Entry 493 — W N E S in My PluraestheticPoetry
I feel I ought to keep up my blog better. So here’s another entry. I was thinking about my latest poems–about all the things I was trying for in them, worrying a bit that I was doing too congestively much, but proud, too, that so much was going on in them. One thought occurred: that my visio-mathematical poems were getting more and more visual–but at the same time more verbal. It appeared to me that thirty years ago most of my visual poems were often interesting neither visually nor verbally but only visiopoetically. Most of my mathematical poems similarly were interesting neither mathematically nor verbally, but only mathepoetically. (And almost never visually.)
I think the mathematics in my poems is conceptually interesting but never interesting as mathematics. Hence, my current visio-mathematical poems are verbal, conceptual, visual,and not significantly mathematical. Many are only very indirectly what I call anthroceptual–having to do with people. There’s no persona in the latest, for instance–it’s all about things. Their final importance, of course, has to do with their affect on people, but they strike the mind first fundaceptually only (i.e., as what they are sensually), then mesh (if the poem works) into a kind of philosophical meaning that eventually resolves itself into a universal human feeling. I think almost none of my pluraesthetic poems are directly anthroceptual. Just about all my Poem poems are. But add anthroceptuality to verbality, conceptuality and visuality as one of the four directions of my visiomathematical poems, their W N E S.
I should add that I have many non-mathematical poems that also have these four directions, a mathematical component not being necessary to make one of them conceptual.