Bob Grumman on “Drift” « POETICKS

Bob Grumman on “Drift”

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Marilyn R. Rosenberg’s “Drift”

Consider, first, how important the large-lettered words wobbling all over the place in it are, particularly “drifts,” “procrastination,” “puddling, babbling, whirling,” and, in just the right place, “lingers,” linging with the “ling” words headed toward it.  Equally important are its graphics, which include a small school of fish and gorgeously splishy brushstrokes in various ocean colors.  “DRIFTS,” as it is actually spelled, can easily and very appropriately be taken for “DREAMS.”  Changes of colors along sharp edges turn the work into a throng of rectangles working geometric precision against the swirl of all else, to suggest blocks of time in motion, being lost . . .  On the other hand, the procrastination is allowing for–well, the eventual dreams the whirl of the creative subconscious yields that I find to be one essential component of this composition.  Final result: words and graphics working together in the reading center and the seeing center of the brain to slow an engagent into a Manywhere-at-Once at the heart of ocean depths and mysteries only dreams can reach.

Note, incidentally, the difference between what I said about Marilyn’s work before reading what she said about it, and her slant.   Neither of us is wrong, nor will you be (necessarily) wrong to find things in the work neither she nor I found.  An artwork is of value to the degree that it can plausibly suggest a great many things, so long as  none of them significantly contradicts the best of them (and there is always a central best meaning to an artwork all sensible people agree on such as the fact that this one is about the ocean). 

  

                                                                                        Bob Grumman

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Column060 — March/April 2003 « POETICKS

Column060 — March/April 2003



 

Mad Poet Symposium, Part Three

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 35, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2003




Another South
Bill Lavender, Editor
277 pp; 2002; Pa and Cloth;
The University of Alabama Press,
Tuscaloosa and London.
www.uapress.ua.edu. $27 and $60.

An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
80 pp; 2002; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries, 1858 Neil Av Mall,
Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

An American Avant Garde: First Wave: An Exhibit
Featuring the William S. Burroughs Collection
and Work by Other Avant-Garde Artists
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
48 pp; 2001; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries,1858 Neil Av Mall,
Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

 


 

I have to interrupt my memoir of the Ohio State University affair to announce the publication of an anthology called Another South. As any longtime reader of this column would have no trouble guessing, it includes work by me–including the mathemaku I wrote for Jim Leftwich, and mentioned in my last column, in fact. Leftwich has a nice chunk of work here, too, as do others in my crowd such as Jake Berry, David Thomas Roberts and A. di Michael. We four and James Sanders (whose “Poem with Referee,” labels illustrations of football referees’ signals with such texts as “internally/ pans/ Night./ hissing” with a text that begins “Donkey Kong may/ been kissing you// with a bulletproof vest”) are the only ones contributing visual poetry, or anything near it, to the collection. I have to boast that I am the only one contributing mathematical or cryptographic poetry to it!

The many textual poems (and prose pieces) here–by such as Skip Fox, Ken Harris, Joy Lahey, Mark Prejsnar and Stephanie Williams (34 writers are represented in all)–cover about as much of the textual poetry range as I’m familiar with. Here’s one by Joel Dailey that I quote not only because I like it and deem it representative of the best work here, but because it takes a whack at the Establishment I’m in close sympathy with:

Poetry fro Dummies

for Helen Vendler

Cheekbones goes business
Allegedly dangerous
Day breaks legs
Nostalgic Hindquarters open
Influential bleeps
An entire infrastructure teed off
By face averted
By Pyres buzz flight
New “upright” position
yoohoo
Discovered today on the river Bobs
Rooster continuation
by rooster gulp

(Note: the “fro” may be a typo, but I like it, so suspect it was intentional.) How “southern” Dailey’s poem is, I wouldn’t know, but Hank Lazer has much of interest to say in his excellent introduction about that aspect of the poetry in this anthology. There, he refers to what he calls “kudzu textuality.” About this, he says, “What I have in mind is the sort of complex, stuttered, overlapping sounds as in these passages from my ‘Suite Quintet for Nathaniel Mackey’ (Callaloo 23, no. 2 [2002]: 670-673):

exited out else
the only where
he’d be / stam
stamp stammer

his the integral
blips into song
remainder as reminder

shucked hush
lattice of gladiola
red bud steps
down into flower

day’s eye
to daisy &
dasein
thus has
designs upon
you

“Such knowing enters first by faith in sounds, a pathway first governed by a submission to the associations of kindred sounds and thus akin to syntactic or graphic kudzu textuality that I have already been describing.” But surely such concentration on sound over sense goes back to the origins of poetry, and flows through such writers as Hopkins, Stein, Joyce . . . Here, too, I would say there is a concentration of imagery over sense, as well. Which is all to the good. (Of course, what I like most in Lazer’s poem are the mathematical terms in the second stanza!) In any event, we can see from Lazer’s and Dailey’s work quoted above (and in the main portion of the collection) the way grammar is currently broken by many of our best poets to get us more effectively “down into flower.” There is much of this in Another South.

There. Now I can return to the catalogue for the Ohio State exhibit. this time to a section of it labeled, “Serials, Books and Manuscripts.” It lists small-press–in most cases actually micro-press–journals and publications from 1975 that were on display at the exhibit. As such it serves as a fascinating overview of the almost entirely unknown history of burstnorm poetry and related arts of that time to the present. Just the names of the publications are revealing, and entertaining: Unmuzzled Ox (whose publisher is SPR’s own Michael Andre), CLWN WR, Perspektive, Xerolage, Shattered Wig, Koja, Pavement Saw, Remixponse Categoriarray, Poethia: Writing-online, Crayon, Caliban, Juxta, Lost and Found Times, Loose Watch, Generator and many more.  Michael Andre was the publisher of the issue of Unmuzzled Ox from 1989 that is on display. CLWN WR (from 1980) was previously called Clown War, according to the text–which includes this charmingly lyrical/nutto quotation from Lyn Hejinian: “sharing the toy/ and all-some banana.”

I’ve discussed Shattered Wig (to jump around in this lazily here-and-there column) before. The issue of it on display dates from around 1993. One of the texts quoted from it is by Al Ackerman (whom I quote or re-quote as much as possible, so exactly and eloquently does he state the over-riding aesthetics of this column): “Look again, Lurcher,” grated Ling. “This thing you’ve been calling the White Bat–DOESN’T IT REALLY LOOK LIKE A GIANT BURRITO STANDING ON END?”

The exhibit is up-to-date enough to include quite a bit of Internet material–Poethia, for example, which contains this, from Mark Peters: “Police arrived./ Former glory./ Foam rubber./ Talented Chef./ Even potatoes.” Jump-cut poetry with a vengeance, but strangely compelling–for me, at any rate. Similar in technique is the following, from Loose Watch: “make one’s blood/ the blood// a law violation// sleep.” It is by jwcurry and Mark Laba.

There are several items here that Richard Kostelanetz was responsible for. Among them is his still horrendously under-rated Openings & Closings of 1975, which includes, in its entirety, the following fiction: “In the beginning, as I said,/ was the end.” John Perlman, Jeffrey Little, Ficus strangulensis, Clark Coolidge, Spencer Selby, Peter Ganick, Vincent Ferrini, Crag Hill, Dick Higgins, John Byrum, Jackson Mac Low and Ivan Arguelles are just a few of the other stand-out bustnorm poets with work listed in this section of the catalogue, accompanied by always provocative and instructive quotations from it. It features several vibrant color reproductions, as well. It alone makes the catalogue worth getting for anyone who thinks it important to jump ahead of Vendler with regard to where American poetry has most arrestingly been for the past quarter century, and where it may be headed. But there is much more of value in this catalogue. So, I’ll probably discuss it some more next issue.

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Column072 — July/August 2005 « POETICKS

Column072 — July/August 2005

Not To Be Found Again

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 37, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2005




 

Lost & Found Times,
#53-54, March 2005. Edited by John M. Bennett.
92pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods.,
137 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214. $10.


The final issue, or double-issue, of Lost & Found Times deserves more discussion than I had space for in my last column, so I’ve decided to devote this entire column to it. Let me begin with a poem in it by someone new to me, Steven Paschall. Names New to me have always popped up in Lost & Found TImes. It has been a leader, probably the leader, in introducing new names to the public. This issue has a plethora of long-known names, too: Richard Kostelanetz, Me, Sheila E. Murphy, S. Gustav Hagglund, LeRoy Gorman, Hugh Fox, John Grey–let me stop there to say that I remember Grey as a fine plaintext poet, but not very burstnorm, yet he begins a poem here, “ye ow puddle beef” and ends it with, “*r^A^Xi r-f- &.”–to indicate the effect Lost & Found Times has had on at least one poet. This, needless to say, is mainly due to its editor John M Bennett, and his partner, Al Ackerman.

