The Contents of a Mailbox

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2011

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      The New Criterion
      Volume 29, Number 3, November 2010.
      Edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball
      Monthly, 80 pp; The foundation for Cultural Review, Inc.,
      900 Broadway, New York NY 10003. $7.75/copy.

      ZYX
      Issue 55, February 2011.
      Edited by Arnold Skemer
      3 times yearly; 10 pp; ZYX, 58-09 205th Street,
      Bayside NY 11364. write for a copy.

 

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The other day two very different magazines arrived in the mail, The New Criterion and ZYX. I’ve long subscribed to The New Criterion, a review of the arts and society that is basically an organ for neo-conservatism, not too much of which I go along with. I enjoy its opposition to political correctness, though. But the main reason I subscribe to it, is that it is about as far as can be from the experioddica I write about here. And a number of fairly good, entertaining writers write about the middle of mainstream culture when not discussing seldom-undiscussed dead art eminences. Hence, The New Criterion helps me keep up with the exhibits of painting, concerts, and dance and theatrical productions going on in New York City and our country’s other centers of provincialism.

Its main critics of poetry, John Simon and William Logan, are near-worthlessly devoted to books published by BigCity and University publishers, although Logan can be instructively hostile about some of the larger names in the field. The two cover everything of interest to the American Poetry Establishment, however, which is useful.

Its critic of music, Jay Nordlinger, writes gush about performers (generally of standards like Beethoven’s Fifth). He rarely discusses music beyond telling us what its name is and who wrote it, and maybe some gossp about the latter. He sometimes mentions music by someone living, but only if a name performer has deigned to perform it., Karen Wilkin, the magazine’s main visimagery critic, is excellent–although limited to mainstream visimagery. The magazine contains occasional attacks (hardly ever by Wilkin) on exhibitions of contemporary work, but I enjoy them, because the contemporary stuff on exhibit at the Whitney and such museums in the Big Apple that The New Criterion discusses, are almost always crap. Criticism of the other arts seems okay to me, although–again–rarely about anything innovative. I find Laura Jacobs’s pieces on the dance quite helpful, as it’s the art I know least about, and–unlike Nordlinger–she tells one about the art she treats as well as those involved with it.

Almost the antithesis of The New Criterion is the other publication I got a copy of, SPR reviewer Arnold Skemer’s ZYX. I’ve been getting it ever since Arnold started it 15 years or so ago, and have reviewed it once or twice here. Devoted almost entirely to the literary arts, it’s worth consideration because of its openness to the full range of contemporary poetry, which Arnold not only publishes but intelligently reviews. He also covers the literary life, generally with highly entertaining belligerance against the Establishment.

He doesn’t often publish his own poems in ZYX but has three in this issue. They’re in the Jack Saunders school of poetry: clear, incisive and contemptuous of the Philistines mindlessly thwarting any poet daring to be adventurously unmediocre–although one is about hope in general, as something you have to believe in even though it’s a fantasy. Arnold is not what you’d call buoyantly positive about life. His front-page essay, “Reacting to Contempt” carries on his campaign against “people who choose to degrade you because you are a lowly poet.” I feel he overdoes it a bit–I’ve met a few people who seem to have believed I wasted my life by devoting so much of it to poetry, but most people are polite about my vocation, and some seem in awe, sincere awe, that I would have been brave enough to follow it (which horrifies me!). But Arnold has a different persona from mine, which is that of the amiable screwball–the strange but harmless Lewis Carrollian uncle so many British families have.

Among the poets whose works Arnold crowds into his zine (48 poems, altogether, some of them much more than sonnet-length) are Britisher Cardinal Cox, if what look to me like prose pieces are indeed poems, Guy Beining, John Jacob, Luis Cusuhtemoc Berriozabail (in very tiny print, so I may have misspelled his name), Vernon Frazer, J. J. Campbell, B. Z. Niditch, and Alan Carlin, the latter two frequent contributors.

Beining is represented by an intriguing poem called, “Spheres of Clouds and Skulls,” which alone puts the zine at the forefront of experioddica. Here’s a passage to give the flavor of his “Sphere of Clouds and Skulls: “Prior to heat there is worship.// barely audible one hears- who is the guest of/ the dead bird? Who holds a hanger as grail/ upside down in water?/ the corpse in all of us moves out/ a bit & on spigot we watch a form rotate/ spawn clouds between legs and along tongue.// Direction is a hazard that makes us move.// beyond cloud cover there is the public dance.”

What is most wondrous-fine to me about the poem is what Beining does in it with clouds (particularly “cloud cover”), constantly, weirdfully, working out under-deepening variations of them and ending the poem with a moon’s view of them.

At the other end of the clarity continuum are Carlin’s vivid contributions such as “The Chess Masters Last Match:/ Marcel Duchamp Plays Samuel Beckett Like a Cranial Harp,” which is as zappingly colorful as a thirties gangster novel, but fizzingly nails Dada and Absurdism. Here it is: “An overturned ash/ can is the table// base and an iron/ grate the top// a chess board is/ laid out on:// the artist sits black/ and the poet sits white// in damp unheated/ room meager light// provided by a single/ bare light bulb suspended// from a ceiling swaying/ in perpetual motion// in slow syncopation/ like a metronome or// a minute hand of/ an unseen clock”

Just about every issue of ZYX has an equal assortment of goods–that no one but I seems ever to mention anywhere. . . .

 

 

Adventures on the Internet

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Small Press Review,
Volume 29, Number 8/9, August/September 1997

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The Grist On-Line Home Page:
http://www.thing.net/~grist

The Light & Dust Home Page:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm

Hyperotics, by Harry Polkinhorn:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/golpub/polk/gpolkina.htm

The Electronic Poetics Center Home Page:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc

The ubuweb:
http://www.ubuweb.com/vp

 

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The hot news from here is that after a year of big bucks from substitute teaching, I was able this March to buy a sophisticated enough computer system to get on the Internet. The system cost around two thousand. I think it’ll turn out to have been worth it–and the $25 a month I have to pay for the Internet link.

Experioddicologically, the Internet’s major plus so far has been Karl Young’s Light & Dust Website. The number of its poetry collections approaches three figures and includes over twenty complete books. There seem as many free-versers as burst-norm poets represented: Wanda Coleman and Toby Olson (the latter new to me but worth investigating) as well as Experioddica stand-bys like Mike Basinski and Karl Kempton (and Scott Helmes, who also does mathematical poetry!) The Light & Dust site has several essays, too–including, yes, one by me. Most of them are on visual or related kinds of poetry. There are also reviews and a list of other sites worth visiting if you find the l&d one to your liking.

The l&d site is a sub-site of the Grist website, which is truly a super-site, umbrellaing not only l&d, but Jukka Lehmus’s neo-visio-scientifico-dada Cyanobacteria, Thomas Lowe Taylor’s language-poetry-oriented anabasis and Robert Bove’s Room Temperature, a more down-to-earth site, featuring plaintext poets like Michael Lally. The Grist site itself showcases a great deal of varied poetry and prose.

A second major source of visual poetry–and sound poetry–is the ubuweb. It’s especially good for its collections of historical visual poetry, starting with Apollinaire’s. It also has essays, and a useful bibliography by Ward Tietz of vispo-related books.

Then there’s the Electronic Poetry Center, which SUNY, Buffalo, devotes to “contemporary experimental and formally-innovative poetries.” There’s too much good stuff here to list it all. I’ll just say that you can get from it to the home page of just about any otherstream press or zine that has a home page, notably Taproot Reviews, with zillions of its reviews of the micro-press over the years. And that my favorite section of the SUNY site is its poetics list, which was set up by Charles Bernstein to encourage discussion and information-exchange among people like David Bromige, Marjorie Perloff, Nick Piombino and so on, but includes a number of lesser names from other poetries–including, now, me.

