I’m still having “creative ideas” but having trouble bothering to put them on paper, even ones as easy to do that with as the ones that led to the following:
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Good ideas (inspired by Marton Koppany’s recent Otoliths book) not yet finding their best presentation, it seems to me.
Tags: haiku
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
I’m skipping ahead to old blog entry #796 today to make a point about my recent cryptographiku. #796 has Cor van den Heuvel’s poem:
. tundra
I go on in the entry to say I believe Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio,” of 1954, was the first poem to make consequential visiophorically expressive use of blank space:
. silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio . silencio silencio silencio
I finish my brief commentary but then opining that van den Heuvel’s poem was the first to make an entire page expressive, the first to make full-scale negative space its most important element. Rather than surround a meaningful parcel of negative space like Gomringer’s masterpiece, it is surrounded by meaningful negative space. I’m certainly not saying it thus surpasses Gomringer’s poem; what it does is equal it in a new way.
I consider it historically important also for being, so far as I know, the first single word to succeed entirely by itself in being a poem of the first level.
Then there’s my poem from 1966:
. at his desk
. the boy,
. writing his way into b wjwje tfdsfu xpsme
This claim to be the first poem in the world to use coding to significant metaphorical effect. Anyone who has followed what I’ve said about “The Four Seasons” should have no trouble deciphering this. I consider it successful as a poem because I believe anyone reasonably skillful at cyrptographical games will be able (at some point if not on a first reading) to emotionally (and sensually) understand/appreciate the main things it’s doing and saying during one reading of it–i.e., read it normally to the coded part, then translate that while at the same time being aware of it as coded material and understanding and appreciating the metaphor its being coded allows.
I’ve decided “The Four Seasons” can’t work like that. It is a clever gadget but not an effective poem because I can’t see anyone being able to make a flowing reading through it and emotionally (and sensually) understanding/appreciating everything that’s going on in it and what all its meanings add up to, even after study and several readings. Being able to understand it the way I do in my explanation of it not enough. This is a lesson from the traditional haiku, which must be felt as experience, known reducticeptually (intellectually), too, but only unconsciously–at the time of reading it as a poem rather than as an object of critical scrutiny, which is just as valid a way to read it but different.
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The only thing I’ll say about this piece is that, like most of these kinds of works by Beining, they are very difficult to classify. This one, I’ve decided, is a visual poem–because I find its text sufficiently fused with its graphics rather than simply accompanying them. It’s very subjective, but I see the text as developing out of the graphic above it and leading to the graphic under it, albeit in a highly surrealistic manner.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
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I may have it wrong, but I believe the college pond part of Clark’s installation began with the top image, then changed to “INKING/SENSATION” which, in turn, became the second image, finally becoming “SENSATION” by itself, then the bottom image, thereafter losing verbal meaning gradually until wholly gone. When I visited it, I saw the middle image. My memory is lousy but I remember it as the green of the bottom image. In any case, it was colored.
I will leave it here for now as an object of meditation as you might have happened on it walking to a class or the library of the college Clark teaches at. More tomorrow.
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
These are all from my previous blog. The top one is “Ellipsis No. 10,” by Marton Koppany. The second is my variation on that, and the third a second variation on it by me. There here partly because, again, I could not come up with anything else to post, and partly because today I finished buying bus tickets to and from Jacksonville, Florida, where I’ll be visiting with Marton Saturday, 2 April. Anyone who’ll also be there then, let me know. Especially if you have a bed I can sleep in on Friday!
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Friday, March 4th, 2011
I’m still pretty much too out of it to do a real blog entry, so here’s this from the 15 February 2009 entry to my previous blog:
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I did a series of 5/7/5 images inspired by Scott Helmes’s slightly different visual haiku. This one I like enough to send with two or three variations on it to Jeff Hansen, who is editing a selection of poetry for Mad Hatters’ Review.
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Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
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Taken from my Comprepoetica blog entry of 30 April 2008. And here’s something from my 8 May 2008 entry I like:
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. After a Long Day
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. Slop slap.
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. Poem weigh 186,
. but his sleep weighed
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. the color of algebra,
. mastered.
