VRZHU bullets of pure love

NEWS ON THE MARCH!!!

NEWS

For those of you who live in the immediate area of Washington, D.C. (motto: Visit Washington! It’s a *Capitol* offense!), Kay Ryan will be kicking off her second term as Poet Laureate with a reading at the Library of Congress on October 21, 2009.

I encourage you to attend this reading if you have a chance, whether you are a writer or not, and, if you are a writer, whether you find Ryan’s poems congenial or not.

As it happens, the online journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, has just put up an issue on the U. S. Poets Laureate, aka The Consultant in Poetry aka Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, that last being the current official title, courtesy of, no doubt, The Department of Redundancy Department.

The issue is guest-edited by Vrzhu Press’ own unindicted co-conspirator, Dan Vera. Nice Work, Dan. And a tip o' th' hat to editor-in-chief Kim Roberts, a noted Vrzhu Press author.

MORE NEWS

Upcoming (imminent!) Vrzhu author Carol Guess, who we are just crazy about, is a featured writer over at the Genpop Books, where you can read four of her wonderful prose poems, a form of which she is a master.

Also don’t forget Carol’s book, Timberbox Lawn, is available from Rose Metal Press, one of the hottest new presses around (along with, e.g., Big Game Books, and No Tell Books).

TRANSLATION

Here, from that aforementioned issue of BPQ, is nice tidbit on translation from Grace Cavalieri and Joseph Brodsky:

Cavalieri: How much are we missing? We see and hear English translations of your poems and some are called brilliant in any language.

Brodsky: You can’t say you are missing much. You can’t say you are missing the prosody of another language. You can’t miss the acoustics of another language. The original is rooted in the euphony of the Russian language. That of course you can’t have and you’re not missing it. You can’t miss something that you don’t know.

Cavalieri: We can get a good lyrical poem anyway that is matchless.

Brodsky: That’s what it is if it works in English. You have to be a judge of solely how it is in English.

Cavalieri: We shouldn’t feel we’re getting only ninety percent of something which is absolute.

Brodsky: You get a poem in English, good or bad. You can’t fantasize about what it’d be like in the original.

That seems like one of the more reasonable remarks about the fraught issue of translating poetry.

Also I suggest giving serious consideration to Brodsky's advice to write your Nobel Prize acceptance speech NOW, "just in case."

Rain

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Poem Infestation - a Vrzhu Reprint

We here in the research arm of Vrzhu Press are working [tirelessly] to improve the lot of poets, and consumers of poetry alike.

However.  Bethatasitmay. We also recognize that sometimes poetic efforts, effluvia and extravasations are not wanted or desired.

As such, one of the R&D efforts here in the warrens and catacombs of the VRB is to assist those for whom poetry is not an occasion, but a nuisance.  Here is a short summary of our initial research and a peek at one of our many products in continuous development.

Poem Infestation

Poems are among the most difficult household pests to control. Except for submission periods when they may migrate from place to place,  poems spend their entire life inside buildings. Usually they are found in libraries, bathrooms and bedrooms. They can be carried into homes in shopping bags, backpacks, furniture and pet foods.

Poems are one of the most disagreeable literary genres that may invade homes. While it is not true that an unkept home will cause a poem infestation, there is indeed a strong correlation between sanitation and poems once an infestation gets started.  The presence of poems often causes serious mental anguish for some homeowners. Poems often associate themselves with teenagers and are known to be involved in the spread of negative emotions which cause mild depression, self-absorption, herbal tea drinking, and more serious melodramatic behavior. Some people appear to be allergic to poems.

The exact origin of our domestic poems is disputed, but many are European, South American and Eastern in origin and now are widely distributed throughout the country. In most areas, homeowners are commonly bothered by five different categories of poems: confessional, experimental, accessible, surreal (which has a subcategory, deepimage), and nature poems, which are more at home outdoors but can also get into the house.

Species

The American poem may grow from one to several hundred pages. It can be identified by its normal markings: ragged, sloppy right margins and, frequently, a body segmented into “stanzas.”  There is not much reliable information about any one poem’s lifespan, which nonetheless seems to be highly variable: from a few minutes to many years or stretching cycles of years.

Oriental poems, or haiku, are uniform and small in appearance, no more than seventeen syllables long when full-grown and are easily recognized by their short lines, though mutations are possible. The haiku seems to be equally at home inside human habitation and outdoors, where they can be found near ponds or blossoms or other similar areas.