I haven’t yet generated much interest in my posts to the SUNY site (list members were as indifferent to my attempt to get a list of poetry schools worked out as readers of this magazine were a few years ago when it had an earlier version of it). Nonetheless, I’ve been having fun. There have been discussions on my kind of topics, like what to call the white spaces like              this that many contemporary poems have. My suggestion was “white caesurae.”

Most recently I’ve gotten into a “thread,” as they call them, on what the smallest unit of a poem is. Whether, for instance, it’s something smaller than a syllable. Tom Orange started it, and as of 18 June I had contributed four or five notes to it, including the following, with which I am now going to end this installment of my column:

“Much of my interest in what might be called micro-poetics is hard for me to defend. For instance, I disagree with Charles Smith when he says that it would not be ‘very useful to posit partial phonemes’ but I can’t offhand think of an example of where it would be useful, only that I vaguely remember from time to time being bothered in my writing by the lack of one.

“As for just calling s and t alphabetic letters, I generally do–but it might not be enough. What if, to take a crazy example, you were dealing as a critic with the line, ‘The twenty-two trucks turned.’ You could say its author used the letter t six times and the phoneme t thrice; but what if for some obscure reason you wanted to say he’d used the t three times as a part of phonemes? That is, what if you wanted to distinguish the fractional phoneme t from the plain letter t, and also from the plain phoneme t (which interestingly to me isn’t necessarily the plain letter t–which makes me wonder what the w is in the phoneme tw of ‘two.’)

“All of this got me rummaging through Cummings, master of the expressive use of the less-than-syllable, as in the following:

“Speaking of syllables-that-aren’t-words like ‘ent,’ just look at how much meaning he puts into ‘ness!’ And at the ‘ting(le)’ he adds with an incomplete syllable, and the zing/sing he gets from a complete but isolated syllable, and–best–the breakdown of the syllable/word, ‘are’ (reversing the expansion of ‘vast’), to show/say the scattered birds’ voices becoming one (with the hint of that one voice’s beginning some primal alphabet). In short, there’s much in poetry that’s smaller than syllables.

“(As Alan Sondheim beautifully demonstrated yesterday at this site with his ‘wundering wumb,’ utc.)

“Now a literary history question. I’m not very widely read but my impression is that Cummings (in English, at any rate) was the first poet to use the ‘intra-syllabic word-break’ to aesthetic effect–as in his breaking ‘inventing’ into ‘inven’ and ‘ting’ for the latter’s hint of ‘tingle,’ and ‘using’ into ‘u’ and ‘sing.’

“Does anyone out there know of anyone who did this kind of thing before him?”

Catching Up, Again

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Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2001

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Bothand, the Warrior. Matrice Kubik.
44 pp.; 2001. Xtant Books, 1512 Mountainside Ct.,
Charlottesville VA 22903. $7.

End of the Ceaseless Road. Will Inman.
26 p.; 2000. Minotaur Press,
4026 Midvale Avenue, Oakland CA 94602. $5.

xtant one, September 2001.
Edited by Jim Leftwich. 102 pp.;
Xtant Books, 1512 Mountainside Ct.,
Charlottesville VA 22903. $12.

Hunkers. John Crouse.
22 pp.; 2001. Xtant Books, 1512 Mountainside Ct.,
Charlottesville VA 22903. $5.

Koja, vol. 3, Fall 2000.
Edited by Mikhail Magazinnik.
60 pp.; Koja Press, Box 140083,
Brooklyn NY 11214. $7 (to Mikhail Magazinnik).

MOOL3Ghosts. Michael Basinski.
21 pp.; 2001. Writers Forum, 89A Petherton Road,
London, England, N5 2QT. $10.

Score, vol. 16, Fall 2001.
Edited by Crag Hill. 68 pp.;
Score Publications, 1111 East Fifth Street,
Moscow ID 83843. $12, ppd.

Strange Things Begin To Happen When
A Meteor Crashes Into The Arizona Desert.
Michael Basinski, with illustrations by Wendy Collin Sorin. 18 pp.;
Burning Press, but order from [email protected].
$15, ppd., nd $100, ppd., for a volume
from the deluxe edition of 27 copies which includes
a 4-color hand-printed waterless lithograph by Sorin.

 

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Lots of things to review this time around. First–because there’re things by ME in it, but also because it’s an issue of a magazine that’s been presenting admirable work for nearly fifteen years, and because it’s notably anthological about a variety of quite valuable but generally under-esteemed poetry–is Score 16. Its theme, stated on its cover, is “the largeness the small is capable of.” Editor Crag Hill uses two or three hundred poems of five lines or less from the huge number of such poems that editor Crag Hill has been collecting since the mid-eighties to demonstrate it. Of the many, many poets involved, here are the names of just the ones on pages 46 and 47: Judith Roche, James Rossignol, Andrew Russell, Steve Sanfield, Thom Schramm and Hal Sirowitz. Among the many many poems are full): Ed Conti’s “On and Off,” which consists of two large O’s, one with a little n inside it, the other empty; gary barwin and jwcurry’s “snow/falls//taste/buds”; Robert Grenier’s “someone than someone”; Steve Tills’s “POEM 189″: “The ultimate revenge./ Send a mirror.” The issue also contains several (short) statements about such poems.

Next is xtant, because it is almost all visio-textual art, half of it from other countries. Christian Burgaud’s richly swirling op-art pieces, most of them doing intriguing things with the letter E, using techniques reminiscent of Bill Keith and Karl Kempton, particularly appealed to me. I also much enjoyed Tim Gaze’s conceptually resonant but also visually absorbing series of pictographic texts with what I’d call “over-scribbles.” This he aptly calls “Old European vs. The Tao.” Others contributing excellent work to the issue include John M. Bennett, John Crouse, Pete Spence, Malok, Tim Gaze, Ficus strangulensis, Jessica Smith, and Marcia Arrieta.

Xtant is also putting out chapbooks such as Hunkers, by John Crouse, and Bothand, The Warrior, by Matrice Kubik. The former consists of one-page scenes in which “Me” and “You” exchange one-line sex-centered, langpo utterances (e.g., “Me: Personal once upons want balls snuggled at doubled loop ripe breasts. You: Recharge different. Me: Rooms in a motherfucking crater. You: Freuds cunt. Me: Loom farthling some must be undercouch cushions worth past.”); the latter is similarly free- association-seeming, but–as you would guess from its title–more narrational (but with no swords in it, I don’t think).

Another periodical that features burstnorm poetry is Koja. Its visual poetry, such as its art director Igor Satanovsky’s fascinating melds of graphics and quotations from famous poets (e.g., “Our South,” which combines a wacked-out rendering of a set of extraterristrial Siamese twins with quotations from Ezra Pound and Edward Lear), is mostly right at the border between captianed graphics, on the one hand, and illustrated poetry on the other, but has a good deal of energy. It also has a nice tribute by Satanovsky and editor Mikhail Magazinnik to Richard Kostelanetz and Konstantin K. Kuzminsky (“2 irritators the hell out of academics”), who turned sixty last year–and much else of worth, including an amusing 21-page absurdist play by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Magazinnik, Dotoevsky-Trip, which is about getting a “word-fix” of pure Dostoevsky.

