Entry 236 — A Day Worthless But Happy Enough « POETICKS-

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.

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N. F. Noyes « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘N. F. Noyes’ Category

Entry 8 — Thoughts on Haiku

Monday, November 9th, 2009

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
Posted in Geof Huth, N. F. Noyes, Poetics | No Comments »

Richard Kostelanetz « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Richard Kostelanetz’ Category

Entry 1678 — A Specimen of My Poetry Criticism

Wednesday, December 31st, 2014

I’m trying to catch up with my collection of Small Press Review columns in this blog’s “Pages” and am about to post the one that follows. I liked it so well (after making some small improvements to it), that I’m taking care of this entry with it:

EXPERIODDICA

September/October 2014

Richard Kostelanetz’s Latest Infra-Verbal Adventure

Ouroboros
Richard Kostelanetz
NYQ Books, Box 2015, Old Chelsea Station,
New York NY 10113. $16.95. 2014. Pa; 188 pp.

An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tail, so an excellent title for Richard Kostelanetz’s collection of 188 words swallowing their tails, most of the time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, as “ouroboros” itself does on the cover (when its s joins its “our”). Those that do not use their first letter as their last to finish a word: “extrapolat,” for example, has only one e but spells “extrapolate” when made into a circle. It’s fun to find smaller words inside them in Kostelanetz’s collection: “tea” and “eat,” for example, in “appetite,” which not knowing at first where the word begins forces one to discover rather than automatically read without thinking about it. But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities?” To use the term my Internet friend Chris Lott thought might be more appropriate for works like them than “poems”–and which turned out to be a term I’ve needed for my over-all taxonomy of verbal expression for a long time but never thought of!

The term seems right for some of Kostelanetz’s words, but only some of them–like “ouroboros.” The addition to it of “sour” is amusing but, for me, not poetically enlarging enough to be a poem rather than a verbal curiosity—which I now define for use in my Official Taxonomy of Verbal Expression as “a text that states an amusing or interesting fact.” That makes it (write this down!) “informrature” (i.e., texts primarily intended to inform) rather than one of the other two kinds of verbal expression in my taxonomy, “advocature” (i.e., texts whose primary intent is to persuade, or verbal propaganda) and “literature” (i.e., verbal art, or texts intended primarily to give aesthetic pleasure). In effect, “ouroboros” as a circular word that “disconceals” the word “sour” states the fact that its letters can be used to spell “sour” following a certain rule, that being to connect the word’s end to its beginning by means of a circular spelling.

Not that such a word doesn’t veer near poetry (which can be succinctly if roughly defined as not-prose) due to its visual difference from conventional prose, its making a reader go slow (a major aim of poetry) and delivering more connotations than prose generally does. But, for me, it is visually-enhanced the way calligraphy is, and infraverbally-enhanced the way “ouroboros” spelled “ouROBoros” to reveal one of its inner words, would be. Yes, it looks good on the page, and makes us think about it more than it would conventionally printed, but it leaves us primarily with only the fact that “sour” can be produced by it (and “our” and “rob” are in it.

Take on the other hand, “appetite,” which swallows its tail to deliver not only “tea,” and “eat” but leads us into and around to “pet” and “petite” to go along with “appetite” itself, to present a little tea party, with a strong suggestion of little girls. Then put “incandescent” swallowing its tail on the page opposite it to form “tin” while making us also aware of its “descent” and “scent”—due to its compelling us to read it letter by letter. “Scent” is particularly significant because of the metaphoric jolt of the3 suggestion of something incandescent as a material scent, or of a scent as something immaterially incandescent. The contrast of “tin” notwithstanding, the result is a fascinating scene occurring somewhere down Alice’s rabbit hole which, for me, makes the word a poem.

At this point I must contradict myself. I now believe all of Richard’s circular words are poems. I say this because I now feel that they do enlarge a reader’s experience of them significantly more than prose does, although some, like “ouroboros” do so to much less of an extent than others. More importantly, this collection as a whole, I’ve come to perceive, is a single poem, whose ssspinning wheelsss free connotations whose interaction with each other disconceal sometimes fairly complex image complexes—as I’ve shown “appetite” and “incandescent” do. The result is a loose collection of themes and counter-themes, occasionally next to each other, as with “appetite” and “incandescent,” but sometimes far apart—like “state, which amusingly becomes “estate,” where the tea party will take place, many pages from “incandescent.”

Kostelanetz’s sequence begins with “insurgent,” and as we go along, the presence of an insurgent, mainly, it comes to seem to me, a language insurgent miswriting words into circular revolts against monosemy establishes one of the sequence’s major themes (with the little girls’ tea party in feminine contrast to it). For example, “Esperanto,” representing a language in revolt against the Tower of Babylon our world has become, supports this “linguicentric” reading. Its disconcealment of “rant” backs up the tone of insurgence (in spite of “toes”—although that suggests “toe to toe,” for one really caught up with the sequence). On the page facing “esperanto” we have “astonish,” which is indicative, I think, of what artistic insurgence’s aim in this story will turn out to be. That the font Kostelanetz has chosen for his words, the highly dramatic “Wide Latin,” which is jabbingly pointed at all extremities, underscores this.