The European poem is larger, usually darker, but vary greatly in appearance and pronunciation. The European poem is quite active and can easily migrate throughout communities thus becoming a major pest, however, it seems to only truly thrive in the presence of American poems, a symbiotic relationship our poentomologists have termed “translation.”  Even so, a troublesome infestation can develop rapidly after the chance introduction of just a few individual poems. It is an unsettled question whether the South American poem, whose habits and behavior are almost identical to the European, is a subspecies, or is an entirely different species.

Another poem sometimes found invading the home is the Woodsy poem. This species lives outdoors and is not as fast nor as wary as its house-dwelling relatives. They may wander into buildings in wooded areas, or may be brought into the house under false pretenses. The males of this species (garysnyderus) are long-lived and have a rough appearance. The females (maryoliveria) are much more reclusive but probably more widespread.

Integrated Poem Management

It is easier (and less costly) to prevent poems from entering a structure than it is to get rid of them.  They can be discouraged from invading buildings by sealing cracks and crevices in foundations and outside walls. Careful inspection of all anthologies and omnibus selections is essential, as poems have been known to hide within large tracts of prose.

Carefully inspect all incoming books, magazines, and junk mail for the presence of poems or references to them.

Control

Unfortunately no method for controlling poems has proven universally successful. We here in the Vrzhu Research Bureau are working on a safe, convenient method of eliminating poem infestations when they occur.

Hope for a Cure Vocal-based Morphometry Reveals Excess Poetic Matter Concentration in Patients with Graphic Poetical Dysplasia

Many patients with graphic poetical dysplasia (GPD) continue to write poems after treatment. The usual explanation for the poor outcome is the presence of residual poetical fluids missed by the pre-suction imaging investigation and therefore not leeched during treatment. We apply a vocal-based morphometry (VBM) analysis to the metaphoric resonance imaging (MRI) scans from patients with GPD and aurally detected GPD to investigate whether (a) VBM is able to detect ego-matter concentration (EMC) abnormalities in patients with GPD, and (b) whether the extent of EMC abnormalities in these patients can be renormalized using aural and critical self-feedback procedures.

Abnormal areas detected by VBM can possibly correspond to mild malformations of poetical development. GPD is a developmental malformation of the right margin cortex that is now recognized as one of the leading causes of drug-resistant poetomania. Noninvasive methods show the presence of lyric cortical thickening, alterations in the pentametric and ABAB patterning, blurring between metaphor- and simile -matter transition, and elongation of the subcortical ego image tapering towards often interminable recitational ventricles.

Carefully designed protocols can detect subtle reality lesions that will not be identified by routine evaluation. Although the diagnosis of GPD has improved, the reasons that many patients do not become poetry-free after poetic fluid reduction are still largely unknown. One possible explanation it that reality lesions in these patients are just the "tip of the iceberg" of a more pervasive dysplastic egomorphing.

Vocal-based morphometry (VBM) is a technique that uses automatic reclassification of poetry “output” with an aurally normalized feedback to reify the dormant critical response function of the patients.

Vocal-based morphometry Although we received an overwhelming numbers of samples (“review copies”) for use in normative structuring, we decided to use our own template to overcome (a) differences in form and school, (b) inhomogeneities in open field scansion, and (c) differences in the demographics of our population (slamist, flarfetics, snarkitudinism, emo, beatic, fugue-state quietude, post-avantilepsy). Poetic images and the template were convolved with an isotropic gluckian kernel (IGK) of 8 mm and were used for optimizing the nonlineation normalization of raw padding-stripped images. Finally, the images were convolved with an IGK of 10 mm to minimize ginsbergal interindividual exapansibility. This smoothing renders poetic-matter concentration normally distributed, enabling us to apply standard attention-span parametric mapping techniques.

We also were concerned that the differences in GPD between patients could be an effect of the younger age of some patients, even though all patients fell within two degrees of the mean age of attainment (MFA, and BA). To address this issue, we randomly selected three normal writers (essayist, short storyist, journalist), and the images from each one of these were compared with the mean imagism of the patients by using the standard analysis of covariance with age as nuisance factor.

