Archive for the ‘Poetics’ Category
Entry 409 — Thoughts on Poetics
Sunday, March 27th, 2011
The following is from Geof Huth’s ongoing “Poetics”:
84. Lie
Does the voice make a lie of the poem? Because a good voice can make a weak poem seem strong and a poor voice can ruin a great poem. Is the poem isolated on the page (the screen) the most accurate version of the poem, true to itself, or does the voice we use to read it in our heads also ruin great poems and resurrect the dead ones?
It comprised his blog entry for Friday. Here’s my reply:
Interesting question. I lean toward considering any poem on paper to its completion as the printed score of a musical composition is to its completion.
I can’t see a bad reading spoiling a good poem or good reading rescuing a bad poem, for me, but that’s because the conceptual area of my brain is much stronger than its auditory area. So, for me, what a poem is on paper is something like 95% of what it is, completed. For others the percentage will be lower or higher.
Since I can’t read music very well, a musical composition on paper is likely less than 15% of what it is, completed, for me. For Beethoven, in his final years, it would have been 100%.
Similar thinking applies to the font-shape and color of a poem’s print, and the color and texture of the paper.
All this is out the window for sound poetry and visual poetry–well, not all of it for those of us for whom poetry is a verbal art requiring completion by being spoken, whether internally by the poem’s engagent or externally by either the engagent or someone else. No more than half out the window, I would say. For me, a verbally effective visual or sound poem can be neither completely spoiled nor completely rescued by its extra-verbal visual or auditory components–but it could be one or the other by its verbal content–as a poem.
Hey, thanks, Geof. I’ve just written my blog entry for Sunday.
–Bob
Still later comment: I wonder if it’s possible for a bad poem to be read so well it becomes, or seems, a good poem. It seems to me that if it can be read in such a way that its sounds good, it must be good–it had whatever is needed to be beautifully voiced.
Entry 401 — Experimental Poetry
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
Thinking about the poem I wrote yesterday:
. Poem in last the Where Yellow
. When sky Poem club over
. sundry conniving. chain Last; exceptions.
. Witheringly so so so, so example for
. doesn’t? It. instants and below.
. shifted candy bellowing bulge ‘s, s,o
. with her wristle
. exceeds which whistley love.
. Parties never part am he.
I realized that it was a genuine experimental poem–as many poems called “experimental” are not. That, unsurprisingly, put me into my defining mode. My first reason for deeming my poem experimental was that in composing it I had devoted myself seriously to doing something significant as a poet that I’d never done when composing a poem before. Or at least couldn’t remember having seriously done. First simple insight–that, for me, a poem I made could be experimental even if what I did as a poet was something others had done. Such was the case with this poem, for I’m sure language poets have made poems with the intention of avoiding any suggestion of sentences. Conclusion: there are two kinds of experimental poems, endo-experimental poems and exo-experimental poems. Poems experimental for their composers and poems that are experimental for the world.
There are also–those in which a p0et does something as a poet new for him that he claims is therefore experimental. Like trying out a new rhyme-scheme. But if it would seem to almost every knowledgeable person that a poet’s endo-experiment is at the level of the “experiment” almost any poet must carry out when composing a poem, since he must make a poem different in some way from any previous poem of his, his poem is pseudo-experimental. Else all poems are experimental, and the term has no meaning.
As I’ve opined before many times, in one way or another: a genuine experimental poem can easily, mostly likely will, be a failure as a poem, but it will never be a failure because one must learn from it. So an experimental poem that fails as a poem is as worth making as a non-experimental poem that succeeds as a poem, unless that latter succeeds majorly.
The main thing a poet might learn from an experimental poem of his that fails as a poem is that whatever it was that he did differently was unproductive, and not worth repeating. Better, he might see variations of his experiment he could try. There would remain the possibility that some variation of the experiment would yield a valuable new kind of poem. If not, he will have learned of a path not worth following. He might also end not only in learning in detail why that path was not worth following, but with a raised understanding of the non-experimental things he could do as a poet, and be able to appreciate and employ them better than he had.
So, what Have I learned from my poem? I’m not sure. Nothing definite, for sure. Just a few inklings that certain details may have potential. I like “instants and below,” who knows why. Ditto, “”example for doesn’t.” The “‘s” is outside the avoid-sentences experiment but makes me think an apostrophe in front of a single letter or maybe two letters might be artfully mysterious, if the letter or letters were not arbitrarily chosen. Something to let the under-conscious bat around. A word like “so” repeated for no apparent reason (except here I thought of “so-so,” and the fact that “so so-so” did make sense). “To part am,” somewhere in my head doing is something.
Another thought: that doing everything in a poem purposely wrong can help shake one out of the habit of doing everything purposely right, which I feel will almost never lead to a good poem.
