Entry 1452 — Bing.Com Images
Last night I thought I’d skim through what the Internet had on me as I do every now and then, and found this, which had over a hundred images going back to the eighties that had to do with me, taken from various Internet sites. A few were of me at conferences or the like, and a lot were of my poems, some of which I’d forgotten about, but many were of friends in poetry and their work. It was like a retrospective of my life as a poet. I strongly recommend it. Just type in your name, or that of anyone else you’re interested in.
I just went to the collection on Geof Huth, and was a bit dismayed that no images of me seemed to be there whereas several of him were among mine. A surprise was that his images mostly connected him to the language poets, as did an accompanying list of “related topics.” It didn’t have a single specialist in visual poetry on it. It seems to me you can find our more about him as a poet among my images than you can among his. Unless he’s really left the otherstream.
Among the first images of my poems was this, “Long Division Poem for John M. Bennett,” which I’d forgotten all about (and quite liked). Another, this one from the R’r Blog:
It was a contribution to the online celebration of his 70th birthday. Right above it is this mathematical poem, which predates my first mathematical poem by around half a decade:
Last but not least at Roadrunner’s blog is this reminder of how out of it academic knownstreamers are from 38 years after my first visual haiku, 36 years after Aram Saroyan’s mathematical haiku–and 12 years or so after my invention of the “mathemaku”:
“. . . I am inclined to think that short poems, even short poems with a seasonal reference and a 5-7-5 syllabic structure, written in English can’t be, strictly speaking, haiku. Or to say it another way, the haiku is still acclimatizing itself, in this country, to the cultures of American poetry. . . . I expect something unexpected will eventually evolve from our admiration for and attempts to translate the practice of the short Japanese poem.”
—Robert Hass (from R’r 7.4, November 2004)
I’m afraid I think he’s probably right about most of the “haiku” of certified poets like himself and W. S. Merwin, but not about the many serious writers of haiku like John Martone and myself that he and his fellow academics are wholly ignorant of.
.
These early examples of minimalist/visual haiku/poetry are superb.
Saroyan’s perhaps uses the mathematical template with words to point to their similarity=both are really self-enclosed symbol systems that have no reference outside their respective “languages.”
And, I like how he adds: life originates in the sea we’ve been taught and by the time geologically you reach forests, you have the roaming space and feeding grounds for the development of horses.
Grumman wonderfully weaves the sibilance of “s” to give the hush quality of “silent” habor, “snow,” and “isle,” and artfully makes of this quiet isolated barren wintriness scene the purpose of qualification, modification, parenthetical of either something left out or as remaking on the equation of
___I_____
Persephone,
which is “I” alone is an isle, a harbor, snow and can only become ripe, flourish when divided into Persephone, when tied to Persephone, the goddess of vegetation, spring, rebirth, nature.
Random thoughts for a cold wintry day.
see Victor Ortiz’s blog:
http://haikuexperiments.com/
i am fond of the second one and the last two.
Great to see the Saroyan mathemaku (as he didn’t call it), which came before any of mine.
And, of course, wonderful to see what Jack Galmitz said about it and mine.
* * * Just stepped out to go to haikuexperiments.com: great stuff there! Yes,haiku is evolving.
Thanks, Roadrunner!