The book’s fourth word underscores this: “another,” or something other than. But then the narrative runs into “hesitant,” which contains “Sita,” the name of the central female character, a sort of Virgin Mary, in the Hindu epic, Ramayana, and the narrative goes strange among “the,” “he” “sit”, “it,” “tan,” “an,” “ant.” After the turn caused by “hesitant,” comes “entomb,” with its “bent” against something. By the “men” of the later “enthusiasm?” The first peak of this insurgent flow is reached with “outlawing,” which causes “gout,” making the act of outlawing things unhealthy, and the insurgence begins to have the feel of anarchism.
I agree with you if you’re thinking one must have quite an accommodating mind to make the kind of connections I’ve so far made—but a main function of poetry is to relax one into doing just that. I have to admit a lot of my interpretations are influenced by my knowledge of Kostelanetz as a long-time personal friend consumed (like me) with innovative insurgency in the arts and anarchistic distaste for political laws.

To get back to his sequence, it’s no surprise that “esoteric” forms the next spinning wheel with its esoteric lawless confusion of “ice,” “rice,” “sot.” Some kind of drunken wedding? Where are we going? The point is that we are going somewhere, or more than one where. And word-lovers who join us will be sure to enjoy the trip!

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Entry 1538 — Curiosities?

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

I’m really cheating today: I’m using part of a review or column for Small Press Review that I’ve been working here. The work I’m reviewing is Richard Kostelanetz’s Ouroboros (see Entry 1535):

An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tale, so an excellent title for this collection of 188 words like, well, “ouroboros,” swallowing their tails, each time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, “sour,” in the case of “ouroboros.” They are set in a highly appropriate, highly dramatic font called “Wide Latin”—very bold and jabbingly pointed at all extremities. It’s definitely fun to find smaller words inside Kostelanetz’s specimens of “circular writing,” as he terms it: “tea,” “pet,” and “petite,” for example, in “appetite,” as well as “appetite” itself, which one discovers rather than automatically sees, or “tin,” “descent,” and, most important,” “scent” in “incandescent” (because of the poetic jolt light as an immaterial scent, or a scent as immaterial light suggest to those sensitive to connotation). But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities” .

I told Chris Lott that I would explain why I thought certain arrangements of numbers Richard had made were more than curiosities, and that I’d soon explain why I thought that. Here, quickly, using Richard’s circular words, I’ll give the gist of my reasoning that some of them are, the ones that: accentuate connotative value, a virtue of poems although not necessarily a defining quality, and in the process create an image complex of aesthetic value, the way I think “appetite” turns eating into a very feminine tea party, and “incandescent” makes “scent” and “incandescence” plausible metaphors for each other; that they also sslow the reading of them, as any effective poem must (although I do not consider that a defining characteristic, either, but the result of defining characteristics, like the flow-breaks line-breaks serve as in free verse, and the extreme flow-break of a word being spelled into a circle); and, least important, but still important, they are decontextualized from prose, both by simply being called poems and by not being visually rose.

Richard’s number poems are somewhat different. I hope to discuss them, too, before long.

One further note. Many of Richard’s circular words combine into interesting narratives full of “heightened cross connotativeness,” by which I mean, one word’s mundane connotation turning vividly into a related connotation due to a similiarly mundane connotation in an adjacent circular word. For more on that, you’ll have to wait for my column, as I now see this text will become. You will be able to do that by subscribing to Small Press Review, which I wish a few of you would do; or by waiting for me to post the column in my Pages here a few months after it is published.

Note #2: I do not consider circular words to be visual poems; for me, they are visually-enhanced infra-verbal poems–the poetic value lies almost entirely on what goes on inside them verbally. Although you might say their visual sspin flicks connotations into view . . .

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Entry 1535 — 3 from Ouroboros

Monday, August 11th, 2014

The following three specimens of Richard Kostelanetz’s “circular writing,”as he calls it, are from Richard’s recent collection, Ouroboros:

I’ve had another tough day–I think my recent accident took more out of me than I thought it did. Anyway, I’m not up to commenting on these pieces yet, except to say that I was seriously thinking of classifying them as “curiousities” after reading a note from Chris Lott referring to a couple of arrangements of numerals by Richard by that term (albeit intriguing ones) and wondering why I thought them poems instead. More tomorrow on the topic, I fervently hope.

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Entry 1417 — Azoom Again, But Evilly Now

Tuesday, April 8th, 2014

A thoughtMix to Richard Kostelanetz, 6 April 2014, energy (& confooselry supplied by my second caffeine pill of that day):

I much enjoyed your piece on prize-winning poets, Kosti–and getting your responses to their questionnaire. I went along with almost all you had to say except (1) I don’t much like Stein’s writings but think I could have been great friends with her like Willie James seems to have sorta been (as long as I was tactful about her writing, and some of it I do like well enough) and (2) while I, too, wish Lincoln had not kept the states together, my reason is the opposite of yours–it would have meant the possibility of one English-speaking country in the world that genuinely believed in freedom, and escaped the cultural imprisonment your city (NY, which I consider the US’s center of anti-individualism) and my group of states (New England) are condemning the country to (with the prizes you wrote of, for one thing). My more serious belief is that it would have been wonderful to have two countries now to compare with one another: the north with its oppressive central government and and unruly confed-eration of southern states, Texas, for one, almost surely with a bill of right that meant what it said. The one good thing about this would be that lessons could be learned that at least one or two of the southern states would be free to be influenced by, due to the weak central government; northern states could not be, because of the too-strong central government’s opposition to free enterprise, etc.

