Tuesday, January 21st, 2014
My absentmindedness is getting worse, it would seem, although it was pretty bad to begin with. Anyway, here is yesterday’s entry, just thrown together a day late. It’s some pages from Of Manywhere-at-Once that I don’t have time to comment on:
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John M. Bennett has another major collection of poetry out. This one is called The Gnat’s Window. 78 poems. Bilingual. Closely inter-associating sequence. Amazing. I told John I’d try to do a critique of it, and I still hope to once my year-end chaos of chores is behind me, but–gah–John is one of the few poets I feel may be beyond my abilities as a critic, and he’s at his best–and therefore beyondest–in this book. Part of one of the poems, which Diane Keys has found a way to, uh, fatten, in all the best senses, with color, a piece of cloth and some cursive annotations–and the circling of “crumpy leg, is below. It’s from the back cover of John’s book.
Diary Entry
Saturday, 17 December 2011, Noon. Wow, since getting back at eleven from tennis and a McDonald’s snack, I’ve already gotten the day’s blog entry posted, which was easy because it was already done, and made a finished copy of the new version of “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” at Paint Shop. It’s not the official copy: it’s too small, and the official version will include the original cut-out fragments of magazine ads. There will also be the A&H framed version which will be in between the one I just made and the official version in size.
8 P.M. Since noon I haven’t done much. I printed out two copies of “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” and scribbled annotations explaining the terms I will put on one that will be on display atthe exhibition. Otherwise, I continued reading started yesterday of the magazines and books I will be reviewing for Small Press Review.
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Here’s Marton Koppany’s latest punctuation poem. It is also a visual poem. Most specifically, it is a visio-ellipsisentered.
That’s partly a joke but also serious. In my taxonomy it is in the subclass, ellipsisentered poems. Above it, from lowest to highest, are punctuational poems, infraverbal poems, visual poems, pluraesthetic poems, poems, literature . . .
Obviously, only someone famiar with Marton’s work would recognize it as an ellipsis. It took me several moments to realize when I first saw it, and I’m a Koppany Specialist! I very much like it, in part because I can’t quite find words to pin it down with. I think it emphatically says what an ellipsis says, to wit: “no need to say more.” What it’s not saying more about is the winter alias death that falling leaves are an ellipsis to. Presenting the leaves cursively is an excellent touch, making the final transition the leaves depict all part of a graceful unhurried rhythm–in the larger flow of Nature.
I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician. Well, no–Havel was an artist. He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:
An early visiopunctuational poet. The first such? Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know. Wait–of course not. My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964. I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though. Terrific poem, in any case. It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.” That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry. I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
All I have to say about yesterday’s entry is that the work at the top of the uppermost page is by Harry Polkinhorn. It’s a frame from Summary Dissolutions, a sequence of his my Runaway Spoon Press published sometime in the eighties. I also wanted to note that the very rough taxonomy presented hasn’t changed except that I now call “illumagery,” by another name: “visimagery.” For this entry I just have something more from Of Manywhere-at-Once:
Note: the text above directly follows my comments on Jonathan Brannen’s poem.
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Monday, December 5th, 2011
It seems that almost every time I seem to be getting productive, something knocks me down. This time it’s only a lost entry–this one, that I was trying to correct some detail of and lost in the process–without realizing it, so was not able to try to find the lost material by backing up until it was too late. So now I have to spend an hour or so, restoring what I can recall of what was here two days ago.
And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:
About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.” I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever. I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white. The original frames are each eleven by seventeen. Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.
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Sunday, 4 October 2011. Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is. I played tennis early in the morning–badly. I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
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.
