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My Scientific American Blog

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2013

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M@h*(pOet)?ica
Blog-Master: Bob Grumman

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/27/mhpoetica-music-and-autobiography/

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To celebrate the full year of entries to my Scientific American guest blog that I completed early this past June, and feeling by then that I could get away with it, I devoted my next entry to my own works. No doubt I’m a gross narcissist, but I did feel self-conscious about such blatant self-aggrandizement. But I have several rationalizations for it. One is that no one else will aggrandize me and I deserve to be, at least a little!
Seriousfully, I have several less self-centered rationalizations. Indeed, I’d go so far as to call them “reasons!”

 1. If an analyst of an art practices the art himself, what works would he be more qualified to discuss than his own–and use to illustrate his over-all view of the art?

 2. Consider, also, what other works than his own could more effectively reveal his strengths (and, perhaps more important, his shortcomings)–and the strengths and weaknesses of the kind of art he is discussing.

 3. Discussion of his own works leads readily to discussions of himself. Not that I consider myself the proper center of writings like this, but I do strongly believe in making oneself a part of almost any writing—because I myself like finding out about a writer as a person as well as about whatever subject he’s writing about. And a sort of self-interview interwoven through possibly dry text may help keep a reader reading. True, it might also turn off a reader impatient with what he considers irrelevancies. But, hey, I’m not sure I want anyone like that reading my stuff!

4. Feeling free to digress agrees with me—although I suppose that isn’t a very serious reason.

5. Nor, I suppose, is my belief that it makes me feel more honest to yak about myself and why I’m doing what I’m doing as I go along—even when I lie!

I was going to begin my entry with a brief autobiography about how I became a mathematical poet. When it became too long, I dropped it–but I have room for it here, and posterity will want to know! My parents are central to it, for they supplied me with math-genes, both of them having been gifted in math although my mother made no special use of it and my father used it only for a few years as an engineer with Sikorski until being let go because he lacked a college degree.

They passed their mathematical genes on to Bill, Jr., the older of my two older brothers, who became a successful civil engineer (and, at 84, still does work as a consultant) and to me. My other brother, Sherman, was good at math, too, but not what you’d call “gifted.” My sister (gotta be complete!) was better at other things, but not a math whiz.

I was certainly no mathematical prodigy, just automatically strongly attracted to it (and, therefore, better than most at it). My brother Bill helped by introducing me at the age of nine or so (before my school was teaching it) to . . . long division. Because of baseball.

Like many boys, I was a baseball statistics nut, so it came about that one day when the males in my family were living and dying with our baseball team, the New York Giants, I wondered aloud about what batting averages were, which led to Bill’s introducing me to long division, and decimals. For more than a week after that, I spent a lot of time figuring out my favorite players’ averages, right after each time at bat. I never went on to doing anything of interest in math, as a mathematician, although I unofficially minored in it when I finally went to college in my thirties.

But I feel my experience with batting averages awakened what I now think of as a visceral sensitivity to mathematics. I would love to learn if real mathematicians believe they have the same sensitivity. I mean the feeling that numbers are nearly as much things-in-themselves as sounds or colors. In any case, my first long division poem seemed to me to be doing something no other aesthetic object did. So I have specialized in long division as a poet for the past twenty years. Six of them are in the blog entry I’m writing about here.

The first of my poems in the entry, though, is not a long division poem, or even mathematical. In keeping with the entry’s theme, which is the importance of music in my work, it’s an ancient visual haiku from my first collection of poems, poemns, which I paid to have printed in 1966. Here it is in full: “strains of Franck and/ radio is to sky as/ flowerstem is to earth”–with the last line upside-down to make it visual!

A little later my “Seaside Long Division” appears. Its quotient, “Musick,” is the only thing in it overtly connecting it to music–but part of the reason for its dividend, “yesterday,” was the Beatles’ song of that name. Here’s the beginning of my relatively long discussion of the poem (slightly revised), to give you an idea of the commentary in the entry (which I’m Very Proud of): “It is one of my woozier efforts—intentionally, I claim, for wooze is mainly what it’s about. I almost want to leave it at that. But, like Pound, I’m an inveterate village explainer, so have to go on to tell you that the “commocean” (which is part of the product of “musick” times the divisor, “distant sail”) underlying a large part of the poem is wooze, and the word, “dreams” (“dreams of marauders” being the poem’s remainder), is almost a synonym for “wooze.” And look at how the coloring woozes out an opening into whatever it is that the poem is about. I would ask, too, is any of the arts closer to pure wooze than music? Finally, right at the center of the piece is ‘yesterday’: or where the present dissolves into wooze.”

The word. “music,” is more or less defined by the next of my poems. A G-clef sign connects two others to music, and a whole staff makes the connection in the remaining two.

Before leaving, I want to quote a footnote I had in the entry which I consider Very Important: “Because there’s always someone at a poetry reading who is annoyed with poets who try to explain their works on the grounds that a poem that needs to be explained is no good, I thought I’d defend the practice—at least for poems that are difficult because unconventional the way mathexpressive poems are. The simple reason explanation is in order, and should in some cases be required of the poet, is that it is only fair. Why? Because conventional poems come pre-explained! That is to say, schools begin teaching conventional poems—simple rhymes, for instance—as soon as children begin formal education, and continue to do so throughout college, even to students not majoring in English. And PBS programs on poetry, large-circulation magazines and commercial presses publishing poetry as well as poetry critics with readerships of more than a hundred help them by re-explaining them. Conventional poems don’t need their creators’ explanations of them, unconventional poems do.”

 

AN OVERVIEW OF THE AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY

For the first 150 years or so following the death of William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in 1616, it seems to have been taken for granted that he was the author of the works credited to him. Certainly no record from those years has ever been found to indicate otherwise. Then, in 1769, a book by the actor David Garrick’s friend Henry Lawrence called Life and Adventures of Common Sense appeared. An allegory, this work follows an Elizabethan character named Common Sense on his travels through England with his friends Wit, Genius and Humour. Along the way they run into a country rogue who steals various magical tools from them that enable him to write a series of brilliant plays. The rogue’s name, needless to say, is Shakespeare. His victims decide to remain silent about his thefts in order not to rob his country of “its greatest ornament.”

17 years later another book appeared that was slightly relevant to the authorship question: The Story of the Learned Pig. Its not-too-trustworthy hero, the pig of its title, claimed to have had many previous lives. In one of them he did odd jobs for Shakespeare’s company such as holding horses, and writing Shakespeare’s best plays for him.

Neither of these books is a serious attack on Stratfordian beliefs. The first is merely a playful description of Shakespeare as having had common sense, wit, genius and humor. The second attempts to deflate bardolatry more than anything else—in the few of its pages that have anything to do with Shakespeare. But to those who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was responsible for The Oeuvre they indicate that even two centuries ago there was suspicion concerning its authorship.

A more plausible indicator of such suspicion was the Stratford-based research around the time of the publication of The Story of the Learned Pig said to have been carried out by James Wilmot, a friend of both Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. What he learned convinced Wilmot that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays—or so he told James Corton Cowell (according to Cowell) years later when the latter was gathering material for a talk on Shakespeare’s life he was to give to the Ipswich Philosophic Society. Wilmot never let anyone see the records of his research, and had all his papers burned upon his death. But he told Cowell that Francis Bacon was the true author of The Oeuvre. That the Stratfordian could not have written it was proven, for him, by the inability of the Stratford townsfolk Wilmot interviewed (a century-and-a-half after Shakespeare’s death) to tell him a single thing about the poet.

But I am not being fair to Wilmot. That he was unable to find any Shakespearean manuscripts in Stratford, or books from the library of Shakespeare, also contributed to his stand. And there was the problem of the knowledge revealed in the plays (regarding, for instance, the circulation of the blood), which seemed to him beyond the Stratford man’s reach. Moreover, Wilmot discovered a host of fascinating local legends and folk tales in Stratford that went back to Shakespeare’s day, like one about pancakes falling out of the sky. None of these legends and tales showed up in Shakespeare’s plays, as one might have expected (according to Wilmot). In short, Wilmot’s findings were not completely worthless, but–except for Cowell–he had no disciples, and Cowell didn’t even have one disciple, for he swore the Ipswich Philosophic Society to silence before revealing what he’d found out from Wilmot (in 1805). That silence wasn’t broken until around 1930, when the texts of the two talks Cowell gave about Wilmot’s research were discovered by a Baconian–which proved to many an anti-Stratfordian how mortally fearful our ancestors were of revealing . . . The Truth.

Or so the story goes.  Unfortunately for the anti-Stratfordians, though, later research spoiled things.   Paul Altrocchi and Daniel Wright (both Oxfordians, but scholars as well–which is possible!) found no records of an “Ipswich Philosophical Society.  They also discovered several instances of anachronistic vocabulary in the Wilmot papers to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt  that the whole affair was a hoax. 

Ergo, it was actually 51 years after The Story of Learned Pig before anyone else had anything anti-Stratfordian to say in print.  It was only someone fictitious, though, a character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel, Venetia, who claimed that Shakespeare was just an adaptor of other men’s work: “a botcher up of old plays.” But that, of course, is not saying he wasn’t responsible for The Oeuvre, just that he wasn’t as original as he might have been—according to this one fictional character.

Eleven years later, Joseph C. Hart, New York lawyer, writer, colonel, yachtsman, speculated in a memoir that late in the seventeenth century, the author of the Shakespearean plays having been forgotten, the actor Betterton and the writer Rowe found a bunch of anonymous plays and decided to say they were by Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself, according to Hart, “grew up in ignorance and viciousness and became a common poacher. And the latter title, in literary matters, he carried to his grave.” Shakespeare was, in short, a fraud. But he did contribute to the plays—by adding the lewd bits.

Along the way, Hart quoted someone unnamed of his own era who spoke of the “singular and unaccountable mystery . . . attached to Shakespeare’s private life,” and how “almost every document concerning him has either been destroyed or still remains in obscurity.” Meanwhile, in 1852, an anonymous article appeared in an Edinburgh journal whose author was bothered, like so many others, by the wide contrast of Shakespeare’s known life with the life the creator of such exalted masterpieces must have led, and by the lack of letters and manuscripts by Shakespeare, and scarcity of references to him by contemporaries. For instance, if Southampton knew Shakespeare, why had Raleigh, Spenser and Bacon “ignored his acquaintance?” The writer suggested that Shakespeare bought plays from some starving playwright and passed them off as his own. He claimed not to think much of his hypothesis but considered it at least as valid as the idea that Shakespeare himself wrote the plays.

It was at that juncture that Delia Bacon entered the scene (with encouragement from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson). In magazine articles of 1856 and a book the following year, she attributed Shakespeare’s plays to a committee which included Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, and was led by Francis Bacon (who was not, it ought to be stressed, a relation of hers). Her thought was pretty confused but she knew that “the illiterate man who kept the theatre” could never have written the Shakespearean plays. She was committed to a mental institution not long after her book was published.

That same year William Henry Smith’s Bacon and Shakespeare came out. He, too, was disturbed by the lack of manuscripts. He couldn’t understand how Shakespeare could have “allowed” inferior versions of his plays to have been published in his name. He argued that Shakespeare of Stratford was a “poor player” who could never have written the plays, pointing out that he never claimed the plays as his own. For him, a telling clue was that Bacon never referred to Shakespeare in print. Smith also found parallels between apothegms in Bacon’s notebooks and lines in Shakespeare’s plays. It was thus certain to him that Bacon wrote The Oeuvre.

