15 July 2004. I found the text in which I classified poems by length. I may already have posted it here--or at another part of Comprepoetica. If so, here it is again:

ON KERNULAR POEMS (version of 13/14 January 1991 revised 27 October 2001)

I am a taxonomaniac, especially when it comes to lyric poet poems. So it should come as no surprise that I have classified such poems on the basis of their size into four categories. To the first category I assign the shortest poems, those that are less than 20 syllables or so in length. I call these poems, "kernular," which derives, of course, from "kernel." The u improves its sound for me, and also hints, I hope, of "capsular." The haiku--17 syllables long in English, when the rules have been meticulously followed--is the most popular kind of kernular poem, but there are more condensed kinds as small as a single word. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis--or image, counter-image and scene--and a space between for tension to smolder in, is all, at the most, they leave room for.

I divide kernular poems into three subcategories, "macro-kernular," "micro-kernular" and "nano-kernular" poems; the first consists of poems from six syllables (or so) to twenty syllables or so in length, the second of poems from one to five, or so, syllables in length, and the last of poems less than one syllable in length.

Lyrics whose length falls between 20 or so syllables and 20 or so lines I categorize, simply, as "short lyrics." The characteristic short lyric is the sonnet, which is fourteen lines long. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis, or image, counter-image and Event, plus tension--and some ornamentation and discussion. Something equivalent to a reflection as opposed to a thought.

The lyrics in my next category I call "mid-length." They run from 20 to 80 lines in length and can take up anywhere from 2 to 5 pages. Longer lyrics I call, simply, "long lyrics." "Tintern Abbey" is a prime example. 200 or 300 lines would be their maximum length, I would think. I don't think a lyric can be any longer. "The Prelude," for instance, is mainly lyric, but even in its relatively short first version, it is in my view a sequence of lyrics rather than a single lyric in itself.

When I was younger, it seemed to me that quantity of esthetic experience determined a given artwork's worth, other things being equal. Ergo, the best lyrics were the long lyrics, and kernular lyrics, however valuable, were the least valuable.

Then it seemed to me that the animated cartoon was the prime vehicle for art, for it could hold more kinds of art than any other form of art. One could write a play, draw its characters and settings, and compose music into it. Only one further step toward the total artwork could be required, the invention of large-scale animated holography. Maximalism, as dreamed of by Wagner, who with his music dramas still seems to have come as close to realizing as anyone although there have been comicstrip creators in this century who have come close to Wagner in their different ways, albeit without much recognition. Al Capp, for instance--and, of course, Robert Crumb. Walt Kelly, another, and Carl Barks. All of them handicapped in the race for Highbrow Acclaim because they had (or have) senses of humor. Aeschylus will always get more respect than Aristophanes, however larger the imagination and range of the latter.

Early on, though, I developed a love of the haiku. 17 syllables, and almost the total reverse of the music drama and other forms of my maximalist dream. I do not deplore that dream but now believe it only one among several equal dreams. The minimalist dream is as valuable. It is to expel as much from an artwork as possible in order to focus on some final single stimulus, thus intensifying the aesthcipient's experience of that stimulus--for all time!

My impression is that it was mid-century illumagists such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Piet Mondrian who first--at any rate first forcefully--propelled minimalistic concerns into artistic importance. There was a long evolution of concern with large anthroceptual, sagaceptual, architectonic, sensual, intellectual and etceteral matter in illumagery into impressionism's concern not with outdoor lighting (as the received word has it) but with brush-strokes and color. Representation of visual reality slowly disappeared as illumagery condensed into pure forms and colors. By the height of abstract expressionism a kind of maximalism was still in effect--Pollock, for instance, was combining color-music (i.e., colors used like notes in music), architectonics, and evidence of paint-application as a means of expressing temperment and physical action--as a means, really, of recording oneself as a dance. At the same time, though, he and Hoffman and de Kooning were continuing to deflect aesthcipients from subject-matter to the smaller concerns of paint as color, texture, something-applied--the basis of minimalist intensification. Gottlieb and Motherwell then began concentrating parts or all of many of their paintings on final simplicities-- rectangles and ovals. Similarly Rothko and Kline and others became concerned with edges, and the huge effect one color can have on another if one concentrates on their clash. I suspect (but have done no research to verify) that Albers started minimalism. The important thing, though, is that he discarded everything in painting but color, reducing his canvases to two or three colors, and his forms to just one--the square. Hence, the viewer must focus on what one color does to another to get anything out of his pictures. Few other abstract-expressionists went as far as he, but many, like Ad Reinhardt, used the same kind of operation in parts of their pictures.

