Robert Frost « POETICKS-

Archive for the ‘Robert Frost’ Category

The best English-language poets are named Robert, but Robert Frost would have been a favorite poet of mine even if he’d been named Adolph. I consider his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” the best straitverse poem I’ve encountered. So it was nice to see a review of a newly available volume of his letters in the latest issue of The New Criterion–although no surprise, considering how little interest to it poets younger than dead for forty years, figuratively if not literally, are. It was good, too, to learn that the reviewer, Andrew Hamilton, feels this collection of letters “should serve as a thorough corrective to (the view of Frost’s main biographer, Lawrence) Thompson as a “monster”–although I never have thought of him as anything but a sometimes cranky decent man, myself . . . although he’d be on my list of great poets however bad a human being I agreed he was, and that comes close to all that counts with me.

I bring him up not only to get another blog entry out of the way so I can go back to bed but because the quite interesting review of his letters mentions his writing in one of them about how appropriate the language of his poetry’s is “to the virtues I celebrate.” “Virtues.” Didacticism. Poetry with a moral. Horace’s stupid pronouncement that poetry should teach as well as please–although it usually comes up in reverse to the way I have it, reminding people that poetry should please as well as teach. I’m an extremist here although I contend I usually seek the middle between extremes–unless I go for both extremes simultaneously. I believe poetry should give pleasure, period. Any teaching it tries to do will only distract from that.

But the first poem of my own I thought okay (the one in my 14 and 15 March entries) pushed the virtue of wilderness versus ordered sterility. My one about “tr,af:fi;c.” had nothing to with any virtue, though. Which doesn’t mean someone trying to force it into everything could charge it with celebrating the virtue of winter serenity or something. It does that. A higher virtue it can be said to honor is the simple virtue of sensual awareness. Perhaps at an even higher level it expresses my own religion’s highest virtue, reverence of the universe. Urp.

But all this indicates is that virtue is a part of any poem to some degree. Ergo, to permit discussion of virtue in a poem to be of value, one must distinguish explicit references to standard abstract virtues like honesty and tolerance (two of my favorites) from implicit references, implicit reference, that is, which the context of the poem fails explicitly to suggest may be there. Only poems concerned with the first kind of virtue should count as moral poems.

I use the same kind of reasoning to justify my contempt for the frequent declaration that all poems are political.

By this reasoning, I consider my favorite Frost poems “lyrical,” which I use for poems the main intent of which is to give aesthetic pleasure, and little or no moral improving. Ergo, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is not a moral poem–although it does convey a moral meaning: duty before pleasure, or something about the importance of fulfilling responsibilities. Frost’s use of this moral message is brilliant, though: it’s only a frame to attach his much more interesting characterization of his persona to, whereas that characterization is only a ladder to a scene (in a [mood]) . . . in Time. But it’s all also in a poem, a poem that is a box of sounds as another sense that poem makes.

My traffic poem goes directly to the scene, with a box of punctuation taking the place of Frost’s box of sounds, and my poem as a whole doing less than Frost’s–but, I would argue, more for poetry.

Actually, my poem has a persona, too. He just isn’t physically in the poem the way Frost is in his. Nor is he brought anywhere near alive. But he’s watching the sky’s descent. He’s punctuating along with the traffic. . . .

* * *

Hey, everybody, wasn’t that a nice essay?! Well, except for the snide remark about the provincialism of the The New Criterion. Someday maybe I’ll write a little essay like this that’s all nice. It may be a while, though.

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Entry 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

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

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

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

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Entry 73 — “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

As long-term readers of my blog will know, one of my projects is an in-depth study of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18.” I’ve also been interested in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” While thinking about it recently, I realized how few polysyllabic words it had. Always ready to formulaize something if I can, I soon came up with a (possibly) new characteristic of poems, semantic density. It is equal to the number of syllables in a poem divided into the number of words in the poem. It turns out the Frost poem’s semantic density is .86, Shakespeare’s about the same. I suspect few other poems have as high a semantic density, but I haven’t investigated the matter.

. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

.                 Whose woods these are I think I know.
.                 His house is in the village though;
.                 He will not see me stopping here
.                 To watch his woods fill up with snow.

.                 My little horse must think it queer
.                 To stop without a farmhouse near
.                 Between the woods and frozen lake
.                 The darkest evening of the year.

.                 He gives his harness bells a shake
.                 To ask if there is some mistake.
.                 The only other sound’s the sweep
.                 Of easy wind and downy flake.

.                 The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
.                 But I have promises to keep,
.                 And miles to go before I sleep,
.                 And miles to go before I sleep.

Technically speaking, there are seventeen polysyllabic words in this poem, one of them three syllables in length, all the others just two in length. I do not count “farmhouse” as a single word, though, since each of its two syllables has a clear separate meaning, “farm” really being an adjective pushed into a noun, “house.” And I count “”sound’s” as two words, because it is: “sound” plus “is.” Yet is is only one syllable in length. So, to get the semantic density of the poem, we divide 110, not 109, by 128

Once become mathematically irreverent toward about the ratio of words in a poem to its syllables, I thought of other density ratios applicable to poems: e.g., euphonic density or the ratio of euphonies (long-o‘s, long-u‘s and “ah”-sounds) to number of syllables in a poem, repenemic density (repenemes to syllables, a repeneme being a repeated melodation such as alliterationor rhyme, the latter counting as two repenemes) and–this one I especially like–oddword density. This would be the ratio of unusual words to syllable-count, with “unusual” being what a word is that comes up only a certain low number of times in s large sample of contemporary writing.

The euphonic denisty of Frost’s poem is just under .20. I’d be surprised if many other poems have a euphonic denisty that high. I’ll check Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18″ tomorrow.

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John Keats « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘John Keats’ Category

Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

In my little-selling Of Manywhere-at-Once, Keats was one of the six canonized poets I wrote a chapter about. Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Cummings and Roethke were the others. I suddenly realize that Stevens was the last of them to become a hero in poetry of mine–around 35 years ago. None since. Nor, that I can think of, any literary heroes of any kind since then. Heroes of verosophy? Perhaps. More likely, no: because I don’t think I have any genuine verosophical heroes. The one who comes closest is Nietzsche, but I consider him a literary hero. I’ve greatly admired a lot of verosophers–Archimedes, Aristotle, Darwin, Newton, Dalton, Faraday, to mention a few–but not the way I’ve idolized and drenched myself in the works and lives of writers like Keats. And a number of visimagists like Cezanne and Klee. But no composers. I guess the reason for this is obvious: I’ve become a writer, and (to a degree) a visimagist, but not a composer. I consider myself a verosopher, but one unlike any I’m familiar with, except–possibly–Pierce.

It may be that I’ve had no cultural heroes since my thirties due to some flaw of mine, but I suspect one grows . . . not beyond, but off to the sides, of hero-worship. Into too much of one’s own work toward becoming a cultural hero oneself to have as much time new ones. One also will eventually have a number of contemporaries to take the place of heroes, albeit differently–as co-heroes rather than as worship-worthies.

In any case, in my chapter about Keats, I spent over four pages on his sonnet to Chapman’s Homer, which was one of the few poems I’d memorized by then (around the age of 18)–and, for that matter, one of the few I have ever memorized. I wish I’d memorized many more, but I also wish I knew more than one language. I tend to think I’ve stored all the data I’ve been capable of (as has everyone), so it doesn’t bother me inordinately. Just a little wishfulness that a few things were not impossible. Except when I’m in my null zone and realize that nothing really good is possible.

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Note Keats’s glorification of “high-piled books” here and another poet’s accomplishment in the Chapman poem–his raw young poetic ambitions as a young man obvious, so just the thing to capture me at 18–besides the level of the writing. Although poetry was never at the center of my writing ambitions until the past decade or so, by default.

(Aside: after going through my edition of Keats’s poems to make sure I remember the poem above correctly–actually to fix parts I knew I hadn’t–the level of his writing bothered me: in less than 26 years he composed more effective poems than I have in almost 75. This is not false humility. But I feel I have added to the poet’s tool-kit, which he did not, and ranged beyond poetry into a theory pf psychology, which he did not, and which I think beyond doubt an accomplishment of sorts. Yes, competitiveness is an enduring part of my character. I still consider more a virtue than not.)

Okay, back to my dictum about reading poetry to the extent that you devour everything you can of the life and work of at least one of them as I devoured Keats. This resulted in several (but not a flood) of defective poems until I wrote the following in my twenties:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

This is a fair derivative poem, I now think, but indicative only that when I wrote it, I had reached the basement of the poet’s vocation–thanks to all the reading I did. I’m afraid I have to admit that this lesson of mine isn’t much of a lesson, for if you need someone urging you to read poems and writings about poets before you’ll do it, all the reading you do will be a waste of time for you. I did the reading I did because I had to. and I had made a hero of Keats I had to find out as much as possible about, because of my genes, which made me search for a hero, then in effect become a sort of apprentice of his. The real lesson is that you should save time by dropping the idea of becoming a poet if you aren’t already automatically doing this. I suppose a minor implicit value of the lesson is to confirm you in your vocation if you have found your Keats–and encourage you to keep going if you have not, but are deeply involved with some kind of poetry.

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Entry 1752 — Break-Time

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

I was hoping to continue my lesson with an entry as good as I feel my one yesterday (mostly) was, but got involved in a duel of interpretations of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24 with Paul Crowley at HLAS. I still was planning to come here and work up a storm but Shirley took care of that. Just as I finished my post for Paul and was about to cut&paste a copy of it in the flash drive I use for things like it, she hopped up on my computer desk, casually walked across my keyboard, then hit the floor again and walked out of the room. In the process, she deleted everything in my post. So I have to do it all over again. I need to because I feel I said a few good things about the poem–and several important things about my discussion of it, which I first called an “explication” but which was not quite that, but–I eventually concluded–the beginning of what I call a “pluraphrase,” and now to make for the poem. So maybe Shirley helped me.

As for the lesson under way, I found the poem of mine that I thought, and am still pretty sure, was the first poem I wrote that, as I put it in Of Manywhere-at-Once, I thought anything of:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife              I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams.

* * *

The “nothingness” is from the sonnet by Keats that ends, “. . . then on the shore/ of the wide world I stand alone and think/ Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.” To make sure my lesson has a good poem in its entirety in it, I will quote the Keats poem in full in it. He’s been dead long enough for the imbecilic copyright laws to allow me to do that.

One other thing I have to report is that I came up with a term for “haiku-sensitivity,” which has come to seem too specific for what I want a term to represent. “Minificance,” (mih NIH fih kehnts) is the new term–to represent “a sensitivity to something in poetry of minimlistic significance.” “Haiku-sensitivity” would be a subset of this.

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Entry 665 — Keats and Me

Friday, February 24th, 2012

James Finnegan posted the following link at New-Poetry a little while ago:. It’s to a review of the latest book on Keats. Here’s an excerpt from the review: “Denise Gigante takes a new approach to the familiar and tragic tale of John’s brief life, by pairing his biography with that of his younger brother George Keats. George was, Gigante argues, a different manifestation of the Romantic ‘Man of Power.’ Where John Keats channeled his energies into writing the poems for which he is famous—odes, including ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn,’ sensuous narrative poems such as ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ and many brilliant experimental sonnets—-George Keats channeled the same pioneering energies into crossing the Atlantic to the wild west of America, investing in business ventures, and after numerous misfortunes, becoming a wealthy mill owner in Louisville.”

I was happy to hear about the book. Keats was the first poet I near-totally absorbed—reading just about all his poems and letters, and the available biographies, and I always wanted to know more about George, whom I saw as this author seems to. No doubt John’s having two brothers and a little sister contributed to that. But George was a very appealing, supportive brother (as mine have been). Tom, too, although dead at seventeen. I always wanted to write a tragedy about Keats, feeling that the world lost far more when he died than it did when any king or politician did. I wanted to do one on Marlowe, too. I suppose now I was missing something, for I never did more than think about the two plays. The world, of course, was no help, but I think the best writers write as much as they’re capable of regardless of the world.

I have no problem with Harvard’s publishing this book, by the way. As always, it’s the many other books they should be publishing and aren’t that bother me.

Meanwhile, by chance, I sketched a poem I’m calling, “Elegy for Keats,” a couple of days ago. Just got a great idea for it: a background of “a name writ on water” repeated swirling like liquid over the entire page,” with a mathemaku including “the sea’s eternal whisperings/ around desolate shores,” from a sea-sonnet by Keats, which I’d already been intending to use, in it. Now if I can only get around to doing it: the background will be difficult; I need to do it cursive, I think, and I’m not good at that. . . . Hmmm, should I just repeat “a name?” I think so. Maybe once in a while add “writ.”

Scottsdale Cash Loans

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E E Cummings « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘E E Cummings’ Category

Entry 1751 — Lesson 1

Friday, March 13th, 2015

I have an excuse to avoid truly beginning my lesson in how to compose an otherstream poem: another medical procedure, this one a sound scan of my thyroid. Routine, I guess because I’m hypo-thyroidal. Only took ten minutes. Errands followed. So, I’m barely unnull. Nonetheless, I will try to get my lesson in today, beginning with lead-in excerpts of poems by Cummings, then the original (and now final) version of my (full) ooem:

* * *

If I were in a high school or college teaching this lesson (which, nota bene, is for absolute beginners, although I hope anyone reading it will learn from it), I would pass out hand-outs with the poems above on them to the students (student?). Then:

IF YOU WANT TO COMPOSE ANY KIND OF POETRY:

Dictum 1: READ POETRY!!!

(I’m tempted to end my first lesson there, but–heck–you’re all my good friends! I can’t cheat you.)

Listening to poetry is okay, but reading it means you have it continuingly in front of you, so seems to me better. It’s also difficult to attend readings or buy recordings compared to getting books or magazines with it, or going online after it. In any case, I will be referring to printed poetry only.

I suspect anyone teaching a how-to-course in any kind of literature will tell you the same thing. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, it’s received wisdom, and received wisdom is right much more often than not. This bit of received wisdom is maxolutely valid–i.e., it could not be more valid.

The more you read poetry, the more of an idea of what it is you will get. Beyond some dictionary’s probably inept, and certainly incomplete definition of it. But by far the most important reason for reading poetry is to find poems you like! And you will find a few before long, even if you read only publications recommended by college professors or other authorities if you seriously intend to compose poetry–as either a hobby (and there’s nothing wrong with that) or a vocation.

If you get through a few hundred poems and find none that genuinely excite you, ask someone who’s been around (like me) where to go for poetry different from what you’ve been reading. If that doesn’t help–if, that is, you sincerely explore a reasonable wide variety of poems and are not excited by any of them, accept that you’re simply incapable of appreciating poetry–as I am incapable of appreciating gymnastics. So what.

