[New-Poetry] Poetic Justice

[Bob Grumman]

A breath-taking poem, Judy?  Too easy for me.  All I have to do is 
repeat my many posts here and elsewhere about "lighght."  
Breath-taking--when I have to emphasize, I first read it.  No poem, or 
any work of art, remains eternally breath-taking for me.

Why?  Because it was a pioneering minimalist poem, done when no one else 
was seriously engaged in making one-word poems--though it's possible (I 
don't know) that others had done one or two), and the idea of trying for 
maximum intensity in a minimum of text was new and potent.  Even more 
important, I'm fairly sure it was the first poem to exploit silent 
letters metaphorically for its central aesthetic effect.  Third, it was 
a good minor concrete poem, aside from its being a major infra-verbal 
poem (poem dependent on what happens inside words rather than between 
words).  Fourth, it is a brilliant (and original) expression of light 
silently expanding.  By itself on a page, it makes those appreciating it 
experience the awesome magnitude of mere light, which is probably the 
most important thing in existence.

Something similar happened to me when I caught on to Cummings's falling 
leaf poem.  I was knocked into what I call "Manywhere-at-Once," which is 
being (literally, I believe) in more than one fully-felt 
generally-rigorously disconnected compartments of your brain at once.  
Lots of other poems have done this to me, most of them very well-known, 
but some not (including a few of my own!)  I mention the short ones 
because it'd take too long to get into the longer ones. 

One last shortie: Basho's haiku about the old pond.

But I think it may be that there are poems that don't click the way 
these do for me that are in other ways as valuable--Frost's "Stopping By 
the Woods," for instance. . . .

--Bob G.