Ackerman? What can I say? One of his many pieces here is a hack of a Bennett/Leftwich poem which begins, “A minder nuts sport can be viewed in two ways: / -exclude bronze nature/ -‘explode your clothes.’” If you don’t realize the importance of the quotation marks around “explode your clothes,” you’re missing a fifth or more of what’s going on in the poem. Bennett? The issue is full of his stuff.

At first, I was going to cover just one or two of his poems, but there were so many I finally decided simply to list all the new or semi-new (and certainly unmainstream) devices he uses in them: (1) wrong-sized, wrong-font letters three places into each line of “TAH” to vertically spell, “rietoietpk,” an anagram for “riet poetik” but much more, including “kite,” partly because an isolated k is next to the r at the top of “rietoietpk”; (2) “screen drip” spelled a letter at time up and (more or less) forward, from the first line of “kcolf,” to form a rectangle of lettering, except at the bottom where more weird things happen, and then down and forward until it is just above the line two words from where it started for who knows what reason (but many possible ones hover just beyond my mind); (3), a combination (done with Jim Leftwich) of scrawled lettering that suggests some kind of fracturing, and. smudged irregular cut-outs from (apparently) newspapers; (4} the frequent use of words spelled one or more times forward, and once or more times backward as in “.Dellecnac” and “Rudder,” a poem of Bennett’s I discuss in my contribution to the issue; (5), dots and/or umlauts over and inside various letters in a text with straight-edged margins, and two large circles overlain on the text, one to the right and more off the text than on it, the other the same to the left (this one done with Jessy Kendall)–I can’t articulate the point of this but think it has something to do with a mix of perspectives that almost seems a kind of opti-sophical illlusion in which two opposed ideas come into and retreat out of focus. . . (6) a Bennett frame of Rs half rectilinear, half irregular, around what looks in this tiny reproduction to be a mad finger painting (to which Thomas L. Taylor has contributed one of his signature Handprints, and Jim Leftwich done who knows what)–and (7 through 77), but I can’t spend my whole column on them!

So, to “*alternate version if color abilities are unavailable*,” the poem by Steven Paschall that I was going to begin this column with but got side-tracked from. It’s a warped mirror poem, the last line mirroring the first, the second-to-last mirroring the second, etc., lots of parentheses, and very ragged margins left, as well as right. In other words, Bennettian version of Cummings. Again, it’s hard quickly to articulate why this is effective, but there’s a shimmer to it conventional poems don’t have (aIthough, yes, you traditionalists out there [as if any traditionalists would be reading th!i!s!], conventional poems have virtues this one hasn’t.

Many great drawings by Ackerman are here. (Have I mentioned him before?) In the vein of Ackerman, Haddock has a 5-panel comic strip on how to “Swell Yr. Nuts to 10x their normal size!” (Wait, could that be Ackerman? He does use a lot of pseudonyms, but not John M. Bennett, whatever Dan Gioia has said.) But there is more than one hilarious tale by Rupert Wondolowski in the Ackerman vein in the issue, and I know he’s a real person!

Reed Altemus guests in one or more poems of Bennett’s. Pulp-Collagist Supreme Malok is here again, this time with a work that, among other things, features an inducement to “Teach your mouse INVISIBLE VALUE” partly under a very happy adult male face. John M.’s wife, C. Mehrl, joins in, as well–with a fascinating hack of a Washington Post article about Kerry in which words are deleted but nothing (except the title) changed. It begins, “But it turned out to tee up the foot and to/ take lumps for his various hard love,” and ends, “Kerry said he opposed gay marriage, but favored gay marriage./ His nuanced Kerry’s recent church of Kerry, ‘I’m going to question his soul.’”

Other treats include some great “melds” from LeRoy Gorman, such as “pubersty,” “breign” and “lostery”; John Elsberg’s ripply neato homage to Andy Warhol, which consists of the repetition of “THECAN’SBEAUTY- ISINITSUNSEENSTAINS” except that each line drops the first letter of the line above it, and puts it at its end, so the poem’s second line, for instance, is “HECAN’SBEAUTYISINITSUNSEENSTAINST”; and another fetching poem by someone I’m not familiar with, Murtagh, is just a five-line free verse poem with five is missing. Hmmm, a good paraphrase of it would be:

s mply
l ght
w thout
t me

Rats, I’ve run out of space with dozens of terrific pieces unmentioned. Sorry.

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Ten Superior Visual Poems « POETICKS

Ten Superior Visual Poems

It is now 25 September 2011.  A few ideas I had the idea for this project but am only now beginning it.  The plan is to store ten visual poems by others that I especially like and attach an appreciation to each that I hope will help others get as much pleasure from them as I have.  I’ll add an artist’s statement, too, if I get one.  I also hope others will attach comments about one or more of the specimens here.  Rules: a hundred words or more; gush about how much you like (or dislike–negative comments are as welcome as positive ones) the piece you are writing about can be included but won’t count toward your hundred or more words requirement; an indication that you are a student if you are.  I will publish every commentary I like with the piece it’s about, and put all others on a second page–except for the best student commentaries, which will go into a special student section.

The first of the ten visual poems is Marilyn R. Rosenberg’s “Drift.”

The second is Márton Koppány’s “Poem–for Karl young (and Laszlo Kornhauser)”

 

 

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Column105 — May/June 2011 « POETICKS

Column105 — May/June 2011





 

Internet Samplings, Part Two

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2011







 

      Serif of Nottingblog
      Blogger: Gary Barwin
      http://serifofnottingham.blogspot.com

      National Poetry Month
      Web-Master: Amanda Earl
      http://nationalpoetrymonth.ca
      http://www.angelhousepress.com

      textimagepoem
      Blogger: Jim Leftwich
      http://jimleftwichtextimagepoem.blogspot.com

      Nonlinear Poetry/Machine Language
      Blogger: Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
      http://nonlinearpoetry.blogspot.com
      http://nlpoetry.livejournal.com
      http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com

 


I’m not sure, but my impression is that the micro-press has been almost entirely replaced by a huge number of blogs and websites, some of them (like mine) with audiences of no more than ten or twenty. The “micro-net?” In any event, like the micro-press before it, the micro-net is where 96% of the most innovative poetry is being displayed and discussed. Don’t expect to read about them in print anywhere but here.

One that specializes in minimalist infra-verbal poetry that is also often visual is Gary Barwin’s Serif of Nottingblog. Its chief virtue, for me, is its infraverbal poetry, for instance, a poem one of the three stanzas of which is “w(and/or)d.” Another pwoermd (or one-word poem in Geof Huth’s lexicon, and–for a long time now–mine, as well (and Barwin’s) that is part of a series is almost “huh?” but its u has been replaced by an upside-down h, which–in the particular font used–looks exactly like a u except for its downward stem–to wonderfully capture the essense of “huh?” Then there are “ywhy, ewher, wh^t, wh      en,” and “who” spelled with an upside-down m in place of its w. I fear it takes a special kind of mind to appreciate these, to feel the “who-ness” of the “who” viscerally, which is a primary function of poetry, for instance, rather than read it without possessing it in any way.

Barwin does much else at his blog (practically daily!), often combining photogaphs and pwoermds or ordinary words. He reviews a range of material, too, including at least once a political speech.

Needless to say, I had to discuss something here with a poem of mine in it. The one-artwork-a-day gallery for National Poetry Month that Amanda Earl of Angel House Press, supervised is it. My “Cursive Mathemaku No. 1″ is 10 April’s selection. As I recall, I made it in about an hour–after working for days on another making similar use of cursive words for important display in Modern Haiku, that doesn’t seem anywhere near as good as this one.

The other artists with work in this gallery, in order of appearance, skipping me, are: Eric Zboya, Camille Martin, Gil McElroy, Marton Koppany, Matthew Stolte, Reed Altemus, Satu Kaikkonen, mEIKAL aND, andrew topel, Bob Grumman, Helen Hajnoczky, Joel Lipman,Aileen Beno, Vern Frazer, Bill DiMichele, Chad Lietz, Anatol, Christine McNair, Gary Barwin, Pearl Pirie, John M. Bennett, Marcus McCann,,Geof Huth, John C. Goodman,,derek beaulieu, Megan Zucher, Sheila E. Murphy, Lily Robert-Foley, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Michele Provost. A lot of first-rate stuff here, although as often as not, not visual poetry (which I continue claiming ought to have words at its center).

Angel House Press, which is responsible for the gallery, includes a store for chapbook sales, but also an essay series, and has an annual online pdf magazine at www.experiment-o.com.