I should think anyone who knows enough about poetry to want to compose it will find poems that he really likes. When this happens, as common sense would indicate, he must find out who wrote them, and look up that poet’s other poems. If this goes well, he will automatically be strongly attracted to one or more, enough to become at least temporarily addicted to his work.

SubDictum 1: When you have found a poet whose work you are extremely drawn to, read everything you can about his life. If you feel like it. I add that, and make this rule a “SubDictum,” because I followed it with great enjoyment and, I think, got a useful push from my vicarious identification with various literary heroes of mine. But it won’t make a poet of you, and I suspect there are those without my interest in poets rather than their work, or literary history. In short, ignore this SubDictum if you have little urge to follow it.

Dictum 2: This is my first teaching that a lot of poets and not all that few teachers of poetry will reject. In fact, I would agree that it is not necessary for one wanting to become a poet; however, it is necessary, in my opinion, for one who wants to become among the best poets. Those I therefore direct to read as much commentary on the poets whose works you most enjoy as you can. Poetry criticism be Good! So what if much of it, maybe most of it, is not too good; 90% of poetry is mediocre or lousy, too. So read as much as you can, and zero in on those whose commentary you enjoy the way you zeroed in on poets whose poems you enjoyed.

One important thing they should do for you is path you to other poets writing work like the ones you like do. Negatively-Positively, they may expose you to flaws in a favorite of yours that helps you to appreciate up to a higher level of enjoyment. They should introduce you, in their negative commentary, to poets whose poor work will increase your appreciation of inferior work, which it is important to learn. Or perhaps make you realize there’s poetry out there the critic doesn’t like but you do. And you will begin developing a critical view of your own.

Dictum 3: WRITE POEMS!!!

Start by imitating the poems you’ve found you like. Remember that you are just beginning and that it takes time to become anything of a poet. In the meantime, it should not take too long for you to experience the happiness of effectively imitating something a hero of yours has done. The chances are 999 to 1 that it will be part of a sub-mediocre poem, but that’s of no consequence. Every poet’s first attempts are poor. Regardless of the mothers or friends or teachers who praise them.

At this point I was going to show the value of imitation using the four texts above. While writing my way to here, however, I realized that I should have used an earlier example of my own work. I wrote a fair amount of bad imitative poetry when I began, and nothing any good until I was around 25 and wrote my “traffic” poem above. It’s a bad example, though, because (in my opinion) quite good, although imitative. There are special reasons for its success. One is that it’s based on the simplest poetic form, the Classical American haiku form (which is derived from the form the Japanese invented–apparently–but significantly different from that in ways I won’t go into right now). What’s more, the Classical American Haiku form is extremely explicit, and therefore easy to get technically right.

* * *

I feel I could keep going for at least a few more full paragraphs but I also think I’ve reached a good stopping point, and have a topic to discuss which may take a while to get through: haiku-sensitivity, which I think a person is either born with or will never have, and I have it. Urp.

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Entry 1750 — Found Original

Thursday, March 12th, 2015

Sorta interesting story about the above: it turned up yesterday in an email from Germany! Remember, I was hunting all over for it in vain, then remembered it together–I thought. Actually, I remembered “descent,” but changed it to “development.” I forgot “mix.” I think the original better than my revision.

To get back to the sorta interesting story, the email it arrived in–more accurately, the email that had a link to it–was from Kurt Henzel, a German who has suddenly discovered concrete poetry, and wanted to buy two books by Irving Weiss that I had published–and stuff of mine. In his email, he asked for signed copies of two of my poems, the one above and “the poem r,” one of my favorite visual poems although never before mentioned by anyone.

Here’s the other:

Here’s something else from the Internet:

resipiscence /res-ə-PIS-əns/. noun. Originally, repentance and recognition of one’s misdeeds. Now the act of coming to one’s senses, a change of heart. The Shorter OED’s formulation: “return to a better mind.” From Latin resipiscere (to recover one’s senses), from from sapere (to taste, to be wise).

From yesterday’s Katex–click here to find out about it. (It’s a newsletter or the equivalent put out by Chris Lott often has interesting odd words. I posted this because it seems so much like many of my coinages–in other words, I’m not alone in my love of coining mouthfuls. I also think I might find a use for this one.

* * *

Apologies, but that’s it for today. Again, a tough day for me: a loss in tennis in the morning, both for me and my partner is one match, and for our team in all three of our matches. Oh, well, we should not finish last, and the season will soon be over. In the afternoon, two hours at my dentist’s (that increased my credit card debt by another thousand).

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Entry 1749 — Lesson One Begins

Wednesday, March 11th, 2015

I was hoping to make a complete lesson for this entry–the one I discussed yesterday for a how-to book for beginning otherstream poets. I had so much trouble scanning the poems by Cummings I wanted to use in it that I’m too worn-out to try to write much of the lesson.

But here is my piece for the lesson again, followed by 4 excerpts of poems by Cummings that I stole the core-technique my poem depends on from Cummings, my lesson being about the necessity to steal from other poets:

            sky's piecemeal white                                development down buildings'                            dark sides into                                   tr;af:fi,c.

* * *

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Entry 1693 — Cummings’s Early Visual Poetry

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

Karl Kempton, who is in the process of writing a full-scale history of visual poetry, queried me about E. E. Cummings earlier today. “relooking at early cummings,” said he, “i can not say his work prior to & (and) could be considered visual, except for impression III, part of tulips and chimneys, publication date 1923.” Then he asked me for my take. The following notes were the immediate results:

I would accept “III’ of “Impressions” as, barely, a visual poem because the way it uses the parenthesis marks at the end of it as a visual metaphor for a sack. At the same time they are a conceptual metaphor for a shooting star’s being changed from something emphatic in the material world diminished into something parenthetical to reality–down a level from it.

“in Just-” (which i have an entry about in the Facts-on-File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry) is a highly effective visual poem for me, albeit its visiophors (visual metgaphors) are very simple. “hist whist” is borderline. “stinging” becomes super-simply a visual poem at its end, “-S.”

These poems are also infraverbal, for me; I consider Cummings more important for more or less inventing infraverbal poetry than for his visual poetry. The passage, “so/ drunG// k, dear,” in his “I” (first stanza: “nimble/ heat/ had”) in “Portraits,” one of the sections of Chimneys, becomes infra-verbal with “drunkG” and also visual when after a space comes “k, dear” because the G in “drunG” is a verbo-auditory metaphor for drunkenness as well as what I’d call a verbo-conceptual metaphor for it. It is the first because its mispronunciation acts as a metaphor for drunkenness; it is the second because its mistakenness is a conceptual metaphor for drunkenness.

I take its capital G as auditory rather than visual (although, yes, the whole word is something visual, but not really visual in the sense of something seen, visual in the different sense of something read); hence it seems to me the G contributes to both its mispronunciation (since it indicates, to me, an accentual emphasis on the g-sound) and its conceptual mistakenness, since it is mistakenly capitalized, according to conventional spelling. The continuation of “drunG” after the line it occupies and a skipped line by a k, makes the “k, dear” a visual metaphor for the blank-minded mistakenness that drunkenness is, and the way drunkenness tries stumblingly to be “correct.”

“Buffalo Bill’s” is, of course, a visual poem.

The gaps in many of the Tulips I consider purely verbal since they simply indicate auditory pauses of various lengths.

So, I would claim the presence of five (-and-a-half) visual poems in Tulips and Chimneys.

It’d be nice to go one into a full-length study of Cummings’s evolution as an otherstream poet–i.e., a visual and an infraverbal poet as well as an adventurer in other kinds of language poetry besides infraverbalism, but I have too many other things on my plate right now.
.

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Entry 1645 — Part of Something from 1994

Friday, November 28th, 2014

I was going to write something new for today but it fell apart somewhere before its midpoint. I have hopes for it, but . . .

So, in place of it, here’s commentary on poetry from an article published twenty years ago that I actually got paid for: 9 pages on all the neglected kinds of poetry then extant (just about all of which are still extant, and neglected). As is the case with nearly all my poetry commentary/criticism, no one every wrote me about it.

I was going to use just what I said about Kathy Ernst’s “Philosophy,” then thought it might be interesting to present the whole page in media res. Less work for me, at any rate. So, here is page 6 from the November/ December issue of Teachers & Writers:

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Entry 1627 — Norman Friedman, RIP

Monday, November 10th, 2014

A day or two ago I got the sad news that Norman Friedman died on the 6th of November. He for many years was probably the foremost critic of E. E. Cummings, one of my three favorite pre-1960 American poets. Certainly I learned more than a little about Cummings (and poetics) from his writings over the years. He was also a very nice man, as I found out when I met him at a literary conference where I presented a paper on Cummings several years ago.

This morning curiosity about him sent me to Wikipedia where, to my shock, I was unable to find an entry on him. Along the way, though, I found an essay of his on Cummings at jstor.org, a site you can read academic writings at for a fee. The fees are way more than I can afford but I took advantage of an offer allowing me to read three essays for free, so am now midway through Friedman’s “E. E. Cummings and His Critics,” (1962).

In his essay, Friedman is making an excellent case for Cummings as what academics should consider a serious poet–i.e., one with a serious outlook on life that he expresses in his poetry. I suppose he is right but for me, “all” Cummings did was celebrate existence, using all the verbal means he could think of in order to able to do that maximally.

Oh, sure, he was diverted from this central concern to take on collectivism (which I applaud) and science (which I don’t applaud) but at his best he did the only thing I believe poets should do, which is use the whole of their language to celebrate existence–which I think requires them at the same time to show by contrast what’s wrong with it. I think what I mean is that a poet should side with, and celebrate, beauty in his poetry, which he can’t do without opposing, and condemning, ugliness (at least implicitly) as when Basho celebrates the beauty of the many moments existence’s best moments combine in his old pond haiku while at the same time implicitly rejects–and I should have used “rejecting: instead of “condemning” earlier in this sentence–existence’s lesser moments, the one’s with only the present in them, or–worse–only some solely intellectual or solely unintellectual present in them. Or nothing at all, unless the nothing that includes all isn’t what many of the greatest minimalist poems are about. (Yeah, I’m going a little over-mystical there.)

You’re in luck. I don’t have time right now to knock out several thousand words on the poetic moment I’m talking about. The traditional haiku moment is an instance of it, but only one instance, whatever the wacked-out anti-Western idolizers of the Far East maintain.
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Posted in Announcements, E E Cummings, Norman Friedman, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1314 — Just-Spring

Sunday, December 29th, 2013

It crossed my mind earlier today that a flair for the use of fresh language might be the most important attribute of a superior poet. Certainly E. E. Cummings had it, which is why he rates so high with me. In particular, I think the invention of new words or phrases, or the use of a word in a way it was never before used, like Cummings’s melding of “just” and “spring” in his famous poem about the balloonman, is about the most important thing a superior poet can do. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas are two others I quickly think of who did this. If I were fading out, I’d try to find examples, and mention more poets of fresh language. I might even come up with a Grummaniacal name for them.

For now, I just say that one way of recognizing mediocrity in a poet is his total conventionality of word-choice and use. You can recognize the subj-mediocrity by his used of dead poeticisms.

Digital Cameras

Posted in Aesthetics, Dylan Thomas, E E Cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1043 — A Revision

Friday, March 15th, 2013

I’m here again because the technician I called to help me with my computer won’t be to my house until later, so I can still come here. (I’m hoping the technician can take care of my computer’s problem or problems while here, but suspect h’ell have to take my cup away for a while.) Anyway, this poem is from a sequence of 4 I made that were published in the Cummings Society magazine, Spring.

I’m posting it because I’ll soon be posting it in my Scientific American guest blog so went to Paint Shop to get it ready, remembering that I wanted to make a short revision of its remainder. That had been “-(little lame balloonman).” It came to bother me because a remainder should not be a negative term. So I’d come up with “the absence of the little lame balloonman.” That was the first thing I changed it to earlier this morning. I liked the idea of a “positive” negativity like an absence of something. But before long I thought it strained. I changed it to “nothing else.” That cost the reference to the balloonman that I have in all peoms in the rest of the sequence. Result: the present remainder. I’m not sure it’s my best, or is as good a one as I could possibly come up with, but it works, and I’m sticking with it.

ShopNBC Coupon

Posted in Bob Grumman, E E Cummings, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 982 — A Philistine Versus Cummings

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

The following is from Poetry, America’s leading home of Philistines. It’s part of a series of negative responses to canonized poets by mostly utter mediocrities (at best). Guriel, author of this slam of Cummings, seems the most egregious, for the others bothered to find parts of their subject’s oeuvre worth praise, or at least not bad enough to scorn. The author of one, on Stevens, forthrightly admitted not having the brains to appreciate him–although she may have been ironic.

It’s fitting that Cummings took the most abuse, for his best work is still a decade or more too advanced for Poetry.

Guriel may not be the most obtuse critic of Cummings ever–while Cummings was still alive, some halfwit whose name I failed to record parodied him by throwing letters on a page “almost as fast as (he) could hit the typewriter keys,” and calling the result, “Forest Fire.” This he follows with a mock “critique” of the poem, praising its “typographically created impression of chaos, suggested by a broken word such as ‘hiss’ and by the skillfully misplaces letters and punctuation marks, all of which add eloquently to the complex simplicity and the dissociated unity of the whole.” Ha ha, aren’t these avant garde critics dumb!

The philistine always assumes a poet he can’t appreciate is only doing one thing in his poetry, so has no problem parodying it since all he has to do is compose something that does nothing but that one thing, as here. He, of course, disregards the fact that doing something another poet has invented is easier than inventing it.

Time now for Guriel, with my commments inserted:

Sub-Seuss

Reconsidering E.E. Cummings.

BY JASON GURIEL

Young people encounter many temptations on their way to adulthood: vampires, Atlas Shrugged, Pink Floyd, the acoustic guitar. Of course, such stuff, designed to indulge one’s sense of oneself as a unique individual, must eventually be repudiated. It’s not easy, growing up.
BG: Growing up requires one to accept that one is a sheep, and leave behind a child’s imaginativeness?

But I had no trouble saying no to the relentlessly quirky E.E.  Cummings. Thank the high school teacher who required me to get Cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by heart. I labored over the poem for an afternoon, recited it to the wall, gave up. What was at stake if I misremembered the order of words like “up so floating many bells down?” Does it really matter it’s not “up so many floating bells down?” Would Cummings himself have applauded the mistake as a heartening sign of a maverick mind at play?