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. sloop
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Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
Shortly after putting together yesterday’s entry (two days ago), I did a little work on the second of the two poems that entry featured (as I then had them). I was only going to change the quotient. I changed my mind about that, but made what I thought a terrific improvement to the sub-dividend product. With my mind on text coming out of a frame, I saw how in the first poem, I could get “understorm.” I liked that, so I changed the frame of the other poem, thus completing (I’m pretty sure) the two poems three years after throwing them together, and marveling at my ability still to be able to find little changes to make that are (for me) devastating! I’m pleased, too, with my finding new uses for old tricks, like what I do with Aram Saroyan’s “gh.”
I’m naming the poems, “Diptych in Praise of Western Civilization.” At least for now.
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I hope to add more colors to these eventually.
Sunday, February 27th, 2011
To get this entry out of the way, this, which is from the 11 March 2008 entry to my previous blog:
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Thursday, February 24th, 2011
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This I posted in my previous blog. I don’t know why I like it, but I liked it right after doing it, and each of the two subsequent times I happened to encounter it, so here it is.
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
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First, to get my latest coinage out of the way before I forget it: “urentity.” I’m not keen on it but need something for more or less fundamental things like photons and electrons–both larger like atoms, and smaller like quarks; for light, too, and maybe gravity. There may be good term for this already out there; if so, I’m not aware of one, and I’ve often wanted one. “Bit of matter” would be good enough if there weren’t some things not considered material, like light.
Maybe “fundent.” “Urentity” is pissy my ear now tells me.
What follows are notes written yesterday toward a discussion of how to define poetry.
Last night I felt I was putting together a terrific monograph on the subject but now, around 3 in the afternoon, I’ve found I haven’t gotten anywhere much, and am out of gas, so will add a few thoughts to what I’ve said so far, without keeping it very well organized.
The best simple definition of poetry has for thousands of years been “literary artworks whose words are employed for substantially more than their ability to denote.” With “literary artworks” being defined as having to have words making some kind of sense whose purpose is to provide aesthetic pleasure to a greater degree than indoctrination or information, the other two things words can provide.
A more sophisticated definition would list in detail exactly what beyond denotation poetry’s words are employed for, mainly kinds of melodation (or word-music), figurative heightening, linguistic heightening (by means of fresh language, for instance) and connotation. Arguments have always risen about what details a poem should have to qualify as a poem–end-alliteration, the right number of syllables, meter, end-rhyme, etc., with philogushers almost always sowing confusion by requiring subjective characteristics such as beauty, high moral content, or whatever.
Propagandists work to make salient words ambiguous. They never provide objective, coherent definitions of their terms. Diana Price, the anti-Shakespearean, for instance, attacks the belief that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him but saying there’s no contemporary personal literary evidence for him, but in her few attempts to define what she means in her book against Shakespeare does so partially, and inconsistently. I bring this up because I hope someday to use her book in a book of my own on the nature and function of propaganda.
I’m not bothering with that right now. I’m intent only on establishing that poetry has always been, basically, heightened language used to entertain in some way and/or another, with different poetic devices being required by poets of different schools of the art. At present a main controversy (although now over a century old) is whether verbal texts using only the device of lineation (or the equivalent) can qualify as poetry, but it would appear that for the great majority of poets and critics, the answer is yes. The most recent controversy has to do with whether poetry making in which non-verbal elements are as important as verbal elements can be considered poetry. the outcome is uncertain but it would seem that another yes will result. Amazingly enough–to me, at any rate–is the belief of many visual artists who make letters and other linguistic symbols the subject of painting that such . . . “textual designs,” I call them . . . are poetry, “visual poetry.” The question has not reached enough people in poetry to be considered controversial yet, I don’t believe–however controversial in my circles.
My newest and best definition of visual poetry is: “poetry (therefore verbal) containing visual elements whose contribution to its central aesthetic effect is more or less equally to the contribution to that of the poem’s words.”
It is constantly claimed how blurry and ever-changing language is, but I’m not sure it is. It seems to me that most of our language is quite stable, and that only language about ideas, which are forever changing, is to any great extent capricious. Sure, lots of terms come and go, but only because what they describe comes and goes. “Poetry,” was reasonably set for millennia, and uncertain only now because for the first time a significant number of artists are fusing arts, thus requiring new terms like “visual poetry,” and amendments to definitions like “poetry.”