Then there are two new books by the prolific Mike Baskinski, Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert and MOOL3Ghosts. It’s hard to characterize the first, whose text ranges from what look like capsule descriptions of movies or television stories (e.g., “a washed-up prize fighter tried to make a comeback and strange things begin to happen when a meteor crashes in the Arizona desert”) to Basinskian langpo/sound poetry like “ich to OyooloougoOst/ Ollosionoo OmpororessOo . . .” accompanied by weirdly appropriate drawings that mostly seem from lost civilizations, earthly and extra- terrestrial, or from fields like alchemy. It’s the kind book one can sensualize all sorts of voyages out of, and never repeat one, however many times one returns. The other book is all squares of text using numerous kinds of typography including Hebrew letters, hearts, little flowers, to mangle the central text just near enough to incoherence to achieve the kind of dancing such sudden whats? as “dclovercloven” become for those in tune with Basinski’s way with words and typo-clutter.

The final item from my box is a book from 1999 by Will Inman, End of the Ceaseless Road, that I should have mentioned here before this, and wish I had space to do more with than quote the first few lines of its author’s introduction. But they should be enough to convey Inman’s style and outlook, and confirm the validity of my belief that he’s one of our very best poets, and still going strong. They also seem to me a fine short apologia for any life of poetry: “I’ve done a lot of walking in my life, and while the longest and latest road has been the Way of Words, I bring foot-rhythms, syncopations of rush and stop short, hoist and heel, to the path.

“Every turn of the way, like every new line, lets me know what is known in me that I didn’t know was there. No resolution comes except in the bliss or dismay of new discovery, proof that in every variation, central unity manifests.”

Ramblblurry, Continued

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 36, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2004

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The Compact DuChamp, Amp After Amp.
By Guy R. Beining
2003; 70pp; Pa; Chapultepec Press,
111 East University, Cincinnati, OH 54219. $23 ppd.

Literature Nation.
By Maria Damon & mIEKAL aND.
2003; 85pp; Pa; Potes & Poets Press,
2 Ten Acres Drive, Bedford, MA 01730. $16, $21 ppd.

Sack Drone Gothic.
By Al Ackerman.
2003; 16pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods.,
137 Leland Avenue, Columbus, OH 43214. $6 ppd.

Several Steps From The Rope.
By Guy R. Beining.
2002; 35pp; Pa; Xtant Anabasis,
Box 216, Oysterville, W A 98641-0261. $15 ppd.

the whispering ice cubes.
By Rupert Wondoloski.
2003; 51pp; Pa; Shattered Wig Press,
425 East 31 st Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. $8 ppd.

xtant, Autumn 2004. Edited by Jim Leftwich.
20 pp; 1512 Mountainside Court,
Charlottesville VA 22903-9797. $20 ppd.

 

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I’d better start reviewing right away. Otherwise, I’ll bolt into self analysis, my favorite topic, it would seem. IAMASLUG: Over a week has passed since I wrote the first two sentences of this column. At least I didn’t bolt into self-analysis, except for the SLUG part. In any event, I’m raring to go at the moment, mainly because I have some text to quote from one of the items under review and from something co-author aND wrote about it, so I won’t have to do hardly no work myself. The item is Literature Nation, the quoted mailer is from its “Whether Hotel” section: “[icicle shoreline]” is above the following paragraph (and the work is near-entirely paragraphed, so for me not poetry but…evocature, so not prose, either): “a street called One Way. A street called along. A street called alone. A street called one. A mandate to document. loneliness came to whether hotel. The street called only. The ballad tells of mighty dirt and the Solitude Cafe, but thats not what this story is about.”

I have to confess that I haven’t read all the pages of this long work, and do not yet know it narratively except that it does seem to be, as aND says, “a love poem for the languescapes we inhabit and for the process of writing itself: intimate forms of creative survival in our favorite earthly settings.” It reminds me of much of Clark Coolidge’s work in its flight from verbal logic while retaining a kind of musical coherence by means of repeated matter and variations thereon.

After writing the preceding, it took me a while to find an example of repeated matter, in the quoted passage. Finally, several related ones were superobvious: “document,” “ballad” and “story.” All these go back to the fourth paragraph of the work, where we find, “literature of the disinherited,” and to the next paragraph, where we find, “Scars are the traces of words,” as well as to many other spots where the languescapc is explicitly discussed or pictured or riffed off of. The landscape is seldom absent, either, especially “the mighty dirt” and closely related forests and shores.

Literature Nation is a book worth a book or more of discussion, but it’s time now to give Sack Drone Gothic another plug. I left out important–commercially important– information about it in my last column: to wit, that is it a hack (i.e., a collage of appropriations from others’ work and reworkings thcreof) of poems by John M. Bennett, some of them in collaboration with such other otherstream names as Ficus strangulensis, Stacey Allam, mlEKAL aND and The Lonely One!

If that isn’t enough to induce you to order a copy, here’s another quotation from it: “Palp your dry and heedless writer’s scalp for/ Writer’s flakes – extra wrong spouse/ Extra two had innate ray stark eyes to/ Do what all-white meatball/ Speaka da stork, a man…” I would explicate this if it weren’t that when I explicate Ackerman’s work, The Atlantic Monthly always steals what I say straight from my computer and prints it before Small Press Review does, giving credit to Dana Gioia or someone, to make me look like a plagiarist (and Gioia like he has more than a half-ounce of marmalade for a brain).

“Today I walked and my buttocks felt firm anel good inside my pants.” This is from the whispering ice cubes, which I feel I should also plug although I covered it in my last column. Note the “inside my pants,” which makes this sentence from “a tribute to maryland, brimming with cancer,” so gloriously eternal. How can anyone not order a book with such a sentence in it?

Now to xtant, which is formidable, which is why I left it till now, when I can claim it’s only lack of space that keeps me from being brilliant about it. There are all kinds of things to steal from in it (I’m serious now), if you’re into visual and related poetries by such as Thomas Lowe Taylor, Andy Topel, John M. Bennett (in collaboration with people like Scott Helmes and Taylor) and Tim Gaze, who provides a letter about what he’s doing when he composes “asemically” (a good litcrit coinage not mine). One very simple piece in xtant that bowled me over is a page by Carlos Luis with the words, “Do we have any idea what we’re talking about? Of course not. The next step should be then:” at the top, and some kind of architectural drawing with a lot of numbers of a square structure. A smaller, tilted square is in the middle of the drawing with a cross indicating N, W, S, E in the middle of the smaller square, skewed with respect to both the squares. This made me laugh, but laugh into a wonder about finding our places in confusion, the absurd (but beautiful because an attempt) use of hyperlinearity to do so, and – finally – Making Our Way in the Universe.

Guy R. Beining is also represented in xtant. One of his pieces, “Stoma 1773,” is (except for a few scribbles) solitextual (“words alone”), something he rarely does, anymore. “Stoma 1773″ is language-poetry-nutty, much like the Ackerman passage I quoted, but without anything like “extra wrong spouse” or “Speaka da stork” to signal comedy. It’s about biological evolution featuring (briefly) an african lungfish, geological evolution (featuring diastrophism), and an “old paris coop/ sheltered by honeysuckles,” to summarize. For me, it mellowly expresses a small local quiettude…in a vague shimmer of large old philosophical concerns. A soothing feel of meditation rather than a meditation. What I most liked about it, though, was its use of arrows from words in the poem out to marginal notes in little 3-sided boxes. One of these arrows goes from “shadows” to “knot in cloth.” Something about the connection between the two images seemed miraculously right to me shadows being a sort of knot in light?

Also in xtant is one of Beining’s signature collages of print, handwriting, drawings and photographs. It’s a gem, as are just about all the similar pieces in his Several Steps from the Rope  and The Compact DuChamp Amp after Amp, which I hope finally to say a little about in my next column.

14 December 2005: Now to begin my first attempt to use my knowlecular theory of psychology to show how appreciation of a visiophor (visual metaphor) takes place, working with “Gloria.”