BG: Yes, Jason, it matters. To understand that, you must first be able to imagine yourself not necessarily superior to a poet doing unconventional things with syntax, but assume that maybe he’s trying to give pleasure by doing so rather than irritate his readers. Here Cummings forces his readers to slow down, the first obligation of a poet, for a poet should want those encountering his work to take the time to let its full sensual effect to reach them. The slight change of word-order is not pivotal, but “so floating many bells” is a more charged image, it seems to me, than “so many floating bells”; the syntax of the first jarring the reader into increasing attention, wondering about “so floating” ( a slant way of saying “so floatingly” to increase the meaning of floating?), and about a “floating many,” the syntax of the second doing nothing. I would add that Cummings uses “up” and “down” simply to describe in a way that almost forces a reader to look up and down bells floating up (and) down. Whatever they are. Bell-sounds and bell-shaped flowers are what they made me think of. They do make one muse into concrete imagery, which is an important duty of poems.

The poetry, I concluded, wasn’t just sub-Seuss; it was tantamount to a teaching tool of the most condescending kind: the last resort. (No, really, poetry is crazy fun was the point one was meant to  internalize.) Cummings seemed to have been invented to convert that stubborn student the syllabus has failed to win over to verse — or, at least, to reacquaint the kid with his inner child, the id whose  appetite for nonsense and nursery rhymes has been socialized away. When it came to Cummings (or unstructured playtime) resistance was supposed to be futile.

BG: Here Guriel its criticizing Cummings for what he thinks his teacher used his poem for. I haven’t spoken with his teacher. It would be interesting if Poetry contacted the teacher and learned the motive for forcing poor Guriel to memorize a poem he didn’t like. (Guess what? It’s far from my favorite Cummings poem.) It’s good to expose students to the crazy fun that poems can be, including the very best. But the teacher might have been thinking of language poetry, so many of whose best features Cummings’s poems were precursors of, the idea being that immersion in Cummings would help the right students later to appreciate the poetry many superior contemporary poets are composing. There are several other possibilities. I suspect, though, that the teacher simply liked the poem and wanted to give students a chance to like it, too.

Randall Jarrell nearly said as much when he noted that “no one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader.” He should’ve said that “no one else has ever made a formula for avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to people who don’t actually read poetry but would like to think they can write it.” Even today, it’s enough to reject an institution or two — capitalism, grammatical English — to be mistaken for an innovator. Rebel, misspell, repeat:
v    o      i       c         e  o                ver  (whi!tethatr?apidly  legthelessne sssuc kedt oward  black,this    )roUnd ingrOundIngly rouNdar(round)ounDing                                            ;ball                                            balll                                            ballll                                            balllll    — From No Thanks, Section Two
The message Cummings communicates here — and which langpo types and concrete poets continue to internalize — is remarkably  unambiguous: words are toy blocks, and poems, child’s play. No one else has made making it new look so easy.

BG: Actually, this excerpt is from a long evocation of the moon. Easy as rhyming to do, sure.

But Cummings’s poems themselves were only superficially “new.” Beneath the tattoo-thin signifiers of edginess — those lowercase i’s, those words run together — flutters the heart of a romantic. (Is there a correlation between typographically arresting poetry and emotional arrestedness?) He fancies himself an individual among masses, finds the church ladies have “furnished souls,” opposes war. He’s far more self-righteous, this romantic, than any soldier or gossip — and far deadlier: he’s a teenager armed with a journal.

BG: Guriel mentions flaws I also find in Cummings, although I favor individualism and my heart flutters with romanticism. Guriel is an irresponsible critic, however, because he ignores the many poems of Cummings that transcend the attitudes Cummings had and Guriel is superior to. As he would find if he read enough of him to be fair to him.

Recording his thoughts about sex or the female body, however, Cummings’s speaker is less a teenager than a child trapped in a man’s body, which is to say a man-child: a boob blinking at a pair of breasts. In poem after poem, he can’t help but notice such curiosities as “sticking out breasts” and “uttering tits” and “bragging breasts” and “ugly nipples squirming in pretty wrath” and breasts that are “firmlysquirmy with a slight jounce” and “wise breasts half-grown.” (Hands off, ladies! He’s spoken for.) And when he shifts his attention to other parts of the beloved — and, worse, gropes for only the weirdest words to describe them — the boob makes an ass of himself:

i bite on the eyes’ brittle crust
(only feeling the belly’s merry thrust
Boost my huge passion like a business

and the Y her legs panting as they press

proffers its omelet of fluffy lust)

How does one excuse such lines? Is it that you can’t write a poem without breaking some eggs? That you can’t make it new without making a mess?

boys w!ll be boyss, i guess….

BG: It’s easy to excuse, Jason. You merely refer to the many many poor poems of Wordsworth, or to the large dead portions of Pound’s Cantos, and point out that the many world-class poems these two composed are a hundred times more important than any number of their bad ones a cherry-picker like you can find.

HSN.com Shopping

Posted in E E Cummings, Jason Guriel | 2 Comments »

Entry 904 — American Visiotextual Art

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

There’s an attempt at a discussion of the Fantagraphics anthology going on at Spidertangle that I’ve contributed to, once by growling that “just saying you don’t like the anthology, or posting blurbs in its favor, won’t get us anywhere.”

I then brought up an idea which I would be amazed if more than three other Spidertanglers thought was a good one: the publication of a companion to the Fantagraphics anthology. If possible, it would have an essay by either Crag of Nico, or both, describing their editorial intentions, and a history of the anthology. Then maybe one or two essays on the history of visiotextual art that discusses where this anthology fits into that history. The rest of the Companion would consist of critical reactions to it—a few from from vispo people, but many I would hope from conventional literary AND visual art people.

I followed that with a digression to a thought about The history of American Visiotextual Art: that with Andrew, we now have a fifth generation. The first generation consisted mainly of E. E. Cummings and Kenneth Patchen. The Pre-Concrete Generation, characterized by more or less standard free verse poems with visual details I’d call minifractional but which were responsible for a large percentage of the aesthetic effect of the poems they were in. An example is the famous Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill who is described as breaking “onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.” A small fraction of the poem but responsible for at least half of its aesthetic effect (however little that effect may seem to those with no understanding of the magnitude of such simple-seeming freshnesses when introduced to poetry). First generation poems were basically semantic poems with just enough significant visual material to make them visual poems.

Second generation American visiotextual art was dominated by concrete poetry—by my definition of it as verbally meaningful texts which are also fully, or near-fully, visual images, and whose verbal and visual content combine to produce the works’ aesthetic effect. In other words, works half verbal and half visual. Ron Johnson’s “moon,” with a third moon printed in between and above the word’s other two o’s. The Solt and Williams anthologies brought them to the attention of the public.

Then came a third generation of “visual poets,” the poets I think of as being published by Karl Kempton’s Kaldron or in close touch with poets who were. The important difference between them and the concrete poets, again by my definition (which ignores who did what where and believed in what politics or moral codes, etc.), was that they made works that included purely visual elements that interacted with their works’ semantic content to produce their aesthetic effect.

The fourth generation, now in power, consists of the asemic poets, who have basically forsaken textual elements for anything other than the way they look in designs. It seems to me that a good eighty percent of the work in the Fantagraphic anthology us if this nature. I have made only a few such works myself, but extremely like some specimens of it in the Fantagraphics anthology. In fact, it’s possible that seven of my ten favorite works in the anthology are asemic.

I believe there is a fifth generation in existence, but I don’t know what they’re up to.

All comments, as always, are welcome.

Don’t Pay Retail

Posted in E E Cummings, Ronald Johnson | 2 Comments »

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Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry, Poetry Lesson, sonnet | No Comments »

POETICKS

Entry 1748 — A Different How-To Book

March 10th, 2015

While writing yesterday’s entry, I thought–as I often do–that I was giving a lesson, for writing about poetry often brings out a need in me to teach others to be able to appreciate, and thus enjoy, the poetry I write about as much as I do. Again today I thought about that while adding another passage to my notes of yesterday. Then it occurred to me that so far as I knew, no one had written a how-to book for beginning otherstream poets. Maybe I should. At worst, it would give me lessons that would take care of my daily blog entries.

I had another tough day, though, and wasn’t up to throwing together a lesson. One reason for the toughness of the day was that I’d come up with a good idea for my first lesson: the use of one of my own early poems as an example . . . but could not find the poem! I still don’t know where I hid it. But I eventually managed to remember how, or about how, it went, so I’ll be able to at least post that here:

            sky's piecemeal white                                development down buildings'                            dark sides into                                   tr;af:fi,c.

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Entry 1747 — Some Bedside Notes

March 9th, 2015

Some notes from a week or so ago that I hoped to make a long division poem of. I keep scrap paper at my bedside in case I have enough ideas I feel the need to record them while lying in bed at night. The second sheet are my notes about the previous notes. The poem I was preparing these notes for was to be the second in the set begun with the poem in Entrymy second long division of boyhood. Nothing further has come of these. Until now, when I’m having too tired a day to be able to think of anything else to put here.

For Easy Reading:

all the climbable trees and bushes for hiding in the hill our house was on

I like this but it is not worded properly and I still can’t see how to fix it–without simply sticking a second “on” into it.

a summer day three wishes more distant than Atlantis

This I find wonderful, the one really nice term I came up with.

faereality–actually a version in code that I didn’t want to take the time to work out, knowing I’d remember to later.

A continuing favored image of mine I want one day to have a cluster of poems about (and already have several).

a decoder disk fresh from the cereal box

I never had such a disk but wanted something about the making of codes that was so important to me as a boy.

secrecy (used as an exponent, an idea I dropped because–fancy this–it didn’t make mathematical sense to me)

Nothing more wonderful in boyhood than this.

an ancient tale-spinner’s path dreaming into a yes with mountains in it

A second fairly inspired term, particularly the “yes with mountains in it”

a boy’s book

Just a possible term if needed, and chosen because books were the ur-source of the best adventures of my boyhood.

I’m not bothering with the second page’s notes because none of them seem good to me–except the use of “secrecy” as a multiplier rather than as an exponent. The idea of a map of something ridiculous to have a map of, except in a poem.

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop | No Comments »

Entry 1746 — A Possible Invention & A List

March 8th, 2015

himlli esyaen r txv eee scn tat li o n

An email from Richard Kostelanetz got me thinking about invented moves in writing of the kind he tries for–in everything he writes except his conventional prose works, it would seem. Result: the possible invention above. Its difference from all other such works is very minor, but does distinguish it from all other such works, if I really am the first to make such a thing. The are a great number of permutations of the basic idea possible. Would each be consider a lexical invention, I wonder. . . .

Now the list:

The Knowleculations, or kinds of knowlecular data in accordance with size

KNOWLEBIT smallest unit of knowledge
KNOWLEDOT all the knowlebits in a mnemodot[1]
KNOWLECULE the equivalent of a word’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLECULANE the equivalent of a sentence’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLECUMIZATION the equivalent of a paragraph’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLEPLEX the equivalent of a chapter’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLAXY the equivalent of a book’s worth of knowledge
KNOWLIVERSE a person’s entire store of knowledge

[1] a mnemodot is a single storage-unit in one or another of the cerebrum’s many mnemoducts; it is what all the percepts (i.e., units of perceptual data coming from the external or internal environment) and retrocepts (i.e., activated units or data stored as memories) of the kind the mnemoduct is responsible for that reach it during an instacon, or instant of consciousness [2]

[2] This seems to be the new proper way to make footnotes. I hate it.

I love my list, though! It’s my latest eurekaplex, for sure. Makes me feel like I’ve summed up epistemology for good! 5 brand-new terms, all from the eureka moment I had last night in bed (although it didn’t feel more than mildly satisfactory at the time). Okay, I know it won’t be of much use to anyone but me, but it will greatly help me to finally understand my knowlaxy of knowlecular psychology.

Since I’m listing knowlecular stuff, here’s another list I made just to be complete about the kinds of knowleplexes there are: rigidniplex, eurekaplex, milyoopiplex (i.e., excessively changeable knowleplex), pseudo-rigidniplex (a rigidniplex forced on someone by indoctrination, verosoplex and . . . various kinds of defective knowleplexes I’ve already named somewhere else (when writing about verosophers, cranks and kooks, I think) but can’t remember, nor locate them easily enough to bother to try to. Ah, maybe “pseudosoplex,” from “pseudosopher” the way “verosoplex” is from “verosopher,” is one of them . . .

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Entry 1745 — Denial

March 7th, 2015

An “argument” far too often used in debates between the impassioned (I among them) is the assertion that one’s opponent is in denial. “Denial,” I suddenly am aware, belongs on my list of words killed by nullinguists. It has come to mean opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose. When used in what I’ll a “sweeper epithet” (for want of knowing what the common term for it is, and I’m sure there is one) like “Holocaust-Denial” (a name given to some group of people believing in something), it has become a synonym for opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose–or morally to express opposition to! Thus, when I describe those who reject Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to him as “Shakespeare-Deniers,” I am (insanely) taken to mean that those I’m describing are evil as well as necessarily wrong. Now, I do think them wrong, and even think they are mostly authoritarians, albeit benign ones, but I use the term to mean, simply, “those who deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.”

Or I would if not having the grain of fellow-feeling that I have, and therefore recognizing that small compromises with my love of maximally-accurate use of words due to the feelings of those not as able to become disinterested as I am may sometimes be wise. Hence, I nearly always call Shakespeare-Deniers the term they seem to prefer: “Anti-Stratfordians.” But I have now taken to call those that Anti-Stratfordians call “Stratfordians,” “Shakespeare-Affirmers.

(Note: now I have to add “disinterested” to be list of killed words, for I just checked the Internet to be sure it was the word I wanted here, and found that the Merriam Webster dictionary online did have that definition for it, but second to its definition as “uninterested!” Completely disgusting. Although, for all I know, my definition for it may be later than the stupid one; if so, it just means to me that it was improved, and I’m not against changing the language if the improvement is clearly for the better as here–since “disinterested” as “not interested” doesn’t do the job any better than “uninterested,” and can be used for something else that needs a word like it, and will work in that usage more sharply without contamination by vestiges of a second, inferior meaning.)

Of course, to get back to the word my main topic, “denial,” means the act of denial, and indicates only opposition, not anything about the intellectual validity or moral correctness of it. Except in the pre-science of psychology where it means, “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.” I accept such a mechanism, but would prefer a better term be used for it. For me it is a probably invariable component of a rigidniplex. Hey, I already have a name for it: “uncontradictability.”

No, not quite. It seems to me it is a mechanism automatically called into action against certain kinds of contradiction: facts that contradict the core-axiom of a rigidniplex, directly or, more likely, eventually. Maybe “rigdenial,” (RIHJ deh ny ul)? For now, at any rate. Meaning; rigidnikal denial of something (usually a fact or the validity of an argument) due entirely to its threatening, or being perceived as a threat to) one’s rigidniplex, not its validity (although it could be true!).

