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Entry 1733 — A Limited Entry

Monday, February 23rd, 2015

Okay, maybe I shouldda said “more limited than usual.”  I’ve had a busy day away from the computer–with nothing I was sufficiently burning to say to inspire a good entry, anyway.  So, just a minor thought followed by Knowlecular Psychology stuff I’ve written about before but want to repeat to get my brain a little more well-fastened to it.

* * *

Thinking about my tendency to try too hard to make sure my readers had all the information they needed fully to understand what I was writing, it occurred to me technology could come to my aid: I’m sure Kindles could be fixed to allow me to avoid boring any reader with information he doesn’t need could but also provide him with a text he could click to at any time which would have all the extra information. Right now footnotes can do this, but what I’m speaking of would not be intrusive the way footnotes are.

Indeed, a reader could be given a choice of texts–one with the math explained, one without that, for example; or any other appropriate specialized version.

* * *

Re: my knowlecular psychology, I was thinking again about what most poems are about, and went through my list again: (1) people; (2) imagery sans people; (3) concepts . . .  Is that all?  Doesn’t sound right, but I’m too out of it right now to think of any others.

What knowlecular psychology has to do with this, is that the first category could be described (as I’m sure I’ve more than once already described it) as “anthroceptual poetry.”  Or as “sagaceptual poetry,” which is poetry in which what happens to one or more people is more important than the people–for the reader, the joy of vicariously experiencing a human triumph is more important than the joy of empathetically merging with another human being.  Two kinds of people poems.

By imagery poetry, I mean poetry that is more concerned with conveying the beauty of the sound and/or the visual appearance (primarily or usually) of what is denoted by a poem’s words–or protoceptual poetry.  As for concept poetry, I’m not sure any kind of genuine poetry is more conceptual than either of the other two (and almost all poems contain both anthroceptual and protoceptual matter).  If it existed, I would call it “reducticeptual poetry.”  A good example would be “lighght”: it is aesthetically dependent on its conceptual element–the conceptual datum about its orthography; but that element’s only use is to metaphorically lift the image the poem is about into, well, poetry, so I consider the poem more protoceptual than reducticeptual.

It may be that certain conceptual poems do use conceptual elements to lift a content that is ideational rather than sensual into poetry.  Indeed, perhaps one of my mathematical poems may provide some reader more with a feeling of the poetry of asensual mathematics than with anything sensual image that may be an element of the poem.

Something requiring more thought.

Note: what I wanted primarily to glue into my memory was the term “protoceptual.”  I’ve had trouble with it because I for a while was using “fundaceptual” in place of it.  Eventually I needed “funda” elsewhere in my psychology and felt it too confusing to have it there and with “ceptual,” so went back to “protoceptual,” which I used before for the term.

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Entry 1701 — The Elements of Free Verse

Friday, January 23rd, 2015

“Imagery, the only prevailing poetic element in modern free verse,” quoth Sarah Ruden, a skilled translator of classical literature in “Back to Tragedy,” an article in the January 2015 issue of The New Criterion.  Others may have said things about poetry more ignorant, but none come to mind.  Ruden is an amiable, knowledgeable writer, so I have to think she just stopped thinking for a moment.  I doubt her editors knew any better.

Imagery is of course one of the many poetic elements in modern free verse (if we consider my own free verse “modern,” as I do), but much more important that imagery is the metaphoric use to which the best poets put it, figurative language being an element of free verse.  As are all the melodational devices of formal verse except regimented rhythm (meter).  Freshness of language and syntactical expression are also elements of all poetry, including free verse.  Infraverbal devices are central to many of the best free verse poems, and–it seems to me–can play a role in formal verse, too.  Then there is the defining poetic element of free verse, expressive lineation, or line-breaks placed where they work best aesthetically rather than where a metrical form requires them to be.  I doubt if Ruden, or David Yezzi, the poetry editor of The New Criterion, are even aware of such things–or of the wide-spread addition of purely visual or purely auditory matter to free verse poems.

Amusingly, these people have almost as much trouble with the American Poetry Establishment as my crowd does, but because the certified poetry of today is beyond them rather than beneath them.

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Entry 1699 — More Scraps

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

Scrap #1: Yesterday’s mail included another chapbook from Mark Sonnenfeld, Check Check Done and Done, half of it devoted to poems by Mark and half to poems by Dory L. Williams.  Good reading but one thing in it by Dory L. Williams really knocked me out: to me, it’s an epigram, because a statement of an opinion, so according to my taxonomy a work of informrature.  Be that as it may, it’s as good an epigram as I’ve come across in years, if ever:

Covetness

If you want fame and money without real
achievement behind it, you’re not greedy enough.

Scrap #2:  After I posted yesterday’s entry, I remembered a central feature of Iowa Workshop Poetry I’d intended to mention before any other, but then forgot: it’s the recognition of the potential of ordinary subject matter for tranfiguringly successful poetry–as in Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and in all the best haiku.   I am all for ordinary subject matter . . . but it can’t do much unless connected to archetypal matter one needs to be in one’s magniceptual awareness to be able to employ.  Williams’s poem is, finally, not about a wheelbarrow anywhere near as much as it is about Beauty.

Lesson for poets: keep explicit abstracts and generalities out of your poems as Ezra tells you to, but build you poems on them as I tell you to.  This, incidentally, you don’t necessarily have to consciously strive for, but you must be able to recognize when something worthily archetypal begins to show under your poem’s words so as to strengthen those words’ connection to it–and/or weaken the visibility of their path to it.  The archetypal foundation of the best poems is much more often understood in their engagents’ marrow long before it’s dealt with the reasoning parts of their higher faculties, if it ever is.  (Few poets have very large reducticeptual awarenesses or scienceptual awareness, which are where analysis is carried out.)

Possibly more important than the connection to the archetypal is the technique, the freshness of the technique employed to make that connection, which is usually metaphorical.

I’m just repeating old thoughts of mine, disorganizedly.   Jus’ tryin’ to make it through another blog entry.
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Entry 1678 — A Specimen of My Poetry Criticism

Wednesday, December 31st, 2014

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

EXPERIODDICA

September/October 2014

Richard Kostelanetz’s Latest Infra-Verbal Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Entry 1628 — The Lyricule

Tuesday, November 11th, 2014

The “lyricule” is my term for the peak moment I claim every poem, to be effective, must cause one engaged with it to experience.  The haiku moment would be one, but only one, example of a lyricule.  I think it deserves a fairly large-scale essay but haven’t worked out my understanding of it well enough to write very much intelligent about it here, or anything at all organized.

The lyricule is produced by a poem’s “lyricular center.”

I would consider Basho’s entire old pond haiku to be a lyricular center.  To be coldly accurate about it, the words of the poem activate memories that combine to form the lyricule.  It produces no perceptual data.  It is thus entirely cerebral.  That does not mean it will contain no visual or auditory data.  It will almost certainly contain sounds, but they will be the sounds of the poem’s syllables seeing the poem’s text will cause the poem’s engagent to remember (assuming he reads it the way it ought to be read, pronouncing what he reads to himself).  The engagent may also “see” visual images certain words denote, and certain images those words connote, if they do so strongly enough.

I habitually claim that when reading a poem, and I’m solely concerned here with poems as read, the poem’s engagent will not “see” the words.  By this I mean that the engagent’s eyes will take in the words but send the sight of them into the engagent’s lexiceptual sub-awareness (or reading center) not his visioceptual sub-awareness.  In the former, he will read the words, not see them; in the latter, he will see them but not read them.  (In normal reading, most of the time.)  This is not important.  I mention it merely to be complete.  But also because visual poetry exploits the visual appearance of textual elements to cause an engagent to read and see at the same time, which can produce lyricules traditional poetry cannot.

Visual poetry can also add direct perceptions of shapes and colors to a lyricule.  So, I suppose I should add, can visually-enhanced poetry, which is traditional poetry using calligraphy or the like as ornamentation.

The lyricule can be considered a moment but really isn’t.  I conceive it as more a unified . . .  knowlecule, to use the term its name comes from that will take more than a unit of consciousness (which I term an “instacon” in my theory of psychology) to experience.  A knowlecule is some datum or combination of data that a person takes as a thing—a flower, or the petal of a flower, or a garden.

I think of a lyricule as seeming like a lengthily-arrested moment.

For me, the best lyricule must produce Manywhere-at-Once, as all effective metaphors do.  Manywhere-at-Once, which I discussed in my first book about poetry, is what one experiences when two or more separate loci in the brain are activated simultaneously (or more or less simultaneously)—and fuse.  For instance, when Romeo speaks of the rising sun as being Juliet, it should cause an engagent to experience some image of the rising sun and, incongruously, an image of a beautiful young woman at the same time, followed immediately by those connotations of each that are the same, such as “beauty,” “dominance,” “bringer of life” or “source of meaningfulness,” “cynosure,” and suffice to fuse the disparate denotations.

Needless to say, the Shakespearean lyricular center is more complex than here discussed—the whole of the plot preceding Romeo’s utterance, for just one element.  There are also other ways of producing Manywhere-at-Once, like simple rhyme, one of the two cerebral sites it activates being one concerned with the sound of the rhymenants, the other with their denotations.

How effective a lyricule is depends on many things.  A consequential one is the intensity of its elements.  The number of its elements is another consequential one.  Not surprisingly, the aesthetic strength of its elements is hugely important (and inordinately difficult to determine).  The freshness of its elements and/or the freshness of their interinvolvment will be signally important in determining the aesthetic strength of its elements.

I’ve already discussed the various levels a poem can have, although I probably didn’t call them levels.  In fact, I’ve probably discussed them more than once, each time with a different name.  Anyway, the levels, or whatever they are, pertain to lyricules as well as poems.  I believe that (in theory) a lyricule might be able to participate in all the ten (or eleven) awarenesses my theory (at this time) hypothesizes are in each healthy human brain.

And there is where I’ll leave my thoughts on this for now.

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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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Entry 1611 — Interpretation of Poems, Part 2

Saturday, October 25th, 2014

I came up with a few more possible layers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 2.   Thou art more louely and more temperate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 9.   But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be nonsense, and clear evidence that your interpretation is defective.  But not to you.  Nor will you ever accept my claim that it is an argument against your interpretation
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Entry 1610 — The Interpretation of Poems

Friday, October 24th, 2014

Essay on the Interpretation of Poems
(First Draft)

One way of dividing verosophers, it seems to me, is into those who are able to construct permanent understandings of a given subject, and those who constantly construct understandings that they immediately forget.  Well, they don’t wholly forget them, but fail to remember any of them well enough to grasp it.  That’s me.  I continually re-construct my various theories, only to make them pretty much all over again six months, a year . . . or five years later.  My incredible defectiveness as an organizer helps.  More often than not, I can’t find previous versions of understandings.  That seems the case right now.

There is an advantage to this, I believe: it is that I, at least, do remember a sort of underunderstanding that returns each time I build a new version of a given understanding.  This, I claim, makes me superior to those whose first construction of an understanding is more or less permanent in the long run due to my not being able to restrain myself from wobbling often into substantial improvements of my understandings they are locked out of.  I would not call them rigidniks, just perhaps too close to being that.  Meanwhile, I doubtlessly am too far from being that, at least some of the time.

The freewending verospher versus the academic verosopher.  Then there is the psitchotic verosopher.  Such a character can be either excessively prone to freewendry or to academicality.  The one I’ll be introducing here is one who is amusingly anti-academic—but nevertheless himself the victim of an academicality of almost unbelievable magnitude.  One thing I’m sure of is that if I am psitchotic (and I will never rule out the possibility), it is due to my being excessively freewendrical.

