I am testing to see if I can write anything into this Page.

(A Slight Revision of an Article Published in Arnold Skemer’s ZYX)(and now, 7 years after I wrote above, its terminology is obsolete, although not much of its thought has changed)

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Bob Grumman

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While on the internet I’ve been exposed to a good number of highly intelligent literary discussions. But they’ve also been full of confused thinking, generally because of what I consider to be their participants’ taxonomical ignorance and/or indifference. This has annoyed me, finally, into the following Laying-Down of the Law Concerning the Classification of Literary Works. I begin with Verbal Expression. At the simplest level, there are two kinds: Oral Verbal Expression, or Speech, and Written Verbal Expression, or Writing. I divide the former into Declamation and Stagework, depending on the degree of physical action involved in its presentation. Declamation is that which, for practical purposes, is all speech; stagework that whose effect is seriously reduced if not acted out. Generally, declamation is performed by a single voice, stagework by more than one, but neither is an absolute requirement. As far as I can tell, there is no need for any parallel division of writing.The Three Main Varieties of Verbal ExpressionAll verbal expression, oral or written, can be split into three main varieties, according to its purpose:………. Literature, or the use of words (predominantly) in the pursuit of Beauty………. Informrature, or the use of words (predominantly) in the pursuit of Truth………. Advocature, or the use of words (predominantly) in the pursuit of Goodness (or, more specifically, the Moral Good) Prose and Poetry Literature (whether oral or written) divides naturally into prose and poetry. I unradically believe that what most distinguishes poetry from prose is that poetry is intended to be read slowly, read into rather than through: connotations, sounds, rhythms, flesh, rather than an asensual focus on denotation only. I thus define it as literature that contains significant numbers of “flow-breaks.” The flow-break has two main purposes: (1) to tell the aesthcipient that he is involved with poetry and should prepare his mind accordingly; and (2) to retard the aesthcipient’s progress through the work so that he experiences it with maximal sensual participation. Prose is simply literature that is not poetry. The Flow-Break I recognize four kinds of flow-breaks, but I’m sure others will find more. My four are: (1) the orthodox line-break, (2) the variable indentation, (3) the interior line-gap, and (4) the intra-syllabic line-break. Any flow-break can be empty or filled–with asterisks, say, or any other kind of symbol (or spoken sound) without a clear punctuational or other semantic use. The Orthodox Line-Break The line-break is simply (and conventionally) any space or other block of asemantic fill that prevents a line from reaching some pre-set (loosely or precisely defined), repeating margin to the right. The Variable Indentation The variable indentation is any space or other block of asemantic fill that prevents a line from starting at some pre-set (loosely or precisely defined), repeating margin to the left. It is the same as a line-break except at the opposite end of a line. The Interior Line-Gap In written poetry, an interior line-gap is simply a block of two or more spaces or other asemantic matter within a line, spoken or written. In oral poetry, interior line-gaps–and the other flow-breaks, as well–are pauses keeping the speaker from continuing to some pre-set stopping or starting point, such as a period, or the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. The Intra-Syllabic Line-Break The third of my “flow-breaks,” the intra-syllabic line-break, is confined to written poetry. Like the orthodox line-break, it occurs at the end of a line; unlike the latter, however, it can end at a pre-set margin; it interrupts flow by stopping a line in the middle of a syllable (generally but not necessarily always, without a hyphen), as in the following sentence. My i mpression is that E.E. Cummings invented this devi ce. Certainly he was among its first significant users. Prose contains flow-breaks, but they are few, and predictible: the paragraphs of prose works generally begin and end with variable indentations, for instance. And interior indentations using dots are used in prose to indicate an ellipse. Poetry uses the flow-break several magnitudes of order more frequently and consequentially than prose does, though. The Two Super-Genres It seems to me that there are two basic genres in literature: “Narrature,” and “Evocature.” Since by “narrature” I mean pretty much what is meant by “narrative,” my coinage is probably superfluous. I’m retaining it for now for two reasons: (1) it fits my system of neologies by ending in “ture,” and (2) I think it useful to distinguish narrative-as-story from narrative-as-that-which-contains-a-story. I define narrative rigorously as more than just events. For me, narrative consists only of those events that take place as some protagonist attempts to reach a goal–in a manner that makes the attempt to reach the goal central to the aestheriencer. The latter qualification makes the definition vulnerable to subjectivity but I see no way around that. I believe the qualification necessary to distinguish a narrative about a plant’s fight to reach sunlight, and a (literary) description of a plant’s growth. The latter would be a form of evocature. Evocature seeks to evoke a mood, generally by presenting a scene or portraying a character. Events might be part of the presentation, but uncentrally. Lyric poetry is the principal kind of evocature but there are also prose poems, and those stageworks whose aim is to capture an era, or a locale, or whatever, rather than tell a story. The Twelve Major Sub-Rubrics of Verbal Expression It should be clear now that a literary work can be declamation, stagework or writing; prose or poetry; and narrature or evocature. There are thus twelve possible “major sub-rubrics” of literature: ….. 1. Narrational Literary Declamation in Prose–or, okay, Story-Telling ….. 2. Evocational Literary Declamation in Prose (i.e., the so-called “prose poem,” declaimed), or Oral Prose Evocature ….. 