John Crouse and Jim Leftwich have countless short poems called “Acts” at Leftwich’s blog, extimagepoem. Here’s a randomly-chosen sample:

        ACT SIX THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED EIGHTY FOUR

        rodent sermon softball: “remember began named”
        solemn havoc software: “turn heart immense”
        sudden amphibian judgment: “patiently with ten”
        sailboat overcoat salamander: “with another then”
        occasions missionary mittens: “order every at”
        incinerator indent hatching: “broken golden handed”
        babies essence esophagus: “knew idea three”
        essays ketchup alligator: “pioneered many purpose”
        hallelujah almanac windmill: “mind february sessions”
        winces audiences wigwams: “all thinking inches”
        wreck willow puffin: “speed tone playing”
        pulley pulpit pumpernickel: “into suffering mind.”

A dada word-collage. I have to admit that I don’t know what to make of it. That some kind of church service may be going on I infer from “sermon” in line one and “pulpit” in the last line, and “missionary” and “hallelujah” later on–which makes “ten” possibly refer to the Ten Commandments? While we remember Genesis, the “began named?” A fun playground of verbal music and sharp images to associate off of. More I can’t say.

Leftwich also has a number of non-representational photographs that I assume have been computer-manipulated at the site. I find most of them visually arresting, even appealing, but can’t figure out why Poems 2011 is the general title he’s given them.

A gorgeous tropical-seeming work of abstract-expressionism by Peter Ganick & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen is on the home page of Kervinen’s nonlinearpoetry blog. Above it we are told he’s moved the blog to nlpoetry.livejournal; some quite beautiful (2008) abstract-expressionist textual designs by Kervinen are there, but at the top of the page we’re told he’s moved his blog again, this time to jukkapekkakervinen. There we find more textual designs and texts like the following:

                  *g$JTs
                  fbKbOgr+
                  HZ6bW2C&DAO
                  L
                  Ad”k&
                  )r=C
                  P@
                  0+
                  9DX7
                  Qq
                  &hATVEiPX”

Now, it happens that I did a brief question and answer with Kervinen at otherstreamunlimited.com about works like this. Me: “I feel slow, but is what you do, Jukka, is write a program that generates a text, which becomes your artwork? If that’s the case, mustn’t the program build the final text from something else–a preliminary text or at least collection of symbols or something?

Taxonomically, it seems to me (so far) that your poems of this kind are found texts that your programs take you to, but I think of such texts as being like texts resulting from, say, textual matter gathered from a book or other source by means of some formula . . . But you say you don’t have a preliminary text, which is where I’m confused.”

Jukka: “Yes, that’s what I do, all the time, write programs which generate texts (as well images, music, videos etc). For these texts, no, there are no preliminary texts, dictionaries or collection of symbols. Just numbers, the program generates numbers according the rules I’ve made, the numbers are converted to characters (ASCII, or equivalent, there are many different character set in old 8-bit computers I use). There are many types of programs I write for generating texts, some of them use dictionaries and/or other sources, however my “goal” has always been standalone abstract, cybernetic machines, which generate everything, without any sources, just the machine (and, unfortunately–me, choosing (what to keep in) the (resulting) texts, although I’ve developed various means to eliminate my intuitive selection process as well). Hope I’m not confusing more :)”

I think I understand him.

 

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Column084 — November/December 2007 « POETICKS

Column084 — November/December 2007



Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Eight

 

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 11-12, November-December 2007




      David Graham’s Poetry Library.
      http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html

      Entropy and Me. Blogger: Halvard Johnson
      http://entropyandme.blogspot.com

      E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.
      Webmaster: Tom Beckett
      http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com

      Muse of Fire. Blogger: Jeff Newberry
      http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com

      NarcissusWorks. Blogger: Anny Ballardini
      http://annyballardini.blogspot.com

      Poetry Blogs. Webmaster: David Graham
      http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/Blogs.html

      Tad’s Opus 40 Blog. Blogger: Tad Richards
      http://opusforty.blogspot.com

      Ursprach. Blogger: James Finnegan
      http://ursprache.blogspot.com

 


 

As I hope I’ve shown here over the past year or more, there are an enormous number of good blogs out there about poetry, none of them getting a tenth of the notice pop artists’ and airheaded political partisans’ blogs are getting, of course–but out there. With this column, I’m wrapping up my survey of poetry blogs (and related websites). I’ve skipped an enormous number of excellent poetry blogs, but hope what I’ve written gives a reasonably useful beginning idea of their scope at present. If not, well, most of the blogs I’ve mentioned have lists of links to other blogs you can use to find out more about them.

For instance, David Graham runs an amiable little website called Poetry Blogs that, as of this writing, lists links to twenty blogs, with brief comments like this, regarding Tad Richards’s blog: “–not just poetry, but any man who loves both John Prine & Sonny Rollins is A-OK with me.” Poetry Blogs is part of a larger website, David Graham’s Poetry Library, that has similarly valuable sub-sites with links to poets’ home pages, poetry publishers, poetry journals, poetry essays, the full texts of books (free!) and craft tools (such as dictionaries, books on prosody, etc.).

I mentioned Poetry Corner Curator/Editor Anny Ballardini’s NarcissusWorks in one earlier column, but too briefly, so I thought I ought to return to it here. (albeit, still too briefly). All kinds of stuff is in it, including frequent first-rate photographs of Italian landscapes (and cityscapes), Anny’s own writings and (more often) texts she’s found elsewhere, like the one she describes as “a good article on Gary Snyder in the Guardian Unlimited sent by Jeff Newberry to the New Poetry List” from which she extracted the following two paragraphs: “Snyder points out that the San Francisco poetry renaissance was already advanced, in the work of Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and others, before the subversive Ginsberg gang arrived from the east coast: ‘They just publicised it.’

“The last letters Snyder received from Kerouac, who died in a broken-down state in 1969, were ranting and insulting, but Snyder remains affectionate towards the man who mythologised him in a cult novel before he reached the age of 30. ‘Jack was a dedicated person. As a Buddhist he had some very good insights. It was all mixed up with his French-Canadian Roman Catholicism, but so what? It’s hard to know why people self-destruct. They do so for reasons of deep and ancient karma, qualities of their character they were born with.’”

Tom Beckett, by the way, interviews Anny at http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-anny-ballardini.html. Beckett’s E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, which has more than a dozen excellent interviews of poets by Tom and other poets, is an excellent poetry resource.

Another blogger who sprinkles his blog (Ursprach) with quotations from others, although posting his own thoughts, too, is James Finnegan. I generally find them a pleasure to disagree with. Here’s one of his own sayings: “A poem of concept is generally lesser in the weight than a poem of content.” For me, the best poetry is substantially both conceptual and . . . contentual. I strongly sympathize with Finnegan’s contention in one of his entries that because “The acoustic effects of language are dismal compared to those of music . . . no one is much interested in words devoid of their meanings”–but he’s wrong that few are interested in asemic texts, as they’re called, by their many makers.

Halvard Johnson, whom I consider an intellectual nihilist (because, among other things, he seems–entirely uncombatively–to believe that all texts are equally valuable) is one who would defend “words devoid of their meanings.” Nevertheless, his own poetry at his Entropy and Me blog is only a mite loopy, not asemic, as in his:

            Sonnet for the New Year

            Pleistocene campfires flickering in the distance, deeply
            rooted slogans chat it up with money barons. Medical
            malpractice suits us just fine, thank you very much.
            For instance, well-delivered apologies salve all wounds.

            Partial reconciliations break step when crossing a bridge,
            miraculous transformations no longer expected or offered.
            Higher disease rates unrelated to education or health costs
            speak volumes to our well-tuned ears. Biology urges us

            to seek out music in the company of other people. Yahweh
            and other loud cellphone talkers gather to break bread to-
            gether, airwaves atremble with salutations, with greetings.
            On everyone’s lips, prospects for reelection, for theatrical

            productions that do not close in a month or less. And soon,
            all spats aside, someone texts us a toast, and all follow suit.

Jeff Newberry’s blog is a good place to go to get an idea of what conventional thirty- something poets are doing and thinking. Here’s a musing of his from one of his entries: “In between midnight feedings, I’ve been rereading John Donne, a poet whose work I’ve always admired, from the very first time I read ‘Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God.’ Lately, I’ve been going through Donne’s early love poetry and have been wondering why on earth I didn’t take him as a model back when I was writing angsty She-doesn’t-love-me poetry. Donne’s early work manages to make a pleading & pitiful persona (a whiney, unrequited lover) quite compelling. His skillful handling of metaphor and his witty word play are the key here.”

The final blog I have room to say anthing about is Tad Richards’s Opus 40. It’s a fun blog containing Tad’s deft caricatures of contemporary poets, fine photographs, his own poems, and news items like one about the American Academy of Poets’ new website feature, Poetry Map, which shows the states with all kinds of poetry resources and local poetry- related landmarks, poetry event sites, and the like labeled. But, Richards complains, “Marvin Bell is not listed in Iowa, and his importance to the state (he’s an ex-poet laureate) and to the Iowa Workshop cannot be overstated.”

