POETICKS

March/April 2014

EXPERIODDICA

Random Chatter

The M@h(p0et)?ica Blog
Blog-Master: Bob Grumman

/math-poetry-blog

First of all, a sad announcement: Scientific American cancelled my guest blog.  Toward the end, it was getting less than a thousand visitors, making it too unpopular, I was told, to be worth continuing.  That it was providing material nowhere else available at the website (or anywhere else) was irrelevant.  My flippant attitude toward science may have been a factor, too–although I was also respectful toward it, being in actuality quite devoted to it in spite of the many tenth-raters contaminating it, as they contaminate all fields (except mathematical poetry).  Bottom line: I’m grateful to Bora Zivkovic, who was the one at Scientific American who gave me my break and let me keeping going for 16 entries.  He left his job shortly after accepting my 17th entry but before posting it.  I suspect he was more open to such stuff than the one who replaced him.

My one big disappointment was that not a single mathematician or anyone else in science ever got in touch with me about the blog. Nor did any poetry commentator mention it anywhere that I know of, except–a few times–to say it existed.  Poetry (the magazine) was one that did the latter (at its blog), can yah buhleeve it?!  But, for the historical record, so far the only mainstream venue that has done anything of any significance for mathematical poetry is Scientific American.  Which suggests that scientists are slightly more likely to accept it than poets–or, more accurately–less likely fearfully to get as far from it as possible.

In any case, the blog’s seventeenth entry has been posted–at my regular poetry blog (poeticks.com), not at the SciAm website.  And I will keep it going, although not at the once-every-four-weeks rate it had been appearing.  I plan to redefine it as a science and poetry, or perhaps even as a science and arts blog, but with poetry and math its main subjects.

I’m also branching out into work for a magazine concerned with mathematics and the arts–a review and an essay.  My invitation to do these was almost certainly the result of my SciAm tenure, so I do owe Scientific American that.

Okay, now to something a bit different for this column–an informal poetics discussion rather than the discussion of poems and poetry publications it’s been every time until now (as far as I recall, but considering how many columns I’ve now done–this is the 122nd–and how bad my memory is, I could be wrong.)

My specific topic is one I’ve been trying in vain to be Absolutely Definitive about for forty years or so: the components of a poem.  I’ve been particularly engrossed with it lately because of my efforts properly to define mathematical poetry at my SciAm blog, which required me to define poetry yet again.

Note: what follows is a considerably-revised version of what was in my original column.)

I’ll begin our adventure with the perennial poetics question concerning what form and content are in poetry.  The wide-spread idea that they are inseparable seems ridiculous to me, but I’m an inveterate reductionist (to a psychotic degree some would claim), so that shouldn’t surprise anyone.  I hold that form is not really a physical part of a poem, but that system of relationships and abstract attributes organizing the poem’s content.  Mainly the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean Sonnet, for instance, along with its metrical pattern (14 iambic pentameters).  Its words are a poem’s content, what they are abstractly–rhymenants and metrical units–and the way they are abstractly arranged, makes up the poem’s form.

A form is also an essentially permanently unchanging part of all the poems using it.  So far as I can tell, it has just one poetic function, by which I mean what it does for a poem to improve its reception by a reader: it connects a poem using a given form to some tradition all the poems using that form make up.  This adds often deeply resonant connotative value to the poem–the under-ambience that a modern Shakespearean sonnet brings a reader from Shakespeare, and Keats and Wordsworth and all the other masters who used it, for instance.  In other words, form adds content to a poem, although it is not itself content.

Not that it doesn’t also have what might be called a craft function, its use for giving a poet a sort of blueprint to follow.  Which reminds me that it does have a second value for its readers: giving them the same blueprint to follow, thus keeping the poem familiar enough in one way to keep what’s unfamiliar about it from defeating them (and every good poem risks doing that simply by being poetry–that is, by inventing new ways to present thoughts and feelings).

For a while I was content to sum up poetic content (oops, interesting unintentional pun) as simply the words and related linguistic components in a conventional poem, plus the equivalent of words in what I call plurexpressive poems such as the visual images in a visual poem.  Then someone at New-Poetry (an Internet discussion group I and others were discussing this) brought up technical components of poems like rhymes and metaphors).  Where in my little two-piece scheme did they fit into, I wondered.

My answer: a poem has two kinds of content: its linguistic components and meta-linguistic components (i.e., elements that denote something averbally in a plurexpressive poem as the image of a certain bird will denote “seagull”), and its technical components such as poetic devices like rhymes and metaphors, each of which is also a linguistic or meta-linguistic component–as well as everything the two express both denotatively and connotatively–and, in the case of the technical components, what they add conceptually (e.g., via a metaphoric connection) and/or purely sensually (e.g., the pure sound of a rhyme, or the pure color of a visual element in a plurexpressive poem).

All of a poem’s components, I should add, will also contribute simple sounds, their shape as letters, and the like to the whole of what an engagent of the poem will experience.  So, we have three kinds of poetic content.

Or we can consider a poem to have only one content consisting of components, some of which can act both linguistically, or the equivalent thereof, and . . . extra-linguistically (as well as purely sensually), and some of which act only linguistically, or the equivalent (as well as purely sensually).

To  sum up, form is that which gives the over-all poem its shape, and contains it.   Content is what a poem’s form contains.   All of a poem’s content is expressive, but its form is also expressive–connotatively, as previously noted.  This does not make its form content, only an element having something in common with content.  The two differ from one another sufficiently to make it silly to consider them the same thing.

After taking quite a while to revise this column, it is clear to me the subject requires many more words to do it justice.  I hope what I’ve said helps until I or someone else can attack it at greater length.

* * *

Whew, I thought I would only use a few words to take care of form and content, then get into a much more detailed concept of what a poem is.  That will have to wait until the next installment of this column.  Unless too many people complain about this one.  Which reminds me to remind you that you can reach me at [email protected] to correct me, make suggestions, or anything else.  I’d love to hear from you!

.

.