3. Narrational Literary Declamation in Verse (note: I use “poetry” and “verse” interchangeably), or Oral Narrative Poetry ….. 4. Evocational Literary Declamation in Verse, or Oral Lyric Poetry ….. 5. Narrational Drama in Prose, or–because it’s so dominant–just plain Drama ….. 6. Evocational Drama in Prose ….. 7. Narrational Drama in Verse, or Verse Drama ….. 8. Evocational Drama in Verse ….. 9. Narrational Literary Prose, or Prose Narrature (e.g., the novel and short story; the essay, which almost qualifies, is imformrature, not literature) ….. 10. Evocational Literary Prose (or plain Prose Evocature) ….. 11. Narrational Literary Poetry (or Narrative Poetry) ….. 12. Evocational Literary Poetry (or Lyric Poetry) Each of these sub-rubrics contains species, and the species contain sub-species and genres–notably tragedy, comedy and melodrama in drama. I lack the space to treat these here, except in poetry–not only because it’s my specialty but because I consider it the most taxonomically vexed of the main literary forms. The Two Major Species of Poetry There are two major species of poetry in my poetics: livenorm poetry and burstnorm poetry I break livenorm poetry into songmode poetry and plaintext poetry Songmode Poetry Songmode Poetry is traditional poetry, always adhering to some auditorily-based pattern (i.e., to rhyme, alliteration, meter, or the like) significantly more than it does not. Plaintext Poetry Plaintext Poetry is standard free verse–i.e., verse in which the use of meter, rhyme and the like is, for most readers, too minor for the verse to seem songmode poetry; it is distinguished from the free verse used in burstnorm poetry in being textual only, and in not rebelling against any significant rules of grammar or spelling. Burstnorm Poetry Burstnorm Poetry is poetry that breaks significantly with the norms of conventional grammar, orthography, logic and/or expressive decorum. There are three major kinds of burstnorm poetry: ….. (1) language poetry (poetry that significantly breaks the rules of grammar and/or spelling for expressive effect) (re-named 7 July 1998, then changed from “idiolinguistic poetry” to “language poetry” 24 May 2004) ….. (2) xenological poetry (poetry that breaks the rules of what one might call the logic of the senses by juxtaposition of incongruent imagery or the logic of narrational by jumping from event to event in a seemingly arbitrary way) (re-named 7 July 1998) ….. (3) pluraesthetic poetry (poetry that significantly breaks the conventions of expressive decorum–by mixing expressive modalities: e.g., the verbal and the visual) Language Poetry There are two main kinds of language poetry: ….. (1) sprungrammar poetry, in which syntax and/or inflection are meddled with (most people understand language poetry as this kind of poetry) ….. (2) infra-verbal poetry, in which spelling is meddled with. Xenological Poetry There are three main kinds of xenological poetry: ….. (1) surrealistic poetry, in which incongruous images are juxtaposed ….. (2) jump-cut poetry, in which narrational sequence is meddled with. ….. (3) non-representational poetry, in which the denotations of words are to be ignored as much as possible, with a resultant emphasis on their sounds and averbal relationships with one another (as, for instance, when one word is an anagram for another), and the like. Pluraesthetic Poetry Pluraesthetic poetry has many sub-classes, among them: ….. (1) audio-textual poetry …………… (a) sound poetry (poetry containing auditory elements that are fused with, and as expressively consequential as, its words) …………… (b) auditorilly-enhanced poetry (poetry spoken in a manner that increases its ability to please but does not increase its core meaning; an example would be Dylan Thomas giving a reading of “Fern Hill”) …………… Textual Music is sometimes described as poetry but is a form of music–music some of whose elements are textual but none of whose elements are to any significant degree words, or words whose meaning is pertinent to what the artwork is saying. It and audio-textual literature together comprise audio- textual art. ….. (2) visio-textual poetry …………… (a) visual poetry (poetry containing visual elements that are as expressively consequential as, its words) …………… (b) visually-enhanced poetry (poetry written in an elegant calligraphy, for instance, or with letters that look like trees or people or the like, as in illuminated manuscripts, or in any manner that increases the work’s ability to please but does not increase its core meaning) …………… Textual Illumageryis sometimes described as poetry but is a form of illumagery–illumagery some of whose elements are textual but none of whose elements are to any significant degree words, or words whose meaning is pertinent to what the artwork is saying. It and visio-textual literature together comprise visio- textual art. ….. (3) mathematical poetry (poetry using mathematical symbols that actually carries out mathematical operations as opposed to poetry about mathematics or poetry that uses mathematical symbols decoratively. ….. (4) flow-chart poetry (poetry that uses the symbols of computer or other flow-charting in significantly expressive ways) ….. (5) performance poetry (poetry in which human physical actions are fused with, and more or less as expressively as important as, the poetry’s verbal elements; it could be considered kinetic poetry or a form of visual poetry except that the human actor(s) involved are of major importance; it could also be considered drama except that it is lyrical–i.e., without a strong narrational element) There are surely other forms of pluraesthetic poetry, and many combinations of different varieties of pluraesthetic poetry. When two or more varieties of it are combined, I term the result “compound pluraesthetic poetry.” If necessary I am more precise: for example, I call some of my mathematical poems that are also visual poems, “visio-mathematical poems.” Pluraesthetic poems can also be combined with idiolinguistic or surrealistic poems. In that case, I call them “compound burstnorm poems,” or more exactly label them, if necessary. At this juncture, we’re still far from the final, most detailed level of classification of poetry. There is, for instance, classification by size, and by genre (or subject-matter); there are also the many shapes of poems such as the sonnet. I believe I’ve covered the most important classes of poetry, though. And there will be time to get to the other levels of my taxonomy later.