The map of New Mexico’s overlooking long-time state resident, Witter Bynner, gives him an excuse to quote a poem of Bynner’s:

            I COME AND GO

            I come and go
            And never stay.
            I pick and choose
            A night, a day,
            I find, I lose,
            I laugh along,
            I will not know
            Right things from wrong.

            I pity those
            Who pity me,
            I ask no boon,
            But being free . . .
            And so the moon,
            My polished stone,
            Shines and shows
            I lie alone.

Too bad about Witter’s not being on the map, but I feel confident that at least a hundred American poets more than twice as good as he aren’t on it, either. And with that slam of the American Poetry Establishment, I close. Content.

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Column102 — November/December 2010 « POETICKS

Column102 — November/December 2010






Battling the Nullinguists

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2010







      Comprepoetica
      Blogmaster: Bob Grumman
      http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff
      http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff

      The Pedestal,
      Issue 57.
      Edited by John Amen.
      April 21-June 21 2010;
      http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/

      Slab,
      Issue 57, 2010.
      Edited by Amy Choate and Caitlin Svetahor
      Yearly; 215 pp; Department of English
      Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock PA.
      slablitmag.org. $10/copy.

 


 

I’m not really obsessed with the definition of visual poetry, I just talk about it all the time. One of the reasons for that is that I consider it a cardinal example of what I consider the “nullinguistic” assault on the idea of language as a means of communication prevalent in the West at this time. Not that mysticism beyond the power of puny words to describe hasn’t always been a potent force in all the tribes of earthlings, but the twentieth century seems to have bought into it more idiotically than any previous era.

“Nullinguist” is my term for people consciously or unconsciously out to destroy the meaningfulness of language, mostly by refusing to accept that any word should have a stable meaning. I tilt lances with them mostly regarding the meaning of “visual poetry,” which for them has no set meaning. Hence it is that as co-editor with John M. Bennett, of a gallery of artworks called visual poetry in The Pedestal, I wrote the following in my preface (John also writing an able preface giving much of the other side): “In the field of what I call visio-textual art, I am considered eccentric, for almost everyone in it believes that a visual poem is no more a kind of poetry than a mongoose is a kind of bird. I disagree, so consider many of the works John Bennett and I have chosen for this gallery to be what I call ‘textual designs,’ rather than visual poems.

“For me a visual poem is a poem combined with graphic elements that is able to provide an engagent an aesthetic experience that is at some point significantly and simultaneously verbal and visual. For instance: J. Michael Mollohan’s “Yellow Flower,” which you see as both common flower and uncommonly glorious sun (and ultimate living result of sunlight) at the same time as you read the word for it. The textual designs I speak of lack sufficient words to do that. Some, indeed, have no words.

“So, considering my attitude about visual poetry, why so many textual designs and so few visual poems in the gallery? Because, first of all, I recognize my view to be a minority view and am democratic enough to feel the majority should rule (even when INSANELY WRONG). More important, I consider the textual designs we chose to be significantly superior aesthetically to the visual poems they beat out. Indeed, for me the works Scott Helmes terms his “visual haiku” here and elsewhere are the best visual artworks of our time, so what if most of them are not, by my standards, poems. Fortunately for my loyalty to poetry, John and I still managed to find a number of fine visual poems among the submissions besides “Yellow Flower,” so, I feel, we have done our duty to it as well as to textual design.”

I should add that our gallery has works by Tom Cassidy, Guy R. Beining, K.S. Ernst, Jim Leftwich, Andrew Topel, Paul Thaddeus Lambert, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Baron, Reed Altemus and Márton Koppány, as well as one apiece by me and John (because we felt them useful as a guide to our prejudices as editors) besides the two already mentioned. All in full color.

After our gallery is a short story by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, “Deck Building Deck Building. In it, a journalist, out of curiosity, investigates a $45,000 deck contractors had attached to the home of a Vietnamese-American doctor which collapsed, causing injuries to the doctor that months later led to his death. Excellent character study of both the doctor and journalist, and fascinating study of a not usually-written-about an ethnic group in America.

The issue boasts a fairly substantial review section, too, and ends with a gallery of audio recordings selected and introduced by Zachery Kluckman of audio-recordings of what I guess you’d call stand-up comics: J.W. Basilo, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Molly Kat, Tufik Shayeb, and Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, that seemed quite polished to me.

Note: unlike many such venues, The Pedestal pays contributors, in case anyone reading this might be interested in submitting to it. It’s no avant garde publication, but a good one. And, as an Internet publication, it’s out there for viewing more or less permanently.

Aimed at a similar audience is the once-a-year, Slab. Like The Pedestal, it does venture into the otherstream to a degree, for this issue has poetry by Experioddica stalwarts, Guy R. Beining (with a poem that contains a striking image of “spotless/ morning/ fed/ to/ fowls/ with/ feathers/ like/ water”) and Richard Kostelanetz (with more of his deft minimalist word-games), which is why I’m reporting on it here (aside from the fact that my coverage of magazines has slipped a bit of late). There are a lot of good short stories and poems here, and some “creative non-fiction.” Among the latter is a charmer called “The Legend of the Hubcap Lady,” an (apparently) autobiographical essay about a woman new to an American Indian community who shows up at a great powwow thinking that paper plates would be provided so not bringing any plates or bowls–so uses the hubcaps of the family car instead and becomes a local legend, laughed with instead of at.

Characteristic of many short stories I’ve lately been reading is Mickey Hess’s affecting “The Old Man and the Tree” about the quietly believable big-brother relationship of a high school teacher in his thirties with a gifted but screwed-up boy in one of his classes that, after several years pass, piddles away, the boy still screwed-up.

Of the many poems more conventional than Beining’s and Kostelanetz’s is one by long-time small press poet, B. Z. Niditch that I’ve decided to end this installment of my column with because of how effective I find it in spite of being highly conventional–about spring, of all standard poetic subjects!

               When Spring Begins

               Ice spreads
               its paperweight shadows
               by the undertow shore
               after a muffled winter
               white sugar drifts nod
               near the bicycle rider
               who parks by the beach gazebo
               through mountains of sand,
               the one-eyed sunshine
               unlocks trees
               of tasseled snow,
               Poseidon waves to his lovers
               asking us to break dance
               on a frozen morning.

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Exploration of Manywhere-at-Once « POETICKS

Exploration of Manywhere-at-Once

Entry 1071 — The Errntlexeme

April 12th, 2013

My latest coinage is pronounced “AIRNT lehks eem.” I’m rather proud of the “errnt,” which is intended to suggest “errant,” because it’s the first syllable I’ve used in one of my coinages that’s a non-standard lexical fusion unit, as far as I know. My “rigidnik,” for instance, is just the standard word “rigid” plus the stand suffix, “nik.” Lexeme is just the standard word for, uh, “word”–as far as I know.

Definition? “A word employed in a poem with the aim of derailing the poem’s, uh, ‘linguflow,’ where it occurs.” A bentword, as I think I previously called it. Oh, make that “A word employed in a poem with the aim of derailing the poem’s ‘linguflow,’ where it occurs long enough to cause the pocipient to experience frustration.  It is an effective errntlexeme for a given pocipient to the degree that it is resolvable, for him–and, in my philosophy, objectively effective to the degree that it is resolvable for the majority of intelligent, knowledgeable pocipients.

Its purpose beyond derailment is to cause aesthetic pleasure (not, I feel I must add, to keep the “truth” of a poem’s didactic message from causing hostility as it seems to me now that Emily Dickinson considered the purpose of slant wording after long thinking–because having forgotten the context of her use of “tell it slant”–she thought of it the way I think of errntlexeme).  But a good errntlexeme will slant away from a pocipient’s expectations to result, if resolved, in the familiar encountered unexpectedly that I consider the sole cause of aesthetic pleasure.  Not that such pleasure may not, and probably will be, accompanied by reflexive sensual or other pleasure.

I’m thinking now that aesthetic pleasure, which I’ve always had a tough time pinning down, is entirely reductiptual–which is to say it occurs only in the conceptual part of the brain.  That’s aesthetic pleasure according to my aesthetics.  The full pleasure of a successful poem includes other pleasures.

More on this in due course.  Right now, what I hope to do in the next few days, is go back to my discussion of  Manywhere-at-Once to analyze how an errntlexeme works in a poem.  I should have started with that, but didn’t think of it. It’s the simplest poetic device, and much undervalued, especially by conventional poets.

Before posting this entry, I want to announce another coinage: “cerebralane,” a replacement for what I was calling a “knowleculation.”

While making announcements, here’s another: yesterday I updated my archive here of published Small Press Review columns in this blog’s “Pages” section.  The most recent of these is a review of The Last Vispo Anthology.

