Entry 1071 — The Errntlexeme

April 12th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 1053 — Manywhere-at-Once, the Metaphor

Monday, March 25th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 1054 — Manywhere-At-Once, the Rhyme

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 1056 — MatO, Review & Corrections

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 1057 — Manywhere-at-Once, the Mathephor

Friday, March 29th, 2013

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

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

Entry 1058 — Poetry Appreciation Accommodance

Saturday, March 30th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 1060 — Surprise Quiz on the Visiophor

Monday, April 1st, 2013

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

Entry 1061 — A Mistake

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entry 1062 — Correction

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

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

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

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

(Tarzan Cry Here.)

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

Entry 1063 – Another Visiophor

Thursday, April 4^th, 2013

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

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

Entry 1064 — Two More Visiophors

Friday, April 5th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

 
 
 

Mad Poet Symposium, Part Two

 

---

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

---

 

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

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

 

---

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neologiology

---

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

---

The Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms.
Sitemaster: Miekal And.

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

 

---

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Grumman

Although modern visio-textual art has been around for most of the century, it has for a long time been without a satisfactory taxonomy, although a few scattered eccentrics, I among them, have named bits and pieces of the field. Now, however, it has found its Linnaeus–in the person of Me. Or so I will attempt to establish here.

My visio-textual taxonomizing began some twenty or so years ago, in the early seventies. Exposed then to the Emmett Williams and Mary Ellen Solt anthologies of concrete poetry, I realized that certain poems therein were not verbal! That is, while they had textual matter, they had no words! How could poetry, from ancient times a verbal art, have no words? The taxonomic solution to this seems simple now, but it took me a while to figure out. I simply separated art comprised of both textual and visual matter into two kinds, one in which the textual matter has precedence, and one in which the visual matter has precedence. I called the first of these “visual poetry,” a term others were using at the time for “concrete poetry” and which I thought more precise than the latter (as well as free of certain unfortunate socio-polical connotations that “concrete poetry” had begun accumulating). I tried various names for the other of the two, settling (after many years) on “textual illumagery,” the latter word being my term for visual art.

The two kinds of art together I came to call “vizlature” (for “visual literature,” even though I question whether textual illumagery is a kind of literature). Later I expanded “vizlature” to its present meaning as art that contains both textual and visual matter (or: visio-textual art).

The first poet outside the Solt and Williams anthologies whose work I tried my taxonomy out on was Karl Kempton. His vizlature split quite neatly into my two kinds. Take, for instance, his “JUMP/SKIP/FLIP/LEAP,” the poem directly following. On the surface, it depicts in op-art fashion exactly what the words in its title verbally mean–with consonance and a rhyme visually as well as auditorily collaborating in the process, and glittering into the pleasant surprise of the poem’s identical four smallest rectangular prisms. At the same time, on a subtler level, the poem forms a pulsatingly energized flower to visually serve as what I term a “juxtaphor” (or implicit metaphor) for the child- lithe love of the physical life that jumping, skipping, flipping and leaping express. In short, the poem’s words say what it is about, and its visual representation on the page expands what it is about into poetry. It is thus clearly a visual poem.

 

 

It is also an example of a classical concrete poem in that it contains nothing but text. There are still those who argue that a genuine visual (or concrete) poem should, like Kempton’s poem, rely on the arrangement of its text only for its visual effect. The poem by Clemente Padin below, with its boarded window acting as a juxtaphor for what the death of her husband does to a woman (i.e., both reduces her by a letter, and closes her) would thus not qualify as a visual poem. This is absurdly limiting–and a leading reason that “visual poetry” is in much wider use now than “concrete poetry” for speaking about these sorts of poems.
 

 

Another Kempton work, a piece from a sequence in homage to Erik Satie that he composed on an electric typewriter in 1976, nicely demonstrates what I mean by a textual illumagery, for although it is entirely textual, consisting of nothing but upper-case D’s, it has no (explicit) words. One at first wonders what the point of the D’s is–why D’s instead of A’s or Q’s or dots or dashes of purple? A study of the occult sciences and related disciplines might provide the answer, for I know Kempton to be highly conscious of the numerological, astrological and/or hermetic values of the letters he chooses. For those of us without a Jungian temperment, though, the letters’ suggestion of sounds and near-sounds, and of language, and their visual value as design elements are their only aesthetic value. That, however, turns out to be a great deal. As dots of sound or near-sound, the D’s here seem to chant the poem they comprise into unsilent being. Meanwhile, by severely reducing his D’s connection to language, Kempton alerts us to their visio-aesthetic charms–such as the tension between their rounded and straight sides (which brings sail-filling breezes to mind, among other things, for me).

 

But the D’s retain their identity as elements of language however asemantically Kempton has used them, so also suggest something of the way dots of language build matter. At the same time they build a second tension, this one between their ambience as abstract symbols and the Klee-like purely sensual appeal of the visual design Kempton has created. This latter, by the way, I see as depicting a fellow half-jumping as he holds up a poster bearing Good News (and how the D’s vivid change from outline to background accentuates that Good News!), but it is obviously open to scores of other equally plausible, and enjoyable, interpretations. By any standard, the work is a wonderful piece of art, whatever it’s taxonomized as, and I emphasize this to fight the misconception of so many in the field that to call something not a visual poem is to denigrate it. For me the best textual illumages have always been absolutely as good as the best visual poems.