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Internet Samplings

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2011

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      dbqp:visualizing poetics
      Blogger: Geof Huth
      http://dbqp.blogspot.com

      Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry
      Webmaster: Karl Young
      http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm
      http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/TextBackHome/Volume5.htm

      Mathematical Poetry
      Blogger: Kaz Maslanka
      http://mathematicalpoetry.blogspot.com

      Poeticks
      Blogger: Bob Grumman
     

      A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry
      Bob Grumman. 20p; 2010; Pa;
      The Runaway Spoon Press, 1708 Hayworth Road,
      Port Charlotte FL 33952. $5 ppd.

      Tip of the Knife
      Webmaster:: Bill Di Michele
      http://tipoftheknife.blogspot.com

      Word-Dreamer: Poetics
      Blogger: Conrad Didiodato
      http://didiodatoc.blogspot.com

 

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Thinking it was time for another column on Internet sites having to do with experriodica, I clicked my way to Firefox, which is the service I use to connect to the Internet. Three sites were already on stand-by waiting for me. One, of course, was my own Poeticks.com, the blog I try to post an entry a day to, mainly to force myself to keep writing. Probably half my entries are lame, but recently I’ve been discussing my latest self-publication, A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry, with those few of my colleagues interested in such stuff: Geof Huth, who did a 1500-word review of it on 11 January at dbqp:visualizing poetics, his incredibly far-exploring blog (which was the second of the sites on stand-by, which it always is); endwar, the most crisply objective poet I know; Kaz Maslanka, who runs Mathematical Poetry, the central blog for mathematical poetry; and Karl Kempton, champion of the historical approach to understanding poetry, especially visual poetry.

Naturally, I disagree in part with all of them. Don’t worry, that’s all I’ll say about it–except to note that I’ve made changes in my taxonomy because of our discussion, so don’t believe anyone who tells you I’m ridiculously strongly set in my ways. Although I’ll never stop believing that anything called “visual poetry” should have words (or word-fragments) contributing significantly to its aesthetic meaning.

Conrad Didiodato also contributed a post to the discussion. I especially don’t want to overlook him because I’ve had interesting discussions of poetics with him over the past year or two, and when I clicked to his blog to find something to say about it here, I found a recent entry (11 January 2011) containing this poem by one of my favoritest contemporary poets, John Martone:

               lighting
               a candle

               & blowing
               it out

               lighting
               a candle

               & blowing
               it out

               lighting
               a candle

               & blowing
               it out

               trying
               to

               under
               stand

                                                                             (thinking of robert lax)

 

As far as I’m concerned, this one poem is worth this whole column–nay, all of my columns to this point and beyond! It seems such a perfect summary and accumulatingly vivid image of just how magically rich in mystery existence is. Human breath, or life, in and out. Fire, ultimately the destructive force, on and off. Wind. Light. The human action of igniting a candle, the simple action of lighting a simple candle. All in a near-perfect homage to Robert Lax, whom I consider first among poets of minimalist repetition, though still not getting the academic attention he ought to.

But the entry has other poems by Martone, along with commentary by Didiodato, who is always invigoratingly insightful, even when I disagree with him. Another of his entries, the one for 14 January, he comments at length on Karl Kempton’s essay, “Visual Poetry: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions,” an essay that deserves attention (and, needless to say, doesn’t seem to be getting it from the academy).

The third site on stand-by where I use Firefox to explore the Internet was Bill DiMichele’s new Tip of the Knife, an Internet magazine now up to its third issue. It has four poems in homage to E. E. Cummings by ME, which–needless to say–was why it was on stand-by. But not why I’m plugging it here, honest! I think my poems, which are visual, mathematical and cryptographic, are pretty brilliant, but there is also stunning work by Crag Hill, Karl Kempton, Dale Jensen, Bill himself, Peter Ciccariello, Luc Fierens, Harry Polkinhorn, Christine Tarantino, Iker Spozio and Gary Barwin. And one can link from it to the second issue of Tip of the Knife which features (outstanding) visio-textual work–by Guy R. Beining, Andrew Topel, Nico Vassilakis, Geof Huth, John M Bennett, Richard Kostelanetz (the only one among the contributors whose work is wholly verbal visual poetry–which is to say, employing nothing but words graphically presented) and Leon 5 (someone previously unknown to me whose work is particularly impressive).

Karl Young’s Light & Dust was not on stand-by but should have been, for its huge collection of poetry runs the gamut from Wilshberia (i.e., the Wilbur to Ashbery portion of the contemporary American poetry continuum, which all but a few academics believe to be the whole of the continuum) to, well, my mathemaku and what’s in Karl Kempton’s Kaldron, which is from the last century but still cutting edge. Also there is Young’s absorbing, major in-progress essay on his poetry and life in poetry, Some Volumes of Poetry: A Retrospective of Publication Work, which also includes the works he discusses, Cried and Measured, and Should Sun Forever Shine, which are also major, for content, and for what at the time of their composition was path-breakingly exploitation of what might be called “reading-direction,” for the printing of lines tfel ot thgir or up or down a letter at a time, or the like, for poetic effect, a poetic effect John Martone has used for many years, as well.

I wish I had space for several examples, but the following, from Should Sun Forever Shine, will have to do:

               SAD?

               PATREFROTRT
               LNTESOPSEIY

               TEEG&AHUA
               ATLHDWERI
               KHITRTCTN

 

               EVENING STAR

 

A combination of wisdom, mood, imagery drawing you slowly (to give your deepenings time to grow) and idiosyncratically by requiring you twice to read up and down instead of right to left (to help you out of inhibiting habituality) out one’s sad self in steps to the eternity of an evening star.