With the pop artists representation returned, but not maximalism as the pop artists in general avoided color effects, brush-stroke-interest and such painterly concerns, and classical subject matter as well, to concentrate of what was generally accepted as banal subjects. A kind of minimalism of objectness came about with --well it was before the flashiest pop artists, with DuChamp's urinal and similar found art. The Urinal is a reduction of illumagery to a single mundane, ordinarily ignored object just as Albers's magic squares are reductions of illumagery to a single pairing of colors that would ordinarily be lost in "larger" concerns such as subject matter, patterns of shapes, brush strokes. Duchamp wrenches his object out of the background by isolating it from its context; he puts it in a frame (of sorts) to force viewers to look at it as something visual and to see it freshly in the same way Albers might get one to suddenly see what some shade of blue against a shade of orange really is.

Of course, pop art like Duchamps's, or like Warhol's later soup cans, are not as minimal as Albers's squares because they have subject matter and thus comment on Art--although Albers comments on Art, too, by claiming that even the simplest of effects are worth concentrating on. For the purposes of this essay, however, the important thing is that pop art is a minimalist art which attempts to give an aesthcipient less than reality does rather than more, as the more traditional kind of poetry does, and Wagnerian music drama, etc.

The Japanese were ahead of us in minimalism, having invented the haiku some 300 years or more ago. Perhaps the most famous of their haiku is Basho's much-translated:

                            old pond,
                            and the sound
                            of a frog's splash-in

Also the idea of serenity broken. And the implicit metaphor of pond as Time Itself, into which lives splash briefly, then disappear forever. All these and other impressions, mainly because the poem's brevity holds the attention long enough for experience to grow out of it.

This haiku influence helped make imagism what it was, and in part inspired that movement's masterpiece, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro":

       The apparition        of these faces           in the crowd:
       Petals           on a wet, black           bough: 

William Carlos Williams was the one modernist who went in for minimalism--too unlyrically much to my taste most of the time. But he carried it off brilliantly in his well-known, "The Red Wheelbarrow":

                            so much depends
                            upon


                            the red wheel
                            barrow


                            glazed with rain
                            water


                            beside the white
                            chickens

I can't answer for Perloff, but I can describe how the line breaks work for me. The division of "wheelbarrow" makes me briefly (and not wholly consciously) visualize a particular red wheel--or the sun at dawn. Arbitrary, yes, but plausible, too, as I hope later to show.

The appearance of "barrow" of course focuses me on a wheelbarrow, but one surrounded by hints of mounds, burials, undergroundnesses and other things associated with barrows. It is a wheelbarrow with a vividly central, and implicitly centering, wheel, too. In short, if I perhaps don't exactly rethink the word's meaning, I certainly refeel it--that is, its connotational (or poetic) value increases for me, significantly.

As for the line-break in the middle of "rainwater," that makes me (however fleetingly and pre-consciously) feel the raining that went on prior to the scene described, but which is now over (or the slightest of drizzles) since it would otherwise be preventing any glaze from holding up. Without the break, I'm sure I would have experienced the rain as water only, not as the process which produced the water. "Water," off by itself, brings the rain more fully to rest. It also makes it seem more substantial, and more sensually liquid: something requiring three syllables--and a space--to represent rather than just a single syllable.

In the final stanza of Williams's poem, another line break nicely stops us in undifferentiated whiteness for a moment, then breaks that down into specific chickens. Again, one must re-appraise the text--if one is susceptible to Williams's sort of formal excellence.

Similarly the size and shape of Williams's stanzas adds to his poem's effectiveness-- by suggesting in appearance four little wheelbarrows, for one thing--and according to Perloff, by "framing" the picture presented. Bawer missed the visual poetry effect (as did I until Alan Davis brought my attention to it in a post to a poetry discussion group I'm in) He doesn't accept Perloff's observation, either, but I'm with her again--except that I'm not sure I mean by "framing" what she does. For me, the stanzas make a 4-frame movie of the poem. It starts in a large generality, then at once narrows to a specific small detail, a wheelbarrow's wheel. This it quickly overlays with information about the weather conditions prevailing. Thereupon its fourth frame expands the poem fully into a scene.

