Archive for the ‘Visual Poetry Specimen’ Category
Entry 1712 — Ground Hog Day
Monday, February 2nd, 2015
This morning, at 4:48 A.M., I turned 74. My Facebook Timeline is swamped with birthday greetings, which is very nice, but it bothers me that Mary Worth hasn’t yet wished me well on my day. The card below from Karl Kempton almost makes up for that, though:
I was delighted with this when I first looked at it. A gorgeous design, yes? After a moment with it, I realized that the message at the top was in code, and quickly decoded it, now doubly delighted, for I love codes. Moreover, this use of a code made Karl’s design not just a birthday card, but a veritable birthday poem! Karl had secreted his message in an underground that had allowed it to wend its way back into sight as little flowers, celebrating their secret message’s meaning! What’s more, the two lines of sheer garden swirled into a single, three-dimensional super-blossoming: I had been given a master-poem with three levels for my birthday.
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Entry 1709 — I Done A New Math Pome!!!!
Friday, January 30th, 2015
The following is an accident, whether a happy one or a disappointing one, who knows. What happened was that I was looking through my digital files for a poem for Bill Michele and came across the divisor and dividend of this one in a folder labeled, “Long Division Problems Worth Attacking.” I immediately wanted to attack it. What’s below is the result (so far–I’m not sure whether it needs more work or not):
I think I was in the mood to work on it because of my thinking about HSAM yesterday. It may be my first autobiographical long division poem. The only unauthentic thing in it is the divisor. Actually, they may well have been there, hard to imagine they would not have been. But they’re not in my memory of the episode. Extremely sentimental, yes? It’s very simple but perhaps still “difficult” for many . . . Will it nonetheless make me famous?
I’d sorta like to do more poems like it, but have no ideas for any yet.
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Entry 1666 — Back to Beining
Friday, December 19th, 2014
Here’s the latest image I got from Guy R. Beining:
It is part of a letter it grieves me to report on. He asks if I think I could sell works like it on my website, suggesting a price of $200 for this. I’d get a 33% commission on all sales. Gah. If I had any semblance of economic security, I’d buy this and four others sight unseen for $200 each. I grieve because I know I can’t sell anything here, at any price. I once offered 25 RASPbooks for $50 and Karl Kempton was the only one to buy a set (and he ain’t rich). No complaints, because I hardly ever buy anything of anyone else’s. Not only don’t I have the money to, but my concept-appreciation to ornament-appreciation (like the feel of hardened acylic, etc., even the size of an image) is much higher than most lovers of visimagery’s (i.e., “visual art”), so Internet access rather than physical ownership is enough for me in almost all cases.
Of course, I also grieve because Guy’s stuff should be in bigTime museums with articles in ARTnews about it. If he can’t get the recognition he deserves, who can? Or am I so out of it that I don’t see how much better New York stuff is than the above?
I wish I had time to really deal with the above critically, but the year is about to end, and I have so much to do! For instance, I still haven’t finished either of my next two columns for Small Press Review, and I’ve had full-length fairly decent rough drafts of both of them ready for a final attack for over a week. Wotta life.
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Entry 1622 — Snap
Wednesday, November 5th, 2014
Here are the back and front covers of one of the books from a series published by Dan Waber almost every one of which is major:
Needless to say, none of the books in this series has gotten any attention from any critic reaching more than a hundred readers.
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Entry 1602 — Long Division of Athens
Thursday, October 16th, 2014
Here’s my latest, unfinished:
The neato recreation of Ancient Athens in my poem was stolen from www.sikyon.com. It is copyrighted by Ellen Papkyriakou/ Anagnostou, with all rights reserved. If I’m still around in 2015, I’ll try to get permission from her to use it here. Still here, you wonder? Well, I think my nervous system is about to go. Lou Gehrig’s disease? I don’t know. I seem to only be half in touch with the lower part of my legs, especially after sitting for a half-hour or more. It’s as though they are on the way to being asleep. I can still walk on them, but if I jog a few paces, I feel the left one beginning to give way. I will be seeing my regular doctor Friday. A week or so after that I have an appointment with the surgeon who did my hip replacement. My hip now feels about the way it did when I went to him to get the replacement. Whether that’s related to my leg problem, I don’t know. It’s quite interesting. Needless to say, I give myself only a fifty-fifty chance to make it into 2015, but that’s just me, always sure of the worst when anything like this happens to me, but sure of the best when it happens to anybody else. Anyway, I’m proud of myself for finally converting my notes for the thing above into a semi-finished product. Gotta add color, and I may change the divisor, but don’t feel up to it right now (15 October, 2 P.M.).