Young’s motive for adding autobiographical background and critical commentary to the reprinting of his poems so fully parallels thoughts of mine often expressed, I quoted a paragraph he wrote about it in his latest section, “Bringing the Text Back Home,” at my blog:

“How best to provide the (engagent of unfamiliar, relatively new forms of art) with adequate context and background,” he begins, “I don’t know. I do know that the lack of it has crippled visual poetry, as it has other arts, and trying to find an answer to the problem is one of the reasons for writing essays like this one. Whatever the case, in the global world of information overload, the concept that ‘the work speaks for itself’ can be no more than nostalgia for a simpler time with a unified and unchanging cultural background. In the broadest context, what has now become the superstition that avant-garde work can be appreciated without context denies and blocks the possibilities of cooperative construction and understanding in an environment that no individual has the ability to completely comprehend, but which requires cooperation to appreciate.”

My columns here have been one attempt to provide just what Young asks for, however inadequately.

Hi.  This is a mechanism to count the number of people who visit my blog now and then.  Each, I hope, will eventually come here just once to add to my visitor count below.  Anonymously.

Thank you, Blogmeister Bob

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The Latest in Word-Games

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2010

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      Open Your I
      By Endwar
      2009, 58 pp; Pa;
      IZEN, Box 891, Athens OH 45701-0891.
      $18 ppd.

      The Complete Works
      By Dan Waber
      2009, 4 pp; Pa;
      IZEN, Box 891, Athens OH 45701-0891.
      $3 ppd.

      Between the Lines
      By Carol Stetser
      2009; 16 pp; Pa; Tonerworks.
      Box 52, Portland ME 04112. np.

      Xerolage 44
      Edited by mIEKAL aND
      2009, 24 pp; Pa; Xexoxial Editions,
      10375 City Hway Alphabet,
      LaFarge WI 54639. $20/4 issues.
      irregularly published.

 

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“In the beginning was the word,” Endwar’s Open your I, or–more correctly–] [, begins; “and,” it continues. “the word was ‘In.’” How do you review a book full of stuff like that except to quote a few of its pieces and tell the reader he ought to laugh at them, and then buy the book to see the rest? I should add, too, that many of them are cause for reflection–for instance: “every one is a number/ everyone is a statistic.” Here are a few more: “everyhere,” “instance / instant,” “rumurmurmur.”

Dan Waber’s The Complete Works is out of the same kind of sense of humor. This . . . product needs just a single sheet of cover stock folded in half (the short way) to live up to its title–absolutely! Its title is on its front followed by “by Dan Waber/ (and everyone else),” the “(and everyone else)” being an important extention of the work within. The inside of the cover has “An incomplete list of works by Dan Waber,” a copyright notice and an ISBN. The back of the book has various unattributed comments on it including “It’s all there, somewhere,” “Never has so little been used to exporess so much,” and “It’s uncanny, how anything you might have said, or even might say in the future, has already been anticipated in The Complete Works by Dan Waber.” These comments are all true.

The text of Waber’s work, aside from its necessary title, is less than a word in length. More than that I cannot say for fear of copyright infringement.

Xerolage has been coming out for well over twenty years no, each issue devoted to the work of a single artist or pair of collaborators. Only Score and Kaldron provide a comparably near-complete representation of what’s been going on in visio-textual art for the past quarter of a century. One of the leading contributors to that field has long been Tom Cassidy, aka Musicmaster, whose work this issue features.

In his amusing introduction to this sequence of around 50 frames (a few consist of two different-seeming images on a single page, but may be intended as a single frame), Musicmaster says he took April Fool’s day off from work in 2009 to avoid pranks that might “have consequences.” Because mIEKAL had the previous year asked him when they saw each other at a book festival not only if he would fill up an issue of Xerolage, including both sides of the front and back covers, but if he would take care of the assignment in one day (!), he decided to use his day off to carry out mIEKAL’S request. Which he did. Much of what resulted consists of texts, some in print, some hand-written, with drawings of biomorphic handyman tools like wrenches and clippers. and cords and little round things that look like birds’ eyes on top of neatly hand-printed poems. The texts on a couple of other pages look like answer sheets to a homework assignment in high school trig. A crazy book but it makes sense! (Aesthetic sense.)

Now a real treat for you. The latest issue of Kalligram came out early this year. I got my contributor’s copy early in March. It’s not listed among the items this column discusses because it’s a Hungarian magazine and my Hungarian ain’t quite good enough for me to get the magazine’s address, cost, date, etc., right. I can read Hungarian numbers, though, so can tell you it’s got 104 pages. It’s a slickzine (i.e., good production values, glossy cover, letter-sized pages). I had three of my conventional poems in it, translated (ahem) into Hungarian. By Marton Koppany, who’s translated me before. Not every American writer has work translated into a foreign language, much less Hungarian (!), and that kind of thing hardly ever happens to me, so I hafta brag about it.

More reprehesibly, I’m now going to quote one of the poems translated, “Poem’s California Career” (“Vers kaliforniai karrierrje”), in both English and Hungarian: “For hours/ a telephone’s unlocatable ringing’ kept the beach and the parasols/ flapping through/ the eyesight the ocean/ had been for so long/ struggling to become.” and (without the little marks above certain vowels it ought to have) “Orakon at/ egy beazonosithatatlan telefoncsenges/ csapdosta/ a vizpartot es a napernyoket/ a latvanyhoz, amellye valnia/ oly sok veszodsegebe/ kerult as oceannak.” What’s interesting to me about this is that I thought my weird use of English would be hard to translate, but in this poem I can see that all the weirdness is in the surrealism, not the diction, so was probably easy to translate.