For a while my simple division of vizlature into visual poetry and textual illumagery worked quite well. Then I began being exposed to visio-textual collages, like the work below, which is from Bill DiMichele’s 1983-4 sequence, (Above) At The Meeting Of White Witches. Here (and interactively throughout DiMichele’s sequence as a whole) the juxtapositioning of incongruous texts and graphics boils up a brew rich enough to keep commentators going for decades. Among the highlights: the wend of “in” from “brains” to “things” to “unkingly” to “thin”; the strange brother-or-cousin act of “briars” and “brains”–with each other and with “Tee thand things” (which calls to mind images of the brain as briars/teeth that catch things/cause pain); the relationship of Jesus, especially the Jesus of the Turin Shroud, to credit cards; the significance of the other references to religion, and to the chart of the “cosmic octaves of radiation” a part of which DiMichele shows here; the distorted man fondling the somehow sexually vibrant female carcass so near “briarsand brains”; the “thin fairgrounds” that consciousness, or reality, ultimately is . . . Such a combination of words and graphics had to be considered a visual poem–but it was so much different from visual poems like Kempton’s “JUMP/SKIP/FLIP/LEAP!” Moreover, if I defined it as visual poetry, wouldn’t consistency compel me to include comic books, cartoons, illustrated poems–any combination of texts and graphics, in fact–in my visual poetry category? I thought it would. So I added a third category to vizlature. I named it “illuscriptation” at first, then “illuscription.” The difference between an illuscription and a visual poem seemed easy enough to pin down: the first’s visual elements were separate from its textual elements whereas the second’s were fused with its textual elements. 

 

My taxonomizing gained momentum from that point on. Soon I was distinguishing visual poetry from “visually-enhanced poetry,” which is poetry printed in a manner that increases its ability to please but does not significantly amplify its core meaning; a poem written in a beautiful calligraphy would be an example, or a poem whose initial letter is in color and perhaps made into a picture as in certain illuminated manuscripts. So I decreed that the visual part of a visual poem had to work metaphorically with its verbal part. When this proved unwieldy, I backed down (though I continue to believe that most of the best visual poetry is visio-textually metaphoric). My definition of visual poetry became: poetry containing visual elements that are fused with, and approximately as expressively consequential as, its verbal elements.

For several years I was content with my four categories of vizlature: visually-enhanced poetry, visual poetry, illuscription and textual illumagery. Recently, though, “illuscription” became problematic. First of all, it covered too much that was clearly not poetry (like cartoons); it also covered visio-textual collages that almost everyone in the field called visual poetry; and it covered poems (illustrated poems) that no one considered visual poetry. Consequently, I decided to use it as my term for comic books, comic strips and cartoons only, and re-assign the poetries I had been calling illuscription to some other category of vizlature. I decided there were just two poetries to re-assign: (1) illustrated poetry, whose name should be self-explanatory, and (2) poetry containing but not fused with aesthetically consequential visual elements–which I named “visiocollagic poetry” because it is so often a kind of collage. The former I put in my visually-enhanced poetry category, the latter in my visual poetry category.Since I had previously considered only vizlature whose visual and textual elements were fused to be visual poetry, I now needed a name to distinguish such poetry from its new partner in the visual poetry category. I dubbed it “visualloyic poetry,” the adjective being a combination of “visual” and “alloy.”

“Visualloyic” and “visiocollagic” are stumbly long names but it shouldn’t matter much as it’s unlikely they’ll be used by anyone but connoisseurs and similar specialists. For such persons, however, they should be useful. Of course, if anyone were to come up with better names for these–or any of the other awkwardly-named poetries in my taxonomy–I’d be delighted.One other task I had to take care of was naming illustrated poetry’s now nameless partner in the visually-enhanced poetry category–the kind costumed in purely-decorative calligraphy or the like. I was straight-forward this time, naming it “typographically-heightened poetry.”

So involved did I get with my definitions and neologies that I finally recognized that the textual and visual elements of many pieces that even I at my most rigorous termed visual poems were not truly fused as I claimed they should be in such poems. The Padin piece below illustrates the problem. The hand depicted in it is not fused with its words although it is unarguably an intimate part of the sentences the poem half-spells (such as the amusing one about the unfortunate miscompletion of the delicate “idea” with a letter from the leaden “word”; or, going in an opposite direction, the one about how precisely the creative hand must place each letter to build something viable out of language). Ergo, I refined my definition of visual poetry to: poetry containing visual elements that are fused or otherwise clearly integrated with, and approximately as expressively consequential as, its verbal elements. 

 

As for textual illumagery, I now divide it into textualloyic illumagery and textcollagic illumagery, to parallel visualloyic and visiocollagic poetry. Textualloyic illumagery is art consisting of averbal textual matter that is fused or otherwise clearly integrated with its visual matter. (It can also contain verbal textual matter that is obviously of no semantic significance like a cut-out from a newspaper shaped to represent a man, the particular words in the news-stories having no real relevance–they’re just there to indicate that the man is composed of language, or of news, or whatever.) Textcollagic illumagery, like visiocollagic poetry, is visio-textual art whose visual and textual elements are separate from one another. It differs from visiocollagic poetry only inasmuch as its textual elements are averbal.