RESULTS

VBM was able to detect a distinct poetic overproduction in each patient. 91% of the patients showed excess of publication and lack of empathy for reading attendees. In 82% of the patients this matched the area of significant EMC excess. In 64% of the patients, EMC excess extended beyond the area of poetic production faculties into post-reading behavior and casual anti-empathic ego-centering.

Among the patients who showed areas of increased EMC, the cluster size of the EMC excess in the region corresponding to ability ranged from 40 to 1,046 units of professional recognition.

DiSCUSSION

Clearly VBM is a crucial and effective tool in detecting GPD. However, the feedback part of the system showed varying degrees of effectiveness. How much of this is due to the restructuring of the poetic matter content, and how much to the impermeability of the poetic ego cannot be determined without a further refinement of our present techniques.

Until then such egomorphic poetry excesses are liable to be pervasive in the poetry world. But with vigilant diagnosis and aggressive treatment this scourge may one day be no more of a threat than small pox or overacting.

A Classic Vrzhu Reprint

Finally, feel safe thanks to Vrzhu Reliable Poetry Protection!

NEWS ITEM

Poetry is naturally acidic, because carbon dioxide emitted by the poet combines with water molecules to form carbonic acid. Acidic poesis occurs when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere react during a poetry reading to form sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and nitric acid (HNO), which falls on the audience as invisible dust. Most poetry readings are known to have a pH of 5.0 or lower.

In past decades, to reduce poetry pollution in areas near universities, English departments built poetic sneeze guards and venting ducts to disperse the poetic particulate high up into the air, away from listeners. However, new EPA regulations have now made this method infeasible.

During the 1980s, the American Poetry Society conducted a major ten-year scientific study of acidic poetry and poetry precipitates. This study, the National Acidic Poetry Assessment Program or NAPAP, found that the effects of acidic poetry were greater than feared. The study found that acidic poetry had affected about 10 percent of Eastern poetry readers and audiences and that it had contributed to the decline in reading poetry by reducing tolerance to anastrophe, rhyme and synecdoche. The study also found that acidic poesis contributed to corrosion in prose writing in affected areas and that poetic particles had contributed to reduced readability and intelligibility in the Northeast and parts of the West. The panel found that the readers and listeners most severely affected were those who lacked a natural buffering capacity.

The particulate matter associated with acid poesis has been shown to have adverse health effects, especially among those who are susceptible to mental disorders, or are highly suggestible. There is also some concern that acidic poesis could contribute to leaching of common sense and humility from the literate populace.

HOW YOU CAN BE PROTECTED

With Poetry Ponchos from Vrzhu Industries!

Our ponchos are safe to use at all poetry readings, both indoors and out:

• readings by nationally known poets,
• open mics,
• local readings,
• “slams,”
• book festivals,
• AWP conferences,
• workshops,
• any event with the words "Geraldine R. Dodge" in it, and
• evenings of performance poetry.

The seams are welded ultrasonically -- no stitching is used in our ponchos – providing maximum protection from poetic seepage.  Elastic hems provide our patent pending “extra snug fit.” There are also reinforced side grommets to be used for added protection and support. Our ponchos naturally resist rot and mildew. A storage bag is included for safe keeping when not in use.

AND INTRODUCING . . .

New to the line and totally new to the market is a one of a kind Emergency Poetry Poncho from Vrzhu Industries and it is nothing short of revolutionary. Living up to it's name, the Vrzhu Emergency Poetry Poncho, the "Prose-Maker," is the ONLY WATERPROOF AND BREATHABLE poetry poncho on the market today. It is a three micro-layer poncho and is unequaled for 100% poetry protection. There are two layers of Polylyricpropylene with a layer of micro-porous film sandwiched between them. This allows for superior poetry protection with the ability for moisture to evaporate through the poncho. It is also highly effective against UV (ultra-verse) rays, prose poems, sound poetry, oulipo, banter, fawning, preening and logrolling. There are built-in, reinforced, scratch-proof tie down grommets that when in use with a cable lock will ensure your poncho will stay put, regardless. The Vrzhu Emergency Poetry Poncho comes with a convenient storage bag, and. . . AN UNBELIEVABLE FIVE YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY!

