M@h*(pOet)?ica – Knocked Back to the Otherstream
INTRODUCTION
I lost heart after Scientific American kicked this blog of mine back into the Otherstream last October.[1] I had this entry under way at the time. I was really revved up about it, for I thought might it become my Majorest Poetics Statement Ever–an extraordinary accomplishment considering how major so many of my previous poetics statements have been. I asked Scientific American to post a notice that I would continue my blog here, which they were kind enough to do, but it took me almost two months to get back to work on my Majorest Poetics Statement Ever (possibly), and it was on&off before I finally got it done late in March (2014).
WARNING
This essay is a long drawn-out (but incomplete!) highly specialized description of a single poem that only someone with a strong interest in poetics (and my . . . unusual kind of poetry) would be able to wade through. Alas, I have too much invested in it not to post it, and am semi-desperate to get my series going again. So here it is. Give it a try, and if you can’t take more than a few paragraphs of it, please come to my next entry, anyway. I will really really try to make it more reader-friendly than this one!
One last item: halfway through, I realized that a great deal of my essay was confusingly exploratory, to boot; I began writing it sure it would be pellucidly definitive. Phooey.
PRELIMINARY TERMS & DEFINITIONS
I will begin the main body of this dissertation where all serious dissertations should begin: defining terms. The first one up is “poetry.” For the purposes of the general discussion I intend, we need only agree that a poem consists of words, and may also contain other expressive matter (e.g., the graphics in visual poems); is intended to provide its readers aesthetic pleasure (although it may provide other things, as well); and consists of form and content. I will return to “aesthetic pleasure” later.
A Poem’s Form
A Poem’s form is that which can be wholly described by a fully abstract equivalent of a map of a municipality or the like. For instance, by showing the number, length and placement of its lines (streets), and what kind of word each of the words or combinations of words (buildings) on those lines is (e.g., rhyming, accented, unaccented, metaphors, etc.), and what else may be in the poem such as a graphic image in a visual poem (a river or mountain).
Some of its details may be hard objectively to make out, so will require a consensus of experts[2] to validate. Take, for instance, what I deem “the Classical Haiku in English” and take its form to be three lines, the first and third of which contain five syllables and the second seven syllables; and whose words (here subjectivity leaks in) denote two or more images at least one of which is from Nature. These images should be in tension with one another, a tension whose resolution results in a “haiku moment.”
On the map, the tension, like everything else, should be labeled—with an arrow pointing to “haiku moment.” It would take a second, huge map to indicate what that is, and it’s quite possible that no single map of it would be able to gain the approval of a consensus of experts.[3] Ergo, we can’t expect absolute thoroughness from the map of a poem’s form, just enough to get a reasonably good idea of it.
My concept of a poem’s form will not satisfy everyone, but I believe that a great majority of poetry scholars and laymen will agree on enough of it to allow reasonably profitable discussion. For instance, perhaps no one will agree entirely on my definition of the form of a classical haiku (in English), but I believe most haiku-lovers will find it close enough.
Every poem has a form, but not every poem is what I call “classiformular,” by which I mean having a form shared by numerous other poems such as the sonnet and classical haiku. I suspect it’s impossible for a poem not to share some abstract quality with any other poem, but certainly many free verse poems are sufficiently unlike all other poems in form to warrant being given a formal category of their own. I call such poems “Idioformular.”
A poem’s form contains a poem’s contents, including itself—including, that is, what it connotes by its allusion to all other poems sharing its form—i.e., Basho’s haiku are in every classical (or, for that matter, every) haiku in any language. Even the most idioformular poem’s form will connote freedom or wildness, and thus become a portion of the poem’s content.
A Poem’s Content
By “a poem’s content” I mean what I call its Fundamental Components, other than its form but including its title. It has just two kinds, verbal and averbal. I divide the verbal into the semantically and sensually verbal. The first make up the semantic base of a poem: its words and verbal symbols that are, in effect, words, like the ampersand (a word for “and”), mathematical symbols like the square root sign (which says, “square root of”), and punctuation marks like the comma (a word for “pause here”).[4]
As for a poem’s sensual verbal components, they are what words, typographical symbols and punctuation marks are sans semantic meaning: i.e., their visual appearance and sound, the latter in particular being important through millennia in poetry but generally close to unlistened to in prose, particularly the most formal prose; the former only beginning to be important in poetry around the beginning the twentieth century (although never entirely ignored before that). Like the verbal components of poetry, I divide its averbal components into two kinds, the averbally auditory and the averbally graphic.
The first are auditory components added to a poem’s words (if one reciting a poem suddenly sings one of its words, for instance) or occurring separately from a poem’s words (if a person reciting a poem intentionally coughs between two of its words, for instance); note: I ignore everyday songs as a different artform from poetry.[5] It is what adds sounds importantly contributing to a poem’s central auditory effect (almost always metaphorically, I believe, but never just decoratively) but not part of any verbal symbol’s normal sound when spoken, though it sometimes will be connected to it.
A poem’s averbally graphic components are the visual images (which include negative space) added to a poem’s printed words (such as color) or occurring separately from a poem’s words—if they do more than merely decorate or illustrate them.
Every poem, to be a poem, must contain both kinds of verbal components. It may contain no averbal components, or one or both of them. All of them together make up the eight . . . “poetiplexes” is the best term for them I’ve so far come up with . . . in any case there are eight of them and every poem contains them all.