A question: if I make a variation of the endo-experimental poem above will the result be an endo-experimental poem? By my definition, no. My first experiment will have to have been my only significant experiment. I wouldn’t be doing more than changing a rhyme-scheme. That, however, would make experimental poems too rare to bother naming, and no poet would qualify to be an experimental poet. So I would extend my definition to include as experimental poems in which the poet devotes himself seriously to doing variations of something significant he has never before tried as a poet.
Entry 383 — Another Throw-Away Entry
Saturday, February 19th, 2011
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The most important element in a poem is its subject matter, but the most important determinant of a poem’s value is the effectiveness of its author’s use of poetic techniques (for non-Philistines).
It’s sort of like the difference for a play between the stage or other performance area it is performed on and its words. Can’t have a play without the first, but other than making a play possible it’s near irrelevant. Granted, a poem’s subject matter is more important for a poem than a stage is for a play, but the comparison isn’t that far off
* * * * *
The above has already drawn a moron-response at New-Poetry, where I posted it earlier (except for the third sentence). I replied to the author of the moron-post, then posted the following:
“An Idea for the Release of Anger at a forum not allowing candid remarks: a folder labeled ‘Morons’ to which you can move posts that make you angry–for those few here who are politically incorrect enough to experience such a base emotion, even as briefly as I sometimes do.”
Trivial and childish, yes, but people like me need trivial, childish outlets when dealing with the number of mediocrities and sub-mediocrities there are in poetry.
Entry 376 — An Ultimate Definition of Poetry
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
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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.”
Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011
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.
Entry 371 — My New Mathemaku, Updated
Monday, February 7th, 2011
Updated, but probably not finished, although I consider the dividend set:
Now to my pluraphrase of this poem I have to add that the dividend is a quotation from Wallace Stevens’s “On the Dump,” one of my all-time favorite poems, so brings that poem’s concern with the nature of metaphor, (sensual) fascination with the seasons and the final essence of existence to it. It’s another fresh expression, too, because still a shock to most minds, and certainly unexpected in this poem. It also provides the poem, I think, with a unifying principle, the idea of language’s being on the precipice or “soon” to (“:”) bring one to the the making, at least to me, enough sense for a poem.
Incidentally, one thing a pluraphrase should do that I neglected to mention is determine a poem’s level of archetypality. Mine seems to me, with “the the” now in it, to do that at the highest level with the search for the meaning of existence. Stars are archetypal. The struggle to express oneself seems to me moderately archetypal.
Entry 370 — A New Mathemaku
Sunday, February 6th, 2011
It’ll be “Mathemaku Something-or-Other” when I figure out how many mathemaku I’ve now composed. Close to a hundred, I’m sure.
Frankly, I don’t know what to make of this. Whether I keep it or not will depend on what others say about it. I made it as an improvisation using “soon:,” so as not to lose the latter due to my revision of the poem it was in. The sub-dividend product is a fragment of my standard Poem poem semi-automatic imagerying.
It is, in fact, a near-perfect candidate for a pluraphrase. Which I’ll add later today.
* * * * *
Okay, here’s my pluraphrase (with thanks to Conrad Didiodato, whom made a comment to my entry for yesterday that I ought to “flesh out” my description of the pluraphrase by demonstrating its operation on some classical poem. That didn’t appeal to me, classical poems having been more than sufficiently discussed, but doing it for a poem I’d just been working on did. It ought to test as well as demonstrate the procedure–and maybe help me with my poem, which it may well have, it turns out. Time to start it.
After a note to the fore: what follows is to be taken as an attempt, an intelligent attempt, to prove a definitive pluraphrase of the poem treated, not a claim to do so.
1. According to this poem, if you divide “nowhere” by “language,” you’ll get “soon:,” with a remainder of “stars, eternally listened-to.” The poem also indicates that multiplying “language” by “soon:” equals “lavender streets slowly asked further and further into the depths of the bookshop’s near-holy mood.”
2. “soon” is an adjective indicating an event that has not yet occurred, a what-will-happen in the near future. An expectation of something interesting to come is thus connoted, a connotation emphasized by the use of the colon, a punctuation mark indicating something to follow. “Language” is the main human means of expression, communicated expression, so the metaphor, “language” times “soon:” suggests some sort message of consequence that is on the threshold of appearing. The arithmetic of the poem equates this message-to-come with “lavender streets,” or a path not likely to be real because of its color so a fairyland or dream path–through a town or city because a “street,” which has urban connotations, and because entering in some way a bookshop’s mood, which places it in a center of trade.
The street does not go in the mood but is “slowly asked” into it, “asked” serving as a metaphor for “go.” We are not told who or what is doing the asking, ever. A feature of many of the best poems is details left to puzzle the reader into subjective but potentially intriguing never quite sure answers. For instance, that here the draw of the books in the shop is strong enough to invite a street, and those on it, into the shop. It’s subtle, though, or so its slowness suggests. And a production is being made of the asking, since ordinarily to ask something takes but a moment. It’s important.