I continue not to warm to the idea of counting textual illumagery as visual poetry, but it seems few in the field are going along with me. And there is some sense in the argument that the textual elements of such art put an aesthcipient significantly in the verbal part of his mind as well as the visual: by providing a verbal ambience, and by being pronounceable (or nearly so), and in discussing language if not quite becoming it. So my position now is neutral: I offer textual illumagery as a form of vizlature and leave it up to the rest of the world (albeit mainly those working in vizlature as poets and/or critics, I hope) to decide whether it ought to be considered visual poetry.To round off my system, I include under vizlature a category which is for text-containing visual art that is not textual enough to be textual illumagery what my visually-enhanced poetry category is to graphics-involved poetry that is not graphic enough to be visiocollagic or visualloyic poetry: infoscriptioned illumagery. The adjective in that term comes from “infoscription,” my term for such things as captions, titles, labels and comic-strip dialogue-balloons (which can be considered elaborate labels for drawn characters’ speech). To put it simply, infoscriptioned illumagery is visual art that has labels or the like affixed that are basically informational rather than expressive. So a painting of a streetscene with the names of stores displayed, making it textual, would not be a specimen of textual illumagery.

Going the other way–to a taxonomical level above visual poetry, that is–I’ve set up the category, “pluraesthetic poetry,” for poetry that breaks expressive decorum by making more or less as much, and as important, use of one or more other expressive modalities than the verbal such as mathematics, music or visual art. It would exclude infoscriptioned illumagery as not poetry but cover everything else mentioned (unless it were agreed that textual illumagery were not poetry, either). Higher up in my system there’s “Burstnorm Poetry,” followed by Poetry, then Literature–which completes my taxonomy as far as vizlature is concerned. Needless to say, my taxonomy is not perfect. Not only are some of the names of its categories less than sonorous or memorable, but the sheer number of sub-divisions in it multiplies what bp Nichol called “border blur” to make subjective guesswork hard to avoid. What, for example, is a Grummaniacal Taxonomist to make of the following piece by W. Mark Sutherland?

 

This gave me all kinds of trouble. In a way, it’s just a picture of forks, with a peculiar label (plus a title), which would make it infoscriptioned illumagery. But the (to me, brilliant/hilarious) point of the piece is the abruptly “mathocentric” refusal of the label to finish, preferring to mispell what is of mathematical significance in the picture than to say what it depicts, and that depends on something visual, the absence of a letter. That absence could be just verbal–except that it wouldn’t be noticed if it didn’t happen in a designated frame, under a picture that seems to expect a fourth letter to finish naming it. The text and graphics of the piece assuredly work together to produce its main aesthetic/philosophical meaning–and do so integratedly. Therefore, in spite of first appearing to be too secondarily textual to even be textual illumagery, then–fleetingly–seeming perhaps visiocollagic, it finally proves to be a visualloyic poem . . . in my expert but subjective opinion.

 

Far easier to classify is jwcurry’s “LINE 4.” It is almost surely a deteriorated poem of some kind but now illegible. It is therefore a textual illumage–to be precise, a textualloyic illumage–whose subject is the disintegration of texts, or poems, or language, or whatever (bringing to mind Ozymandias, among other things). Or maybe it is about language slowly coming to life.

 

Similarly, the arresting “review” of (or response to) b. dedora’s he moved, which is also by curry, is a textualloyic illumage–which suggests interesting things about fading-or- congealing bits of language, in contrast with an established “word” (the “bihhh”).

 

But then there’s Mark Laba’s snark piece, which seemed similarly textual but not verbal to me. In another essay I said the following about it, “If some critic can paraphrase its verbal fore-burden and show how that connects with its visual matter, I’ll (ahem) allow it to be called a visual poem, but for now it looks to be a textual illumage to me.” Luigi-Bob Drake took up the challenge. Here’s what he said in an e.mail letter to me: “th top level, in stenciled letters, reads: “skitzofrenia is an i for eye”. schizophrenia is “misspelled”, with the substitutued “skit” homophone emphasizing the dramatic (as well as praps role-playing?) aspect of th clinical imbalance referred to. ‘skitzo-frenia’ is also partially obscured, whited out, as many schizophrenics attempt to hide or deny their condition–and as society, too, is apt in some circumstances to be in denial ov mental illness.

“next, visual cues, in the form ov the arrows, are given to force the vertical reading of ‘is’ ‘an’–an ‘unnatural’ direction, as well as a disjunction of the ‘ia’ from it’s preceeding word; in both aspects, the mode of perception is not the normal one, with iconic visuals taking precedence over traditional reading (thinking) habits. this leads to the last line, in which visual perception (“eye”) is somehow in transaction with the self (“I”) of the poem–traded for? substituted? or in place of? it suggests, to me, that th ‘I’, th schizoprhic subject ov the poem, has lost his ‘self’, or her vision of’ ‘self’, perhaps overwhelmed by perceptions too chaotic or distorted to be intepreted…

“But what ov the Snark, in the background level of the poem? obviously referring to the Lewis Carroll poem, in which the crew goes off in search of the elusive creature, only to find that the particular Snark they are hunting is in fact a ‘Boojum’–and coming upon a Boojum, ov course, leads to one’s own disappearance, as the hapless Baker finds out at the end of the poem. the hunt for the snark, and the resulting disappearance of the self, echoes th subject’s search for sense in a visual realm & loss of sense of self w/in the disease. when the Baker disappears, he’s in the process of saying ‘it’s a boojum’ but only gets out the first syllable of the last word–his final ‘”oooo…’ echoed in the background here, as well as echoing praps a cry of pain & loneliness that is so symptomatic of schizophrenia…”

So: the work is a visual poem, after all–a visualloyic one. And now that I’ve finally brought this essay into a patch of words by someone who knows what he’s talking about, I think it’s a good time to end it.
.

