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21 September 2005: my report on the probable final text for my Cummings essay on why mainstreamers don't believe Cummings has been influential is anti-climactic. I shrank what I said about the mainstreamers substantially to: "As for Collins, Kenner and the other mainstream poets and critics, and professors who
have rated Cummings uninfluential, I think their condition due in good part simply to their lack of sympathy for his poetry. Many academics are bothered by his romantic individualism, frequent sentimentality, and--to them--narrow interests (in spring, stars and flowers, for instance). They tend also to be too verbal to appreciate the visual aspects of his poetry, and too techniphobic to have much interest in the nuts and bolts of poetry beyond such
long-familiar nuts and bolts as rhyme and meter." I'll save my more thorough analysis of anti-Cummingsism for some later work.
I go from what I quoted to an assertion that "Even were mainstreamers capable of sympathy for Cummings's work, though, they would have trouble tracing its influence on contemporary poetry." That's because they are ignorant of the mimeostream, which I discuss for two or three paragraphs.
Meanwhile, Geof's blog entry for yesterday is about pattern poetry and concrete poetry. He seems to agree with my position. Karl Kempton apparaently doesn't, but in his comment announcing his disagreement, he doesn't really say why, only refers me to Dick Higgins's excellent overview of pattern poetry and bawls me out for "seem(ing) to want to see everything thru
his classification system and not do the deep historical research to
undertand context and text and pre-text, ect." What that has to do with my observation that that classical concrete poems like Gomringer's "Silence," almost never contain textual elements that, by themselves, would add up to anything close to a poem, and therefore seem significantly different from classical pattern poems like George Herbert's "Altar," which contain textual elements that, by themselves, almost always add up to full-scale poems.
Both kinds of poems are litagraphic poems in my taxonomy--which means that I consider them visual poems by any definition. I have not yet worked out subclasses of litagraphy for such poems. They are just two of many specific kinds of visual or litagraphic poems. Or maybe not. I think it'd be more accurate to classify some classical concrete poems as a subclass of pattern poems. I mean the ones whose text is laid out in some kind of symmetrical pattern, like Gomringer's "Silence," but not those like Ladislav Novak's "Gloria," which consists simply of the word, "gloria," printed as "gl ria" with its o high above it.
My tentative taxonomic scheme would have a class for pattern poetry at the same level as a class for poems like Novak's--which I can't think of a name for, at the moment. Maybe "free-shape poetry."
I'd have a class above these two for visual or litagraphic poems possessing textual matter only--to be called, "Solitextual Litagraphic Poetry," since "solitextual" is now my standard term for work consisting of textual matter only. It would have a mate called . . . "Semitextual Litagraphic Poems." The latter would also have pattern and free-shape classes under it.
Okay, anybody who is still reading, you're free to stop now. No more taxonomy today.
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