Baconianism seems to have reached its peak in 1892 when Ignatius Donnelly discovered what he (but no sane person since) took to be ciphers in the Shakespearean plays. As decoded by Donnelly, the ciphers revealed Francis Bacon as The True Author. In a Shakespeare-versus-Bacon debate that a leading publication of the time subsequently sponsored, a jury came out 20 for Shakespeare, 2 for composite authorship, 2 for neither of the two, and 1 for Bacon.

The next man credited with The Ouevre had two things going for him: he was a proven genius as a playwright, and he had a motive for concealing his authorship that makes sense. I’m alluding, of course, to Christopher Marlowe. In 1593 he was killed in a tavern brawl, or the equivalent, according to the official documents, and at the time was possibly in mortal trouble with the authorities (as–again, possibly–a loudly out-of-the-closet anti-Christian homosexual and advocate of counterfeiting—or one thought to be). His circumstances would thus have made his pretending to be killed and then going abroad, and continuing his vocation under an assumed name, a wise course of action. He was brought into the controversy in 1895 by a San Francisco attorney, William G. Ziegler, in a book called, It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries. Calvin Hoffman, another American, resuscitated the theory in 1955 with The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare.

At some point or another, William Stanley, Earl of Derby, and other noblemen (and women) have been put forward as the true Shakespeare, but none of them has gotten much backing (in the English-speaking world, at any rate)—except for Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. His discoverer was an English school-teacher named John Thomas Looney who in 1920 announced his theory in a book called “Shakespeare” Identified. In the words of Charlton Ogburn, his main disciple, Looney “did what no one had done before. He approached the quest for the author systematically, and with a completely open mind.” His procedure was to study the plays and poems and make a list of the traits their author must have had (such as membership in the higher aristocracy)—none of which the Stratford man happened to have–and examine the lives of the time’s nobles to find one who did have them. Looney has since been updated and amplified by Ogburn, whose views are now dominant among the anti-Stratfordians.

Hundreds of others have written vigorously anti-Stratfordian articles and books. Ogburn, unsurprisingly, considered this to be evidence of “the extraordinary proportions of the objection to Shakespearean Orthodoxy,” but hundreds of articles and books have been written to disprove Darwin’s theory of natural selection or to prove the existence of ghosts, too, so there seems little reason to take Ogburn’s observation seriously. Ogburn was also impressed by the quality of the people on his side of the question, for they have included (so anti-Stratfordians maintain) Whittier, Whitman, Lord Palmerston, Henry James, Bismarck, Mark Twain, Galsworthy, Freud, Chaplin, and many others.

These famous people contributed no direct evidence to support their view. Nor did they offer original reasons for their candidate or against Shakespeare or ever exhibit any talent for serious historical research. They are thus irrelevant (as are the at least equally large number of big names on the Stratfordian side who contribute nothing to the debate but invective and the party line).

Unfortunately, for a long time, few knowledgeable Shakespeareans deigned to argue seriously with the opponents of Shakespeare, hiding in the premise that to argue with them was to dignify them, which they didn’t deserve. This is the way all estabniks treat the ideas of those seeking to overthrow them. It is not only a disservice to the search for truth, but futile even for status-protection in the long-term. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the inflexibility of most anti-Stratfordians, and the frivolousness of so many of their arguments make it generally unprofitable to spend much time with them. A few valiant Stratfordians have nevertheless gone to the front lines. J. M. Robertson, for example, took all the passages in Shakespeare’s plays that had to do with the law, however faintly, and compared them to similar passages in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. He concluded that the use of legal terminology and ideas was standard for Elizabethan playwrights and rejected the anti-Stratfordian notion that only a lawyer could have written the Shakespearean plays.

Milward Martin attacked the over-all anti-Stratfordian point-of-view with dispatch in his not-yet-answered Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? (to which Ogburn referred but once in his major, very thick pro-Oxford tome—to dispute one trivial point of Martin’s about the meaning of something Francis Beaumont wrote to Jonson about Shakespeare). Since then—due probably to Ogburn’s book, a PBS Frontline “documentary” propagandizing for Oxford, and scattered superficial discussions of the question in mainstream magazines like The Smithsonian and The New Yorker (some years prior to the outburst of the even more superficial, and less responsible articles mentioned in the Preface)—several other Shakespeare-Affirmers have joined Martin against the heretics. Chief among them have been Irvin Matus, who tackled Oxfordianism in his book, Shakespeare, In Fact, the team of Terry Ross and David Kathman, who for many years beginning on 23 April 1996 combatted a wide variety of anti-Stratfordian notions at their Website at http:\www. shakespeareauthorship.com, and Alan Nelson, at his Website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson. As for me, I’ve been arguing in letters with isolated anti-Stratfordians since the middle eighties, even managing to get two letters into their publications. Of late, I’ve been active at an Internet newsgroup called humanities.lit. authors.shakespeare, site of a free-for-all between my side and anti-Stratfordians of various stripes, several of whom I’ll be introducing you to in this book.

So far as I know, no established Shakespearean scholar has ever agreed with the heretics’ position. It would be hard for one to do so, for the hard evidence is about as conclusive as historic evidence can be that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. It begins with the monument put up to him in Stratford’s main church between his death and 1623, when it was referred to in the First Folio, the famous first collection of his plays. The monument’s inscription clearly states that he was a writer, referring to “all that he hath writt.” It also compares him to Virgil for art, and places him on Mount Olympus. No other person of the time who used the name “Shakespeare” is known to have been a writer. It therefore follows that he is by far the most likely person such contemporaries of his as Francis Meres, John Webster and Richard Barnfield meant when they spoke of the poet “Shakespeare,” and that the name, “Shakespeare,” on various published plays was almost certainly his—unless the inscription was fraudulent, for which there is no evidence, or mistaken, which seems absurd considering that the inscription was in the most public (and revered) place in the poet’s hometown where all his friends, relatives and acquaintances could see it.

We also have documentary evidence that makes Shakespeare of Stratford Shakespeare the actor. Two records are central. One is the Stratford man’s will, in which he bequeathed money for memorial rings to three actors, referring to them as his “fellowes.” The other is a document from the Herald’s Office from about 1600 depicting the Stratford Shakespeare family’s coat of arms, and labeled, “Shakespear, ye player.” Another clump of documentary evidence makes Shakespeare the actor Shakespeare the poet. Among the records confirming this are the First Folio, which lists Shakespeare as the leading player in his own works, and two poems by John Davies that indicate the poet acted. Hence, the two clumps together firmly establish the Stratford man as the poet (Stratford Shakespeare = Actor Shakespeare; Actor Shakespeare = Poet Shakespeare; ergo, Stratford Shakespeare = Poet Shakespeare).

There is much other evidence that corroborates this. It includes the testimony of Ben Jonson in the First Folio, in recorded conversations with William Drummond, and in Jonson’s journal, Timber. Even more telling, though often overlooked, is the engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio, which resembles the bust of Shakespeare that is part of his Stratford monument—and is definitely not a likeness of any other known writer of the time. On par with that is a poem to Shakespeare by William Basse, circulating in manuscript before 1623, which had a note attached to it when published in 1633 stating that Shakespeare had died in April of 1616, as the Stratford man was known to have.

All the surviving anecdotal evidence assumes William Shakespeare was a poet/playwright, and one would expect so uncensored a source to at least hint of a great hoax, had there been one. Not only that, but all the other authorship candidates with any kind of backing either died before the dates of records showing Shakespeare still living, or were alive after the dates of records showing Shakespeare no longer living.

Against this, the doubters have only four weapons:

(1) their suspicions of fraud, such as their claim that the monument was actually put up for Shakespeare’s father and decades later changed when Stratford started trying to lure literary tourists to their town, even though Leonard Digges mentions Shakespeare’s “Stratford monument” in his poem for the First Folio;

(2) their ability to find fault with any bit of evidence, such as the comparison of Shakespeare to Virgil, a poet, on his monument (according to them, it ought to have been to Sophocles or some other ancient playwright, not to Virgil, who wrote no plays);

(3) their invulnerable conviction that the commoner from Stratford lacked the education and background to have written the (incredibly erudite) plays he was said to have; and

(4) their certainty that there are authorship-confirming parallels between the events Shakespeare described in his writings and various events in the life of whatever man they’re backing—but not in Shakespeare’s. (That one anti-Stratfordian can find as many such parallels in Lord X’s life as another finds in Lord Y’s life doesn’t seem to faze them.)

As far as I’m concerned, what I’ve just said should be enough to convince any rational person that Shakespeare was the poet/playwright he has always been said to have been. Partly because the anti-Stratfordians will complain that I’ve left out their best arguments, but more to show in greater detail their manner of (dysfunctional) reasoning, I will now re-argue my position for the next ten (!) chapters. Even then, I will probably miss many of the other side’s arguments. I do hope to cover all their even slightly sane ones, however.

My extended argument begins with Shakespeare’s name.

Next Chapter here.
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Another ME Column

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 36, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2004

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Ampersand Squared
Edited by Geop Huth. 2004; 92 pp; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press, 1708 Hayworth Road,
Port Charlotte FL 33952. $10 ppd.

Sack Drone Gothic.
By Al Ackerman. 2003; 14 pp; Pa;
Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $6 ppd.

 

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I tripped again as the year began, mailing in my Small Press Review column for January/February late. Then, I got ridiculously confused, getting it into my head that the late column, or the one I sent right after it, had been lost in the mail. Complicating matters was my having accidentally deleted my only copies of both the columns involved. Before finding out neither of my columns had been lost, I made new columns that repeated material in the previous ones, and had to withdraw them. But I still need to comment on some of the items I mentioned in the unlost columns, because I said so little about them there (and probably indicated I’d say more in the future). I can’t yet because I still have no copy of my second unlost column, so can’t be sure of not repeating myself. This column will thus be a side-column, consisting of three announcements about ME.

First, though, I do want to quote and briefly comment on part of Al Ackerman’s 20-stanza Heroic Hack of various John M. Bennett poems, shared and solo, Sack Drone Gothic, which I covered in at least one of my previous columns. It’s the first line of Stanza 13 of that work, which I’m fairly certain I haven’t yet quoted: “MORE DONG (this the happy jute part).” As ever: a strange combination of the very funny with exits into a kind of lyrical Zen–for those who go clicky-hey over locutions like “drawers and side and ledge” (which is part of the quotation from stanza 18 of Ackerman’s poem, which I did mention in one of the two preceding columns).

Now for the announcements about ME. One is that my outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press just published Ampersand Squared, a collection of pwoermds, which that term’s inventor, anthology editor Geof Huth, incorrectly defines as a one-word poem without a title, believing that a title is part of a poem. There are many fetching pwoermds in his gathering, some of the very best by Huth, himself. Aram Saroyon’s famous “lighght” and famous “eyeye” are here plus specimens from both mainstream and otherstream poets like Emily Romano, Cor van den Heuvel, Jonathan Brannen and Richard Kostelanetz (with a four-page pwoermd!) Needless to say, I have two in it, as well. The book has an excellent introduction by Huth–and a rippingly thorough bibliography that the hypermeticulous Huth fashioned, with some help from me (I pointed out a book I wrote that wasn’t in it but should have been). The asking price for Ampersand Squared is $10 but if you order from me and mention this column, you can have it ppd. for $6. (Note: as of April Fools’ Day 2005 no one has taken me up on this; not that I ever thought this column influential, here–where the offer also applies–or at Small PRess Review. Still . . .)

Incidentally, I had the anthology done by a publish-on-demand firm called Bookmobile, which mIEKAL aND told me about. I highly recommend them. They did an excellent job (from print-ready computer files) for a reasonable price: $630 for printing and shipping 200 copies. And I can now order 25 additional copies from them at any time for less than $3 a copy. The price, I gather, would have been about the same if the book have been eight-and-a-half inches by five-and-a-half inches, instead of the non- standard four-and-a-quarter inches by five-and-a-half inches Ampersand Squared is, for those interested in publishing something of a more standard size than the latter.

