POETICKS

Z Rhlokd sqhbj

When I was a child, I spent hours developing codes and ciphers: mostly simple substitution ciphers based on following the pattern of the alphabet—but from the wrong point in the series. The letter A would be B, for instance, so B would be C. I read about ciphers all the time, I created invisible inks out of lemon juice, I accidentally burned pieces of paper trying to reveal the hidden messages they held.

Bob Grumman seems to have lived a similar life, since the first poem in his Cryptographiku 1-5 is about a boy sitting at a desk writing in code. The poems in this brief chapbook are so few in number that to quote one of them would be to quote 20% of the book, so I won’t write out this poem or break its code for you. Let me tell you that the imagination of Bob Grumman awakens at the thought of using weird xenographic techniques: making poems out of long division problems (in his famous mathemaku, which are legion) and making poems that carry ciphers within themselves (in his less well known and less well named cryptographiku).

Most of the poems in this collection end with brief ciphers, ruining the reader’s expectation of a clean ending. Instead of concluding with a few words that clarify or enlarge the vision of the poem, most end with a series of numbers or nonsense characters, and the reader must puzzle out the meaning alone. In some way, these are like ancient riddle poems (seemingly nonsensical poems that lead to a logical meaning the poem only hints at), but these poems of Grumman’s always reveal the key to their meaning.

Take the following atypical cryptographiku, which suggests a pattern and, thus, suggests a solution. It is the figuring out of the code that is the essential part of its reading.

Cryptographiku for Wallace Stevens

spsjpi

sxqqhu

cwuvmn

winter

If you decrypt this poem correctly, you will note an interesting inconsistency in the code, one that suggests how the four seasons flow into one another.

Against the wishes and claims of the author, I see these cryptographiku as visual poems because their awkward yet poetic visual presence is part of their esthetic, because the poems cannot be read straight through as regular text, and because they live on the page (as signs in space) rather than in the ear (as signs in time).

That last phrase was a little bit of code for those of you who know the most ancient city of Florida, a state I will begin to drive towards tomorrow.

(an entry to his blog 6 April 2004)

a post to Spidertangle, 17 September 2010, responding to the author’s request for feedbakc about two of his  cryptographiku he referred to as “gadgets”

As with most of the cryptographiku, this one depends on the simplest substitution cypher of all (A=1, B=2), etc., which can leave us with this resulting plaintext:

#####

a [b]i[rd]

a [p]oe[m]

a bird

a poem

a [b]i[rd]

a [p]oe[m]

a

all around the path

orange, yellow, red and brown

leaves in slow descent

You’ll note that I’ve removed all the decimal points and converting the octothorps (#s) to letters surrounded by brackets, [ ]. The plaintext, however, is not the poem, is pretty darn plain, except that I’ll note the title is undecipherable. The octothorps represent a missing letter but do not provide the letter, which can be deciphered only via context, but the title is without context except for the succeeding poem, so I’d guess the title could be converted to both “birds” and “poems.”

That’s the easy part. The hard part begins with the idea of two gadgets. Do you have two poems here? I don’t think so. So does “gadgets” refer to the octothorps and the numbers? the two ways of converting the poem back into plaintext?

Everything else I might say is fraught with peril. The octothorps, which have a natural italic tilt to them, remind me of a flying bird, so it is possible that they represent flight, and thus birds, which are then also equated with poems in this poem. So birds are things of flight, and poems are things of flight as well, things that fly us away, let’s say. Second, the octothorp is also called the number sign (as well as the pound sign), but as the number sign they work just as numbers do in this poem, but more cryptically.

The poem gives us a hint to its decipherment, of course, in a pleasant way: the .1’s that open the poem, convert to .a’s after a few lines, making wonderful use of the a’s primary purpose as an indefinite article. What I don’t understand, though, are the opening decimal points. Those before the 1’s and the a’s are separated from those characters but a space, causing us not to read them as decimal points, and hardly as periods, since they open the lines. So I read them as starting points. The point is the simplest symbol, a dot that might be a decimal point, a period, a tittle, the lower or upper half of a colon, etc. Simple, but filled with meaning. From that point everything grows. Every line grows out of that starting point as does every word that follows the opening counting symbol.

A sequence of numerals or letters in order (numerical or alphabetic) suggest a listing, a moving forward, but this poem subverts that expectation by never proceeding past the first item in the series. We are always stuck at 1 or a, always beginning, held essentially in a moment. I also think it interesting that the 1’s and a’s work this way even though they would naturally precede the periods, rather than follow them, to carry this meaning. Meaning is both subverted and supported simultaneously herein, then, and in the entire poem, which seems unreadable at first, but which is a simple coded text, something simple to crack.

Finally, what do the dots mean within the words? First as separators, so that we can tell the difference between the numerals 1 and 6 and the number 16. Second, though, the opening dots, just as with the dots that precede the 1’s and the a’s, these dots suggest that anything said, anything seen, anything real before us, such as a bird, and anything conceptual yet present, such as a poem, is merely a fraction of something larger and is made up of fractions. Whatever we see or hear or write about is never the whole thing–always a part of an unswallowable whole.

The poem as a whole now seems simple: An autumnal view, from among trees, birds inside the trees, and they can be seen through the leaves (obscured by #s and numbers). They seem to the viewer either poems or grist for poems, so the birds are the same as a poem to the reader, and maybe because birds sing and poems were first sung things of the mouth that connection is even closer. Suddenly the focus becomes clearer because the viewer focuses on the trees, in which the birds are hidden, and he sees the leaves falling from the tree, which may be leaves or may be the feathers of birds.

The importance of song is heightened, I’d say, by the fact that four of the very few lines of this poem are reduced only to vowels, which are the sounds of song, the sounds we can hold through the singing of a song. And those vowels are the vowels for “bird” and the vowels for “poem.”