I have to admit, that I suspect the North would be where the best art came about–until the seventies. But maybe not. Too complex to know what would happen. Just one possibility: that the South never gave women the vote. I can’t believe that would have hurt it, women being much more anti-freedom and risk than men. I think if I were thirty, with my present “knowledge,” I could write two books about this, one showing the USA vastly superior to all other nations and the CSA like 1950’s South Africa; or the USA like the Soviet Union and the South like a large version of an Athens that was able to defeat Sparta. One problem for the first is that Texas oil and a free economy could well have made the South economically superior to the North. Hey, I ain’t ashamed to say I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m sure I’m making at least as much sense as any editorial-page pundit would on my subjects.

Note: apologies for the underlined words in blue: some spammer did that and I don’t know how to get rid of them. I tried misspelling the words involved, but the spam mechanism just used other words.

What Richard said, by the way, is worth flairfully worth quoting: “I despise Abe Lincoln, who should have dumped the Confederate states, whose leaders were independentistas wanting to secede. Instead, Lincoln initiated a war that took many lives and, with “victory,” burdened the North with backward provincials to this day.” Later thought typing what he said lit: as a war-lover, I wonder if the war between the states was a main reason the US defeated Germany twice. Richard and I are quite close politically but his libertarianism includes warfear, mine understands war to be unavoidable–and ultimately biologically necessary. Ultimately, war is just another name for death, and irrationally overrated as an Evil: compare the world population in 1900 with the world population in 2000, and the average life span and standard of living of the two dates. Remember that the twentieth century is supposed to have been the most horrifyingly war-plagued century ever–and proof the hoomins izzint civilized.

Posted in Miscellaneous Thoughts, Richard Kostelanetz | 1 Comment »

Entry 1392 — Library Holdings

Friday, March 14th, 2014

Yesterday I came across a website new to me I thought interesting. It’s here, where there’s a box you can type any author’s name into. It lists a huge number of authors all the way down to my low level of visibility and indicates, as you will see, how many copies of the authors are in all the libraries belong to the organization running the site. Mostly university libraries, I suspect, since I doubt that aside from them more than the Library at Charlotte High, where I subbed for fourteen years and was good friends with the head librarian, has anything of mine, assuming even the Charlotte High library does.

My pal Richard Kostelanetz has almost as many pages there as I have individual entries. No surprise. I mention it for three reasons–(1) to gain status with the claim that he’s a pal of mine (because I’m a real statooznik, as everyone knows); (2) because his most widely-held publication (in over a thousand libraries) is Dictionary of the Avant Gardes that I’m in, too (!), which encourages me to believe posterity may come across me even fifty years from now; and (3) to put the “Audience Level” of my works in perspective by noting that it’s around 90 on a scale of 100, his around 50, so I can pretend my stuff is vastly more intelligent than his (although I recognize that my work is just much less clear than his–and mainly experimental poetry versus well-written non-academic prose).

I’m a little bothered that Velocity had a lower rating than Of Manywhere-at-Once, which I tried my best to be at the level of the average reader. I find it pretty funny that apparently A StrayngeBook is at a higher level than Richard’s work. But, ho, one of Richard’s works got a hundred! None of mine did. I should do something about that . . .

Overview

Works: 46 works in 50 publications in 1 language and 226 library holdings

Most widely held works by Bob Grumman

Visual poetry in the Avant Writing Collection by Ohio State University ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2008 in English and held by 78 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Writing to be seen : an anthology of later 20th century visio-textual art ( Book ) 2 editions published in 2001 in English and held by 25 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Writing to be seen : an anthology of later 20th century visio-textual art ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2001 in English and held by 22 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Of manywhere – at – once by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 2 editions published between 1991 and 1998 in English and held by 9 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Early in 1983 … [the] severely middle-aged poet/critic [author] began writing a 14-line poem (a sonnet, in fact). this … book tells the story of his 5-year struggle to get that poem right. More than that, however, it is a full-scale investigation of poetics, with numerous side-musings into poems by such masters as Shakespeare, Keats, Cummings, Pound, Yeats, Roethke and Stevens–as well as such contemporaries as Karl Kempton, G. Huth, Crag Hill, Bob Grenier and John M. Bennett. It is, in fact … [a] large-scale discussion of poetry to cover all extant varieties of it, including current visual poetry, alphaconceptual poetry and “language poetry.” Anyone interested in what words, or even mere letters, can say and be at their best, should find this book of … value …-Back cover

Just feet by John M Bennett ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1994 in English and held by 9 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Swelling by John M Bennett ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1988 in English and held by 7 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