Note: I am here speaking of the “sane insane.”  Both I and the psitchotic you’ll be meeting are sane enough to stay out of mental institutions, and seem rational enough to others.  Both of us are normal—but possibly normal to an excess.  That is, according to my theory of psychology, everyone is a mixture of three normal character-types, the rigidnik, the milyoop and the free-wender, and becomes a neurotic or psitchotic due to being too entirely one of these types but does not become psychotic, or nuts across the board.  To put it simply, psitchosis results from a single gland’s being under- or over-active; psychosis from greater defects spread throughout the brain.

There.  400 words and I haven’t gotten to my topic, the interpretation of poems.  I will now, with a list of what I’m calling the layers of a poem until I can come up with a better name for them.  For now, I’ll stick them on my list as they occur to me.  I hope in my return to my understanding

I may at least be able to find this list and better organize it.  Anyway, here goes:

1.    The background layer.  This consists mainly of what the person analyzing a given poem knows of its author, the poem’s form and . . . the poem’s title, if it has one.  Its presentation—as an inscription on a monument rather than on a page in a book, for instance—may be part of this layer, too.  (Oops, before I forget, I must tell you that this essay will be concerned with poems one encounters in a book, not oral poems.  What I say can be readily applied to oral poems, I believe, but I am not up to showing how over and over again.)

2.    The sensory surface of a poem: what it looks like to the eye, sounds like to ear, and perhaps feels to the tactile sense, or even smells—meta-verbally.   I distinguish the sound and visual appearance of words acting as words from their sensory effect beyond that, which I call their meta-verbal appearance.  For instance, the word, “oh,” is heard verbally as a long o, but may be heard meta-verbally as a shriek, grown, mumble or any of numerous other enunciations; similarly it may seem visually just an o or, in a visual poem, be (meta-verbally) ten times larger than the rest of the poem’s letters, and orange instead of black.

3.    The melodational layer, or how a poem sounds verbally.  The sound of “oh” as “oh” spoken normally.  Alliteration, rhyme, assonance, euphony, etc.

4.    The narrative layer, or what story the poem tells, and I believe every poem must tell some story.

5.    The symbosensual layer, or the sensual imagery the poem’s words denote (symbolically), generally the visual images they represent, but also at times sounds (“the clang of a bell”) or even smells, the taste of food, the feel of satin.  I coined my awkward term for this because I feel it important to distinguish verbal images from actual images like the graphic ones that may turn up in visual poems.

6.    The ideational layer, or all the ideas that may be in a poem.

7.    The unificational layer, or everything in a poem that, en masse, acts  as the poem’s unifying principal (if it has one).

8.    The metaphorical layer, or what I call its metaphormations.

9.    The archetypal layer, or everything in a poem that gives it archetypal depth.

10.     The paraphrasable layer, or what a poem is, on the surface, about.  It can be a repetition of the narrative layer, but will often be quite a lot more.

11.    The allusional layer, or the sum of a poem’s allusions to other poems, or cultural material of any kind, and to parts of itself.  Some of this will have been in the background layer, but some not . . . I think, but won’t be sure until I’ve worked entirely through a poem using this list.

12.    The twelfth layer, which is the layer containing everything in a poem not in the other layers.

A proper full explication of a poem, or what I call a “pluraphrase,” will identify each of these layers in a poem, or a particular layer’s absence, and evaluate it.

TO BE CONTINUED
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Entry 1586 — “Moonlight Equation”

Tuesday, September 30th, 2014

intuition + reason = moonlight + pond

I’m bringing the poem above back from an earlier but recent entry because when I just happened to see it Sunday night, it made me realize a virtue of mathematical poetry I hadn’t thought of before: that an simple equation in the form a + b = c + d  strongly suggests each of the terms has a different value than the others; hence a must be part c and part d, which means the reader has an extra meaning to muse about: in my poem, just how much moonlight, for instance, is intuition, and how much reason.  Ditto for each of the others.  In other words, “intuition + reason = pond” would be a nice poem, but not nearly as loaded as “intuition + reason = moonlight + pond.”  To over-argue my point, the three-term poem consists of one mathematical idea, the other of five mathematical ideas.

No more for this entry.  I’m having another tired of my tired days, but just got through another chapter of my book, one I don’t think I made more than two or three changes to.

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Entry 1541 — Thoughts Concerning Entry 1540

Sunday, August 17th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Taxonomy « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Taxonomy’ Category

Entry 1733 — A Limited Entry

Monday, February 23rd, 2015

Okay, maybe I shouldda said “more limited than usual.”  I’ve had a busy day away from the computer–with nothing I was sufficiently burning to say to inspire a good entry, anyway.  So, just a minor thought followed by Knowlecular Psychology stuff I’ve written about before but want to repeat to get my brain a little more well-fastened to it.

* * *

Thinking about my tendency to try too hard to make sure my readers had all the information they needed fully to understand what I was writing, it occurred to me technology could come to my aid: I’m sure Kindles could be fixed to allow me to avoid boring any reader with information he doesn’t need could but also provide him with a text he could click to at any time which would have all the extra information. Right now footnotes can do this, but what I’m speaking of would not be intrusive the way footnotes are.

Indeed, a reader could be given a choice of texts–one with the math explained, one without that, for example; or any other appropriate specialized version.

* * *

Re: my knowlecular psychology, I was thinking again about what most poems are about, and went through my list again: (1) people; (2) imagery sans people; (3) concepts . . .  Is that all?  Doesn’t sound right, but I’m too out of it right now to think of any others.

What knowlecular psychology has to do with this, is that the first category could be described (as I’m sure I’ve more than once already described it) as “anthroceptual poetry.”  Or as “sagaceptual poetry,” which is poetry in which what happens to one or more people is more important than the people–for the reader, the joy of vicariously experiencing a human triumph is more important than the joy of empathetically merging with another human being.  Two kinds of people poems.

By imagery poetry, I mean poetry that is more concerned with conveying the beauty of the sound and/or the visual appearance (primarily or usually) of what is denoted by a poem’s words–or protoceptual poetry.  As for concept poetry, I’m not sure any kind of genuine poetry is more conceptual than either of the other two (and almost all poems contain both anthroceptual and protoceptual matter).  If it existed, I would call it “reducticeptual poetry.”  A good example would be “lighght”: it is aesthetically dependent on its conceptual element–the conceptual datum about its orthography; but that element’s only use is to metaphorically lift the image the poem is about into, well, poetry, so I consider the poem more protoceptual than reducticeptual.

It may be that certain conceptual poems do use conceptual elements to lift a content that is ideational rather than sensual into poetry.  Indeed, perhaps one of my mathematical poems may provide some reader more with a feeling of the poetry of asensual mathematics than with anything sensual image that may be an element of the poem.

Something requiring more thought.

Note: what I wanted primarily to glue into my memory was the term “protoceptual.”  I’ve had trouble with it because I for a while was using “fundaceptual” in place of it.  Eventually I needed “funda” elsewhere in my psychology and felt it too confusing to have it there and with “ceptual,” so went back to “protoceptual,” which I used before for the term.

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Entry 1402 — Something From The Eighties

Monday, March 24th, 2014

Note: hold down your control button and punch + to be able to read the following more easily.

PseudoLangHeading

PseudoLang

PseudoLang2

PseudoLangData

Once again I needed something to post here and grabbed this from 25 years or so ago.  It didn’t get me into the BigTime.  Note: “vizlation” was my word then for “visimagery,” which is my word now for “visual art.

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Entry 1347 — Another Late Entry

Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

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

MatOpage146

MatOpage147

MatOpage148

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Entry 1290 — AudioTextual Art, Part 1

Thursday, December 5th, 2013

One of my many problems as a would-be culturateur is biting off more than I can chew. Today, for instance, I needed something for this entry. My laziness struck first, telling me to just use the graphic immediately below:

ForEmileBerliner

It’s from Mark Sutherand’s Sonotexts, a 2-DVD set he recently sent me–with a copy of Julian Cowley’s user’s guide to sound poetry from Wire.  As soon as I saw what Mark had sent me, I went into one of my yowie-fits, perceiving it, as I wrote Mark, as a sort of class in sound poetry, something I’d been wanting to come to terms with for years.  I had visions of taking a fifteen-minute class in the subject based on Mark’s package–something I’ve followed through on for four or five days now, except my requirement isn’t fifteen minutes daily of immersion, just a significant immersion that might last only a few minutes–like the amount of time it took me to read the text and above and study the graphics.

I had a second yowie-fit concerning my use of the above here, which I suddenly saw as the first step in a Great Adventure, Bob Grumman’s Quest to Assimilate Audio-Texual Art.  (Not “sound poetry” because I had already realized my subject would cover more than sound poetry.)   I would write a book here, one Major Thought per daily entry that would not just describe my attempt to learn about sound poetry and advance the World’s understanding of  the whole range of audio-textual art, but expose the World to my theory of aesthetics–down to its Knowlecular foundation.  All while working on three or four other not insignificant projects daily.  But I was not wholly unrealistic: my aim was “merely” a good rough draft, not a perfect final draft.

Well, maybe I’ll keep going for more than a few days.  Perhaps I’ll even write something of value.  For .  .  . ?   One of the reasons I probably won’t get far is my belief, strengthening daily–if not hourly–that there are not more than a dozen people in the world able to follow me at this time, nor will there ever be, so I’ll be wasting my time.   Yes, I do recognize that the reason for this may not be how advanced my thoughts are but how badly expressed and/or obtuse they are.   No matter, I myself will enjoy writing about my adventure, and having it to write about may be enough to keep me in it until I’ve actually accomplished my main aim, an understanding of audio-textual at that makes sense to me.

Ergo, here’s lesson one, which an enlargement of the text above from the booklet that comes with Mark’s set will facilitate: ForEmileBerlinerText

Its words, of course, are Mark’s.

Student Assignment: two words or more concerning “Sound Poem for Emile Berliner”–prior to listening to it.   Not much to say except for taxonomical remarks unsurprising to anyone who knows me.  First off, since there can be nothing in the composition anyone will be able to recognize as verbal, as far as I can now see, I would term it “linguiconceptual music,” “linguiconceptual” being my term for asemic textual matter in an artwork that conceptuphorically (or provides a concept that metaphorically) adds appreciably to the work’s aesthetic effect.  I will say more about this after hearing the composition.  Right now I don’t see how its textual content can be evident without a listener’s simply being told that it is there.Unless the tracing is exhibited as the composition is being played, as it seems to me it ought to be, and maybe is!  The tracing IS a visual poem, albeit a simple one that serves the work as a whole as its caption.

No, it’s more than that–the textual music is metaphorically its voice, which makes it an integral part of the composition that is secondarily a caption for it.

So much for lesson 1.  (I think I passed.)

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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.

 

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Entry 1248 — What a Poem Is

Thursday, October 24th, 2013

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

First of all I have ordained that a poem hath:

Fundamental Constituents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will have to come back to this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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Entry 1084 — Yet More Mathpo Thoughts

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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Entry 1083 — More Mathpo Blither

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

I believe I’ve worked out my final argument for considering mathematical operations to happen in my mathexpressive poems:

(1) Consider the sentence, “It is the east and Juliet is the sun.”  The sun is presented as a metaphor for Juliet but it remains an actual sun.