A precise, widely agreed-on definition of “poetry” is essential not only for critics but for poets themselves, no mater how little many of them realize it. They want to use it freely, and should if you believe with me that “poetry is the appropriate misuse of language.” A metaphor is a misuse of language, a lie. Calling me a tiger when it comes to defending the rational use of language is an example. I’m not a tiger. But I act in some ways like a tiger. A metaphor actually could be considered an ellipsis–words left out because understood, in this case saying “Bob is a tiger” rather than “Bob is like a tiger.” In any case, if we don’t accept the definition of tiger as a big dangerous cat, the metaphor will not work.
To say a word can have many meanings according to its context does not make it polysemous, although if provides the word with connotational potential the poet can take advantage of.
James Joyce’s “cropse’ is a neat misspelling but useless if one does not accept the precise meanings of “crops” and “corpse.”
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Mathematical Poetry is poetry in which a mathematical operation performed on non-mathematical terms contributes significantly to the poem’s aesthetic effect.
Mathematics Poetry is poetry about mathematics.
Neither is a form of visual poetry unless a portion of it is significantly (and directly) visio-aesthetic.
The taxonomic rationale for this is that it allows poetry to be divided into linguexclusive and pluraesthetic poetry–two kinds based on something very clear, whether or not they make aesthetically significant use of more than one expressive modality, with the second category dividing cleanly into poetries whose definition is based on what extra expressive modality they employ–visual poetry, for example, employing visimagery; mathematical poetry employing mathematics; and so forth.
Directly. I mentioned that because there are some who would claim that a linguexclusive poem about a tree so compellingly written as to make almost anyone reading it visualize the tree is a “visual poem.” But it sends one to one’s visual brain indirectly. A genuine visual poem about a tree, by my definition, would use a visual arrangement of letters to suggest a tree, or graphics or the like directly to send one to one’s visual brain.
A confession. I’ve been using the pwoermd, “cropse,” as an example of a linguexlusive poem that muse be seen to be appreciated, but is not a visual poem. Yet it is almost a visual poem, for it visually enacts the combination of “corpse” and “crops” that carries out it aesthetic purpose. To call it a visual poem, however, would ignore its much more potent conceptual effect. I claim that it would be experienced primarily in one’s purely verbal brain, and very likely not at all in one’s visual brain. One understands its poetry as a conception not as a visimage. When I engage it, I, at any rate, do not picture a corpse and crops, I wonder into the idea of the eternal life/death that Nature, that existence, is. It is too much more conceptual than visual to be called a visual poem.
I had a related problem with classifying cryptographic poetry. At first, I found it clearly a form of infraverbal poetry–poetry depending for its aesthetic effect of what its infraverbal elements, its textemes, do, not on what its words and combinations of words do. It was thus linguexclusive. But I later suddenly saw cryptography as a significant distinct modality of expression, which would make cryptographic poetry a kind of pluraesthetic poetry. Currently, I opt for its being linguexclusive, for being more verbo-conceptual than multiply-expressed. A subjective choice. Taxonomy is difficult.
For completeness’s sake, a comment now that I made in response to some comments made to an entry at Kaz’s blog about my taxonomy: “Visual poetry and conventional poetry are visual but only visual poetry is visioaesthetic. The point of calling it ‘visual’ is to emphasize the importance of something visual in it. In my opinion, the shapes of conventional poems, calligraphy, and the like are not important enough to make those poems ‘visual.’ Moreover, to use the term ‘visual poem’ for every kind of poem (and many non-poems) would leave a need for a new term for poems that use graphics to their fullest. It would also make the term of almost no communicative value. By Geof’s logic we would have to consider a waterfall a visual poem because of its ‘poetry.’ Why not simply reduce our language to the word, ‘it?’”
Saturday, November 27th, 2010
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This is my favorite of Guy’s three. I didn’t get the game the text plays right off. Even without it, the piece is major–one of those works that make me think I’m in some non-human species so little do I understand why so much trash wins adulation and works like this hang nowhere but in galleries like this, at best.
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Received 4 years ago, exactly. Still holding up!
Of course, it’s much better at about twice the size of the above, which would be, I believe, its proper size.
