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Daily Notes on Poetry
19 April 2004. Back to my obsession with neologistic poetics taxonomy today, with the emphasis on "neologistic." I've come up with a new term, one I've been searching for, or waiting to find, for years: "Solitextual Poetry." It means, "poetry consisting of words only." It is a necessary term because of visual poetry, and other kinds of poetry that contain aesthetically significant averbal elements such as graphics. It replaces others I've used such as "lexical poetry," (which, I believe, Karl Young was the first to use, and which others now use, and my own "textual," "monotextual," and "omnilexical poetry." It leaped to mind when I thought of "solitary" in a completely different context, and remembered from my two years of Latin 9th and 10th grades that "solus" means "alone." Yeah, I should have found it years ago, but I didn't.
"Illumagery" is again my word for "visual art," or "graphics." "Graphacture" just didn't cut it. And I'm junking "litragraphy" and associated terms. I'm doing this in part because of the similarity of "litragraphy" to "lithography," but also because now that I'm going to keep "illumagery," I feel I ought to go all the way, and use it in my compound term for viso-textual art, which is now, HEAR YE, HEAR YE, "textlumagery." All this means I need to present my chart again, updated:
THE TEXTLUMAGERY (or VISIO-TEXTUAL ART) CONTINUUM
| 1 words whose semantic meaning is of crucial importance for the artworks they are in combined with visual effects of little aesthetic importance for the artworks they are in OR Visually-Enhanced Literature |
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(A) works as described above whose words have been infiltrated by graphic matter which is clearly decorative only as when fancy initials are used to start chapters of novels, or a calligrapher renders a poem OR Typographically-Beautified Literature
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(B) works as described above whose words share pages with graphic elements obviously intended to illustrate the words only OR Illustrated Literature
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| 2 words whose semantic meaning is of crucial aesthetic importance for the artworks they are in combined with visual effects of near-equal aesthetic importance for the artworks they are in OR Semantic Textlumagery
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(A) Works as described above whose words are fused with graphic elements whose aesthetic importance is equal or nearly equal to the words' aesthetic importance, as in many examples of classical concrete poetry, OR Fusional Semantic Textlumagery
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(B) Works as described above whose words share pages with graphic elements but are separate from them which are as aesthetically important to the works they are in as the words, as in many specimens of sophisticated collage, OR Collagical Semantic Textlumagery
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3 visual effects of crucial aesthetic importance for the artworks they are in combined with textual elements whose semantic meaning is of little or no aesthetic consequence for the artworks they are in but whose connotations or references to language are of an aesthetic importance nearly equal to that of its visual effects for the artworks they are in OR Asemantic Textlumagery
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(A) Works
in which text is subject matter as text but whose words are irrelevant or of little relevance OR Visual Portraits of Language
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(B) Works using textual elements as design elements but ignoring their semantic
significance, if any OR Typographical Designs
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| 4 visual effects of crucial aesthetic importance for the artworks they are in combined with textual elements used as labels of some parts or the whole of the artworks they are in but are of little or no aesthetic consequence for those artworks OR Label-Containing Illumagery
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| 5 visual effects of crucial aesthetic importance for the artwork they are in combined with words or other textual elements that are part of visual elements being depicted (such as a name on a sign in a streetscene) but are without aesthetic importance OR Text-Containing Illumagery
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Note: "illumagery" is pronounced, il LOO madge ree, so "textlumagery" is pronounced, tehkst LOO madge ree.
What seems to me psychologically interesting (or, to use my psychological terminology, which is more specific, egoceptually interesting) about this latest round of neologizing of mine is that I seem to be repeating my Adamic mania of some ten to fifteen years ago when I kept inventing neologies for discussion of visual poetry and related arts and then changing them over and over. Have I been reborn? Or am I just back in an old rut, unable to rise to anything valuably new?
Whichever, I doubt that my mania will last anywhere near as long as it did the last time. Indeed, I hope it's almost over.
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