THE POETIPLEXES
The Prelimiplex
The prelimiplex consists of everything in the poem reduced to what it materially is, a collection of words and equivalents of words spoken or printed, with or without graphics and other matter. It is what is there prior to expression. Highly unimportant but without it, there is no poem. It makes sense to consider it the top layer of a poem.
The rest of the poetiplexes are more like galaxies than flat planes the way I visualize the prelimiplex. While galaxies are said to form layers, they form thick ones. As layers, their position in a poem can be anywhere. Usually the second layer of a poem is its expressiplex.
The Expressiplex
A poem’s expressiplex, like all poetiplexes, consists of everything in the poem, but with a different facet showing than is visible in any other poetiplex. Each poetiplex, that is, present a different view of the same collection of matter. A poem’s expressiplex reveals what the poem says, denotatively and connotatively, and only that. It is what a detailed paraphrase of it would reduce it to (semantically). What it says denotatively, while never absolutely objective since nothing can be that, is maxobjective, “maxobjective” being Grummanese for objective enough to satisfy the sane.
What it says connotatively is what most people would find it implicitly—or explicitly via established symbols or clear allusions or references—also to express. Determining the consensus is not as easy objectively to do as determining the consensus ultimately dictating words’ denotative meaning, but still maxobjective. Note: if the poem is plurexpressive (i.e., if it employs more than one expressive modality besides words to achieve its central aesthetic effect—the way visual or sound poems do, for instance)–its graphics or sounds will contribute to both layers: a drawing of a house will denote a house, for example, and the sound of a gunshot will denote a gunshot. (“Gunshout,” I mistyped that as, at first. Aren’t words fun?!) The house may also connote security, the gunshot violence, both becoming part of the expressiplex’s cargo.
The Signiplex
Ordinarily right below a poem’s expressiplex is its signaplex, a (generally simple) statement of what a consensus of knowledgeable, intelligent readers will agree the poem is, over-all. The signiplex of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” for instance, is (for me—and you, too, if you have any sense) is The Celebration of the Joy of Reading a Great Poem. The signiplex of Basho’s famous frog haiku is the The Celebration of the Wonder of the Eternal Ongoingness of Existence’s Variety of Durations. (Note: a good poem’s signiplex contains–sums up, I would say–many subplexes; one Basho’s haiku’s signaplex contains, for example, is The Celebration of the Joy of Being One With Nature, Or With a Frog.[7]
(“Boulder,”I just realized, is “bolder” with a u added. Sorry, I began wondering if I could–oops, that’s “cold” with a u added–make a Kostelanetzian[8] list of words like “gunshout.” Extraneous opinion: isn’t it wonderful that no one has made English orthographically rational!)
Most signiplexes are a statement of a poem’s Unifying Principle, although a signiplex need not be capable of reduction to a unifying principle. I believe all the best ones do, although sometimes they are very difficult to pin down. That may well be due more to my particular temperament than anything, though.
So, we have the expressiplex for what a poem says, and the signiplex for what it can be said to mean (beyond the simple meaning of the poem’s words, for the signiplex indicates the final “large” meaning of all the lesser denotative and connotative meanings of a poem). Much more important than the expressiplex and signaplex, for me, are a poem’s next three poetiplexes: the “aesthetiplex,” “anthroplex” and “narratiplex.”
The Aesthetiplex
The aesthetiplex is my favorite. It has no meaning, it just is. (See MacLeish.)[9] It consists of all that makes the poem sensually pleasurable (as opposed to semantically enjoyable. In my notes about it I mention “imagery” (and I should have written, “evocation” of existence’s sensual images, particularly its “deepest” ones), “freshness of expression,” “archetypality,” and “patterning.” There are more, probably many more.
The Anthroplex
Then there is the anthroplex. In the manner that the aesthetiplex expresses sensual imagery (and does not mean, but is), the human-centered anthroplex expresses an empathetic feeling of oneness with one or more other human beings. Not “love” because that seems to me to have too wide a range of meanings to represent what I want it to here; “brotherhood” would probably do if the generic masculine were still allowed. What I’ve come up with is “kincognition” for “the joyful recognition of being one with some other person or group of persons regarding something of consequence, like whom you want to win the super bowl. . .” (I happen to look down on such poems, but that’s me, a male lout. I can’t say I don’t write my share of them, though, and admire many by other poets.)
The Narratiplex
The third of what I consider to be the important poetiplexes, the narratiplex, expresses the story told by the expressiplex, if any (and I believe every poem tells some story, however fragmentary); its goal is Triumphancy[10], the (vicarious) feeling a poem’s engagent[10] experiences when the protagonist of a story the poem is telling reaches the goal of his quest.
The Utiliplex
There are two remaining poetiplexes. One is the utiliplex. It, like the signiplex, is a statement of a poem’s central meaning–not its semantic meaning, but its meaning as a utilitarian object, or (most commonly) its socio-economic meaning. A rhymed text you value because of what you learned from it, for instance. The pleasure of a celebratory affirmation of any significance is beside the point; what counts is what the text can supposedly do for you beyond any direct pleasure it can give you. Here’s an example:
Count that day lost
Whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand
No worthy action done.
It’s from a wall of my old high school’s cafeteria. I don’t know who wrote it, but like it a lot–and believe in it! A pretty rhyme but didactic—that is, its utiliplex is dominant. Its function is not to provide pleasure but to instill a valuable rule of conduct (however pleasantly). Therefore, it is not an artwork but a lesson.
