19 February 2004. Note: if the tradition in blogs is not to revise entries, I'm going against it now, for what follows is something I wrote on the 19th of February but revised on the 20th. It has to do with the poem below, which David Graham posted at the new-poetry discussion group yesterday morning:

                Betsy Sholl.  The Maine Poets.  Down East Books, 2004.

There are two moronic complaints against literary criticism that particularly disgust me. One is: "if you can't do what a writer you are finding fault with does as well as or better than that writer, you have no right to criticize him." The other: "You must not deprecate a work for what it is not." I probably can't write picturesque poems like the one above as good as it, but I am going to say some negative things about it, anyway. Moreover, those negative things will be almost entirely about what it doesn't do. "Gulls in the Wind" seems to me to be an example of what I call Iowa Workshop Poetry--a first-rate one: a well-observed, impeccably-expressed, interesting picture of something out of the everyday. It crackles beyond itself into higher concerns of Ecology, man vs. non-human life, and the archetypal Final Significance of The Struggle To Survive. But . . . what's the point of it, beyond the point of first-rate painters to paint postcard pictures of coastlines or city parks or the like? I tend to like more postcard pictures than I don't, and I have books of postcard paintings I prize, and a few on the wall. But the art I prize most is one or two orders of magnitude more valuable to me.

What, in particular, is wrong with it? I thought, after my first quick read, that it had no equaphors (my word for figures of speech--and more, which I won't go into here). But its first stanza has "Bedraggled feathers like bonnets/ that would fly off if they weren't strapped," then "kazoo voiced, a chorus of crying dolphins/ or rusty sirens a speck of dust could set off," and ends by calling the gulls "gleaners"--although I wouldn't count that as any longer metaphorical. Still, quite a colorfully, organized, appropriate group of equaphors. So, it is superior to many presentable poems that are published by commercial publishers and garner awards. What, then, is it inferior to?

That question brings me to a challenge I got after making my first opinion of the poem (which was less positive than above) known at the New-Poetry site. It was to support my statement that there is "Serious Art two or three orders of magnitude more valuable than "Gulls in the Wind" with a speciman of such art. I impulsively quoted Aram Saroyan's "lighght" as one such artwork. It certainly is, but it's hard to compare it to Sholl's poem because it is so short. So here's another one, albeit not too much longer. It's my own "Homage to Athena":

I composed "Homage to Athena" in 1985, so it is one of my earliest elaborate visual poems. It appears in my book, Of Manywhere-at--Once, and remains my favorite among my own poems. Few, I suspect are more effective. Quite a few, I hope, are more important.

What I say about it in comparison with "Gulls in the Wind" applies equally (or more) to "lighght" (in comparison to "Gulls in the Wind"). I claim my poem is one order of magnitude more valuable than Sholl's because it does significantly new things. By "new things" I don't mean "absolutely original things," just things that, so far, few poets are working with--its infraverbal fragmenting of words, and its visiopoetic reshaping of a word to make a metaphor. It doesn't tell, it does. This I consider a wholly objective evaluation: a poem either makes it new or it doesn't, and my poem's devices are unquestionably newer and less used than those of Sholl's poem.

My next claim is much more subjective. It is that my poem is a second order of value above Sholl's because of its referential size. It is not about a small beach scene like "Gulls in the Wind" (although "Gulls in the Wind" is implicitly about more than it explicitly depicts) but explicitly about Greek mythology (due to its highly important title which Geof Huth told me, if I remember rightly, I should drop), and the Search for Truth, as well as a very simple skyscape. I'm not going to spell out exactly what's in my poem because I think that would spoil a main fun of the work.

I'll say no more about the two poems now but hope to further discuss the evaluation of poems tomorrow. (Later note: as of 7 April 2004, no one at New-Poetry, by the way, responded to my answer to the challenge. That's the way things generally go at such sites. I should be fair and point out, however, that the person who made the challenge actually didn't make it as a challenge but as a request that I clarify how I evaluated poems, so should not have felt any obligation to say anything back. However, I did give others who consider me full of hot air to demonstrate it, which they ducked.)