When I began this entry, I planned just to list some of the kinds of what I’m now calling “rigdenial” there are, preparatory to (much later, and somewhere else) describing how it works according to knowlecular psychology. I seem to have gotten carried away, and not due to one of the opium or caffeine pills I sometimes take. I’ve gotten to my list now, though. It is inspired by my bounce&flump with Paul Crowley, who sometimes seems nothing but a rigdenier.

Kinds of Rigdenial

1. The denied matter is a lie.

2. The denied matter is the result of the brainwashing the person attacking the rigidnik with it was exposed to in his home or school

3. The denied matter is insincere–that is, the person attacking the rigidnik with it is only pretending to believe it because the cultural establishment he is a part of would take his job away from him, or do something dire to him like call him names, if he revealed his true beliefs.

4. The denied matter lacks evidentiary support (and will, no matter how many attempts are made to demonstrate such support: e.g., Shakespeare’s name is on a title-page? Not good enough, his place of residence or birth must be there, too. If it were, then some evidence that that person who put it there actually knew Shakespeare personally is required. If evidence of that were available, then court documents verifying it signed by a certain number of witnesses would be required. Eventually evidence that it could not all be part of some incredible conspiracy may be required.

5. The denied matter has been provided by people with a vested interest in the rigidnik’s beliefs being invalidated.

6. The denied matter is obvious lunacy, like a belief in Santa Claus.

7. The rigidnik has already disproved the denied matter.

8. The person advancing the denied matter lacks the qualifications to do so.

9. The rigidnik, as an authority in the relevant field finds the denied matter irrelevant.

10. The rigidnik interprets the meaning of the words in a denied text in such a way as to reverse their apparent meaning. (a form of wishlexia, or taking a text to mean what you want it to rather than which it says)

11. One form of rignial (as I now want to call it) is simple change-of-subject, or evasion.

12. Others.

I got tired. Some of the above are repetitious, some don’t belong, others have other defects. Almost all of them are also examples of illogic. But the list is just a start. I’ll add more items to it when next facing Paul–who has a long rejoinder to the post I just had here.

Posted in Crankery, Language-Use, Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

Entry 1744 — An Organization for Culturateurs

March 6th, 2015

First something from a comment I made yesterday at HLAS when some wack brought up the quotation from Emerson cranks and others who can’t argue well love:

Emerson is a hero of mine, and I love “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” But “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall,” is insanely stupid–the way the writings of Foucault and the other French literary critics whose idiocy has dominated academic literary criticism in the US for so long are. Perfect consistency is probably not possible, but maximal consistency–ULTIMATELY–is what all the largest minds try their best to end in, even Emerson, even if he might not have been aware of it in his need to be allowed to say anything he wanted to purely on the basis of how much he liked it rather than on the basis of how much reality it reflected.

“With consistency a philogusher (lover of gush) has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” Grumman, 5 March 2015

Better the shadow of himself he sees on the wall than one of himself that he sees on the side of a hairy green & purple unicorn eating marmalade in a thunderstorm on the moon.

–Bob G. Hmm, I realize decades too late that I should have been signing myself “Bobb” rather than just “Bob.”

As for the “organization for culturateurs, it’s “The Academy of American Culturateurs.” It does not yet exist, nor is it likely it ever will, at least not as anything more than an organization with just one member, ME. I like the idea of it. Its members would consist of all the culturateurs in America. My definition of culturateur being “a person who makes a meaningful contribution to the culture of his time, that being either the arts, verosophy or technology,” and my definition of “meaningful” being at the level of Beethoven’s or Wagner’s to music, or Cummings’s to poetry (i.e., not the equivalent of simply composing great music or poetry but of also contributing something importantly new to one’s field),” its membership would not be large. It would, of course, exclude anyone who had ever been rewarded in any significant way for his accomplishments by any of the country’s cultural establishments–a Pulitzer, say, or MacArthur grant. Even a Guggenheim fellowship. Okay, maybe this would keep one or two deserving culturateurs out whom some establishment had accidentally recognized as a mediocrity but the rule would be right too often not to use it.

Posted in Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

Entry 1743 — Hillary Clinton’s Latest Scandal

March 5th, 2015

As I have frequently said, I hate politics and wish I could totally ignore it. I’ve managed to keep it out of this blog most of the time, but wish I’d kept it completely out of it. Nonetheless, today–again for lack of anything else to post–I am reacting to a bit of political news making the rounds in conservative Internet circles: Hillary Clinton’s illegal non-governmental email system.

Here’s a quotation from Jim Geraghty’s conservative newsletter about it: “ABC News political director Rick Klein said he was at a loss to come up with an innocuous explanation for Hillary’s ‘home-brewed’ system. There is no innocuous explanation. The whole point of it was to create an e-mail system that Hillary and her team would control completely, that would be beyond the range of federal record-keeping rules and laws and beyond the range of FOIA requests. If any message seemed embarrassing, politically inconvenient, or incriminating, she could erase it, and rest assured it was gone forever, beyond the reach of any investigator, FOIA request, or subpoena.”

I’m no fan of Hillary’s, but in this instance I’m on her side. I oppose sunshine laws. Politicians, and everyone else, in a free country, would be allowed to meet and discuss things in private. Let the voters vote for or against them on the basis of the laws they favor and oppose, and vote for and against, who cares why. Here’s my most horrible thought: if a politician promotes some law I favor, or–more likely–works to repeal some law I hate, I don’t care if he is doing so because bribed to. In fact, I have nothing against bribery since those with the most are more likely to be right than those with less.

Okay, that would only be true in an economically much more free country than ours is where making money depended on how good your product was, not in how good you were at getting the government to make laws against your competitors, or grant subsidies to you, etc. Not, in other words, based on the kinds of legal briberies so widespread now.

To get back to the sunshine laws. The main thing about them that bothers me is how inhibiting it would be to know that you are in effect revealing all your relevant thoughts to everyone whenever you try to work what you think should be done about something your office is in charge. Plus the extreme difficulty (I should think) of finding out what others think.

It makes me thing of the ridiculous hate laws, which are developing into laws against saying anything that a hyperoffendable finds demeaning or negative in any way. One of the books I’ve always wanted to write but never will would be a defense–nay, a celebration–of anger.

As for sunshine laws, I also dislike them simply because they are laws, but mostly because I am a zealot about freedom of speech, which I think should be total. In other words, it should include the freedom of silence and concealment. I should be able to say anything I want to–and say it privately if I want to. And say nothing if I want to. No fifth amendment right but the absolute right to say, “that’s none of your business.”

I’m over 500 words so ending this minor rant. It ain’t likely I’ll say anything of consequence. But I may be the first one utterly to oppose sunshine laws. No, I can’t believe no one else has, but I don’t keep up with stuff like that. An irony of my being against them is that I probably reveal more vile things about myself than about anybody. But that’s mainly because this blog is so private. I guess. Actually, if ten million people suddenly began reading my entries, they’d probably stay the same. Mainly because I’m no longer young enough for it to make any difference to me what others think of me.

Oh, one thing that is against Hillary is that she broke her contract with the government since using the government’s email system for all her government-related emails was part of it. I lean toward breaking stupid laws, though. Too bad she didn’t have me working for her: I’d have had a censor letting emails that were innocuous go to her private email system and to her government system, but only questionable ones going to the former. If Hillary could find a way to finance it, I’d hire experts to revise the questionable ones and put the revisions into the government system before sending the originals to the private system.
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Entry 1742 — A New Page & More Crowley

March 4th, 2015

Here’s the link to what will become but is not yet The Runaway Spoon Press Homepage. You can also get to it toward the bottom of the entries to the right under “Pages.” I hope eventually to have a table of contents from which you can click to any of the authors of works my press has published and read about their Runaway Spoon Press books and see samples of the work in them. (Thanks to Karl Kempton for the good suggestion to create it.)

* * *

And here I am, finishing my latest “discussion” with Paul Crowley (which, who knows why, I failed to post yesterday although it was ready to post):

PART TWO of Bob Contra Paul
> > Why do almost all those that have encountered it, consider it
> > insane?
>
> They ‘know’ that the poems were written by an
> illiterate, who had illiterate parents and illiterate
> children.

Why does almost everyone with any knowledge of Shakespeare who has encountered this assertion of yours consider it insane?

> > Oh, and why have you presented no valid argument against
> > MY interpretation of Sonnet 18 as a comparison between a
> > summer’s day and the poem’s addressee, which ends with the
> > idea that the poem has made the addressee immortal?
>
> Because it’s not disputable. That’s how it was
> meant to read — especially for people incapable
> of seeing any more.
>
Not so. My interpretation of the sonnet is that it is a comparison of a summer’s day to the sonnet’s addressee, etc,, AND NOTHING ELSE. My arguments for the “nothing else” include my subjective opinion that your subjective interpretations of various locution and passages in the sonnet are invalid; that there are no other poems in the English language that do what you say this one does (except, for you, others of Shakespeare’s poems; that your interpretation requires the sonnet’s author to be someone a huge amount of direct evidence says was not its author; that it is my subjective view, which I share with many others, including poets and critics of note, that the sonnet is a superior example of lyric poetry as we interpret it, and would be debased by the kind of sub-text you find conceal in it, but severely disturbing its tone and breaking its unity and tangling its readers up in childishly stupid word-games.

(Note: Paul believes puns and other word-games, once solved, reveal the poem to be addressed to Queen Elizabeth and concern Queen Mary of Scots, and other nobles, during 1566, when its author, the Earl of Oxford, was 16!)

> > Why is it invalid for me to simply assert that all your attempts
> > to invalidate my interpretation are too inept to count as
> > arguments?
>
> Because I have never made any such attempts.

Good. Now I can say my interpretation completely explicates the poem because no one has proven it wrong, or even produced an argument against it.
>
> > Paul, you have no idea at all of how science, history, literary
> > criticism, the human mind and people work. You can’t just
> > gather facts and apparent facts and force them into a theory
> > you like, then assert that it is unarguably true because you
> > alone say it is.
>
> Every new statement in science, history, literary
> studies, etc., starts out that way. It’s up to the likes
> of you to point out where it goes wrong — if you can.

I can’t recall any new statement in science that started out with its author claiming it was true because he alone said it was. Nor do I know one that was wholly rejected by EVERYONE knowing of it, as your has so far been–unless you can produce someone will to say he accepts your interpretation as valid, or even more valid than any other.

> > What you really have to do is first write a detailed exposition
> > as to you methodology and why it is valid.
>
> I have, and there is nothing special. Read the
> words and phrases and check them against
> the events in (and during) the life of the poet
> which could have prompted them.

That’s not “nothing special.” What all competent explicators of poems do is read the text and figure out what they mean, checking a dictionary if necessary, and being on the look-out for figures of speech and literary allusions. If that doesn’t produce a plausible, unified of what the poem is saying, then one might study the poet’s life to see if there’s anything in it that the poem might relate to. However, we need know absolutely nothing about the author of Sonnet 18 fully to gain full normal appreciation of it as a poem–although appreciating it as a part of literary history or as an example of the human creative process or as an item out of the life of a known once-living human being or the like ius possible, too.

Your method is close to worthless, and has been classified as such by critics for close to a century as worthless.

> > You should also discuss how others determine authorship and
> > tell us why their methods, most of them greatly different from
> > yours, are flawed.
>
> There is — broadly — no difference. Everyone
> who studies the Sonnets asks ‘How do they
> relate to the life of the poet?’

No, they don’t. Most just read them. Many literary scholars, however, have a NON-LITERARY interest in them because they want to find out about their author. Your question, for them, comes after the question of what the sonnets are about and their evaluation as being so good that one wants to findout who their author was, if unknown, and anything else about they can.

> Strats come up with absurd crap such as that the line ‘from
> hate away she threw’ puns on ‘Hathaway’. And that’s the sole thing they can get to ‘match’

Actually, it makes a better match than anything you’ve come up with for Oxford. But Stratfordians, as you seem unwilling to reveal, have found a much better match, the passage, “My name is Will.”

> from the 154 Sonnets! There could hardly be
> better proof that they have the wrong guy. Marlites don’t do any better, and likewise for
> Baconians and the rest. Sabrina does not
> try, AFAIR.

I think Sabrina does in her second book, which is mainaly about Sackville. But DOZENS of people have found all kinds of things in the sonnets that they think reveal the personwho wrote them, and that includes a lot who think Shakespeare wrote them. Rowse comes to mind.

Here’s Wikipedia on Rowse and the sonnets:

Rowse’s “discoveries” about Shakespeare’s sonnets amount to the following:

The Fair Youth was the 19-year-old Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, extremely handsome and bisexual.
The sonnets were written 1592–1594/5.
The “rival poet” was the famously homosexual Christopher Marlowe.
The “Dark Lady” was Emilia Lanier. His use of the diaries of Simon Forman, which contained material about her, influenced other scholars.

Christopher Marlowe’s death is recorded in the sonnets.
Shakespeare was a heterosexual man, who was faced with an unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.

Rowse was dismissive of those who rejected his views, but he did not make such assertions without supplying reasons. In the case of Shakespeare, he emphasized heterosexual inclinations by noting that Shakespeare had managed to get an older woman pregnant by the time he was 18, and was consequently obliged to marry her. Moreover, he had saddled himself with three children by the time he was 21. In the sonnets, Shakespeare’s explicit erotic interest lies with the Dark Lady; he obsesses about her. Shakespeare was still married and therefore carrying on an extramarital affair.

Frankly, I thought Rowse was a jerk. Imagine my chagrin when I found out just now that I also believe “Shakespeare was a heterosexual man, who was faced with an unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.” I also lean toward the ascription of Southampton as the fair youth. Sabrina gives a good argument for that: there is a line in one of the sonnets about how the author has NAMED the fair youth in his writings, and the only person Shakespeare ever named was Southampton, in his dedications to his narrative poems.

> The Oxfordian PT merchants are just as bad —
> generally ‘reading’ each Sonnet and asserting
> that it matches some crazy scheme that (for no
> good reason) they have decided is appropriate. Whittemore decides (for no reason in particular)
> that the poet wrote one Sonnet a week while his
> son (Wriothesley) was in prison, starting at #1
> and ending at #154. He ‘matches’ them week
> by week. Alan Tarica (another PT nut) decides
> (for no particular reason) that the Sonnets were
> written in reverse order. So he starts with #154
> and works backwards to #1. https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/
>
> These schemes (and all others) require that you
> ignore the words of the Sonnet, merely claiming
> that each one says what you vaguely think it
> vaguely ought to say.

So you assert, Paul, but your opponents are as convinced that they are right as you are that you’re right.