When the engagent first sees this poem (assuming he has little or no background in visual poetry), he is bothered (at least momentarily) by its “misspelling.” What happens in terms of my theory is that (1) his knowlecule (cerebral molecules of knowledge) for g followed by his
knowlecule for l “predict” or expect (actually send energy to) various other knowlecules (mostly those representing vowels, including the one for o) but not to the knowlecule for a blank. His expectation is frustrated, so he will experience a trace of pain. He will interpret
the poem (probably subconsciously) as a puzzle.

(2) Once the engagent has experienced the knowlecules for r, i and a–and o, when he sees the out-of-place o–he will partially solve the puzzle by determining what word the letters spell. But he will still experience pain because of the word’s “misspelling.” The high-flung o will continue to be “wrong,” unpredicted, unfamiliar, and–in my theory–unfamiliarity is the sole cause of cerebral pain.

(3) The engagent’s pain will cause him to lower his cerebral energy.  This, in turn, will let possible solutions to the puzzle in the form of images and ideas swarm through his mind (subconsciously). Most of the images and ideas will be of no help, but–with luck–one of them will be the knowlecule for [cathedral-shape] due to the shape of the word, “gloria,” as a graphic image with its o suggesting the top of a steeple, coupled with the knowlecule for [religious grandeur], almost certain to be activated by the conventional connotation of the word, “gloria.”

(4) If this connection does begin to take place, it will cause pleasure–because the knowlecule for [cathedral-shape], helped by the religious grandeur context, will link to the knowlecule for the poem as a whole “logically.” That is, the engagent’s brain will “predict” the [cathedral shape]’s linking back to the poem. The engagent’s pleasure will increase the engagent’s cerebral energy. This will make his “solving” the puzzle of its “misspelling” quickly enough, if things go well, to appreciate it.

I am aware that my analysis is very rough. It is incomplete, too.  I left out important points about “accommodance” and “accelerance,” for instance. I felt like I was responding to, and barely passing, an essay exam. So, I will return to it tomorrow, and for several days thereafter, I expect.

15 December 2005: To continue with my analysis of the nature of metaphor appreciation, I need to introduce and define five terms connected to my theory of psychology. They all have to do with general intelligence. Character, accommodance, accelerance and cerebrachive.

Character is the mechanism that determines one’s basal level of cerebral energy–which in turn determines how strongly one can bring up memories, and hold on to them.

Accommodance is the mechanism that determines how quickly and how low one can lower one’s level of cerebral energy, and keep it lowered–which in turn determines how strongly one can let in data from the external environment without interference from memories.

Accelerance is the mechanism that determines how quickly and how high one can raise one’s level of cerebral energy, and keep it raised–which in turn determines how fast one can find answers (but not how correct those answers may be).

These three mechanisms are the basis of general intelligence, in my psychology. The cerebrachive (“cerebral archive”) is simply one’s store of information, or knowlecules–or unified representations of data ranging from, say, a letter, to, say, a philosophy (but capable of being much smaller than the former, and much larger than the latter).

Oh, and here is a redefinition of a common term in psychology, “the subconscious.” For me, it is that part of the cerebrachive which is readily available to consciousness, the latter simply being all that we are aware of at a given moment–or what I believe just about everyone
would take it to be.

Tomorrow, I plan to show how the three mechanisms of general intelligence interact with one another, and with the cerebrachive, to experience a metaphor.

16 December 2005: To continue, let me list my terms again:

Character is the mechanism that determines one’s basal level of cerebral energy–which in turn determines how strongly one can bring up memories, and hold on to them.

Accommodance is the mechanism that determines how quickly and how low one can lower one’s level of cerebral energy, and keep it lowered–which in turn determines how strongly one can let in data from the external environment without interference from memories.

Accelerance is the mechanism that determines how quickly and how high one can raise one’s level of cerebral energy, and keep it raised–which in turn determines how fast one can find answers (but not how correct those answers may be).

The Cerebrachive (“cerebral archive”) is simply one’s store of information, or knowlecules– or unified representations of data ranging from, say, a letter, to, say, a philosophy (but capable of being much smaller than the former, and much larger than the latter).

The Subconscious is that part of the cerebrachive which is readily available to consciousness, the latter simply being all that we are aware of at a given moment–or what I believe just about everyone would take it to be.

To significantly appreciate a metaphor, all three of one’s mechanisms of general intelligence must be superior. First of all, one’s character must keep one’s cerebral energy at a generally high level. This will cause one to be significantly bothered by the unconventionality of “Gloria” when he first encounters it. Or: he will very energetically maintain his expectation as to what the work should look like, so its failure to match his expectation will pain him much more than it might someone with medium or low character. Consequently, if he succeeds in appreciating it, it will increase the relief (according to my theory) he will experience (pleasurably) when he does so. More on this in due course.

Secondly, his accommodance must be effective at quickly responding to his pain and lowering the level of his cerebral energy. This will unfocus him, allow random memories more readily to break into his unconscious, make him more susceptible to extraneous stimuli in the external environment–in short, increase his chances of quickly connecting to a solution to the puzzle the work involved has become for him.

His having a large cerebrachive will be important, too–the larger, the better, for the most part. His accommodance is important here, too, for what it has done (crucially) in the past to increase the size of the engagent’s cerebrachive, and the variety of the items in it.

The engagent’s accelerance must also be of high quality, and thus able to react as soon as something in his subconscious indicates it may “solve” the poem by swiftly increasing the engagent’s level of cerebral energy to a maximum. It will tend to respond more violently the more frustrated the poem has made the engagent–to get back to the significance of how attached to his expectation of the conventional presentation of the poem that its actual presentation rebels away from. I claim that the more a person is frustrated, the more strongly activated (in turn) both his accommodance and accelerance will be.

Up to a point. If it takes too long for a solution to pop up, the mechanism responsible to activating the accommodance and accelerance will become too exhausted to strongly do that–if it even can, finally, do it. Hence, the need for both those mechanisms to be able to act quickly and decisively.

Summary to this point: one needs to be intelligent to appreciate metaphors. One needs, in fact, to have superior specimens of all three of general intelligence’s mechanisms to be able to appreciate them.

17 December 2005: Now for an attempt to show my mechanisms (definitions at the end of this entry) carrying out an appreciation of “Gloria.”

The engagent begins to read the poem with high character. A copy (I’m speaking more or less figuratively) of what he expects to read forms in his memory, but what he sees fails to match it. The o is displaced.  Result: discordance. Pain. The latter is felt in the evaluceptual center.
As a result, it starts building up cerebral energy for use in combatting the source of the pain. Some of the energy goes toward activating the engagent’s accommodor, which is the name I’ve just made up for the mechanism that runs the operation of accommodance. The acceletor
would be the mechanism taking care of accelerance.

For reasons I won’t get into here, accommodance causes random memories to seep into the subconscious. Because it lowers the cerebrum’s ability to activate memories in general, random images from the external environment–as well as unrandom percepts (data bits of perceptual origin) will enter the subconscious, as well. Momentary couplings of various knowlecules in the subconscious will jar other random knowlecules to be remembered (i.e., to enter from the cerebrachive). Soon, bits and pieces of extraneous data will fill the subconscious.

By accident, at some point, something like the following will occur: part of the engagent’s knowlecule of the shape of the word, “gloria,” on the page will encounter a piece of a memory of a church. The engagent will (subconsciously) recognize that the shape is appropriate for a church, or experience the shape plus the church as something familiar. The Evaluaceptual Center will sense the pleasure this causes and set the acceletor into action. The increased energy resulting will speed the “solution”–that is, it will cause the full connection between word-shape and church-shape to be quickly made. The engagent will appreciate the metaphor.