Try it and you'll say: Thank you Vrzhu Industries, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Vrzhu Research Bureau, part of the family of Vrzhu Comglomerates and Vrzhu Press, a name you can

Back in a minute

Late twentieth century medicine still accepts as its ultimate aim the ideal set for it by such figures as Pavlov, Dastre,  and Metchnikoff in the first years of the [20th] century: the perpetual maintenance of the human organism as a maximally efficient machine, and the indefinite postponement of the ‘accident’ of death.  Given this aim, it is clear that ‘the medical ideal, ever more closely approximated, must be bodily immortality.’ Such an ideal is not normally expressed in explicit terms, however. Rather than calling for the prevention of all deaths, one speaks, for example, of seeking to achieve ‘further reductions in premature deaths’; but this more cautious formulation only thinly disguises the demand for immortality, since ‘it often seems doubtful from our words and deeds that we ever regard any particular death as other than premature, a failure of today’s medicine, hopefully avoidable by tomorrow’s.

The twentieth-century medical opposition between life and death, then, is one that reduces death once again to a kind of nullity, but not the nullity resulting from privation of something positive. Death is now a nullity not because of the loss of something internal to life, but because it is the failure of something external to life, the perpetual maintenance service of modern medicine. The consequences of this outlook can be seen in medical judgements about death and dying, for in practice ‘[d]ying is defined…in terms of the actions—or failed actions—of the physicians. In keeping with the predominant technical bias of biomedicine, “dying” becomes a cultural metaphor which symbolizes treatment failure. Already, at the beginning of the century, Dastre has argued that when a physician ‘declares that any particular person is dead, it is less a judgement of fact that he utters than a prognostication’ that nothing he could do would restore the dying person to life. Observations of medical residents in a contemporary hospital have shown a similar attitude…

In earlier times, anxiety over the diagnosis of death was motivated by the fear of premature burial. In an age of organ transplants, concern was to become focused instead on the fear of premature dismemberment. To introduce cessation of brain functions as the criterion of death, in place of the traditional reliance upon the cessation of heart and lung functions, conjured up visions of the comatose but still breathing, albeit mechanically supported, patients being vivisected by overzealous surgeons in their haste to obtain transplantable spare parts.  That the patient could be regarded by opponentsof the brain death criterion as ‘alive’ despite being totally dependent upon artificial support systems for heart, lung, and other vital functions, did not merely reflect lingering nostalgia for the traditional heart-lung definition of death. It also reflected, more importantly, widespread acceptance of the living human body’s dependence upon medical technology as a perfectly natural and indeed intrinsic feature of ‘life’ itself.

As the definition of the brain-death criterion makes clear, in contemporary medicine dying and death are neither a part of life as in the nineteenth century nor the absence of life as in earlier ages. Today, a comatose patient today whose whole loss of  spontaneous brain functions is irreversible by existing resuscitation techniques is ‘dead’. Another comatose patient tomorrow, in exactly the same physiological state as the first was today, is ‘not dead’ if in the meantime a new resuscitation technique has been introduced that can be used to reverse the coma, the criterion of death is technological rather than biological.

For modern medicine, then, life is not the opposite of death as the active is the opposite of the inert, for the same level of organic activity/inactivity can count as death at one time and life at another, according to the state of medical technology. Nor is life the opposite of death as the natural is the opposite of the artificial, for the greater capacity medicine has to intervene technologically in the production and maintenance of life, the less sense it makes to characterize life or death as natural. In the twentieth century, both life and death fall under the aegis of a perpetual maintenance programme; their relationship must now be understood as the opposition between self-declared successes and ‘accidental’ failures of a single technological project.

-Ideas of Life and Death by W. R. Albury, From the Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine by William F. Bynum, Roy Porter

Tuesdayness

What are poems? [Part one]

"Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves, as Plato's age had not yet made it fully a part of itself, we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Yet writing (and especially alphabetic writing) is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment: styli or brushes or pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints, and much more. … Writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist."

   —Walter Ong

*    *    *    *    *

Fait Divers de la Poemes Amercaine et Brittanique

 Bombardier beetles of the genus Brachinus are unique in mixing chemicals to make an explosion. The ingredients are made and held in separate glands. When required, they are squirted into a chamber near the rear end of the beetle, where they explode, forcing noxious (caustic and boiling-hot) liquid out through a nozzle directed at the enemy.

The archer fish comes to the surface of the water and spits a mouthful at a perched insect, knocking it down into the water, where it eats it. The archer fish's spit is guided, with devastating accuracy, by binocularly focused eyes.