Friday, May 21st, 2010
I simply disconnected from my blog–just didn’t think of it for about a week until a day or two ago. Then last night for some reason I started thinking about haiku and came up with the following poems that I thought worth making this entry for:
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. early April night:
. barely a single haiku
. of moonlight in it
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. the street’s cherry blooms,
. dazzling, yet almost grey
. besides the haiku’s
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Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Today’s entry is a repeat of one from Christmas day, 2005, with a few comments from today at the end of it:
25 December 2005: “clenched sky.” That’s one of the scraps in the notebook yesterday’s entry was about. Circa 1983. Never got into any poem of mine but may yet. Another scrap is the start in fading cursive of a sonnet I completed somewhere else on Dylan Thomas. I was momentarily quite taken by what the word, “steepled” did to its fifth line, “by his construction of a steepled truth,” for it took a while for me to realize the word was not “stupid.”
Other highlights include the following five unpublished haiku:
rain now as loud
against the northern side of the house
as the roof
rotting log
only part of forest floor
to show through melting snow
glimpsed tanned shoulder;
thin white string across it,
tied like a shoelace
bikini-bar dancer
showing off to her boy-friend,
me in between them
far enough from the storm
nearing the color-dotted beach
to see above it
I wrote these about the time I pretty much stopped writing conventional haiku. I quite like the storm one, probably because I still vividly remember the first Florida storm I saw from far enough away to see above–and to both sides–of it. I don’t think it’s a truly outstanding haiku, though. The one about the bikini dancer is fair in the wry sardonicism vein, I think. The one about the bikini string is nearly not a haiku, for it doesn’t really provide any haiku contrast; i.e., it’s a single-image description. On second thought, maybe it’s excitement versus the mundane: girl in bikini versus shoelace.
I dunno. The other two are very standard, but I’ve tried to improve them,anyway:
the rain now louder
against the house’s north side
than on the roof
rotting log:
only portion of the forest floor
to show through the snow
The first is slightly haikuish in the way it obliquely discusses a wind; the second re-uses a very over-done haiku theme, to wit: life goes on, or–more specifically–winter snow won’t win; but the theme is slightly warped toward freshness with the use of something a reader will take to represent a cohort of winter rather than a counter to it, until he realizes the cause of rotting.
Also in the notebook this bit of High Sagacity: “The Eastern Wise Man attempts to reduce his awareness to the size of his experience; the Western Wise Man attempts to increase the size of his experience to the size of his awareness.” Yep, I’ve always been Eurochauvinistic.
From today:
rotting log;
nothing else of the forest floor
showing through the snow.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Today was another bad day for me (because both my bikes had flat tires so I had to walk to where I had an MRI for my bad back, then walk to the bicycle shop two miles from there to get tubes before going on home, another two miles, so I’m just going to post one entry from my old blog, #631, in its entirety–because it’s one of my best entries for the general poetry public, I think:
24 October 2005: Well, we lost electricity in my neighborhood for seven or eight hours due to Wilma, but we got through it with minimal damage. Naples, to the south, didn’t do so well. Sad for them, but someone had to lose–and one good thing about the outcome is that the weather people seem to have been on top of things all the way through, which is certainly reassuring. In my ideal world there’d be hurricanes–but the land to persons ratio would be so high no one would have to live anywhere near places like Naples. There’d still be places like Naples, but they would be staffed by commuters, and lived in by vacationers. (Down with over-population–which in my book is anything over ten million–for the whole world.)
Okay, the poetry-related subject of this entry is the following poem:
. 2 children’s
. rained-around dry quiet spot
. within forsythia
This, or something like it, was in my first book, poemns. After selling some of the copies of the book, I found something wrong with one of the other three poems on the sheet it was on, so removed the whole sheet from the remaining copies of the book. I think the printers failed to make a line in one of the poems go off the edge of the page as I’d intended it to. I should have a copy of the four poems somewhere but it’d take me a week to find them if I tried to, I’m sure.