---

 

The British-American Panatomist Movement

.

---

Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2013

---

The New Arcana.  John Amen an Daniel Y. Harris.
2012; 115 pp. Pa; NYQ Books, Box 2015, Old Chelsea Station, New York NY10013. $14.95.
www.nyqbooks.org

---

The New Arcana is a fascinating book, a kind of scrapbook of the literary cutting edge scene that has existed in the West for the past fifty years, with a partial inclusion of the Dadaists and the like from earlier times that is alarmingly accurate although completely hallucinated by its two authors, John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, whose photographs and bios at the end of the book position them firmly near the center of the post-art, meta-art, and inter-psychometastatic aesthetics their book is about.

I would place William S. Burroughs at the origin of what The New Arcana deals with.  Many of its forty or more characters seem modeled in one way or another on him–on his connection to drugs and violence (he accidentally fatally shot his second wife, I think while under the influence of drugs but am not sure) and seeming craziness as an artist, to be exact).  Take Jughead Jones and Sadie Shorthand, the book’s first two super-avant-garde super-geniuses.  Jughead (appearing without Archie but elsewhere the same comicbook hero he was for me well over fifty years ago) is quoted as saying, “Dad, what you call your life is just an epistemological construct,” on his tenth birthday.  As for Sadie, she is quoted a great deal, as when, during her school trip to France when she was sixteen, she commented, “Mathematics is a thousand ladders to nowhere./ Theology is a newborn sibyl cooing in the darkness.”  Daft, but . . . poeticophilosophically somewhere valuable, say I.  Her quote for her senior yearbook is, “To be God—now that’s a strange karma.” Elsewhere she wrote, “And is an illusion.”  Both die young, Jughead possibly having killed Sadie, for his trial is mentioned.  Little is for sure in this book, however.

Almost all of the book is very funny (always dead-panned) parody of impossibly intellectual artists and thinkers like Jughead and Sadie; and Enrico the Insouciant; Constance Carbuncle, who “before her first lobal earthquake,” was “dubbed a galactic prodigy, blessed with  four-dimensional visions, a truly acrobatic intellect, amygdalae pulsing with the electricity of a two hundred and eighteen point intelligence quotient,” whose competency hearing is the main subject of the book’s second section; Freddie Brill of Sir Adrian the Fob-Murderer; Klaus Krystog di Moliva (1874 – 1936), a forerunner of “Panatomism,” the main art movement chronicled in The New Arcana; Amanda O’Brien, who may be the sole semi-sane character in the book; Sir Walter Springs-Earwing III (an excerpt from whose Commencement Address, Harvard Divinity School, is quoted; and the murderer Banders Griffin, a photograph of whose four- or five-year-old smiling son holding a little American flag on 4 July 1992 is shown.  Many of these are more than just names.  Just about all of them are as nuts in similar ways as Burroughs but persons in their own rite (pun intended).  All kinds of violence happen to them, too.

The book is full of deftly-chosen exactly-right inappropriate illustrations, many in color. One, for instance, is of the sculpted head of a famous Roman emperor whose name I can’t remember—in the middle of a text about “contingent or concomitant psychic structures . . . as readily observed as is the concentric relation of a quark and an atom”—which the emperor may be gazing at.

Which reminds me to say that the collage by Mary Powers, “The New Arcana,” which extends from the back cover across the spine and over the front cover is wonderful as a stand-alone, but also a wonderfully full impression of the contents of The New Arcana.  I feel I could easily devote this entire review to it in such a way as to do justice to both the collage and the book.

The non sequitur is the literary device of choice in The New Arcana (as it has been in most literary academics’ idea of innovative poetry for the past forty years or more).  Here, for example are three sentences from a play featured in Section Two: “Bless the 1990s, my ancestors raised on Ecclesiastes and the hickory switch.” “Oh boy, kitsch, daiquiris, margueritas, beef jerky.” And “Who shall actually insist on the immutability of physics when his wax wings fail?”

I mentioned Amanda O’Brien earlier.  An excerpt from her essay on “The American Panatomists” is given two-and-a-half pages at the end of Section Three, 7/9ths of the way through the book.  The essay sounds to me almost Coleridgean, perhaps only because at least an order of magnitude less loony than most everything else in The New Arcana.  It does seem somewhat of a satire on the over-analyticality of too many academic critics, but it also makes sense (to me)—as when it says that “paradox and balance” are “the primary muses” of the American Panatomists (which you can take as the recent American avant garde).  “The Surrealists,” it goes on to say, “even at their least dogmatic, were essentially nihilists, at least theoretically, in terms of their relationship with egoic consciousness.  In short, they were clear about ‘what not to do,’ about who/what the enemy was: the conditioned mind.  But the Am-Panatomists are less rigid . . . (striving) for a precise balance when it comes to navigating numerous aesthetic and methodological antipodes: cohesion and dissolution, linearity and non-linearity, meaning and non-meaning, sequentiality and non sequitur, traditionalism and rebellion.”  In short, the essay makes the “Am-Panatomists” seem at least moderately not insane—and soon verifies it by quoting one of their poems with the formatting off because I don’t know how to get it right at this site:

Paranoia as the ivy sprawls.       When it matters least,     specks of justice.     Why must it always be rainbows or   geometry?             Most have natal anguish and repeat          themselves.             I think this has something     to do with ambivalence.