Kalligram is well worth a mention here for better reasons than my having something in it, for it’s got a nice gallery of first-rate visual poems by Karl Kempton, Karl Young, Geof Huth, Endwar, Dan Waber, Nico Vassilakis, Roy Arenella and Tim Gaze. Looks like a nice variety of Hungarian stuff, too–including a six frame narrative (film clips?) by Juha Valkeapaa showing a young man in some kind of melodrama that begins with him facing a masked man in a dental chair (or some such chair) and ends with him happily whispering something into a friend’s ear while a number of smiling people watch.

Ah, I do have a URL for it: www.kalligram.com.

Ramblablurry

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 36, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2004

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The Compact Duchamp Amp after Amp.
Guy R. Beining. 72 pp; 2003; Pa;
Chapultepec Press, 111 E. University,
Cincinnati OH 45219.
www.tokyoroseserecords.com. $23.

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

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

Several Steps from the Rope.
Guy R. Beining. 34 pp; 2002; Pa;
Anabasis Press, PO Box 216,
Oysterville WA 98641. $15.

the whispering ice cubes.
Rupert Wondoloski. 51pp; 2003; Pa;
Shattered Wig Press, 425 East 31st Street,
Baltimore MD 21218. $8 ppd.
www.normals.com/wig.html. $8 ppd.

Xtant3. Autumn, 2003.
Edited by Jim Leftwich. 208 pp.;
Xtant, 1512 Mountainside Ct.,
Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $20 ppd.

 

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I don’t know what makes what I’d call conversational writing, of any kind whatever, so frequently excruciatingly difficult to do for me (and many others); no, not actually do, but start to do. In my case, I think it’s primarily a fear that I’ll say something rilly stoopid or stoopidly or both (any of which will bother me just as much if I say it to myself only as it will if I say it to a friend or even the general public, like you–which, now that I think of it, is probably because I megalomaniacally believe everything I write will eventually be read by some public). No, wait: it’s more likely due to laziness, or a combination of laziness and an excessive feeling of high responsibility. That is, I feel it my duty to say Important Things, but finding facts to back them up with, and working out the right way to say them is hard work (much harder than just thinking of Important Things To Say). I guess fear plays a role there, too–in this case, fear that I won’t be able to find the facts I need. Fear of misexpression, too, but–oddly–not fear that what I think are Important Things aren’t, however unlikely others will have as respectful a view of them as I. For some reason, I’m close to unbudgeably confident that what I think is Important, is! Like poetry. Like, in particular, the kind of poetry I compose and write about, though not necessarily my specimens of it, or my writings on it. Which, as I’ve said, I fear may be stoopid or expressed stoopidly.

My usual solution to the problem is to do what I’m doing here, which is writing super- casually. First off, this gives me an out, even to myself, for whatever sins of thought or expression I commit: I wuzn’t rilly trying! It also allows me to leave my opinions unsupported, if I can’t readily find some fact I need. A beauty of the method is that once I get going, I can sometimes break through my neurosis and actually do all the work necessary to back my views. I may have done that as many as five times in the sixty odd columns I’ve now written for SPR, in fact. No chance I’ll do it here–which is okay, since I’m sure that by now I’ve lost all my readers. (“Elimination of Witnesses” is surely one an appropriate name for my method.)

I will, however, finally start ramblabblurring around the texts this column is supposed to be about. I’ll begin with otherstream, which is what all these texts are. I mention that because “otherstream” is my term, and people aren’t using it enough. It’s better here than “experioddical” because the latter is supposed to refer to periodicals, and four of the texts I’m covering are books. It’s also intended to be less of a nonce word than “experioddical.” It does not mean “not mainstream,” it means “not knownstream.” “Knownstream” refers to art of a kind almost any college arts department would know about. Hence, it would include mainstream art, However, it would also include sestinas about Bavarian lesbians cowgirls who love to make carvings of elephants, say, which would be knownstream (in kind) but not mainstream.

Of the texts I’m reviewing here, the whispering of ice cubes, by Rupert Wondolowski is the closest to “mainstream.” It is only insane. More precisely, it is a collection of surrealistic poems and prose pieces. While “surrealism” has long been mainstream, Wondolowski’s kind certainly hasn’t. To put it very roughly, mainstream surrealists (in general) dip from the everyday into surrealism, otherstream surrealists dip from surrealism into the everyday–and the grammar of the first group tends to be much less improper than that of the second.

Wondolowski reminds me a lot of Al Ackerman (which should not me surprising, considering that they are friends and work in the same Baltimore bookstore–which, I believe, Wondolowski owns). A main difference is that most of Ackerman’s characters seem driven to accomplish great, if insane, things whereas the majority of Wondolowski’s are simply telling us what’s going on with them. The narrator of “bathtub,” for example, tells us, “I am in the bathtub having a cough syrup moment and the sun feels warm and personal. I stare into the light and I am with the light. It’s kind of like LSD except I don’t want to eat my face off.” I think an Ack Wack would be trying to eat his face off, and expecting the reader to understand the Grave Importance of this and sympathize with his failure to achieve it. At any rate, both writers are similarly funny, but easy to tell apart, And their personae break unexpectedly often into high (and lyrical) emotional truths, as when the speaker of Wondolowski’s poem, “you’ve just gone to a place where you have no hair,” says, “Good Christ, I realize I’m/ older than Gerry Sandusky/ who is waiting out in the/ dark wooden shack of the photocopy.”

