Now a poem I scribbled in my head this morning while still in bed:

I came up with it while thinking the latest entry at Ron Silliman's blog, which Geof Huth had directed me to because of an opinion in it about Writing To Be Seen, the anthology of visio-textual art I co-edited with Crag Hill. The entry itself was mainly about some poems of Carla Harryman most of which seemed hermetic to me. As I said in my blog entry yesterday, obscurity is easy; it's difficulty that's hard, and Harryman's poems (with one exception that I enjoyed but didn't think too important) seemed to me obscure, not difficult. Things anyone could knock out. Which led to the poem above, which is not a parody of Harryman's (I don't think), which I really didn't study or even fully read, but a simple attempt to make what I'm tentatively calling, "Abitraipsic Poetry."

I believe Gertrude Stein wrote this kind of thing, and many of her imitators in language poetry. Jorie Graham and John Ashbery, too. It seems to me to consist of clumps of text, each of which is followed by a ("non-linear") jump to something suggested (auditorilly, semantically, emotionally, who-knows-whatly) by part of the text just composed without reference to anything previous to that text. The kind of thing a reader can find any meaning he wants to in, which thrills some kinds of readers but not me. Slapdash but usually clever and literate.

My own poem is based on thoughts about arithmetic, to begin with, and highly influenced by what I think I'm doing in my mathematical poems. "lS" is a visio-poetic pun which is there only because "S" looks to me like a "5." This entity "continues to feel its wane" for no particular reason except for the punny "way/wane." The next line does stay in arithmetic until "more," which comes, no doubt, from Cummings, but is also a rhyme with "four." More arithmetic follows. After that, the poem jumps for no reason at all to "daisy-lewd lunations," the hyphenated adjective there merely because it sounded interesting to me and I felt the poem was ready for some kind of color. Alliteration provided "lunations." "they can't" is there for obscurity only, as far as I can understand myself; "exception date" is a very distant pun for "expiration date"--and, aha, goes back to "wane," which I hadn't noticed when I put it in. And so forth.

I think that with work I could get an okay poem out of all this, but I also feel that connoiseurs of arbitraipsic poetry would think my tampering with it further would spoil it--except they would say it was worthless if they knew I was using it as an example of inferior poetry. But I'm not as sure the people composing such poems are doing what I did as I sound. I may well be missing something. I would admit to that if some critic could make a unity-indicating pluraphrase of a poem I deemed arbitraipsic I accepted. That is, that I didn't feel I could find contradictions to in the poem, and derive from the poem equally valid-seeming pluraphrases entirely different from it.

This is a problem I'm working on, not one I think I'm solving.