(2) Consider the equation, “(meadow)(April) = flowers.”  The mathematical operation of multiplication is presented as a metaphor for the way April operates on a meadow, but it remains an actual mathematical operation of multiplication.  The equation carries out the operation of multiplication on two non-mathematical terms to get a third non-mathematical term.  It is something real that acts metaphorically.

If the mathematical operation does not occur, what happens?  Two images, one of a meadow, one of April, whose collocation a reader is to take as having to do with flowers?  What sort of poem would that be? Not that the actual mathematical operation makes it a great poem; I only use it because its simplicity makes my point so clearly.

That it is possible for such a thing as a poem that is part mathematical and part verbal to exist is important to me for taxonomical reasons since it helps substantially to allow me to claim all poetry ultimately to be of just two main kinds, lexexpressive poetry, which consists of nothing (or, sometimes, nearly nothing) but words (and punctuation marks), and plurexpressive poetry, in which one or more expressive modality is as aesthetically important in it as words (and punctuation marks): visioexpressive poetry, mathexpressive poetry, audioexpressive poetry and performance poetry (which I want to find a term for that carries on my “X-expressive” coining).

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Entry 1065 — Behind Again

Saturday, April 6th, 2013

I waited until early afternoon before finally taking a caffeine pill.  I just couldn’t get going.  it’s a little after 5 now, and I’ve been zipping along, feeling content albeit not exuberant.  I haven’t done anything of consequence yet, though, and this entry won’t be much: one of my “just-keeping-my-vow-of-an-entry-a-day” ones.

First off, here’s where my latest Scientific American guest blog entry is, although I’m sure all of you got my group e.mail about it. I have one sort of interesting thing to say about it. In one of my poems there my quotient is, “painter/ unsleeping/ a day long ago.”  I saw when looking over the entry earlier today that most readers would probably interpret this as about a painter who is staying awake through some day long ago but what I meant and thought without thinking that I was saying was that the painter was in the act of unsleeping the long ago day.  I was using an intransitive verb as a transitive verb.  I did mention that in my entry but not because I thought anyone could take me to be writing about an unsleeping poet.  Anyway, to make it clearer, although maybe not clear enough, I’ve changed my version of the passage to “painter/ unsleeping a/ day long ago.”

I have tentatively coined “bentword” to represent words like “unsleeping” which will derail readers.  If they do so effectively, they will cause the simple pleasure of fresh language.  Which I hope soon to discuss like I’ve just discussed rhyme, and various metaphors–including the verbaphor, another new coinage to go with my visiophor, mathephor and audiophor, as a kind of metaphor.  I must be taxonomical complete, you know.

Well, my caffeine pill is wearing off, so that’s it for this entry.

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Entry 1033 — Important Taxonomy Announcement

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

At New-Poetry today, Al Filreis mad the following announcement:

Today we are releasing PoemTalk #63, a discussion of Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets with Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Lee Ann Brown, and Jessica Lowenthal:

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PoemTalk is available on iTunes (simply type “PoemTalk” in your iTunes store searchbox).
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From the program notes:
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PoemTalkers Jessica Lowenthal, Lee Ann Brown, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee gathered with Al Filreis to talk about five poems from Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, which was published by Counterpath Press of Denver in 2007. We chose two of Browne’s “fractional sonnets,” two of the sonnets in which the talk of her children is picked up partly or wholly as lines of the poem, and one of her “personal amulet” sonnets. These are, to be specific: “Six-Fourteenths Donne Sonnet” [MP3], “Two-Fourteenths Sonnet” [MP3], “In Chinese astrology you are a snake” [MP3], “I’m a bunny in a bunny suit” [MP3], and “Protector #2: Your Personal Amulet” [MP3]. The sonnet after Donne is a constrained rewriting of a “holy” sonnet: “I am a little world made cunningly.”
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After reading about the fractional sonnets, which sound like fun to me, I am giving up my lifetime view that a sonnet must consist of 14 rhyming iambic pentameters. There are just too many variations people are calling sonnets for my previous insistence to make sense. But we need a name to distinguish the traditional “real” sonnet from other poems called sonnets, so I ordain that such sonnets be called “classical sonnets,” and all other sonnets be called . . . “stupid sonnets.” Just kiddin’. I haven’t thought of a name for them yet.

(Yeah, yeah, who cares. But I wanted to show that I can change my mind.)
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Basho « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Basho’ Category

Entry 1248 — What a Poem Is

Thursday, October 24th, 2013

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

First of all I have ordained that a poem hath:

Fundamental Constituents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will have to come back to this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Entry 1059 — Break from MATO Analysis

Sunday, March 31st, 2013

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

AnalysisOfOldPondHaiku

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Entry 1012 — Basho Poem, Last Visit

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

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

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Entry 1011 — Back to My Cryptographiku

Monday, February 11th, 2013

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

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

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

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Entry 1010 — Major or Worthless?

Sunday, February 10th, 2013

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

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

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

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Entry 673 — “Mathemaku for Basho”

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

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

 

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

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

 

Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 44 — A Mathemaku & Some Poetics Notes

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

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

Mathemaku4Basho

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

Sept03page

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

Jonathan Brannen « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Jonathan Brannen’ Category

Entry 1347 — Another Late Entry

Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

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

MatOpage146

MatOpage147

MatOpage148

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Entry 399 — Christian Jurgensen Thomsen « POETICKS

Entry 399 — Christian Jurgensen Thomsen

What follows is an excerpt from Geoffrey Bibby’s The Testimony of the Spade, 1956.  It’s here as testimony in support of my view of the importance of taxonomy.  Thomsen, who was unfamiliar to me until earlier this morning, is credited by most scholars of originating the division of prehistory in the stone, bronze and iron ages.  A simple feat of taxonomy but hugely important for raising artifact collection out of empirical scatter into systematic study–i.e., provided what was needed to the science of archaeology out of it, and thus a means to significant understanding of prehistory.

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Entry 1057A — Anumric Mathematics

Friday, March 29th, 2013

As a think, one of my mottoes is definitely, first thought, wrong thought.   The other day I changed one of my wrong thoughts–well, not all wrong, but wrong enough to change; and it wasn’t a thought, it was one of my coinages.  I’d introduced the mathematics equivalent, I thought, of “asemic writing,” calling it “anumeric mathematics.”  But a day or two ago, I realized that “anumeric” is not the equivalent of “asemic” but of  “asemantic.”  The equaivalent of “asemic” would be “anumric!”  One excellent result of this chance, which I now officially make, is that there’s no reason an anumric mathematical work can’t have numbers in it, so long as they are doing nothing numric, by which I can now say I mean, doing no more than possibly signifying a quantity.  In the latter case, they would be acting numerically if minimally–but not numricly.  That’s important!  So, everybody, correct your notes.

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Entry 469 — A Personal Problem

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

 

My standard arguments against the application of the term, “visual poetry,” to works without words, or without words that contribute significantly to their central aesthetic meaning have long been: (1) expanding the coverage of the term to just about any conceivable somebody or other wants to call a visual poem–which, of course, renders it worthless as a tool of description; and (2) it breaks with the practice of several thousand years of considering poetry a literary art, and therefore requiring words; why change a meaning so drastically that’s worked so well for so long?  With regard to (2) let me add that, yes, the meaning of “poetry” was expanded to included free verse, and just about all such terms need to be at least a little flexible, but free verse poems continued to use the majority of devices that metrical verse did, and remained a literary art (and as such, I claim, continued to achieve its most important effects in the verbal area of the human brain, not elsewhere in the brain, and certainly not elsewhere in the brain and not in the verbal area of the brain).

I have a third problem with what I consider the misuse of the term, though–a personal one.  It is that as people encounter works like many of those in the new (excellent) collection at Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia that are called “visual poems” although they are without aesthetically significant words or even textual elements and are thus conditioned not to expect anything called a visual poem to be verbally meaningful. Ergo, unless I call my combinations of words and graphics “visual poems containing significant words,” those encountering them will take them as perhaps pleasant designs but not trouble to work out what they much more importantly are due to their words. In short, my own works will suffer because of the way others mislabel theirs.

True, few will care about my works even after alerted to the fact that the words in them are not just graphically-designed into them.  Still . . .

Entry 399 — Christian Jurgensen Thomsen

Monday, March 7th, 2011

What follows is an excerpt from Geoffrey Bibby’s The Testimony of the Spade, 1956.  It’s here as testimony in support of my view of the importance of taxonomy.  Thomsen, who was unfamiliar to me until earlier this morning, is credited by most scholars of originating the division of prehistory in the stone, bronze and iron ages.  A simple feat of taxonomy but hugely important for raising artifact collection out of empirical scatter into systematic study–i.e., provided what was needed to the science of archaeology out of it, and thus a means to significant understanding of prehistory.

Entry 354 — A Few Further Thoughts on Taxonomization

Friday, January 21st, 2011

First, another thought about taxonomy: an effective taxonomy will have lacuna that its structure makes readily fillable.  The Periodic Table of Elements is a prime example.

And an anecdote in support of the high value of taxonomization.  It concerns one of my many small possible discoveries while working on my knowlecular psychology.  It was that despite the standard view of certified psychologists, there is no such thing as “short-term memory,” there is only “memory.”  In other words, we don’t store recent events in one section of the brain for some short period than release the unimportant ones, and shift the important ones to another section of the brain devoted to long-term memories.  I always had trouble with this because I could see no way of evaluating short-term memories–how, for instance, could the brain pick out some memory that might be crucially important ten years down the road however irrelevant at the moment?  Where taxonomization came in was that I was at the same time driven to make my taxonomy as compact as possible.  Limit the number of classifications.  That’s a prime goal of any taxonomist.  So I worked to eliminate the short-term memory and long-term-memory as subcategories of “memory.”  It was many years before I found a very simple, elegant solution–a way the brain could tag all incoming data in such a way that one’s faculty of remembering would tend to choose recent events before older events (of equal contextual attractiveness–i.e., if you just met someone named Mary and your wife is named Mary, the name Mary will probably still more likely bring up a memory of your wife than of the new Mary you’ve met, but if your wife’s name is Judy, than the name will bring up a memory of the new Mary faster than it will bring up some other acquaintance of yours who has that name, to put it very simply).

I claim that taxonomization significantly helped me to my breakthrough this time, and many other times.  If my psychology proves invalid that may seem a so what, but I also claim that taxonomization is similarly helpful to successful theorists.

I think the reason I’m such an advocate for taxonomy is my work throughout the years to construct a full-scale psychology.  Reflecting on it, I realize that what I’ve mostly done has been taxonomization–defining items and systematically classifying them.  Such informal taxonomization is essential for any serious full understanding of a versosophy (any verosoplex, that is), including ones more respected than mine.  I’ve read about some of the research that’s been done in this area, by the way, and don’t find any of it to contradict my theory; in fact, the researchers seem to me empiricists without little idea of what they’re doing.  They’re certainly not concerned with a big picture.

When I have more pep, I hope to be a little more specific about how I’ve worked out my theory, beginning with the universe, the activity of the brain, which I divide into perception, retroception (memory) and behavior.

Entry 352 — More on the Value of Taxonomy

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

The more I think about it, the more I feel like superciliously saying that Truth is one of the two primary values in life beyond survival, and therefore of the highest value for itself alone, and that a taxonomy is the basis of every significant form of Truth, so of the highest value for itself alone.  It is an understanding the value of which can only be appreciated by those able to perceive the full size, if not fully understand a form of verosophy and follow its taxonomical base into “ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections.”