Another ME announcement is that Mary Veazey recently very attractively published a collection of 11 of my solitextual (textual only) poems about a persona named “Poem” at her Sticks website. It’s at http://www.stickspress.com/grummanc.html#target.

My last announcement about myself is about my new blog, which can be found at http://www.reocities.com/Comprepoetica/Blog/Bloghome.html. I’ve now made daily posts to it for over 100 days. Since making my previous announcement about it, I’ve added two galleries and an essay section. One of the galleries holds the twelve finished mathemaku I’ve made to date since starting the site. The other is devoted to a sequence of mine, “Long Division of Poetry,” in which I divide various words or phrases such as “words” and “numbers” and “beauty” into “poetry”; the answer is always the same distorted, upside-down version of “words,” the product of it and the divisor always a graphic that’s a full-color variation of an old visual poem of mine called, “Summer Things.” I consider it my most important poem so far.

I highly recommend having a blog. Mine is part of my website, Comprepoetica, which costs me $5 a month at Geocities (but would be free if I didn’t need extra space for my graphic images). It has the value of a diary, which is (mainly) to force one to write something daily, with the advantage that it’s public, which forces one to try to write something with some potential interest to others.

One of these days I’ll do a column on Blogs. There are some excellent ones out there including Geof Huth’s Visualizing Poetics at http://www.dbqp.blogspot.com (this one inspired me to start mine and at times carries on discussions with the latter) and Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard at http://scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score. One that is particularly good in covering burstnorm territories I’m not as up on as I feel I ought to be is language poet Ron Silliman’s Silliman’s Blog at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/. To balance things out a bit, let me also direct you to Mike Snider’s Formal Blog and Sonnetarium at http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501. He is worth reading although he actually admires the tripe published in Poetry.

My Ssmumbmmmnrre

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Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 8/9, September/October 2000

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Blackbird, Number 2, Winter 2000;
edited by David Stone. 134 pp; Merle Publications,
112 W. University Pkway, #1C, Baltimore MD 21210.
$18, ppd., with check made out to David Stone.

The End Review, Number 2, May 2000;
edited by Scott Keeney. 32 pp;
The End Review, 153 Pocono Road #1,
Brookfield CT 06804-2013. price: donation, $3 to $5 suggested.

Score, Number 15, Summer 2000;
edited by Crag Hill and Spencer Selby.
70 pp (printed on one side only); Score Publications,
1111 East 5th Street, Moscow ID 83843. $12, ppd.

Uncertain Relations, by Joel Chace,
with illustrations by Frank C. Eckmair.
56 pp; Birch Brook Press, Box 81, Delhi NY 13753. $14.50.

 

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Hang on, ’cause I’m gonna try to write this column in sixteen minutes. I can’t give it more time on account of I got more important things to do, primariliest a novel I’m writing, but also the anthology of visio-textual art Crag Hill and I are co-editing, Writing To Be Seen, which I just sent off to the printer, 346 pages, but who knows if it’ll come out since the press I sent it to isn’t sure it can handle the graphics it’ll mostly consist of–and I’m not sure Crag and I can handle the cost, if they can publish it. It’s a vanity publish-on-demand press I was suddenly forced to use because Sprout, the good publish-on-demand press I’ve touted in this column, abruptly decided not to offer publish-on-demand services anymore.

I mention all this as a community service tip to anyone considering publish-on-demand that most of the companies offering it are rip-offs, although the verdict ain’t entirely in on the one I’m trying to get to print the anthology. Another I’m in touch with charges nothing to hold your novel, or whatever, on its hard drive, thus making it available to anyone who wants to buy a copy. But it will charge you $12 a copy, plus postage. If someone else buys it for the too-high retail price of $16 plus postage, you get a buck or two royalty. Too high to expect to sell any copies unless you have something so terrific you could have gotten a regular publisher to publish it. But a retailer can get it for $9.60 plus shipping, so if you have a friend who owns a bookstore, as I do, you can get it for that still-damned- high price. The only excuse for using the service, it seems to me, is if you want to use the printed copies as samples. The one good thing about this form of publication is that you retain all rights to your book, so if you can later get a real publisher to take it over, you are allowed to do so. So what I’ll probably do with my novel is buy ten or twenty copies of it to shop around.

Originally, I wanted to finish a book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy this summer but got bogged down in a chapter refuting the anti-Shakespeare people whose every argument I felt duty-bound to discuss. There were so many of them, I finally flipped out. Couldn’t stand to write no more (though I will eventually return to it, by gawd). To keep my summer from being a complete bust, I decided to write the novel, a sorta James Bond thing with a virtual reality machine central to it, that’s nothing but tv-tested action cliches but (my downfall) has a main character with my interests. Today I hit the halfway point. I no longer comprehend my plot so I’m going to have my main character talk about mathematical poetry till I figure it out. I estimate I have about a 40% chance of finishing the thing. Then I’ll see if I can save it with superhuman revision.

My sixteen minutes ended five minutes ago, but I’ll keep going. I can’t let my faithful readers down–and I do have some works to discuss–seriously. One is a book by Joel Chace called Uncertain Relations that consists of a series of poems involving the poet’s reflections on his 75-year-old mother, now suffering occasional, possibly stroke-related delusions, interwoven with the poet’s memories of an outdoor college chemistry class’s notations in colored chalk on a patio’s stone slabs that he’d wandered past soon after his mother had had to be institutionalized–with seemingly meaningless facts and statistics from a friend’s emails to him jumbled occasionally into the mix. Result: a carnival of science-gone-aesthetic bizarrely playing spring to the winter the poet’s mother is succumbing to, and which is spilling into her son–in a larger winter of a universe gone shimmeringly and overlappingly micro- and macro-Heisenbergian. But not without shafts of sardonic humor.

Then there’s Blackbird, which is either a (spiral-bound) magazine or the second in a series of anthologies, but a good read–make that, scan–whichever it is. It’s all kinds of collages, visual poems, textual poems, illumages and who-knows-whats about blackbirds by art-makers from Russia, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, the USA, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Argentina and Brazil including Theo Breuer of Germany whose politics aren’t mine (he thinks gas chambers and electric chairs equally representative of the century just past though one was used for innocent Jews, the other for convicted murderers) but makes up for it with a translation of, and commentary on, a first-rate poem of Paul Celan: “SUSCEPTIVE/ was the one-/ winged hanging blackbird,/ over the firewall, behind/ Paris, high up there/ in the/ poem,” to whose Paris/poem alliteration he refers as the “one thing (that) is probably better in the English version” and which he (correctly, when I thought about it) characterizes as “PERFECT.”

As for Score #15 and The End Review #2, I’ll just say that the former is fuller than ever of A-1 visio-textual matter, and that the other, whose editor, Scott Keeney, has a droll/reflective updating of Stevens’s 13 Blackbirds in Blackbird, is on par (i.e., well worth buying) with the previous issue of the magazine, which I reviewed here a year or two ago.

A Visit to a Webzine

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 3-4, March-April 2007

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      Poets Greatest Hits: Bob Grumman, 1966-2005.
      Bob Grumman. 23p; 2006; Pa;
      Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane,
      Columbus OH 43213. $10 ppd.
      www.puddinghouse.com.

      Sugar Mule #26. M. L. Webster, editor.
      An Anthology of collaborations
      guest editor: Sheila Murphy
      Sugar Mule

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It would seem that the Internet is taking over my literary life. Except for what’s in one recent chapbook, all my poetry for the past few years has appeared on the Internet– principally at my blog, but several other places. I no longer send work to any non- electronic periodicals or publishers. Actually, I no longer submit work anywhere, I just send it, sometimes, to some editor soliciting it–such as Jennifer Bosweld who last year invited me into her press’s series of Greatest Hits, which resulted in the chapbook just mentioned. I’ve drastically cut down on my prose appearances both electronic and in print (except for my blog entries). This is my only column anywhere now. After twenty years of pushing my poetry and criticism at the poetry world hoping for recognition and getting just about none, I’ve given up. This column and my blog satisfy my need to make my my art and ideas known. And I have won recognition from those who count. So there, BigWorld!

Since I brought up Bosweld’s Greatest Hits series, I ought to talk a bit about it. Bosweld started it in 2000 as a parallel to pop singers’ greatest hits CDs. Each contributor is asked to select 12 poems for his volume that he considers to be those “most often requested for reprint or performance.” That was hard for me. I picked the very few anyone ever mentioned anywhere as having read, heard or viewed, plus the two hangable mathemaku that I’ve actually sold (for hunnerts of bucks, each!) And I didn’t forget the haiku that won a best-of-issue prize (of one dollar) from the magazine it was first published in. (“oncoming stepfuls/ of dry-leaf noise and/ a cold sky’s red kite!”) Four of my twelve poems are solitextual (i.e., solely textual) Two are mostly textual. Only one is a pure visual poem. The others are mathemaku.

Okay, now to the main subject of this installment of my column, an issue of a webzine called Sugar Mule that guest-editor Sheila Murphy devoted to solitextual collaborations. I was invited to submit to it but couldn’t any of my few appropriate collaborations (mostly with jw curry aka Wharton Hood), my house being almost as disorganized as my mind. But Geof Huth found a poem he and John M. Bennett had written together, and that I had then slightly revised. Sheila accepted both the Huth/Bennett poem and the Huth/Bennett/Grumman poem. So I was in. Meanwhile, Sheila suggested I collaborate with Geof. He was amenable, so we made a few new poems for the issue, which was fun (and interestingly educational).

The following excerpts should give some idea of the range of the material in the issue, most of it what I’ve taken to calling “neocontemporary” to distinguish it from the “paleocontemporary” poetry dominating the mainstream. The first is from Murphy and K. S. Ernst’s “Words To Start,” which serves as a preface to the issue:

          as though form had lost its felony/
          amid the penmanship
          triggers speech unstained by boundaries with promise
          interior case catching the smallest current of women

My second specimen is from “Who Feed Their Leaves, ” by Mary Rising Higgins and George Kalamaras:

          Asphalt howl sunblinds
          Route 66 brakeride west
          Heartnerve, wordsway mum

          I was busy looking up
          My blame as spilled into sky

          Signature heat swim
          Heartbrain beats in utero
          Closed curve space earth strings

          Protozoan gentle tongue
                                     God, not more geography!

I mustn’t overlook the now-fabled team of John M. Bennett and Jim Leftwich, who are represented by two poems, “Clank” and “Clue.” The first begins, “cusp an door an lift an lot an lump an loot an/ pest an lump an lawn an blast an crush an plot an,” the second, “pork an pot an puke an pencil an clung an clock an/ bone an shawl an joints an flops an blinker an fester an”

Almost as interesting as the poetry are some of the Contributor Bios, which were supplied by the contributors themselves. For instance, among them is Nico Vassilakis’s: “storm tainting sprays of robust loss in mid collapse and blanketed affirmation when you cease to identify with what is absent though a description of portions found denuded remain.” Andrew Topel provides the proper pronunciation of his name in his bio, and tells us that “Andrew” is a noun used “to name what changes shape.” Its etymology? “And (&) from the bowels of other universes, and Rew, proper name and short for renew; a person who is sewn in ink.” “Topel” is a verb with several meanings, one of which is “to form poetry as if from language robed in Swahili.”