Ahoy, it looks like mission accomplished already: i.e., I’ve almost finished this column. You can’t tell, but it took me two go’s, the second occurring four or five days after the first. Of course, I’ve barely begun reviewing anything, but the point is to get my column done! Which I could probably say that I have now done. Before I stop, however, I should quote a stanza of Ackerman’s Sack Drone Gothic to give you some idea of it: “A scam and a lumbar/ Drain the coughers/ And Godhood fame loosens up for cool animal gobber lung hole guy/ The old story, drawers and side and ledge.” I love this, mainly, I guess, because it so marvelously summarizes not only this but all my columns–especially with its reference to “ledge!”

I feel dutybound, too, to inform you that there are terrific collages and more in the books by Guy R. Beining listed at the start of my column, and that Walter K. Lew said this about Literature Nation, Maria Damon and mIEKAL aND’s collaboration: “uncanny ecstasies strengthened to pt of no return… poseproseplosively synchzynch intraterrventriclist…” As for Xtant, the last of the things I should mention here, it’s huge, and full of pursueworthy awaynesses. I will say more about these, I hope, in my next column. Meanwhile, to find out more about Sack Drone Gothic, and a host of other texts not easy to find reviews of, check out Mike Basinski’s corner of a literary website called The Hold.Com. Its url is http://www.the-hold.com/library/basinskilibrary03.html.

Len Fulton, 1934–2011

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

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I never even spoke with Len on the phone. The few letters we exchanged during the twenty years we knew each other were more notes than real letters, although sometimes personal, such as when he quickly asked for reassurance that I was okay after Hurricane Charlie blasted into my town (and house), and just a month or so before his death when he checked up on me after an operation I’d had for an arthritic hip.

I also remember with a smile one letter in which he revealed his not being all that sure who wrote the works of Shakespeare after I’d mentioned an Internet discussion group about the Authorship Controversy where I rather fanatically argued for my boy Will against Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford and the others advanced as The True Author by authorship skeptics. We didn’t get into a fight about it, though!

My strong impression of him was that if we had, he wouldn’t have held it against me. He was a man of solid, firmly-held, common sensical views of life that he was confident enough of not to be bothered (much) by those who thought differently from him. An excellent exemplar of the kind of Openness that has made California America’s research and development leader in the arts and sciences–as well as the home of the world’s largest collection of flakes (I one of them for the fifteen years I lived in North Hollywood).

Len’s contribution to cultural research and development, of course, was to literature. I’m sure I’m not the only unmainstream poet forty or fifty years ago who would have been lost if not for the annual directories of small press literary markets he made available, one of which I used to connect to the haiku magazine that first published  anything of mine. Another one gave me the most important address I ever used as a poet, one Writers Digest and its directories would never have thought worth listing, the one (in California, unsurprisingly) for Karl Kempton’s Kaldron.

Small Press Review was next in importance. When I first came across it in the late seventies in a college library (at Cal State,  Northridge, I think, although it could have been at Valley Junior  College), I thought the Atlantic and The New Yorker were about the only poetry markets in the country. Suddenly I learned of a whole new literary world the Establishment hadn’t enough gatekeepers to block, a world with a place in it even for the kind of work this column of mine would become devoted to.

I particularly remember the columns and reviews of Robert Peters and Laurel Speer, both of them writing of interesting work in a manner that made me feel they were colleagues of mine rather than representatives of some far-off cultural region I could never be a part of. Family members almost, as was Len, long before he became my long-time editor. That happened in the early nineties when I reviewed a collection of poems by d. a. levy, a highly experimental poet that Establishment is still not giving anything like the attention he merits, whom both Len and I admired.

I may be wrong but I believe Len took me on as a regular columnist almost entirely out of his conviction that the whole continuum of literature be represented. I’d only been writing my column for a year or so when he carried out a survey of readers in an attempt to find out which columns were most, and which least liked. I never found out how I did. He wouldn’t tell me, which makes me suspect I didn’t do well. But he kept me on. And with me, news about kinds of poetry no other publication in the country with a circulation above a hundred had.

Besides his contributions to literature as an editor and publisher, Len was the author of two novels, The Grassman, a fine western, and Dark Other Adam Dreaming, the story of a young man’s coming of age, several plays, and American Odyssey, a still entertaining and informative Bookselling Travelogue about his beginnings in the book business.

According to an article about his death from news and review, an  independent alternative news and entertainment resource located on the Internet at http://www.newsreview.com/chico, he was also “an exceptionally strong (Butte) county supervisor when he represented the Paradise area from 1982 to 1993.

“Tall and lanky,” the article goes on to say, “with a thick moustache, he looked like the horseman he was, often showing up at supervisors’ meetings wearing Western boots and a bolo tie. He brought a no-nonsense, take-care-of-the-land-and-its-people attitude to the board, and worked well with other supervisors to foster good government in Butte County.”

I was amused to read in another piece on the Internet, a fine tribute  by Erick Silva of The Paradise Post, that he’d been a life-long fan of the baseball Giants–and saddened that I hadn’t shared his  happiness for them when they won the world series last year. I’d rooted for them when they were the New York Giants, then for a while after they abandoned their New Jersey, New York and Connecticut fans, but only because of my emotional investment in their players. I eventually dropped them for the Mets. But last year they were my team–I liked their players and felt the organization had been punished long enough for having skipped out of the Polo Grounds. Now that I find they won one for Len, I’m even more for them!