Entry 1053 — Manywhere-at-Once, the Metaphor

Monday, March 25th, 2013

Recently I’ve run into people who seem not to come close to understanding Manywhere-at-Once.  To try to make clear what I mean by it, and it is central to my poetics, I’m going to turn to the following sentence, “in the battle he was a ferocious tiger.”  Here a tiger is used as a metaphor for a man in a battle.  Let us assume that the sentence is being read by a mentally healthy, intelligent reader who has never encountered the metaphor before.  I claim that it will send him to two unconnected places in his brain.  To Manywhere-at-Once, in other words.  The illustrations below roughly indicate  the simpler details of what happens:

MATO-TigerMetaphor01

MATO-TigerMetaphor02

Note: “r” stands for “retroceptual” or “having to do with remembered data”; “p” stands for “perceptual” or “having to do with perceived data”; and “c” stands for “combiceptual” or “having to do with data partially remembered and partially perceived.”  In the diagram at the top, a person hearing the sentence, “In the battle the warrior was a ferocious tiger,” experiences [ferocious], an auditorily-perceived word , then [tiger], another auditorily-perceived word.  I assume the sentence will make the person remember the word, “warrior,” or a similar word, because it is strongly suggested by the fact that a “he” who is “in a battle” will be a warrior.  It may be something else.  Exactly what will depend on the previous related experiences of the person involved and memory mechanisms too complicated to get into here.  It will be something, almost surely, if only a vague impression of a human being.  It will specifically be something the person involved expected to follow the word, “ferocious,” but not “tiger.”

The perception of the “wrong” word (“tiger”), the errntlexeme, is contradicted by the retroception of the expected word (or near-word, what it is) to cause momentary pain.  To enter Manywhere-at-Once will generally cause momentary pain.  But if a resolution of the contradiction quickly occurs, the relief experienced will be high pleasurable.  In this case, it does: both “tiger” and “warrior” lead quickly to “destroyed” (or some word like that, some word that works, that connects “tiger” and “warrior”).  So, the pleasure of resolution.  To this is added a feeling of expansion due to the enlargement of experience–instead of just experiencing connotations that would have occurred had “warrior” been spoken rather than”tiger,” one experiences also tiger-connotations.

Now, then, when one next hears to sentence, one still may not be ready to expect “tiger” as part of what “ferocious” leads to, and one will re-experience Manywhere-at-Once.  At some point, however, one will experience [tiger] and [warrior] combiceptually, as shown in the lower illustration.  From then on one may well experience the two as a pleasurable enriched image-cluster, but no longer be in Manywhere-at-Once.

Oops, that’s not entirely true.  If one is absent from the metaphor for long enough a time, one’s “Onewhere-at-Once” may weaken enough for one to re-experience the metaphor freshly.  To put it simply, one will forget one’s previous visit to a particular Manywhere-at-Once sufficiently to come back to it as if for the first time.

Entry 1054 — Manywhere-At-Once, the Rhyme

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

I’m tempted to leave the diagrams shown as sufficient explanation of my theory of rhymes.

SightFlight02

SightFlight03

Oh, what the heck, I’ll at least partially explain it.  First of all, you have to understand that I believe in a sort of platonic form of language–a kind of speech that is not genuinely heard.  Absurd?  Only slightly.  My description was intended to overdo it a bit to be provocative.  To heighten your attention.  What I believe is that when we listen to someone, we do hear their words, but only audiolexically–which is to say, only enough to identify them as words.  The words identified as such go through further processing on their way to the “lexical zone” of the brain shown in violet in the diagrams above.  There they cause energy to be stored in appropriate cells in sufficient quantity to activate them.  Their activation is what experience lexically.  A record of those cells’ activation is at the same time made in cells within what I call the zone’s ”mnemoduct.”

Note: the pieces of sound that words themselves are never get past the ears.  What I call “words” in the preceding paragraph are actually ever-changing signals that end up (probably) as chemical neuro-transmitters that tell a cell to tell a person’s consciousness he has encountered a certain word.  For simplicity’s sake, I call them words, anyway.

The words involved simultaneously also make their way to the audiolexical zone shown in blue.  They will also cause energy to be stored in appropriate cells there but not in sufficient quantity to activate them.  The energy will merely prime the cells they are in, which will increase their susceptibility to activation by any further energy they gain.

The reason the audiolexical cells involved are not activated is that the zone will be in a state of low-attention, put there by the brain’s helping the person involved to focus on the words he is hearing by lowering his attention on other zones, and raising it on his lexical zone.  Assuming ordinary circumstances, since this will not always happen (according to my theory of knowlecular psychology, as is the case with everything I’m saying here).  Listening to a poem as we read it, is another matter, or really concentrating on words we want to memorize.  Either will awaken our audiolexical zone.

When we read words, we will (generally) only “sublexically” see them the same way we generally sublexically hear spoken words.  The seen words will transmit energy to cells in the visiolexical zone rather than the audiolexical zone.  There is also a musculexical zone where our percepts of our own normal and and sublingual speech transmit energy to appropriate cells.

I’m too worn out to go on.  See if from what I’ve told you, you can figure out how I think our appreciation of rhymes works!  I will come back to it tomorrow, if I’ve recovered from my efforts today.

Entry 1055–Manywhere-at-Once, the Rhyme, 2

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

Okay, here goes my attempt to give my knowlecular explanation of rhyme-appreciation.  In the upper illustration the auditory knowlecule [ght] is carefully differentiated from the audiolexical knowlecule [ght] (a ‘knowlecule” being a “molecule” of knowledge in my theory, as you should all know by now!), and shown highlighted in gray to indicate that it is “primed,” which means that it is partially on the way to being activated because it contains stored . . . neuro-transmission chemicals of the kind that provide cell-activating energy when available in sufficient quantity.  The illustration is intended to depict the knowleculation–in this case, an audiolexical one ending in [x]–just created in a given subject’s brain.  [x] is whatever connotations knowlicles (final units of knowlecules) [“a lovely sight”] activated along with random “noise”–i.e., random knowlicles that will come alive in every instacon (or moment of consciousness) almost entirely out of context.  I include it for completeness, but it is of no importance for my story here.

SightFlight01corrected

SightFlight02corrected

The lower illustration shows  the subject having just heard “these swans in fli–”  in the process of experiencing [ght] audiolexically.  Of pivotal importance, though, is that he is shown also experiencing [ght] as a retrocept in his auditory zone.  This results because the audiolexical knowlecule (or partial knowlecule) [fl] must send a small amount of neuro-transmitter to the primed [ght] in the subject’s auditory zone.  Now, this may not be enough for the latter’s activation, but in most cases ought to be, for the auditory [ght] will probably have gotten a bit of activation-causing neuro-transmitter from the expectation of rhyme-occurence he, like most people, would have learned that poems of the kind he is hearing cause.  Be that as it may, I’m assuming the second shot of neuro-transmitter causes the activation of the subject’s auditory [ght].  This puts him in a Manywhere-at-Once because he will experience a [ght] in each of two separate places.

It’s all ridiculously simple.   According to my theory of pain and pleasure, pleasure is a matter (for the most part) of the number of  neuro-transmitters an instacon’s releases that succeed in causing cellular activation compared to number that fail to do this.  Ordinarily, the neuro-transmitters [fli]‘s sent to the auditory zone would not activate anything, so would keep the audiolexical [fl] from causing much, if any, pleasure.  Not so, this time.

There are many other complexities involved that I won’t get into here to avoid confusion.  It should be remembered that what I’ve said is a simplification.  I stand by its being close enough to what will happen if my theory is not too wrong.  I further contend that even if my theory is 90% hooey (no, my good friends, it is nowhere near 100% hooey), my account of rhyme-appreciation is better than any other one out there.  And it applies, too, to all the varieties (nearly) of what I call “melodation”–to wit, alliteration, consonance, etc.  ”Nearly,” because it does not account for the pleasure of euphony.  That, and perhaps others, is due to our innate predisposition to derive pleasure from certain sounds like “ah.”  We may also have such a predisposition to enjoy any repeated verbal sound.  Only when neurophysiological lab technicians have the means to test my ideas, and they eventually will (if they don’t already), will we know how valid they are.

Yes, they are readily falsifiable.  They also break no long-accepted laws of science.  Hence, they are scientific.

Note, what I’m calling the auditory zone could probably more aptly be called the lexical-auditory association area.

Entry 1056 — MatO, Review & Corrections

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

The first two illustrations show the creation of the metaphormation of “tiger” as a metaphor for “warrior” in the brain, according to my knowlecular theory of psychology.  Concerning this, I have a minor correction: I previously said the part of the brain involved was the audiolexical zone.  I now say it’s the lexical zone.

MATO-TigerMetaphor01

MATO-TigerMetaphor02

I have little to add to my knowlecular treatment of rhyme-formation except to note that the ext involved opens a knowleculation in the lexical, not the audiolexical zone, and that it is the latter, not the auditory zone in which the rhyme is experienced as a sound.  Actually, the audiolexical zone is part of the auditory zone; it’s where in that zone lexical sounds only can be heard.  A text will always in normal circumstances cause a lexical knowleculation to be laid down in the lexical zone and, at the same time, the same knowleculation to be primed but not activated in the audiolexical zone.  One advantage of this evolutionarily, I might note, is that it gives spoken material a better chance of being remembered shortly after a person’s exposure to it than most competing data.

