|
4 February 2005: Geof Huth's entry for 2 February, my birthday, made me feel good. It's can be visited by clicking : this. Geof displays four of my poems, including the following three from my early book, poemns:
Note that the second poem above is one I recently posted here--with mistakes in it. Geof seems to have the original full-copy of my poemns which has the correct version of this poem--which I could find when I made my entry on it. I went from memory, and forgot the quite important intra-syllabic flow-break I used on "sky's." I forgot to put a period at the end of "traffic," too, which is absolutely essential! Well, maybe not that, but close to it. I remembered all the words, though--I think.
Among the comments Geof's entry got was one from someone named Scott that Geof's response to confused me into thinking Geof had printed only "sky's" from my traffic poemn, and Scott had found "its/ an honesty/ that rips me." I loved the idea of "sky's" as a pwoermd on a blank page, so took credit for it at once. When I typed it, though, I decided that the flow-break didn't work. So my version is:
Geof also included a poem by E. E. Cummings, for his entry is about Cummings's (great) influence on me:
This may be Cummings's most famous visual poem. I extremely like it, but Geof said it was not one of his favorites. I had a few other small disagreements with Geof's stance toward Cummings. One is with Geof's belief that Cummings "influenced the world of visual poetry only slightly. First-time experiments in visual poetry by young poets often mimic some of Cummings� visual tropes, but he has engendered few serious descendants." I think Cummings has had a huge unacknowledged influence on both visual poets and language poets. And he didn't quite come out of nowhere, as Geof also implied. He knew Apollinaire, and the surrealists, and Joyce and Pound. On the other hand, he was the first to do his kind of visual/infra-verbal poetry CENTRALLY--perhaps in the world? Certainly in America.
|
