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2 November 2004.
Today the introduction of another Grummanism, the noun, "aesthative," to represent an
artwork's aesthetic arrangement. EHS thah tiv. It goes with "narrative," an artwork's story, and
"envirative," an artwork's material setting. The verb associated with it is, "aesthate,"
meaning, "to construct an aesthetic arrangement (in poetry, of words and word
fragments)," to go with "narrate," meaning, "to construct a story," and "envirate,"
meaning, "to construct a setting."
It occurred to me that we need the word while thinking about a John M. Bennett poem I'm analyzing. A narrative of sorts might be found in it, although I haven't found one so far, and in a way it could be said to be setting up a scene of sorts, but--maybe because of my recent bout with non-representational painting--I think what it is mostly doing is simply arranging itself in an aesthetically meaningful way. Not to inspire a mood, although it will do that if successful but to cause aesthetic feelings, which I consider different from a mood. Moods are psychological, have to do with the self and/or the other/s; aesthetic feelings are purely sensual, and concerned with objects. To put it roughly.
I've been clumping around with taxonomical seriousness in what I'm calling non-representational poetry for only a couple of years. I think the texts in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons are non-representational--but probably not poems, but prose. A lot of the works I call textagraphy are non-representational, too, but definately not poems, but illumages.
I'm fairly certain all poems have a narrative, a envirative and an aesthative, but in most poems one of these three . . . coheratives . . . dominates.
More on all this in due course, I strongly hope, because I don't feel on top of it yet.
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