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9 June 2005: Geof Huth's rhapsody on the word in print at his blog yesterday got me thinking about what is most important to me: the printed word, the sensual particulars of what it represents, or the concept it ultimately represents. Then, I realized it would depend on the word. This led to the question of what kind of words I most want a poem to be built around, words that look good on the page, words richly sensually expressive, or words that connect to deeply meaningful concepts. I'm for all three, but if I had to take just one, it'd be the last. This, I'm sure, puts me into a very small minority of poetry-lovers, and makers.
For example, take the poem I often rate my all-time favorite, Aram Saroyan's "lighght." I am taken by its expansion and unusual appearance. It also fills me with good, if vague, feelings of bright lights or summer noons. What makes it a terrific poem for me, though, are (1) its basis in the concept of silent letters (which makes it, in my poetics, an alphaconceptual infraverbal poem, albeit also to less of an extent, a visual poem), which enables it powerfully to (2) metaphorically conceptualize light as infinite silent expansion a texteme at a time. That is, what I get most from the poem is an exalted concept of light. The other things I also get from it and am grateful for are secondary, for me.
My preference, I'm sure, is what drew me to mathematical poetry. I love the concept of carrying out a mathematical operation such as division on some verbal (or otherwise non-mathematical) substitute for a mathematical term by another. It is also why I tend to have what Geof Huth would describe as a pedestrian "printer's fist," which is what he calls a visual poet's effectiveness as a chooser/inventor of typography. I generally use the most common type, Times New Roman--because I don't want the way the type looks to distract from what the text is doing conceptually. Okay, sometimes because I'm too lazy to find a more appropriate typeface. Even that, though, indicates how little it means to me, most of the time. The size and color of my textemes is important to me, and certain rough oppositions such as elegant versus crude, regular versus italic, dark versus light. . . .
In other news, my "Map of Apollo" is where it was yesterday. I think I'm slowly coming out of my null zone, though. Today, I started work on two publishing projects. The Runaway Spoon Press may well publish some books this year, after all!
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