Character is the mechanism that determines one’s basal level of cerebral energy–which in turn determines how strongly one can bring up memories, and hold on to them.

Accommodance is the mechanism that determines how quickly and how low one can lower one’s level of cerebral energy, and keep it lowered–which in turn determines how strongly one can let in data from the external environment without interference from memories.

Accelerance is the mechanism that determines how quickly and how high one can raise one’s level of cerebral energy, and keep it raised–which in turn determines how fast one can find answers (but not how correct those answers may be).

The Cerebrachive (“cerebral archive”) is simply one’s store of information, or knowlecules– or unified representations of data ranging from, say, a letter, to, say, a philosophy (but capable of being much smaller than the former, and much larger than the latter).

The Subconscious is that part of the cerebrachive which is readily available to consciousness, the latter simply being all that we are aware of at a given moment–or what I believe just about everyone would take it to be.

18 December 2005: One complication with what I’ve said so far about how one appreciates a metaphor, according to my (knowlecular) theory of psychology, is that I’ve assumed only intelligence involved is general intelligence (which–since yesterday–I call “cerebrigence,” to
distinguish it from the other intelligences I will be discussing). I’m partly in the Howard Gardner school of multiple intelligences. I differ from him as to what specific intelligences we have, and as to the importance of cerebrigence. (For a long time he considered it–under the name, g-factor–non-existent; of late he grants it minor importance*.) I consider cerebrigence more important than any sub-intelligence.

But the sub-intelligences are highly important, and often the difference between high effectiveness in a vocation and mediocrity. Verbal intelligence is such a vital sub- intelligence where appreciation of metaphor is concerned. It uses the same mechanisms– character,
accelerance, etc.–as cerebrigence, but does so locally, in what I call the verbiceptual awareness, a subdivision of the reducticeptual awareness. The latter is where we deal with concepts, abstractions, symbols. I hypothesize that the verbiceptual awareness is where we process language.  It breaks down further into the dictaceptual center, which handles human speech, and the texticeptual center, which handles the written word (and is evolutionarily very new). It gets hairier, but I’ll leave discussion of other related verbiceptual details, such as the function of the Broca’s Area, for another time.

My theory, needless to say, is based principally on guesswork. The latter ranges from grade-A guesswork, or guesswork I believe strong supported by empiracal evidence such as the existence of the verbiceptual awareness in some form, down to grade-P guesswork, such as my belief that housecats are more cerebrigent than women. A grade-B guess of mine is that subawarenesses such as the verbiceptual have augmenters that increase the effect of the cerebrigentical devices I’ve introduced (such as decelerance) when those devices operate within them. It follows that people vary in the effectiveness of their subawareness augmenters (and that such augmenters vary in effectiveness from one of a person’s subawarenesses to another). I believe, too, that some people’s peripheral nervous system’s are better at picking up subtle nuances of speech than others, or at reading fine print, and so forth. So they have better data to work with. Some people, then, will be better at appreciating metaphors than others because of their being . . . better with words.

There’s yet more to genuine verbal effectiveness: the part that depends on certain of the brain’s many association areas. There are three of major importance: the visio-verbal association area where words connect to visual memories; the verbo-auditory association area where words connect to averbal auditory memories (i.e., sounds of nature rather than sounds of words) and the visio-verbo-auditory area (a grade-C guess, I should insert) where words connect to memories that combine sound and sight.  Obviously, the better these areas operate, the more easily a person will make the kind of extra-verbal connections he needs to in order to appreciate the best metaphors near-maximally. The auditory and visual awarenesses must also function well for this to happen, since these association areas feed off them.

So, today’s lesson has been that one must have not a only an effective cerebrigence, but an effective verbal area (verbiceptual awareness) and effective related association areas, to be able to appreciate metaphors reasonably well. I realize that common sense should have told you that, but am interested in setting out what I consider the psychological details of the matter.

* I like to think that I helped change his mind, for I refuted his view with some pretty good arguments in a letter to him that he never answered some years ago, but he probably never read the letter; his secretary got back to me, though, telling me he would be glad to read
any published material of mine on the subject, the standard way estabniks brush off their superiors–and, yes, inferiors. I sent him a copy of the piece I wrote on creativity that I later posted here at my blog.

19 December 2005: It would seem I’ve made an error in presentation: I’ve been using a specialized metaphor–a visiophor–to show how one processes conventional metaphors–i.e., solely verbal ones. The process goes a little differently with the latter, so I’d better backtrack– to a simple metaphormation (as I call a metaphor and its referent, or the thing in the foreground and the thing it stands for together): Paradise Lost is a cathedral.

The process is not too much different from that described. One perceives “Paradise Lost is” with high character which focuses the mind to “expect” something like “a great poem” or “boring” or the like. In fact, according to my theory, the engagent’s brain contacts memories such as the verbal knowlecule, “a great poem,” and begins to remember them. But “cathedral” occurs. A falsehood, literally speaking. Disruption. The  evaluceptual center reacts by calling accommodance into play. The knowlecule, {Paradise Lost}, will weakly continue to transmit cerebral energy (or, more accurately, molecular packets that can be converted to energy) to appropriate memories, many of them connotations (of various degrees of aptness) which would not be activated if the engagent’s character had remained high (because of too much focus, or cerebral narrowness). At the same time, accommodance will cause the knowlecule, {cathedral}, to assist a wide variety of partial memories into the subconscious, many of them also connotations (of various degrees of aptness) having to do with cathedrals.

Certain of these latter memories should quickly stick to certain of the connotations of Paradise Lost–“grandeur,” for instance; “solemnity”; “architectural impressiveness”; “result of faith”. . . .  Accelerance taking over, something like “Paradise Lost is a cathedral in architectural grandeur” will result: the “solution” to the puzzle of how a poem can be called a building.

The differences in the process just described and the process yielding the appreciation of “Gloria” are due to the one major difference in the metaphors: “cathedral” as a metaphor for a poem is verbally stated in the example above; in the previous example, it is visually depicted (as a rough cathedral-shape made of typography). Ergo, whereas one has to have an effective verboceptual awareness to be able readily to appreciate metaphors such as “cathedral” is for Paradise Lost, one needs much more to be able to appreciate the kind of metaphor the distribution of the letters of “gloria” make up: besides an effective verboceptual awareness, one needs an effective visioceptual awareness to be able quickly to see the print on the page, and and effective visio-verbal association area to allow the work’s visual datum to interact with the work’s verbal datum.

So, in my clumsy way, I’ve answered both how the appreciation of a conventional metaphor takes place, and suggested the talents the appreciator must have, and how the the appreciation of a visual metaphor takes place, and suggested the talents the appreciator in that case must have. Which gets me back to Geof Huth’s original interest in where a visual poet comes from. Clearly, he must be, first of all, such an appreciator of visio-verbal metaphors–or born with superior verbal and visual intelligence, and high cerebrigence. It goes without saying that he needs more to become a visual, poet. I tend to believe that the more that he needs is simply better verbal, visual, and general intelligence than lesser appreciators of visio-verbal metaphors. In my view, talent automatically generates use of talent. Once a person can near-maximally enjoy visio-verbal metaphors, he will need to make his own.

20 December 2005: Note: the way a person appreciates a metaphor is very similar to the way a person appreciates a joke. (1) He is bothered by the equivalent of a misspelling; (2) his accommodance, awakened, exposes him to potential “solutions,” or connections that make the apparent error seem logical; (3) one such solution is potent enough to turn his accelerance on and, with its help, become fully active. It is at this point that appreciation of metaphor diverges from appreciation of joke. It With a joke, step (3) ends the experience with laughter. With a good poetic metaphor, step (3) causes step (4), during which the engagent goes on to make other fruitful linkages, such as that of the o to the moon, or a ballon–or something airbourne, light, ascendant; and to the word, “oh,” in the case of the metaphor “gloria” features.
Also, there won’t be the hostility in the engagent’s encounter with the metaphor that there almost always will be in an encounter with a joke. But one will usually smile, even laugh, with a good metaphor.