My own bio, which I quote for contrast (and Gross Ego-Building), is embarrassingly conventional: “substitute high-school teacher living in Port Charlotte, Florida, whose specialty as a poet is visiomathematical poetry, but who also composes conventional poems (mainly about an alter ego called Poem), infraverbal poems (i.e., poems that happen mostly or entirely inside words) and unmathematical visual poetry. A critic, too, he is notorious for believing visual poems ought to have words, and for his attempt to provide a proper taxonomy for all forms of poetry. He has a website, comprepoetica.com, from which one can go to his poetry/poetics blog, po-X-etera. He’s had some things published.”

Close to forty pairs or trios have poems in the issue–usually two or three. Here are the names of just the last nine groups participating: Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal, John Crouse and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Michelle Greenblatt and Tom Taylor, Susan McMaster and Penn Kemp, David Baratier and Sean Karns, Mackenzie Carignan and Scott Glassman, Frances Presley and Tilla Brading, Maria Damon, mIEKAL aND, and jUStin!katKO, Tom Beckett and Thomas Fink. They and the ones unnamed have done some fascinating things here.

A Visit to Crag Hill’s Blog

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 1-2, January/February 2007

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      Crg Hill’s poetry scorecard. Webmaster: Crg Hill.
      scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score.

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The better poetry reviews quote a poem, or two, which I consider obligatory. But, aside from a word of praise or criticism, the reviewers let the quoted poems speak for themselves. Many readers like this, but I feel, considering how few readers are genuinely able fully to appreciate poems without help, that more is needed. Ergo, to review Crag Hill’s blog, I’m just going to explicate a single poem, a found poem by Crag, that I consider representative of the kind of fascinating material one can bump into at his blog:

          From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson
          I come back to the geography of it,
          I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
          I have been an ability–a machine–up to
          I have had to learn the simplest thingsI live underneath
          I looked up and saw
          Imbued / with the light
          I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s
          In cold hell, in thicket, how
          In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
          is a  monstrance,
          I sing the tree is a heronI sit here on a Sunday
          It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
          it was the west wind caught her up, as

Now, the poem again, a line at a time, with my comments interspersed:

          I come back to the geography of it,

A great beginning. We don’t know what “it” is (and I’m purposely not checking Olson’s Selected Poems to find out), but here–dislocated–“geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., since everything has a geography. Less surrealistically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . . What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.

          I don’t mean, just like that, to put down

Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation breaks off, which effectually explains all the better his state of mind.

          I have been an ability–a machine–up to

I take this line to mean the narrator has not been personally/ emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).

          I have had to learn the simplest things

Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero (as geography sort of is).

          I live underneath

We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).

          I looked up and saw

Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life.

          Imbued / with the light

Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.

          I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s

The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named, run-of-the-mill who-cares-where.

          In cold hell, in thicket, how

After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way.

          In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–

Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . in fact, “meubles” means “household furniture.” Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.

          is a monstrance,

The poetics (become furniture) “is a monstrance,” or “a vessel in which the consecrated Host is exposed for the adoration of the faithful!” The poetics (once like household furniture) holds a divinity, a redeeming divinity, that must render the cold hell surrounding it wholly impotent. “In cold hell, in thicket,” (and “in English”) we learn how the techniques, the poetics, that life can be thought to be composed (comfortably) in accordance with, is a sacred demonstrance of its transcendental value. Olson is Roethke.

          I sing the tree is a heron

But the narrator can sing. Whitmanesquely inpired, he sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, the tree, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:

          I sit here on a Sunday

The tone quiets into mundane sitting, but is implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services.

          It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death

The early chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.

          it was the west wind caught her up, as

Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.

So endeth explication and column.

 

New Substantials

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2009

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      Words & Junk
      By C. Mehrl Bennett
      2008; 45 pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods,
      137 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214.
      http://www.lulu.com/lunabisonteprods.
      $18.48–or $4.50 to download.

      Permutoria
      By K.S. Ernst and Sheila Murphy
      2008; 117 pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods
      37 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214.
      http://www.lulu.com/lunabisonteprods,
      $27.50–or $5.00 to download

      Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008
      By Mark Young
      2008; 412 pp; Pa; Meritage Press,
      256 North Fork Crystal Springs Road,
      St. Helena CA 94574. $24.
      http://www.meritagepress.com.

      Mad Hatters’ Review
      Number 10
      http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10

 

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The tenth issue of the webzine, Mad Hatters’ Review, not only has two poems of mine in it, but a review by me of C. Mehrl Bennett’s Words & Junk, so naturally I had to bring it up here. It’s got much else: a video interview of mIEKAL aND and Camille Bacos, for instance; a substantial gallery of vispo curated by C. Mehrl Bennett where my poems are, along with stunning work by Marilyn Rosenberg, K. S. Ernst, Bennett herself, Nico Vassilakis, Crag Hill, and 15 or so others of equal merit; an audio text collage by Davis Schneiderman and Don Meyer; fiction, poetry, four reviews besides mine, cartoons, drama, music and cartoons. And other stuff. There’s even a computer-enhanced picture by C. Mehrl B. of me in the contributors’ section.

Because part of this installment of my column will be dealing with C. Mehrl, I thought I’d steal a portion of what Mad Hatters’ Review says about her in that same contributors’ section for use here. I, for one, like such bios, not being a pure enough literatus to scorn personal data about artists whose work I admire. Anyway, according to Mad Hatters’ Review, “Bennett comes from a fine arts background; B.A. in painting and drawing, spent many years as a mail artist, and has an art exhibit history from the 80’s and early 90’s that focused on junk assemblage. . . . She lives in Columbus, OH, with spouse (they met through mail art), poet John M. Bennett. Her word art has been published in Lost&Found Times, Vispoeology, Otoliths, Naked Sunfish, Womb, Word For/Word, and Black Box.”

About her book, Words & Junk, I said in my review that it “is a collection of 43 visio-textual artworks in full color, one to a page, plus a diptych, on facing pages, which may be my favorite piece in the collection. That’s odd, because it is the least colorful of them, and I love the frequent risks Bennett takes at the borders of too many colors, and too much clash of colors, always triumphantly. The diptych consists mostly of sine-like waves of black lines on white, a brownish discoloration singing much of the white. There is a strong pop-art effect. On the image to the left, a sort of inset shows a letter R being moltenly formed in steps under the word ‘REA.’ The rest of the image, to the right of the R, shows O’s turning into D’s. ‘READ.’ With that action’s magnetic lines of force prominently depicted.

“In the second image of the diptych, the same graphic is shown, except shifted left to reveal the D’s multiplying off into a darkness. Above them is the word ‘ZEN.’ To make, ‘REAZEN,’ and–for me–a wonderful visual poem about the trans-rational reason that the best reading can raise one into.” I hope that’s enough to give you some notion of what’s in her fascinating book.

Permutoria, a collection of collaborations by K. S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy, is out of the same territory as Bennett’s book. I blurbed it with “Who could give such an enormous range of smashingly interactive fusions of poetry and visual art as this book contains the blurb it deserves? I sure can’t.” Many of the pieces feature a single (colorful) letter. Each is a delightful design–but also unexpectedly potent semantically, for those susceptible to minimalism. One depicting a semi-transparent P, for instance, situates the P partly on a pink and beige shape on the left, and partly on greens and whites to the right. I immediately spelled it into “pier” (because it struck me as something projecting from a shore) and then “peer.” Just one plausible interpretative drift, but the many others possible make a strong case for the ability of letters to be piers, and of art to allow us to peer enthrallingly far beyond the facts of the day-to-day.

Moreover, the one-letter pieces provide a continuingly enriching set of variations both “merely” visual, and linguistic. They add and subtract from all the other pieces in the collection as well, many of them much more complex textually. In short, the collection deserves a much fuller discussion than I have space for here.

No doubt the laziest thing a critic can do when discussing a collection of poetry (except for re-cycling bits of his old reviews like I’ve gotten in the habit of doing) is to quote something from it, but it’s also the best thing he can do. So, here’s a representative poem from Mark Young’s collected works, Pelican Dreaming:

Young’s multitude of poems here range widely in style and form, although almost all of them are solitextual (solely words). Among those not is one called “Mountain to Sea” which is on a chessboard with one white word on each black square and one black word on each white square. The engagent is thus arrested by each word long enough fully to appreciate it, and the slow connection it makes with the next, and all the other words in the poem, left to right, right to left, up to down and down to up. Diagonally, too. Hence, just the words in the first two squares in the top rank, and those in the two squares directly under them, “mountain” and “children,” “orchids” and “silence,” by themselves do a lot more than most much longer contemporary poems.

Young, a New Zealander now living in Australia, is too little known in this country. I hope this book will change that.

M@h*(pOet)?ica – Knocked Back to the Otherstream

INTRODUCTION

I lost heart after Scientific American kicked this blog of mine back into the Otherstream last October.[1]  I had this entry under way at the time.  I was really revved up about it, for I thought might it become my Majorest Poetics Statement Ever–an extraordinary accomplishment considering how major so many of my previous poetics statements have been.  I asked Scientific American to post a notice that I would continue my blog here, which they were kind enough to do, but it took me almost two months to get back to work on my Majorest Poetics Statement Ever (possibly), and it was on&off before I finally got it done late in March (2014).

WARNING

This essay is a long drawn-out (but incomplete!) highly specialized description of a single poem that only someone with a strong interest in poetics (and my . . . unusual kind of poetry) would be able to wade through.  Alas, I have too much invested in it not to post it, and am semi-desperate to get my series going again.  So here it is.  Give it a try, and if you can’t take more than a few paragraphs of it, please come to my next entry, anyway.  I will really really try to make it more reader-friendly than this one!

One last item: halfway through, I realized that a great deal of my essay was confusingly exploratory, to boot; I began writing it sure it would be pellucidly definitive.  Phooey.

PRELIMINARY TERMS & DEFINITIONS

I will begin the main body of this dissertation where all serious dissertations should begin: defining terms.  The first one up is “poetry.”  For the purposes of the general discussion I intend, we need only agree that a poem consists of words, and may also contain other expressive matter (e.g., the graphics in visual poems); is intended to provide its readers aesthetic pleasure (although it may provide other things, as well); and consists of form and content. I will return to “aesthetic pleasure” later.

A Poem’s Form

A Poem’s form is that which can be wholly described by a fully abstract equivalent of a map of a municipality or the like.  For instance, by showing the number, length and placement of its lines (streets), and what kind of word each of the words or combinations of words (buildings) on those lines is (e.g., rhyming, accented, unaccented, metaphors, etc.), and what else may be in the poem such as a graphic image in a visual poem (a river or mountain).

Some of its details may be hard objectively to make out, so will require a consensus of experts[2] to validate.  Take, for instance, what I deem “the Classical Haiku in English” and take its form to be three lines, the first and third of which contain five syllables and the second seven syllables; and whose words (here subjectivity leaks in) denote two or more images at least one of which is from Nature.  These images should be in tension with one another, a tension whose resolution results in a “haiku moment.”

On the map, the tension, like everything else, should be labeled—with an arrow pointing to “haiku moment.”  It would take a second, huge map to indicate what that is, and it’s quite possible that no single map of it would be able to gain the approval of a consensus of experts.[3]  Ergo, we can’t expect absolute thoroughness from the map of a poem’s form, just enough to get a reasonably good idea of it.

My concept of a poem’s form will not satisfy everyone, but I believe that a great majority of poetry scholars and laymen will agree on enough of it to allow reasonably profitable discussion.  For instance, perhaps no one will agree entirely on my definition of the form of a classical haiku (in English), but I believe most haiku-lovers will find it close enough.

Every poem has a form, but not every poem is what I call “classiformular,” by which I mean having a form shared by numerous other poems such as the sonnet and classical haiku.  I suspect it’s impossible for a poem not to share some abstract quality with any other poem, but certainly many free verse poems are sufficiently unlike all other poems in form to warrant being given a formal category of their own.   I call such poems “Idioformular.”