I won't be posting any more rough drafts of mathemaku for a few days. I think I need a vacation from making them. I intend to continue playing with Paint Shop daily, though.

(Note of 7 April 2004: while looking for an old essay of mine, I came across the following commentary of mine on "Homage to Athena." It accompanied it in a British anthology the poem got in, WORD SCORE UTTERANCE CHOREOGRAPHY, which was published by Writers Forum in 1998. It's certainly pertinent, so here it is:

The preceding poem is called "Homage to Athena" since it contains the words, "knowledge" and "owl" (the owl being the bird sacred to Athena--and, of course, symbolic of wisdom). It started as an infraverbal poem, the word "windowledge" broken into its three interior words. But when I suddenly saw it as a rhyme of sorts for "knowledge," I knew I needed to make it visual to reveal that. Shortly thereafter I came up with the idea of wind as negative space. That resulted in the final version of the poem, which has ever since been my favorite of my own visual poems. (That's why I had it represent my visiopoetic work when supplying illustrations for an autobiographical essay I was asked to do for Contemporary Authors; alas, after I okayed the way it looked, some alert layout editor carefully used the word "edge" to define the poem's bottom border, and truncated its text to "kn/wind owl!" Which may be an improvement but seems a touch too subtle to me.)

When asked to accompany my poem here with "performance notation," I wasn't sure what to do. What's there to perform with such a poem? You just hold up a copy of it. After further thought, though, I unnarrowed enough to begin to consider the poem in terms of its sounds. I'd had no direct exposure to sound poetry and the other kinds of poetry that are performed (rather than recited) out here in the boondocks where I live, but I'd read about it. And I had always felt that if ever I started doing large-scale presentations of my visual poems, I ought to do more than just display them. Gradually, the following stage directions jelled for me: (1) a chorus, or one highly mobile dancer/reciter, begins the poem with "knuh" in different pitches, volumes and even pronunciations,and from different locations (perhaps starting offstage), and sometimes overlapping, the aim being to suggest knowledge's beginning from mystery (both loud and inaudible); (2) "whuh" is added, starting with the minutest of whispers; (3) finally, the full pronunciation of "wind," followed--some distance away--by (4) someone's saying "owl"; (5) all three sounds scatteredly, at the end ""knowl" and "windowl" coming to the fore; (6) "edge," quietly, several times, with the other sounds continuing; then, (7) "owl, edge, owl edge, owledge," the other sounds ceasing; (8) "windowl, windowl; windowl . . . edge. windowledge," followed by (9) whispers of "knowledge" and (10) the appearance of the printed version of the poem projected on a large screen at the rear of the stage; (11) the withdrawal of the performer(s), whispering "whuh, whi," etc.

To score this, I thought of color-coding the printed versions of the sounds, one color indicating the ones first to be spoken, another color the ones next to be spoken, and so forth. Where each sound was on the page would indicate where on the stage its speaker should voice it. The size of the letters of a sound in print would be in proportion to the loudness with which it was to be spoken. Some of this I tried to do, in a very modified, uncolored way, with my other poem here, "The Wind," one of my very few authentic sound poems--though it is also, as we shall see, a visual poem. The poem is intended to be spoken by a dancer, and/or dancers, at different locations on the stage, with "black and pale and small and--" severally-voiced (by means of a tape-recorder if there is only one performer) but not in exact unison to suggest the blur and discordance of the scene portrayed. The order of presentation is standard: from the top to the bottom of the page. The word, "wind" should be performed and enunciated as in the previous poem. Echoes could be effective. Improvisation should be encouraged. At the end "winter" is not spoken but displayed on a poster by the main performer to suggest that winter is to autumn what a seen word is to a heard word.