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This is my favorite of Guy’s three. I didn’t get the game the text plays right off. Even without it, the piece is major–one of those works that make me think I’m in some non-human species so little do I understand why so much trash wins adulation and works like this hang nowhere but in galleries like this, at best.
I had all kinds of trouble getting the following images into this post, and I’m exhausted, so won’t say much about them until tomorrow. I will say that I consider the top one an example of what has been wrong with the arts world for the past 40 or more years.
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Sunday, April 17th, 2011
Finally I’m returning to Clark Lunberry’s installation. Ironically, I already had the words I’m posting written–they’re all from the diary entry I made when I got home from Jacksonville, although somewhat revised:
So, we spent time at a Farmers’ Market–part of it very very pleasantly, under a freeway underpass on a bank of the river through Jacksonville, the name of which I now forget. We had lunch there, while listening to a girl singer accompanied by guitar–in the folk vein, I guess, and nice. Then quite a distance to the college Clark teaches at to see his installation (as well as an excellent exhibition of some of Marton’s pieces) . I wasn’t prepared for the outdoor part of the installation, “SENSATION” making an X with “THINKING” floating in the center of a small pond with geese swimming in it in front of where we parked. An evolving installation: later Clark rowed out to the X in a kayak and changed “THINKING” to “INKING.” It seemed okay to me. The words are from a quotation from Cezanne he’s done many variations on at other installations of this particular (4-year) installation.
The installation continued in the library building next to the pond. First, the long glassed-in exhibition space in the library’s lobby I had a picture of a few entries ago. In it were a huge number of books on water, trees and sky, plus an intriguing mush of torn pages of text in the jar that summed up the adventure into a secret cave that all the books contained. Then three visual poems, each taking up one portion of the stairway window, or glass wall, that faced the pond. The first featured repetitions of the word, “WATER,” the second “TREES, the third “SKY.” These are in many of the other versions of the installation’s . . . “frames.” Several other texts in much smaller letters, some of them sentences, crossed the windows. I was enthralled with the way one could see through these texts into the pond, and the trees beyond, and–finally–into the sky (wonderfully cloud-clumped when we were there) . (Sound effects were included although only the ones for “WATER” were working at this time.)
I immediately thought of Bob Lax (a favorite p0et of Clark’s too, I learned). Clark is a big fan of Samuel Beckett’s (whom he’s been teaching many for five or more years), who is also an obvious influence. But he’s also absorbed and created out of many other influences, many of them non-literary.
According to Billy Collins, E. E. Cummings is, in large part, responsible for the multitude of k-12 poems about leaves or snow
But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere. Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at. Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem: suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend. For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness. That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.
To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much. But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story. Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine. I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to. It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.
I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.
The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:
But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly– one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once. Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness. For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.
Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:
In this poem the F suggests to me a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point. So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text. Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives. And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been. Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world. In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.
So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.
Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.
endwar says: Hmmm . . . . all leaves in fall.
Was this one of the response to Dan Waber’s “Fall leaves” project?
– endwar
I’m away from the files in my main computer so can only tell you it was a response to one project of Dan’s, probably the one you mention. Not sure, though, It had to do with work by bp Nichol, though.
My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:
![100_0085[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00851.jpg)
What the heck, here’s another wall:
![100_0087[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00871.jpg)
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Márton Koppány says: They look great, Bob! Good to see them exhibited.
All the best,
Márton
Thanks, Marton. Who knows, maybe some nut will notice them and be so impressed by them that he’ll scrawl, “Wow!” in chalk on the wall!
Actually, if I were really ambitious, I’d sneak in and vandalize them, at last thereby getting press coverage.
Hello,
Interesting idea to leave out the last few syllables and replace with a visual iinstead. But the yellow ellipses need to be more vivid. I suggest darkening the background and increasing the saturation and brightness of the yellow. Also, the second line needs more description, less laundry list, I think. (Forsythia do not grow in California–I miss them. People not from the East or midwest may have trouble with the poem. Would the daff… work?)
I like the second one , but kind of want a little more hint. I first put in “unknown immense” in my head then realized you may have meant “unknown expanse.” Would “the unknown immense…..” work?