The Extraneoplex (and Faciliplex and Sentimiplex)
The final poetiplex is the extraneoplex (“ehk STRAY nee oh fiss”10). It consists of two subplexes, the “faciliplex” and the “sentimiplex.” The former has to do with the facility of a poem’s maker. I call it an extraneoplex because the skill of a poem’s making is extraneous to its value as a poem. I accept it as a subplex because it can be part of a poem than gives people pleasure, however minor. Pope’s incredible skill as a craftsman; the wondrousness of what Frost did with standard techniques when he composed, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Related to this is the sentimiplex. This, as I hope one will guess, has to do with the sentimental value of a poem; Grandma wrote it, or your first boyfriend introduced you to it, or its author won a Nobel Prize. Again, extraneous to the artistic value of the poem, but part of the poem nonetheless.
Although every poem is a mixture of all of these poetiplexes, some may be only microscopically present in a given poem, and one will generally usually clearly outweigh its others. When a poem’s aesthetiplex is the dominant one, the result will be a lyrical poem; a dominant anthroplex will result in a people poem;[12] a dominant narratiplex in a narrative poem; a dominant utiliplex in an ornamented utilitarian text; otherwise the result will be some sort of bauble I haven’t yet a name for.
THE APPLICATION OF THE TERMINOLOGY
It is now time for the main event of this entry: an analysis of a poem employing all these poetic components and poetiplexes.
I’m afraid it’s one of mine. My excuse for using it instead of some widely-admired poem by someone else is I’d just been making it, and was still thinking a lot about it. This entry gave me a good excuse to continue that out loud. At the time, I thought the entry would contain six or seven poetry specimens, but once I got into it, I realized I had too much to say to cover more than one poem, if that.
A secondary consideration was that this blog is primarily for mathematics-related poems, and there weren’t many of them around I could use. I doubt that I would have understood them as well as I understood my own poem, either. Or maybe I would have, which would have discouraged me. In any case it’s my poem you’ll be stuck with—after a glance at this:
It’s one of my earliest large visual poems. A xeroxial collage. I used a template to trace out the letters and a Xerox copier to organize them into what you see above. I consider it a visual haiku. In any event, it’s an appropriate lead-in act for the poem I’ll soon be analyzing, for it’s a similar celebration of Mankind’s Exploratory Urge. I will say little about it except that its central metaphor is intended to celebrate the reversal of outlook regarding the visible universe that I hope many of us underwent due to the moon landing.[13]
Now for my poem, a tribute to one of my greatest heroes:
Tribute to Columbus
Columbus has become a problematic hero for some, but not for me. I consider what he did vastly greater than what our astronauts did, because men like him and his shipmates were allowed to take chances back then and took some into a Terra Incognito more unknown than mankind will ever again be able to explore into. Not that I don’t greatly admire what the astronauts and the engineers who made their journeys possible did. Interesting that no major poem (of length) I know about has yet commemorated those journeys. Horribly sad, the return after, what was it, the second of the moon landings? to the edges of the earth’s atmosphere for so long, and who knows how much longer.
In my poem I took some poetic license regarding how pre-Columbian explorers stuck to the Atlantic’s edges. The Scandinavians were as bold as Columbus, and did leave the northern edge. But only for short distances in a series of sub-Columbian feats vastly less culturateurically[14] valuable than Columbus’s. Ditto others whom the winds may have blown west, like the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Celts.
About this poem, I’ll be truthful: it has to be considered a Major American Poem! Two superior classical haiku (the first of which I added “quietly” to in order to get the 5/7/5 syllable pattern needed to make it classical). The idea of “.001” as numerically a winter, and its multiplication by poems about winter (which I claim should suggest winter about to become spring, poems being equal to spring) to yield the spring of Modern Western Civilization).
Then the ellipsis going off the page into absolute mystery. . . . (thus paying homage to my Hungarian friend, Márton Koppány, King of Ellipses. No, make that “Grand Wizard of the Ellipsis”). I like my choice of colors, too. Finally, I claim that nothing is more major than the Eternal Quest, however defined. (Even if Scientific American isn’t interested in going on mine. They got me and my shipmates in mathematical poetry to the Canary Islands, though.)[15]
FULL-SCALE ANALYSIS OF “HOMAGE TO COLUMBUS”
The Poem’s Fundamental Components
As I use my four components for the first time as a practical critic (as, that is, an analytical commentator on a single poem), I am pleased at how it simplifies my job. To begin with, note how I can start my pluraphrase, by which I mean a kind of paraphrase at its deepmost that I consider it the duty of a practical critic to carry out—by simply objectively listing everything that’s in a poem and stating the significance thereof:
1. the semantic verbal components of “Homage to Columbus”: “.001,” “Homage to Columbus,” “the Eternal Quest,” the words in the two haiku, the ellipsis. But also the dividend shed (as I call a long division example’s combination of “)” and a line) as a symbol verbally stating, “divided into”; and the grey line because it verbally says, “with a remainder of.”
Surely no one can disagree that the items on my list are not there or that the poem contains anything else that could be considered “semantic verbal components.”
2. the sensual verbal components of “Homage to Columbus”: the sound of the poem’s verbal components when read aloud or sublingually pronounced (as every poem ought to be when read), and the visual appearance of them as elements of typography, most emphatically including their colors (in this case, because they are not all the same color, and their shapes (again, in this case, because they do not use the same font).[16] Here’s the poem again.[17]
Since the poem has no sensual components save the verboauditory ones (i.e., the way the words sound when spoken) and verbovisual ones (i.e., the way the words look on a page), we can skip the averbal components of this poem and go quickly on to its poetiplexes.
