Archive for November, 2009
Entry 28 — Old Blog Entries 652 through 660
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
#652 had some gadgets by Richard Kostelanetz that I thought fun but trivial–4-letter words in squares, one letter in each quadrant. The gimmick is that three of the letters, in upper-case, spell a word that becomes a second word with the addition of the fourth (lower-case) letter, as in
. G O
. o D
The anti-gimmick is the fact that very few of the too words disconcealed in each specimen relate enough to each other to achieve metaphoricality, or anything poetic else. The above is the best one I could find among the bunch he sent me (and others of his literary friends). Another problem is that such words are too easy to find–although I applaud Kosti for bringing their existence to our attention because they do provide word-game fun.
Several nice poems in #653 that I got from the June 2005 issue of Haiku Canada Newsletter, including this, by John M. Bennett:
. Clou
. laem
. foam
. d
and these two haiku gems, the first by Cor van den Heuvel, the second by Grant Savage:
. end of August-- . a crinkled elm-leaf falls . and rocks once
. on the park bench . this spring afternoon . a new old man
#654 featured wonderful pwoermds from LeRoy Gorman like “marshush,” “rainforust” and “riverb”; but I complained that powermds as pwoermds rather than as climaxes in longer lyrics had become boring for me. I returned to my quest for a decent word to represent “partaker of artwork” in 655, reporting that I’d just coined “aesthimbiber” for that purpose. I seem to have dumped it soon after that but think I should not have. I like it right now.
After posting two works of J. Michael Mollohan in #656, which I put on display in yesterday’s entry, I discussed them in my next two entries. A few lazy autobiographical paragraphs on my procrastination followed. This set of ten entries (from a zine called Dirt) ended with an example of what can be done with pwoermds used as I’d like to see them used, as parts of longer poems:
Ight nowhere lignt gnight lightninght thwords now here
It’s by none other than Geof Huth, who calls it “A Series of Pwoermds.”
Entry 27 — Two By J. Michael Mollohan
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Just the two pieces above from #657 today–’cause I’m tired and my back and right leg ache from having played tennis this morning (horrid-badly). I have sciatica and wrong thought I might be over it. I’m not.
Entry 26 — The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney
Friday, November 27th, 2009
The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney
a book review for Amazon that Amazon won’t accept, so far, because it won’t accept my password.
As I read the 22 poems in JoAnne Growney’s Angles of Light (all but two a page in length), I quickly became aware of the wide range of subject matter they cover. The two poems facing each other on pages 12 and 13 are excellent examples of this. One, “Can A Mathematician See Red?” is about the mathematical representation of objects, and more “unemotionally” abstract than that it would be hard to get; the other; “Keeping Watch,” concerns a woman visiting her hospitalized mother, and gets about as emotionally unmathematical as you can get as it plumbs the depths of a complex human relationship.
In “Can a Mathematician See Red,” the poet considers a sphere “whose points seen outside/ are the very same points/ insiders see.” If red paint is spilled over this sphere, what color, the poet wonders, would the sphere’s interior be. Red? A mathematician’s answer, the poet tells us, would be, “No,/ the layer of paint/ forms a new sphere/ that is outside the outside/ and not a bit inside.” Conclusion: “A mathematician/ sees the world/ as she defines it.” But, she continues, “A poet/ sees red/ inside.”
Among the many things I like about this poem is its crisp contrast of mathematical reality with physical reality, an immaterial sphere with something able to take a coat of paint. It brings to life the magnitude of the most genuinely real world, which I take to be the physical world, with the mathematical world enmeshed in it, but perceptible only to asensual cognition. Even more, I love the way it provokes follow-up questions–at least from intellectual types like me–such as whether it would be possible to paint a mathematical sphere–as opposed to a glass sphere, say, which is emulating a mathematical sphere. In other words, it put me back in Athens with Socrates and Plato. . . .
Except for “Horizon,” which compares the universe before darkness was created, and ends, “Divided/ into complexity/ Eden disappears,” the other poems in the collection are concern people, or landscapes, rather than ideas, so do not require the specialized taste to appreciate that “Horizon” and “Can a Mathematician See Red?” may.
Not that they aren’t equally penetratingly thoughtful. In “Keeping Watch,” which concerns a visit to the mother’s hospital bed by the poet, for example, Growney movingly captures in a minimum of words the kind of person (considerate, courageous) her mother is, and wholly captures the love/opposition she feels for her, a woman able to bear her pain “because her Christian Faith/ holds Paradise against my dark resistance/ to believe in Hell or Christ.”
