in poetry rather than merely referred to, however as eloquently as Rita Dove has referred to the geometrical.

payday loan company

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 25th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Mathematical Poetry, Poetics, Taxonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Harry Polkinhorn « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Harry Polkinhorn’ Category

Entry 1348 — “Nymphomania”

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014

Note: the text above directly follows my comments on Jonathan Brannen’s poem.

Posted in Discussion of a Poem, Harry Polkinhorn, Poetics, Richard Kostelanetz, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

lineation « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘lineation’ Category

Entry 12 — Line Breaks

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I may know as much as anyone in the world about the nature and function of lines breaks. That’s not a major boast: there isn’t much to know about them, and understanding them doesn’t take research or study, just a little commonsensical thought. I’m making them the subject of this entry because of a thread at New-Poetry I got involved with. A few of the contributors to the thread seemed to me to be having trouble fully understanding the device. Anyway, I’ve decided to write a minor primer about it, bringing back my recent Poem poem to illustrate its simplest functions:

. Another Failure

.                                  For half the night
.                                  Poem struggled mightily
.                                  to sing himself a sleep
.                                that melted understandings into him
.                                as intricately deepening as April rain
.                                  dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;
.                                  but nowhere in it did
.                                  anything extend beyond
.                                its decimal point.

I will now repeat it, with a comment in purple under each of its lines:

. Another Failure

. For half the night

The poem’s first line-break notifies the reader that he’s in a poem, as does every poem’s first line-break; slows his read to force him to pay at least a little more attention to what’s going on in the language of the poem and what its expressing, particularly its imagery, as do all line-breaks; with the corroboration of the poem’s other lines, if the reader glances at them, informs him of the poem’s pace, in this case comparatively quick; gives his mind a resting place from the possibly difficult material of the poem (again, like all line-breaks); presents a hint (possibly misleading) of the kind of poem the will follow as to style, subject matter, rhythmic nature, technique, point-of-view, and the like, in this particular case, mainly suggesting quotidianness via a commonplace diction, and the representation of a highly standard image; and, finally, setting up a rhyme by leaving “night” in an emphazied location of the poem.

. Poem struggled mightily

The poem’s second line-break does most of the things its first one did but also pretty much establishes the poem as free-verse, and puts “might” near its end to rhyme with the final word of the previous line.

. to sing himself a sleep

The next line-break does little new, but the extra time it gives the reader may help prevent his reading “a sleep,” a key contributor to whatever value the poem has, too hurriedly.

. that melted understandings into him

Coming a little late compared to the other line-breaks, this one is responsible for giving its line a feel of magnitude, importance; I believe it will be welcomed for the pause it provides the reader to think about just what its line and the preceding one mean

. as intricately deepening as April rain

The next line-break lets its line extend even more.

. dislodging a woodland’s smallest wisdoms;

Then a line-break halting its line somewhat sooner than the previous line-breaks halted theirs–perhaps indicating the we’ve reached the poem’s peak and are now quieting.

. but nowhere in it did

Another short line, now, stopped before it says anything–stopped also on a word a more standard line-break would not have, to “merely’ keep the reader from being completely on balance.

. anything extend beyond

The penultimate line-break does little more than prevent the reader from too quickly learning where the sentence he’s reading is going.

. its decimal point.

The poem’s final line-break provides it with a sharp short clear end.

Any questions?

Additional comments: when I wrote this poem, I paid little attention to the line-breaks I was making–they came pretty much naturally. I’m sure that’s the way it wis with most composers of free verse. The “did” I thought about before going with, though, and I think I came back to one pair of lines that sounded wrong, and change the line-break between them.

A reader, too, if experienced, ought not pay much conscious attention to the lineation of a work of free verse–but, if effective, it will have a great deal of influence on his understanding of the poem.

One last comment: in the right hands–those of E. E. Cummings, for example–line breaks can be employed to do much more of value in a poem than they do in “Another Failure.”