A straynge book by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1987 in English and held by 6 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

SpringPoem No. 3,719,242 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1990 in English and held by 5 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Vispo auf deutsch : an anthology of verbo-visual art in German ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1995 in English and held by 5 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

An April poem by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1989 in English and held by 4 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Greatest hits , 1966-2005 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2006 in English and held by 4 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Ghostlight by G Huth ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1990 in English and held by 4 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Of manywhers-at-once : ruminations from the site of a poem’s construction by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1990 in English and held by 3 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

A straynge catalogue by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1989 in English and held by 3 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Velocity ( ) in English and held by 3 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Shakespeare & the rigidniks : a study of cerebral dysfunction by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 2 editions published in 2006 in English and held by 3 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Dirges by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2002 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

A selection of visual poems by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 2 editions published between 1999 and 2005 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Between : sequence 1 by J. W Curry ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1989 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

This is visual poetry : chapbook by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2010 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Audience Level Kids General Special Audience level: 0.93 (from 0.47 for Velocity … to 1.00 for Swelling / …) (Note: Swelling is by John Bennett, but I probably wrote an intro for it; it’s one of my press’s publications. So it doesn’t mean I have anything with a 100 audience level rating.)

Second Page

11 works in 11 publications in 1 language and 16 library holdings

Roles: Editor

Most widely held works by Bob Grumman

Cryptographiku 1-5 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2003 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Poemns [sic] by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1997 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Poem, demerging by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2010 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Mathemaku, 6-12 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1994 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

April to the power of the quantity Pythagoras times now : a selection of mathemaku by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 2008 in English and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

Mathemaku, 1-5 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1992 in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide

Pnd by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1987 in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide

Vispo auf deutsch : an anthology of verbo-visual art in German ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1995 in Undetermined and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide

Mathemaku 13-19 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1996 in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide

Mathemaku no. 2 by Bob Grumman ( Book ) 1 edition published in 1988 in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide

Audience Level 1 Kids General Special Audience level: 0.87 (from 0.00 for Writing to … to 1.00 for Poem, deme …) (Ah, good, I do have a book with a top audience level rating! It will be interesting to find out its audience level rating in fifty years. Much lower, I’m sure.)

WorldCat IdentitiesRelated Identities • Bennett, John M. plus • Ohio State University Libraries Avant Writing Collection plus • Sackner, Marvin A. 1932- plus • Ohio State University Libraries Rare Books and Manuscripts Library plus • Hill, Crag plus • Stetser, Carol plus • American Visual Poets’ Cooperative plus • Runaway Spoon Press Publisher plus • Berry, Jake plus • Ackerman, Al

Later Note: I found out you can click an individual title and find some but not all the libraries with copies of it. As expected, in my case, it’s just university libraries wanting to have complete collections of ephemera–just in case.

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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 1309 — A Little Quartet

Tuesday, December 24th, 2013

With thanks to Mark Sonnenfeld in whose whose latest Marymark Press broadside it appears:

Sony Store

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Entry 1138 — Kostelanetz Fiction & My Rip-Off

Monday, July 1st, 2013

The first is one of the works on exhibit in my latest Scientific American blog:

I couldn’t resist the temptation of rip it off–but kept the rip-off out of my blog entry:

Discount Florists

Posted in Bob Grumman, Number Poems, Richard Kostelanetz | No Comments »

Entry 740 — The Special Value of Solitextual Visual Poems

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

In my taxonomy a solitextual visual poem is a poem consisting solely of textual elements that are significantly visioaesthetic–that is, what their text is visually is necessary to the poem’s central aesthetic effect. A famous example is this, by Eugen Gomringer:

I’m posting it again to illustrate two points. One is that is has always been considered a “concrete poem,” because it consists of nothing but words, yet has a visual component absolutely necessary for it to have any appreciable aesthetic value–the visual appearance of the absence of text in one part of it. That, of course, is what makes the poem a classic by depicting a silence greater than the silence of printed words–by, that is, surprising one encountering the poem (with the ability to appreciate it) with a sudden poetic understanding of something central to existence.

My other point occurred to me when recently reading something by Richard Kostelanetz in which he speaks of finding “that with words alone (he) can make the most powerful images available to (him).” In context, he seems to be suggesting that these images are more powerful than those others get with works combining verbal and graphic elements. I can’t go along with that. However, on reflection, I saw how solitextual visual poems like Gomringer’s and Kostelanetz’s can be said to have a unique aesthetic punch compared to poems mixing graphics with text. That’s because of the increase in the unexpectedness of whatever it is a solitextual visual poem does visioaesthetically compared to what the other kind of visual poem does. I claim that both kinds of poems will, if successful, put an engagent in Manywhere-at-Once, or a part of the brain neither a conventional poem or conventional visimage (graphic image) is likely to put one, but the engagent will already be partway into that location upon first encountering a poem combining the visual and the verbal whereas he will only be in the verbal part of his brain until the pay-off in a purely solitextual poem, so the pay-off will come more forcefully, and probably be more intense. The mixture of graphics and text, however, will be able to make up for the reduced intensification by increased richness–by going to a larger Manywhere-at-Once or inter-connected Manywhere-at-Onces. Equal but different.

