[New-Poetry] Poetics (was Poetic Justice)

[Judy Prince]

"Lightght" sounds better to me for some reason, Bob.
Judy

2008/11/2 Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>

>  lsg wrote:
>
>  I'm wondering if Bob Grumman has invented a new art:  it is not poetry at
> all, but something else entirely.  Even though it is related to poetry, it
> may be so different as to deserve its own category.  Like songs and poems
> are related but are not categorized together.  Dance and acrobatics
> (gymnastics) are related but still different enough to own separate
> categories of endeavor...
>
> Beware, Linda Sue, I'm a taxonomaniac and neologizer.  You've just gotten
> me to coin "physibition" for the art of expressing oneself through physical
> actions: the dance, acrobatics, gymnastics, diving, ice skating, water
> ballet, baton twirling, etc.  As for a separate category for poems like
> "lighght," I think you're too late: they've long been called poems.  Also,
> it makes more sense to consider them a sub-category of poetry rather than a
> whole new category since they are entirely verbal.  Visual poems which
> include purely graphic material are less easy to call poetry but they're as
> much literature as the drama is.  They, too have long been called poetry by
> a lot of people, although many have claimed they are not, almost always
> dismissively.  I prefer to limit the main categories, though, so class them
> "poems."
>
>
>
> Again...just a thought...and you all might have already covered this in
> depth...as I dip in and out of this list... I might have missed it.
>
> lsg
>
> PS  That situation of inventing new art forms is much different from the
> cases where thugs beat up on older poets to get their doggerel read.  When
> an artist actually invents a new art, he will probably need to explain it
> and compare it to its closest cousins.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
> *To:* NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> *Sent:* Saturday, November 01, 2008 5:49 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] Poetic Justice
>
>  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.
>
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