But I contend that a taxonomy also has valuable utilitarian uses.  A cardinal one is its use for helping people understand  a given poem.  To demonstrate that, let’s take an untitled language poem with no author’s name that someone not knowing anything about such a thing encounters, and for some obscure reason doesn’t dismiss it as nonsense but wants to understand it.  Let’s assume it has some normal words in it.  If he knows about my taxonomy, he can go to it and figure out from it that the object he has is 1. material and therefore matter, 2. part of life because printed as a human artifact, 3. part of human life because a human artifact, 4. m0re than likely something resulting from mentascendancy, 5. a form of art since it certainly isn’t a form of versosophy–nor recognizable as religious though he may have to investigate that further, by perhaps taking it to a minister of some kind, 6. literature since it certainly is neither persuasive or utilitarian (although it may take him a while to reach that conclusion), and 7. poetry, because not having the set right margin that prose has.

It is obviously 8. linguexclusive and 9. not songmode, so plaintext poetry, and 10. not  orthological, so xenexpressive (the class I have now, thanks to Geof, replaced xenological and language poetry with).  Under xenexpressive, he’ll find language poetry with jump-cut poetry and surrealistic poetry, neither of which fit, so he’ll identify it as 11. language poetry.  He should be able to tell which main kind of language poem it is–let’s say, 12. sprungrammatical.  In the full taxonomy I hope one day to put together, he’ll be able to determine what kind of sprungrammatical poem it is–one to three levels down.  Now, with a name, he’ll be able to study anthologies of such poems and read articles about them.  Then he can dismiss them as nonsense with a clear conscience!

What is his alternative?  I can’t think of any–assuming he’s alone–i.e., has no educated friends to help him–except to consult a typology, or list of poetries–after somehow deducing that the text is a form of poetry.  He must then read the description of every kind of poetry until coming on one that seems to be of his text.  A long j0b, and even then he’ll not have learned anything about what such poems are like and unlike.

A taxonomy can work in the opposite direction, too.  Let’s say our subject finds a text labeled a language poem and finds it interesting, but puzzling in part.  He looks it up in a reference book and finds a fair but finally unsatisfying vague definition of it.  If in a typological reference book, he’ll have nowhere else to go.  Of course, few if any references are entirely typological; most of their definitions will mention what general kind of poetry a specific poem is.  He might find, for instance, that his language poem is “postmodern,” and read about that, which may help a bit.  But if he learns what it is taxonomically, he’ll soon be able to learn more about its xenexpressive qualities, and its plaintext qualities, and so forth  And see why it is not surrealistic but illuminatingly somewhat like surrealistic poetry.  Etc.

Entry 351 — Debating Huth on Taxonomy

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

Shortly after he got my booklet, A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry, Geof Huth wrote an excellent review of it at his blog, here. It is also a critique, which I will not respond to in detail.

Bob Grumman has released a new book, really a chapbook, entitled A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry, and it combines the two halves of Bob’s intellect into one. The first of these is an interest in clear thinking, in making distinctions even if only for distinction’s sake, an interest in definition and categorization. And the second is its opposite, though it is the second that Bob rarely sees. The second is a tendency to simplify distinctions by setting rules that are not in evidence in the facts, a tendency to muddle things a bit, to wander.

And I love both these halves of Bob, even though, or probably because, they both can annoy me and enchant me, because their annoyance is often a possibility for illumination and because their enchantments lead me terribly astray. These two halves of Bob are the two halves of his visual poetry as well. He creates some of the most considered visual poetry, a poetry interested in the word and new senses of syntax, and he sometimes creates with this intellect visual poems that seem to care little about their visual presentation. Then he will create visual poems almost totally inscrutable from a verbal point of view but which are still among the most beautiful visual poems around. His best work is among my favorite being created these days.

Somewhere I gave my opinion of this idea of Geof’s but I’ve been unable to find what I said. It wasn’t much, only that I wouldn’t call my intellect divided in two: it’s just the tool I use to define, distinguish and classify reality, among other things. Sometimes it is effective, sometimes not, but it’s the same intellect at all times. As for its creating “visual poems that seem to care little about their visual presentation,” this goes back to an ongoing difference of ours as to the importance of what I consider trivial decorative effects and he considers centrally important effects–because, I feel, I’m more committed to the conceptual meaning of poetry than he is, and less to the sensual meaning. A complicating factor is that I lack the means–e.g., a superior computer and printer–often to create poems that look as well on the page as I’d like them to. All of which may seem to have little to do with our taxonomy debate but which, I think, parallels his greater interest in trees than in forests compared with my greater interest in forests than in trees.

It would have been helpful if he’d provided an example of my “setting rules that are not in evidence in the facts, a tendency to muddle things a bit, to wander.”

So there’s the context for this, a little accounting of my point of view, which might be only an accumulation of my own biases. I’ve left a few things out. I’ve known Bob for just under 25 years. He is my oldest visual poetry friend. And we almost never agree on anything. We come to visual poetry with much different ideas. As a matter of fact, when Bob says “visual poetry” he means something considerably narrower than I mean when using the same term. We are not sympatico in that way.

Why Taxonomy?

Bob opens the booklet with “A Defense of the Taxonomization of Poetry,” which is an impassioned defense of taxonomies and the effort it takes to produce them. Part of the reason for his passion is that Bob has suffered through a few sometimes heated arguments over the years from poets, especially visual poets, who are themselves passionate in their opposition to taxonomies. These people see a taxonomy as the equivalent of an autopsy that produces no results. In this opening section, Bob does a reasonable, though quick, job of directly disputing the ideas of the critics of taxonomy, but he provides no justification for taxonomy at all, except to say that “an effective taxonomy” allows “the clarification of discussion.”

This is a big weakness to me. In the face of enormous criticism of taxonomy, Bob undermines the arguments of his opponents, but not in a way that argues the case for his own. All of his arguments are negative. None is positive. The one above is actually my reversal of his refutation of his detractors’. Bob needs to prove how his taxonomies do something valuable. What he does is insist that they do something valuable without clarifying those values or giving any evidence of any.

As I’ve elsewhere noted, I provided much more justification for taxonomy: for instance, I called it the basis of the conceptual appreciation of art, and declaimed that “At their best, taxonomies (and analysis in general) reveal ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections to discover down or up to–while allowing us a vocabulary greater than ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’ with which to share our pleasure with others.” Geof has since shrugged these off as trivial. I’m in the processing of making much more elaborate points, but I consider these pretty good ones.

Upper Levels of the Taxonomy

This taxonomy of Bob’s is the most formal he’s ever created. It begins with the Universe of the taxonomy (in this case “Matter”), and narrows down from there:

Domain: Life

Kingdom: Human Life

Phylum: Mentascendancy (“the pursuit of meaningfulness”)

Class: Art

Order: Literature

Family: Poetry
Immediately, I’m thrown into a quandary, one of definitional confusion and doubt. Is Poetry really divided into Matter (instead of its opposing universe: Mind) or into Life (instead of Non-Life). Even if stored inside a human, aren’t poems really only inanimate? and are they not more things of the mind rather than of matter? A poem on a page is not so much the poem as a poem accepted into a mind. This is a serious issue, one that needs justification in the taxonomy.*

Frankly, I feel Geof has been thrown into goofiness here. But maybe that’s my fault, for not having defined “human life” as “everything having to do with human beings, including their activities and products.” I didn’t define “mind,” either. For me, it is irrelevant–a consciousness that observes matter but does not otherwise interact with it. It has no subclasses. I only put it in my taxonomy to be complete.

I agree with Geof that poems are only inanimate. However, while they are products of the brain, which I’m sure is what Geof means by the “mind,” so are cars. What counts in my taxonomy are what they are as matter, to wit: verbal expressions, oral or written. That they become sets of activated brain-cells is interesting, and I believe will ultimately vindicate the validity of my taxonomy (by showing which brain-cells are activate for each different kind of poetry in my taxonomy), but my taxonomy only deals with what’s out there in the real material world.

Even if that were not the case, I don’t see that it would make much difference. What defines poetries as written or spoken material artifacts would define them as mentally accepted artifacts.

At the Level of Prose and Poetry

Bob divides all literature into two main families, Poetry and Prose, and this might be a satisfactory division, though I would have, at least, discussed dramatic works and addressed the question of apparent hybrid forms, such as the verse novel and verse play. Here, Bob posits that “poetry is intended to be read slowly, read into rather than through: connotations, sounds, rhythms, flesh being emphasize rather than denotation only.” In general, the general direction of this definition is fine, but it’s too absolute and doesn’t take into account such facts as the inclusion of doggerel in the family of poetry, or that fact that many prose works depend on all the effects mentioned by Bob and also do not depend on denotation alone. This definition is complicated by Bob’s paragraph that consists of this sentence: “Literary prose is simply literature that is not poetry,” which seems to assume that any works that depend on denotation alone (or, let’s say, principally) are thus prose. This situation is quickly complicated again by Bob’s not-quite-stated-but-clearly-implied point that poetry is text that includes flow-breaks, the most well known of which is the linebreak. Whatever poetry or prose is or isn’t isn’t clarified here.

In other writings I’ve done, I’ve gotten into verse plays and other such things. In my unpreliminary taxonomy, I will, too. I didn’t here, which is a minor flaw Geof is right in pointing out. His main criticism may have resulted because I for got to say, as I usually do when differentiating poetry from prose, that poetry is verbal expression in which flow-breaks (as I define them) are clearly significant. Prose is verbal expression in which flow-breaks occur relatively very infrequently. Yes, it’s a subjective matter, and yes, there will be instances of works of verbal expression whose category will be difficult to decide. But expecting a taxonomy to be perfect is absurd.

The same argument holds for poetry’s being “intended to be read slowly, read into rather than through: connotations, sounds, rhythms, flesh being emphasize rather than denotation only.” I suppose I should have written that it is significantly more than prose “intended to be read slowly, read into rather than through: connotations, sounds, rhythms, flesh being emphasized rather than denotation only.” Again the problem of subjectivity (which no attempt to define or classify can avoid, but must only try its best to minimize) arises, and of the borblur where rare works of verbal expression occur that are hard to define. Note well, however, that what I say about poetry here is descriptive only. It has nothing to do with the classification of poetry, which depends entirely on whether or not its ratio of flow-breaks to words is sufficiently high to make it poetry or not.

I would add in passing that doggerel is, even without truning to flow-breaks, poetry on the basis of its sounds–since doggerel always has rhyme ends.

Flow-Breaks

Bob, next discusses, flowbreaks (I’m discarding the hyphen): 1. the linebreak, 2. variable indentation, 3. interior line-gap (which is simply a caesura), and 4. the intrasyllabic linebreak. Here is the genius of Bob Grumman. He sees and defines topographic features of poetry that others have virtually ignored and he sees how they fit together into one set of poetic tools. My only problem with this is that one of his examples of an intra-syllabic linebreak is really intersyllabic, and the the fact that a line breaks within a word or a syllable doesn’t make it significantly different from a traditional linebreak. What he should have used as his fourth category of a flowbreak was an instance of visual tmesis, which would be a different form of flowbreak.

I checked and was surprised to find that in obsolete verse, blocks of more than one space are used to form caesurae. I always thought of them as rhetorical breaks with nothing special indicating them but the sense of the text where they are, or a simple punctuation mark. The term, “line-gap” is still necessary, however, because it applies not only to blocks of spaces but blocks of anything else that clear put a blocking gap int&&&o a line.