I found it hard to make the yellow show enough from the beginning. I didn’t like my “list,” either. My problem is that I like the idea of colored dots for an ellipsis, and yellow for forsythia is good, too, but not enough. I would keep forsythia, by the way, even knowing there are people not familiar with it. They can look it up. Or look at the footnote my editors will surely provide (you know, fifty years from now when I’m dead and finally world-famous). I think I’ll just have to let the yellow dots sit in my brain until I get lucky and a way properly to use them occurs to me.
Ditto the second idea. Would “uni . . . rse” work better. My problem here is that it is either not easy enough to decode or too easy. No matter. I felt from the outset that my use of the ellipses within a ellipsis did work here.
Thanks for the comments, COnnie. They strengthened my misgivings about the poems.
–Bob
I hope the misgivings do not cause you to drop them entirely. Do you have Adobe Photoshop Elements? It is not cheap and takes awhile to learn to use, but is very powerful regarding color changes. I believe you could definitely get the first poem to work well with just a bit of tweaking. Darken the background, choose a different contrasting color for the words and use bright yellow for dots. Change mistiness to mist and you’ve got two more syllables to play with in the second line.
(And yes, forsythia is more interesting than daffodil. I had to rely on the footnotes for “oleander” before I knew they grew all over out here!)
Universe is the wrong syllable count for a haiku. I actually prefer the ellipses to stand for an unkown something in this haiku. Whatever… Good luck.
Cheers,
Connie
Good thinking, Connie–since they’re the same as ones I had, myself, but didn’t mention! (Really!)
I hope the misgivings do not cause you to drop them entirely.
I hope so, too, but don’t think they will.
Do you have Adobe Photoshop Elements?
I have Paint Shop, which I consider the Kmart version of Photo Shop, which I’ve used but can’t afford for myself.
It is not cheap and takes awhile to learn to use, but is very powerful regarding color changes.
Paint Shop does color changes nicely.
I believe you could definitely get the first poem to work well with just a bit of tweaking. Darken the background, choose a different contrasting color for the words and use bright yellow for dots.
Good thinking that I did not have is to change the color of the words. Only consideration is that I may want the words to be absolutely standard, to make the unstandardness of the ellipsis more pronounced. Changing the background is essential but difficult. I did make it a pale grey to try to help the yellow. A pale blue is another possibility. I don’t want dark grey or blue because it would start the poem already (possibly) too unstandard. Also, I want some kind of natural sky background for the ellipsis.
Change mistiness to mist and you’ve got two more syllables to play with in the second line.
Humorously, I changed “mist” to “mistiness” to get my syllable count, not able to find two syllables to add that I though worked.
(And yes, forsythia is more interesting than daffodil. I had to rely on the footnotes for “oleander” before I knew they grew all over out here!)
Hey, I don’t know what oleander is! For a haiku poet, I’m terrible with names of trees, bushes and flowers.
Among the possibilities I’ve come up with for repairing the forsythia poem are to forget forsythia and just go with something a better color for this idea. Another simply to use bigger textemes (if that’s my word for letters and similar elements, like punctuation marks). One thing I feel I’ll almost certainly use is bigger textemes and some kind of scenery inside the dots, like a close-up of forsythia in bloom.
Hmmm, how about “It’s April and the forsythia is in bl o o o” with the o’s filled in and yellow? Rhetorical question. I do think that idea has possibilities, though. . . . A poem in bl o o o
all best, Bob
Universe is the wrong syllable count for a haiku.
I know. Couldn’t think of a way to make that line five syllables. Gave up, knowing I only had a rough draft.
I actually prefer the ellipses to stand for an unkown something in this haiku. Whatever… Good luck.
My problem is that I really don’t know how I want to use it. Most of my ideas for visual poems begin with a gadget like colored ellipses that I play with until I suddenly see what I can make the gadget mean. Then I work on the text until I think it makes that meaning reasonable clear.
Thanks for your comments. With mine, they provide a good demonstration of what should be going on in the head of a poet but seems not often to. A danger is making a rationale for a poem too overt, but the reverse danger, not bothering to connect a poem to a rationale, is worse, I think.
–all best, Bob
Yes, I see why you want to keep a black text in the first haiku. A bright sky blue should contrast well with yellow.