THE POEM’S POETIPLEXES
The Poem’s Prelimiplex
There’s not much to say about its preliminplex, that being simply the matter the poem consists of before it denotes or connotes. The poem can therefore (usually)[18] be said to begin to be a poem with its expressiplex, or what its denotative and connotative layers say.
The Poem’s Expressiplex
Its title makes its first statement, that it is a tribute to the famous explorer, Christopher Columbus. It should eventually become clear that the opening statement of this one’s main body of text (where a paraphrase of it will probably begin) is: “the quantity, .001, goes into the quantity, the Eternal Quest, a “9 winter poems,” etc., number of times, with a remainder of “something to follow,” the denotation of the ellipsis in the poem. Closely connected to this statement is the poem’s secondary statement, that the quantity, 9 winter poems, etc., times the quantity, .001, equals the quantity, ships for the first time, etc.
Each of the two haiku must be paraphrased, too. They are straight-forward denotatively. The first verbally describes nine poems about winter that are somehow becoming a single thing that is somehow entering another time from the present, a time significantly distant from it. The second is a verbal description of sea vessels said to be in the Atlantic Ocean out of sight of any shore. Both of these need connotative details also part of the expressiplex to clarify, as does “the Eternal Quest.” So much for most of what the expressiplex denotes of significance that I’ve been able (fairly quickly) to turn up.
The expressiplex’s connotative cargo is fairly substantial. It also begins with the poem’s title, which for most people will paint galleons into their reading of the poem, and—for many—admiring thoughts of heroism. Others, alas, will be bothered by negative thoughts about the Big Bad West; the rest of the poem will clearly connote which side of that unfortunate controversy the poem is on.
That this and what I term the “subdividend product” are haiku give the poem a strong connotation of haiku-ness: serenity, reflectiveness, classical restraint, importance . . . The words of this one suggest a kind of historical nostalgia, I think, and of something beautiful (poems) taking place that has to do with the quietest, in some ways “deepest,” of the seasons. Vagueness.
At this point, due to my probably excessive need to be thorough, I feel I must point out that I believe that the more a poem can plausibly connote, the better. I contend, however, that every poem connotes certain things plausibly enough to rate as maxobjective connotations. The connotations of the haiku form I list above are such. In fact, all of them seem to me to be objective enough for any reasonable person to accept. A personal connotation of a downhill ride on a sled that I, and many others, may get from the haiku is subjective. A personal connotation of such a ride down Hyde Hill in Harbor View on a flexible flyer which only I and, perhaps, a few others might get from it is a hermetic connotation. A connotation of “winter” as “Martian Acrobats” is an insane connotation.
The other haiku I hope strongly connotes an exploratory splendor of some sort. It should unloose other connotations. These, and the connotations of the rest of the poem I’ll leave to my readers to find, and go on to the poem’s signiplex, the poem’s expressiplex having now been taken care of. (Note: neither of my “haiku” is, to my mind, a full-scale haiku; the second, in fact, has only one image; they are to suggest, not be, haiku.)
The Poem’s Signiplex
This, as I’ve said, is mainly what I’ve used the terms, “unifying principle,” and “meaning” in other writings for (although it can also be its “minimalist conglomeration”). I contend that my poem has a unifying principle, though I doubt any two people will agree on every detail of it. Most engagents, however, ought to accept at least the gist of the unifying principle I find it to have, which is, roughly, that the quest for a Final Understanding of a Significant Portion of Existence that Columbus’s voyages were is of eternal, archetypal supreme importance. Or, to put it a step more generally, the poem is organized around a unifying celebration of the cultural value of heroic quests like Columbus’s.
Among the details required to make this a complete “meaning” are the fact that risk of some sort will always be involved . . . that going where no man has gone before is of central importance; that it can begin, perhaps most likely will begin, maximally far from success (as .001 is to whatever number represents success); that beauty will be part of it; that no final success is possible.
I am aware that this poem’s signiplex, and that of many poems, is close to a moral, but I don’t feel that makes them close to being advocature (i.e., not poems) because there is vastly more to the poem than its not-explicit moral. Something, I would add, that no poem can escape having to some degree.
The Poem’s Aesthetiplex
Next up is the poem’s aesthetiplex, the goal of which is to deliver a maximum of sensual pleasure. I split this pleasure into two kinds: precerebral and cerebral. The first is quite simple (and most people would agree it exists): it is the direct pleasure certain stimuli automatically give one: the scent of certain flowers, primary colors, circles, certain patterns of sounds or shapes, housecats (I’m certain), the human face, the major chords, and so on.
The second is a little more complex (and will seem simplistic): it is what one feels upon encountering the sensually familiar, directly (a rhyme the poem makes you hear, for instance) or indirectly (for instance, Frost’s woods filling up with snow that his poem’s make you imagine). That’s all. It is important to note, though, that only the familiar will cause it, not the too-familiar. The latter will cause indifference—unless too familiar, in which case one will experience boredom, painfully. The unfamiliar will also cause indifference—unless too unfamiliar.
I worked out this little theory at age 26 merely thinking about music: how a Tchaikowski symphony first seemed painfully discordant—until I had forced myself to listen to it enough times (having learned it was supposed to be superior music) finally not to mind it; whereupon I quickly wanted to hear nothing but it for the rest of my life. Until it abruptly didn’t seem that pleasurable anymore—and finally seemed horrible.