MusiciansFriend.com Coupons

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Entry 88 — MATO2, Chapter 1.10

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

During the next two days I got a copy in the mail of the introductory essay Richard Kostelanetz wanted me to critique, the manuscript of a poetry collection John Bennett my press was going to publish, and letters from Jake Berry and Jack Foley. Richard’s essay was is fairly good but I saw a number of things I counted wrong with it;. As for John’s manuscript, it seemed fine–one poem in particular, whose main image was a car wash, I especially liked. I wrote a short letter of full acceptance to John and a card acknowledging receipt, and suggesting he delete much of one section of his essay, to Richard.

Jack’s letter was friendly but he quickly.got on me for under-representing females and blacks (and Asiatics) in of Manywhere. In my reply I tried to skirt the issue. I didn’t pugnaciously tell him that my purpose was accuracy, not making the world better for members of victim-groups. Hence, I wrote about the four canonical poets, all male, whom I admired enough to put explicitly into the sonnet my book was partly about, and the fifth, also male, to whom the sonnet strongly alluded. Except for a few short passages about Shakespeare and a mention or two of contemporary linguexpressive poets like Wilbur, my book is about an area of literature few women have done anything of importance in, and no blacks that I knew of at the time I wrote it. The late Bill Keith is still the only significant black American in visual poetry I know about, Larry Tomoyasu the only Asian American. I don’t know whether I knew him when I wrote the first volume of my series. I don’t believe I mentioned him in it.

The ever-amiable Jake was fully positive about my book.

Posted in Autobiographica, Jack Foley, Jake Berry, Richard Kostelanetz | No Comments »

Entry 370 — A New Mathemaku « POETICKS

Entry 370 — A New Mathemaku

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, 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 47 — Solution of a Cryptographiku « POETICKS

Entry 47 — Solution of a Cryptographiku

The Four Seasons

3 31 43 73 5 67    3 61 43 67 67 19 41 13    1    11 19 7 31 5  3 12 15 21 4 19    3 18 15 19 19 9 14 7    1    6 9 5 12 4  8 21 25 33 9 30    8 28 25 30 30 16 24 14    4    12 16 10 21 9  64 441 625 1089 81 900    64 784 625 900 900 256 576 196    16    144 256 100 441 81

Today, the solution, with an explanation, to the above.

1. Each line says, “clouds crossing a field.”

2. A reader should know from its looks and the fact that it is a cryptographiku that it is a coded text. He should try simple codes at first on all the lines, the way one would in order to solve a cryptogram. If he’s familiar with my other cryptographiku, he will know I’ve more than once used the simplest of numeric codes. Such is the case here, in line 2. The code is 1 = a, 2 = b, etc.

3. The codes used for the other lines are harder to figure out, but the lines themselves give an important clue as to what they say: they each consist of four words, the first six letters in length, the second eight, the fourth one (which would almost certainly be “a”) and the fourth five. That ought to make one guess that each repeats the decoded one. As each indeed does.

4. It should be evident that the code for the fourth line uses the squares of the numbers in the code for the third. The basis of the arrangement of numbers in the third line will probably not be easy to guess.

5. If you consider what kind of numbers are being used in a given line, and are at all mathematical, you will realize that the numbers used in line one are all primes, with the first prime, 1, representing a, the seond prime, 2, representing be, and so on.

6. The next step is trickier but also requires one to think about kind of numbers. It turns out that the numbers used for the code in line three are the non-primes in order, with first of them, 4, representing a, the second, 6, representing b.

7. The surface meaning of the lines and the kinds of coding they’ve been put in is now known. All that remains is to findif a larger meaning in intended (yes) and, if so, what it is, and what the logic behind the coding is (and the kind of coding used in a cryptographiku is, by definition, meaningful. Wallace Stevens, whom one familiar with my poetry and criticism will know is important to me, helps with the last of these questions. Stevens wrote many poems (“Man on the Dump,” for instance) meditating on the idea that winter is pure reality, summer poeticized reality. Or, winter is primary, so can be metaphorically thought of a consisting of prime numbers only. Spring, by this reasoning, can logically consist of all the (lowest) numbers, summer of oonly factorable numbers, numbers that can be reduced to simpler numbers–expanded, poeticized numbers. Autumn, the peak of the year because it yields the fruit of the year, consists of summer’s numbers squared, or geometrically increased.

8. The final meaning of the poem is derived from its repetition of the simple nature scene about the clouds. A reader aware of Robert Lax’s work (and he will, if he’s familiar with mine), will know that he has a number of poems that repeat words or phrases–to suggest, among much else, ongoingness, permanence, undisturbably serenity. My hope is that this poem will make a reader feel the change of seasons within the grand permanence that Narture ultimately is. A constant message, in different coding as the seasons change.

9. All this should lead to “Whee!”

5. The decoded text uses a technique Robert Lax pioneered in to convey a meaning I consider archetypally deep, like the meanings Lax’s similar poems have for me.