The personification of the bookshop as a creature capable of experiencing a mood clearly makes “mood” a metaphor” for “ambiance.” This ambiance is “near-holy” for some unspecified reason, probably having something to do with language, books, literature, the word. Something complex since the street apparently goes quite deeply into the mood–and, as I’ve just pointed out, slowly. With perhaps deliberation. Not on whim.
In keeping with “soonness,” the street reaches no final point, it is in the process of going somewhere. Something is building.
If “stars, eternally listened-to” is added (and the addition needn’t be metaphors since additions are not confined to mathematics) to the image of the street descending into the bookshop (or bookshop’s “mood”), we somehow get “nowhere.” Or so the arithmetic requires us to accept. Stars are (effectually, for human beings) eternal, and ‘listened-to” must be a metaphor for attended to or the like. Or a reference to the music of the spheres, making what’s going on a mystically experience. It would seem to be intended to be awe-
inspiring. Hence, for it to contribute, with a perhaps questing street, perhaps questioning street, to nowhere seems a severe anticlimax, or a joke. Nothing makes sense except that the view expressed is that our greatest efforts lead nowhere. Which I don’t like. If I can improve the poem, from my point of view, by changing the dividend, which I may well do, it will demonstrate the value for a poet of a close reading of his work.
My pluraphrase is far from finished, though. We have the technalysis to get through–and, in passing, I have to say that that is a beautiful term, I must say, even if no one but I will ever use it. Melodation? Well, the euphony of “nowhere,” “slowly,” “holy,” “soon:,” “into,” “shop’s” “mood,” “to” and “star,” with the first two carrying off an assonance, and the long-u ones possibly assonant with each other, too. The “uhr”-rhymes, and backward rhyme of “lang” with “lav.” A few instances of assonance, alliteration and consonance, but no more than you’d get in a prose passage of comparable length. I would say that the pleasant sound of the sub-dividend product’s text adds nicely to its fairy-flow, but that melodation is not important in the poem. No visio-aesthetic effects are present, or anything else unusual except, obviously, the matheasthetic effects.
The mpoem’s being in the form of a long division example, the chief of these, allow the metaphors of multiplication and addition already described in the close reading–but also the over-all metaphor of a “long-division machine” chugging along to produce the full meaning of the poem. This provides a tone of inevitability, of certainty, of this is the way things truly are. The ambiance of mathematics caused by the remainder line, and what I call the dividend-shed, is in what should be a stimulating tension with the ambience of the poem’s verbal appearance–as a poem. Extreme abstraction versus the concreteness of the poetic details, science versus art, reason versus intuition. All of which makes an enormous contribution to the poem’s freshness, since very few poems are mathematical.
The final function of an artwork is to cause a person to experience the familiar unexpectedly, here with long division yielding an emotional image-complex some engagents of the poem will find familiar. Too much unfamiliarity for those without some experience of poems like this one. Which reminds me that since this poem has a standard form, at least for this poet’s work, a long-division example–and, more generally, an equation, it alludes to other poems of its kind. No other allusions seem present.
Part of the poem’s freshification, too, are “lavender street” since few streets are lavender, the idea of a street’s being “asked” into something, the idea of stars as “listened-to,” or a bookshop’s having a mood. The breaking up of the poem into five discrete images is easy enough to follow but different enough to be fresh.
That’s it for the pluraphrase. I think I’ll make the dividend “the the.” The only thing I have against that is that I’ve used that before more than once. I’ll probably do more with the look of the thing, add colors. I’ve had thoughts from the beginning of giving it a background, with words.
Entry 366 — An Extra Value of Long Division Poem
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
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I just realized something I should have realized long ago but didn’t: a huge virtue of the long division poem is that one can use it to indicate the value of its images to each other. In a long division poem I was working on last night, I suddenly saw how important the size of the remainder was. I’ve done other long division poems in which in which I consciously exploited the remainder’s small size, and I’ve often worried that my dividend might be smaller than my divisor or sub-dividend product or quotient, or even remainder. But I’ve never thought of the abstract aesthetic value of the characteristic. It’s something no other poem than a math poem can have, and that few math poems can have as clearly as a long division poem. So: hurray for me.
That’s all for today. I had hoped to post a new mathemaku, the one I sketched last night, and was very proud of. But a day of tennis then a long dental procedure–a tooth implant–did me in, and I started the day sluggish. And no longer think much of the poem.