There’s more to it than that, but not all that much. Context enters in by lessening or increasing the familiarity of the stimulus. Life experiences can re-enliven something that had become boring. But, basically, just thinking of Tchaikowski’s “Pathetique,” which I haven’t listened to for twenty years, gives me a stomach ache. It’s a great piece of music but beauty is not eternal (except for sentimentalists).
In my theory of psychology, I postulate that all cerebral pleasure and pain, not just the pleasure or pain that artworks cause—the pleasure or pain the search for truth, social relations, a game of golf, and so on, cause, as well–is a matter of the brain’s comparing memories with incoming perceptions: if they are a bad match, one feels pain; a better match will be acceptable but not pleasurable; if the match is 85% (or whatever—I’m just guessing and doubt I’ll be around when academic psychologists finally measure it); when it gets over 90%, it becomes merely acceptable until it hits 95%, painfully.
Another way of putting all this is that one’s brain automatically predicts what a given moment will lead to. To the degree it is accurate, one will continue what one is doing (and thinking) following–a path into a woods one is on, say. Once it begins seeming less familiar, one will slow down—and start retreating if it becomes too unfamiliar. Unless feeling a strong need for some reason to keep going, perhaps remembering similar fears or other bad feelings overcome. All this makes biological sense.
Take, for instance, our instinctive hostility toward a genuine stranger— until he shows himself sufficiently predictable. The preservation of the species requires one to be hostile to anything not yet understood sufficiently to deal with—to hate or fear it. But, retreat far enough, and the unfamiliar will gradually until one’s curiosity drive takes over enough for one to stop retreating and eventually investigate it—and increase one’s familiarity with it. A happy sense of adventure may result. In any case, one will not retreat forever.
On the other hand, once something becomes so familiar one is irritated by it, however pleasurable it once was, one will turn to something else, perhaps even something painful that one hopes to conquer. In this way natural selection keeps a species from stagnation.
Needless to say, both a poem’s cerebral and pre-cerebral effects combine and inter-relate in numerous ways, often quite complicatedly. The net pleasurable effect of a superior poem is thus no easy matter to disentangle. But I will now return to my poem’s aesthetiplex to try to do that for its aesthetically pleasurable effect.
I’ll start with its precerebral stimuli: its colors, the shapes of its letters, its ellipsis, and the sound of its words when subliminally pronounced as they should be. Note: the context of the poem will differ from engagent to engagent, so the pleasure/pain ratio a given engagent experiences will differ. I’m assuming one familiar with poetry, and with my work, and with a background more or less like mine—raised in suburban America, taught about Columbus, etc. What I get out of the poem shouldn’t seem bizarre to such a person.
Probably none of the colors will cause pre-cerebral pleasure, because not primary colors, but ought to remind the engagent enough of pure blue, and perhaps pure yellow (which I contend are instinctively pleasurable, by themselves) to seem at least not unpleasant, and perhaps mildly pleasant. The letters will be mildly pleasant, too, because varied enough in color and size and placement to be slightly unfamiliar. The circles will tend to give precerebral pleasure as will the straight lines. (Probably not much because, although they are precerebrally pleasant, they, like all other data, will have their—“evaluational effect,” I call it—influenced by how familiar or unfamiliar they seem in context.)
The two zeros will “rhyme” with the first two dots of the incomplete ellipsis, too. A zero with cause an engagent (at some point, if the poem is scanned as though it were a painting, which it in part is) to remember a dot, unexpectedly—that is, not predicted. Example: think of one of Picasso’s misrepresentational paintings of a woman superimposed on the image of a real woman: the two will have enough in common to make the over-all image familiar, but the misrepresentation will warp it pleasurably away from over-familiarity. Or maybe too far, but rescued by his colors.
A musical phrase followed by a variation on it is a song’s standard way of doing the same thing: the variation overlays the expected repetition of the first phrase—expected because repeating it closely enough, for long enough, soon enough (before forgotten). And the second haiku will seem a visual near-prediction-come-true of the first. Some of the letters in my piece may do this—a light green s performing a variation of a light blues. Each set of three lines will seem, however slightly, a phrase followed by two variations on it. That everything is both unordinary (not a proper-looking poem!) but predictably laid out in straight lines is something else that may give cerebral pleasure. Some standard patterns like this one may be automatically pleasurable.
The rectangles, too, I believe are precerebrally pleasurable. I think the over-all design—the yellow/orange letters against the dark blue in the center and the two haiku flowering outward from it and the rest of it may have a fair amount of precerebral beauty, too, but I’m not able to pin that down. Others may well be able to find other such pleasurable visual details I missed. I hope so. My hope as a poet is that all these will seem just pleasant enough to invite an engagent more fully into the poem.
Oddly, it was only when I made my final revision of this essay that I realized I’d not mentioned any of my poem’s instances of poetry’s most standard device: word-music, I guess because I didn’t go out of my way to produce much of it. But I always listen to my words as I add them to a poem, and drop them when they don’t seem to me to flow, and at least occasionally happen into alliteration or assonance or euphony as they do here. I try for rhymes, too, but got none here. Unless you count “po” to rhyme for “go,” and it does, it just doesn’t contribute to an end-rhyme. “Win” rhymes with “in,” too. In my poetics, “un” also rhymes with “in,” but this essay is long enough without my explaining that here.