As I write this, I have no idea what the future of Dust Books will  be. Needless to say, I hope it continues, and that Small Press  Review remains one of its products. Whatever happens, I’ll remain  permanently grateful to Len Fulton for having made me part of
SPR’s later history. And wishing I had better words to remember  him by.

Criticism in the Otherstream   Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 3, March 1995             Taproot Reviews, No. 5, Summer 1994; 28 pp.      Burning Press, Box 585 Cleveland OH 44107. $10/4 issues.      Silent But Deadly, No. 6, January 1995; 28 pp.; USF #30444,      4202 Fowler Ave. Tampa FL 33620. SASE.      Poetic Briefs, No. 18, December 1994; 16 pp.;      UB Foundation, 31Parkwood St. #3,      Albany NY 12208. $10/5 issues. Good literary criticism is as important to the health of our literature as good literature, but there are even less outlets for it. If any commercial or academic periodicals exist that carry anything more than superficial reviews of best-sellers, staid appreciations of long-certified classics, or diatribes whose only engagement with art is political, I’m unaware of them. In my tiny branch of the cultural world things are better, thanks to such publications as the ones I’ll be discussing here (and, of course, to the one printing this!) The most wide-ranging of them is Taproot Reviews, a professionally produced tabloid edited by Luigi-Bob Drake that is now in its third year. The bulk of it consists of brief reviews (mostly of poetry) in two alphabetized sections, one devoted to zines, the other to chapbooks. In the summer issue each of these had something like 150 reviews by people in the field like Charlotte Pressler, Oberc, Susan Smith Nash–and me. Since some of its material is recirculated in Factsheet Five, TRR might best be described as an enlarged version of F5’s “Arts and Letters” section–but deepened as well as enlarged since TRR also includes a number of longer pieces that go beyond simple reviewing. Thus, the summer issue has a full page by Fabio Doctorovich on Paralengua, an Argentinean “post-typographic poetry” movement Doctorovich is active in; a critique of Ivan Arguelles’s Hapax Legomenon by Jake Berry; a discussion by Kristin Prevallet of translations from the French; a survey of Russian Transfuturists by Drake, accompanied by an interview of Transfuturist Serge Segay by Craig Wilson; and several other articles of equal substance. Although TRR’s main focus is on what I call the Otherstream, Drake does not scant zines dealing in plaintext poetry and other non-experimental art. Indeed, he is committed to encouraging poetry (and art) of all stripes. So if you’re the editor of any kind of art-periodical, send him a copy of it for review! Similarly, if you’re looking to publish your own work, you should be able to find appropriate publications to send that work to in TRR. A more intensely critical zine than TRR is Silent But Deadly, which Robert Peters saw and praised last year in SMR, and now contributes to himself (as do, needless to say, I). With each issue of SbutD, editor Kevin Kelly (aka Surllama), distributes four or five poems from among those that participants have sent him, or–sometimes–from his reading. Anyone interested, including C. Mulrooney, can then critique these, Kelly printing the critiques in the next issue. SbutD also includes miscellaneous illustrations, letters and poems, such as one in #5 by Mulrooney called, “Bob Grumman Teaching His Grandmother To Suck Eggs.” It consists of blocks of repeated lines about the operation of a Smith-Corona word-processor such as:             Bold Print – Highlight words for emphasis.             Bold Print – Highlight words for emphasis.             Bold Print – Highlight words for emphasis.   In the same issue John B. Denson prays for Mulrooney, though definitely not because of Mulrooney’s disrespect toward me! The zine, in short, is a lot of fun, and a great place to get close readings of one’s poems from all kinds of other poets. Poetic Briefs (pun intended) is, like Silent But Deadly, much concerned with the particulars of poetry–though it rarely focuses on single poems the way SbutD does. Issue 18 starts with a poessay by Stephen Ratcliffe intended to exemplify and simultaneously discuss writing that appropriates rather than formally quotes or refers to previously existing texts, in this case passages from Mallarme, and from a poem by Ratcliffe himself. The resulting language-poetry richness and mystery aptly introduces the rest of the issue, which is devoted to appreciations of the poetry of Clark Coolidge. The first of these, by Stephen-Paul Martin, is my favorite, for it goes into my kind of verbal subtleties, showing how the title of Coolidge’s The Maintains, for example, is both about the way the article, the, “unobtrusively maintains conceptual order in various forms of verbal communication,” and the way language acts as a “maintain” of the “zones of consciousness and apperception that poetry makes possible.” Cynthia Kimball says wonderful things about Coolidge, too, in a poem consisting of lines from Coleridge’s “Xanadu” that alternate with lines from Coolidge, while Coleridge’s name is shown dissolving into Coolidge’s–to provide a near-exact parallel to the way in which Coleridge’s tone and imagery marry into Coolidge’s with surprising smoothness. Suchwise does Poetic Briefs provide consistently intelligent and often lyrical insights into what’s going on in the best current language poetry. I can’t imagine any serious lover of poetry’s not being able to learn something of importance from it, or its allies, Taproot Reviews and Silent But Deadly.

A Key Vispo Publication

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2008

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       Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection
       Edited by John M. Bennett. 2008; 142 pp; Pa;
       John Bennett, Rare Books, 6070 Ackerman Library,
       610 Ackerman Rd., The Ohio State University. $30.