That scene is said to have "much depend(ing) upon it." Since a wheelbarrow and some chickens would seem of little consequence to most people, the reader must try to figure out just how the scene can be thought of as having what critic Bruce Bawer calls "importance . . . in the universe," and which he denies the poem as having. Needless to say, I consider him to be wrong. For one thing, he seems oblivious to the archetypal substance the scene has. It speaks of Newness, since the wheelbarrow will take a glaze and is thus not old and rusted or worn; and of Cleanness, since water washes, and white is pure; and of Primariness, because of the colors (as Perloff points out), and the cultural fundamentality of the scene, on a farm. It speaks, too, of spring because of the qualities just mentioned, and because it has to do with agriculture, and includes a recent rain. The idea of the barrow as a burial mound would fit in with this scheme, too--as something primeval (like spring soil) which contains precious items awaiting rebirth. Add to all this the rising sun, or day's beginning, that I consider the "red wheel" to hint at, and which the poem's "under-burden" that I've been describing should make much more plausible than it might have at first seemed, and it becomes hard to dispute that the scene symbolizes Fertility and Birth and Creation. It therefore is of "importance . . . in the universe."

But the poem is not in my view finally about the meaningfulness of the scene--or about a nation's having a thriving agriculture, as suggested by Perloff. It is about the ability of the red wheelbarrow, the glaze on it, and the white chickens not merely to be meaningful, but to convey meaningfulness.

So, I would phrase the poem's main meaning as follows: "so much depends upon the way everyday scenes can in the world's best moments convey a sense of enduring, universal meaningfulness." The poem makes me--and I believe, most people who read it--recall similar scenes we've turned some corner of our lives into, and felt exalted by. Williams's scene is a symbol for all such scenes. They are what keep us going.

                                 On is it up
                                 Yes upon
                                 It is and now
                                 Endure

In any case, the poem is kernular. It is also solitextual, but flirts with infraverbal concerns. With, specifically, "on" before, and then following "up." Before I pontificate on the importance of this, I need to complete the poem for you: its title is "Fawn." It is incomprehensible without that title. With it, it should come across as a description of a fawn's tottering to its feet for the first time.

This allows an alphaconceptual metaphor (whether intended or not): the trip of "on" (past two obstacles) to "up" and then the place-changing of the two to form "upon" is equated with a fawn's awkward rearrangement of itself from recumbent to upright. This is subtle, or at least it was for me--exactly the kind of thing one needs time to recognize, the time that only minimalist art (normally) can narrow one into. Minimalism is the presentation of a package so severely simplified that one can keep the whole of it in mind while one concentrates of its emphasized minimal special effects.

Aside from what it does with "on" and "up," the poem nicely jerks through its four brief lines to form just the kind of four step effect that the fawn's rising no doubt formed. With a question quivered out of the first step in step with the uncertainty of the fawn's undertaking. But we're still not--I'm still not--finished with the alphaconceptual effect of Tongue's play with "on" and "up." For the minimalism of the poem holds us also onto the change from what "on" means to what "UPon" means, from a kind of passive on-ness to being both up AND on. So much more mastery and triumph coming from upon-ness than simple up-ness, but mastery and triumph that might have been missed if the minimalism of the poem didn't make the reader want to get something more out of the words in the poem than he otherwise might have. A sense of this can't be all that is one's first response to any poem that is both short and simple. And which should cause one to dig for more meaning--but too often doesn't, the reader assuming the poet having been a simpleton.

So the fawn is first on, then on up--or it is uncertain at first whether the fawn is on OR on up until the second line declares that it is by then up--and up on (the earth). Whereupon "is" and "it" exchange places in a rhyme with what "on" and up" just did, and underscore the ascent from uncertainty into accomplishment. The "and now/ endure" contains a neat little rim-rhyme (and/end--a rim-rhyme being my term for a rhyme occurring between words whose initial, in this case blank, and terminal syllables are the same, but whose vowels differ). This, plus--again--the poem's attention-heightening minimalism, made me hear "grandeur" along with "endure." Most appropriately.