SightFlight01corrected

SightFlight02corrected

What follows is my illustration of the first two steps in the creation of a mathephormation (i.e., a knowleculation containing mathematical metaphors).  The stimulus is the multiplication example at the top left in the upper illustration.  It is depicted in the upper illustration causing a more or less standard lexical knowleculation to be laid down in the lexical zone.  Along the way, however, the mathematical symbols generate a fragmentary mathematical knowleculation which includes the algorithm for multiplication.

mathephor01

mathephor02

This, as the lower illustration indicates, allows for the creation of the sort of mathematical sentence containing metaphors that I contend effective mathexpressive poetry will result it, with pleasure for those experiencing them.

What happens, to simplify to a ridiculously great degree, is that the multiplication algorithm the person has long ago learned (one hopes), will force the formation of a knowleculation beginning with [April meadow], which is the muliplicand.  To this is added . . . and here my illustration crumbles, so I have to fix it.  But it still should give you an idea of what happens.  The main thing it does not give you an idea of is the sense of the logic of the mathephors generated.  Tomorrow I hope to have a corrected version of the lower illustration and a third illustration with which I try to show why a good mathexpressive poem can provide significant aesthetic pleasure.

Entry 1057 — Manywhere-at-Once, the Mathephor

Friday, March 29th, 2013

I’m not in my null zone, for I feel pretty chipper, but I’m turble tired.  So just a few more illustrations of how a mathematical metaphor (“mathephor”) develops in the brain.  For those of you who have given my previous lessons the proper amount of attention, my illustrations should be enough, particularly if you remember what accommodance is, since it is what ultimately allows for the creation and appreciation of metaphors of any kind, although a higher level of it is probably needed for the creation and appreciation of mathephors.

mathephor03a

mathephor03a

Note that the metaphor reaches its highpoint in the mathelexical zone.  Not shown is the continued presence of related words as pure text in the lexical zone.  Hence, the person involved will experience Manywhere-at-Once.  More on this in tomorrow’s entry, I hope–then on to the visiophor.

Entry 1058 — Poetry Appreciation Accommodance

Saturday, March 30th, 2013

(Note: I suddenly realized that I’ve been treating my texts like they are world class poems, or excerpts of world-class poems. What I’m doing, if it isn’t clear, is showing how a very simple example of a use of metaphor in an attempt at poetry will work for someone who appreciates it–someone, in other words, who is at its level, as we all were once at the level of nursery rhymes.)

mathephor03a

What’s going on in the illustration above is accommodance at work.  It could just as well be called “dipping into the subconscious.”  I got the idea for it from Aldous Huxley when he was discussing his experiences with drugs—hallucinogenic  drugs, I believe.  All he said was that they opened a door that admitted data we normally blocked out.  I was considering the possible effect of variable cerebral energy levels at the time—being sure, as I still am, that everything we do mentally depends on energy-requiring mechanisms.  Not being well-read in formal psychology I’m not sure those in the field with the proper credentials believe that, but I think most of them do.  It’s the mystics who don’t.

Anyway, for some reason, I jumped into the idea that “blocking” the entrance of data might require energy pushing the involved door shut.  Hence, a weakening of energy might be what allows those doors to swing open.  Other simple ideas of mine in development lead me to conclude that a sense of wrongness can cause a lowering of cerebral energy which causes something to happen somewhat like what Huxley described, except much less dramatic.

To put it most simply, what happens (according to knowlecular psychology) is that a person’s normal tendency to find his way from his ongoing experiences into habitual knowleculations is weakened by a lowering of the energy needed for it.  The person’s ability to remember is weakened which, oddly, increases his memories (although it may take a few moments before it does).  One of the things that must be understood is that normally one goes from one strongly-remembered understanding of what is going on in one’s life to another—because they have become familiar, something that will not usually happen if they are defective.  Hence, if it rains, we remember previous times when it rained and how we avoided getting wet, and open our umbrellas, or run for shelter.  That’s all there is to it.

If a person starts to open an umbrella and it explodes (harmlessly), the experience will be unexpected because unfamiliar—radically unfamiliar.  One will become appropriately stupid, in effect, due to a decrease in cerebral energy due to his accommodance.  He will have no remembered understandings to draw on.  He will still try weakly to find memories that pertain to his circumstance, but activate very few.  At the same time, much of his cerebral energy will be transmitted to varied memories that will not become active but will become primed to become active.  Bits and pieces of memories primed before the explosion may be randomly activated by the environment, which will be able to activate more percepts than it had because of lack of competition from retroceptual activation.  Eventually, he will remember recent events, but not necessarily in order (which will enhance their ability to re-order themselves effectively, although they will most often re-order themselves counter-productively—which won’t matter much, usually, due to the brain’s ability to recognize their flawedness and ignore them.)

Finally, sometimes during one’s first reflection on a poetic passage with a metaphor like the one under discussion here, enough of the . . . accommoflow? will clump into a resolution or partial resolution.  That will cause one’s accelerance to come into play, strongly activating the new understanding (or, too many times, the potential new understanding that isn’t).  And one will have resolved his frustration—or realized he hadn’t, which will turn on his accommodance again.

The process could take a week or more in the case of a poem.  Ergo: some poems need to be read many times, and reflected on before they make sense.  One can’t expect to enjoy a dramatically new technique like a mathephor as easily and quickly as one can enjoy a rhyme.

mathephor03a

Now we know that the above, shown again, depicts something I’m tentatively calling an accommoflow.  A very simplified one.  With a focus on the part of it in the mathelexical zone although much will be going on importantly at the same time in the lexical zone, and probably in both the visiolexical and audilexical zones.  In the best cases, important mental activity will be occurring in non-lexical zones, too—where we feel a moment of some long ago spring just after a shower, say.

Crucial to the effectiveness of the mathephor here, is the colored x, which is my symbol for everything multiplication is, everything that makes it much more for those sensitive to it than a mechanical switch (which it certainly also is).

Ooops, I see I left out the importance of the multiplication algorithm, which is really the primary agent in the creation of the mathephor because (I claim) it will have been strongly activated before the “explosion” occurred by both the multiplication sign (“x”) and the line under the second term.  Moreover, it will be a very strong habitual knowleculation, so able to do more even when the cerebral energy available is low than most other data.  It will cause a person to find a multiplier and a multiplicand and then use the logic of multiplication he should have learned to determine why it makes sense for the product of the two to be “flowers.”  Eventually, understandings like the three shown in darker ink must occur if the mathephor has any chance of being a success.

mathephor04

The above depicts a successful resolution of the knowlexplosion.  A multiplication serves as a metaphor for the transformation of a meadow/ the coming of spring/ the birth of flowers, all of these with vivid connotations that will be activated by the energizing effects of the resolution.  I would add that there are “under-metaphors” present to the sensitive aesthcipient—for me, one is the metaphor of spring as some kind of machine like a long division “machine” churning out beauty from ordinary constituents.

It is important to note–or am I re-noting it?—that the resolution of this particular knowlexplosion will occur in different parts of the mathelexical zone while at the same time many of the knowlecules involved with be activated in the lexical zone—[flowers], for instance.  I fall goes as well as it sometimes can, remembered images of flowers, flower-smells, pleasant dampness and other sensual knowlecules will enter the final experience.

Apologies my not articulating all this very well.  It’s not a first draft, either—more like a fiftieth draft.  Each one is saying more, but remaining less coherent than I’d like.

Entry 1060 — Surprise Quiz on the Visiophor

Monday, April 1st, 2013

Okay, class, it’s time to find out how much you’ve learned about . . . Manywhere-at-Once.  You have the rest of the day to describe the visiophor in the beginning of the poem (my “Nocturne”) and how it works according to knowlecular psychology.  E.mail me your papers by seven o’clock tomorrow.  They will be graded!

NocturneAnalysis01

Entry 1061 — A Mistake

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013

What happened?  Only 657 of you turned in papers.  Fortunately for the rest of you, I’m only counting it ten percent of your grade for the term.  But you’ll now have to work pretty hard for a C, and you no longer have a chance at an A.

NocturneAnalysis01

Now for a quick run-through of the main points you should have made in your paper, though I’m afraid only four of you got them all.

1. The subject encountering the poem sees it as shown in “Reality.”  In most cases he will scan it from top down.

2. He will experience its first three images as the perceptual stack in his visual zone shown over a period of three instacons.