There is an n-consonance in the top haiku’s first two syllables, and three eh-assonances and three l-alliterations in the haiku as a whole. Three long-o’s and a long-u give it four euphonies, the long-u, long-o and ah being considered poetry’s three euphonies—its pre-cerebrally pleasurable sounds (babies, I believe recognize practically at birth as pleasurable—and maybe before birth). The “ah” of “on” in the second haiku give it its only instance of euphony. I hope the two haiku are more musically pleasurable than good prose but frankly don’t know whether or not that’s the case. They sound to my ear at least okay, though! And the sound of the long division’s divisor, “one one-thousandth,” is gorgeous!
No, no—I was kidding. Bad sound, but the “word’s” other virtues make up for it. One last important variety of word-music some poems have and that an engagent should keep an ear out for is their rhythm. This one has no formal meter but does have one subtle auditory effect that I feel I can boast about, although I can’t call it my doing: in fact, I just noticed it now for the first time: it’s the way the second line of the first haiku takes a looong time compared to the lines above and below, it seems to me suggests the unhurriedness of the unseveraling spoken of; note, too, how its two words’ final syllables form an alliteration with sort of the effect of a rhyme to suggest an action fully carried out.
The way the haiku form forces the two haiku here into single thoughts/images/sound-bites makes a nice series of repetitions that should seem in the proper zone of just-familiar-enough to give pleasure. The dividend, too, is a haiku line (since it is five syllables in length). Hey, it’s the first line of the haiku all quests begin . . .
Equaphors and Deviavices
I would divide the aesthetiplex in two and call the layer responsible for the poem’s effects just listed the “aesthetiplexal surface.” It is where an artwork’s most accessible pleasures are stored. Beneath it, in a manner of speaking, is the “aesthetiplexal underface” where the “sub-components” of poem responsible for higher pleasures, if any, are to be found. The principal ones, for me, are the poem’s “equaphors” (basically its metaphors, similes and other figurative language), and its “deviavices” (basically those of its contents that deviate freshly from convention (which includes several items previously mentioned such as the color of the letters, the letters of most poems at this time being black).
Its equaphors are responsible for most of a poem’s cognitive value, its deviavices for just about all of its pleasuring capacity—in my view. (Needless to say, a locution can simultaneously be an equaphor and a deviavice—and I say the best of them will be.) Hence, it should surprise few that I go out of my way in this poem to heap each poem of mine as much as possible with both.)
The Poem’s Veritiplex
At this point in what I hoped would be my final draft of this essay I ran into a problem. I was already feeling like the essay had defeated me—so many complications had been coming up, and now this! I was supposed to be showing how the aesthetiplex carried a poem’s aesthetic cargo but here I was introducing something containing a poem’s cognitive value. By which I had to mean its non-sensual abstract value. But I had defined aesthetic pleasure as entirely sensual.
I was close to giving up. Or drastically pulling away from this wretched attempt of mine to be detailedly definitive. A few hours later, though, I recalled a few of my old ideas about the “beauty” of science, how what some scientists called “beautiful” was not strictly speaking that, but something else that delivered a pleasure equal to but very different from what my aesthetics claimed beauty delivered. I then considered using a word for “scientific beauty”: “verity.” (For a change, I’d found a real word, rather than bumbling out another of my seldom-popular coinages.)
I did not then add it to my aesthetic. But I now had reason enough to do so. Hence, I defined it as something that gave a person able to experience it an intense sense of logic lucidly bringing previously disparate ideas into an unarguably correct synthesis. Or something like that. The pleasure was experienced in a person’s reducticeptual (or “cognitive”) awareness, the locus of abstract reasoning and the like, not in his fundaceptual (or sensual) awareness, the locus of sensual perception that my theory of aesthetics claims is the only region of the brain capable of yielding aesthetic pleasure.
I hope I’ve only somewhat extended the main accepted meaning of “verity.” If not, spell it “verrity” and consider it another coinage of mine. In any case, I could now distinguish scientific (and other forms of what I call verosophical) pleasure from aesthetic pleasure, and give its stimulus its own name, however real scientists may deplore it.
It was an easy step from “verity” to the creation of one more poetiplex, the “veritiplex.” That, I now decreed, ordained and ruled was what contained everything in a poem that was . . . “veritiful.” A complication was that this would include a poetic component that was perceived as both beautiful and veritiful. Solution: that element of a component perceived as beautiful was in the poem’s aesthetiplex; that element of the component perceived as veritiful was in its veritiplex.
There, you have just been at the site of a Historic Moment in the Cultural History of Our Time.
Back to the Poem’s Equaphors and Deviavices
We will now return to the aesthetiplex of “Homage to Columbus.” As a whole, the poem is itself both a deviavice and an equaphor. It is “deviavicial” in being what almost no poem is: a long division example. At the same time, it divides terms no mathematical operation would be expected to divide. Its doing that makes it also equaphorical, for it results in what I an implicit metaphorical expression for “this poem equals a mathematical operation,” and is therefore as elegant and correct as mathematics. The actual operation of long division is purely abstract, so something occurring on the poem’s veritiplex. On reflection, I would say the equation of the operation of a long division example implicitly to the development of a poem is also expressed by the poem’s veritiplex. (I’m just now working the latter into my poetics, so feeling very unsure of myself with it.)