Part crazy, part child-dimwitted, but part edging out of the confused pretentiousness of most academic writing about the avant garde–particularly the “post-modern” avant garde (and even my own writing about innovative art at times)–into what seem to me compellingly valid statements about what art best is.  So I recommend this adventure as good for laughs, unexpected bubblings of poetry, valuable skewerings of bad critical thinking, and glimpses of paths into mental precincts worth exploration.  Amen and Harris are terrific clowns, but also occasionally poet-philosophers.

.

Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Three

 

---

Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 11-12, November-December 2006

---

Chris Lott’s Blog.
www.chrislott.org/2003/09/01/why-this-blog-sucks.

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

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

 

---

.

Petulant Muse

Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! —
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!

You’ll be important when we’ve finished it —
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem taught in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!

And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.

Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.

.

I’m sneaking this poem by Mike Snider into a column ostensibly about the Internet because it’s the first poem in Mike’s book, 44 Sonnets, which he advertises at his blog (where he also writes fascinating essays about formal verse), and because I say the following about it at my blog: “I’d call this a serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish, the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard to me, which I mean as a compliment.”

Ergo, the poem nicely serves to demonstrate the virtue of the Internet as a place where you can easily find out about worthwhile poetry you would have trouble finding out about anywhere else–and discussions of it (for nothing except the cost of whatever electricity your computer uses while you’re looking, and a fraction of your monthly hook-up fee). It’s also where you can sound off about poetry, as I did above. It’s an automatic publisher, and storer, of whatever you feel like gabbing about. Ideally, you’ll get feedback. I didn’t in this case, but sometimes I do.

The one large problem with blogs (like the small press, and–more so–the micro-press) is that they are near-invisible. I have lots of ideas about how this should be attacked, most of which I’ve rattled on about at my blog. One thing needed is a search engine you could key with names of poets you like that it would use not (merely) to get to blogs that mention those names but to blogs those names suggest you would like. A given name would go to some systematic overview of the schools of poetry now in operation of the kind I’ve been vainly calling for, for something like a decade now. Once there, it would pick out the schools you’d most likely be interested in and send you to them.

I’d need five columns to have space enough to mention all of my ideas for alleviating this problem, so will leave it for now to get going with my survey of the Internet. This time around the featured site is Chris Lott’s blog. Forgive the egocentricity, but when I went out to it to see what I could say about it, I did a search on it for my name. Here is what came up: “There’s another aspect of the approach of some of the post-avant weblogs and theorists that doesn’t sit too well with me, which I mentioned briefly in my longer screed below… the underlying (and not so underlying) sense of cynicism that comes out in some of the critiques. When I was first confronted with Bob Grumman’s Mathemaku poems, for example, I made a flip comment to the effect that they struck me as ‘pointers to poems’ or ‘ideas that could become poems’ when the real problem was that I hadn’t taken the time to really open my ears (and, most importantly, my eyes) to approach them with a generous consideration. The implication of my words was that the poet had not yet put in the work needed to craft a poem. I was called on this implication, and rightly so. Bob maintained, and I believe him, that he worked as hard on any one of these short, visual poems as any craftsman of mainstream narrative poems does. Maybe even more so, given that he is also creating/synthesizing a new kind of form.

“But for too many, this attitude of approaching the work on its own merits only applies as long as it is convenient. Those that decry the traditionalist lack of estimation are quite willing to posit theories about a poet’s ‘fundamental dishonesty’ in writing in a ‘received form,’ and they are quite happy to surmise about the laziness they are displaying in writing in an existing mode. If this isn’t, in itself, a dishonest and hypocritical position (and I don’t think that most of the post avant crowd is dishonest), then I am left to think that it must come from an essential cynicism or resentment that sometimes makes it impossible for the reader to separate their estimation of a poetic work from the life and personality of the poet, or their position in the academy. Hayden Carruth, for example, has written some great work. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, or refuse to accept his work on its own terms because he was well-educated and worked at a University.”

Yes, I like that Chris comes off here on my side–and that he says things I pretty much agree with beyond that. But I’m quoting him so extensively because his words provide so excellent illustration of his outlook and style–and of what blogs at their best can be: intelligent, self-critical, exploratory, tolerant.

Further Adventures of Me

---

Small Press Review,
Volume 31, Numbers 3/4, March/April 1999

---

The End Review, Number 1, August 1998;
edited by Scott Keeney. 64pp;
464 Somerville Ave. #5, Somerville MA 02143-3230.
price: donation ($3 – $5 suggested).

Comprepoetica,
Sitemaster: Bob Grumman.
Reocities.

Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume 1, 3rd ed.,
by Bob Grumman. 190 pp.; 1998; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press, Box 3621,
Port Charlotte FL 33949. $10, ppd.

 

---

 

I have exciting news about Me, but first–to avoid 100% egocentricity–I want to mention Scott Keeney’s zine, The End Review, a welcome new foray beyond the mainstream (though nowhere not verbal) that includes both Charles Bernstein and his arch-enemy Richard Kostelanetz. Also Rosemary Waldrop, Bill Marsh, Henry Gould, many others. It boasts first-rate reviews that more than summarize, too, by such as Keeney himself, Steven Marks (who uses one of my words!) and Gary Sullivan (on Sheila E. Murphy).

