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Daily Notes on Poetry

16 April 2004.

BOB GRUMMAN'S LITERARY TAXONOMY (excerpt)

kingdom:              Poetry

             phylum:	  Songmode Poetry (formal verse, with or without rhyme)

             phylum:      Plaintext Poetry (conventional free verse, most haiku)

             phylum:      Burstnorm Poetry ("experimental verse")

               class:        Idiological Poetry
                   order:      Surrealistic Poetry  
                   order:      Jump-Cut Poetry  
                   order:      Non-Representational Poetry

               class:        Xenolinguistic Poetry
                   order:      Infraverbal Poetry
                       family:     Fissional Poetry 
                       family:     Fusional Poetry
                       family:     Microherent Poetry 
                       family:     Alphaconceptual Poetry 
                       family:     Sprungrammar poetry

               class:        Pluraesthetic Poetry
                   order:      Visual Poetry
                   order:      Sound Poetry
                   order:      Mathematical Poetry
                   order:      Others

About a year ago, Modern Haiku published a taxonomical essay of mine covering the haiku genre. It did not prove popular. I blamed it on my trying to stuff all my taxonomical terms into it, which I in turn blame on my desire to make sure they get into print somewhere. The terms above are just some of the terms in my essay, which was a little over 2,000 words in length. In a just world, someone would have commissioned me to write a full book on poetry, in which case I would have spread the same number of terms--well, maybe a few more--over something some fifty times longer than my essay. Even then they would have been hard to take for most poetry-lovers, who tend to be anti-analytical--anti-rational, even. So I resolved to someday rewrite the piece minus most of my terms.

Not in the mood to write anything from scratch for my blog today, I remembered my Modern Haiku essay. I thought I could rewrite it and take care of this entry in two shakes. Well, an hour later I hadn't been able to find a copy of it in either of my two computers. So I had to scan it in from the issue of Modern Haiku it was in, then correct the scan. By that time, I no longer felt much like revising it. But I had intended to list the terms I'd taken out of it after posting it, so why not do that before posting it? In fact, I could just post the taxonomical chart that appeared with the essay in Modern Haiku! Which is what I did. Tomorrow, I hope, the revised essay. Or maybe I'll just discuss the chart above. . . .

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