With that, I end this rough attempt to apply my knowlecular theory of psychology to metaphor- and vispo-reception. I hope eventually to deliver a smoother discussion of the matter.

A Trip to Chicago      Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 11, November 1995            Poets & Writers, Vol. 23, No. 5,      September/October; 120 pp.;      72 Spring St., New York NY 10012. $3.95.      karma lapel, No. 6,      Summer 1995; 32 pp.; Box 5467,      Evanston IL 60204. $2.      The New Philistine, No. 28,      Summer 1995; 5440 Cass, #1006,      Detroit MI 48202. $1.      tomorrow magazine, No. 12,      Fall, 1994; 28 pp.; Box 148486,      Chicago IL 60614. $5.      U-Direct, No. 5, August-      November 1995; 44 pp.; Box 476617,      Chicago IL 60647. $3.      Led Balloons, 1995; 16 pp.;      Dave Kocher, 4506 Darcie Drive,      Erie PA 16506. $1. I got on another panel this year at the Underground Publishing Conference (UPC) at DePaul University in Chicago. Its subject was reviewing, so I was able to say a little more than I did last year, when my panel’s subject was marketing. I discussed the terms for describing the three main kinds of poetry–“burstnorm,” “plaintext” and “songmode”–that have made me America’s second most celebrated poetry reviewer (C. Mulrooney, of course, being #1), but otherwise I didn’t say much of note. My co-panelists, Ashley Parker Owens of Global Mail, Seth Friedman of Factsheet Five and Heath Row of Karma Lapel (an excellent source of intelligent zine reviews that was new to me, incidentally), said more than enough to cover what I missed, however. One of the questions asked us was what a bad zine was. Ashley felt there was no such thing, and I tend to agree inasmuch as any zine is an act of creative communication and thus praiseworthy. On the other hand, there are surely zines that are more worth reading than others. Heath suggested that the best zines are those invested with the most genuine passion. I would have added that I think a zinester’s failure to ask what his zine will do that no other zine is already doing more than anything makes for inferior zines, but the 34-hour bus ride from Florida to Chicago I was coming off of made it hard for me to think very fast at the time, so I didn’t. I was up for a small grant from Poets & Writers to attend the conference, by the way. It didn’t come through, which obliges me to make a few negative comments on the 25th anniversary issue of that organization’s magazine, which recently appeared. Except for two or three token representatives of minorities, the people invited to honor the anniversary with texts were all estabniks. Perhaps the most egregiously pre-1950 of them was Dana Gioia, whose list of his 25 favorite modern love poems included “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”–and nothing by anyone who hasn’t been published in The New Yorker or somewhere comparable. Anthologist David Lehman chipped in with an attack on the New York Times Magazine article on the American poetry scene that I attacked here two columns ago; Lehman condemned the article for being too flippant; I for ignoring whole schools of first-rate current poetry, like Lehman’s anthologies. Meanwhile, Karl Wenclas was circulating a rant in his zine, the New Philistine, that characterized the UPC as a “ridiculous geek show” consisting of “underground corporate wannabes seeking respectability” and “rather-piggy corporate-flunkies.” And he described the UPC panelists as “very above-ground” (which must account for the surprisingly high amount of my last paycheck for writing, $20, which I got last November). Wenclas’s principal complaint concerned the help the conference got from a professor (Ted Anton) in getting a University to let its grounds be used for it. He was also put off that the rich poseurs in attendance, like “Mr. Silicon-brain Chip” Rowe, publisher of Chip’s Closet Cleaner and, alas, a Playboy editor, use computers rather than manual typewriters, like Wenclas. In short, no one in poetry is too small to seem a Gioia to someone like Wenclas–or, no doubt, to feel a Wenclas to someone like, say, Danielle Steele, as Gioia probably does. As for “corporate” ambitions, they weren’t a factor for most UPC participants. We just want to get our ideas and art out without starving. While we do crave more notice, it’s much more because feedback can help us improve than because the notice could lead to fame, power and money. Which reminds me that in one of the two panels I was a spectator at, which was devoted to copyright law, the question of whether you should allow a magazine like Harper’s to quote you came up. One zine-publisher said she didn’t care who quoted her since all she cared about was communicating. I couldn’t think of a proper reply to that till later, as usual. It is that if you let slickzines quote you, you help them, which means that you facilitate the dissemination of crap, which you should be against. So you must think long and hard whether the good done by what they want to quote of yours will make up for the harm done by the crap it accompanies–if you can convince yourself that their selection of something of yours isn’t proof that it’s crap, too. At the other panel I attended, Mike Basinski was persuasive on the value of the direct, visceral, impolite plaintext poetry of poets like Paul Weinman and Cheryl Townsend that dominates most literary zines, but is scorned by the academic and commercial presses. I disagreed with his calling such poetry “zine poetry,” however–since zines are also, as he later agreed, the sole venue for the much different, high-brow kinds of burstnorm poetry that are generally my subject here. So I suggest dividing “zine poetry” into “streetlevel” and “otherstream” poetry. I prefer “streetlevel,” or some such, to “street” because the latter suggests poetry by street people only and there are many working stiffs, housewives and the like also writing such material. Before signing off, I’d like to plug the Zap-level cartoons of Dave Kocher, whom I met at the conference; Tim W. Brown’s zine, @>tomorrow magazine@>, which includes one of Lyn Lifshin’s streetlevel Marilyn poems (which I consider among her best work), and an appealing cluster of Richard Kostelanetz’s one-sentence short stories; and the latest issue of U-Direct, which is edited by Batya Goldman, the main organizer of the conference, and has, since just last year, become a leading source of articles on, and reviews of, zines.