This poem, incidentally, is a near-sonnet, like three other poems in the collection–that is, it pretty much adheres to sonnet-form except near-rhyming or not rhyming more than traditionally rhyming, In general, Growney’s poems intriguingly skitter between technical formality and supple free verse.
“Thoughtful,” a word I’ve already used for them, may be the best adjective to describe the bulk of poems in this collection. With “wry” a close second. Take, for example,
9 syllables
Mock feelings
serve as well
as true ones.
Or:
11 Syllables
Obedience covers
with a thin layer.
The poet’s mother, according to the first poem in the book, “Write from the Beginning,” is a woman “who cries/ when she’s happy, who talks fast/ when she’s tired, who acts silly/ when she’s sad is a central subject of Growney’s poems. In “Present Tense,” Growney describes her as “a terrifying/ woman. She eats anything./ I dreamed when the sun rose/ she’d be a brick wall.// She is.” Her mother is in “Stories,” too, along with her father and her childhood on the family farm. She “loved God and Esther Williams” after her husband died, “Symmetry” tells us. The farm is the setting of “Things to Count On.” At its end, Growney writes that her “mother’s a good woman, worth three good women. For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said. I’ve stopped counting.” The final poem about Growney’s mother is the one already discussed, “Keeping Watch.”
Several of the poems have to do with love–”Today at the Grocery Store I met the Man I Loved,” for instance–which ends, “In the grocery aisle, we spoke of the weather/ in our separate parts. Floods and storms/ have abated. Nothing separates our hearts.” A few landscapes make it into the collection, snow, a night sky–and in the last poem in the book, its longest, “Three times the size of Texas,/ Alaska–with fewer living species/ and fewer miles of paved roads/ than Rhode Island.”
This poet clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot more.
Bob Grumman
Entry 25 — Old Entries 641 through 651
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
azily back to old blogs again, this time beginning this mathematical poem by Andrew Topel taken from #641:
A very slightly revised version of one of the mathemaku in yesterday’s entry not worth posting here was the feature in my next entry. Then some minor autobiography. In #644 & #645 I posted 3 more of Andrew Topel’s addition poems, including:
On September 24, 1997, I started my first blog, an actual log for my poetry website, Comprepoetica. In entries #646 through #651 I reprinted my (few) entries. OF great historical interest, no doubt, but too boring to post here.
Entry 24 — Old Blog entries, Again
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
The question I battled in #632 was what to call the emotional state which is neither painful nor pleasurable. I came up with a few coinages but didn’t like any of them, and still haven’t one that I consider worth keeping. My next entry had to do with my semi-addiction to Civilization, the computer game I play too much of, and almost always lose. In #634 I returned to my quest to find a word for the feeling of no feeling and came up with a coinage so bad I refuse to tell you what it was. Next I discussed the difference between what a poem is as an object, and what it is as (I guess) a signifier–which is what most people take it only as.
Out of one of my more and more rare episodes of creativity the following mathemaku came into being, and I posted them in #636, #638 and #640:
I consider all of these unsuccessful drafts with potential that I hope to work on over the next few days. In #637 I had a variation I don’t now think much of on something of Geof Huth’s. Two entries later, this, which I no longer understand although I’m positive I did when I made it:
Which takes me to the end of another set of ten entries from my old blog.
Entry 23 — An Old Haiku of Mine
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Today was another bad day for me (because both my bikes had flat tires so I had to walk to where I had an MRI for my bad back, then walk to the bicycle shop two miles from there to get tubes before going on home, another two miles, so I’m just going to post one entry from my old blog, #631, in its entirety–because it’s one of my best entries for the general poetry public, I think:
24 October 2005: Well, we lost electricity in my neighborhood for seven or eight hours due to Wilma, but we got through it with minimal damage. Naples, to the south, didn’t do so well. Sad for them, but someone had to lose–and one good thing about the outcome is that the weather people seem to have been on top of things all the way through, which is certainly reassuring. In my ideal world there’d be hurricanes–but the land to persons ratio would be so high no one would have to live anywhere near places like Naples. There’d still be places like Naples, but they would be staffed by commuters, and lived in by vacationers. (Down with over-population–which in my book is anything over ten million–for the whole world.)