A poem’s form contains a poem’s contents, including itself—including, that is, what it connotes by its allusion to all other poems sharing its form—i.e., Basho’s haiku are in every classical (or, for that matter, every) haiku in any language.  Even the most idioformular poem’s form will connote freedom or wildness, and thus become a portion of the poem’s content.

A Poem’s Content

By “a poem’s content” I mean what I call its Fundamental Components, other than its form but including its title.  It has just two kinds, verbal and averbal.  I divide the verbal into the semantically and sensually verbal.  The first make up the semantic base of a poem: its words and verbal symbols that are, in effect, words, like the ampersand (a word for “and”), mathematical symbols like the square root sign (which says, “square root of”), and punctuation marks like the comma (a word for “pause here”).[4]

As for a poem’s sensual verbal components, they are what words, typographical symbols and punctuation marks are sans semantic meaning: i.e., their visual appearance and sound, the latter in particular being important through millennia in poetry but generally close to unlistened to in prose, particularly the most formal prose; the former only beginning to be important in poetry around the beginning the twentieth century (although never entirely ignored before that).   Like the verbal components of poetry, I divide its averbal components into two kinds, the averbally auditory and the averbally graphic.

The first are auditory components added to a poem’s words (if one reciting a poem suddenly sings one of its words, for instance) or occurring separately from a poem’s words (if a person reciting a poem intentionally coughs between two of its words, for instance); note: I ignore everyday songs as a different artform from poetry.[5] It is what adds sounds importantly contributing to a poem’s central auditory effect (almost always metaphorically, I believe, but never just decoratively) but not part of any verbal symbol’s normal sound when spoken, though it sometimes will be connected to it.

A poem’s averbally graphic components are the visual images (which include negative space) added to a poem’s printed words (such as color) or occurring separately from a poem’s words—if they do more than merely decorate or illustrate them.

Every poem, to be a poem, must contain both kinds of verbal components.  It may contain no averbal components, or one or both of them.  All of them together make up the eight . . . “poetiplexes” is the best term for them I’ve so far come up with . . . in any case there are eight of them and every poem contains them all.

THE POETIPLEXES

The Prelimiplex

The prelimiplex consists of everything in the poem reduced to what it materially is, a collection of words and equivalents of words spoken or printed, with or without graphics and other matter.  It is what is there prior to expression.  Highly unimportant but without it, there is no poem.  It makes sense to consider it the top layer of a poem.

The rest of the poetiplexes are more like galaxies than flat planes the way I visualize the prelimiplex.  While galaxies are said to form layers, they form thick ones.  As layers, their position in a poem can be anywhere.  Usually the second layer of a poem is its expressiplex.

The Expressiplex

A poem’s expressiplex, like all poetiplexes, consists of everything in the poem, but with a different facet showing than is visible in any other poetiplex.  Each poetiplex, that is, present a different view of the same collection of matter.  A poem’s expressiplex reveals what the poem says, denotatively and connotatively, and only that.  It is what a detailed paraphrase of it would reduce it to (semantically). What it says denotatively, while never absolutely objective since nothing can be that, is maxobjective, “maxobjective” being Grummanese for objective enough to satisfy the sane.

What it says connotatively is what most people would find it implicitly—or explicitly via established symbols or clear allusions or references—also to express. Determining the consensus is not as easy objectively to do as determining the consensus ultimately dictating words’ denotative meaning, but still maxobjective.    Note: if the poem is plurexpressive (i.e., if it employs more than one expressive modality besides words to achieve its central aesthetic effect—the way visual or sound poems do, for instance)–its graphics or sounds will contribute to both layers: a drawing of a house will denote a house, for example, and the sound of a gunshot will denote a gunshot.  (“Gunshout,” I mistyped that as, at first.  Aren’t words fun?!)  The house may also connote security, the gunshot violence, both becoming part of the expressiplex’s cargo.

The Signiplex

Ordinarily right below a poem’s expressiplex is its signaplex, a (generally simple) statement of what a consensus of knowledgeable, intelligent readers will agree the poem is, over-all.  The signiplex of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” for instance, is (for me—and you, too, if you have any sense) is The Celebration of the Joy of Reading a Great Poem. The signiplex of Basho’s famous frog haiku is the The Celebration of the Wonder of the Eternal Ongoingness of Existence’s Variety of Durations. (Note: a good poem’s signiplex contains–sums up, I would say–many subplexes; one Basho’s haiku’s signaplex contains, for example, is The Celebration of the Joy of Being One With Nature, Or With a Frog.[7]

(“Boulder,”I just realized, is “bolder” with a u added.  Sorry, I began wondering if I could–oops, that’s “cold” with a u added–make a Kostelanetzian[8] list of words like “gunshout.”  Extraneous opinion: isn’t it wonderful that no one has made English orthographically rational!)

Most signiplexes are a statement of a poem’s Unifying Principle, although a signiplex need not be capable of reduction to a unifying principle. I believe all the best ones do, although sometimes they are very difficult to pin down.  That may well be due more to my particular temperament than anything, though.

So, we have the expressiplex for what a poem says, and the signiplex for what it can be said to mean (beyond the simple meaning of the poem’s words, for the signiplex indicates the final “large” meaning of all the lesser denotative and connotative meanings of a poem).  Much more important than the expressiplex and signaplex, for me, are a poem’s next three poetiplexes: the “aesthetiplex,” “anthroplex” and “narratiplex.”

The Aesthetiplex

The aesthetiplex is my favorite.  It has no meaning, it just is. (See MacLeish.)[9]  It consists of all that makes the poem sensually pleasurable (as opposed to semantically enjoyable.  In my notes about it I mention “imagery” (and I should have written, “evocation” of existence’s sensual images, particularly its “deepest” ones), “freshness of expression,” “archetypality,” and “patterning.”  There are more, probably many more.

The Anthroplex

Then there is the anthroplex.  In the manner that the aesthetiplex expresses sensual imagery (and does not mean, but is), the human-centered anthroplex expresses an empathetic feeling of oneness with one or more other human beings.  Not “love” because that seems to me to have too wide a range of meanings to represent what I want it to here; “brotherhood” would probably do if the generic masculine were still allowed.  What I’ve come up with is “kincognition” for “the joyful recognition of being one with some other person or group of persons regarding something of consequence, like whom you want to win the super bowl. . .”  (I happen to look down on such poems, but that’s me, a male lout.  I can’t say I don’t write my share of them, though, and admire many by other poets.)

The Narratiplex

The third of what I consider to be the important poetiplexes, the narratiplex, expresses the story told by the expressiplex, if any (and I believe every poem tells some story, however fragmentary); its goal is Triumphancy[10], the (vicarious) feeling a poem’s engagent[10] experiences when the protagonist of a story the poem is telling reaches the goal of his quest.

The Utiliplex

There are two remaining poetiplexes.  One is the utiliplex.  It, like the signiplex, is a statement of a poem’s central meaning–not its semantic meaning, but its meaning as a utilitarian object, or (most commonly) its socio-economic meaning. A rhymed text you value because of what you learned from it, for instance. The pleasure of a celebratory affirmation of any significance is beside the point; what counts is what the text can supposedly do for you beyond any direct pleasure it can give you.    Here’s an example:

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

It’s from a wall of my old high school’s cafeteria. I don’t know who wrote it, but like it a lot–and believe in it! A pretty rhyme but didactic—that is, its utiliplex is dominant.  Its function is not to provide pleasure but to instill a valuable rule of conduct (however pleasantly). Therefore, it is not an artwork but a lesson.

The Extraneoplex (and Faciliplex and Sentimiplex)

The final poetiplex is the extraneoplex (“ehk STRAY nee oh fiss”10).  It consists of two subplexes, the “faciliplex” and the “sentimiplex.”  The former has to do with the facility of a poem’s maker.  I call it an extraneoplex because the skill of a poem’s making is extraneous to its value as a poem.  I accept it as a subplex because it can be part of a poem than gives people pleasure, however minor.  Pope’s incredible skill as a craftsman; the wondrousness of what Frost did with standard techniques when he composed, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Related to this is the sentimiplex.  This, as I hope one will guess, has to do with the sentimental value of a poem; Grandma wrote it, or your first boyfriend introduced you to it, or its author won a Nobel Prize.  Again, extraneous to the artistic value of the poem, but part of the poem nonetheless.

Although every poem is a mixture of all of these poetiplexes, some may be only microscopically present in a given poem, and one will generally usually clearly outweigh its others.  When a poem’s aesthetiplex is the dominant one, the result will be a lyrical poem; a dominant anthroplex will result in a people poem;[12] a dominant narratiplex in a narrative poem; a dominant utiliplex in an ornamented utilitarian text; otherwise the result will be some sort of bauble I haven’t yet a name for.

THE APPLICATION OF THE TERMINOLOGY

It is now time for the main event of this entry: an analysis of a poem employing all these poetic components and poetiplexes.

I’m afraid it’s one of mine.  My excuse for using it instead of some widely-admired poem by someone else is I’d just been making it, and was still thinking a lot about it. This entry gave me a good excuse to continue that out loud.  At the time, I thought the entry would contain six or seven poetry specimens, but once I got into it, I realized I had too much to say to cover more than one poem, if that.

A secondary consideration was that this blog is primarily for mathematics-related poems, and there weren’t many of them around I could use.  I doubt that I would have understood them as well as I understood my own poem, either.  Or maybe I would have, which would have discouraged me.  In any case it’s my poem you’ll be stuck with—after a glance at this:

 

It’s one of my earliest large visual poems. A xeroxial collage.  I used a template to trace out the letters and a Xerox copier to organize them into what you see above.  I consider it a visual haiku.  In any event, it’s an appropriate lead-in act for the poem I’ll soon be analyzing, for it’s a similar celebration of Mankind’s Exploratory Urge.  I will say little about it except that its central metaphor is intended to celebrate the reversal of outlook regarding the visible universe that I hope many of us underwent due to the moon landing.[13]

Now for my poem, a tribute to one of my greatest heroes:

Tribute to Columbus

Columbus has become a problematic hero for some, but not for me.  I consider what he did vastly greater than what our astronauts did, because men like him and his shipmates were allowed to take chances back then and took some into a Terra Incognito more unknown than mankind will ever again be able to explore into.  Not that I don’t greatly admire what the astronauts and the engineers who made their journeys possible did.  Interesting that no major poem (of length) I know about has yet commemorated those journeys.  Horribly sad, the return after, what was it, the second of the moon landings? to the edges of the earth’s atmosphere for so long, and who knows how much longer.

In my poem I took some poetic license regarding how pre-Columbian explorers stuck to the Atlantic’s edges.  The Scandinavians were as bold as Columbus, and did leave the northern edge.  But only for short distances in a series of sub-Columbian feats vastly less culturateurically[14] valuable than Columbus’s. Ditto others whom the winds may have blown west, like the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Celts.

About this poem, I’ll be truthful: it has to be considered a Major American Poem!  Two superior classical haiku (the first of which I added “quietly” to in order to get the 5/7/5 syllable pattern needed to make it classical).  The idea of “.001” as numerically a winter, and its multiplication by poems about winter (which I claim should suggest winter about to become spring, poems being equal to spring) to yield the spring of Modern Western Civilization).