The Comprepoetica Dictionary of Poetry, Poets, Et Cetera in Progress

Introductory Remarks by Comprepoetica Lexicographer Bob Grumman: a number of terms concerning poetics and related areas follows–approximately in alphabetical order. I hope visitors will critique them for both style and content–and add their own terms, with or without definitions in the following box (but, please, if a suggested term is unusual, try to define it): During the three or four years I’ve asked for terms, I’ve gotten NONE with definitions, and–at most–two terms not either already in my dictionary or in every standard dictionary and not in mine only because I obviously haven’t gotten around to putting it in. It is annoying to be sent entries like “alliteration,” for instance. I consider it spam–although I realize some senders may sincerely have thought they were helping me out. Anyway, I’m closing down the sending area for new words so I won’t be any longer bothered with inappropriate responses. Suggested Poetics Term(s): Many of the first terms recorded here are from the glossary of my book on poetry, Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume 1: Ruminations from the Site of a Poem’s Construction. I didn’t start with them because of their importance but because they are the poetics terms most readily available to me. Note: many of the terms and/or definitions are peculiar to me, so don’t use them to answer questions in exams, kids. aesthcipient: the recipient of an artwork, especially one who experiences it in more than one way–e.g., visually and verbally alliteration: a repenation whose shared sound is a consonant-sound that begins a syllable (e.g., bat/bug and kite/cane) alphaconceptual poetry: for the most part, poetry whose spelling is equaphorically significant, and which is therefore “infra-verbally” as well as verbally expressive alphaconceptual illumagery: for the most part, textual illumagery whose textual elements are equaphorically important anapaestic meter: a form of meter one “foot” or unit of which consists of two weak beats followed by a strong one, as in the word, “interrupt” archetype: an image or idea so powerful to the human psyche that it is universally emotionally rich assonance: a repenation whose shared sound is a vowel-sound (e.g., bat/rag and pick/sift) backward rhyme: in general, any set of words whose last or only syllables sound alike except for their final sounds (e.g., miles/mind) cacophony: a harsh sound–commonly used in poetry to provide relief from excessive euphony compound pluraesthetic poetry: poetry which is pluraesthetic in more than one major way concrete poetry: a 1950’s term which has come to mean approximately what I mean by the term, “vizlature” consonance: a repenation whose shared sound is a consonant-sound that ends a syllable (e.g., bat/cut and rib/job) content: in my poetics simply a poem’s physical text (and what it means semantically) dislocational poetry: poetry whose syntax or train of thought is dislocatingly unconventional dysphony: cacophony euphony: a particularly musical sound in poetry equaphor: that term of an equaphorical expression that is the less important of the expression’s two terms so far as the artwork containing the expression is concerned; four kinds exist: the simile, the metaphor, the juxtaphor and the symbol equaphorical expression: an aesthetic analogy, explicit or implicit, that consists of an equaphor and the equaphor’s referent equaphoration: a poem’s analogical devices. equaphorical referent: that term of an equaphorical expression that is the more important of the expression’s two terms so far as the artwork containging the expression is concerned. foot: one unit of a meter fore-burden: what, on the surface, a poem is chiefly about (e.g., its plot, or what happens; its argument, or “moral;” its ambience, or “feel”) form: the sum of a poem’s most abstract structural elements–such as its metric pattern, its rhyme- scheme–and perhaps the grammatical conventions it adheres to; that which “contains” a poem’s content highverse: poetry which depends for its main esthetic effect on equaphoration iambic meter: a form of meter one “foot” or unit of which consists of a weak beat followed by a strong beat, as in the word, “pursue” illumagery: visual art illuscription: words and pictures together in more or less equal portions but not fused internal rhyme: a rhyme one or more of whose rhymenants are within a line rather than at its end inversion: the shifting of one word from after to before a second against normal prose usage– usually in order to complete a rhyme or to obey some metrical scheme irony: a juxtaphor in which an image or idea is presented concurrently with its reverse juxtaphor: an implicit metaphor of which there are several kinds, including the irony, the pun, the onomatopoeia and the litraphor language poetry: a dislocational form of poetry lineation: the division of a text into lines ending or beginning where their author dictates rather than at (or near) some constant pre-set margin litraphor: an entirely verbal juxtaphor whose equaphor and referent are separate from each other. Manywhere-at-Once: a state of being in more that one consequential area of one’s mind at once due to the effects of poetry melodation: a poem’s sound, or its combination of rhyme, meter, alliteration, euphony, cacophony and like aurally-based devices metaphor: an object, process or group of objects or processes that is equated (equaphorically) with a second object, process or group of objects or processes with which it has some elements in common but is otherwise significantly different from; or, put more simply, a pair of dissimilar images which are (equaphorically) equated with each other, and thus put an aesthcipient into Manywhere-at-Once meter: the result of syllables’ arrangement into a repeating pattern of accented and unaccented beats of which, in my poetics, there are only two important kinds, the iambic and the anapaestic nearprose: poetry whose only poetic device is lineation nexus: the implicit image or concept that an equaphor and its referent have in common, or meet at normal rhyme: in general, any set of words whose last or only syllables sound alike except for their first sounds (e.g., seems/dreams) octave: the first eight lines of an “Italian” sonnet onomatopoeia: a word or group of words whose pronunciation suggests what it denotes–buzz, for instance, both meaning, and sounding like, the sound a bee makes parallellism: the gross repetition of words, syntax or thoughts in poetry (and prose) pattern poetry: shaped poems pluraesthetic poetry: poetry which is “plurally aesthetic”–or “aesthetically expressive in more than one major way”–such as visual poetry poetry: in my poetics any text that is lineated prose: anything verbal that isn’t poetry pun: a word (or group of words) which is used to express two different things at once: its own meaning and that of a second verbal expression which it exactly or nearly sounds like– or is repenation: that which results when two or more syllables that are fairly close to each other in a passage share one or more sounds (excluding the sound of silence) repeneme: the sounds shared by the syllables involved in a repenation rhyme: in general, any set of words whose final, or only, syllables sound alike except for one of their sounds (e.g., seems/dreams, miles/mind and seek/sake) rhymenant: one of the members of a rhyme (e.g., “seems” is one of the rhymenants of seems/dreams) rhythm: the arrangement of strong and weak beats in poetry or prose–or music rim-rhyme: in general, any set of words whose final, or only, syllables sound alike except for their vowels (e.g., seek/sake) sestet: the last six lines of an “Italian” sonnet shaped poetry: poetry whose lines are at appropriate times indented and/or cut short in such a way as to make their texts resemble things out of nature to the eye simile: a metaphor whose equaphor and referent have been explicitly connected to one another through the use of “like” or its equivalent (e.g., “brain like a sieve”) sonnet: a traditional poetic form consisting of fourteen iambic pentameters each of whose last words rhymes with some other line’s last word stanza: in poetry what paragraphs are in prose strophe: stanza style: in my poetics the tone-establishing kind of words or phrasing or the like used in a poem symbol: an advertance whose referent is barely suggested tenor: I. A. Richards’s term for what I call a metaphor textual illumagery: illumagery with textual elements added which modify its tone but nothing deeper undermeaning: any implicit meaning in a poem that makes sense vehicle: I. A. Richards’s term for what I call a metaphor’s referent verse: in my poetics, a synonym for poetry visual poetry: poetry whose visual appearance is as important as what it says verbally, to put it simply vizlature: verbo-visual art, or that part of the media continuum where literature and visual art overlap as in visual poetry and textual illumagery Note: Comprepoetica has several discussions related to the definition of poetics: click here for one on the taxonomy of visio-textual art, with illustrations; here for a taxonomy of the whole of literature; or here for a defense of such taxonomizing. Go to Comprepoetica Table of Contents. . .

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Bora Zivcovik, who was then (as I understand it) in charge of the Scientific American guest blogs, was kind enough (and adventurous enough) to take me on as a regular blogger in the spring of 2012.  My first entry appeared on 28 August 2012.  14 months later I sent my 17^th entry off to Bora and went off on a cruise to the Bahamas with an old friend who’d gotten a good deal on one she could take a companion along on, and was willing to pay my part of it, I being completely unable to.  While on Grand Bahama Island, I was unable to find my entry at the Scientific American site.  Querying Bora about it, I learned he had left his position with Scientific American and his replacement was behind schedule.  It took me a while to get in touch with the new man.  His reply was friendly but disappointing (albeit not unexpected): he had decided to discontinue my blog.  It had been an experiment that didn’t work, very few people taking an interest in it (once again demonstrating C. P. Snow’s belief in the “two cultures”).  My only real unhappiness about the blog’s demise is that I will no longer be able to pay my tithe to the church of plurexpressive art by giving exposure in the mainstream to poets using math in their works.  (Which includes *Me*.)

A major good thing about it is that it means less work for me.  But I want to continue it so am posting the entry I sent to Bora that never made it online.  Thereafter, I hope to post an entry once every two or three months.  Meanwhile, maybe I can get some other visible venue to take it.

NOTICE: NEWS ABOUT THIS BLOG WILL OCCASIONALLY BE ADDED BELOW, SO CHECK AFTER THE TABLE OF CONTENTS BEFORE LEAVING.