Here’s just one of its poems, “Trace,” not to indicate the kind but the level of work in The End Review. It’s by W.B. Keckler.

“wing,” the prehensile writing
finger, phalanges
forager   (holding patterns
in dream.   bent
under a focused cone of light
pre-cinematic, avian-consciousness
warps space, convex:
a mixture
of breaths    (criss-crossing clouds
Sanskrit “vati,”       “it blows”
through Dan. & Sw. “vinge”
“wing-hand”
it stirs the minuses of words
Ovidian, as the Roman stylus
flying so fast, the person
under covert feathers
has two lateral times.  but we
are not binocular like that
left/right      (the pour of symmetry
faux-simultaneity
we’re clipped./speech

Writing as a form of flight? Our “left/right” equal to “clipped./speech”– or flightlessness a period makes emphatic versus speech, a speech clipped of a bird’s full vigor? Flying a form of speech? Whatever (and the poem is loaded with whatevers), such twinings as that of dream with “pre-cinematic” light with “avian consciousness” with breaths . . . of Sanskrit– and images like, wow, “the minuses of words” that writing (writing the word “wing”?) stirs up make “Trace,” for me, a master-poem (and The End Review a master-zine for having it, and other poems of equal excellence).

Now to the exciting news-bytes about Me! One is that my web- site, Comprepoetica, had its official first birthday last October. It was intended, as its name implies, to showcase poems, poetics and poets of schools and managed to collect something like fifty bios of various poets–and one critic–and samples of poetry from maybe a fifth of them in its first half-year. Some of my essays are on it, too–and the beginnings of an attempt at a dictionary of poetry-related terms. My rough first part of ’98, and happy but busy summer and fall, kept me from doing much, if anything, to keep it active with new materials and publicity, so it’s been drawing hardly any traffic (in spite of what I thought was my great idea of running a poll on favorite living and dead American poets (Ashbery leads living poets with 11 votes, Williams the dead with 22).

I’m now writing a weekly poetry commentary for it, and have put out word that I’d like to run reviews by others, once-a-week, if I can. So if you have any reviews, or material for review, send ‘em my way (1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952). I’m soliticiting Serious Essays, as well–and feedback on anything that appears at Comprepoetica. I bring all this up not only to publicize my site but to commend the value of running a web-site (mine is free but I’m required to keep commercial advertising banners at the tops of all my files; to use the Internet costs from $15 to $30 a month–and the investment of at least a thousand dollars, generally speaking, in a computer). The main virtue: you can write whatever you want to and know it’ll be published, no matter how long or intelligent, for your site can always take it. Good place, too, for old published material hardly anyone’s seen (like all my published material). And maybe (yes, the odds against are about ten million to one) someone in a position to help you will see something he likes of yours (and, yow, could I use that).

My other piece of me-related news involves my book, Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume One, which I’ve updated and had reprinted for the second time. Multiply this column by fifty and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what my book’s like. What should make you sit up, though, are the details of its printing: it cost me just fifty dollars to get ten copies done (perfect-bound with four-color, laminated covers, if I wanted them, and I didn’t because of the way laminated covers tend to curl)–that’s fifty dollars upfront! Five-dollars-a-book isn’t cheap if you’re doing a hundred copies or more, but it certainly is for just ten.

And now I can order additional copies for just $3.30 or so apiece as long as I want to. The company doing the printing, an outfit called Sprout (http://www.sproutinfo.com or 430 Tenth St. NW, S-007, Atlanta GA 30318), you see, is an “on-demand printer,” so it charges only to scan your master-copy (which you have to provide) into its computer, plus $25. (In my case, the scanning charge, which is 25-cents-a-page, was waived due to a special introductory offer.) I think it’s a great deal if you want to self-publish a book you don’t expect to get rid of very many of, and/or if you don’t have the five hundred bucks or more that you’d otherwise need. And it eliminates the need for warehouse space. I hope to use Sprout for the second volume of my Of Manywhere series–and have already also used it for the third printing of Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi, Volume One. It’s really gotten me excited!

A Visit to Another Webzine

 

---

Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 5/6, May-June 2007

---

 

      Big Bridge, vol 3, #4.
      Michael Rothenberg, Editor.
      http://www.bigbridge.org/index2.htm
 

---

 

I don’t think books and magazines will ever be obsolete–except for those they’ve always been close to obsolete for. Sure, they can wear out, but–well-taken-care-of–they should be good for a lifetime, and none of their texts will suddenly change or vanish. Aside from that, they’re pleasurably, physically-engagably solid in a way that cyberbooks and webzines never will be, even when technology has perfected tablets you can page through by pushing buttons. But, yow, the advantages of webzines and cyberbooks below the level of art-objects are becoming staggering! Take the webzine, Big Bridge, which has a section I guest-edited, for example. My section alone would run about 200 pages if published as a book. It has nearly 300 works by 75 different artists (or artist-teams). What’s more, they’re in full color (although at times too small, something I hope eventually to get remedied by making them into thumbnails). Yet, my little section is just one of many of comparable length in the issue!
Here’s what is also there: a chapbook of 17 or 18 poems (one passage may be an untitled poem or part of the preceding poem) by Ed Dorn, illustrated by Nancy Victoria Davis; seven essays about Dorn by John Herndon, Stefan Hyner, Reno Lauro, Alice Notley, Richard Owens, Claudia Pisano and Dale Smith.