Spitting spiders [family Scytodidae] lack the fleetness of a wolf spider or the net of a web spider. A spitting spider chucks a venomous glue some distance towards its prey, pinning it to the ground until the spider arrives and bites it to death.

The bolas spider [Mastophora] uses a missile to capture prey. The spider synthesizes and exudes the fake sexual scent of a female moth, which attracts male moths. The missile is a blob of silk. The blob is attached to a thread of silk, which the spider whirls around like a lasso or bola, then hurls at its prey, which it then reels in.

The diving bell spider [Argyroneta aquatica] lives and hunts entirely under water.  Like dolphins, dugongs, turtles, freshwater snails and other land animals that have returned to water, the diving bell spider still needs to breathe air. To accomplish this it constructs own diving bell. It spins a bell of silk attached to an underwater plant. The spider goes to the surface to collect air, which it carries in the same way as some water bugs, in a layer trapped by body hairs. But unlike the bugs, which just carry the air like a scuba cylinder wherever they go, the spider takes it to its diving bell, where it unloads it to replenish the supply. The spider sits in the diving bell watching for prey, and it stores and eats prey there, once caught.

Extra credit for identifying the poets alluded to above!

*    *    *    *

What are poems? [Part two]

"Even more confusion of terminology could be avoided by realizing that making ever more precise or restrictive definitions does not generate greater precision in the understanding of any animal.  Animals are dynamic. Each animal’s choices fit in somewhere in a long continuum of almost anything that can be measured or imagined. Different terms may apply in any one animal in varying degree, depending on circumstances, but ultimately the species, and often the individual, fashion their own solutions to fit the situation or the occasion. We gain understanding not so much by lumping and defining, but by differentiating the specifics form the generalized features. The latter have a tendency to become enshrined as rules or laws that are ultimately statistically derived descriptive artifacts. But animals don’t follow rules or easily allow us to pigeonhole them into convenient intellectual boxes. A “rule” is nothing more than a consistency of response that we have deduced animals exhibit because it serves their interests. Rules are the sum of decisions made by individuals. They are a result. The chaos, and the art, of nature remains." -Bernd Heinrich

For "animal," read "poem." For "nature," read "the poet."

Stay tuned...

Our usual Saturday Video will be delayed due to technical difficulties, tryptophan-induced coma, cuisine- related injuries, and indolence.

See you in the next day or two....

Also answers to our quiz...

Tuesday Vrzhu - How Healthy Is Your Poetry?

Today’s (October 14, 2008) New York Times Science section has an article about Dr. James W. Pennebaker.  Dr. Pennebaker, a psychologist, counts words. He also has some very good and practical advice about writing and how it can help you improve your physical and mental health. This is fascinating and I'd like to think about it in more depth here sometime--how something as abstract as language can affect something as concrete as your health. Pennebaker says: "The words we use reflect who we are. Word choice can serve as a key to people's personality and social situations."

He also has a cool article analyzing the candidates in the current presidential election. From the article:

Palin’s thought processes seem to be the least complicated of the four: she uses fewer words that refer to cognitive processes (insight, cause and effect relationships, inclusion, exclusion, and so on) than the other nominees. The only cognitive words she uses frequently are inclusive words (plus, and, with), which, like conjunctions, can indicate rambling. She uses particularly few inhibition and exclusive words. Using few exclusive words sometimes indicates dishonesty.

 

In any case, I recommend the NYT article because most poets spend some amount of time thinking about words.

But also for another reason. From the article:

…Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.

Dr. Pennebaker also noted that the healthier a person becomes, the more that person uses causal words, such as because, cause, and effect.  But we’ll get to those some other time.

Poetic Trauma

One of the great antinomies of 20th and 21st Century poetry has been built around embracing or repudiating the personal pronoun in poems.  The responses to the personal pronoun vary: an outright ban, subversion, ironic use, badge of honor, deconstruction, vilification, gulag, mockery, and so on. Poetics statements run the gamut from condemnation of a self in poems as capitalist dupe, to assertions of personism.

I do think the native tendency is for the general reader to prefer the use of the personal pronoun rather than find it annoying.  This might be because of the generally held opinion among non-poetry specialists that a poem is about the person writing it or is a reflection of her experiences and thoughts.