6. The final meaning of the poem is (a) Nature is eternally changing; and (b) Nature is eternally unchanging. When I saw I could make ti say that, I got a thrill! I consider this poem one of my best inventions–even though I’m not sure it works as a poem.

Have fun, kids!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 12:19 PM and is filed under Bob Grumman, infraverbal poetry, Poetics, Robert Lax, 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.

Entry 234 — Thoughts on Anthologizing « POETICKS

Entry 234 — Thoughts on Anthologizing

Another year’s anthology of “the best American Poetry” is about to hit the market. A brief discussion at New-Poetry about it got me thinking once again about the proper way to edit such a book. The groundwork, which should have been laid long ago, would be to list all the schools of contemporary American Poetry (and Canadian, since I consider American and Canadian culture one), as I’ve been trying to do for years–without great success because just about no one in poetry is willing to help me. Hence, if I were asked to oversee such an anthology, I would turn down the job unless I were chosen two years in advance. And given a good deal of money to hire researchers, as well as to support me for two years (which would only cost a few thousand a year).

I’d hire a few young researchers (with no background in poetry to confuse them), spend a week with them telling them how to recognize poetry and what characteristics to look for in distinguishing one kind from another. Then I’d set them loose. Their specific job would be first to list the poetry magazines published during the previous twelve months. The anthology would consist of poems from periodicals only, as I forgot to mention–and as, I believe, the current “best” anthologies do. Including those published on the Internet.

Job number two would be to sort the magazines into the eleven main categories of poetry my taxonomy presently recognizes (and which should not be controversial–conventional free verse, visual poetry, surrealistic poetry, etc.). Magazines with more than one kind of poetry would go into more than one slot. Magazines containing poetry whose classification my researchers were not able with confidence to determine would go into a twelfth category. These I would examine, and discuss with my work crew.

Meanwhile I would issue announcements everywhere I could think of but principally the Internet calling for the names and descriptions of schools of poetry, offering a monetary award for any new one I was unaware of. I would be generous, and pay for any obviously good attempt whether I accepted the group of poets involved a school of poetry or not. I’d try to generate discussions, writing provocative posts about the project under many names.

I feel 99.99% sure I could, within a year, have a list of every school of contemporary North American poetry, which I would define as any group of two or more poets doing similar work that I judged significantly unlike poetry outside the group. Some schools I’d have to divide into sub-schools. I’m thinking of the language poetry school, which consists, it seems to me, of three or more such sub-schools, each considerably different from the others. Ditto the visual poetry school. I’d rather have too many schools on my list than miss one.

My guess would be that I and my helpers would find about fifty schools. I would place them in my taxonomy. (Just the thought of doing that excites me, as I suspect it would excite almost on one else in poetry.) Then I’d try to combine similar schools, my goal being to work with just twenty or fewer poetry groups.

All the research done would enable me readily to find one or two editors who were expert in the school or schools of poetry their magazines preferred. I’d hire them to supply me with every poem in a magazine from the year the anthology would cover that they thought as good as any poems being published. With an asterisk next to any they thought genuinely belonged in the anthology. I would hope to be able to skim all the magazine, myself. In any case, I would add all the poems that jumped out at me. The only egalitarian rule I’d follow would be to make sure to have at least one poem from each of my twenty or fewer groups. Finally, I would cut my selections down to a hundred or so, perhaps asking for the opinion or others on the few I wasn’t sure of.

That would be it except for an introduction explaining and defending my procedure, and making the usually declaimer about the choices being, in the final analysis, subjective–but meaning it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010 at 8:00 AM and is filed under 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 383 — Another Throw-Away Entry « POETICKS

Entry 383 — Another Throw-Away Entry

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 19th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under 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.

Basho « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Basho’ Category

Entry 1248 — What a Poem Is

Thursday, October 24th, 2013

I can’t seem to get into this value-of-poetry topic so for now will simply deal with the terminology I came up with several days ago and thought would get me going deeper. I’ve pretty much junked all of my previous related terminology. The new terminology should cover everything it did.

First of all I have ordained that a poem hath:

Fundamental Constituents:

1. words as words, and punctuation marks and verbal symbols like the ampersand and mathematical symbols like the square root sign, or the verbal constituents of poetry;

2. words as sounds, or the auditory constituents of poetry–which can, in the case of sound poetry, include averbal sounds;

3. words as printed objects, or the visual constituents of poetry–which can, in the case of visual poetry, include averbal graphics.

I tentatively would also include negative space, by which I mean not only the blank page words are printed on but the silence their sounds can be said to be printed on, as fundamental constituents of poetry.

Every poem contains all four of these constituents. Taken together, they form the poem’s denotative layer, which expresses what the poem explicitly means. That layer in turn generates the poem’s connotative layer, which expresses what most people would find it implicitly to mean. Note: if the poem is plurexpressive–a visual or sound poem, for instance–its graphics or sounds would contribute to both layers: a drawing of a house would denote a house, for example, and the sound of a gunshot would denote a gunshot. (“Gunshout,” I mistyped that as, at first. Aren’t words fun?!)