My two examples of intrasyllabically broken words were “dev/ice” and “i/t.” line-break. For me, “device’s” two syllables are “de” and “vice,” but maybe I’m wrong.

I like “flow-break” as opposed to “flowbreak,” by the way, because I think the hyphen emphasizes its meaning.

Types of Poetry

This lengthy discussion has brought us only to the saddle-stapled middle of the chapbook, which is where Bob divides poetry into three classes: linguiexclusive poetry (poetry dependent on words alone) and pluraesthetic poetry (poetry that mixes “expressive modalities,” such as the verbal and the visual. This distinction is solid, though I have questions with the subsubtypes of poetry Bob identifies.

Linguiexclusive Poetry

Just one i in “linguexpressive.”

Bob divides linguexclusive poetry into three subsubtypes: orthological, xenological, and language. The first is fairly standard poetry (subdivided yet again into categories), the second is poetry that breaks with the conventions of normal sense and syntax in various ways, and the third subsubtype is both confusing and unnecessary. All of its pieces should appear under xenological. Bob has divided to use a term here (“language poetry”) that already has a meaning, though a taxonomically unhelpful one, and he gives it a new sense to no particular purpose.

Geof may be right, but I think of xenological poetry as breaking with logic, not breaking with syntax, although I can see that a breaking of syntax will also cause a break in logic . . . I think. Not to argue but for background, the reason for the split is that in an earlier version of my taxonomy I divided poetries on the basis of their innovativeness, and put surrealistic and jump-cut poetry under “xenological poetry” among the uninnovative poetries, since their innovations where much older than language poetry’s, and not, in my opinion, as great.

“Language poetry” has no real meaning. At least I’ve never seen it defined. well, unless you consider “language-centered poetry” a definition. In any case, I long avoided using it but finally decided that it was popular enough and appropriate enough to use, and that I could use it to mean “language-centered,” but go on to define it in much greater detail. I think I will keep it, but perhaps put it under “xenological”–after changing “xenological” to “xenexpressive.”

The definition he gives is “Language poetry is poetry in words [that?] seem to be used with almost maximum communicational responsibility. Language is at the center of such poetry, not semantics or sound.” This definition does not seem at all helpful to me, and I cannot imagine a poetry without semantics that still focuses on language.

I would guess my computer screwed me up when I wrote my “definition” of language poetry. However, the three kinds of language poetry I went on to define should have clarified everything sufficiently. Language poetry is poetry whose words seem to be used with almost maximal communicational IRresponsibility (I’m sure i mistake was mine, not my computer’s) Language is at its centr, not semantics or sound. That semantics is not at its center does not mean it does not have semantics. I’m trying to say that it focuses on what words do rather than what they mean. Then in my three kinds of language poetry, I show some of the ways it does that.

Pluraesthetic Poetry

In discussing the types of pluraesthetic poetry, I’ll skip any discussion of the fact that Bob redefines “visual poetry” for his own uses, because it is important for him to do it here in order for “visual poetry” to fit neatly into his definition of poetry. Bob, however, also distinguishes mathematical poetry and flowchart poetry (“poetry that uses the symbols of computers or other flow-charting in significantly expressive ways”) from visual poetry, but I do not. Mathematical poems add mathematical features that visualize the poetry, so I consider them visual poems, and to have a category for flowchart poetry assumes that process symbols are textual and thus not visual. I’d argue, again, that they are not orthodox text, so these poems are also visual poems.

I’ll just state my disagreement–and the reason for my disagreement, which is that the point of my taxonomy is to separate different members of the set, “Poetry.” A term is of value only to the degree that it is specialized. I should add that I flubbed my definition of flow-chart poetry; it should be simply “poetry that uses flow-charting symbols in significantly expressive ways.”

Also, Bob’s definition remains indefensible: “poetry that uses mathematical symbols that actually carry out mathematical operations.” These mathematical operations are not actual; they are apparent. That is a big different. Duck cannot be divided by yellow in any mathematical way, though it could in a metaphoric way that has nothing to do with math directly.

See my previous entry discussing this.

For reasons I don’t understand, Bob distinguishes between “cyber poetry” and “hypertextual poetry,” which is not a distinction. Hypertext poetry would be a subset of cyberpoetry. But the real taxonomic distinctions in the category would be between non-interactive and interactive digital poetries, not by the types of computer languages used in the coding of the poems.

To me the distinction is between poetry that consists of computer language and poetry that consists of regular language but may have embedded computer instructions that allow it to do things poetry without them can’t.

Bob leaves out of his poetry videopoetry, which might have some overlap with cyberpoetry that Bob will have to work out.

Videopoetry is just animated visual poetry.

Numbering

Finally, since Bob is presenting a complex nested taxonomy, he should design a numbering system that allows the user to determine their level in the taxonomy and, thus, be able to identify relationships more easily. At points I was briefly confused because I did not understand what certain headings were subsets of. Even the traditional outlining system once taught in school to students drafting essays could work here, but I think, given the number of levels in play, something direct though a little more complex, such as the number system in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, would work better.

Good point.

Coda

Bob’s “Final Comment” includes this unsupportable statement: “I think no members of any other vocation care less about what they do than poets.” I’d say this is an unprovable statement, so it’s opening “I think” saves it, but I also believe everything after those first two words is false. Poets, in my experience, care more about poetics than about poetry. They are more likely to read someone writing about poetry than to read the poetry. They prefer, for instance, blogs on poetics over blogs that reproduce poetry. Poets are thinking people, even when guided by the heart, the spleen, the bone. But sometimes that interest in how poetry works does not extend to an interest in categorization. A general interest is not equivalent to an interest in taxonomy.

At the end of this, I realize that I’d like to see the next draft of this book. I like the idea of seeing how poetry can fall into categories, though I’m sure those categories will dissolve into one another. And I’m happy that Bob has made this book and glad that he has. But he still needs to prove how these defined categories could help us think about poetry. I don’t see it, even though I like the effort to make these categories and the entertainment of the results of that effort.

Finally, my thanks to Bob for giving me a special limited edition of one of the book, with a copy of one of his mathemaku pasted in. I’ve filled my copy with pencil marks of various kinds and notes to myself, but it is still a perfect copy. And I used pencil because I’m an archivist.

I truly thank Geof for his efforts. One of the reasons I say things like “no members of any other vocation care less about what they do than poets” is because, yes, they IN GENERAL are indifferent or hostile to projects like this of mine, even to my simple attempt over twenty or more years to get a list of contemporary poetry schools assembled. Two people suggested schools I didn’t have on my preliminary definitely incomplete list. I would add that I don’t think my idea of what poetics is comes very close to what most poets who think they’re discussing it think it is. But, hey, I’m a bitter old man long ignored by the public at large while tenth-raters make it big.

Not really. Just when I think about my situation in the world of poetry while writing entries like this one.

Entry 350 — Re: the Value of Taxonomy

Monday, January 17th, 2011

My good friend Geof Huth has challenged me to demonstrate why taxonomization is of value.  At first, I was somewhat dumbfounded by his belief that it was, if not useless, not of major importance.  Able occasionally to illuminate but not able to do so well enough for one to make a life-long project of, as I have.   I have always taken it as a given that an effective taxonomy is of value–of crucial value–in all fields.  Linnaeus’s Taxonomy, Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table of Elements, Euclid’s Geometry . . .   I termed it “the basis of the conceptual appreciation of art” (in a slightly different arrangement of those words), in the introductory defense of it in my A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry.  I also mentioned “the clarification of discussion that an effective taxonomy can accomplish.”  Later, I may have gone off the lyrico-mystical deep end when I said, “At their best, taxonomies (and analysis in general) reveal ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections to discover down or up to–while allowing us a vocabulary greater than ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’ with which to share our pleasure with others.”  Granted, the idea that without taxonomy’s help, our vocabulary would be limited to ooohs and ahhhs is absurdly exaggerated.  Still, as I hope to show, only a taxonomy-based vocabulary is of maximal usefulness in the search for significant truths.

I soon admitted that I had not done much more than assert the worth of taxonomy, although it still seems to me that anyone who has done serious work in any kind of verosophy (i.e., field of significant material knowledge) would find plenty of support in his experiences for those assertions.  Ergo, I now must present a detailed case for taxonomy.  Not easy, for that requires a discussion of knowledge,  a main contention of mine being that taxonomies are either necessary or hard to do without in all attempts significantly to understand a discipline.  Here I ought to stop, for the possibility that I could convince anyone that my understanding of what knowledge is, and how we acquire and use it is valid is less than point oh one percent.  Nevertheless, I’ll try.  If I can figure out how to.

Warning: I’m now going to think out loud.  I will be hard to follow as I will probably jump around.  My logic will at times be very lax, and I’ll use coinages of mine unfamiliar to all but me.  Don’t expect too much in the way of articulateness, either.

I’m going to start with the knowleplex.  That’s what I call the complex of knowlecules (bits of knowledge) that a person’s brain forms when learning his way around a portion of reality containing interrelated matter–one’s neighborhood, for instance, or marine biology, or the study of the photon.  There are many kinds of knowleplexes.  The most effective, for verosophers, is the verosoplex.  That’s because it is systematically organized.  Not perfectly, but always aiming for maximal systemization.

I would claim that one reason many plenty dislike taxonomy (and reductive thinking and everything else having to do with science and related fields) is that they are incapable of forming verosoplexes.  Some whom I call “milyoops, tend because of their innate temperaments, mainly to form sloppy clumps of knowlecules some of which interrelate with some of the others in the knowleplex  but few of which interrelate to all or even a majority of the others in it.  The milyooplexes, as I call these, lack a unifying principle, something that makes a big picture possible.  An effective taxonomy is the ultimate such unifying principle.

It’s just like a city: an ideal system of streets will get you with maximal efficiency wherever you want to go; streets designed merely to connect one building to one or two others, will be worthless outside a give neighborhood.  Similarly, a city with an effective system of streets will tend to fill up with building at eay to find and get-to locations.  A really well-organized city (impossible because Nature must make it so) would have a center from which the whole of the center would be in view.

Another kind of knowleplex is the rigidniplex.  It’s formed by people I term rigidniks whose innate temperament compels them to create unsound unifying principles–conceptual skeletons, so to speak–that are too inflexible to form a unifying basis for sufficient knowledge to provide a rational understanding of a field.  They over-unify too little data.

Milyoops are satisfied by their milyooplexes because they allow pleasurable short-term connections–the pleasure of vaudeville versus the pleasure of a well-written full-length play.  Or pop songs versus classical symph0nies.  They can’t experience long-term pleasure or be other than bored by anything aimed to provide that, so they oppose it.  They love to learn small facts, but avoid systematic knowledge.  Another way of putting it is that a milyoop lacks much of an attention span–a pop song’s immediate variation on its initial theme will give them pleasure, but forget a second movement of a symphony’s providing a (probably more complicated) variation on a (probably more complicated) theme played ten minutes previously.  They can’t use a taxonomy, which does, basically, what a fine symphony does, so they reject it.

The whole idea is that a small understanding of some small portion of a knowleplex will give pleasure, but if one also can connect it to some other portion of the knowleplex, one can enjoy the second portion at the same time, and if one can also–do to one or more such connections, intuite something of the way everything in the knowleplex interrelate, one can enjoy a truly superior pleasure.  Indeed, such an understanding can suggest the sense of the oneness of all things that religions hype as the ultimate happiness–and which I believe all verosophers experience in their best moments, and have spoken of.  Artists, too–although not by means of a verosoplex, but by means of (this is a new idea of mine) an intuiplex–a knowleplex whose unifying principle is protoceptual rather than reducticeptual.  Or sensual rather than conceptual.