I’ve used this poem elsewhere since the book, I believe. I want to discuss it here cbecause I consider it a near-perfect example of what I try for as a poet, which is simply to render, in as few words as possible, an image that will cause others as much pleasure as possible. This one accomplishes this through its (1) subject matter, which is (a) quotidianly likely to elicit most persons’ sympathy, (b) pretty, children generally coming off as cute, and forsythia as beautiful, (c) peaceful, the rain having to be little more than mist not to be getting through forsythia branches, and, most important, (d) archetypally resonant by representing Shelter and Companionship, as well as Spring (rain and forsythia, and human beings in their spring); and its diction, which includes the wonderful rained/round rim thyme (but, not, I’m sure that’s not original with me), the with/syth near-=rhyme and the dry/qui aft-rhyme (or whatever it is I’m calling traditional rhymes). Only now, by the way, did I realize that the latter rhymes were near- or full-rhymes. The poem is also effectively concise, and it draws on its being a haiku, for that adds haiku-depth to it (via what it picks up from the tradition, and all haiku before–and after–it).
To me, one of its points of greatest interest is in what it does not have, mainly, manywhere-at-once, or equaphorical layering. In a way, this is a virtue, for it clarifies it into a moment of particular intensity. Amusingly, that emphasizes its being a pure haiku–albeit one without quite the right syllable-count. I do consider its lack of equaphors (or metaphors and the like), in the final analysis, a defect. I continue to believe the very best poems express two or more simultaneous images. But poetry as a whole would suffer consequentially if every poem were equaphorical.
Real life did inspire the poet, by the way. The forsythia in it is from the yard of the Hyde House, as it was known, on Harbor View Island in Norwalk, Connecticut, that I lived in between the ages of 7 and 12. It actually formed a sort of hut, though I’m not sure they could have kept out even mist. I played in it from time to time but most remember my sister Louise, a year younger than I, playing some kind of queen’s court game in it with her friends Ellen and Cindy.
Ironically, just the other day I learned that the Hyde House I’ve been reminiscing about is no more. It was leveled to make way for two condominiums that have to be devastating the ambiance of the shabby-genteel little clump of mostly vacation homes on the island. Progress triumphs again.
note: the large print is stupid, but I’m using it to indicate large blocks of quoted material because I haven’t been able to figure out how to indent at this site (other than use periods as with the poem quoted within my quote–which would take too long to get right for long prose passages).
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
In #622, #623 and #624 I apparently had little to say so presented a few snippets of autobiography–and the following poems done for jwcurry, some of them possibly in collaboration with him calling himself Wharton Hood:
. peeling out of
. a bullet’s stipend
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. her skirt
. crows
. skhert splhurt
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. cats sleep the sky here
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. flowers strip
. footsteps
. to the moon
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. pond
. dusk
. Pan’s thoughts
. appled in place
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. eyesigh pray supherSkIrT
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. miles of 3. a.m.
. after the
. haik
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And that’s all for now, for i”m deep in another null zone.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Okay, back to Geof Huth’s haiku and why I consider it a specimen of nearsense, and what that means:
. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there
This could be temporary nonsense, or a text that at first seems not to make sense but later does. Its speaker may simply have driven his car past another car without noticing the other car. At that point a companion’s remarking, “Hmmm, that car must be over fifty-years-old,” might cause the speaker to look in the direction where the old car should be and seeing no car–because it has moved. He never noticed the car but knows it was there although it has gone.
The problem with this is that no companion is mentioned. Moreover, the incident seems too minor to form the basis of a poem. So I take it to be a paradox: one can’t notice that one has failed to notice something. One can’t think there is a car somewhere that one did not notice since to do so indicates one noticed it. Or can one notice not noticing? It’s very confusing–coming close to making sense but never quite doing so. It’s not pure nonsense (as a form of literature meant simply to amuse) nor is it willfully and sadistically completely meaningless the way constersense is. There is thus something about it that gives pleasure–the way an optical illusion does, or the paradox, “This sentence is a lie.”
My tentative explanation for the pleasure is that we like reminders that existence is not wholly rational, wholly predictable. The paradox performs a variation on the theme of reason. It makes enough sense to prevent anger, but not enough to be fully satisfying in the long run–as a paradox. But Huth’s poem is more than a paradox: it captures a human feeling we all have of suddenly being discontinuous with Existence–lost. The universe has gone left while we were continuing right.
The difference between nearsense of this kind and constersense is that we share the feelings of the creator of nearsense but are the victims of the creator of constersense (unless we share his contempt for those who want existence to be reasonably reasonable and enjoy thinking of the pain he is inflicting on them).