The poem’s lesser deviavices include the use of the adjective “several” as a verb—after changing it as an adjective to its opposite–to (attempt) freshly to say “fusing into one”; the use of “long ago” after a preposition is unconventional, too; and the ellipsis as a word for “something to come,” or the like, and as an implicit metaphor for “leaving the edge (and going into the Unknown).” The poem falls into two familiar patterns that most engagents will get mild pleasure from: the look of free verse poems and the look of long division the poem-look veers into. Both should gain from being mild distortions of the way poems and long division examples look.
The poems’ becoming a single poem in the “long ago” acts, I hope, as a complex implicit metaphor for remembering (with “long ago” suggesting a country rather than a period of time). The use of the adverb, “quietly,” should add a note of mystery. . . . A further intended implicit metaphor—which may better be considered a symbol—is the unseveraling representing the coming of spring. Near-hermetic, I suppose—except for my referring to the coming of spring in so many of my poems.
The poem only has three explicitly verbalized images, ships (Columbus’s galleons), the Atlantic and winter, all of them picturesque but not uncommon, so possibly slightly pleasant but not rivetingly so.
The Poem’s Archtyponents
One other important sub-component of a poem in my poetics is the archetyponent[19] or archetypal image (which I suspect is something like the “deep image” in Robert Bly’s formulation). “The Eternal Quest” is the most obvious one here—man’s search for Final Understanding—of a geography, or of the nature of quests, or even of what poems can do—and of the Final Mystery that existence is, which is an archetypal idea in itself. So, I just realize, that would put it in the poem’s veritiplex, although I suppose it has vague sensual connotations. What qualifies as archetypal is in most cases pretty subjective, but I think ships, the Atlantic, and—certainly—winter, are that. In any case, it is a poem’s archetyponents which give it what depth it has. Again, I hope other archetyponents can be found in my poem, but so far I’ve missed them.
The Poem’s Anthroplex
That does it for this poem’s main poetiplex, its aesthetiplex—and for its veritiplex. So on to its anthroplex. This, remember, is the contribution to the poem of those of its components having to do mainly with human (or other sentient) beings, particularly their thoughts and feelings, and their activities in stories they participate in, if any. People poetry and narrative poetry. Columbus is the only person mentioned in my poem, and he is only in its title. But the ships in the poem must have sailors aboard, and the quest undertaken is undertaken by men. The poem is thus neither a people poem nor (significantly) a narrative poem—although connoting the adventure undergone by Columbus and his men. In other words, there is little to be said about its anthroplex—a major reason poems like it are not nearly as popular as mainstream poems, almost all of which are people poems.
The Poem’s Utiliplex
Similarly, there is almost nothing to be said about this poem’s utiliplex or utilitarianly lesson-bearing poetiplex. Unless you want to believe it is propagandizing for questing or the like (and I can’t claim it absolutely isn’t). So, alas for educators (except for the few how may believe something that reminds children of Columbus is a good thing), my poem is of no value. Ah, except that it may be able to wake up a few superior high school students. Or rattle a few creative-types into cross-fertilizations that lead to commercially-successful new products! Or . . . no, I’m not getting into this now. Maybe in another entry.
The Poem’s Extraneoplex
I can’t say much about the poem’s extraneoplex because its wholly subjective effects will vary so much from engagent to engagent. Certainly many19 will be awed by the incredible intellectual effort that had to have gone into its construction. Others may find it just one more trivial product of a computer. Etc. I’m hoping that the Nobel Prize it wins (and I reject) will help its reputation with the Poetry Establishment, though.[21]
* * *
1 Scientific American may not be happy about it, but it proved an astrological prediction about my career right: according to the prediction, I was supposed to reach a peak in the arts last year. Getting Scientific American to run my blog seems to have gotten me there, although I had hopes it would merely finally get me on the way to a much higher peak. 2 My definition of an expert in a given subject: “One who has produced a full-length coherent book or the equivalent on the subject that follows most of the established methodology of scholars seriously involved with the subject (e.g., logic) and definitions (although redefinitions, if revealed as such, should be permissible). This definition may need work, but it should do for the purposes of this entry. 3 For what it’s worth, I myself define it as is a feeling of sudden, archetypally-consequential illumination about existence—celebratory illumination. It’s not part of a haiku’s form, but something aimed for by it by the tension produced by its images, as indicated by its “haiku-moment-aimed arrow.” (Urp.) 4 I’m seriously considering using “wordic” or some such in place of “verbal” strictly to mean “consisting of one or more words or equivalents of words such as the ampersand. “Verbal” can mean that but means too many other things to be satisfactory for my purposes, as is the case with far too many words. 5 Whether songs are music or poetry or a third thing is a fascinating taxonomic question too complex for me to get into here. 6 Just in case you don’t know the poem, or have forgotten it, here is my translation:
7 My good friend Richard Kostelanetz has specialized as a poet in playing in this manner with words and phrases, making more of them, I am sure, than anyone else in the world, and more good ones, although more active in other fields than he is in poetry.
8 Might as well be nice to those of you who are inexcusably ignorant of Archibald MacLeish’s wonderful poem, and quote it for you:
9 I use the term, “engagent,” to signify anyone involved as a spectator, reader, appreciator, or the like, of an artwork. An experiencer of an artwork in general. I coined it because there seems not to be any word in English for it and I wanted a term that would emphasize all that an experiencer of an artwork was, as an experiencer of a visual poet is more than a reader or viewer. It may not be needed, but I’d rather risk using more terms than strictly necessary than less.