This is a good moment for me.  Due to the taxonomical thinking I always do when working with my theory of psychology.  I classify artistic temperaments as different from scientific temperaments on the basis of their brain make-up, which I won’t go into here.  And suddenly perceived how I could be nice to artists with this intuiplex, which I genuinely see can be a route to large truths equal to the verosoplex.  But also what causes the two cultures C. P. Snow wrote about, and which I fully accept.

The intuiplex much more than the verosoplex aids the pursuit of beauty, which I hold to be as important as the search for truth, but probably hinders the latter–except when used by someone who also is capable of verosoplexes.  Similarly, verosoplexes tend to get in the way of the pursuit and appreciation of beauty.

Again, I yield to the temptation of using my present reasoning to support the value of taxonomy.  Only because of taxonomy have I been able on the spur of the moment to hypothesize an intuiplex–because it is based on the knowleplex, which is only a taxonomical level one step above it, and the verosoplex, which it is recognizably identical to (to me) except for one thing, its being an arrangement of primarily protoceptual knowlecules (think of the somatic knowledge that some highly unintellectual highly effective athletes have) instead of reducticeptual knowlecules–which, by the way, is taxonomically very similar, and in the same taxon as protoceptual knowlecules, differing from them only in that their ultimate source is the data conveyed to the brain more or less directly from the senses rather than extracted from the senses pre-cerebralling and converted to reducticepts (or conceptual knowledge, like words, numbers or geometrical shapes).

An important point to recognize is that the validity of my theory of psychology is irrelevant so far as the value of its taxonomy is concerned: its taxonomy greatly facilitates my navigation of it, and ability to understand it–and find gaps worth trying to fill I’d never find without it,

I really think I know what I’m talking about, however little it may seem so.  I hope someone somewhere in time and space gets something out of this installment of my adventure in Advanced Thought.  More, I hope, tomorrow.

Entry 349 — My Subtaxonomy of Poetry

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

I’m excited this morning, for I have a brand-new enthusiasm: a taxonomy devoted entirely to classifying the attributes of a single poem!  Athena herself told me to work one out last night while I was in bed when I was pondering how poor the 30-box rectangle and its contents represented the taxonomy of a poem it was intended to be in my “Mathemaku in Praise of Taxonomy.”  I’d not intended to rectangle to be more than suggestive but the more I thought about it, the more I felt a serious taxonomy of the single poem would be useful.  More important, I thought I’d enjoy working on one.  I admit that the strong possibility that it would be the world’s first enthused me, too.  It also me me laugh since I’m sure almost everyone would consider it much too trivial to bother with.

Anyway, here goes–extremely preliminarily:

1. The Poem (i.e., something with words and flow-breaks)

2. A. Poetic Form &  2.B. Poetic Content

By poetic form I mean every generalized attribute of a poem: rhyme, for instance; by “poetic content,” I mean every specific attribute of a poem such as the specific “rhyme/grime” rhyme–in spite of what those nullinguists who abhor clarity of communication contend.  The abstract container and the concrete contained.  Very simple.

3.A.i. Classiform & 3.A.ii Idioform

By “classiform,” I mean those sets of “form-traits” making up a kind of poem that more than a few people repeat, or, to put it simply, an established poetic form; an “idioform” is simply a poetic form that used only for the poem it is in, or–if more than that, not enough to be considered established.  A traditional sonnet versus one of my free verse Poem poems.

3.B.i. Words and the equivalent alone & 3.B.ii. words and other matter

This is basically a repeat of my division of poetry into linguexclusive (words only) and pluraesthetic (words and other matter) except that I mention “the equivalent,” by which I mean all symbols that act, in my view, as words, such as the plus sign and other mathematical symbols and such verbal symbols as the ampersand.

4.A.i.I.  Metrical Shape & 4.A.i.II. Set Length

By “metrical shape,” I mean things like number and length of lines using some metric foot as the unit of measure. By “set length,” I mean length of lines or poem as a while using any unit of measure; most often that would be a syllable, as with the classical American haiku, which is suppose to be 17 syllables long, in three lines. I think there are few established forms that are set length. I can’t think of any other criteria traditional poems have to conform to but suspect there may be some.

4.A.ii.I. Width & 4.A.ii.II Length

I admit that I really had no idea what to put here. Idioformular poems come in too many varieties to be easily classifiable–I think.

4.B.i.I. Figurative & 4.B.i.II Plaintext & 4.B.i.III. Melodational & 4.B.i.IV. Imagistic

These are based on what is most prominent about the words and word-equivalents in a poem. Plaintext will have little or not figurative, melodational of imagistic language. The other three can be mixed if more than one variety of words is prominent: e.g., figurative-imagistic or even figurative-imagistic-melodational.

4.B.ii.I Words and Graphics & 4.B.ii.II Words and Heightened Sounds & 4.B.ii.III Words and Mathematics & 4.B.ii.IV Words and Cryptography & 4.B.ii.V Words and Computer Language & 4.B.ii.VI Words and Tactile, Gustatory or Olfactory Elements

All the pluraesthetic kinds of poetry, if I have them all.

5.A.i.I.1 Locked & 5.A.i.I.2 Flexible

The first would consist of relatively rigid forms like the sonnet and limerick, the second of fairly informal forms of no particular length but requiring rhyme (doggerel) or strict meter. At Level 6. all these varieties would be listed; there would be no Level 7.

5.A.i.II.1. Non-Classical Haiku & 5.A.i.II.2 Other Free Verse Poems

Not much more to be said about the form of free verse poems.

5.B.i. This level would divide figurative poems by what figures–metaphors, puns, etc., they have; melodational poems by what melodations–rhyme, alliteration, etc.-they use; and imagistic poems by what images (in general–such as animal) they have. 5.B.ii. would divide various pluraesthetic poems similarly–mathematical poems into kind of math used, crytographic poems into kind of code, etc. At Level 6, every variety in the Content Section of the Taxonomy would be divided based on subject matter, and that could continue into any desired level of specificity–say from animal to mammal to rabbit to variety of rabbit, or more.

Okay, I got tired toward the end. An okay start, though, I feel. But I’ve lost my excitement–and fear I see why nobody else (probably) has tackled this problem before.

Entry 348 — Endwar Enters the Taxonomy Discussion

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

Endwar had such intereseting comments to contribute to the discussion going on at Geof Huth’s blog concerning my A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry that I decided, with his permission, to give them a second printing here, with a few stray comments of mine to follow:

On mathematical poetry and mathematics:  I’m not sure I agree completely with anyone here.  It seems to me that in a mathematical poem one sees a mathematical operation with words (usually) operating in a metaphorical way (thus the poetry enters).  That said, the mathematical operations involved are usually well-defined for numbers, but not for various words and concepts.  “3+1=2” is something everyone (is taught to) agrees on in a literal way, and it follows from the definitions of each number and the signs “+” and “=”.  The statement “candy cane + child = happiness” is also probably pretty generally understood, but not with the same level of definiteness (or definition, as per the previous sentence) as the numerical example earlier.  You could write “candy cane + child = obesity”, which would probably also be understood, but because of the metaphorical nature of the math, you can’t conclude (via the law of substitution) that “happiness = obesity” (though some may point out the phrase “fat, dumb, and happy”, which could then lead us to conclude “happiness = obesity = stupidity” . . .  You can see, then where the multiple meanings of words (bifurcations of meaning, to throw in another mathematical metaphor popular in some at one time trendy lit-crit circles)) can lead.)

I would argue that a mathematical poem is a statement that represents a mathematical operation on the words involved, but which isn’t necessarily one that can be checked the way mathematical statements with numbers can be.  I will even go one step further and assert that one can create a mathematical poem that is mathematically wrong but which still makes a metaphorical point.  I have done this using matrix multiplication – a 2×2 matrix times a 2×1 vector is set equal to a 3×1 vector.   That’s not something you can do with real number (or even imaginary number) math, but I think it works as a poem.

Written mathematics is inherently visual, not verbal>:   I can grant Bob’s point that “3-1=2” is visually not interesting, and furthermore it hardly matters what font is used.  It does matter a bit what numbers are used – roman numerals will say “III-I=II”, and binary says “11-1=10”, and ternary says “10-1=2”, which are all the same numerically.  But it becomes evident for large numbers that roman numerals are unwieldy for calculating, and we are used to the decimal number system, so the non-decimal numbers need cumbersome subscripts or context to be read as intended.  I would argue, though, that the real test of whether we have something verbal versus something visual is whether the statement can be read aloud.  Again “Three minus one equals two,” is pretty straightforward, but that is merely because of the simplicity of the expression.  Try reading, say, a passage out of the middle of J.D. Jackson’s <I>Classical Electrodynamics</I> or any other graduate physics or mathematics text, and it will be immediately obvious why these equations aren’t written out in words and why mathematicians and scientists do nearly all their professional discussions with slides or in the presence of a blackboard.  And even if one does manage to put the text purely into words read aloud, you will find nobody in the audience who will understand what has been said who hasn’t at least written down some equations or a drawing as a guide.   One of the most tedious reading experiences I had was a few pages out of an algebra text written by Leonhard Euler, who felt it was necessary to write down an equation and then repeat the equation in words, such as:
“E=mv &sup2;/2

The kinetic energy is equal to half the product of the mass and the square of the velocity.”  This continues for page after page.

If you’re still not convinced, show me how to do read calculus aloud and make it intelligible.  Two pages minimum.

Because the visual representation is integral to the intelligible communication of all but the simplest mathematics, I would argue that mathematics is inherently visual language, and that by extension, mathematical poetry is also inherently visual poetry.  The visual poem may still not depend on which font is used (though I have examples where that is the case as well), but it still can’t be read aloud and have the same meaning, because it will not then register as mathematical.

On hypertext:  I think Bob is right that hypertext is not necessarily computer poetry, though the number of sequences need not be infinite.  There are primitive hypertexts preceding the web, if not the computer, perhaps the most literarily respectable being Julio Cortazar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch, or the near equivalent in the many children’s books where the reader gets to decide the adventure, where one reads the first page and at the bottom of each page one sees a sentence like “If Joe enters the gate, go to page 23.  If Joe continues down the road, go to page 42,” and continues until one reaches an ending.  (I suppose one can write out a tree or flow chart to describe the plot and then label it some sort of finite state machine or finite automaton, which is sort of a representation of a simple computer, but I digress.)  The point that I am agreeing with Bob is that a hypertext does not necessarily require a computer, though using a computer and particularly one with html, greatly facilitates the process.  Hypertext is thus distinct from code poetry like that which might be like that of Sondheim (or Jim Andrews or Ted Warnell (poems by Nari)).  And just as there is a difference between mathematics with numbers and mathematical poetry, a poem written in/with computer code need not be an actually compileable program.  There are of course many other approaches to poetry using a computer (starting with using a text editor to pound out cantos), for which I will refer the reader to the books of Jorge Luiz Antonio, who is trying to catalog them all (to see his long list of links to Brfazilian digital poetry samples, see http://vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm).

BTW, for another experience of the difference between computer code and a written document, try viewing the source code of this web page (or the dbqp blog itself), and contrast the instructions for the computer (the part read and understood by the machine) and the human readable part.

endwar

First a very quick acceptance, I think, with Endwar’s definition of mathematical poetry, except that I’d use different words to define it than he has: mathematical poetry is poetry that carries out mathematical operations, metaphorically, on non-mathematical terms.  This is, I believe, the first time I’ve accepted that the operations are metaphorical, as Gregory St. Thomasino tried to convince me six months or so ago.  My trouble (still) is that the operations seem actual to me–the sun really does multiply a field to get flowers!

