24 May 2004. More taxonomical/terminological crud today--some comments in response to some more from Barry Spacks, this time making better sense.

"Certain terms are useful, but none without cost," he says. "'Impressionist' painting, okay. 'Impressionist' painter? I begin to worry (what if he had an Expressionist day? --would he feel brave enough to emerge from his convenient cubbyhole?) -- but 'Yellow-Green-ish with lotsa Sunflowers' mode? -- whoa!"

"Here's one way it can work, Barry," I replied. "Say of Mr. X that he is a member of the Impressionist School. You can add that he is also a member of some other school or schools, or assume the person you're talking to is not an imbecile and will realize the possibility of that. Or you can say Mr. X makes impressionistic and other kinds of paintings. Etc."

"Let a poet be good and firmly Bob'd, he'll wear the arm-band of, say, 'formalist' or 'non-formalist.' Would even obsessive-Bob deny such a spill-over from poem to poet?"

Odd how many mistake occasional intensity and stick-to-itiveness for "obsessiveness." To the rest of what Spacks says I can only say that I've never said or implied that poets cannot make more than one kind of poem.

I then went on to defend myself against the charge of using perjorative terms for poetry by people like Spacks: "Believe it or not, I didn't feel 'plain' was necessarily pejorative. 'Plain-spoken' is usually a compliment, as is 'plain' when compared with 'fancy.' What makes poetics naming hard is the super-sensitive emotional irrationality of most poets."

When Spacks said, "Further, even level-playing-field terms like the ones Bob now tentatively offers in practice still intimidate, over-order, and limit the very quality he seems in his personal taste most to favor, namely works that favor cunning experimentalism," I reminded him that I had I suggested someone come up with a term for "unburstnorm poetry" that would favor cunning non-experimentalism as much as "burstnorm poetry" supposedly favors the opposite.

Digression: my irrelevant motives for coming up with "burstnorm" (which my fellow burstnorm poets have so far unanimously rejected) had almost nothing to do with pr. It was to find a better term than the ones then, and still, being used. On such term is "experimental." I feel that this is a stupid way to describe poetry because, as Barry says, any real poem is a kind of experiment; and many poems I want to call "burstnorm" are not really experimental enough in my view to be called "experimental." It's a complex matter. For instance, sometimes when I make a long division poem, I don't experiment at all--except in the limited sense of seeing whether some choice of words works better than another; other times when I make a long division poem, I feel I'm significantly experimenting; it's generally when I'm trying some technique new for me. A so far failed one was to see what would happen if I made a long division poem's "division shed" (my term for the symbol in long division that contains a dividend) is and remainder line out of words. The result seemed interesting but I couldn't see any aesthetic point to it. So I've put it aside.

"Avant garde" was another word I wanted to replace simply because much burstnorm poetry is no longer avant garde--although it is still ignored or disparaged by stasguards. Ditto "cutting edge."

Note that all these long-in-use terms could be, and were being, used to hype the kind of poetry I'm supposedly doing pr for with my "burstnorm" term. My main objection to all these terms is that they have nothing to do with what the art they name does, only with its very temporary, and sometimes only apparent, newness, which can't be permanent. "Burstnorm," however, should be less tied to chronology since it has to do with more or less permanent norms, like the one requiring consistent spelling.

Yes, to a degree I wanted to make my kind of poetry a little more visible, but I was more trying to specify more exactly what it was. I started taxonomizing, by the way, when I found the definitions in use for "visual poetry" defective and tried to define it myself. Visual poets still won't accept my reasoning, which includes the proposition that poetry must contain words--which means that a visual artwork using typography but not words cannot be called a "visual poem."

I was going for clarity. I worked on what poetry itself was, too, because I found all prior definitions too vague--and, yes, tending in some cases to exclude my kind of poetry (though in other cases to include lots of stuff I thought it ridiculous to consider poetry). Eventually, because I tend to be unable not to try for completeness, I started trying to taxonomize all of verbal expression--and, really, as much of existence as I could.

Sure, I'm limited by comparative expertise only in fields I've been or am personally imvolved in, and a need to make sure those fields get some credit. That's why I ask others for help. That I tend to get jokes at best instead is why some of my ad hoc terms are often derisive, especially the ones relating to personality or character.

To Spacks's "'Comparisons are odious' because at their most lethal they license pre-judgement and sneering," I said, "Cars are odious because at their most lethal they are used to run over people." Then, when he said he that because he "treasure(d) the right to eclectic practice as a reader and writer, (he found my) mini-management approach objectionable," I challenged him to tell me just how my calling all his poems, and all the poems by others which he admire, "lumpshit hackets" would interfere with his "right to eclectic practice as a reader and writer." "Let's go further," I added, "and imagine my term was accepted by all the scholars in the field and put into textbooks. What then? Would you decide you had to start writing and admiring other kinds of poems?" I reminded Spacks of all the labels people have pinned to my taxonomy. Does it stop me?

Spacks expanded on some of his boilerplate with the opinion that, "Obsessive labeling also tends to handcuff poets who do happily major in one particular so-called 'mode,' as if all poems that rhyme, say, or use classic forms and/or strict meters were somehow the same for that, or all far-out experimental poems automatically are to deserve a 'brave' trail-blazing moniker."

In reply, I said that "(i)n certain respects, working in traditional forms is braver than working in newer ones because you can't use the excuse that you were trying something new.

"But it is also safer because of all the paths already available. As I said, though, my 'burstnorm' term won't celebrate what it applies to any more than "avant garde" already did, and continues to do. Moreover, how can anyone describe something that few are doing without making it seem adventurous? It's not my fault that people will have to take a person trying to make a poem out of computer languages, paper mache and The National Enquirer as more adventurous than someone making a conventional free verse poem about his . . . grandmother."

Time for my latest attempt to strait-jacket Professor Spacks. I am now trying "plainlyric" for what I was calling "plainlay" and then "primellay"--or "conventional free verse poem." I was slow to use "lyric" because I associate it with trying for beauty, and don't think all free verse poems try for that. I think "plain" might work against that. I hope "lyric" will, in turn, work against the connotations "plain" may have of being poor.

As for a term for main plainlyric, my latest choice is "Iowa plainlyric." To go with "New York plainlyric." I don't like place of origin to get into my terms, but these two kinds of poems are already geographically debased, so I may as well go with it. And it makes it easier to connect the given kinds of poems to their respective schools, the Iowa School and the New York School. Other kinds of plainlyrics I've decided exist are "imagist" and "contragenteel." H.D. and Bukowski.

That's it for that level of my taxonomy for a while (I pray). I still want some term for "nonburstnorm," or a pair of terms for that and "burstnorm," or one that is less an "honorific" for burstnorm, so will continue working in that area of my taxonomy. I probably won't have anything more to say about it till I come up with new terms, though.

He blasted me some more, but I said nothing in reply, bowing out of further discussion of terms for what I am now calling "Iowa plainlyric," for the nonce.