DiscountContactLenses

Posted in lineation, Linguexpressive Poetry, Of Poem, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a « POETICKS

Entry 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a

According to Billy Collins, E. E. Cummings is, in large part, responsible for the multitude of k-12 poems about leaves or snow

But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere. Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at. Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem: suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend. For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness. That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.

To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much. But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story. Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine. I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to. It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.

I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:

But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly– one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once. Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness. For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.

Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:

In this poem the F suggests to me a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point. So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text. Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives. And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been. Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world. In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.

So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.

Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under E E Cummings, Marton Koppany, Poetics, Poetry Criticism, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 436 — Visual Poetry Intro 1a”

endwar says:

10 June 11 at 11:40 PM

Hmmm . . . . all leaves in fall.

Was this one of the response to Dan Waber’s “Fall leaves” project?

– endwar
Bob Grumman says:

11 June 11 at 11:00 AM

I’m away from the files in my main computer so can only tell you it was a response to one project of Dan’s, probably the one you mention. Not sure, though, It had to do with work by bp Nichol, though.

Entry 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued « POETICKS

Entry 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued

.    Sonnet 18
.
.       Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
.       Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
.       Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
.       And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
.
.       Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
.       And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
.       And every fair from fair sometime declines
.       By chance or Nature’s changing course untrimmed.
.
.       But thy eternal summer shall not fade
.       Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.
.       Nor shall Death brag thou wandr’st in his shade
.       When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
.
.       So long as men have breath and eyes to see,
.       So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
.

Shakespeare, 140 syllables, 116 words (because I count “sometime’ as two words) to give a semantic density of .83. That’s lower than I estimated yesterday because when I forgot that not all its words of more than one syllable had only one more than one. So Frost’s poem is quite a bit higher than Shakespeare’s.

The sonnet has a surprisingly low euphonic density: .09. It makes up for that in repenemic density. I have the figures somewhere to measure that with but am not up to finding them just now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Linguexpressive Poetry, Poetics, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 236 — A Day Worthless But Happy Enough « POETICKS

Entry 236 — A Day Worthless But Happy Enough

I had what seemed to me a lot of errands to do today. It was also one of my three tennis days a week. So I never expected to get anything much done. I have so far, and probably wont. (It’s a little after four in the afternoon.) I feeling lethargic, as I seem always to. But happy enough because I was able to run close to all out on the tennis court for the second time in a row. I’m not quite up to what I consider full speed, and I still have trouble when I have to push off on my left leg. But I feel reasonably able to play near my standard, which I would rate at slightly above average for my age. This is the main reason for my good mood.

My errands were getting milk and bananas (I eat one banana every morning), depositing a credit card cash advance for $500 in my bank account, dropping buy to pay my dentist my monthly bill, and stopping at my general practitioner’s to get a lab appointment and an office appointment, having missed two schedule for earlier this month, how, I don’t know, but–yikes–I’m getting absent-minded of late. Once home, I managed to write the times of the appointments down on a wall calendar I have for the very purpose but two often forget to use it.

My dentist has ordered my two recent collections of plurexpressive poetry, but I don’t want to turn them over to her until I written some notes to help her understand them, which is my next minor writing chore. I’ve been avoiding doing it these past two days, for some reason. I should be able to start on it tomorrow.

I had some thoughts on how much more important than subject matter in a poem techniques are, inspired by another me-in-the-minority discussion at New-Poetry. Can’t remember much of what I had to say now, but I do remember discovering that techniques are invisible; it’s their effects that we are aware of in poems. Ditto form. I contended that subject matter is too often the only concern of poets, poetry readers, poetry editors and poetry critics. Certainly almost nobody in the field considers technique more important in a poem than it, the way I do.

I also discovered that actually technique is everything in poetry, for the simple choice of subject matter is a technique. Subject matter is also everything in a poem.

One thing I said was that it is technique that gives the subject matter of a poem its meaning. I also opined that viewpoint is a kind of subject matter. I guess I’d divide subject matter into primary subject matter like the summer day of “Sonnet 18,” and secondary subject matter like Shakespeare’s view of the summer day in that poem as something fine but flawed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Poetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.