Then my two comments at Geof’s blog:

Thanks for all the comments, endwar. I’ll get to all of them, I hope. Right now, just some thoughts in response to your comments about mathematical poetry.

I don’t care whether a poem can be read aloud or not. Mathematics is written in text just as ordinary verbal material is. Text printed standardly is effectively not visual, as far as I’m concerned: it’s symbolic. So a purely mathematical poem, in my definition, would be expressed in verbal and mathematical symbols.

On further thought, it seems to me all mathematics can be read out loud. So what if one needs to see it on the page to understand it? That would be true of many linguexclusive poems, too. Even relatively simple ones. I’ve almost never understood poems I was unfamiliar with when read at poetry readings.

As for the child and candy cane, I like your reasoning, but it now seems to me you have simple shown that “candy cane + child = happiness” and “candy cane + child = obesity” are both incorrect! They should be “candy cane + child = happiness + X” and “candy cane + child = obesity +Y.” And “happiness – obesity + X – Y.”

* * * * * * *
.
By the way, I love this discussion of mathematical poetry. I suddenly wondered, though, if there’s a subject fewer people in the world would be interested in.

One futher note: even if we admitted that difficult math must be seen to be understood, that would not make “candy cane + child – X = happiness” a visual poem since that particular poem would not have to be seen to be understood. That said, I can’t wait for the first mathematical poem based on mathematics you have to see on the page to understand.

–Bob

Entry 346 — The Definition of Visual Poetry, Yet Again

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

In a comment to the entry Geof Huth made to his blog about my taxonomy, Kaz Maslanka said, “I like what I understand to be Karl Kempton and Karl Young’s definition of: ‘Visual Poetry is a Poetry that has to be seen.’ This is such a simple yet powerful definition that seems to me to be true in every case of vizpo that I have seen.”

My definition is not so simple–because while the double-Karl definition probably does cover every case of visual poetry, it fails to distinguish certain works that I do not consider visual poetry: illustrated poems and captioned or labeled visimages; ordinary poems whose visual appearance has been improved by calligraphy or special graphic touches like ornate capitals at the beginning of stanzas–poetry, in other words that has been graphically decorated enough to make it more pleasing but not enough to significantly increase its aesthetic effect; certain infraverbal texts like Joyce’s “cropse,” which must be seen to be appreciated but are not visual, if by “visual” we mean “of any special interest to the eye.”  Of course, the definition works for those for whom just about any combination of textual and graphic material is visual poetry–but then we would still need a special term for artworks in which the interrelation of words and graphics causes has a significant aesthetic effect (or is intended to).  For that, the double-Karl definition won’t work, and that more than any of the other combinations of text and graphics is what requires definition.  Because, in my view, only that will jolt an engagent in both the reading section and the seeing section of his brain simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously.

This latter, by the way, is only one example of the way that my taxonomy of poetry is, like a proper theory of science, falsifiable.   Eventually superior forms of cat-scans will be able to determine where in the brain different forms of poetry are appreciated.  I claim each of the main kinds I classify will have a unique brainprint.  Moreover, that brainprint will prove close to exactly what one would expect it to be: visual poems, by my definition, will have a visioverbal brainprint (which will be different from textual designs’ visiotextual brainprint); linguexclusive poems will have a purely verbal brainprint–initially, for most of them will give rise to visual imagery; avisual mathematical poems will have a purely verbomathematical brainprint, but visiomathematical poems will have a visioverbomathematical brainprint.   The brainprints of more specialized poems–particular kinds of visual poems should–if my taxonomy is valid and my theory of psychology right–each have its own unique visioverbal brainprint.

One brainprint that especially intrigues is the one a cryptographic poem would have.  It’d have to be verbal, of course, but also something caused by a conceptual part of the brain I haven’t worked out yet.  Okay, crazy maybe, but don’t be too sure about that until it’s tested.

Endwar « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Endwar’ Category

Entry 348 — Endwar Enters the Taxonomy Discussion

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

Endwar had such intereseting comments to contribute to the discussion going on at Geof Huth’s blog concerning my A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry that I decided, with his permission, to give them a second printing here, with a few stray comments of mine to follow:

On mathematical poetry and mathematics:  I’m not sure I agree completely with anyone here.  It seems to me that in a mathematical poem one sees a mathematical operation with words (usually) operating in a metaphorical way (thus the poetry enters).  That said, the mathematical operations involved are usually well-defined for numbers, but not for various words and concepts.  “3+1=2” is something everyone (is taught to) agrees on in a literal way, and it follows from the definitions of each number and the signs “+” and “=”.  The statement “candy cane + child = happiness” is also probably pretty generally understood, but not with the same level of definiteness (or definition, as per the previous sentence) as the numerical example earlier.  You could write “candy cane + child = obesity”, which would probably also be understood, but because of the metaphorical nature of the math, you can’t conclude (via the law of substitution) that “happiness = obesity” (though some may point out the phrase “fat, dumb, and happy”, which could then lead us to conclude “happiness = obesity = stupidity” . . .  You can see, then where the multiple meanings of words (bifurcations of meaning, to throw in another mathematical metaphor popular in some at one time trendy lit-crit circles)) can lead.)

I would argue that a mathematical poem is a statement that represents a mathematical operation on the words involved, but which isn’t necessarily one that can be checked the way mathematical statements with numbers can be.  I will even go one step further and assert that one can create a mathematical poem that is mathematically wrong but which still makes a metaphorical point.  I have done this using matrix multiplication – a 2×2 matrix times a 2×1 vector is set equal to a 3×1 vector.   That’s not something you can do with real number (or even imaginary number) math, but I think it works as a poem.

Written mathematics is inherently visual, not verbal>:   I can grant Bob’s point that “3-1=2” is visually not interesting, and furthermore it hardly matters what font is used.  It does matter a bit what numbers are used – roman numerals will say “III-I=II”, and binary says “11-1=10”, and ternary says “10-1=2”, which are all the same numerically.  But it becomes evident for large numbers that roman numerals are unwieldy for calculating, and we are used to the decimal number system, so the non-decimal numbers need cumbersome subscripts or context to be read as intended.  I would argue, though, that the real test of whether we have something verbal versus something visual is whether the statement can be read aloud.  Again “Three minus one equals two,” is pretty straightforward, but that is merely because of the simplicity of the expression.  Try reading, say, a passage out of the middle of J.D. Jackson’s <I>Classical Electrodynamics</I> or any other graduate physics or mathematics text, and it will be immediately obvious why these equations aren’t written out in words and why mathematicians and scientists do nearly all their professional discussions with slides or in the presence of a blackboard.  And even if one does manage to put the text purely into words read aloud, you will find nobody in the audience who will understand what has been said who hasn’t at least written down some equations or a drawing as a guide.   One of the most tedious reading experiences I had was a few pages out of an algebra text written by Leonhard Euler, who felt it was necessary to write down an equation and then repeat the equation in words, such as:
“E=mv &sup2;/2

The kinetic energy is equal to half the product of the mass and the square of the velocity.”  This continues for page after page.

If you’re still not convinced, show me how to do read calculus aloud and make it intelligible.  Two pages minimum.

Because the visual representation is integral to the intelligible communication of all but the simplest mathematics, I would argue that mathematics is inherently visual language, and that by extension, mathematical poetry is also inherently visual poetry.  The visual poem may still not depend on which font is used (though I have examples where that is the case as well), but it still can’t be read aloud and have the same meaning, because it will not then register as mathematical.

On hypertext:  I think Bob is right that hypertext is not necessarily computer poetry, though the number of sequences need not be infinite.  There are primitive hypertexts preceding the web, if not the computer, perhaps the most literarily respectable being Julio Cortazar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch, or the near equivalent in the many children’s books where the reader gets to decide the adventure, where one reads the first page and at the bottom of each page one sees a sentence like “If Joe enters the gate, go to page 23.  If Joe continues down the road, go to page 42,” and continues until one reaches an ending.  (I suppose one can write out a tree or flow chart to describe the plot and then label it some sort of finite state machine or finite automaton, which is sort of a representation of a simple computer, but I digress.)  The point that I am agreeing with Bob is that a hypertext does not necessarily require a computer, though using a computer and particularly one with html, greatly facilitates the process.  Hypertext is thus distinct from code poetry like that which might be like that of Sondheim (or Jim Andrews or Ted Warnell (poems by Nari)).  And just as there is a difference between mathematics with numbers and mathematical poetry, a poem written in/with computer code need not be an actually compileable program.  There are of course many other approaches to poetry using a computer (starting with using a text editor to pound out cantos), for which I will refer the reader to the books of Jorge Luiz Antonio, who is trying to catalog them all (to see his long list of links to Brfazilian digital poetry samples, see http://vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm).

BTW, for another experience of the difference between computer code and a written document, try viewing the source code of this web page (or the dbqp blog itself), and contrast the instructions for the computer (the part read and understood by the machine) and the human readable part.

endwar

First a very quick acceptance, I think, with Endwar’s definition of mathematical poetry, except that I’d use different words to define it than he has: mathematical poetry is poetry that carries out mathematical operations, metaphorically, on non-mathematical terms.  This is, I believe, the first time I’ve accepted that the operations are metaphorical, as Gregory St. Thomasino tried to convince me six months or so ago.  My trouble (still) is that the operations seem actual to me–the sun really does multiply a field to get flowers!

Then my two comments at Geof’s blog:

Thanks for all the comments, endwar. I’ll get to all of them, I hope. Right now, just some thoughts in response to your comments about mathematical poetry.

I don’t care whether a poem can be read aloud or not. Mathematics is written in text just as ordinary verbal material is. Text printed standardly is effectively not visual, as far as I’m concerned: it’s symbolic. So a purely mathematical poem, in my definition, would be expressed in verbal and mathematical symbols.

On further thought, it seems to me all mathematics can be read out loud. So what if one needs to see it on the page to understand it? That would be true of many linguexclusive poems, too. Even relatively simple ones. I’ve almost never understood poems I was unfamiliar with when read at poetry readings.

As for the child and candy cane, I like your reasoning, but it now seems to me you have simple shown that “candy cane + child = happiness” and “candy cane + child = obesity” are both incorrect! They should be “candy cane + child = happiness + X” and “candy cane + child = obesity +Y.” And “happiness – obesity + X – Y.”

* * * * * * *
.
By the way, I love this discussion of mathematical poetry. I suddenly wondered, though, if there’s a subject fewer people in the world would be interested in.

One futher note: even if we admitted that difficult math must be seen to be understood, that would not make “candy cane + child – X = happiness” a visual poem since that particular poem would not have to be seen to be understood. That said, I can’t wait for the first mathematical poem based on mathematics you have to see on the page to understand.

–Bob

Entry 57 — Minimalist Poem Sequence by Endwar

Monday, December 28th, 2009

#699 through #715 of my old blog are all about the anthology of visio-textual art Crag Hill and I co-edited ten years or so ago, Writing To Be Seen.  I do an entry on one piece by each of the contributors and a few miscellaneous ones.  Rather than run them again here, I’m going to put them all together as an essay in the Pages section to the right.  It’ll start off being a jumble but eventually will get organized, as with several still-disorganized pages.