Entry 364 — The Flow-Break
Monday, January 31st, 2011
Why Jump-Cuts Are Not Flow-Breaks (In My Poetics)
Jump-cuts are not generally instances of flow-breaks because they usually occur at the end of a thought or image. One goes immediately into them from what preceded them, too. A line-break, on the other hand, requires one often to stop in the middle of a thought–and return all the way to the other side of the page one is reading. Or it&&&clogs one’s reading path, as here, or i t breaks in a manner much less common than a change of subject matter, as here.
More exactly, a flow-break is explicit, concrete, physical–an unusually large space or string of strange symbols or a space where it never is in prose–something objectively present. A jump-cut occurs usually after a normal space. When it occurs in the middle of a sentence, it’s not so much a physical break as a break in the thought conveyed. On the other hand, all flow-breaks cause a break in some thought.
I think I have to accept that here I’m not sure of my definition. Any literary text with persistent lineation (at either end or anywhere else in a line is poetry, that I will never change my mind about. The problem is, what else is poetry?
On reflection, I think I was right to begin with. I just need to emphasize that lineation is a significantly large physical stoppage of a line (before it begins in the case of right-margin lineation), which is usually performed by spaces but can be performed by anything else. “Thi s” would not be a specimen of lineation (as I previously held), and hence not a flow-break but a poetic device, an intra-syllabic word-break.
Entry 362 — My Defixation Continues
Saturday, January 29th, 2011
First, another definition:
Visiomathematical Poetry: mathematical poetry containing a strong visioaesthetic component. I’m posting this as an example of my belief that a variety of poetry should be named on the basis of what it most is, not automatically called “visual poetry,” for instance, because it is partially visioaesthetic, as many of my mathemaku are, and as linguexclusive poems that calligraphy has prettified are.
Next, the contents of a post sent to New-poetry:
First off, this is a test to see if an attachment will show up when this e.mail is posted. If not, one can see what it contains at http://tipoftheknife.blogspot.com/2011/01/tip-of-knife-issue-3.html?showComment=1296227493737#c7300633740752662346. Scroll down to my “EE-Winter.”
Secondly, to those who believe non-Wilshberian works like this piece are the equivalent of someone kicking an elk skull and calling what they’re doing “poetry,” what such a work should be called. Not “visual art,” by the way, since everything in it is textual–the verbal text of words and the mathematical text of mathematical symbols (to wit, the absolute signs [the verticals], the minus signs, and the remainder and what I call the “dividend shed”).
Thirdly, I’d love to hear what anyone makes of the poem. Everything in it can be paraphrased–if one knows how to read math and solve simple cryptograms. I call it a cryptographic mathematical poem, by the way.
Third, something with nothing to do with poetics definitions, a comment to Bill DiMichele’s blog I just made in response to a brief comment of someone who found Bill’s latest entry “wonderful”:
As one with work in the post, I thank you, Caio. As one with work in the post, however, I have a request: couldjah say why you think the post wonderful? Partly because of my work, for instance? Partly in spite of my work? Sorry for this slightly annoyed comment, but I find way too many comments to blogs and discussion groups to be nothing but close to useless thumbs up or down. On the other hand, it is nice to know when anyone cares enough about something on the net to actually comment! Hardly nobody done does that. So a sincere thanks, anyway. (And the stuff Bill has gathered, aside from mine, is wonderful, isn’t it!
persnickedly yours, Elderly Bob
Now a comment about my mathemaku about “winter,” or–more accurately–about what some might call my analytical perfectionism. In the original version of the poem, the remainder was simply “little lame balloonman,” a quotation from E. E. Cummings’s “In just-spring.” Thinking about it yesterday, I can’t remember now why, I realized that the remainder should not be positive, because what it was being added to to get the (negative) dividend was negative. That meant that any positive remainder could not be added to it to make it equal the negative dividend (negative because a negative value was chosen to multiply a positive value to try to get it). This bothered me greatly because I need my mathematical poems to be mathematically accurate, however little many others believe they can’t be. I couldn’t quickly figure out how to remedy the poem. At length, though, the obvious answer occurred. It was to make “little lame balloonman” negative. (I had to keep “little lame balloonman” as my remainder because that’s what the remainder in each of the other three poems in the set this poem is part of are.)
To make the arithmetic more clear simply divide 2 into -3. If you make the quotient -1, then your remainder will be -3 minus -2 or -1. Which makes sense because if you turn the -1 into a fraction to get the quotient 100% accurate, you’ll get negative one-and-one-half.
Next, another thought inspired by the nullinguists: if a visual poem is not poetry, why need it be visual? Adjectives count more than nouns?
Last, a Comment on “Cleave”: the reason “cleave” is famous among aesthlinguists is that it has two official definitions that are exactly opp0sed to each other, “to separate” and “to cling to.” I mention it here because its fame is due to its nature’s being so extremely rare. Even the masses prefer a word not to contradict itself. I feel sure that even some certified lingusts do also.