> >> So all you have to do is show that (a) Sonnet 18
> >> could _just_as_well_ have been written for the
> >> Battle of Hastings, or the Siege of Troy — or any
> >> historical episode that you care to select OR
> >> (b) finding some other sonnet or poem that could
> >> _just_as_well_ fit the events at the court of Mary
> >> Queen of Scots around February and March 1566.
> >
> > It exactly fits both the battle of Hastings, and the Australians
> > conquering of Atlantis in 9,456 B.C. because “so long” is
> > used twice in it, and salami was the chief food of both the
> > Australians and the Chinese who fought in the Battle of
> > Hastings.
>
> Yeah. yeah. Deep criticism.

You can’t refute it.

> >> IF my reading is false, either of those courses would
> >> be easy. Look at some really bad readings of the
> >> Sonnets — such as from Hank Whittemore or from
> >> Jim F. in this newsgrouip or from any Strat perfesser.
> >> Anyone could readily take one of their ‘interpretations’
> >> of a particular poem and show that it is so shallow
> >> that it could apply to almost any text or any occasion
> >> OR (b) when they do get into some kind of detail,
> >> showing that it bears little relation to either the
> >> words of the text or the facts of history, or both.
> >
> > Your confidence in your interpretation is entirely subjective.
>
> No. Part of it comes from the purely rhetorical
> nature of the ‘objections’ that I get from you and
> others.

Sure. Nothing we say is of any substance, How do you know? Because you have examined what we’ve said and found it to have no substance. That doesn’t work in real scholarly pursuits, Paul.

> > To assert it is right will not make it right for anyone but you.
>
> It’s your total inability to present sensible arguments
> against it that is so convincing.

Ah, “my TOTAL inability.” Odd that I’ve never met anyone who was totally unable to present ANY sensible arguments against my views. How can you believe your argument to be so exquisitely perfect that no one can present a sensible argument against it. But a sane person would know, for instance, that the fact that in more than one sonnet their author calls his addressee “a boy” is a sensible argument that the addressee is a boy. An assertion that the author is joking, if accepted, would defeat the argument, but NOT make it not sensible. To get the assertion accepted, though, evidence for it would be useful, and you have none. Only your recognition that your delusional system would fall apart if if were false.

> >>> Showing it impossible would be impossible.
> >>

I suspect that I took the word, “impossible,” from you.”

> >> Your rigidnikry again. In effect, ‘highly unlikely’ in
> >> this context means ‘impossible’. For example,
> >> there is no reasonable likelihood that Mamillius
> >> (in Winter’s Tale) represents Raleigh (which is
> >> what you or someone said was Richard Malim’s
> >> claim) — for the reasons I gave yesterday.
> >> Mamillius was royal and immediate heir to the
> >> throne. Raleigh was a low-born cad — in the view
> >> of every courtier of Elizabeth, especially in that
> >> of the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Here again you put one of your main flaws as a thinker on view, Paul: you fail to recognize how various people are. It is quite likely that Raleigh, who made quite a name for himself, and was an important member of an intellectual group Marlowe and Spenser were part of, so he must have had SOME friends. He may even at times been Oxford’s friend. He was Elizabeth’s at times. And Oxford could have only pretended to like him during a time when Raleigh’s star was ascending. Friendships can change from day-to-day. You weren’t there.

Note: he has a much higher reputation today than Oxford among non-Oxfordians. In fact, your denigration of him is ridiculous.

> [..] (Paul’s snip)

> > First of all, Paul, you are arguing that a fictional character
> > represents someone else. You have to show why the
> > character is not entirely fictional. You don’t.
>
> Of course I do. Hamlet’s mini-play “The Mousetrap”
> was supposedly fictional. But we all know — as King
> Claudius also sees — that it wasn’t Many in that court
> could have shown it wasn’t ‘entirely fictional’ by
> pointing out the parallels between King Claudius and
> the actions depicted in the mini-play/. They were too
> many and too close to have been there by chance.

Very direct parallels but the only direct evidence we have that the play was supposed to be about a real event is that Hamlet tells us it is. Who tells us Hamlet is really about Oxford? As for the parallels, there are many parallels between Hamlet and the life-stories of other besides Oxford, including King James, and there are many differences between Hamlet and each of them, which you ignore.

There is also NO document indicating that anyone took any of Shakespeare’s plays to be about the real court of the time.

Aside from that, the convincing parallels are between Hamlet and its source.

> Likewise for Sonnet 18, or for Viola being Raleigh,
> or for Elizabeth being ‘the Phoenix’ and Oxford ‘her
> Turtle’ or for the numerous other parallels. You
> dodge every challenge to deny them — resorting to
> rhetoric and other crap ‘arguments’.

You have no direct evidence of any of that. I can’t remember my arguments against Raleigh as a girl, but I’ve repeated a few of my Sonnet 18 arguments, and they are not “rhetoric” or crap arguments, unless I agree to let you be sole judge of the matter, which makes the debate irrelevant. You need just publish your findings, and in a preface tell the reader that you’ve examined everything you’ve said in your book and found it to be correct, so they have no reason to doubt any of it. Just to make sure they accept your findings, add that no one has ever refuted any of them or even present a sensible argument against them.

I believe it was Copernicus’s failure to do this that kept his ideas from being universally accepted for so long. It makes science and related disciplines So much easier.

> >>> Why should we have more works in his name?
> >>
> >> Good authors are not common. When someone
> >> demonstrates good writing skills, we’d expect to
> >> see them employed.
> >
> > You’re missing my point: I’m assuming that if Sackville was the
> > True Author, we’d only have work from him in his front’s name,
> > not from him, as because the case, you claim, for Oxford.
>
> In practice, the most difficult part of any anti-
> Stratfordian case is to demonstrate the WHY
> and the HOW such ‘an extensive’ cover-up was
> mounted. Many Oxfordians fail in the respect
> (as a result of adopting far too many Stratfordian
> assumptions) and, in desperation, they fall back
> on PT crapology. Most non-Oxfordians don’t even
> bother to try — since they know they have no case.
> For example, Sabrina dodges every question
> about HOW and WHY. With the monarch and her
> successor providing the backing, it’s very easy to
> see how it worked. Without the monarch, and
> her successor, it’s near-impossible. But Marlites,
> Baconians, Sabrina and PT theorists rarely allow
> for the interests of the monarchy and its presence
> in the cover-up.

Don’t you realize that you asked why we have no late works from Sackville as we should have if he were a great author, and I told you why–we did, but they were in his front’s name. You couldn’t let yourself admit that you had lost that argument, so jumped into a different argument against Sackville.

Sabrina’s answer makes sense to me: it is that Sackville did not want to his authorship known. So it didn’t become known. The court had nothing to do with it.

We have no strong reason not to accept that Sackville was simply odd. You simply can’t understand that anyone might behave differently from the single way you think he would. But how about a great author who suddenly becomes so bored with what he’s been doing, or becomes depressed due to an endocrinological problem related to old age, and stops thinking his life’s work has any value. Did you know that Groucho Marx as an old man once view one of the greatest of the Marx Brothers films and said he could figure out why anyone thought it was funny?

Anyway, the beauty of Sackville’s not caring about posterity is that it greatly simplifies the Great Hoax. Just a few people knew The Truth while Sackville was alive, and within a decade or two of his death no one any longer did. And there would have been no need to leave fatuously silly “clues” for posterity. Just about everything could be taken as above board.

> If Sabrina provides no indication of the HOW
> and the WHY, then there is no point in bothering
> with her theory. It’s not got off the ground.

Her WHY is the standard “stigma of print” for noble authors. She argues it better than other anti-Stratfordians have, it seems to me. You should buy her book and study it. I’d be surprised if there were nothing in it you could use.

Her HOW is far more elegant than yours: Sackville simply wanted to write plays for the public theatre and did so anonymously until he met Shakespeare, a second-rate playwright who had priated a play of Sackville’s and rewritten it as his. Sackville saw how well he could conceal his identity if he let the Stratford hack continue taking credit for his plays. Sabrina allows just a few others to be in on the secret, including Jonson.

I think it would be very difficult for you to find anything wrong with it except the flaws I find as a Stratfordian in it which you could not accept because they work as well against Oxford as against Sackville. For instance, the stigma of print. You can’t refute it for Sackville without refuting it for Oxford. And the absence of direct evidence works the same way against all anti-Stratfordian candidates, so can’t be used. Etc.

I do know you think Oxford had to conceal himself because of how damaging his plays would be taken to be if known to be by a noble, expecially one as high up as Oxford. I don’t think Sabrina uses this argument for her man, but she could.

Whew, I got through your whole post.
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Entry 1741 — Arguing Against a Crank, Again

March 3rd, 2015

Today I felt too tired (although I’d had a decent night’s sleep, for me–over six hours), to do anything after just a little over an hour of tennis (doubles, which isn’t that demanding), and–earlier–my set of exercises which now take me about a half-hour, and a run of about a mile and two-thirds, very slowly. After lunch, though, I came into my computer room to at least post something here. As a warm-up, I got involved in the SAQ (Shakespeare Authorship Question), which is probably my most insane hobby, especially when it involved my Primary Opponent, Paul Crowley, as it often does, and did this time.

As I was bouncing along giving as good as I got (I think) I began wondering what I was getting out of my interaction with Paul. Hey, I thought, I spend so much time getting nowhere with Paul in order to find out why I spend so much time getting nowhere with Paul.

I’m sort of serious here. One thing I’m trying to do is work out a definitive analysis of crankery–and, it looks like–of counter-crankery, which is close to as insane. Another thought: that by studying a crank theory one gets a better idea of what I’d call a validiplex or sane understanding of some significant field, or significant portion of a field.

It’s a genuine sport for me, too–a chance to exercise my brain, with very little of importance in the balance. Finally, when I’m in a day that’s clearly going nowhere, I can shove what I’ve said to Paul into a blog entry like this one, hoping others may find it amusing, and at times interesting (because I sez profundities all the time, even to Paul!)

My ado out of the way, here’s the latest episode of the Bob ‘n’ Paul show:

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 8:21:04 AM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> >> That’s just not the way they were thinking. They
> >> (entirely justifiably) believed that as soon as anyone
> >> looked properly at Stratford and it environs, and at
> >> the nature of the Stratman, and his background,
> >> those investigators would forget any possibility that
> >> he could have written a poem, let alone any of the
> >> great works.
> >
BOB:They were extremely mistaken, which suggests they were not
> > very intelligent, after all.
>
PAUL: It’s very easy to underestimate stupidity, and
> very hard to predict the future. Also they did not
> grasp the extent to which ignorant uneducated
> low-class people (editor’s note: Paul does not
> consider himself any kind of snob) delighted in the idea that a
> great writer could emerge from their own ranks.

BOB: Many educated and even upper-class people went along with it. Aside from that, there are many ways of arranging things so as to pretty much insure that the Truth would be revealed in much less time that it has taken–for instance.

You simply assume that a perfect hoax was easy except for making sure Oxford got proper credit within a reasonable time, which was impossible, and impossible even for the geniuses carrying out the hoax to realize. Because you say so. You have no direct documentary evidence of such a hoax whatsoever.

> >> My statement that “Sonnet 18 was written in
> >> London in (or close to) April 1566″ is a very simple
> >> factual one. IF it was false (and if the supporting
> >> arguments were erroneous) then it would be very
> >> easy to demonstrate the falsity.

BOB: It is false for probably at least a hundred reasons, but impossible for you to accept any of these reasons as even arguments. For instance, Shakespeare’s name, not Oxford’s, is on Sonnet 18, but that’s not an argument against your theory because the name was a lie–according to you, although there’s no direct evidence that you are right. Oxford, who you say wrote Sonnet 18, was only 16 at the time, although the sonnet can be shown to have been (1) far superior to any poem Oxford was known to have written; (2) far superior to any poem known to have been written by a 16-year-old; and (3) equal to the best of the works of its author when he was surely a much older man, as well as far better than other works of its author when he was surely older.

There is also the literary history of the period concerning how the poets of the time influenced each other, which would have to be scrapped if Oxford wrote Sonnet 18 in 1566. This literary history is subjective, but based on a huge number of facts about the times, and about the way creative poets work. You merely assert that those who have contributed to this history are incompetents.

It occurs to me to ask you why they are incompetents–besides the fact that they refuse to accept Oxford as Shakespeare. Granted, from your point of view, that is an insane mistake, although there is no direct evidence that ought to make a competent scholar accept that Oxford was Shakespeare. But what else? Did they get the English victory over Spain right? Were they right about Francis Drake? Were they right that Spenser wrote the Faery Queene? Possibly not. It seems to me, as a dabble in your thinking, that you consider them COMPETENT wherever their reasoning matches yours. So you probably consider their thinking about Jonson correct, except regarding Jonson’s Shakespeare-related writings.

My problem is that the more I think about your scenario, the more incredibly complex it becomes–without leaving any direct evidence that things were as you say. Take Lyly, for example–credited with important novels and plays influencing Shakespeare, but for you a front man for Oxford–or was he just a mediocre writer that Oxford helped? Greene was fictitious, although many other writers wrote about him. Marlowe probably fictitious. The whole literary history of the times was, according to your scenario, much less like the experts in the period say it was than the Christian fundamentalists idea of biology is like Darwin’s.

You really should carefully write up your history of England from 1530 or so until 1630. Why won’t you? You shouldn’t want someone like me to give my version of it. And you have no followers who would do it for you. The HLAS archives might be lost–and even if not, the material there by you would be hard to organize.

PAUL explains his method of determining what a poem means:
> >> The question is something like “Does this piece of
> >> this jigsaw fit this gap?” — when it’s a complicated
> >> shape, with many patterns on the piece in question
> >> and in that part of the picture of the jigsaw. You can
> >> disprove the matching by (a) showing that such a
> >> piece could readily go elsewhere, OR
> >> (b) showing that there were many other pieces that
> >> would fit the gap as well.
> >
BOB: If this is so, why do no other attribution scholars use your
> > procedure in determining authorship?
>
PAUL: There is nothing exceptional in what I do. If you
> come across an unsigned letter, you identify
> who wrote it by linking some person to the acts
> and circumstances mentioned.

BOB: Shakespeare’s works were signed.
>
PAUL: Whereas most ‘attribution scholars’ are looking at
> works they see as completely non-autobiographical

BOB: How can you keep saying that, Paul? What you MUST say as a sane literary investigator is that “most ‘attribution scholars’ are looking at works they see as NOT SUFFICIENTLY autobiographical TO BE MUCH HELP IN IDENTIFYING THEIR AUTHOR.” Actually, however, attribution scholars are making no effort to identify the author of Shakespeare’s works. You’re speaking of what might be called ‘attribution-defenders.’ As one of them, I say that (1) the hard evidence for Shakespeare, a man known to have lived at the right time in the right place to have written the Shakespearean Oeuvre, is sufficient for him to be taken as their author insomuch as there is no direct evidence against him, so we need not bother trying to relate his life to his works; (2) we know too little about his life to relate it in any kind of detail to his works; (3) his works, except the sonnets, are clearly not based on their author’s life–e.g., he didn’t become bewitched in an Athenian forest by a faery named Puck.