To make this entry more than just an announcement, here is the sequence of minimalist permutational infraverbal poems (subverse, in his jargon, which I believe he got from his and my pal, Will Napoli) by Endwar that I featured in #716:

Oh, and a second announcement: today I began, and almost completed, my column for the next issue of Small Press Review. No big deal except that it’s a chore I’ve tried to get to every day for at least two months.  I feared I’d never do it!  Really.  I hope my getting to it means I’ll start being at least slightly productive again.  There’s so much I need to get done.
.

.                                                    add
.                                                    read

.                                                    a lie
.                                                    realize

.                                                    a verb
.                                                    reverb

.                                                    a mind
.                                                    remind

.                                                    a vision
.                                                    revision

.                                                    apt
.                                                    repeat

.                                                    a sign
.                                                    resign

.                                                    all
.                                                    real

.

Oh, and a second announcement: today I began, and almost completed, my column for the next issue of Small Press Review. No big deal except that it’s a chore I’ve tried to get to every day for at least two months.  I feared I’d never do it!  Really.  I hope my getting to it means I’ll start being at least slightly productive again.  There’s so much I need to get done.

Entry 39 — 3 by Endwar

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

They’re from #674.

Communist-EvolutionCommunist Evolution

NoNoNoNo

TransgenderTransgender

#673 had two poems by John Elsbergs from his Runaway Spoon Press book, Broken Poems for Evita. One was this:

          RAISING EVA              (Or, the myth of art and politics)              L                  EVITA              tio        nis                   th           EPRE                         fer                   RED        al        TERN                         at        ivefor              thosewhona                t         UR                            ALLY          S                                                         inK

And that’s it for this entry.    (Am I feeling more worn out than ever for no reason?  Yes.)

Entry 31 — Old Blog Entries 663 through 670

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

In #663, I presented my Odysseus Suite–but the reproduction is too crude for me to re-post it here.   My next entry featured this, by Endwar:

TenByTenAs I announced when I first posted this, I am hoping to publish an anthology of mathematical poems, like this one, so if you have one or know of one, send me a copy of it, or tell me about it.

#665 had this by Marton Koppany, which I have to post here because it was dedicated to ME:

Odysseus

Hey, it’s mathematical, too.  The next entry, whose number I fear to state, concerned this:

Bielski-Haiku-BW

This is from Typewriter Poems, an anthology published by Something Else Press and Second Aeon back in 1972. It’s by Alison Bielski, An English woman born in 1925 whose work I’m unfamiliar with. I find this specimen a charmer . . . but am not sure what to make of it. Three lines, as in the classic haiku. The middle one is some sort of filter. Is “n” the “n” in so much mathematics? If so, what’s the poem saying? And where does the night and stars Hard for me not to assume come in? Pure mathematics below, a sort of practical mathematics above? That idea would work better for me if the n’s were in the lower group rather than in the other. Rather reluctantly, I have to conclude the poem is just a texteme design. I hope someone more clever sets me right, though. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen later visio-textual works using the same filter idea–or whatever the the combination of +’s. =’s and n’s is, but can’t remember any details.)

It was back to my lifelong search for a word meaning “partaker of artwork” in #667–but I now believe “aesthimbiber,” which I thought of in a post earlier than #667, I believe, but dropped, may be the winner of my search.

Next entry topic was about what visual poets might do to capture a bigger audience.  I said nothing worth reposting on a topic going nowhere because visual poets, in general, are downright inimical to doing anything as base as trying to increase their audience.   One suggestion I had was to post canonical poems along with visual poems inspired by them, which I mention because in my next entry, I did just that, posting a Wordsworth sonnet and a visual poem I did based on and quoting part of it–and don’t re-post here because of space limitations.  I wrote about the two in the final entry in this set of ten old blog entries.

 

Entry 469 — A Personal Problem « POETICKS

Entry 469 — A Personal Problem

 

My standard arguments against the application of the term, “visual poetry,” to works without words, or without words that contribute significantly to their central aesthetic meaning have long been: (1) expanding the coverage of the term to just about any conceivable somebody or other wants to call a visual poem–which, of course, renders it worthless as a tool of description; and (2) it breaks with the practice of several thousand years of considering poetry a literary art, and therefore requiring words; why change a meaning so drastically that’s worked so well for so long?  With regard to (2) let me add that, yes, the meaning of “poetry” was expanded to included free verse, and just about all such terms need to be at least a little flexible, but free verse poems continued to use the majority of devices that metrical verse did, and remained a literary art (and as such, I claim, continued to achieve its most important effects in the verbal area of the human brain, not elsewhere in the brain, and certainly not elsewhere in the brain and not in the verbal area of the brain).

I have a third problem with what I consider the misuse of the term, though–a personal one.  It is that as people encounter works like many of those in the new (excellent) collection at Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia that are called “visual poems” although they are without aesthetically significant words or even textual elements and are thus conditioned not to expect anything called a visual poem to be verbally meaningful. Ergo, unless I call my combinations of words and graphics “visual poems containing significant words,” those encountering them will take them as perhaps pleasant designs but not trouble to work out what they much more importantly are due to their words. In short, my own works will suffer because of the way others mislabel theirs.

True, few will care about my works even after alerted to the fact that the words in them are not just graphically-designed into them.  Still . . .

6 Responses to “Entry 469 — A Personal Problem”

  1. karl kempton says:

    note term in title– intermedia

  2. Ed Baker says:

    SHE
    walking down Houston
    in a wet-dress clinging
    to that image with-in
    & with-out
    in a single word:

    pure-poetry-in-motion

    not a single need/want to cut-&-paste

  3. Bob Grumman says:

    I admit I was thinking of your show as a collection of visual poetry, Karl. I fear most people will mistake it as such. But my problem is not with it but with the extremely wide-spread notion, which I fear your introduction to your show does little to address, that an artwork need not have words or even textual elements to be a visual poem.

    Ed: a poem can be a metaphor for a woman but it can’t be a woman.

  4. Ed Baker says:

    yeah & thank Gawd
    (whoever she may be)

    for the difference

    or

    in the immortal words of

    (what’s her name) :
    “I never saw a poem as lovely as a tree”

    the last time I kissed “her” I got a mouth-full of wet oil-based paint
    of
    a Blood-Red persuasion

    so

    I called her bluff and named her DIOTIMA

    525 pages later she turned from ink into stone …

    full moon
    I think I’m in love
    with a rock

  5. karl kempton says:

    bob,

    given the wide spectrum of modern and post modern art, your demands are older than 100 years in the rear view mirror. look at art and music on the experimental frontiers: single colored canvases over 50 years ago, music scores of one note hours long over 50 years ago. films of a building days long . . .

    u forget poetic gesture (jest), accent, etc not being words but very poetic. u r being very literal and o so very non visual. can not fractured sounds of speech be made visual with broken letters not words . . .

    also y i am now using “sound illumination” to get away from nit pickers.

    is not the actual heading of the entire collection “illuminated script”? it is a door wide open to possibilities to illuminate mind(s).

  6. Bob Grumman says:

    Just saw this post of your today, Karl. Not sure what you’re talking about. You have a bad habit of avoiding specifics.

    Of course “fractured sounds of speech” can “be made visual.” So what? If they do nothing semantic, they are not poetry, by everyone’s definition of poetry for thousands of years. Sure, gestures can be “poetic.” So can kangaroos. Which means any word can be used metaphorically. But in verosophy the purpose is to define things objectively, unmetaphorically. Only then can words be used to communicate knowledge.

    I continue not to see what “sound illumination” or “illuminated script” mean–without definitions attached.

    –Bob

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Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again! « POETICKS

Entry 477– Re-Defining, Again!

 

Yeah, for almost forty years now I’ve been defining and re-defining visual poetry, often returning to old definitions.  Believe it or not, I’m trying to come up with one others will accept–without letting it go as “undefinable,” or–worse–infinitely-definable.  I think I may
have it now–but I always think that when I advance a new definition.  This one is only slightly new.  What’s new is the sub-categories I split it into.  Okay, here goes:

Visual Poetry is an artwork containing a verbal and a graphic constituent in which part or the whole of the semantic meaning of the verbal constituent and part or the whole of the representa-tional meaning of the graphic constituent each makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

It comes in two varieties: visiophorical and visiocollagic poetry.  Visiophorical Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent acts as a metaphor for part or the whole of what its verbal constituent denotes that makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

Visiocollagic Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent combines ametaphorically with part or the whole of the semantic meaning of its verbal element in such a
manner as to make a centrally significant contribution (in the view of a consensus of informed observers) to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

An awkward set of definitions but necessarily so.

I’ve decided a main reason it’s taken me so long to get a final set of poetics definitions is that I’m treating poetics as a verosophy–or attempt to come to a rational, objective understanding of some consequential large-scale aspect of existence sufficiently close to full for any reasonable person–and there are very few people (especially in the arts) interested (or, probably, qualified for) such an undertaking.  Those few who are, are off in their own wilder-nesses, not mine, or involved in a group effort as most of the sciences are.   In short, I’m basically without help–although occasionally I have gotten useful feedback.  I’m also over-extended–which is my fault.

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Entry 354 — A Few Further Thoughts on Taxonomization « POETICKS

Entry 354 — A Few Further Thoughts on Taxonomization

First, another thought about taxonomy: an effective taxonomy will have lacuna that its structure makes readily fillable.  The Periodic Table of Elements is a prime example.

And an anecdote in support of the high value of taxonomization.  It concerns one of my many small possible discoveries while working on my knowlecular psychology.  It was that despite the standard view of certified psychologists, there is no such thing as “short-term memory,” there is only “memory.”  In other words, we don’t store recent events in one section of the brain for some short period than release the unimportant ones, and shift the important ones to another section of the brain devoted to long-term memories.  I always had trouble with this because I could see no way of evaluating short-term memories–how, for instance, could the brain pick out some memory that might be crucially important ten years down the road however irrelevant at the moment?  Where taxonomization came in was that I was at the same time driven to make my taxonomy as compact as possible.  Limit the number of classifications.  That’s a prime goal of any taxonomist.  So I worked to eliminate the short-term memory and long-term-memory as subcategories of “memory.”  It was many years before I found a very simple, elegant solution–a way the brain could tag all incoming data in such a way that one’s faculty of remembering would tend to choose recent events before older events (of equal contextual attractiveness–i.e., if you just met someone named Mary and your wife is named Mary, the name Mary will probably still more likely bring up a memory of your wife than of the new Mary you’ve met, but if your wife’s name is Judy, than the name will bring up a memory of the new Mary faster than it will bring up some other acquaintance of yours who has that name, to put it very simply).

I claim that taxonomization significantly helped me to my breakthrough this time, and many other times.  If my psychology proves invalid that may seem a so what, but I also claim that taxonomization is similarly helpful to successful theorists.

I think the reason I’m such an advocate for taxonomy is my work throughout the years to construct a full-scale psychology.  Reflecting on it, I realize that what I’ve mostly done has been taxonomization–defining items and systematically classifying them.  Such informal taxonomization is essential for any serious full understanding of a versosophy (any verosoplex, that is), including ones more respected than mine.  I’ve read about some of the research that’s been done in this area, by the way, and don’t find any of it to contradict my theory; in fact, the researchers seem to me empiricists without little idea of what they’re doing.  They’re certainly not concerned with a big picture.

When I have more pep, I hope to be a little more specific about how I’ve worked out my theory, beginning with the universe, the activity of the brain, which I divide into perception, retroception (memory) and behavior.

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