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
I have always wondered why anyone would make much of most Dada works. It was evident that a good number of reasonably intelligent, sensitive people have, though. Including friends of mine who have shown themselves quite capable of fashioning works I think vastly superior to their Dada works.
Then I came upon Geof Huth’s
. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there
in the recentest issue of Haiku Canada Review. Not Dada, but certainly nonsense, or so I at first thought. I would now term it nearsense. As
. the crab boils filge at blargets in the goamy fludge
it would have been nonsense, or a literary work which uses irrational language in order to amuse (in the view of most knowledgeable people encountering it). As
. car didn’t (e time)s into bleep blegg bllllg you
it would be constersense, or a literary work whose textual matter seems chosen for no other purpose than to cause consternation–by seeming to be nearsense but ultimately not making sense, or proving amusing.
Then there’s temporary nonsense such as Joyce’s “cropse,” which at first seems either nonsense or constersense (and will always seem constersense to Philistines) but, given time, will quite rationally if poetically say “corpse” and “crops” simultaneously in succinctly sum up all the important cycles of human existence.
I have more to say about this, particularly about why the poem by Geof Huth is nearsense, but I’m too worn-out from another tiring day to do so until (I hope) tomorrow.
Monday, November 9th, 2009
A new Grummanism today, “constersense,” to go with an old one, “nonsense,” and one in between old and new, “nearsense.”
One item always worth taking a look at in the Haiku Canada Review is the page on which N. F. Noyes discusses haiku he likes. One of them got me thinking about nonsense
. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there
It’s by someone calling himself G. A. Huth. About this Noyes says, “From a fourteenth century poet I quote: ‘Generally speaking, a poet requires some understanding of emptiness.’”
(An amusing comment to make in a discussion of the World-Expert in the praecisio. See Geof’s blog for details on that if–shame on you–you don’t know what it is.)
Noyes goes on to say, “Here the sudden emptiness provides a strong “Aha!” experience, despite a seeming diregard for the haiku’s chief guideline of close observation, in ‘I didn’t notice.’”
(But I would contend that what the poet closely observed with his act of not noticing.)
Noyes was reminded of a haiku by Buson:
. Tilling the field:
. The cloud that never moved
. Is gone.
The other two haiku Noyes liked (as did I) are:
. a kicked can
. cartwheels
. into its echo –Jeffrey Winke
. transplanting
. four rose bushes
. transplanting bees –Liz fenn
More on nonsense and related matters tomorrow, if I’m up to it. (Final note: I at first mistyped Geof’ haiku as “the care I didn’t notice isn’t there.”)
This is from Geof Huth’s blog:
I liked this when I first saw it although I didn’t find it saying anything verbally. When I finally realized it said, “fifty,” I thought it accidental because I couldn’t see why it would say that. My slow mind eventually remember that Geof is now fifty-years-old, which makes this image a particularly effective representation of his present strange combination of freedom and awkward incompleteness . . . straining, yearning for something. With his ego (“I,” as Karl Kempton would be sure to notice) lost or transcended.
Diary Entry
Sunday 18 December 2011, 6 P.M. Another unproductive day. Tennis in the morning, a fine meal at Linda’s in the afternoon. A blog entry for today just taken care of a little while ago. A little work done on my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes” to count as “work on preparation for the A&H exhibition.” And now I’d like to go to bed, but will probably read instead.
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Here’s a piece I really like by Marilyn Rosenberg called “Muse We Can’t Return”:
Among the many virtues of Marilyn’s work is what I consider its constantly enhancing verbal and visual inter-referentiality. Note, for instance, what she does with the beige circles.
To see more of her work, click HERE.
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
I’ve been in and out of my Null Zone quite a bit of late, and for the past few days have been extremely in it. No zip, at all. I want to sleep but am barely able to–it takes me four or five hours to get to sleep at night, and I can’t sleep past six or seven. Even with a sleeping pill–or two. Ambiens? Something like that. The lowest dosage.
