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4 May 2005: I've had a severe headcold for about a week: clogged head, scratchy throat, runny nose, sneezing spells, desire to go to bed and stay there for a few months--but otherwise okay. In fact, I still feel at the top of my game as a poetickser (though I've been barely productive on any important poetics chore of late, just adding small bits to my Cummings Presentation). . . and even not too far away from there as a poet, for I've roughed out two new cryptographiku in the past two days or less. A cryptographiku is a crytographical poem that is as similar to a haiku as my mathemaku, at least the early ones, are. As for a "cryptographical poem," for me it's a poem in code whose coding has some kind of metaphorical significance. That is, it does more than encrypt some message. I'm especially pleased because I thought cryptographical poems were a dead-end for me, and probably everyone else. I'm not sure they still aren't, for my two new poems may do little more than add a foot or two to the length of the lane out of traditional poetry that cryptographical poetry is. On the other hand . . . In any case, I hope soon to post one or both here.
My second bit of news is that my babble at New-Poetry, which I made yesterday's post out of, has elicited just one response. It and my comments on it are now with yesterday's post--so I wouldn't have to quote the thing here. Also because it's not really worth mention--except as an example of out-and-out insanity. (Marcus Bales was the responder.)
To finish with today's entry, here's a poem by Clark Coolidge, whom I consider the best of the language poets I know:
I'm using this, which is from something called ARRANGEMENT, albeit I got it from Ron Silliman's anthology of langpo, In the American Tree. Coolidge describes what he was up to in writing it in the text I excerpted it from. Interesting. It would seem to be direct from Stein. I'm using it as a specimen of langpo that uses Cummingsesque sentence-breaks--oops, make that line-breaks, no matter that Coolidge may well not have known anything about Cummings's work. (I'm trying to get into a discussion of things like this with Ron Silliman, but in vain.) I stuck it into this entry, though, more to stir myself (and, I hope, others) into getting a better grasp of langpo. The thing is a minor success, for me, but I'm not sure why, and Coolidge's discussion of it doesn't satisfy me.
To be continued.
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