 

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I wrote one of the three introductions to Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection, the book this column is about. Marvin Sackner and its editor, John M. Bennett, wrote the other two. Four of my poems are reproduced in it, as well. And I personally know many of the others with work in it. Small wonder I’m positive about it. But if anything were holy to me, I’d swear by it that my bias has nothing to do with my opinion of it.

First off, it’s about as professionally packaged as anything of this kind can be: glossy 7.5″ by 10″ pages with nothing on one side showing through on the other; dazzlingly intense full color reproductions of some 250 works (the color very accurate, if the reproductions of my own pieces are any indication); and wonderful design and layout by Linda Lutz, Pamela Steed Hill and the staff at University Publications. The introductions, forgive me for bragging, are important, too. Sackner’s is a sharply discriminating, succinct overview of the catalog’s contents, Bennett’s an insightful discussion of what visual poetry is, mine a series of close readings of many of the pieces in the collection.

What makes it a “key vispo publication,” though, is its representation of just about all the best current American visual poets–and a fine sampling of first-rate poets of other countries–in something published by a bigtime university. It is a worthy successor to the first anthology of visual poetry put out by an American university (that I know of), the anthology edited by Mary Ellen Solt and published by Indiana University some forty years ago, Concrete Poetry.

It should be kept in mind that the pieces in the catalogue are simply a sampling of what’s at the Ohio Statue University Library. It is not intended to be a Serious Statement about the State of World Vispo. Bennett, the collection’s curator (with a “staff” of two student assistants at most and a severely limited budget) has done his best over the years to entice friends and acquaintances in the field to donate materials to the library rather than unrealistically trying to get work from every notable practitioner around (some of whom have already donated to other libraries or archives, or are procrastinating about letting their work go, or–like I–are waiting for Harvard or Oxford to offer a few million dollars or pounds for what they have). In any case, a number of important visual poets are represented in the book by only one piece: Joel Lipman, Karl Kempton, Julian Blaine, Crag Hill, Klaus Peter Dencker and Guy R. Beining, for example–although Bennett would love to have had more of their work at the library to choose from. With luck, this catalogue may inspire some of them, and others doing first-rate work, to start sending packages to The Ohio State University Library.

K. S. Ernst, Scott Helmes, Bennett himself (often in wonderful collaborations), Jim Leftwich and Carlos Luis are the stars of the show, each (deservedly) with four pages or more of pieces (in part, I understand, because of the size of their donations of materials to the library). The book is too loaded with just about every possible kind of visual poem for me to be able properly to characterize it in the limited space of this column. Instead, I will be lazy, and re-cycle a slightly-edited version of one of the attempts at a close reading I made in my introduction to it. It’s of a poem by Gyorgy Kostritskii, one of a number of poets whose excellent work I was ignorant of until this collection. My excerpt would be much clearer for someone reading it in my introduction, and thus able to turn to the work it concerns, but I hope something useful about the way text and graphic interact in Kostritskii’s piece (and, I should add, in so many of the other pieces in the book), and how one critical mind flickers and sputters in reaction to his piece, comes through.

“The text of Gyorgy Kostritskii’s ‘is of,’ ‘is of/ Has a/ And goes,’ is a conundrum. Something that is of something, possesses something . . . and goes. Is of–is part of something else, makes up something larger than itself. Words shorn of connectivity like this, and in a nothingness of confusedness, force their reader to either leave quickly or seep into thoughts like mine. Perhaps into the idea of ‘And’ going (on), or connections being made. Or is “And” leaving, and connections being broken? The work’s blots declare themselves an illustration of this text but clearly at the same time connect in no way with it other than geographically (by sharing a page with it). The scene is primordial: the most basic of words in black and white. Geography? I keep wanting to take the scene as a beach. Whatever it is, it seems to enclose the text–but has an entrance, or exit, for it or other texts, at its top. The highmost blob is difficult not to take as the sun, which makes little sense, but gives the work a feel of archetypality I also get from similar works of Adolph Gottlieb. Can the text be considered the color of this picture?

“The work’s text seems part of one of the two trails the other shapes in the picture make. It also hangs in about the same direction of the rest of the picture mostly does. So: is the black of the graphic portion of the work achieving verbal expressiveness? There’s something in it of text as quotidian–just something there with a small world’s other sloppy arbitrary shapes. The thing forces the engagent–me, at any rate–to read the text into the graphics, and see the graphics into the text. A mystery that won’t finally declare itself, but avoids irritating by being utterly, serenely all curves except where the tiny letters make their sharp angles, and by being pleasantly balanced. I’m not sure where this piece should go on my continuum. I find it an A-1 illumage with a text that prevents it from staying for long in the visual cells of one’s brain. Strictly speaking, it’s not a collage, but close enough to put among the other more legitimate collages on the continuum.”

I end this column feeling I haven’t done justice to the book discussed. I’ll be shocked if any other poetry publication of 2008 is half as important for poetry as it.

 

Here beginneth my knowlecular psychology blog.

This has been up for a day or so and has had three visitors!  I wasn’t sure anyone was interested in my totally uncertified theory.  Anyway, I think the three of you, even though you may all just be students of abnormal psychology.  (Actually, I think you’re all academics stealing ideas from me.  No problem.  Although I would like getting credit for them, I’ve gone too long without any recognition for even one of them to be able any longer to care much.)

* * *

Later note: this won’t work as a blog, I now realize.  Ergo:

Here endeth my knowlecular psychology blog.

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