The two layers together make up what I’m now calling a poem’s expressifice. (“Boulder”–“bolder” with a u added. Sorry, I began wondering if I could–oops, that’s “cold” with a u added–make a Kostelanetzian list of words like “gunshout.” I didn’t intend for the longer word to be a regular wourd. . . .)

Back to “expressifice.” It is responsible for what a poem says. Okay, nothing new except the Grummanisms so far. Recently, and this is an area I must but probably won’t research, there has been some grappling with the idea of “conceptual poetry” that I have found important and interesting, but confusing. My next “poetifice” is the conceptifice. My Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary provides a definition of “concept” that I find satisfactory for my purposes: “an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances.” In a poem, it would be close to what I’ve used the term, “unifying principal,” for. A poem’s “meaning” seems to me a near-synonym for it, too.

I can’t see that it’s any less “expressed” by a poem than connotations are, and I mention that because my impression is that those discussing conceptual poetry generally oppose it to “expressive poetry,” by which they basically mean “what a poem says” rather than the meaning of what a poem manifests.

It now occurs to me that what the conceptual poets are doing is minimalizing what I call their poems’ expressifices to magnify their conceptifices. If so, my term should be more useful than I at first thought it would be. I feel it of value anyway because of the great difference between what it can be said to express and what the expressifice can.

As I wrote that, I realized that the entire conceptifice of many poems, particularly the most popular ones is not very ideational–is, in fact, just a large connotation. Basho’s famous frogpond (“frogpound?”) can help here, I think (and I’m a bit foggy about where I’m going, but think I’m getting to someplace worth getting to). Here’s my translation of it:

‘

                old pond  .  .  .  .  .  .                     the sound of a frog                         splashing in

This poem may have more valid, interactive unifying principals per word-count than any other poem ever made. So its conceptifice includes the idea of “the contentment the quiet portions of the natural world can provide one.” Or is that an image? In any case, it seems different in kind to a seond idea it clearly presents: “the wide range in magnitude (in all meanings of the word) of the universe’s moments.” We feel the first, we . . . ideate? the second–while feeling it, yes, but in a another way, in another place in our brains, than we do the serenity the first component of the poem’s conceptifice is about. Poetry, and poetry-become-philosophy.

I will have to come back to this.

The final three poetifices are the aesthifice, the anthrofice and the utilifice. These have to do the meaningfulness of a poem’s initial meanings. Every poem has all three of these, but usually one is emphasized at the expense of the other two.

The aesthifice has no meaning, it just is. (See MacLeish.) It is meaningful for its expression of sensual beauty. It can’t help but express other things, but they are trivial compared with the beauty of its sounds and/or sensual imagery and/or feelings it is most concerned with. In my notes about it I mention “beauty of constituents,” “imagery” (and “deep imagery,” possibly. “freshness of expression,” “archetypality,”display of skill” and “patterning.” There are more, probably many more.

The anthrofice has no meaning, either, but is primarily concerned with human beings, their actions and emotions. It expresses what I call “anthroceptual beauty,” the beauty of human love, for instance. Narrative poetry aims for anthrofices, lyric for aesthifices. Then there’s the utilifice. It does mean. A rhymed text you value because of what you learned from it will feature a utilifice. Beauty of any significance is besides the point, what counts is that what one gets goes beyond what the poem is–the poem is a helpful step toward attaining something more valuable than it whereas a lyric or narrative poem is art for art’s sake. In short, I categorize a “poem” whose utilifice is dominant as a form of utilitry–either informrature if conveying information, or advocature if telling people what to do. Lyric and narrative poems are forms of art.

If I weren’t such a lump, I’d now apply the above to actual poems. As a matter of fact, that’s what I want to do in my November Scientific American blog entry. Right now, though, here’s a rhyme that isn’t a poem:

                     Count that day lost                    Whose low descending sun                    Views from thy hand                    No worthy action done.

It’s from a wall of my high school cafeteria. I don’t know who wrote it, but I like it a lot-–and believe in it! A pretty rhyme but didactic, so not a poem. Its function is not to provide pleasure but to instill (however pleasantly) a valuable rule of conduct.

All of a poem’s poetifices taken together are a . . . poem, a lyrical poem if the poem’s aesthifice is dominant, a narrative poem is its anthrofice is dominant, and a utilitarian poem is its utilifice is dominant.

* * *

Well, I did a lot better than I thought at the start. It needs more work but I’m satisfied with it as is.

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Posted in Basho, Bob Grumman, Grumman coinage, Poetics, Taxonomy | No Comments »

Entry 1059 — Break from MATO Analysis

Sunday, March 31st, 2013

I had a slush-brained day yesterday, so only did a little work on my discussion of Manywhere-at-Once. Then, while doing a little putting of mine house in order, I came across this. It wasn’t till I got to the word “aesthcipient,” which no one uses but me that I recognition the piece as mine. At that point I was wondering who else had written so insightfully about Basho’s old pond haiku, which it clearly concerned. I’m not sure where it’s from, but I’m sure it was written more than twenty years ago. Nice to know I could sometimes write so well even way back then!