3. An instacon or two later, his visual zone will start a knowleculation in his visiolexical zone.  It will consist of the images in the visual zone “grammaticalized,” or put in a line, one after the other, because (and it’s important that you mentioned this, the images sufficiently suggest words to the subject due to his familiarity with the written word.  (Due, more accurately, to precerebral mechanisms in the brain that have been trained to detect and strain out visual data that seem textual from everything coming in from the eye, but we have yet discussed that in class, so you needn’t have mentioned it in your paper.  I bring it up only to make some of you who are feeling confident about fully understanding this phase of knowlecular linguistics that we are so far dealing with it at an extremely superficial level.)

4. The knowleculation in the visolexical zone will be enough to start a knowleculation in the lexical zone, which will consist of the near-letters converted to Platonically perfect letters.  Not shown are the connotations and varied retrocepts that will occur as all the above transpires.

5. Shown in the illustration, however . . .  Oops, I see that I made a mistake.  But no one caught it.

Well, those of you who failed to turn in a paper or who did poorly on one, got a reprieve.  I will give those few of you who responses to the quiz demonstrated you’ve been paying attention in class will begin the next quiz with thirty to fifty points,  so will need only thirty to ten points to pass it, and only sixty to forty to get an A on it.  That quiz will be due tomorrow morning.  All you need do if tell me what mistake I made, and why it was a mistake.

Entry 1062 — Correction

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

You should all have found the mistake with no trouble.  My correction is below:

NocturneAnalysis01A

The illustration now indicates how the percept, [sun], with help from the visiolexical percepts showing partially deleted versions of the word, will cause the subject to experience a visual retrocept of the sun followed by a visual retrocept of a sunset.  Not shown but obvious is that the latter will cause a resolution of the minor pain the subject will have experienced due to the marred printing of the word “sunlight” (in a stack, I might add, that breaks standard rule of syntax).  Result: “sun,” as it appears in print, as a (simple) metaphor for a sunset, and a momentary trip to a Manywhere-at-Once consisting of the subject’s experience of the visual image (or partial image) of a sunset in his visual zone at the same time or about the same time as he experiences the word for sun.

As I wrote the preceding sentence, I realized that what actually happens is that he re-experiences the Manywhere-at-Once containing the visual sun with the word for it, for he would–as a child, have earned the two words together, possibly with poetic awe since words would then have been magical to him, and perhaps the sun a new thing.  This re-experience would reproduce the earlier pleasure, or–at least–something like it (assuming always that the metaphor is effective), because the earlier Manywhere-at-Once of sun and word would have long since been converted to a Onewhere-at-Once consisting of only the word.  The poem carries out poetry to revive it–that is, it reconnects a word to the visual experience of what the word denotes, which is the ultimate function of poetry–as stated by True Authorities in many different ways many times.

(Tarzan Cry Here.)

(Note: I was disappointed that none of you e.mailed me an attempt to say what was wrong with my illustration.  Do not believe me incapable of flunking you all!  I will continue the class, however, due to the requirements of my contract with Erato and Apollo.)

Entry 1063 – Another Visiophor

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

The second visiophor in “Nocturne” should be easy enough to follow.  The only part of the process that I don’t feel I understand very well is the “magical” change of the l to an n.  The subject may almost automatically accept it as due to what ink can do.  So my illustration is incomplete.  It should show the printed words and partial words calling up a memory of the drawing of a letter.  Or maybe the l-percept activates a tree-retrocept which in turn activates a wind-blown retrocept . . . plus the retrocept [magic spell].  Anyway, the transformation of the printed word “light” to “night” becomes a visiophor for the transformation of day to night.

NocturneAnalysis02

Note: I’m getting very lazy with my illustrations, leaving more and more out–even stuff I’m now mentioning.  Apologies to anyone who is–God forbid–actually trying to understand me.  It’s beginning to look like I’ll need a whole book to get just this and my last few entries–and the one (no more, I hope) to come–right.

Entry 1064 — Two More Visiophors

Friday, April 5th, 2013

With this entry, I am through with this ever-deteriorating attempt to explain Manywhere-at-Once.  I nonetheless think the fragments of insight scattered through it make it equal to anything else written about the metaphor, and I don’t care who knows it!!!  Okay, that’s the part of me that comes to the fore when I’ve taken my zoom-dose (one caffeine pill and one hydrocodone tablet) talking.  The lesser me isn’t nearly as confident of that but won’t agree that there’s no basis for the view.

NocturneAnalysis03A

NocturneAnalysis03A

This illustration is the laziest of all the ones I’ve done.  Of course, if I got everything right, which would mean including a great many things I haven’t mentioned, it would have to be two yards by two yards in size.  Anyway, here’s what I’m depicting:

1. The subject has reached the bottom three lines of “Nocturne,” which is shown in Reality (i.e., shown as a visual stimulus in the external world which the subject scans from top to bottom).

2. What he sees is transformed by preliminary visual mechanisms twixt eyes and brain into the large (“stacked”) perceptual knowleculation shown to the left in the subject’s Visual Zone.

3. Other visual mechanisms cause the visiolexical zone to form the knowleculation shown.  Meanwhile, the visual percept formed is repeated (which I haven’t bothered to show;) ergo, it is a continuing presence.

4. At the same time, or perhaps a few instacons later than) those two knowleculations come into being, visual mechanisms, possibly with the help of the visiolexical zone, cause the knowleculation shown in the Lexicial Zone to form.

5. First claim, the details of which are not illustrated and might take four or five pages or more to illustrate properly: “night” in the Visiolexical Zone, with all its letters dotted, cause a percept of “night” with its i dotted to become active, or more strongly active if already active in the Visual Zone, because it will make the subject look at the the involved stimulus in the printing of the poem itself in Reality.

6. That percept in turn will cause the subject to look at the previous rendering on the page of “night” and notice the absence of a dot over the i.

7. Next, he will look again at the dotted i that follows.  This and his previous look will put the two percepts of undotted and dotted i into the Visual Zone.

8. The second of these two percepts will (eventually perhaps) lead to the retrocept of a lit candle which will in turn lead to a retrocept of a star.

9. The latter in company with the Visionlexical Zone’s percept of “night” with all its letters dotted, will activate a retrocept of stars to complete the visiophor of stars in the sky as dots as parts of letters, another simple metaphor without much going for it except the initially surprising dotting of letters not conventionally dotted, the unfamiliar part of the metaphormation (i.e., the metaphor plus its reference, plus the two’s resolution) the latter’s resolution make pleasurably familiar, or reasonable.

10. The dots as stars is repeated for the percept of “voice” with all its letters dotted with an extra step, the dotted letters leading to the dotted letters of “night” and from there to the candle and the start and the stars.  Extra connotations and images not shown will also have to come into play to allow the resolution of the poem’s final metaphormation as something along the lines of stars in the sky’s romantic (mystically beyond-ordinary) beauty as the sound of the voice in the night of  a loved one (the woman involved assumed to be that ’cause it’s a poem!)

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Column059 — November/December 2002 « POETICKS

Column059 — November/December 2002

 
 
 

Mad Poet Symposium, Part Two

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2002


 

An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
80 pp; 2002; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

An American Avant Garde: First Wave: An Exhibit
Featuring the William S. Burroughs Collection
and Work by Other Avant-Garde Artists
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
48 pp; 2001; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

 


 

My previous column sketchily described the events of day one of the two-day symposium put on by Ohio State as part of its An American Avant Garde: Second Wave exhibit. Before going on to day two, I’ve decided to spend some space on the catalogue for the exhibit, for the more I go through it, the more I feel it provides one of the best summaries of where our most technically adventurous poets have been during the past twenty or so years. It’s a gorgeously-produced glossy-paged book whose cover features a spicily wacked-out, menuey collage by Ficus strangulensis of cut-out big short texts (e.g., “$2.19,” “Boneless,” “Free”) on scrambled pages of a small-print Bible.

Just past the title and copyright pages is wonderful visual poem from Jim Leftwich’s unfinished <em>Croker Norge</em> (1995): smearings or cut-outs or fragments of plants, I couldn’t tell which, but green and brown were the main colors except for the off-white background. In one diagonally-opposed pair of corners charred paper. A little yellow and blue. The whole highly suggestive of nature–leaves, bark, water. But with a precise rectangle outlined in black in the upper left containing at the top, “known as n e a r b y.” If that was the extent of its text, I’d call the work an illumage (i.e., work of visual art); the phrase would be its title, no more, although a title up there with Klee’s for poetic charge. But the text next says something about “in homonyms of the/ corporal” and two phrases too muddied with paint for me to read on the right, while lower down on the other side of the rectangle one can make out “nect;/ spond/ death is not/ final/ Spicer/ says of/ tempo- /rality and/ spatiality” and more obscured words that make it a powerful poem about death and other things that the graphics more than merely illustrate.