Then the ellipsis going off the page into absolute mystery. . . . (thus paying homage to my Hungarian friend, Márton Koppány, King of Ellipses. No, make that “Grand Wizard of the Ellipsis”).   I like my choice of colors, too.  Finally, I claim that nothing is more major than the Eternal Quest, however defined.  (Even if Scientific American isn’t interested in going on mine.  They got me and my shipmates in mathematical poetry to the Canary Islands, though.)[15]

FULL-SCALE ANALYSIS OF “HOMAGE TO COLUMBUS”

The Poem’s Fundamental Components

As I use my four components for the first time as a practical critic (as, that is, an analytical commentator on a single poem), I am pleased at how it simplifies my job.  To begin with, note how I can start my pluraphrase, by which I mean a kind of paraphrase at its deepmost that I consider it the duty of a practical critic to carry out—by simply objectively listing everything that’s in a poem and stating the significance thereof:

1.  the semantic verbal components of “Homage to Columbus”: “.001,” “Homage to Columbus,” “the Eternal Quest,” the words in the two haiku, the ellipsis.  But also the dividend shed (as I call a long division example’s combination of “)” and a line) as a symbol verbally stating, “divided into”; and the grey line because it verbally says, “with a remainder of.”

Surely no one can disagree that the items on my list are not there or that the poem contains anything else that could be considered “semantic verbal components.”

2.  the sensual verbal components of “Homage to Columbus”: the sound of the poem’s verbal components when read aloud or sublingually pronounced (as every poem ought to be when read), and the visual appearance of them as elements of typography, most emphatically including their colors (in this case, because they are not all the same color, and their shapes (again, in this case, because they do not use the same font).[16]    Here’s the poem again.[17]

 

Since the poem has no sensual components save the verboauditory ones (i.e., the way the words sound when spoken) and verbovisual ones (i.e., the way the words look on a page), we can skip the averbal components of this poem and go quickly on to its poetiplexes.

THE POEM’S POETIPLEXES

The Poem’s Prelimiplex

There’s not much to say about its preliminplex, that being simply the matter the poem consists of before it denotes or connotes.  The poem can therefore (usually)[18] be said to begin to be a poem with its expressiplex, or what its denotative and connotative layers say.

The Poem’s Expressiplex

Its title makes its first statement, that it is a tribute to the famous explorer, Christopher Columbus. It should eventually become clear that the opening statement of this one’s main body of text (where a paraphrase of it will probably begin) is: “the quantity, .001, goes into the quantity, the Eternal Quest, a “9 winter poems,” etc., number of times, with a remainder of “something to follow,” the denotation of the ellipsis in the poem.  Closely connected to this statement is the poem’s secondary statement, that the quantity, 9 winter poems, etc., times the quantity, .001, equals the quantity, ships for the first time, etc.

Each of the two haiku must be paraphrased, too.  They are straight-forward denotatively.  The first verbally describes nine poems about winter that are somehow becoming a single thing that is somehow entering another time from the present, a time significantly distant from it.  The second is a verbal description of sea vessels said to be in the Atlantic Ocean out of sight of any shore. Both of these need connotative details also part of the expressiplex to clarify, as does “the Eternal Quest.”  So much for most of what the expressiplex denotes of significance that I’ve been able (fairly quickly) to turn up.

The expressiplex’s connotative cargo is fairly substantial.  It also begins with the poem’s title, which for most people will paint galleons into their reading of the poem, and—for many—admiring thoughts of heroism.  Others, alas, will be bothered by negative thoughts about the Big Bad West; the rest of the poem will clearly connote which side of that unfortunate controversy the poem is on.

That this and what I term the “subdividend product” are haiku give the poem a strong connotation of haiku-ness: serenity, reflectiveness, classical restraint, importance . . . The words of this one suggest a kind of historical nostalgia, I think, and of something beautiful (poems) taking place that has to do with the quietest, in some ways “deepest,” of the seasons.  Vagueness.

At this point, due to my probably excessive need to be thorough, I feel I must point out that I believe that the more a poem can plausibly connote, the better. I contend, however, that every poem connotes certain things plausibly enough to rate as maxobjective connotations.  The connotations of the haiku form I list above are such.  In fact, all of them seem to me to be objective enough for any reasonable person to accept.  A personal connotation of a downhill ride on a sled that I, and many others, may get from the haiku is subjective.  A personal connotation of such a ride down Hyde Hill in Harbor View on a flexible flyer which only I and, perhaps, a few others might get from it is a hermetic connotation.  A connotation of “winter” as “Martian Acrobats” is an insane connotation.

The other haiku I hope strongly connotes an exploratory splendor of some sort.  It should unloose other connotations.  These, and the connotations of the rest of the poem I’ll leave to my readers to find, and go on to the poem’s signiplex, the poem’s expressiplex having now been taken care of.  (Note: neither of my “haiku” is, to my mind, a full-scale haiku; the second, in fact, has only one image; they are to suggest, not be, haiku.)

The Poem’s Signiplex

This, as I’ve said, is mainly what I’ve used the terms, “unifying principle,” and “meaning” in other writings for (although it can also be its “minimalist conglomeration”).  I contend that my poem has a unifying principle, though I doubt any two people will agree on every detail of it. Most engagents, however, ought to accept at least the gist of the unifying principle I find it to have, which is, roughly, that the quest for a Final Understanding of a Significant Portion of Existence that Columbus’s voyages were is of eternal, archetypal supreme importance.  Or, to put it a step more generally, the poem is organized around a unifying celebration of the cultural value of heroic quests like Columbus’s.

Among the details required to make this a complete “meaning” are the fact that risk of some sort will always be involved . . . that going where no man has gone before is of central importance; that it can begin, perhaps most likely will begin, maximally far from success (as .001 is to whatever number represents success); that beauty will be part of it; that no final success is possible.

I am aware that this poem’s signiplex, and that of many poems, is close to a moral, but I don’t feel that makes them close to being advocature (i.e., not poems) because there is vastly more to the poem than its not-explicit moral.  Something, I would add, that no poem can escape having to some degree.

The Poem’s Aesthetiplex

Next up is the poem’s aesthetiplex, the goal of which is to deliver a maximum of sensual pleasure.  I split this pleasure into two kinds: precerebral and cerebral.  The first is quite simple (and most people would agree it exists): it is the direct pleasure certain stimuli automatically give one: the scent of certain flowers, primary colors, circles, certain patterns of sounds or shapes, housecats (I’m certain), the human face, the major chords, and so on.

The second is a little more complex (and will seem simplistic): it is what one feels upon encountering the sensually familiar, directly (a rhyme the poem makes you hear, for instance) or indirectly (for instance, Frost’s woods filling up with snow that his poem’s make you imagine).  That’s all.  It is important to note, though, that only the familiar will cause it, not the too-familiar.  The latter will cause indifference—unless too familiar, in which case one will experience boredom, painfully.  The unfamiliar will also cause indifference—unless too unfamiliar.

I worked out this little theory at age 26 merely thinking about music: how a Tchaikowski symphony first seemed painfully discordant—until I had forced myself to listen to it enough times (having learned it was supposed to be superior music) finally not to mind it; whereupon I quickly wanted to hear nothing but it for the rest of my life.  Until it abruptly didn’t seem that pleasurable anymore—and finally seemed horrible.

There’s more to it than that, but not all that much.  Context enters in by lessening or increasing the familiarity of the stimulus.  Life experiences can re-enliven something that had become boring.  But, basically, just thinking of Tchaikowski’s “Pathetique,” which I haven’t listened to for twenty years, gives me a stomach ache.  It’s a great piece of music but beauty is not eternal (except for sentimentalists).

In my theory of psychology, I postulate that all cerebral pleasure and pain, not just the pleasure or pain that artworks cause—the pleasure or pain the search for truth, social relations, a game of golf, and so on, cause, as well–is a matter of the brain’s comparing memories with incoming perceptions: if they are a bad match, one feels pain; a better match will be acceptable but not pleasurable; if the match is 85% (or whatever—I’m just guessing and doubt I’ll be around when academic psychologists finally measure it); when it gets over 90%, it becomes merely acceptable until it hits 95%, painfully.

Another way of putting all this is that one’s brain automatically predicts what a given moment will lead to.  To the degree it is accurate, one will continue what one is doing (and thinking) following–a path into a woods one is on, say.  Once it begins seeming less familiar, one will slow down—and start retreating if it becomes too unfamiliar.  Unless feeling a strong need for some reason to keep going, perhaps remembering similar fears or other bad feelings overcome.  All this makes biological sense.

Take, for instance, our instinctive hostility toward a genuine stranger— until he shows himself sufficiently predictable.  The preservation of the species requires one to be hostile to anything not yet understood sufficiently to deal with—to hate or fear it.  But, retreat far enough, and the unfamiliar will gradually until one’s curiosity drive takes over enough for one to stop retreating and eventually investigate it—and increase one’s familiarity with it.  A happy sense of adventure may result.  In any case, one will not retreat forever.

On the other hand, once something becomes so familiar one is irritated by it, however pleasurable it once was, one will turn to something else, perhaps even something painful that one hopes to conquer.  In this way natural selection keeps a species from stagnation.

Needless to say, both a poem’s cerebral and pre-cerebral effects combine and inter-relate in numerous ways, often quite complicatedly.  The net pleasurable effect of a superior poem is thus no easy matter to disentangle.  But I will now return to my poem’s aesthetiplex to try to do that for its aesthetically pleasurable effect.

I’ll start with its precerebral stimuli: its colors, the shapes of its letters, its ellipsis, and the sound of its words when subliminally pronounced as they should be.  Note: the context of the poem will differ from engagent to engagent, so the pleasure/pain ratio a given engagent experiences will differ.  I’m assuming one familiar with poetry, and with my work, and with a background more or less like mine—raised in suburban America, taught about Columbus, etc.  What I get out of the poem shouldn’t seem bizarre to such a person.

Probably none of the colors will cause pre-cerebral pleasure, because not primary colors, but ought to remind the engagent enough of pure blue, and perhaps pure yellow (which I contend are instinctively pleasurable, by themselves) to seem at least not unpleasant, and perhaps mildly pleasant.  The letters will be mildly pleasant, too, because varied enough in color and size and placement to be slightly unfamiliar. The circles will tend to give precerebral pleasure as will the straight lines.  (Probably not much because, although they are precerebrally pleasant, they, like all other data, will have their—“evaluational effect,” I call it—influenced by how familiar or unfamiliar they seem in context.)

The two zeros will “rhyme” with the first two dots of the incomplete ellipsis, too.  A zero with cause an engagent (at some point, if the poem is scanned as though it were a painting, which it in part is) to remember a dot, unexpectedly—that is, not predicted.  Example: think of one of Picasso’s misrepresentational paintings of a woman superimposed on the image of a real woman: the two will have enough in common to make the over-all image familiar, but the misrepresentation will warp it pleasurably away from over-familiarity.  Or maybe too far, but rescued by his colors.

A musical phrase followed by a variation on it is a song’s standard way of doing the same thing: the variation overlays the expected repetition of the first phrase—expected because repeating it closely enough, for long enough, soon enough (before forgotten).  And the second haiku will seem a visual near-prediction-come-true of the first.    Some of the letters in my piece may do this—a light green s performing a variation of a light blues.  Each set of three lines will seem, however slightly, a phrase followed by two variations on it. That everything is both unordinary (not a proper-looking poem!) but predictably laid out in straight lines is something else that may give cerebral pleasure. Some standard patterns like this one may be automatically pleasurable.

The rectangles, too, I believe are precerebrally pleasurable. I think the over-all design—the yellow/orange letters against the dark blue in the center and the two haiku flowering outward from it and the rest of it may have a fair amount of precerebral beauty, too, but I’m not able to pin that down.  Others may well be able to find other such pleasurable visual details I missed.  I hope so.  My hope as a poet is that all these will seem just pleasant enough to invite an engagent more fully into the poem.

