Archive for the ‘Explication’ Category
Entry 783 — A Conceptually-Treated Text
Thursday, June 28th, 2012
I’m having another off-day, so will take care of this entry with the following paragraph from one of my early columns for Small Press Review. I’m hoping for more examples of this sort of thing so I can write a major essay on it.
Conceptually-Treated Texts
Basinski also contributes a version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” that lists all of Poe’s words in alphabetical order. This, for me, yields nothing less than the subconscious mind of the story, eerily achieving a narrative interest in its own right as it blends or clashes with what Poe wrote–as in the following passage: “shriek shriek shrieked shrieked shutters silence silence simple since since single single singularity sleep slept slept slight slight slipped…” or “how how however human” followed by 120 instances of “I.”
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Entry 778 — Back to “Fact”
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
I now have a reaction to the following:
Fact
By Craig Dworkin
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%. Reaction product of tall oil rosin: 12.5%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.5%. Pentaerythritol [C5H12O4]: 5%. Aliphatic C14 Hydrocarbon: 15%): 19.4%. Carbon Black (C: 92.8%. Petroleum: 5.1%. With sulfur, chlorine, and oxygen contaminates: 2.1%), used as a pigmenting agent: 18.6%. Tung oil (Eleostearic acid [C18H30O2]: 81.9%. Linoleic acid [C18H32O2]: 8.2%. Palmitic acid [C16H32O2]: 5.9%. Oleic acid [CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH]: 4.0%.), used as a reducer: 3.3%. Micronized polyethylene wax (C2H4)N: 2.8%. 3/50 Manganese compound, used as a through drier: 1.3%. 1/25 Cobalt linoleate compound used as a top drier: .7%. Residues of blanket wash (roughly equal parts aliphatic hydrocarbon and aromatic hydrocarbon): .2%. Adhered to: cellulose [C6H10O5] from softwood sulphite pulp (Pozone Process) of White Spruce (65%) and Jack Pine (35%): 77%; hardwood pulp (enzyme process pre-bleach Kraft pulp) of White Poplar (aspen): 15%; and batch treated PCW (8%): 69.3%. Water [H2O]: 11.0%. Clay [Kaolinite form aluminum silicate hydroxide (Al2Si2O5[OH]4): 86%. Calcium carbonate (CaCO3): 12%. Diethylenetriamine: 2%], used as a pigmenting filler: 8.4%. Hydrogen peroxide [H2O2], used as a brightening agent: 3.6%. Rosin soap, used as a sizer: 2.7%. Aluminum sulfate [Al2(SO4)]: 1.8%. Residues of cationic softener (H2O: 83.8%. Base [Stearic acid (C18H36O2): 53.8%. Palmitic acid (C16H32O2): 29%. Aminoethylethanolamine (H2-NC2-H4-NHC2-H4-OH): 17.2%]: 10.8%. Sucroseoxyacetate: 4.9%. Tallow Amine, used as a surfactant: 0.3%. Sodium chloride [NaCl], used as a viscosity controlling agent: .2%) and non-ionic emulsifying defoamer (sodium salt of dioctylsulphosuccinate [C20H37NaO7S]), combined: 1.7%. Miscellaneous foreign contaminates: 1.5%.
NOTES: “Fact” is an exact list of ingredients that make up a sheet of paper, hence the blunt title of the work. It’s a self-reflexive, deconstructed meditation on the act of writing and of publishing, with an emphasis on the materiality of language. Each time Dworkin displays the poem, he researches the medium on which it’s being viewed, changing the list of ingredients. It’s a flexible work in progress, sometimes manifesting itself as a list of the ingredients that make up a Xerox copy, other times listing the composition of an lcd display monitor.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2009).
I read it as a lyrical evocation of language turning into communicated meaning, leaving behind the mere physical ink which had held it on a sheet of paper whose materiality is emphasized to a magnificent extreme by a dense list of its chemical ingredients (and, in highly technical terminology, their purposes), thus connecting the reader to such final dichotomies as content/form, motion/stasis, creativity/ sterility, metaphysics/science, ethereality/plainness, emotionality/ passiveness, adventure/stagnation, and–most of all–spirituality/ corporeality . . . Under all of it at the same time is an expression of the glorious complexity of the universe, one sheet of which is depicted as the ground of the meaning that the ink contains. Or: the huge reality which is all matter in balance with the huge meaningfulness language magicks out of it.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the materiality of language–the material ink and paper aren’t language, they just contain language.