Maybe my trouble sleeping is why I liked the visual poem below of mine so much when I came across it earlier today while looking for a sonnet-related visual poem of mine for use in a presentation on sonnets I’m scheduled to give at the local writers’ center in a little over a week and can’t seem to work on for more than ten or fifteen minutes a day.
I may need my dosage of synthroid, the medicine I take for hypothyroidism, increased. I’m sure I’m suffering depression, too: one of my two brothers recently died. Visiting him for a week, then returning for three or four days for his funeral was one of the reasons for so few recent entries here.
Apologies for this doleful entry, but I wanted you few who come here upon occasion to know what’s going on, especially you few I’ve told I expected to write about an artwork of yours here by now.
Now that I’ve gotten going, I might as well make an announcement: the issue of The Pedestal with the gallery of artworks John M. Bennett and I edited for The Pedestal will be published tomorrow (at www.thepedestalmagazine.com), according to our editor, John Amen. We expect the usual flak about it. I just want to say all the wrong choices were John’s. And that I prefaced it with a ringing undorsement of calling textual designs visual poetry. Which John’s preface countered, but we’re still pals.
Isn’t it amazing? No matter how null I get, I retain my acerbic wit.
Another announcement: if I ever get even slightly energetic, I’m going to post a few of the works submitted to the gallery that didn’t make it into the gallery but that I liked; John says he might like to post a few of his favorites that didn’t make it, too. We also plan to have a gallery containing just about all the works submitted. It will go up at Spidertangle.net 1 August. I thought it’d be extremely informative for people to see what was submitted. We won’t post anything without the submitters’ permission, and have been turned down by three, so far. The same number so far have granted permission.
More, eventually, I very much hope.
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
I have to apologize to those of you who have sent me comments about this blog. For some reason, I was not getting e.mail notification of them. I also wasn’t aware of where I had to click to, to approve them (and apparently I have to approve them at this site for them to be posted). So I didn’t know I was actually getting comments.
I hope they will now show up. I hope, too, to get to them and reply. I just glanced at them when I finally discovered them, unapproved, but noticed several very interesting ones. Be patient with me, though. I’m pretty bushed at the moment, and out of it because of unhappy family matters. I’ll recover, though–always have.
–Bob
Sunday, April 11th, 2010
In a shift in my way of describing varieties of visio-textual artworks, I’m trying out a taxonomy of words and wordlike, uh, expressitons. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll change the latter to something better. I threw it onto the screen within a second or two of reaching where it put it in my sentence. What I’m talking about are things that act in an artwork the way words act in standard poems. It would include a brush-stroke in a painting, say, or a dot of paint, or maybe an entire shape. I got the idea of calling such a thing a kind of word, by the way, when I thought I might send Geof a pwoermd consisting of a scribble of paint, using the logic that since a visual poem, for him, need not have words, a visual pwoermd need not, either.
Here are the kinds of words I thought of:
1. word — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically rational context; e.g., “gulp” in “I gulp water just before playing tennis.”
2. nullword — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically incoherent context; e.g., “gulp” in “water I just tennis before gulp playing.”
3. unword — a nonsense word; e.g., ” gspp”
4. fragword — a fragment of a word incapable of easily being read as a word, and in a context in which it would be incoherent even if read as some word; usually intended to represent language, never to be language.
5. preword — something in a photograph or work of visual art that a word exists for–for instance, a tree.
6. visword — an element in a visual artwork like some of Scott Helmes’s visual haiku that is wholly atextual but intended, it would seem, to represent a word. Helmes’s visual haiku generally consist of three shapes, each suggesting a line in the classical three-line haiku; hence, each shape must contain a set of words adding up to five or seven syllables.
The use of these terms: I can now call poetry that is significantly visual visual word art; I can call visual art with semantically meaningless words in it, visual nullword art; visual art with nonsense words visual unword art; and three other kinds of visual n-word art. Then I will be able to communicate with the five or six people in the world who would are capable of telling the difference between these forms of art effectively.