Okay, the poetry-related subject of this entry is the following poem:
. 2 children’s
. rained-around dry quiet spot
. within forsythia
This, or something like it, was in my first book, poemns. After selling some of the copies of the book, I found something wrong with one of the other three poems on the sheet it was on, so removed the whole sheet from the remaining copies of the book. I think the printers failed to make a line in one of the poems go off the edge of the page as I’d intended it to. I should have a copy of the four poems somewhere but it’d take me a week to find them if I tried to, I’m sure.
I’ve used this poem elsewhere since the book, I believe. I want to discuss it here cbecause I consider it a near-perfect example of what I try for as a poet, which is simply to render, in as few words as possible, an image that will cause others as much pleasure as possible. This one accomplishes this through its (1) subject matter, which is (a) quotidianly likely to elicit most persons’ sympathy, (b) pretty, children generally coming off as cute, and forsythia as beautiful, (c) peaceful, the rain having to be little more than mist not to be getting through forsythia branches, and, most important, (d) archetypally resonant by representing Shelter and Companionship, as well as Spring (rain and forsythia, and human beings in their spring); and its diction, which includes the wonderful rained/round rim thyme (but, not, I’m sure that’s not original with me), the with/syth near-=rhyme and the dry/qui aft-rhyme (or whatever it is I’m calling traditional rhymes). Only now, by the way, did I realize that the latter rhymes were near- or full-rhymes. The poem is also effectively concise, and it draws on its being a haiku, for that adds haiku-depth to it (via what it picks up from the tradition, and all haiku before–and after–it).
To me, one of its points of greatest interest is in what it does not have, mainly, manywhere-at-once, or equaphorical layering. In a way, this is a virtue, for it clarifies it into a moment of particular intensity. Amusingly, that emphasizes its being a pure haiku–albeit one without quite the right syllable-count. I do consider its lack of equaphors (or metaphors and the like), in the final analysis, a defect. I continue to believe the very best poems express two or more simultaneous images. But poetry as a whole would suffer consequentially if every poem were equaphorical.
Real life did inspire the poet, by the way. The forsythia in it is from the yard of the Hyde House, as it was known, on Harbor View Island in Norwalk, Connecticut, that I lived in between the ages of 7 and 12. It actually formed a sort of hut, though I’m not sure they could have kept out even mist. I played in it from time to time but most remember my sister Louise, a year younger than I, playing some kind of queen’s court game in it with her friends Ellen and Cindy.
Ironically, just the other day I learned that the Hyde House I’ve been reminiscing about is no more. It was leveled to make way for two condominiums that have to be devastating the ambiance of the shabby-genteel little clump of mostly vacation homes on the island. Progress triumphs again.
note: the large print is stupid, but I’m using it to indicate large blocks of quoted material because I haven’t been able to figure out how to indent at this site (other than use periods as with the poem quoted within my quote–which would take too long to get right for long prose passages).
Entry 22 — More Old Blogs
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
I get behinder and behinder every day. Today, I’ve so far puttered my way through a few hundred words of an Amazon review of JoAnne Growney’s Angles of Light. My intention was to have it done by yesterday, at the latest. My hope this morning was to finish it today, and post it here to take of this entry, as well as at Amazon. Since it looks like I may not finish it today, I am instead returning to my project of re-visiting all my old blog entries. #629 was where I left off, so I’ll begin–and end– here with #630, which was just a brief report on a hurricane on its way toward where I live. It missed us.
Entry 21 — Blogging Frustration
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
I’ve just spent three hours working on the Page entitled, “Comprepoetica Biographies — A.” Take a look at it. All I was able to accomplish was posting one entry in reasonable condition, and a second halfway there. Something must be wrong with my computer, because the process has been incredibly slow. Sometimes–frequently, in fact–the damned computer stops for five minutes or so to carry out a save I don’t want. Or takes fifteen seconds to let me insert a comma. In any case, this is all I’m posting here, and I probably won’t be doing much more on the biographies. I did get them backed up to my hard drive, and on a CD.
Entry 20 — Comprepoetica Restored
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
An Internet miracle has occurred: some outfit called ReoCities is bringing websites that Geocities zapped back to life, including my Comprepoetica. Great news for me, but bad news, too, because it means I need to do a lot of work backing it up. This I’ve already started. I intend to keep with it till it’s done, so am doing no more here than make this announcement.