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Entry 691 — About my Piano Mathemaku
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
I’ve brought back the above because one of my friends in visual poetry brought it up back-channel, inspiring the following beginning attempt at an explication (although it’s only mine, I have to emphasize, and I’m not being sarcastic):
A lot of what I do is surrealism: multiplications, for instance, that make surrealistic sense to me. The basic idea of the above is that a piano and all it represents (music, the creative process, self-expression, something to play, etc.) times a mountain and a fortress that is merged with the mountain and what it represents—power, unchangingness, seriousness, intimidation, etc., or the antithesis of what the piano represents, equals a painting of boats that represents a sea journey, but also a musical composition (theme and variation, a kind of fugue in spots–think of the boats as melodies), a game, happiness, as well as various associations with Paul Klee, from whom I stole the boats (although I’ve changed them)—also a progression from dimness into color. This journey, I contend, is similar to the brook’s journey to the spring flowers the brook’s water will nourish into being. All the journey of boats needs, surrealistically, exactly to equal the coming of spring, is the remainder, which is the word “mystery” made mysterious and added to by other words and elements—a magic word, you might say. I feel I’m ignoring scientific logic for emotional logic. Can’t help it, is my only defense. But I hope an engagent will find my dividend to be a pleasant short poem, and the graphic a pleasant picture—at least in its final larger size—and touched up.
A thought: what if someone played a mountain fortress on a piano, and the music that resulted came out as pictures? What would they look like? The whole idea is absurd, but . . .
Meanwhile, today I broke free of my egocentricity to come up with the Truly Brilliant, However Simple, Idea that I can use my new gallery (in my dentist’s waiting room) for exhibitions of works other than my own! That way I could work up from the classics of visual poetry almost anyone would like to what I and my most advanced friends are doing in the field. Basically, I have three walls. What I think I may do is devote one to classics like Cummings’s falling leaf poem; the second to my earliest, most accessible visual poems, and the third to my “Odysseus Suite,” if I can get it to satisfy me, something I’m still working on but making progress, I think–and two other recent ones. The one above and my “Seaside Mathemaku,” which several people have liked.
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Entry 206 — Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Over at the Forest of Arden, I had a lot of trouble figuring out Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97, then suddenly put together an explication of it I liked so much, I’m posting it here.
Sonnet 97
How like a Winter hath my absence beene
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting yeare?
What freezings haue I felt, what darke daies seene?
What old Decembers barenesse euery where?
And yet this time remou’d was sommers time,
The teeming Autumne big with ritch increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widdowed wombes after their Lords decease:
Yet this aboundant issue seem’d to me,
But hope of Orphans, and vn-fathered fruite,
For Sommer and his pleasures waite on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute.
Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheere,
That leaues looke pale, dreading the Winters neere.
* * * * *
Okay, here beginnith my explication:
How like a Winter hath my absence beene
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting yeare?
What freezings haue I felt, what darke daies seene?
What old Decembers barenesse euery where?
the quickly passing year, is like being in winter.
Coldness, darkness, December’s bareness seem
everywhere to me, as everyone agrees. Vendler
adds that Shakespeare is picturing an “imaginary
winter.” He isn’t. He’s just making a simile.
And yet this time remou’d was sommers time,
The time we’ve been apart was summer.
Still straightforward and undebatable.
The teeming Autumne big with ritch increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widdowed wombes after their Lords decease:
NoSweatShakespeare, a website with sonnet analyses, put
an “and” at the beginning of this. I wouldn’t, but the
“and,” which I’d previously thought of, too, then discarded
helped me accept this as just a continuation of the previous line:
I missed, Joe, Sally . . . The speaker was gone during the
end of summer and much of autumn. . . So, to backtrack:
And yet this time remou’d was sommers time,
The teeming Autumne big with ritch increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widdowed wombes after their Lords decease:
The time I have been away from you was
summer followed by autumn, which was
bearing a good crop like women bearing dead
husbands’ offspring.
Yet this aboundant issue seem’d to me,
But hope of Orphans, and vn-fathered fruite,
However fine the autumn, abundant and promising
seemed to me a dreary place for orphans and fruit
no love-making had produced, which is about
as nearly everyone would have it, I’m sure.
For Sommer and his pleasures waite on thee,
For, imaginatively, it’s still summer, because the realest
summer although it wasn’t exactly hers) is still waiting for
the addressee’s to continue.
Confession: I got the contrast of what’s imagined, what real,
from Vendler.
And thou away, the very birds are mute.
Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheere,
That leaues looke pale, dreading the Winters neere.
Back in the real world, where it’s autumn, the birdies
and the leafies are sad, thinking about the nearness
of winter.
Have I more or less finally gotten it? Regardless, I feel
quite buoyed to have come up with what I did. Later I
discovered Robert Stonehouse had much the same
interpretation as mine, but I think I did better on
“summer/ Autumn” and “summer waits” than he,
so remain happy about my achievement.