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Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters



6 July 2005: The topic is terminology, again. It's Geof Huth's fault. Yesterday, he posted the following (A-1) poem of his, "What We Sea," at his blog:


Unfortunately, he got into a discussion of what term to use for its kind of half verbal, half "glyphic," poem. Said he: "I'm a bit entranced by the word glyph, which 'originally' denoted 'a sculptured mark or symbol' (OED), but which now usually refers to "a symbol (as a curved arrow on a road sign) that conveys information nonverbally" (M-W). This latter definition makes glyph the perfect word for visual poetry that is moving towards the non-verbal, for visual poetry that works at the level of non-verbal visual symbol instead of the word"--sauch as "What We Sea." Geof wanted to call it a "typoglyph," but felt he couldn't because Karl Kempton long ago invented the term, "typoglif," for one variety of his several major signature works, and Geof's "typoglyph" differs too much from it. So Geof wants a different term. I couldn't help him out, though I suggested, "typocrap," "textoglyph," "linglyph," and a few others.

In the process, I remembered "texteme," my term for any single 'atomic' textual element/symbol such as a letter, numeral, punctuation mark." I wondered what the graphic equivalent of a texteme would be--a heart, for example, which can be considered a symbol but not truly textual. A smilie face. These could be examples of "glyphs" (as the OED defines them, but not I) but I thought of them as being units of glyphs--although, just as the textemes "I" and "a" are also words, a few of them could also be glyphs. In any case, I came up with "depictneme" for the graphic or visual printed equivalent of a texteme, and "depictseme" for the graphic or visual printed equivalent of a word.

Naturally, I couldn't stop there. My aesthetics/linguistics glossary now also contains "audioneme" (musical equivalent of a texteme), "mathneme," "choreoneme"--and, because all the rest were "nemes," "texneme." Because of the addition of "mathneme," "texneme" no longer covers numerals and mathematical symbols. I didn't feel the need for addition "seme" terms. I may need "scineme" eventually, but think mathneme, depictneme or texneme should cover such things as astronomical symbols (like the ones for Venus and Mars), chemical notation, and so forth.

One result of all this is that I could call pluraesthetic poetry "polynemic poetry." I'm not going to.












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