PAUL: and they are trying to pick up clues from style and
> word-usage. They would be only a small part
> of my interest.

BOB: It’s the only part that is in any way scientific, and–however flawed now–will almost surely settle the matter eventually. (Paul elsewhere had claimed that literary history is just as scientific as anything else, including physics. Hence, if his theory was wrong, I should be able easily to scientifically dismantle it, which–needless to say–I can’t.)

BOB: Why do no historians use your methods in determining what
> > happened at various points in history?
>
PAUL: Of course they do. They study the documents of the
> day, and glean what they can about the interests
> and motivations of the people involved. So they
> often change their minds on people like Richard III,
> or Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Moore.

BOB: Do they decide certain prominent figures were fictitious, or as good as fictitious the way you believe Shakespeare (the owner of New Place, according to the deed to that property), was? How much of what they say can they claim is objectively true the way in chemistry its true that a base plus an acid will yield (in normal conditions) a salt and water?
>
> > BOB: Why does no one agree that your interpretation of the sonnets is correct?
>
>PAUL: Like you, they have not put in the work.

BOB: How is that a good dodge considering that you can re-use it indefinitely? (I am sure, by the way, that I’ve put more work into Sonnet 18 than you have. I am also sure that many who have written complete books on the sonnets, which you have not, have done at least as much work on them as you. They just don’t realize that all who have preceded them in their field have been incredibly wrong about who, when and where the sonnets were written and what they really mean–have, in short, taken them to be poems like all poems except for their details, and not the new kind of literature you think Oxford invented, the mixture of confession/personal philosophy/autobiography/journalism/gossip/who-knows-what disguised as world class lyrical poetry and verse plays.

HERE I decided to stop, although possibly more than halfway through Paul’s post.
.

Posted in Paul Crowley, Shakespeare Authorship Question | No Comments »

Entry 1740 — Of Meaning & Meaningfulness

March 2nd, 2015

I think a lot of gush and counter-gush in philosophical discussions has been caused by the use of the word, “meaning,” to mean two different things: (1) a description of a named entity in material reality that relates it to one or more named and defined entities in material reality in such a way that a person knowing the language its name is part of will, upon hearing or reading that name, be able to distinguish it from what it is not—by pointing to it on a table or the equivalent; and (2) a description of some real or alleged function of a real or unreal named entity that allows the entity to carry out or contribute to the carrying out of some mission important to whoever defines it as having this kind of meaning.

I’m satisfied with my definition of the first meaning of “meaning,” but consider my definition of the second meaning rough. The following examples should help clarify it:

Keats’s bust of Shakespeare had a great deal of meaning for him for reminding him of the possibilities of poetry. That is, the function of the bust was its help in encouraging him to follow Shakespeare’s lead as a poet.

The New Testament has a great deal of meaning for a sincere Christian for reminding him that Jesus died to allow him a chance for Heaven–i.e., its function (or one of its many functions) is to remind a Christian that immortality is possible.

Winning the first world series game has special meaning for a baseball manager because winning the first game in the other team’s ballpark gives a team an advantage, and winning it in one’s own ballpark prevents the other team from having an advantage–i.e. winning the first game regardless of where played has the function of increasing a team’s chance of winning the series (in addition to the advantage an victory will have.

Each time I list one of these “meanings,” it is plain to me that the word I should be using is not “meaning,” but “meaningfulness.” So my simple insight concerning the meaning of “meaning,” is that the second meaning should be junked. The main place it crops up is in the phrase “life’s meaning.” I maintain that “life’s meaning” should be, simply, “a state of being certain entities in material reality possess which allows the entity to move of its own volition, and in other ways act as living organisms in accordance with the latest scientific understanding of the state,” not “life’s purpose.” If you want to discuss the latter, the correct term should only be “life’s meaningfulness.”

And the question central to much of philosophy should be, “What gives life meaningfulness? not what gives life meaning? Linguistics with the aid of biology gives the word, “life,” its only proper meaning, a meaning that it is important to point out is objectively-arrived at, because based solely (for the rational) on the material attributes of the state of being the word, “life,” represents. (I’m ignoring the inexpressible intangibles those who believe in the existence of immaterial entities or substances consider part of life’s state of being as irrelevant because either non-existent or existent but not material, so incapable of having any effect on anything.)

There, another attempt to form a minor understanding of an over-rated question without great success. But if I’ve only gotten a few people to use “meaning” only in its linguistic sense, never in its philogushistic sense, I’ll be happy.

Posted in Linguistics, Philosophy | No Comments »

Entry 1739 — In the Eurekan Zone

March 1st, 2015

I often write here about being in my null zone, or almost in it. I guess I’ve mentioned a few times I’ve been in a good zone. I rarely mention being in a good zone, though: I’m too involved with more important things to. When I’m in my null-zone, though, I tend not to have anything else to write about. Anyway, a few minutes ago, I was getting all kinds of ideas. I was feeling energetic and enthusiastic. It was like I felt for about an hour while writing about the rigidniplex. Ergo, I should call where I was the “eurekan zone.”

I was not in it for long, not wholly in it for long. I feel mentally in it at the moment, but physically in the null zone, and in a so-so mood. My mood may be good enough to allow me to take care of the entry–if I can remember any of the ideas I had.

One was simply my counter to something I read in the latest issue of The New Criterion about how foolish so many thinkers were for believing that “a hard science of human affairs has been or soon will be achieved.” I think a poor hard science of human affairs has been achieved, and that neurophysiological understandings will eventually make it equal as a science to chemistry in hardness, especially once academics are aware of my theory ( . . . I hope).

Gary Saul Morson, the writer whose words I quoted against the notion of hard science because if political science were a hard science, there would be no room for reasonable doubt for the same reason there is no room for reasonable doubt about most aspects of chemistry. I find this no problem because (1) however hard a science is, it will never be complete, so there will always be important differences of opinion.

ns about aspects of it; and (2) the axioms chosen to base a given hard science on will necessarily be a subjective matter, so squabbling at the roots of political science will always occur.

It may be exclusively the moral axioms of physical science that people will argue about, as they do now: for instance, which is better, a collectivist society or an individualistic one? Answer: it would depend on whom you ask. Security versus freedom. The first is better for certain people, the second better for others. Which is why our nation and others mix the two. But how much of either is the right mix will always be debatable.

* * *

I’m definitely out of my eurekan zone. While briefly in it, I coined a few new terms, as I tend to do when I feel at my best. One was “conclusory,” which consists of verosophical conclusions and the actions taken because of them. I was thinking about the many people involved in the sciences who are not seeking important understandings of anything but using the conclusions such understandings lead to as the basis of technological accomplishments. But that would mean they are working in technology, so “conclusory” is not needed.

“Techthetics” was my word for the equivalent field in Art. It would be for the technological use of art for decoration. I was trying to differentiation those artists who advance their art from mere “techthetists” who just use received art to make salable paintings that go nowhere man has not been before. But the umbrella term “technology” covers such people as readily as it covers those whose field is applied science. So, good-bye “techthetics.”

* * *

Posted in Miscellaneous Thoughts | No Comments »

Poetry « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

Entry 1755 — Robert Frost

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

I use the same kind of reasoning to justify my contempt for the frequent declaration that all poems are political.

* * *

Posted in Poetry, Robert Frost | No Comments »

Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry, Poetry Lesson, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1752 — Break-Time

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

As for the lesson under way, I found the poem of mine that I thought, and am still pretty sure, was the first poem I wrote that, as I put it in Of Manywhere-at-Once, I thought anything of:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife              I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams.

* * *

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1751 — Lesson 1

Friday, March 13th, 2015

* * *

IF YOU WANT TO COMPOSE ANY KIND OF POETRY:

Dictum 1: READ POETRY!!!

(I’m tempted to end my first lesson there, but–heck–you’re all my good friends! I can’t cheat you.)

Dictum 3: WRITE POEMS!!!

* * *

Posted in Autobiographica, E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1750 — Found Original

Thursday, March 12th, 2015

Here’s the other:

Here’s something else from the Internet:

* * *

Posted in E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1749 — Lesson One Begins

Wednesday, March 11th, 2015

            sky's piecemeal white                                development down buildings'                            dark sides into                                   tr;af:fi,c.

* * *

Posted in E E Cummings, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1748 — A Different How-To Book

Tuesday, March 10th, 2015

            sky's piecemeal white                                development down buildings'                            dark sides into                                   tr;af:fi,c.

Posted in Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1648 — The Social Role of Poetry

Monday, December 1st, 2014

Today at NowPoetry, a message appeared with a link to two mediocrities writing about

The Social Role of Poetry Since Shelley

in the culturally retrograde (which I feel I have to mention because so many people don’t seem to be aware of it) NY Times. Its title alone inspired me to this:

Mine Dogma on this subject: The social role of poetry, and of the arts in general, is to convince the best of us that life is worth living by pin- pointing, and adding to, its beauty. This contributes to the greater good due to the increased creativity of the best in other areas than poetry it will result in, if effective.

While thinking about the question of social roles of vocations, I chuckled to think that I’ve never read anyone writing about the social role of pure mathematics. Surely not even the worst utilitarians would propose that it had one. But then I began to wonder if maybe it did, by adding a different kind of beauty to existence’s than the arts do. Pure mathe-matics at its best is a silent music. It’s a kind of minimalist music, music reduced not just to asensuality, but to something entirely cerebral.

A similar question that it’s amused me to ask at times is what the aesthetic role of politics is. Why shouldn’t it be required to have one by the kind of people who require poetry to have a social function?

Posted in Poetry | 2 Comments »

Kinds of Poetry « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Kinds of Poetry’ Category

Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry, Poetry Lesson, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1752 — Break-Time

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

As for the lesson under way, I found the poem of mine that I thought, and am still pretty sure, was the first poem I wrote that, as I put it in Of Manywhere-at-Once, I thought anything of:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife              I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams.

* * *

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1712 — Ground Hog Day

Monday, February 2nd, 2015

This morning, at 4:48 A.M., I turned 74. My Facebook Timeline is swamped with birthday greetings, which is very nice, but it bothers me that Mary Worth hasn’t yet wished me well on my day. The card below from Karl Kempton almost makes up for that, though:

I was delighted with this when I first looked at it. A gorgeous design, yes? After a moment with it, I realized that the message at the top was in code, and quickly decoded it, now doubly delighted, for I love codes. Moreover, this use of a code made Karl’s design not just a birthday card, but a veritable birthday poem! Karl had secreted his message in an underground that had allowed it to wend its way back into sight as little flowers, celebrating their secret message’s meaning! What’s more, the two lines of sheer garden swirled into a single, three-dimensional super-blossoming: I had been given a master-poem with three levels for my birthday.

Posted in Karl Kempton, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1709 — I Done A New Math Pome!!!!

Friday, January 30th, 2015

The following is an accident, whether a happy one or a disappointing one, who knows. What happened was that I was looking through my digital files for a poem for Bill Michele and came across the divisor and dividend of this one in a folder labeled, “Long Division Problems Worth Attacking.” I immediately wanted to attack it. What’s below is the result (so far–I’m not sure whether it needs more work or not):

I think I was in the mood to work on it because of my thinking about HSAM yesterday. It may be my first autobiographical long division poem. The only unauthentic thing in it is the divisor. Actually, they may well have been there, hard to imagine they would not have been. But they’re not in my memory of the episode. Extremely sentimental, yes? It’s very simple but perhaps still “difficult” for many . . . Will it nonetheless make me famous?

I’d sorta like to do more poems like it, but have no ideas for any yet.
.

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

Entry 1669 — “A Bukowski Poem”

Monday, December 22nd, 2014

Did too much busywork in my practiceptual awareness today to be able to provide anything more here than a poem of mine I just came across that was in Harry Burrus’s O!!Zone 98, one of a series of O!!Zones that featured a lot of good work, much of it at a higher level than my poem–which isn’t to say that my poem ain’t pretty good. I had been writing Poem poems by 1998, so am not sure why this one wasn’t one. Possibly I later put Poem into it. If not, I may yet.

A Bukowski Poem

Because it’s been nearly a
year since I last wrote
anything remotely like a poem I’ve
decided to try my
hand at just jotting down
what would be unpunctuated
agrammatical prose except
for its linebreaks what I
call a Bukowski Poem after its
inventor William Carlos O’Hara it might
be fun and who knows it
might also get me going
again or even turn out worth
while of itself in a minor
way as such poems can for
instance if after awkwarding
to the final drab of flatness you go
for just a little more like
say the alley side
of a North Hollywood delicatessen
awning just the way the shade’s
turned its red to rust
can by contrast bridegroom
a reader to oceanic
expansions at which point you
should end your poem unless you go
in for anti-climaxes which can
be effective too.

Posted in Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1666 — Back to Beining

Friday, December 19th, 2014

Here’s the latest image I got from Guy R. Beining:

It is part of a letter it grieves me to report on. He asks if I think I could sell works like it on my website, suggesting a price of $200 for this. I’d get a 33% commission on all sales. Gah. If I had any semblance of economic security, I’d buy this and four others sight unseen for $200 each. I grieve because I know I can’t sell anything here, at any price. I once offered 25 RASPbooks for $50 and Karl Kempton was the only one to buy a set (and he ain’t rich). No complaints, because I hardly ever buy anything of anyone else’s. Not only don’t I have the money to, but my concept-appreciation to ornament-appreciation (like the feel of hardened acylic, etc., even the size of an image) is much higher than most lovers of visimagery’s (i.e., “visual art”), so Internet access rather than physical ownership is enough for me in almost all cases.

Of course, I also grieve because Guy’s stuff should be in bigTime museums with articles in ARTnews about it. If he can’t get the recognition he deserves, who can? Or am I so out of it that I don’t see how much better New York stuff is than the above?

I wish I had time to really deal with the above critically, but the year is about to end, and I have so much to do! For instance, I still haven’t finished either of my next two columns for Small Press Review, and I’ve had full-length fairly decent rough drafts of both of them ready for a final attack for over a week. Wotta life.