The linearity of the rectangle and a zigzag drawing in black inside it plus the varied typography of the text give the work an intellectuality-to-basic-nature range that I think represents the work in the exhibit about as effectively as anything could. That Leftwich’s poem consists of items from more than one expressive modality, some of them fragments or cut-ups, and all of them requiring visceral understanding to make sense of as a whole, connects it, too, to a main underlying theme of the exhibit, and its catalogue: the importance of collage, cut-ups and other disjunctive devices in the work of William S. Burroughs, whose literary effects are archived at Ohio State and who was the central subject of an exhibit at the same library the year before, and in the work of related innovators of his generation such as Brion Gysin.

Leftwich’s literary effects are also archived at the library along with such other contemporaries as Scott MacLeod, John M. Bennett, Thomas L. Taylor and William T. Vollman. Sheila Murphy’s published works are archived there, too, but not–I don’t believe–her other literary effects, at least, to any extent. A bunch of my press’s books are there, one of them my own Of Manywhere-at-Once, which made it into the exhibit. A letter of mine, which was among Leftwich’s literary effects, is also on exhibit. It’s from 1994, not yet ten-years-old. Both it and my memoir are discussed in the catalogue. In the letter, I discuss my “Cryptographiku for Jim L5ftwich,” which is one of many minimalist poems reproduced in the catalogue, to make it, for my money, a leading anthology of such poetry (because of the many minimalist poems in it, not because mine is in it, though that definitely helps!):

a full wish of a moon
lingering without effect
in the 23 8 5 1 0 0

One result of my discussion of this poem with Jim, who was not able to figure it out, was its revision to:

full wish of a moon
lingering without effect
in the w i n 20 5 18 14 9 6 4 0

which should be much easier to understand (and is a perfect 5/7/5 haiku, to boot). Don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you want to solve it without help! If you want help, the “5” in the title should provide a lot. The “Cryptographiku” there is another big clue. Then there is “win.” (Final hint: think about the many meanings of zero.)

Strange to think something I scribbled to a personal friend without thinking that much about it is in a glass case in a large Important Building to be looked at by the general public. On the other hand, I’ve always had a streak of megalomania, so probably wrote it, as I write most of my letters, at least partially to that public.

On the same page of the catalogue as the entries for me, are three for Peter Ganick which reveal two amusingly different sides of Ganick’s work. One is a 1997 manuscript for a book called Flavor. About the poems in this collection, including the following, Ganick says in a letter to Don Hilla of 3300 Press, “I don’t think I could write any more poems like these”:

manly from the start
over a beer and water
news as text is for concentration upon
the aspects regurgitated by his students

An excerpt shown in another entry for Ganick indicates his more customary sort of poetry:

as th reason for was only language old
nova lesson the slaphappy innocence
tingle th crisis of fringe appearance

John M. Bennett says regarding the longer poem this latter excerpt is from, “here is what goes on inside the mantra, which is present in the poem’s rhythm and flow, in its grounded drone or continuo.” A nice virtue of the catalogue is its frequent inclusion of pertinent remarks like Bennett’s, and one in the same entry by Sheila Murphy, about the poems it features.

Ooops. I see I’ve about used up a column’s worth of words already. Looks like I’ll be talking about this catalogue for a while.

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Column049 — March/April 2001 « POETICKS

Column049 — March/April 2001



Neologiology



Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2001




The Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms.
Sitemaster: Miekal And.

Neologisms, a web-space for the discussion of word-coinage. Sitemaster: Miekal And.

 


 

“Neologiology” is my neology for “the study of word coinages.” I’m writing about it now for two reasons. One is a desire to defend my penchant for inventing words. It was recently attacked by a dolt in the Internet newsgroup (i.e., discussion group) where I argue about who really wrote Shakespeare. What am I, he wanted to know: superior to the English language? I had just introduced “foreburden” into a discussion, you see, and he found it obscure–and, when I explained it means, “what a given literary work is, in the main, explicitly about,” he thought “interpretation” would do just as well. Not so, as I will in due course show.

The other reason for my subject here is that a few days after the attack on “foreburden,” I saw an Internet announcement about a discussion group concerned with neologisms, as they are also called, and thought it worth publicizing. Miekal And, who runs the group, inaugurated it with a post listing some fifty neologies created by Michael Helsem, a mad neologist since the eighties or earlier. Two of these neologies, with their definitions, are “yenen – consumer goods related to an addiction” and “hellp – a store exclusively for yenen.” Another I quite like is “dredreamam,” which, for me, is a pwoermd (i.e., one-word poem, in the lexicon of G. Huth)–though Helsem defines it as nothing more than “an allnight insomniac.”

And has been a neology-nut as long as Helsem. In 1985 he began collecting Helsem’s and others’ coinages for his Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms, which is now also on the Internet. In his introduction to the site, And says he is “particularly interested in invented words which represent concepts or objects that didn’t previously exist.” He sees neologizing as “a chance for artists to alter the future history of culture by ‘breaking the code’ & making a parallel history.”

Among the many enjoyable specimens of neologization I turned up during a quick browse of the site’s A and B sections are And’s “abrabro” (“pertaining to but not including pertinence”), Samantha Lowry’s “aggrieviations” (“nihilist organizations or doctrines”), Scott Noegel’s “agication” (a cross between agitation and education), and Eric Hiltner’s “bleer” (“obnoxious or overused stare”). And’s dictionary also has a number of my own coinages, starting with “aesthcipient,” my word for “one who experiences an artwork,” which I’m still trying to improve on (because it’s too hard to pronounce).

I’m not sure whether “foreburden” is yet in And’s dictionary. It’s a word I’ve used quite a bit for critiquing poems. It indeed almost means “interpretation” but an “interpretation” would include a poem’s foreburden plus subjectively found meanings (such as its political meaning), and “undermeanings” (another coinage of mine, although not likely original, which means exactly what it sez it does). Nor is the foreburden of a poem its “meaning,” because that would be an interpretation (i.e., more than what is explicitly there). There is also the problem that some poems–many of the best, in fact–do not have what most people would regard as a meaning. Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro,” for instance, depicts rather than states.

Many meanings can be mined from it, but its foreburden is simply, “the way certain members of a group of people emerging from a subway look.” What I mean by foreburden is probably close to a summary, but a summary is external to, not part of, a poem–and I, for one, feel easier speaking of a poem’s foreburden than of its “summarizable content,” or whatever.

Another possible synonym for “foreburden,” a “paraphrase,” would be more detailed than a foreburden (or summary). Like a summary, too, it would be external to the poem it had to do with. An “explication” would have the same problem, as well as include implicit meanings. In short, “foreburden” can do what no other word can; I therefore proclaim it legitimate. It is also effective, in my view, because it is reasonably pronounceable, and consists of words or word-parts that suggest its meaning.

It won’t surprise anyone who knows me that I’ve worked out a taxonomy of neologies. I divide them into four (so far not well- named) kinds: (1) nulleologies, or nonsense words; (2) malneologies, or neologies unneeded because one or more adequate words meaning what they are intended to mean already exist; (3) play-neologies, or coinages created for pleasure more than utility (e.g., entertaining nonce words like Helsem’s “yenen” and Robert Greene’s rude description of Shakespeare as a “Shake-scene,” and aesthetically significant pwoermds like Aram Saroyan’s “lighght” and Huth’s “myrrhmyrrh”); (4) tool-neologies, or utilitarian neologies.

I subdivide the latter into two classes, beta and alpha. Beta tool-neologies allow the expression of needed meanings, but do so discretely; alpha tool-neologies allow the expression of needed meanings–with reference to an intelligent taxonomical system; that is, alpha tool-neologies express both a meaning and its relation to a system, which beta tool-neologies do not. An example would be my “juxtaphor,” which I define as “an implicit metaphor consisting of two (or more) images, ideas or the like, that are not explicitly equated with each other but juxtaposed to each other in such a way as clearly to suggest a metaphorical relationship. This occurs most often in visual poetry, but Basho’s haiku, “on a withered branch/ a crow has settled/ autumn nightfall,” provides a nice purely textual example. Because I term all forms of linguistic equation or near-equation of words such as metaphors and similes “equaphors,” “juxtaphors” refers both to its sibling, “metaphors,” and to its taxonomic class, “equaphors,” while also expressing its specific meaning.

Conservatives would no doubt criticize “juxtaphor” on the grounds that “implicit metaphor” would do as well. And what are my “equaphors” but figures of speech? But a Major Neologistic Rule of mine is that a single noun is preferable to the combination of an (often-used) adjective with an (often-used) noun because a single noun (1) will prevent the slack use that can corrupt meaning–e.g., the slide of “visual art” to “art,” which can be ambiguous; and (2) can be made adjectival much more smoothly than an adjective/noun combination can–e.g., “illumagistic,” from my neology for visual art, “illumagery,” versus “visual-artistic.” That one can express just about anything with some combination of words, to put it another way, does not mean neologization is of little or no value. The point is not just to supply meanings unexpressed, but meanings not yet concentratedly expressed.

With that, I’d better end this column-become-lecture before it runs away with me entirously.

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