Oddly, it was only when I made my final revision of this essay that I realized I’d not mentioned any of my poem’s instances of poetry’s most standard device: word-music, I guess because I didn’t go out of my way to produce much of it.  But I always listen to my words as I add them to a poem, and drop them when they don’t seem to me to flow, and at least occasionally happen into alliteration or assonance or euphony as they do here.  I try for rhymes, too, but got none here. Unless you count “po” to rhyme for “go,” and it does, it just doesn’t contribute to an end-rhyme.  “Win” rhymes with “in,” too.  In my poetics, “un” also rhymes with “in,” but this essay is long enough without my explaining that here.

There is an n-consonance in the top haiku’s first two syllables, and three eh-assonances and three l-alliterations in the haiku as a whole.  Three long-o’s and a long-u give it four euphonies, the long-u, long-o and ah being considered poetry’s three euphonies—its pre-cerebrally pleasurable sounds (babies, I believe recognize practically at birth as pleasurable—and maybe before birth).  The “ah” of “on” in the second haiku give it its only instance of euphony.  I hope the two haiku are more musically pleasurable than good prose but frankly don’t know whether or not that’s the case. They sound to my ear at least okay, though!  And the sound of the long division’s divisor, “one one-thousandth,” is gorgeous!

No, no—I was kidding.  Bad sound, but the “word’s” other virtues make up for it.  One last important variety of word-music some poems have and that an engagent should keep an ear out for is their rhythm.  This one has no formal meter but does have one subtle auditory effect that I feel I can boast about, although I can’t call it my doing: in fact, I just noticed it now for the first time: it’s the way the second line of the first haiku takes a looong time compared to the lines above and below, it seems to me suggests the unhurriedness of the unseveraling spoken of; note, too, how its two words’ final syllables form an alliteration with sort of the effect of a rhyme to suggest an action fully carried out.

The way the haiku form forces the two haiku here into single thoughts/images/sound-bites makes a nice series of repetitions that should seem in the proper zone of just-familiar-enough to give pleasure.  The dividend, too, is a haiku line (since it is five syllables in length).  Hey, it’s the first line of the haiku all quests begin . . .

Equaphors and Deviavices

I would divide the aesthetiplex in two and call the layer responsible for the poem’s effects just listed the “aesthetiplexal surface.”  It is where an artwork’s most accessible pleasures are stored.  Beneath it, in a manner of speaking, is the “aesthetiplexal underface” where the “sub-components” of poem responsible for higher pleasures, if any, are to be found.  The principal ones, for me, are the poem’s “equaphors” (basically its metaphors, similes and other figurative language), and its “deviavices” (basically those of its contents that deviate freshly from convention (which includes several items previously mentioned such as the color of the letters, the letters of most poems at this time being black).

Its equaphors are responsible for most of a poem’s cognitive value, its deviavices for just about all of its pleasuring capacity—in my view.  (Needless to say, a locution can simultaneously be an equaphor and a deviavice—and I say the best of them will be.)  Hence, it should surprise few that I go out of my way in this poem to heap each poem of mine as much as possible with both.)

The Poem’s Veritiplex

At this point in what I hoped would be my final draft of this essay I ran into a problem.  I was already feeling like the essay had defeated me—so many complications had been coming up, and now this!  I was supposed to be showing how the aesthetiplex carried a poem’s aesthetic cargo but here I was introducing something containing a poem’s cognitive value.  By which I had to mean its non-sensual abstract value.  But I had defined aesthetic pleasure as entirely sensual.

I was close to giving up.  Or drastically pulling away from this wretched attempt of mine to be detailedly definitive.  A few hours later, though, I recalled a few of my old ideas about the “beauty” of science, how what some scientists called “beautiful” was not strictly speaking that, but something else that delivered a pleasure equal to but very different from what my aesthetics claimed beauty delivered.  I then considered using a word for “scientific beauty”: “verity.”  (For a change, I’d found a real word, rather than bumbling out another of my seldom-popular coinages.)

I did not then add it to my aesthetic.  But I now had reason enough to do so.  Hence, I defined it as something that gave a person able to experience it an intense sense of logic lucidly bringing previously disparate ideas into an unarguably correct synthesis.  Or something like that.  The pleasure was experienced in a person’s reducticeptual (or “cognitive”) awareness, the locus of abstract reasoning and the like, not in his fundaceptual (or sensual) awareness, the locus of sensual perception that my theory of aesthetics claims is the only region of the brain capable of yielding aesthetic pleasure.

I hope I’ve only somewhat extended the main accepted meaning of “verity.”  If not, spell it “verrity” and consider it another coinage of mine.  In any case, I could now distinguish scientific (and other forms of what I call verosophical) pleasure from aesthetic pleasure, and give its stimulus its own name, however real scientists may deplore it.

It was an easy step from “verity” to the creation of one more poetiplex, the “veritiplex.”  That, I now decreed, ordained and ruled was what contained everything in a poem that was . . . “veritiful.”  A complication was that this would include a poetic component that was perceived as both beautiful and veritiful.  Solution: that element of a component perceived as beautiful was in the poem’s aesthetiplex; that element of the component perceived as veritiful was in its veritiplex.

There, you have just been at the site of a Historic Moment in the Cultural History of Our Time.

Back to the Poem’s Equaphors and Deviavices

We will now return to the aesthetiplex of “Homage to Columbus.”  As a whole, the poem is itself both a deviavice and an equaphor.  It is “deviavicial” in being what almost no poem is: a long division example.  At the same time, it divides terms no mathematical operation would be expected to divide.   Its doing that makes it also equaphorical, for it results in what I an implicit metaphorical expression for “this poem equals a mathematical operation,” and is therefore as elegant and correct as mathematics. The actual operation of long division is purely abstract, so something occurring on the poem’s veritiplex.  On reflection, I would say the equation of the operation of a long division example implicitly to the development of a poem is also expressed by the poem’s veritiplex.  (I’m just now working the latter into my poetics, so feeling very unsure of myself with it.)

The poem’s lesser deviavices include the use of the adjective “several” as a verb—after changing it as an adjective to its opposite–to (attempt) freshly to say “fusing into one”; the use of “long ago” after a preposition is unconventional, too; and the ellipsis as a word for “something to come,” or the like, and as an implicit metaphor for “leaving the edge (and going into the Unknown).”    The poem falls into two familiar patterns that most engagents will get mild pleasure from: the look of free verse poems and the look of long division the poem-look veers into.  Both should gain from being mild distortions of the way poems and long division examples look.

The poems’ becoming a single poem in the “long ago” acts, I hope, as a complex implicit metaphor for remembering (with “long ago” suggesting a country rather than a period of time).  The use of the adverb, “quietly,” should add a note of mystery. . . .  A further intended implicit metaphor—which may better be considered a symbol—is the unseveraling representing the coming of spring.  Near-hermetic, I suppose—except for my referring to the coming of spring in so many of my poems.

The poem only has three explicitly verbalized images, ships (Columbus’s galleons), the Atlantic and winter, all of them picturesque but not uncommon, so possibly slightly pleasant but not rivetingly so.

The Poem’s Archtyponents

One other important sub-component of a poem in my poetics is the archetyponent[19] or archetypal image (which I suspect is something like the “deep image” in Robert Bly’s formulation).  “The Eternal Quest” is the most obvious one here—man’s search for Final Understanding—of a geography, or of the nature of quests, or even of what poems can do—and of the Final Mystery that existence is, which is an archetypal idea in itself.  So, I just realize, that would put it in the poem’s veritiplex, although I suppose it has vague sensual connotations.    What qualifies as archetypal is in most cases pretty subjective, but I think ships, the Atlantic, and—certainly—winter, are that.  In any case, it is a poem’s archetyponents which give it what depth it has. Again, I hope other archetyponents can be found in my poem, but so far I’ve missed them.

The Poem’s Anthroplex

That does it for this poem’s main poetiplex, its aesthetiplex—and for its veritiplex.  So on to its anthroplex.  This, remember, is the contribution to the poem of those of its components having to do mainly with human (or other sentient) beings, particularly their thoughts and feelings, and their activities in stories they participate in, if any.  People poetry and narrative poetry.  Columbus is the only person mentioned in my poem, and he is only in its title.  But the ships in the poem must have sailors aboard, and the quest undertaken is undertaken by men.  The poem is thus neither a people poem nor (significantly) a narrative poem—although connoting the adventure undergone by Columbus and his men.  In other words, there is little to be said about its anthroplex—a major reason poems like it are not nearly as popular as mainstream poems, almost all of which are people poems.

The Poem’s Utiliplex

Similarly, there is almost nothing to be said about this poem’s utiliplex or utilitarianly lesson-bearing poetiplex. Unless you want to believe it is propagandizing for questing or the like (and I can’t claim it absolutely isn’t).  So, alas for educators (except for the few how may believe something that reminds children of Columbus is a good thing), my poem is of no value.  Ah, except that it may be able to wake up a few superior high school students.  Or rattle a few creative-types into cross-fertilizations that lead to commercially-successful new products!  Or . . . no, I’m not getting into this now.  Maybe in another entry.

The Poem’s Extraneoplex

I can’t say much about the poem’s extraneoplex because its wholly subjective effects will vary so much from engagent to engagent.  Certainly many19 will be awed by the incredible intellectual effort that had to have gone into its construction.  Others may find it just one more trivial product of a computer.  Etc.  I’m hoping that the Nobel Prize it wins (and I reject) will help its reputation with the Poetry Establishment, though.[21]

* * *

1 Scientific American may not be happy about it, but it proved an astrological prediction about my career right: according to the prediction, I was supposed to reach a peak in the arts last year.  Getting Scientific American to run my blog seems to have gotten me there, although I had hopes it would merely finally get me on the way to a much higher peak. 2 My definition of an expert in a given subject: “One who has produced a full-length coherent book or the equivalent on the subject that follows most of the established methodology of scholars seriously involved with the subject (e.g., logic) and definitions (although redefinitions, if revealed as such, should be permissible).  This definition may need work, but it should do for the purposes of this entry. 3 For what it’s worth, I myself define it as is a feeling of sudden, archetypally-consequential illumination about existence—celebratory illumination.  It’s not part of a haiku’s form, but something aimed for by it by the tension produced by its images, as indicated by its “haiku-moment-aimed arrow.”  (Urp.) 4 I’m seriously considering using “wordic” or some such in place of “verbal” strictly to mean “consisting of one or more words or equivalents of words such as the ampersand.  “Verbal” can mean that but means too many other things to be satisfactory for my purposes, as is the case with far too many words. 5 Whether songs are music or poetry or a third thing is a fascinating taxonomic question too complex for me to get into here. 6 Just in case you don’t know the poem, or have forgotten it, here is my translation:

7 My good friend Richard Kostelanetz has specialized as a poet in playing in this manner with words and phrases, making more of them, I am sure, than anyone else in the world, and more good ones, although more active in other fields than he is in poetry.

8 Might as well be nice to those of you who are inexcusably ignorant of Archibald MacLeish’s wonderful poem, and quote it for you:

9 I use the term, “engagent,” to signify anyone involved as a spectator, reader, appreciator, or the like, of an artwork.  An experiencer of an artwork in general.  I coined it because there seems not to be any word in English for it and I wanted a term that would emphasize all that an experiencer of an artwork was, as an experiencer of a visual poet is more than a reader or viewer.  It may not be needed, but I’d rather risk using more terms than strictly necessary than less.

10 I used “ss” to indicate the soft-c sound because I couldn’t find out how that was done in my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Not that I use the proper ways of indicating pronunciation otherwise, but I think my way should work well enough with most English-speakers.