Posted in collage, Guy R. Beining, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1652 — 2 Laxian Repeater-Stack Poems

Friday, December 5th, 2014

I was having a great time commenting on an article in yesterday’s issue of the online magazine, Aeon, then pasting my comments, with further comments into this entry when my computer managed to lose one of my comments at Aeon and everything I had written here–in spite of my having remembered twice to save what I had here. So I’m in a sour mood now, and just posted a poem I just composed followed by Marton Koppany’s preliminary Hungarian translation not of it, but of my first draft of it:

Note: according to the translator of my poem, a person’s first name in Hungarian is not first. I think that only half explains the problems with Hungarians, however. –BG

Posted in Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry, Marton Koppany, minimalist poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1651 — Another Wave Poem from Ed

Thursday, December 4th, 2014

Note: I have this listed in my blog categories as “Unclassifiable Poem.” However, every poem is classifiable: I just haven’t gotten around to classifying this one.

Note #2: A long time ago I could have read the math in the above and figured out what Ed’s poem is doing, but I have to confess I can’t now. But it’s doing enough simply as the juxtapositioning of physics at the college level and a haiku ambiance to work very nicely as a poem. I’m understanding this stone girl as the moon, by the way. Am thinking maybe she is in all of Ed’s poems about her, something I don’t remember thinking before. . . .

Posted in Ed Baker, Unclassifiable Poem | 1 Comment »

Entry 1650 — “one wave theory”

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014

Well, he’s proven it for good now: Ed Baker is more interestingly crazy than I am:

I, meanwhile, am determined to spend the day working on the definitive version of my theory of the innate etiological drive–which compels most of us to seek explanation.

Posted in Ed Baker, Unclassifiable Poem | 2 Comments »

Entry 1626 — Another from Karl Young

Sunday, November 9th, 2014

Yeah, I’m cheating here again, but with something good! The following is another specimen of Karl Young’s Clouds:

This seems to me exactly the kind of thing Ezra Pound did when at his best–but given a near-perfect visioaesthetic presentation.
,

Posted in Karl Young, visual poetry | No Comments »

sonnet « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘sonnet’ Category

Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry, Poetry Lesson, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1515 — Sonnet Revision

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

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

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

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

* * *

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

No poetry written after the year X is any good.

No poetry written before the year X is any good.

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

Posted in Literary Thoughts, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1022 — A Change to the Sonnet

Friday, February 22nd, 2013

See if you can find what I changed–then figure out why I thought it worth making (which I haven’t been able to do):

Sonnet from My Forties

Much have I ranged the luminous deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found

a realm to equal it. I’ve often been
as well to where the small dirt’s first grey steps
toward high-hued sensibility begin
in Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

of wing-swirled, myth-engendering pure light
that Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
that Pound re-morninged raucously to life,
and struggled fruitlessly to match their works.

Yet still, nine-tenths insane though it now seems,
I seek those ends, I hold to my huge dreams.

I think it may be that I consider it a slight improvement in the meter. I was trying to lower the poem’s adjective-count, but wasn’t able to.

Now, to make up for the sonnet, here is another visocollagic poem be Guy R. Beining from the Do Not Write In This Space anthology I recently got from its editor, Marshall Hryciuk:

It’s untitled, but here I’m calling it “Kulak” because I hate untitledness.

Palm Springs Hotels

Posted in Bob Grumman, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1021 — The Never-Finished Sonnet Again

Thursday, February 21st, 2013

I noticed versions of it during my latest visit to previous blog entries that made me want to yet again try to perfect it, although I no longer think it has a chance of being anything of value:

Sonnet from My Forties

Much have I ranged the luminous deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found

a realm to equal it. I’ve often been
as well to where the small dirt’s first grey steps
toward high-hued sensibility begin
in Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
that Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
that Pound re-morninged raucously to life,
and struggled fruitlessly to match their works.

Yet still, nine-tenths insane though it now seems,
I seek those ends, I hold to my huge dreams.

Yeah, too many adjectives, too gaudy. I wonder what Hopkins or Dylan Thomas would have made of it. At the moment I think it’s the best of my attempts, though. I doubt I’ll think that a year from now.

Brother HL 6050DN

Posted in Bob Grumman, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 824 — Critique, Continued

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

Here’s my sonnet, again, back for further dissection

Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.

The first question of the day is whether or not the “mis-used” words are virtues or defects. They are “miracled” and “synapsed,” two nouns used as verbs. The noun-to-verb change happens all the time in English, yet there seem still to be people peopling the outskirts of provincialism whom it dismays. Of course, when one comes on a noun that’s been used as a verb for the first time in the one’s experience, it is bound to seem slightly wrong. In a poem, though, no one should object to this practice if the object is freshness. Which it almost always is in my poems. Still, one can over-do it. Whether I have with these two, and with the later “re-morninged,” which is both a noun used as a verb and a word given an unexpected prefix. “Re-morninged” may be strained, but I like it (and used it in all my versions of this poem) because it is also a metaphor for the particular way Pound brought the past “to life again.”

Then there are my coinages, “lolli-skied,” which I’ve already discussed, and “underhue,” which may well not be a coinage. If a coinage, it uses “under” as a prefix the same way Wordsworth did, so I consider it a plus. (If I were an academic, I’d quote the passages where Wordsworth used it, but I’m not–’cause I got more important things to do.) Again, whether these are plusses or minuses is a to each his own proposition.

I’m not sure what “seem” and “are” are the way they are used here. Verbs as nouns, I guess–“seem” meaning “things as they seem,” “are,” “things as they are.” So, verbs as noun preceded by ellipses? In any case, they are appropriate here for indicating one constant theme of Stevens’s poetry, usually specifically with the difference between reality and our metaphors for it. On the other hand, “are” is inserted for the rhyme. It should be evident by the fourth line that I could have used fewer words, and sometimes shorter words, to say what I have, but didn’t because I had to have so many syllables per line, and get the meter right. The fourth line should be just “burned to found.” And “found” seems a bit of a strained effort to make a rhyme. Poets don’t “found” poetic worlds so much as “fashion,” “create,” or “form” them. Sometimes such a not-quite right word works beautifully, though–I’m thinking of Blake when he asked “who could frame” the “fearful symmetry of the tyger.

I remember, too, never liking the way “to” followed “too,” but I couldn’t think how elsewise to write that part. Lines 6 and 7 are downright bad due to the padding I’m speaking of “to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,/ and earthlife synapsed in the underhue . . .” This ultimately became, “to where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps/ toward high-hued sensibility begin . . .” which is superior (I believe) though not perfect because all four of the adjectives in first of the two lines adds something to the picture the dirt in spring using seeds to ascend to color (and “sensibility,” which I won’t defend here). Does such padding kill a poem? Not unless overdone, in formal verse, where I believe padding nearly always happens–but pays off in the best poems with in a smooth rhythm and rhyme (and rhyme is a wonderful thing, so what if great poems can eschew it). Does padding kill this poem? I frankly don’t know. Certainly “the fading fragments of the past,” wounds it, not only as padding but as cliche–i.e., fragments of the past are pretty sure to be “fading.”

I don’t remember if the version of this sonnet I consider the final one still “has “windily” in it. I wanted to refer to the brisk weather I thought rule many of Pound’s best poems, but “windily,” alas, also suggests the windy speaker that he too often was.

Finally, there’s the repetition of “How vain they’ve been,” which I confess was due to the need to fill out the line–although one can argue that it helps emphasize the strong feeling of the couplet it’s in. As I’ve said before, however, when I read this poem after not having read it for probably more than ten years, I did like it, not noticing the problems I’ve now found in it. I’m convinced it’s not a mjor poem, but it may not be a bad one.

Incidentally, I’ve not yet mentioned the poem’s subject. It is a simple, conventional one: the desire of a poet to write great poetry–with explicit praise to the side of three poets, and implicit praise of a fourth (Keats). I claim that no poem’s subject is important, unless it’s unclear or ridiculously stupid (e.g, raw toads taste better spread with peanut butter). It’s how the subject is treated that counts. What kind of monument to it does the poem’s words create? Most import for me has always been how well it gets an engagent to Manywhere-at-Once (which is where an effective metaphor takes you, but not only metaphors), how often, how deeply, and how richly. Oh, and archetypal depth is crucial for the best poems. This one has to do with its speaker’s needs for greatness, and that’s are archetypally significant as any subject can be.

I never bothered to mention my poems “melodation,” either. That’s what I call the many ways poems can give auditory pleasure: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, even cacophony in the right place; and meter. I claim that even poor poems usually have effective melodation. There’s always the danger of too much of one kind–alliteration, most commonly; and of cliche–in choice of rhymenants (which is what I call words that rhyme), for example, “love/above.” My sonnet avoids cliched rhyming through the use of my bow-rhymes, and I don’t think any of my melodations is overdone. Most of them, by the way, came naturally. I think few people who have composed enough poems think about melodation while making a poem: it just comes. Every once in a while, you may have to think about it when not sure which of two or more words is right for a line–usually one will make the best sense but not sound as well as a second.

Did anyone notice how I ran out of gas toward the end of the above. For a while yesterday I really thought this would turn into a Terrific Example of New Criticism at its Best. Oh, well, I don’t yet think it’s wretched.

Cheap Desktop Computers

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Entry 823 — A Lesson in Critiquing a Poem

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Here’s “Sonnet from my Forties, No. 2,” again:

Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.

How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.

I mentioned when I posted it two days ago that it had flaws. Struggling as almost always to find something to do a blog entry on, I thought of how good it would be to use as a lesson on critiquing poetry on. Good because it does have a lot of flaws to point out and comment on. It has a fair number of excellences, too, I must assert. A good critique will mention them, as well. What makes the poems much better than most poems for me to critique is that it’s mine. Hence, I probably know more about it than anybody else who might try to critique it. Much more important, I don’t have to worry that I’ll hurt its author’s feelings if I’m too rough on it: I know he doesn’t have any, and is too much of a jerk for it to matter if he did.

To start with, let me say that his rhyming is among the greatest virtues of his poem. Blockheads, of course, will have already given it thumbs down for having what they consider three near-rhymes. If it did, I would agree with them that they were defects, for my reactionary belief is that every line in a sonnet should rhyme with some other line, fully rhyme. Well, although “are/art,” “earth/urge” and “past/path” are not conventional full rhymes, their rhymnants rhyme as much as conventional rhymnants by the following logic: “are” is as close in sound to “art” and “are” is to “far.” In each case, one syllable is different in over-all sound from the syllable it rhymes with in one sound only, but the same in the other two syllables (and I take all syllables to have three sounds, including the ones which once or twice contain the sound of silence). Those claiming, as many opposed to my idea are, that “are”/”art” is just an alliteration are clearly wrong–as wrong as declaring “are”/”far” just a consonance. To my ear, the new kind of rhyme sounds as pleasantly echoic as the old. I can’t see any reason to disapprove of it than simply the fact that it’s different from received rhymes. Wilfred Owens’s “rim-rhymes,” as I named them many years ago, such as “blade/blood” and “flash/flesh,” which are from his “Arms and the Boy,” seems to have gained some acceptance but few poets are making much use of it. My impression, in fact, is that only poets using Dickinson near-rhymes as full rhymes, are–and I don’t think much of near-rhymes, though I do think some poets have used them quite well. (I always feel Dickinson used them because she couldn’t come up with a real rhyme rather than for some aesthetic reason. I’m not up to researching it, but I wonder if anyone hating what I’ve just said could see if he can find an instance of Dickinson’s using a near-rhyme when a real rhyme would have worked but not been as aesthetically effective?)

I haven’t come up with good names (like “rim-rhyme”) for the two other kinds of full rhymes I accept. One set I like but don’t really believe should be adopted are “chime-rhyme” and “rile-rhyme.” The first is okay although I would claim all three full rhymes chime equally; the second is a bit silly, since I never began using the kind of rhyme it names to rile anyone. My best attempt is “stern-rhyme” for rhymes of syllables sharing the same last two sounds, as “chime” and “rhyme” do; and “bow-rhyme” for rhymes of syllables sharing the same first two sounds, as “rile” and “rhyme” do.

While discussing my bow rhymes, I would critique them as not only not defects but as virtues, since they extend the possibilities of rhyme and are fresh elements of my poems, and freshness is a cardinal need of superior poetry. As long as it doesn’t go too far, as “lolli-skied” may. My intention was to indicate a sky glistening like a lollipop (and as tasty as one!), the way I feel Stevens’s skies, or the equivalent thereof, do. But “lolli” has connotations of juvenility and triviality which may make it inappropriate–although a hint from children’s worlds needn’t be a fault. I dropped this locution from what I considered my best versions of the sonnet–with sorrow. I’m still not sure I was right to.

Most things in any poem are bothersomely right/wrong. My first line, for instance, will sound awkward to moderns, but is an intentional allusion to the opening of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It immediately ignores one requirement of the sonnet-form, its meter’s being iambic. True, all formal verse is allow to break with its proper meter at times: most scholars claim it is necessary to prevent monotony. I don’t agree, especially for so short a poem as the sonnet. In fact, I would scan the first two words of my sonnet as “Much have” rather than “Much have,” for I believe forcing a meter on a formal poem is better than breaking meter. For one thing, it emphasizes another main feature of superior poetry, its not being prose. It also pounds the monotonousness of a poem into the mind of the poem’s engagent sufficiently to provide a counter-irritant to the more extreme breaks with prose expectations, and common sense, which I consider the best use of meter. A monotonous sky and ocean for a ship full of lunatics.

Boink. More to follow–tomorrow, I hope.

Portland DSL ISP

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Entry 821 — “Sonnet from my Forties,” Version 2

Sunday, August 5th, 2012

According to Of Manywhere-of-Once, the second version of the sonnet I worked on from 1983 until just a few weeks ago, if indeed it’s really finished, I wrote the following version of it, my second:

Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.

How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.

The reason I being up here is that I just happened to read it after finding a copy of the book and getting it ready to send it to Andrew Topel, who ordered a copy. What’s interesting . . . and sad . . . is that I thought it better than my final version. Looking at it again as I typed it into this entry, I saw a few defects, and noted the omission of Yeats, whom my final version lauds. One of the defects was in the ninth line which had, “to master his and Stevens’ craft.” “Stevens’” should have been “Stevens’s,” which screwed up the meter, so I changed it to what it now is, the only thing I changed. Final thought: that I really have no idea which of the two is better–or–probably–which of the twenty or thirty versions of the thing (possibly many more if I count all ten versions of a given day that differed from one another by half-a-line or less) I eventually made is the best. John Bennett told me I didn’t have a bunch of different versions but a bunch of different sonnets. I wasn’t attracted to the idea then: I wanted to make a perfect sonnet, and chuck all I’d made that weren’t. I now believe he may well have been right.

One would have thought I’d come out of my experience with this sonnet with some facility for the form, but I don’t believe I’ve ever made a sonnet again.

Video Game DVD Rentals

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Entry 596 — A Final Version of my Sonnet, Again

Saturday, December 17th, 2011

I couldn’t stay way from it. I kept running it through my mind since posting the previous version here a week or two ago, finally coming up with the version below the night of 15 December. Note, each line should be pronounced as an iambic pentameter, including the third.