10 I used “ss” to indicate the soft-c sound because I couldn’t find out how that was done in my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Not that I use the proper ways of indicating pronunciation otherwise, but I think my way should work well enough with most English-speakers.
11 There has to be a better term for this, but even I won’t accept “anthroceptual poem” or “anthroficial poem” as that.
12 To make it more clear, imagine the difference between being outside the display window of a store looking into it, and being inside a store looking through its display window out at what’s outside it.
13 One of my many coinages is “culturateur,” to represent “one who makes a significant contribution to the culture of his time. A Beethoven or Newton—but there different levels, so a Stephen Foster or Charles Schultz also. “Culturateurical” thus describes “an achievement of a culturateur.”
14 Ergo, blessings on Scientific American for forgetting for over a year that it was a mainstream publication.
15 Just as I consider the sound of the word, “No,” verbal when pronounced in the ordinary way, and even when—for example–emphasized as instructed by underlining or italics, but “meta-verbal” when roared in an oral presentation as it might be by a lion if it had the power of speech, I consider the shape of a word’s letters to be verbal if standard, but “meta-verbal” if hand-printed the way “001” is—in this context, a context in which all the other letters are in a standard typed font.
16 One of the many great virtues of this blog publication is that one can keep an item being discussed continually in view as the discussion progresses.
17 Highly innovative texts their makers and others (but not I) consider poetry may eschew semantic expressiveness, although it can’t avoid it entirely. Hence, they could be said to not have an expressiplex. This, however, is too arcane a matter even for this discussion.
18 I made up this term, and several others in this piece, on the fly; someday I or someone else, I hope, will improve them—although one or two may not need improvement.
19 See? I am capable of humility. I could have said “all.”
20 At this point, I thought I ought to sit on my essay for a while, then revise it one more time. But then I realized that it would not be going to the Scientific American website where I couldn’t get at it. It would be available at my own website where I could easily fix it whenever I needed to, so why not post it as is. I mean, besides the fact that it’s horribly stupid! 21 So I posted it. Comments welcome.
21 Yet another result of Scientific American’s dumping my blog is that I was able to take many more intellectual risks than I would have dared if I were writing for it. Ergo, the entry’s unusual deviaviciality for better or worse. (Its disgusting lengthiness, too—8,225 words.)
. Bob Grumman
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Bob
I really enjoyed this entry. I enjoyed it a lot more than the ones that were published in Scientific American. In part, this is because you took more time to make more colloquial and fuller explanations. It also seems to me that you took more time to pursue topics farther down whatever roads they were on. In any case, I found it well worth the time of reading, even though some of your made-up words are a little hard to swallow! In fact, I call them “lingua-fabricates,” in a deliberate attempt at friendly mockery.
Be that as it may, I like your approach to separately looking at different aspects of a poem. In particular, I think you are onto something with the separation of aspects of the poem that are verifiable or at least are something like verifiable. I don’t think this is a new idea at all, though I’ve never heard a term for it before. It seems to me that if it isn’t the same as the satisfaction of solving a math puzzle or a scientific problem, it is pretty close to it. What do you think about that? Does discovering proof of a new species of moth yield the same sort of pleasure as the act of reading a poem and noticing some new confluence of observations that yield a new logical or scientific idea? It seems to me that you said in your essay that they are the same.
My silly computer asked me if I approved your comment, David. Boy, did I ever! So I approved it. Thereupon, it asked me if I really meant to do that. I did. I feel you came about as close to describing what I tried for as I could have. You made so many remarks I want to respond to, I’m now going to italicize your comment and insert reactions of mine:
I really enjoyed this entry. I enjoyed it a lot more than the ones that were published in Scientific American. In part, this is because you took more time to make more colloquial and fuller explanations. It also seems to me that you took more time to pursue topics farther down whatever roads they were on.
Thanks. I feel I was about as colloquial in most of my previous entries, but–because the focus was on a single poetics idea, using an analysis of a single poem, my explanations were much fuller. Ironically, the fuller they got, the more I felt I was leaving out!
Also, I was more myself, for better or worse, because not concerned as much with my audience.
In any case, I found it well worth the time of reading, even though some of your made-up words are a little hard to swallow! In fact, I call them “lingua-fabricates,” in a deliberate attempt at friendly mockery.
I have trouble with my coinages, too. I’m sure if I ever got the opportunity to write a commercial book on poetics, I would find ways to eliminate many of my coinages, or improve them. But they help me think, and some I maintain are essential.
Be that as it may, I like your approach to separately looking at different aspects of a poem. In particular, I think you are onto something with the separation of aspects of the poem that are verifiable or at least are something like verifiable. I don’t think this is a new idea at all, though I’ve never heard a term for it before.
Ought-oh. Now I’ll spend the next week or two trying to find a Grummanism for it. I’ve done other . . . stratigranalyses in the past. I never thought of them as an original method, they just seemed natural to me. At bottom, though, I’m a theorist, a Grand theorist seeking, ultimately, the equivalent of a unified field theory, however unable to succeed.
It seems to me that if it isn’t the same as the satisfaction of solving a math puzzle or a scientific problem, it is pretty close to it. What do you think about that? Does discovering proof of a new species of moth yield the same sort of pleasure as the act of reading a poem and noticing some new confluence of observations that yield a new logical or scientific idea? It seems to me that you said in your essay that they are the same.
Absolutely. But along with the aesthetic (i.e., sensual) pleasure the poem should provide.
Thanks much for the comment, David.