Nota Morbeedissima: if I don’t never finish the above, I’d be grateful is someone else did, following how I done my swan one. Actually, I would not be able to be grateful, but you know wot I mean.
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Entry 1597 — My Swan Poem, Finished
Saturday, October 11th, 2014
I finished this at around 5 P.M, yesterday, and immediately stuck it here. I plan to comment on it tomorrow, when perhaps I’ve calmed down a little about how terrific it is.
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Entry 1591 — “The Night Times Who”
Sunday, October 5th, 2014
Here’s the poem I made the “tyger” image for yesterday:
I made the original, in black and white, a little over a decade ago.
Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that my new poem of a couple of days ago with the swans is screwed up. I must change both its remainder and its subdividend product. I have a good idea, I think, for the latter, and a vague one for the remainder.
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Entry 1589 — “Homage to Debussy”
Friday, October 3rd, 2014
A month or two ago, I suddenly had ideas for poems that I took notes on. Seeing the notes yesterday when hunting for something else I never found, I saw enough of the poem below to work it out. I made the version below this morning. It’s not finished. I want to think a little more about it. I feel “reason” and “intuition” need inner colors. I hope an idea for a background occurs to me, although I wouldn’t say it needs one. The interior of “dreams,” by the way, consists of a fragment of “faereality” from other poems using that, with the coloring shown here. My clever little way of alluding faery magic into this poem’s idea of a dream.
Conclusion: my career as a poet ain’t over quite yet, I guess. The one thing that bothers me about my few recent works is how little visimagery counts in them.
Observation: whenever I get intensely into one project, I seem to flood with ideas for others. Nice, but the danger is my getting distracted into four or five completing projects. But I did finish the second-to-last draft (for some reason, I just don’t want to use “penultimate”) of my novel yesterday. And I swear I’ll get the final draft done before 2015.
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Entry 1585 — Simple Country Girl
Monday, September 29th, 2014
I grabbed the following from the Spring issue of Bomb because I felt I didn’t have time for anything but a hurried entry:
It’s by Samuel Jablon. Usually the works I post are ones I consider superior ones, so I thought one I didn’t think much of, with a few explanatory remarks would be a nice change. After more time with Jablon’s work, though, I’m not so sure it isn’t pretty good. I’m not ready to call it superior because the decorative work is terrific but seems to me arbitrary (so far). What metaphoric function do the differently-colored tiles have I want to know, for instance. I feel the artist is choosing them for intuitive visimagistic reasons, which is okay, but limits the result to a beautifully decorated sign, sort of visual prose rather than visual poetry. But I haven’t studied the reproduction sufficiently to consider my thoughts more than a rough beginning from vague liking toward something more. Needless to say, to really do it justice, I’d have see the original–from a gallery with more of his work.
Hey, the reason I felt the need to get this entry done as quickly as possible is that I am really focusing on my novel finally: from an average of a chapter every two or three days to eleven chapters in the past four days, and I had a lot of household chores on two of those days! Five more chapters and an epilogue and I’ll be done. (With this revision; I feel I need to go through the whole thing one more time; copy editing, but also in hopes of unstilting some of the dialogue; I also have two or three narrative lines I have to make sure are logical.
IMPORTANT CORRECTION OF STATEMENT IN EARLIER BLOG ENTRY: “FACT: almost no statistical study of anything whatever takes into consideration all the variables it should” should say “FACT: almost no statistical study of anything having to do with human beings whatever takes into consideration all the variables it should.” Obviously there are many areas of study like the roll of dice where all relevant variables can easily be taken into consideration (to get a maximally if not absolutely accurate statistical analysis of). Sociology and Psychology are the two leading fields of statistically incompetence.
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Entry 1584 — Beining, Again, at his Frequent Best
Sunday, September 28th, 2014
As any of you who have been visitors here for a while will know, Guy Beining is a good friend of mine (however annoyed I sometimes get with him for refusing to get a computer!) and one of the artists who has long been on my list of the ten poets with whose work I’m familiar is clearly at least as good as that of any major prize-winner and clearly at least a magnitude of order more important. He is now on the mend from congestive heart failure and doing well enough to have sent me two letters recently. On of them included this, which I find exceptionally good, even for him:
I’m too busy with my novel to say more about them here. The novel, by the way, has me suddenly feeling better (in a non-ecstatic way) than I’ve been in for ten or twenty years. I really like the chapters I’ve worked through recently and feel like the novel will be a valuable contribution to the Culture of my Time after having doubts of that for over a week.
Before I go, here’s a noun I looked up a little while to be certain of its meaning as an adjective and found out it has the following meaning as a noun, as I suspect a lot of people know but I didn’t and believe I ought to: “substantive, a word or group of words functioning acts as a noun.”
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