Sonnet from My Forties

     Much have I ranged the kingdoms Stevens forged
     Of deeply penetrating inquiries
     Into, and deft use of, the metaphor,
     And volumes filled in vain attempts to reach

     The heights that he did. Often, too, I’ve been
     To where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps
     Toward high-hued sensibility begin
     In Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

     Of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
     That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
     That Pound re-morninged splashingly to life,
     But failed as dismally to match their works.

Yet still, nine-tenth insane though it now seems,
I seek those ends; I hold to my huge dreams.

Diary Entry

Friday, 16 December 2011, 11:30 A.M. I have a few small exhibition-bookkeeping chores yet to do that I’m letting go for this weekend so I can concentrate on the stack of reviews for Small Press Review I have to do. One of them will be of I, a novella by Arnold Skemer that I find excellent but a very slow read, in the best sense of the description.

Toy store discount

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Entry 586 — “Sonnet from My Forties”

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

While hunting this morning for an essay of mine that had something in it I wanted to tell Richard Kostelanetz about, I came across a copy of Jake Berry’s zine, The Experioddicist, and found a version of the sonnet of mine I wrote about in my Of Manywhere-at-Once. I spent months on it, never getting it right, then continued working on it on and off–until now, never getting it right. I often thought for a while I had. That’s the case now. The version in The Experioddicist isn’t quite right, but I immediately saw how I thought I could change it so it was: here’s the once again final version:

Sonnet from My Forties

Much have I ranged the broad-skied latitudes
That Stevens festivalled his inquiries
On truth and the imagination to,
And reams used up in vain attempts to reach

The heights that he did. Often, too, I’ve been
To where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps
Toward high-hued sensibility begin
In Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent

Of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
That Pound re-morninged windily to life,
but failed as dismally to match their works.

Yet still, nine-tenths insane though it now seems,
I seek those ends; I hold to my huge dreams.

Okay, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m not so enthusiastic about it. I changed line 3 from “On truth and metaphor in due course to” to “On truth and the imagination to,” a definite improvement. The first stanza still doesn’t quite do it for me, but the rest of the poem seems fine–or would, I’m sure, if I hadn’t read and reread it some many hundreds of times. Needless to say, it’s in the old-fashioned mode of Hopkins/Yeats/Thomas and probably over-rich–certainly to today’s taste. It’s somewhat redeemed by its use of reversed rhymes (which are full rhymes, not alliterations). It still sums up my life in poetry, though–alas.

* * *

Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 5 P.M. A non-productive day, although I did try to get a few things done. Mainly, I spent a couple of hours getting a copy of terms that are for use in my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes”–twice, the second time because I needed them a different size. (Actually, I plan to have a full-size version of the work, and a smaller one, so I can use both sets of terms.) Earlier, another round of tennis, which went fairly well for me, for a change. A second breakfast with teammates at the nearby McDonald’s followed. Later I had a doctor’s appointment to get through and some grocery shopping to do. I got some new medicine for my continuing urinary problems. Right now I’m weary, as usual. I feel, as I often do, that if I could just go to bed and go to sleep for twelve or thirteen hours, I’d be a new man. But, although I’m more than sleepy enough than I should need to be to go to sleep, the chances are I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, nor stay asleep for even as much as an hour if I did.

Blockbuster.com

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Entry 109 — An Old Sonnet

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I was around twenty when I wrote this following sonnet. A few days ago, I changed its last two lines–and, just now, line one’s “eagle eyes” to “sharpened eyes.” I have all kinds of trouble evaluating it. It may be okay or even good, but it’s so much in a long-disused style, in spite of its backwards rhyming that halfwits won’t consider rhyming, that I can’t read it with much enjoyment.

John Keats

He read of Greece; and then with sharpened eyes,
espied its gods’ dim conjurations still
in breeze-soft force throughout his native isle–

in force in clouds’ remote allusiveness,
in oceanwaves’ eternal whispering,
in woodlands’ shadowy impermanence.

Once cognizant of earth’s allure, he sought
a method of imprisonment – a skill
with which to hold forever what he saw.

The way the soil and vernal rain converge
in carefree swarming flowers, Keats & Spring
then intersected quietly in verse.

The realms he had so often visited
at once grew larger by at least a tenth.

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Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

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Entry 1752 — Break-Time

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

As for the lesson under way, I found the poem of mine that I thought, and am still pretty sure, was the first poem I wrote that, as I put it in Of Manywhere-at-Once, I thought anything of:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife              I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams.

* * *

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Entry 1669 — “A Bukowski Poem”

Monday, December 22nd, 2014

A Bukowski Poem

Because it’s been nearly a
year since I last wrote
anything remotely like a poem I’ve
decided to try my
hand at just jotting down
what would be unpunctuated
agrammatical prose except
for its linebreaks what I
call a Bukowski Poem after its
inventor William Carlos O’Hara it might
be fun and who knows it
might also get me going
again or even turn out worth
while of itself in a minor
way as such poems can for
instance if after awkwarding
to the final drab of flatness you go
for just a little more like
say the alley side
of a North Hollywood delicatessen
awning just the way the shade’s
turned its red to rust
can by contrast bridegroom
a reader to oceanic
expansions at which point you
should end your poem unless you go
in for anti-climaxes which can
be effective too.

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Entry 1652 — 2 Laxian Repeater-Stack Poems

Friday, December 5th, 2014

Note: according to the translator of my poem, a person’s first name in Hungarian is not first. I think that only half explains the problems with Hungarians, however. –BG

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Entry 1566 — “View from a Small Bridge”

Wednesday, September 10th, 2014

View from a Small Bridge    water  water rippling nowhere               in particular  but          everywhere                       in general

This poem is based on my crossing a small bridge over a canal and for some reason finding the canal water especially restful. I thought out a haiku about it that included the present title of the poem and its first three lines, in slightly different words. Then I added “but everywhere in general”–mainly, I have to admit, because it gave the poem, I thought, a feeling of portentously mysterious but essentially vacuous depth. But I’ve gradually come to think it also an answer to my wondering where the water would ripple if not to nowhere. So it makes rational sense once one considers where water might go when made more than water (or the word , “water,” made more than a straight-forward denotation).
.

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Entry 1560 — Just a Haiku

Friday, September 5th, 2014

It’s by John Elsberg & Erik Greinke–the last haiku of a 6-haiku sequence called “Basho’s Sandals” from Catching the Light (2009, Cervena Barva Press), a collection of 12 such sequences:

moonlight  on half the pond         I don't know  the splash beyond

Really nice extension of Basho’s old pond poem. A minor but perfect touch is “moonlight” all by itself to begin. Major is the huge light/dark, known/unknown dichotomy after that. I’d have this in any best poetry of 2009 anthology.
.

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Entry 1550 — Back to the English

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

Here are the original versions of two of the Poem poems I posted two entries ago:

Poem is my alter-ego, so sometimes me, but sometimes an imaginary me. The first poem in some strange surrealistic way (my intuition tells me) sums up my attempt to become a known writer, of plays mostly, during the fifteen years I spent from 1968 to 1983 in Los Angeles. I think maybe the ocean of the poem is Poem’s alter ego . . .

The second poem is about my life from 1983 in Florida, where I still am and will probably be for the rest of my life. The scene is more or less real; the heron is definitely real. My mood and thoughts (authentic) are from more than one different scene.

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Entry 1549 — Translation Translation by Google

Monday, August 25th, 2014

I wasn’t sure what poem of mine was the bottom one in the set of Hungarian versions I posted yesterday, so had Google translate “vecen.” It gave “plumbing” for that. I thought the poem concerned was probably one I remembered with “toilet” in the title but couldn’t find it in my book, Of Poem (dbqp press, 1995), which I thought all three of my poems were from. So I had the first line translated. “Verse engineering sectors during?” That didn’t help. By then, however, I thought it’d be fun to have Google translate the whole poem back to English and put the result here:

The Toilet

Verse engineering sectors during
almost bllinding certainty recognize
o the greatest lines in the poem
the history of the universe.
Kuncognia had to, because he thought
how much
hold for what everyone
I admit that.

By adding “a” before “vecen,” I got an accurate translation of the title, but most of the rest of the text was a bit off. Close enough, however, for me to find the poem in my second collection of Poem poems, Poem Demerging (Phrygian Press, 2010):

On the Toilet

Between movements, it occurred to Poem
with an almost bllinding certainty
that his were the most superb works of any art
or science
in the history of the cosmos.
He chuckled as he thought of how long
it would take the rest of the world
to realize this.

Much thanks to Geof Huth and Arnold Skemer for publishing, respectively, Of Poem, and Poem Demerging.

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Entry 1548 — 3 Poems in Hungarian

Sunday, August 24th, 2014

I’ve actually been semi-productive lately, getting nine reviews, two columns and an editorial done for Small Press Review, and some work on an essay that may turn into a book about boredom. Consequently, after Here are three of my Poem poems in Koppanaical Hungarian:

They are from Kalligram, March 2010, with sundry visual poems by such as Geof Huth, Endwar, Nico Vassilakis, Dan Waber, Karl Young (also in Hungarian) . . . Marton Koppany’s doings, needless to say.
.

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Entry 1547 — 2 Pages from Outside the End

Saturday, August 23rd, 2014

I thought I ought to display one of the wholly textual poems in the book by Guy Beining I’ve been featuring lately, such poems making up the bulk of the book. So below is one–next to another great collage, with a terrific name:

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Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen « POETICKS

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Entry 1753 — My 1st Full-Scale Hero in Poetry

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

Posted in John Keats, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Poetry, Poetry Lesson, sonnet | No Comments »

Entry 1752 — Break-Time

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

As for the lesson under way, I found the poem of mine that I thought, and am still pretty sure, was the first poem I wrote that, as I put it in Of Manywhere-at-Once, I thought anything of:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife              I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams.

* * *

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Entry 1669 — “A Bukowski Poem”

Monday, December 22nd, 2014

A Bukowski Poem

Because it’s been nearly a
year since I last wrote
anything remotely like a poem I’ve
decided to try my
hand at just jotting down
what would be unpunctuated
agrammatical prose except
for its linebreaks what I
call a Bukowski Poem after its
inventor William Carlos O’Hara it might
be fun and who knows it
might also get me going
again or even turn out worth
while of itself in a minor
way as such poems can for
instance if after awkwarding
to the final drab of flatness you go
for just a little more like
say the alley side
of a North Hollywood delicatessen
awning just the way the shade’s
turned its red to rust
can by contrast bridegroom
a reader to oceanic
expansions at which point you
should end your poem unless you go
in for anti-climaxes which can
be effective too.

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Entry 1566 — “View from a Small Bridge”

Wednesday, September 10th, 2014

View from a Small Bridge    water  water rippling nowhere               in particular  but          everywhere                       in general

Posted in Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen | 1 Comment »

Entry 1549 — Translation Translation by Google

Monday, August 25th, 2014

The Toilet

Verse engineering sectors during
almost bllinding certainty recognize
o the greatest lines in the poem
the history of the universe.
Kuncognia had to, because he thought
how much
hold for what everyone
I admit that.

On the Toilet

Between movements, it occurred to Poem
with an almost bllinding certainty
that his were the most superb works of any art
or science
in the history of the cosmos.
He chuckled as he thought of how long
it would take the rest of the world
to realize this.

Much thanks to Geof Huth and Arnold Skemer for publishing, respectively, Of Poem, and Poem Demerging.

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Entry 1357 — “Still Another Definition”

Friday, January 31st, 2014

The poem below is on the page in Of Manywhere-at-Once just after the one (most of) my Stevens poem is on:

The next page had the rest of the paragraph above: “. . . techniques that were, and are, important to me. But I decided the statement should be trying its words on everything, not just certain vivid particulars. Anyway, I took much of the offbeat language out.”

Posted in Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1264 — A Quasi-Haiku

Saturday, November 9th, 2013

The very first poem in the Bridges 2013 Poetry Anthology (Tesselations Publishing, Phoenix, 2013), Michael Bartholemew-Biggs’s, “Taylor’s Theorem,” which I’ve been invited to review, bothered me because I thought he was calling it a haiku. Here it is:

If we knew it all
for just a single moment
we’d hold the future

I was going make my standard point about 5/7/5 not being required for a haiku, and not being enough to make a text a haiku when I reread Bartholomew-Biggs’s title for the sequence of which “Taylor’s Theorem” was just one of seven poems and saw he was calling those poems “quasi-haiku.” In any event, I liked it and the rest of his sequence, particularly a sort of quasi-haiku diptych, “Ill Conditioning”:

Catastophists say
one butterfly’s wingbeats can
switch drought to monsoon.
Catastrophe spreads
through some computations from
one decimal’s doubt.

I’m quoting these partly because I like them, but also because they and many of the other poems in the anthology strike me as what I’m calling “idea-poems” as opposed to “image-poems,” which I consider an interesting division to ponder, and will, with results to show you eventually, I hope.

.

Lose Weight

Posted in Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, Poetics, Taxonomy | No Comments »

Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2

Friday, September 6th, 2013

Note: the version of my sonnet above is not the final version of it.

Petsmart Coupons

Posted in Bob Grumman, Cryptographiku, haiku, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, minimalist poetry | No Comments »

Entry 1204 — The Exerioddicist, July 1993, P.1

Thursday, September 5th, 2013

While looking for a poem for use in my Scientific American blog, I came across the following, an issue of Jake Berry’s 4-page The Experioddicist from July 1993 that was entirely devoted to Me:

I think it pretty danged fine, and not entirely self-centered, for it has criticism of material by others. I hope that by holding down the control button and clicking the + button, you can get an enlargement you can read. My next three blog entries will have the other three pages–and give me extra time to work on other things.
.

Sport Chalet

Posted in Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 1035 — Scrap from a Critic’s Life

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

I was really groping for something to put in this entry. I didn’t really feel blah so much as empty. So I went to a carton I’ve been dumping various literary materials in that I don’t know what to do with–or hadn’t until a few days ago, when I suddenly realized I could put each item in one of the fifty new hanging file folders I recently got, and put those into the two empty filing cabinet drawers I’ve had available since the last time I put mine house in order, to a slight degree. On the top of the things in the carton I found two papers–from ten or more years ago, I’m sure. On them I’d written notes–apparently for a review of what seem to be two poems that are also on the papers. I don’t know what happened to the review, if there was one, or whom the poems (and the nifty sketches illustrating it) were by. Maybe someone will recognize them and let me know. Meanwhile, they will take care of this entry–and tomorrow’s, I just decided!–as what some may find interesting as materials from the life in process of a disorganized critic.