|
Daily Notes on Poetry
14 March 2004. Today, someone a little more obtuse about infraverbal poetry than I thought possible wrote, "hte," and "ANd" as parodies of "lighght." He also provided a silly commentary on them that he no doubt thinks perfectly captured the kind of critical remarks I often make about such poems. I fired off a parody of his post in which I presented horribly dense parodies of my parodist's favorite kinds of poems, formal poetry by the long, long dead, and modern Iowa Workshop nearprose. Then I wrote a very insulting post about the "hte" man which I didn't transmit. Finally, I came up with something I rather like, that is not a parody but which I consider a dippitty-doo serious poem. It's about the persona of the other omnilexical poem I posted versions of here, Poem:
Poem's Patience Rewarded
Poem spent months on the dump
studying the the.
He knew that poetry
can't permanently stop growing,
even in the starkest
wand's winter of our finest poet
of ultimate stillnesses,
but where, he wondered, was even
the smallest flicker of anywhere further
in the absolute black
just beyond the the?
Yet, as he wondered and wondered,
he wore slowly down
to the edge of his voice, then at last
into something long-lost
that was more primary than voice,
and there in a black
somehow increased
from the black
it had been before,
he began to make out
hints of the hte.
|
Now, a nice poem by Geof Huth, "Silent Homage to Gomringer," which he sent me yesterday. I'm posting it because I like it, but also because it got me thinking about "silence" as an image. I tried to make my own take on Gomringer at Paint Shop shortly after seeing Geof's take, but it didn't come out the way I wanted it to. I wanted bigger and bigger specimens of "silence" that ended with one that the viewer could see through. Far in the distance inside my largest-lettered rendering of "silence" I wanted to put a barely-visible rendering of "silence." I still like the idea and will try for it again at some juncture, I'm sure. (I couldn't today, because I spent the day buying an twice failing to download the latest version of Paint Shop, because the version I have was given to me, and I thought I owed it to the manufacturer, Jasc, to buy a copy. I also thought the newer version might allow me to do things I can't do with the version I have.)
I have the "silence" I ended with below Geof's poem because I rather like it. I hope to use it as a term in a mathemaku but haven't yet been able to think of any other terms to go with it. I find myself less and less able to make pure visual poems--I tend now to think of anything I make that might be a visual poem as an element to be used in a mathemaku.
|