But I have yet to see it used as a diagnostic tool in poetry.  So let me suggest a way we might start doing that. 

Given Pennebaker’s data, let’s use the word count of personal pronouns in a poem, or series of poems to indicate the degree to which a poet’s works can be described as traumatized.  I’m going to take two examples and see if this analysis holds true, or, at least, enforces the common conception of a poet’s work.

I used the poems available online that Sylvia Plath wrote in 1962 and the beginning of 1963 as a test case for traumatized poems, and all the readily available online poems of Richard Wilbur as an example of poems generally accepted as untraumatized.

Next, I did a manual word count of personal pronouns (I, me, mine, myself) in each batch of poems, and an automated word count of the total words in each batch.

Out of a total of 4,355 words, Wilbur's poems use the personal pronoun 47 times or about 1.08%.  In contrast, out of 14,437 words, the personal pronoun shows up in Plath’s poems 531 times or about 3.68% of the total number of words. This is almost 4 times more often than in Wilbur’s poems. 

This appears to justify the commonly held opinion that Plath’s poems are poems of trauma (or that the poems themselves are traumatized), and Wilbur’s are not.

I now think we can use the results to help current poets establish a trauma index for their own  poems.

Note that this is not meant to reflect the value or worth of any single poem, or, colloquially, whether any one poem rocks, or, on the contrary, sucks.  The following trauma scale merely measures the relative traumatization that the poem has undergone, or, perhaps, reflects. Also, this scale should not be used on poems written by adolescents or poems by relatively inexperienced writers, since in the first instance, trauma can be assumed as an existential condition, and, in the second, control over the writing is insufficient to reflect an accurate trauma-pattern.

The Poem Trauma Scale

Simply put, the parameters of the scale are these:

Any poem whose use of the personal pronoun is 1.08% of the total word count, or less, can be definitely placed in the category “untraumatized.” Any poem whose use of the personal pronoun is 3.68% of the total word count, or more, can be definitively called traumatized. 

Using the average of the two percentages, any poem with a personal pronoun count of less than 2.38% can be judged to be relatively untraumatized, and poems with a PPC of more than 2.38% can be placed in an increasing traumatized zone.

Using a large sample of my own poems, I found my PPC is 1.53%, relatively untraumatized, but more traumatized than Richard Wilbur.

***

On a completely different note, Mary Karr's Poet's Choice column this past Sunday featured Bill Knott.  I think Mary might be starting to hit her stride.

ADDENDUM: after reading this, this and this, let me hasten to include a link to Bill Knott's great blog (which I have praised heretofore) and his lulu page where you can download his poems for free. It's the equivalent of Goya giving away his prints on a streetcorner. They're that good.

And--I missed this before--the Emerging Writer's Network recently had an interview with "upstart publishers," including Vrzhu Press fave Rose Metal Press.  Both Vrzhu and Rose Metal have a book coming out immanently by the brilliant Carol Guess.

And, why not, while we're at it, here's an interview with Pattiann Rogers.

And, finally, here's an excerpt from Sarah Kane's play, Crave:

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want want you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's a beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

***

Match the quote with the name:

1. We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

2. When in doubt, take a nap.

3. The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

4. In poetry we're trying to make birds, not birdhouses.

5. And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?

6. Prosody is to poets what laying a fire is to married couples, a matter on which nobody is right but oneself.

a. W. H. Auden
b. Syd Barrett
c, Andre Breton
d. Paul Newman
e. Dean Young
f. Dean Young

Answers in our next full post!

 

A Classic Vrzhu Post (Vrzhu Reprint Series #1)

A Note on Poetic Thought Disorder

Poetic Thought Disorder (or PTD) has traditionally been applied to a variety of ill-defined speech acts, poems, and poetic forms which are assumed — and it is an assumption — to be secondary to a more fundamental disturbance of versifying or writing poems. These practices were first noted by Hecker in 1871 but they were studied and described in much more detail by Bleuler who regarded them as a direct consequence of ‘metaphors and poetic associationalism’ which he thought was fundamental to poetry. Thus the long-lived assumption that Poetic Thought Disorder was of cardinal importance, aetiologically and diagnostically, being exhibited by all poets and by no one else. However, no one has ever succeeded in producing a satisfactory definition of the term poetry, or in identifying any fundamental psychological or linguistic term capable of accounting for the various observable qualities of a poem. Worse still, few of the qualities have proved to be specific to a poem, and none to be manifested by more than a proportion of poems in what in other respects are typical examples of the genre. Indeed, large studies of the symptomatology of poems show them to be rare in comparison to delusions (“this is a great poem”) and hallucinations (other poets envy me”).