11 There has to be a better term for this, but even I won’t accept “anthroceptual poem” or “anthroficial poem” as that.

12 To make it more clear, imagine the difference between being outside the display window of a store looking into it, and being inside a store looking through its display window out at what’s outside it.

13 One of my many coinages is “culturateur,” to represent “one who makes a significant contribution to the culture of his time.  A Beethoven or Newton—but there different levels, so a Stephen Foster or Charles Schultz also.  “Culturateurical” thus describes “an achievement of a culturateur.”

14 Ergo, blessings on Scientific American for forgetting for over a year that it was a mainstream publication.

15 Just as I consider the sound of the word, “No,” verbal when pronounced in the ordinary way, and even when—for example–emphasized as instructed by underlining or italics, but “meta-verbal” when roared in an oral presentation as it might be by a lion if it had the power of speech, I consider the shape of a word’s letters to be verbal if standard, but “meta-verbal” if hand-printed the way “001” is—in this context, a context in which all the other letters are in a standard typed font.

16 One of the many great virtues of this blog publication is that one can keep an item being discussed continually in view as the discussion progresses.

17 Highly innovative texts their makers and others (but not I) consider poetry may eschew semantic expressiveness, although it can’t avoid it entirely.  Hence, they could be said to not have an expressiplex.  This, however, is too arcane a matter even for this discussion.

18 I made up this term, and several others in this piece, on the fly; someday I or someone else, I hope, will improve them—although one or two may not need improvement.

19 See?  I am capable of humility.  I could have said “all.”

20 At this point, I thought I ought to sit on my essay for a while, then revise it one more time.  But then I realized that it would not be going to the Scientific American website where I couldn’t get at it.  It would be available at my own website where I could easily fix it whenever I needed to, so why not post it as is.  I mean, besides the fact that it’s horribly stupid! 21  So I posted it.  Comments welcome.

21 Yet another result of Scientific American’s dumping my blog is that I was able to take many more intellectual risks than I would have dared if I were writing for it.  Ergo, the entry’s unusual deviaviciality for better or worse.  (Its disgusting lengthiness, too—8,225 words.)

.                                                                      Bob Grumman

.

A New Vizlature Anthology     Small Press Review, Volume 29, Number 2, February 1997              Visuelle Poesie aus den USA, edited by Hartmut Andryczuk. 67 pp; 1995; Pa; Hartmut Andryczuk, Postlagernd D-12154, Berlin, Germany Toward the end of 1995 a new anthology of vizlature, or verbo-visual art, came out of Germany. It was edited by Hartmut Andryczuk. I was sent a copy of it because I have a couple of pieces in it, but–alas–I got no details concerning its price. Among the sixteen participants in Andryczuk’s anthology is Marilyn R. Rosenberg, quietly one of this country’s premiere vizlateurs for some two decades. She is represented by a landscape-sketch close enough to an outline to double as a map, thus exploiting the tension of the literal versus the abstract. Her piece is all in calligraphic lines of various degrees of thickness and delicacy that delineate clouds (or mountains) forming above water foaming into being among juts of a landmass. The latter includes an area that could be either a tilled field or a lined page, but in either case is a locus of creativity. At various points in the composition are a Q, and an A (to suggest question/answer), three X’s, a C and a T–and, right together, a W, an upside-down W (or M), and a sideways W (or E), to put us in a Japanese-serene country where a breeze can tilt West to East, and all hovers mystically just short of nameability. In dramatically unbreezeful contrast to Rosenberg’s piece is John Byrum’s “Transnon,” which consists, simply, of “TRA/ NS/ NON” in large white conventional letters against a black background. With the two cardinal directions missing in Rosenberg’s composition (north and south) in it, and black & white . . . and a backwards rendering of the word, “art,” this work seems almost monumentally engaged with ultimate dichotomies. Two more map/drawing/poems are presented by Richard Kostelanetz, from an early work of his using text-blocks of pertinent city impressions (e.g., “Boutiques,/ mostly in/ basements,/ their names/ as striking/ and transient/ as rockgroups:/ ‘Instant Pants’/ ‘Pomegranate’ . . .”) to represent various blocks of New York such as that defined by First and Second Avenues and St. Mark’s Place. Very local-feeling, intimate, accurate. A similar kind of opposition is at the heart of one of Nico Vassilakis’s contributions to this volume, “foremmett” (“emmett” being famous visual poet, Emmett Williams). It consists of a square with two parallel lines drawn horizontally across it near its middle; just above the upper line is “BL”; just below the lower line is “RED”; in between them is “UR.” In the corners of the upper section of the diagram the word, “blue,” is repeated; the word, “red,” is repeated in the corners of the lower section, while “purple” is printed once at each end of the narrow middle section. Another minimalist, almost overlookable piece that teems with the blur of science and sensuality, or where blue analysis becomes, or arises from, a red mood. . . . Three poems by Dick Higgins carry on this kind of letterplay in homage to Jean Dupuy, ina blom and wolf vostell. The first, just four lines in length, demonstrates the technique: “JEAN DUPUY/ NUDE JAY UP/ DUNE JAY UP/ PUN JAY DUE.” Then, following a charming mathematico-visual tribute to his daughter Amy, Karl Kempton does a lyrical take on the moon that includes a partial reflection of the moon as “wo u,” to magically suggest a fragment of “would,” or moon-distant wishfulness. Chuck Welch, active in mail art since 1978 as “the Crackerjack Kid,” contributes a moving swirl of words enacting Gaea’s flow which ends with “this dream truss/ clerestory/ Gaea’s blueprint,” but also a medallion-sort of visual poem that I liked less well: it looks nice but too boiler-platedly) condemns white C(IA)olonialism and genocide, for my taste. A “cubistic” specimen of Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Go series is here, too, with a more clearly visual poem from the same series that evokes a rescue at sea, a flare filling the sky with o’s while the excitement of the situation fills it with oh’s. St. Thomasino, and many of the other artists in the volume, provides readers with a short artist’s statement, by the way, which are quite useful. Others with first-rate pieces in this volume are M. B. Corbett, Harriet Bart, Harry Burrus, Spencer Selby, Stephen-Paul Martin, John M. Bennett (who does terrific things with near-empty frames of the tackily rubber-stamped kind well-known to those familiar with his work) and Paul Weidenhoff. All in all, Andryczuk’s anthology gives a valuable if rough idea of the terrain of current American vizlature.

 

Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Two

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 9-10, September-October 2006

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Avoid Long Lines, Read My Poetry.
Poet: Ed Conti; Editor: Mary Veazey.
www.stickspress.com/conti.html.

The Heron’s Nest.
Editor: Christopher Herold.
www.theheronsnest.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

Mike Snider’s Formal Blog.
www.mikesnider.org/formalblog.

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

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

 

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Ed Conti doesn’t know much about haiku, but he’s awfully funny. Mary Veazey has devoted a section of her website, Sticks Press, to a collection of his work that includes this “Palindromic Haiku”:

Night!
I with gin.

I consider him (at times) an infraverbal poet–that is, one who composes poems whose main interest is what happens within their words, as in the palindrome. Here’s another of his haiku that’s at the site: “How do I love thee?/ Let me count the syllables/…sixteen, seventeen.” Here, again, is an infraverbal interest in the constitution of words much more than in their denotations. Actually, the first specimen might pass as a haiku (by my roughest definition): one image followed by a second that somehow interacts with the first in an emotionally meaningful way. Night; (depression); alcohol. The second just makes fun of the mechanics of provincials’ haiku, the kind that scrupulously have 5, 7, and then 5 syllables.

The temptation is to quote all of Conti’s poems, for they are all funny. I’ll just quote one more, the very short “Still Life”: “Fly swatter./ Fly flatter.” Conti has long ones at the site, and funnier ones, if you can believe it. There are twenty, altogether, deftly chosen and near-perfectly displayed by Mary Veazey, the site’s founder and editor. I spotlight the collection here in my continuing endeavor to prove the value for poetry of the Internet because they demonstrate how good some of the poems on it are, but also how varied, from light verse like Conti’s to, say, the mathematical poetry often at my po-X-cetera site, or the concrete poetry at Dan Waber’s minimalist concrete poetry.

At Mike Snider’s Formal Blog, you can find sonnets (including many by Mike himself that I very much like and have discussed at my blog) and commentary on that form, while several sites are devoted to haiku, such as –well, my site, again, at times–the Heron’s Nest, which is a webzine, not a blog. I mention the latter simply because it was the first one Google found for me when I searched for “haiku”–and because I thought the haiku on its home page by Steven Thunell, a good one: “summer morning/ squeak/ of the bicycle seat.” Lovely evocation of quiet speed–and summer.

The first haiku in the zine’s Winter 2006 issue is another good one: “winter evening/ a light is burning/ in the back of the house.” It’s by Jerry Ball. Some of the others aren’t as appealing to me–too many comparisons of spring and graveyard concerns–you know, rebirth and death. But the superior haiku make up for the lesser ones (and I haven’t come across a haiku publication yet whose contents were more than ten percent first-rate, at most).

Dan Waber’s blog, minimalist concrete poetry, is an exceptionally good blog from my point of view because of the range of its coverage: all kinds of minimalist poetry and visual poetry–and visimagery with textual elements (“visimagery” is Grummansprach for “art”–when “art” means “visual art”). As I write this (around the beginning of May 2006), a set of terrific artworks by Carlos Luis is featured on its homepage that consist of fractured letters, or shapes suggestive of fractured letters. If they have any semantic value, I’ve missed it, but I find them stunning as stark depictions of language–not language, but visual metaphors for language.

One, for instance, has an F-shape at the top whose lower horizontal bar (whatever its correct name is) extends into a completely- connected downward loop (if you can call something without curves a loop) of hopelessly garbled “speech”–actually black rectilinear irregularities few would take as letters in any context but this one. A compelling shape that reminds me of Klee, but beyond that, one can almost hear the f-sound it makes as it seems (to me) to aggress like a demented steam shovel going who-knows-where to devour something the way language can in some ways be thought to devour things. The work is hugely textual–but visually textual, not semantically textual, so a pure monochromatic Matisse cut-out.

Also currently at Waber’s site is Karl Kempton’s “VISUAL POETRY: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions.” This is well worth reading, although it competes with my own take on visual poetry’s history. For instance, Kempton calls Blake a visual poet, I call him a painter/poet who illustrated his own poems, or captioned his illustrations with his own poems. He thinks ancient rock paintings are visual poetry, I think they’re . . . rock paintings, sometimes (possibly) with words. In short, he covers way more territory than I think such a history ought to. But praise be to the Internet for making such a history of a neglected sub-genre available–not only to read, but to fire comments at, something, alas, no one but I and British visual poet Lawrence Upton have done in the first month or two the piece has been up (with Kempton and Waber responding to Upton at the site, and to me back-channel).

The final site I have space to mention is a kind of multiple site run by Michael P. Garofalo. One portion of it is an excellent resource for those interested in the sort of things that are at Waber’s site. It includes an enormous number of links to full books such as Art and People, by noted visual poet, Clemente Padin, which Karl Young, in his preface to this version, calls, “probably the most important of Clemente Padin’s critical works”; and Padin’s Selections from VISUAL POEMS 1967 – 1970, both of which are at Young’s light & dust site. One section of Garofalo’s multiple site is devoted to Garofalo’s own fine concrete poems. The third section of his site I have a URL above for specializes in Text Poems, ASCII-Art-Poems, Shape Poems, Calligrams, Art-Poems, and Lettrisme. Again, thanks to the Internet, a resource of materials only such rare places as Ruth and Marvin Sackner’s Visual and Concrete Poetry Archive in Miami had available as little as ten years ago.