These two sections, let me interrupt to say, particularly pleased me, for Dorn has not goten quite the recognition I feel he merits–for passages like this from “Early Modern,” which is in Big Bridge: “Every Poet needs a chorus of Negro women/ And a friend in wing-tipped shoes.” And for being the kind of guy who, according to Herndon’s piece on him, said after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, that he would start “working on a series of poems called—Chemo Sabe.”

Okay, to continue my list, the issue includes a poetry section containing one to eight poems (and/or jokes, illustrations, collages, plays) by 35 poets (Ralph DiPalma and Michael McClure among them); a second poetry section containing the work of nineteen contributors (Eileen Myles and Charles Borkhois among them) guest edited by Thomas Devaney; a section of fiction, non-fiction, reviews and memoirs by 26 authors including Skip Fox and Tom Hibbard; a section of illumages (i.e., visual artworks) in full color by Rodney Artiles (13 pieces), Amy Evans McClure (18 photographs of sculptures) and James Spitzer (23 pieces); “Death on All Fronts,” a collection of 51 anti-war poems edited by Halvard Johnson; 13 collaborations between a poet and an illumagist–Jerome Rothenberg and Susan Bee, for example; Part Two of Karl Young’s fascinating history/memoir of his life in vispo; “A Tribute to Richard Denner,” a collection of six essays about Denner and his work plus some selections from his work edited by Jonathan Penton; Roma Amor (41 pages) by Allan Graubard; Joel Weishaus on Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder; an excerpt from What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? by Bill Berkson & Bernadette Mayer, and a review of the latter by Larry Sawyer; and, finally, brief reviews of the following “little magazines” followed by excerpts from each: Home Planet News, House Organ, Kickass Review, Moonlit, Plantarchy, Poesy, Spaltung, Versal, Xerolage. Enough already, right? Whew.

Here’s what Jonathan Penton said in the final section listed about Xerolage (which I have to mention because that zine is so experioddicalistic): “If the concept of freakiness was capable of having a standard, it might define itself as the long-running and consistently high-quality literary journal, Xerolage. Edited by mIEKAL aND, each issue of xerolage is a deep study of one experimental visual poet, presenting a thorough and varied look at some of the most varied creators in the world of art. Meticulously reproduced in the highest resolution black-and-white imagery, on simple white folio-sized stock, the magazine design of Xerolage simply gets out of each artist’s way, making each issue a mind-expanding journey into the expanded mind of another.” The excerpts that came after that were from issues 37 and 38, which featured the work of Andrew Topel and Peter Ciccariello.

One very minor quibble about the Big Bridge before I forget it: its sectioning tends to prevent serendipity–that is, an advantage of traditional magazines is that one might notice a poem sharing a page with a story one is reading, and read the poem, too, out of curiosity; this won’t happen the way Big Bridge is laid out. But I realize that weaving Big Bridge together to allow for accidental adventures would take way too much time and energy. Purity of focus is a virtue, too.

To finish filling my space (and provide a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes in the BigTime Experimental Poetry World), I’m now going to quote my preface to the selection I edited for Big Bridge: ” . . . It seems that Cleveland poet, glass artisan and gallery director Marcus Bales, out of nowhere, offered me an opportunity to curate a show of visual poetry at his gallery. What is interesting about this is that Marcus and I had for years been going at each other tooth and nail on the Internet about what poetry is. We particularly did not agree that what I call visual poetry is a form of poetry. A traditionalist, Marcus won’t even agree that free verse is poetry. He has also been negative about my attempts to taxonomize the entire field of poetry.

“‘Grumman wants to create a kind of taxonomy of poetry,’ he told Dan Tranberg, who wrote a flattering piece about the show for The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland daily. I’m against the very notion of a taxonomy of poetry on the grounds that poetry is an aesthetic field, not a scientific one.’

“I’m afraid to confess that we on occasion quite annoyed each other. I definitely personally insulted him on more than one occasion. He claims never to have insulted me, but I feel there were times when he wasn’t very nice to me. Whatever the truth of the matter, we were often scolded for intemperance by the moderator of the Internet poetry group (New-Poetry) we had our (sometimes incredibly long) ‘discussions’ at. In fact, Marcus finally got kicked out of the group. I didn’t only because I promised to behave better.

“So, why the offer of space for a show? I’m still not clear about that–except that he meant it as a kind of challenge: if I thought this stuff was disgustingly under-recognized, as I often sputtered in harangues against–you guessed it–The Establishment, here was my chance to prove it with a show. I don’t know that I proved it, but the show seems to have gone over well. Marcus extended the show for one week into May because the Tranberg review came out the weekend the show was closing. According to Marcus, ‘Sales were pretty good, considering the narrow swatch of the world that this appealed to. I think we sold something in the neighborhood of $1500 worth of stuff, retail, most of it in the $10 and $25 range, but at least one sale over $200.’” I priced each of my three (unsold) works in the show at $400, but doubt anyone would have bought them at any price. (Sorry to brag, but that’s the way I am.)

Mad Poet Symposium, Part Five

 

---

Small Press Review,
Volume 35, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2003

---

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

---

 

My presentation at the Ohio State Avant Garde symposium on 27 September 2002 was scheduled for 3:30, which was six-and-a-half hours after the proceedings began. Ergo: lots of time for me to become a nervous wreck. But the excitement of the presentations by others that I was able to see kept me from getting too wacked-out.