Preliminary Classification of Poetic Thought Disorder (PTD)

The following definitions are taken from authoritative texts, and are widely accepted.

Derailment

Derailment occurs when a train jumps off the track. Andreasen (1979) defines derailment as “A poem in which the ideas slip off the track onto another one which is clearly but obliquely related, or onto one which is completely unrelated”.

Each is truly a unique piece,
you said, or, perhaps, each
is a truly unique piece.
I sniff the difference.
It’s like dust in an old house,
or the water thereof.
Then you come to an exciting part.
The bandit affianced
to the blind man’s daughter. The mangel-wurzels
that come out of every door, salute the traveller
and are gone. Or the more melting pace of strolling players,
each with a collapsed sweetie on his arm, each
tidy as one’s idea of everything under the sun is tidy.
And the wolverines
return, with their coach, and night,
the black bat night, is blacker than any bat

-John Ashbery, The Burden of the Park

Derailment is one of a number of types of PTD. However, it is a basic type and at least some of the other types of PTD appear to be elaborations of derailment.

Tangentiality

This term can be applied when a question is asked in a poem and the poet gives an answer which has “slipped off the track” and is either obliquely or even unrelated to the question.

An example of tangentiality:

It doesn't seem as though we could die up here, does it?
The Acropolis is so old that death on it seems superfluous.
So we can afford to take some chances—
Leap off the wall! Bash statues with our heads!

-Kenneth Koch, On the Acropolis

At first glance it might appear the writer is making a mountain out of a mole hill, as this is the sort of response we all might make, sliding off the question and communicating other important information. However, this answer came early in the poem. In this setting, such a response suggests, but does not prove, PTD. As mentioned, isolated examples of derailment occur in the writing of normal individuals as well as poets.

Flight of ideas (includes clanging (rhyming, alliteration, etc.))

The central feature of the flight of ideas in a poem is rapid, continuous verbalisations which are associated with constant shifting from one idea to another.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

-John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Wing et al (1974) describe three types of flight of ideas: 1) where there is rhyming or clanging, eg, “pards, retards” above, 2) where there is an association by meaning, including opposites, eg, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, and 3) where there is distraction, e.g., “O for a beaker full of the warm South,/Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,/ With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,/And purple-stained mouth.”

Alliteration:

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Under the heading of clanging, Andreasen (1979) has drawn attention to punning, as well as alliteration. Not surprisingly, with high mood elevation the punning of flight of ideas can be frequent, amusing and apparently clever.

Punning:

The wasp and all his numerous family
I look upon as a major calamity.
He throws open his nest with prodigality,
But I distrust his waspitality.

-Ogden Nash, The Wasp

Andreasen (1979) states “flight of ideas is a derailment that occurs rapidly in the context of pressured speech”. (“Objectivity and again objectivity, and no expression, no hind-side-beforenesss, no Tennysonianness of speech - nothing, nothing, that you couldn't in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.” –Ezra Pound, known to have suffered from PTD (emphasis added)).

Perseveration and Echolalia

Perseveration is the repetitive expression of a particular word, phrase, or concept during the course of speech.

have they crushed an aluminum can.
have they crushed an aluminum can.
have they crushed an aluminum can.
have they crushed an aluminum can.

have they bent an aluminum can.
have they bent an aluminum can.
have they bent an aluminum can.
have they bent an aluminum can.

-Robert Grenier, Sentences.

Echolalia is the repeating of words or phrases in the poem:

Then tell me, what is that supreme delight? Echo: Light
-George Herbert (1593-1633), Heaven

This by no means exhausts the typical manifestations of PTD in a poem. We have yet to cover Poverty of thought, Poverty of content, Illogicality, Incoherence , Blocking (Thought blockage), and Neologism. There is much of interest here (e.g., a remarkable feature of neologisms is that the poet usually seems unaware that they lack meaning to the listener), however, these topics will be covered in a later installment, where we hope also to elucidate neopoesis, exceptionalism, revisionology, Williamloganism and Billycollinsism.