Below is a table of contents with links to my first blog entry, and to the seventeenth:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Entry 1: M@h*(pOet)?ica – 28 July 2012
Entry 2: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Summerthings
Entry 3: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Louis Zukofsky’s Integral
Entry 4: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Scott Helmes
Entry 5: M@h*(pOet)?ica – of Pi and the Circle, Part 1
Entry 6: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Happy Holidays!
Entry 7: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Circles, Part 3
Entry 8: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Karl Kempton
Entry 9: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Mathematics and Love
Entry 10: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Mathekphrastic Poetry
Entry 11: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Mathekphrastic Poetry, Part 2
Entry 12: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Matheconceptual Poetry
Entry 13: M@h*(pOet)?ica – The Number Poems of Richard Kostelanetz
Entry 14: M@h*(pOet)?ica – Music and Autobiography
Entry 15: M@h*(pOet)?ica – PlayDay, Part One
Entry 16: M@h*(pOet)?ica – PlayDay, Part Two
Entry 17: M@h*(pOet)?ica – PlayDay, Part Two
Entry 18: 31 March 2014: Knocked Back to the Otherstream

NEWS

8 February 2014.  This blog’s new name will henceforth be: Mathepoetcetera:  A Continuation of a Mathematical Poetry Blog Formerly a Guest at the Scientific American Website.  The “etcetera” that is part of the new name is important.  It is intended to suggest that my blog will now be about more than just mathematical poetry.  The math(ematics) and poet(ry) in the name is intended to indicate the blog’s continuing major interest in the combination of mathematics and poetry that proved so unbeguiling to Bora’s replacement at Scientific American, but I hope to do more with all of science and poetry–and perhaps science and arts other than poetry.  I have some ideas.  Please, if you have almost anything you think I might be interested in using here, get in touch with me.  Probably the best way to do that is via a comment containing your email address.  As an egomaniac, I love displaying my own work and gabbing about it, but as a genuinely ardent team-player I also love calling attention to the many other unrecognized otherstreamers doing valuable work.

 

16 November 2014 Note: 184 visitors so far.  I fear this blog is done for.  I’ve been in a bad slump for a long time now.  I no longer believe there’s much chance that it will end.  –Bob

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Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part One

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 7-8, July-August 2006

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Fieralingue.
Webmaster: Anny Ballardini
www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome

Googlefight
www.googlefight.com

Michael P. Garofalo’s Index to Concrete Poetry
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/index.htm

Michael P. Garofalo’s Concrete Poetry Website
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/concr1.htm

Michael P. Garofalo’s Concrete Poetry
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/this.htm

minimalist concrete poetry.
Blogger: Dan Waber
www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry

po-X-cetera.
Blogger: Bob Grumman
www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog

Xerocracy.
Blogger: Malcolm Davidson
Website: xerocracy.blogspot.com

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On the Internet, someone lamenting David Lehman’s dismal The Oxford Book of American Poetry opined that popular music would be the saviour of contemporary American poetry. Not so. Popular music isn’t doing anything for American poetry that it hasn’t been doing for decades, maybe centuries. If (serious) poetry is to be saved, it will be computers that save it. The Internet will blog it to the few interested in it, and computer-enabled publish-on-demand outfits will make inexpensive hard copies of it available to the fewer who actually want to spend money on it. In fact, it already does.

I won’t say anything about Lehman’s anthology except repeat my long-expressed vain hope that someday a viable list of schools of contemporary American poetry will be created to serve as the basis of an anthology in an edition of more than a few hundred copies like The Oxford Book of American Poetry that will cover the full range of superior contemporary American poetry. It’d have to be edited by someone conversant with far more kinds of poetry than Lehman; ideally, by a group of editors, each of whom is an expert in the school of poetry his section is on. Back to the Internet, and how important it is for serious poetry.

Firmly establishing that is the central aim of this column, and my next two or more. First, though, a bit about an amusing site I happened onto recently, googlefight.com. I’d had my first bad computer crash early in March, and was doing a search on my own name to try to round up lost links to work of mine on the Internet. (One quiet but wonderful virtue of the Internet is that you can use it as a display cabinet for your work–but you need to know the addresses of the sites your work is at.) One of the links I turned up was to this “Googlefight,” which I’d never heard of. Curious, I went to it.

It turns out that Googlefight is a cyber-arena at which a visitor can find out which of two words or phrases appears most on the Internet, or so it seems to me. In any case, someone had put my name up against Ron Silliman’s there. I was amazed at my score: near 40,000, an absurdly high number–though Ron trounced me: he scored 280,000. When that contest was over, I started one between catsup and poetry. I forget the score but poetry won by a huge amount. Fun site. (Note, some names, like those of poets Mike Snider and David Graham, are shared by too many people for Googlefight to work well with them–although Mike felt he got a fairly accurate score with “Mike Snider, Poet.” Also: it’s important to put quotation marks around your name or other term: I beat Ron when I ran my name without quotation marks against his without quotation marks because of Northrup Grumman and other firms using the Grumman name.)

Okay, now to the blogs and similar websites I happened on during my search, some because my name was there, others because the ones my name was at had links to them, and the rest because I was previously familiar with them or those running them. I don’t know how I got to Xerocracy, which is run by Malcolm Davidson–in Gdansk, Poland, of all places. He has a series of entries subtitled: “The rules of poetry as derived from whatever I happen to be reading .” Such long-running discussions of poetry are common on the Internet, and most encouraging to those of us who sometimes fear no one at all cares about the art. Among Davidson’s rules is “Rule 17: contrary to one common anti-art complaint, you can’t just randomly insert line breaks into a text and get a poem. “Reading strategy: take a poem you don’t know well, pull out all the line breaks, then come back to it later and see if you can put them back where they were. “Are the line breaks need where they were? Are they needed at all? Look at the Bukowski piece again to see why he wrote this:

from the sad university
lecterns
these hucksters of the
despoiled word
working the
hand-outs
still talking that
dumb shit.

“and why he did not write this:

from the sad
university lecterns
these hucksters
of the despoiled
word working
the hand-outs
still talking
that dumb shit.

“So it may not be the greatest poem in the world, but it has been constructed with some care, not just bashed out with random line breaks.”

This drew three comments. Someone signing himself, “Michael,” changed Bukowski’s lineation, without comment, to:

from the sad university lecterns
these hucksters of the despoiled word
working the hand-outs
still talking that dumb shit.

The blogger, Davidson, I assume, but calling himself, “eeksypeeksy,” said, “That’s pretty good. Maybe better than his, though his shorter lines may be better for throwing vicious little concrete chunks up at the lectern.”

I then came in with, “Bukowski’s version is much better than Michael’s because the line- breaks are much less expected–or certainly were when he wrote it. His kind of line- breaks are pretty common now, I guess. But I hit your blog’s comment button to air a minor gripe. I say you most definitely CAN “just randomly insert line breaks into a text and get a poem.” What you won’t get is a GOOD poem. For me, what I call “flow-breaks” are what differentiate poetry from prose. Line-breaks are the main kind of flow-break.”

A major problem with blogs is that no one ever answers me. Okay, I exaggerate–Geof Huth does. Eeksypeeksy didn’t. But, ah, the pleasure of being able so frequently to fire off a response to what someone says in print and know it will be published, unlike almost all letters to the editors of bigCity publications.

Gee, I thought I’d say a lot more about the many blogs and other websites I’ve been visiting, but I’m already out of room. Nonetheless, I’m going to leave the names of those I didn’t get to on my list, Anny Ballardini’s because it boasts what is probably the most eclectic collection of poems on the Internet (including a selection of mine, which is the real reason her site made my list, of course), my own blog because it’s mine; and the sites of Dan Waber and Michael Garofalo because they are excellent sources of first-rate concrete and related poetry, and commentary thereon. Dan’s has an especially interesting essay by Karl Kempton on the history of visual poetry.