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Posted in Basho, Criticism, Poem Critique | No Comments »

Entry 1012 — Basho Poem, Last Visit

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

I suddenly realized yesterday that I had my secret messages reversed: the one I thought should be the lower was above the other (as I visualize the piece). So I redid the poem. I dropped “and,” while I did so to suggest that what followed might be thought of as the pond, or an illustration of it–as it is intended to be a metaphor for it.

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Posted in Basho, Bob Grumman, Clue for “Cryptographiku for Basho”, Cryptographiku | No Comments »

Entry 1011 — Back to My Cryptographiku

Monday, February 11th, 2013

I reduced the size of the message in code. Very Minor, it would seem, but I think it improves the thing significantly! It looks better to me, but the main thing is that it suggests through its reduced size, the secret nature of the message. Historical note: when I first made a cryptographiku ten or more years ago, I thought I was really on to something. Within a year or two, I already felt I’d exhausted the form. I’d made six or seven cryptographic poems, and used coded material in a few other poems. I did think the cryptophor (coding employed metaphorically) was an effective device that might remain in the poetry tool kit, but that a poem whose central aesthetic effect depended on one had little future. I still think it may not, but my Basho poem is a new use of the form so gives me hope others will be able to find other new ways of using it.

Psychologically, I find it interesting that I suddenly, pretty much out of nowhere, had the idea for this new kind of cryptophor of mine (which, I will now reveal, involves a method of coding two messages at once–to suggest layers of hidden meanings rather than just a single under-meaning) after giving up on the device. My experience suggests how long it can take the subconscious to take an invention, my cryptophor, one step further. At least five years.

In this poem, to continue, the cryptophor suggests the entrance into another world that Basho’s frog’s dive is, and without anyone’s plunge into real, or equivalents of, ponds . . . I think its meaningfulness makes my poem at least a good one, and its metaphoric use of “doubling coding” makes it important enough to be considered major. If I’m wrong, all my poetry has been a waste of time. Oh, except for the pleasure of creativity I’ve derived from it. But I have a need to make a significant contribution to the culture of my time, not just do things I enjoy, although I’d see no point in making significant contributions to the culture of my time if I didn’t get creative pleasure from the process. If that were possible: I don’t think anyone can do anything of cultural value doing something he doesn’t enjoy. (Something verosophical or artistic.)

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Posted in Basho, Bob Grumman, Clue for “Cryptographiku for Basho”, Cryptographiku | No Comments »

Entry 1010 — Major or Worthless?

Sunday, February 10th, 2013

Okay, everybody, I claim that this poem, “Cryptographiku for Basho,” which I finished this morning after having the preliminary idea for it several days ago, is either a Major Poem or worthless:

For obvious reasons, I tend to go for the former (and I’m not on any pills at the moment). Discussion on this should follow tomorrow.

(Note: I now have a category you can click to below that has a clue in it for solving this poem–but it will appear under this entry, too.)

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Posted in Basho, Clue for “Cryptographiku for Basho”, Clues, Cryptographiku | No Comments »

Entry 673 — “Mathemaku for Basho”

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

I’m not sure when I made this mathemaku–two or three years ago, is my guess. I’ve probably posted it before, but this is a touched up, slightly altered new version:

It’s built around a famous haiku by Basho: “on a withered branch/ a crow has settled;/autumn nightfall.” The Japanese in my rendering translates as “autumn fnightfall.” My divisor comes out of who-knows-where, but my remainder alludes to a distant sail in a rendering of a Chinese poem by Ezra Pound. My quotient is a fragment of a map of Norwalk Harbor on Long Island Sound overlaid with portions of a Sam Fancis painting severely reworked in Paint Shop. The sub-dividend product consists of the SamFrancisfied Harbor in full, and the background graphics are also alterations of portions of the Francis painting. Fadings, fragmentations, disappearings, endings . . .

I don’t consider this one of my A works, but would be satisfied if all my works seemed as good to me as it.

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Posted in Basho, Bob Grumman, haiku, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | 2 Comments »

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.

Posted in Basho, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, Poetics, Wallace Stevens | 2 Comments »

Entry 44 — A Mathemaku & Some Poetics Notes

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

The following, which is from #691, is one of my earlier mathemaku. It’s simple to understand: just think ripples, and remember that in strict mathematical equations, what’s on one side of an equals sign is upposed to stay there, and what it might mean metaphorically if it did not.

Mathemaku4Basho

Next we have a page I scribbled some notes on in 2003 that makes good sense to me at this time, although I never took the notes into any kind of essay, that I recall:

Sept03page

And now, after two simple uploads, I’m too worn-out to do anything else, believe it or not.

Posted in Basho, Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 371 — My New Mathemaku, Updated « POETICKS

Entry 371 — My New Mathemaku, Updated

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, 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 44 — A Mathemaku & Some Poetics Notes « POETICKS

Entry 44 — A Mathemaku & Some Poetics Notes

Mathemaku4Basho

Next we have a page I scribbled some notes on in 2003 that makes good sense to me at this time, although I never took the notes into any kind of essay, that I recall:

Sept03page

And now, after two simple uploads, I’m too worn-out to do anything else, believe it or not.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 7:35 PM and is filed under Basho, Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, 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.