Said presentations, each a half hour long, began with Miekal And’s visiopoetic computer animations. He showed an especially winning one he had at his website called “After Emmett” that had gotten many hits for a short time because noticed by the mass media somewhere. Inspired by Emmett Williams’s “Voy Age,” it consists of squares made up of the nine letters of one, two or three words (e.g., “e v o/ l u t/ i o n,” “e a r/ v o y/ a g e”). The squares appear one at a time, their letters blinking arrestingly through numerous, extremely varied fonts–and spelling beyond, way beyond, simple denotation. Another I particularly liked was “SeedSigns for Philadelpho, an homage to South American visual poet, Philadelpho Menezes, who recently died. Here And formed the letters of “Philadelpho” with seeds that he placed on top of his scanner, then animated and danced through various yowwy gyrations. Both these works–and much else of high interest–are at http://cla.umn.edu/joglars/floraspirae/inhale.html.

Next on my schedule was Ficus strangulensis. He showed slides of many of his transforms, as Crag Hill calls such pieces (or “transmorfations,” as Ficus calls them). These are pieces in which a word or phrase–“live,” in one of Ficus’s–is graphically altered in discrete steps until some poetically appropriate new word or phrase–“live” becomes “erode” in the one mentioned–is revealed. I was familiar with most, but not with the details of how Ficus uses his computer to make them, which should help me with future poems of my own. He showed other works of his, as well, mostly textual collages. I had also seen many of these, but only in black&white, so was pleased to see them now in full color.

I caught Igor Satanovsky’s presentation after Ficus’s. Igor mainly showed and discussed stuff from his book, American Poetry (free and how), which I reviewed here some time back. Carlos Luis, whose presentation I next attended, went back and forth between Spanish and English. I may have understood his Spanish better than his English, and I don’t speak Spanish. But he’s a dynamic, extremely personable performer, so what he did physically more than made up for any words I missed.

After Carlos’s half-hour, I went to a reading from his translations of Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-Plastique by Irving Weiss, with the silent, knitting accompaniment of his daughter, she all in black, he all in white. Lots of sharp observations, a few not-so-sharp, but fun. Fairly sex-centered, many of them. Scott Helmes’s presentation followed. It included some ravishing new pieces from his Visual Specere series of cut-outs from magazines which he claims are not collages. I think he’s right, as they are narrative, as he also claims, and more linear than collage in that there are definite starting and ending points for their reading. He brought up his and my disagreement as to whether they were poems or not, John M. Bennett and others saying they were, which made me yell out that they weren’t–in what I considered a humorously annoyed fashion. Later Scott said he’d asked people their opinion on the question, and about half agreed with him, half with me.

I wandered around the campus during the lunch break, one of the very large, rich muffins the library had out for snacks making up my lunch–with some cracker jacks I had bought during my bus ride to Columbus. I got lost, naturally, but was helped back to the library by a few nice people (it took more than one!). When the symposium began again, I took in John Byrum and his wife Arleen Hartman’s “Generator & Another Incomplete Understanding.” It used two slide projectors and a boombox. Two walls of images, in other words, one of which I wasn’t aware of till more than halfway through the presentation, for it was behind me. Lots of interesting graphics, some usually who-knows-what texts. While the slides were shown, John read some kind of jump-cut, numbered list whose contents I now forget but which held my attention at the time. And I remember seeing a lot of fascinatingly resonant-in-the-context networks (tree branches, nerve branches, river systems, capillaries, etc.).

The presentation beginning times were not in synch, so I missed the beginning of Dave Baratier’s presentation, but think I got the main gist. He said some provocative things about letter-writing and read some letters from a published collection of letters of his. They sounded like poems to me. Certainly they were full of arresting lines–but, alas, I was too out of it to take notes, so can’t quote any. Equally enjoyable was Sheila Murphy’s later reading, with lots of genial, interesting commentary in-between poems. Just before Sheila’s reading, I went to Kathy Ernst’s slide show of various works, most of which I was already familiar with, but enjoyed seeing again, particularly her pieces from Plaisir D’Amour, which I’d call a break-out work, except that she’s always doing break-out works.

At 3, almost everyone went to John M. Bennett’s reading. I’ve been at a couple of John’s readings, though, and heard him a lot on tape, so went to Michael Magazinnik’s presentation. Mike read in Russian and English along with and/or against overhead projections of visual material. The highlights included his consonant poetry, and a piece incorporating a toy musical box. Mike ended early, which gave me a chance to appropriate five or ten minutes of his time and show and try intelligently to comment on Karl Kempton’s fine “In Her Own Words” sequence.

My own presentation followed. I probably hurried a little too much but still didn’t get through all my pieces. Here’s what Igor Satanovsky later said on the internet about me: “I have seen some math poetry before, but nothing like Bob’s work. He specializes in Mathemaku (his hybrid of haiku and math poetry), which he creates by constructing weird division formulas, where instead of numbers we find entities like ‘spring’, ‘woods’ and ‘memory.’ What I most admire about Bob is his ability to pick up the most cliched romantic notions and turn them into poetry.” He said a little more, but it wasn’t sufficiently flattering for me to quote it here.

The day ended with a panel discussion on collaborating. I don’t think anything truly memorable was said, though Marilyn Rosenberg said some particularly sensible things, and Scott Helmes started things off well by admitting that his main reason for collaborating was that he was lazy. My main pleasure was listening to people whose presentations I’d missed or who hadn’t presented, and fixing names to faces, especially of Lewis LaCook and Jesse Glass.