Comprepoetica Miscellany

(poetics terms)
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isotope: an anagrammatical form, each line of which uses only the sixteen letters of a 4x4 word square.
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(suggested name of new school) concrete poetry circa 1952-70's

(Reasons for Composing Poetry) 10. He/she has to, has no choice, is compelled. Any pencil she passes leaps into her hand, says "I have something to say. Help Me!"

(Reasons for Composing Poetry)
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In the absence--of real motives--lack of those--might as well--do the trick for you--------
In the absence--of a true Master--give a Monkey the whip--...might as well--do the trick for you---------
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(favorite contemporary American poets) Why is this site so tardy?
Because only a few votes come in a month, and the over-all picture doesn't change much. The Sitemaster is Very Busy, too.

(favorite contemporary American poets)
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Does the sitemaster know
that it ain't cool to leave
his correspondents stupidly waiting?
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See above.

(poetics terms) Rhyme scheme

(poetics terms) rhymed cuplets iambic pentameter

(Reasons for Composing Poetry) the desire to express something which simply cannot be conveyed within the boundries of conventional language.

I'm discouraged again, incidentally. Visits to Comprepoetica are back down to three or four a day--the majority just people who have an essay and/or biography here and want to check it. Oh, well, I just have to accept that it's a storage shed, nothing more.

31 July 1999: I put this site on vacation a couple of months ago--I mean, I kept it open, but I was away from it. I put an announcement to that effect on the home page. I had decided to devot mys summer to a book I'm writing in which I attempt to explain the cerebral dysfunctionality of the people who believe that Shakespeare did not write the works ascribed to him. It's been coming along very slowly, but it's been coming along. Today I decided I ought to catch up a little here, for the first time this summer. So I parked four new bios into the biography section. I didn't format them, though. Comprepoetica now boasts 65 biographies. Meanwhile, four "new" terms arrived to be considered for inclusion in the Comprepoetica dictionary: "meter," "poetics," "sonnet" and "anapaestic meter." Nice to get suggestions but what I'm really looking for are terms that wouldn't likely be in a poetics dictionary--like my own "infra-verbal poetry." On the other hand, it's possible I'll forget obvious terms, like "poetics."

I also got a nice poem from Janet Buck in answer to the question, "Why Write Poetry?" There's a link to it from her i>Comprepoetica biography. Someone else answered that question, "Why not?" Frankly, I'm looking for more precise answers. That is, I want formal psychological explanations of why people write poetry, not poetic or anti-intellectual ones--here, at any rate. Still, I'm grateful for any feedback. And Janet I. Buck's poem is certainly as worthwhile, in its different way, as the kind of answers I want.

I also heard from "dp" that he liked my mathemaku, but that he thought "the commentary should be a more general explanation of the mathemaku form . . . (and that I ought to) "leave the specifics for readers and future critics to find." Well, I see no reason not to allow a poet to comment as fully as anyone else on his own poems. On the other hand, if a reader doesn't want his analysis of it, he certainly shouldn't force his anaysis on that reader. That's why I keep my thoughts on my poem on a separate page from the poem. If I ever have my mathemaku published as a collection, I hope to follow dp's advice to the extent of putting just a general explanation of the mathemaku form in the front of the book. But I'll have specific explanations of each individual mathemaku elsewhere in the book. Frankly, I love author's explanations of their own poems-- to compare my own (usually so much better!) explanations of the same poems, or to learn from.

(Note: I later realized that "dp" may be "Dark Poet," someone who sent me a bio of himself that I put into the Comprepoetica biography section months ago but only today remembered to make accessible by putting Dark Poet's name on the biographical section home page--with two other new names I'd forgotten to list there. All of the three's biographical entries are still in rough draft form, as are the other three newest ones. The interesting thing about "Dark Poet," incidentally, is that his place of residence is the town I substitute teach in, so I probably know him, or her.)

Here's an excerpt e.mail I got yesterday, which I'm quoting because it's nice, and it's about Comprepoetica--and gives URLs to another site doing a lot of the same stuff I'm doing here except more broadly and professionally. It's well worth a visit--make that, many visits!

Hi Bob,

I'm working with Bob Holman as a guide to poets & poetry on the Net at About.com Poetry. As he must have told you, we featured your "Authoritative List of Schools of American Poetics" in September 1997 (it's still archived at http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa092397.htm).

I'm writing because I thought you'd like to know that we featured links to the Comprepoetica Biographical Dictionary, Comprepoetica's survey form & your Mathemaku 6-12 on our front page "In the Spotlight" section this past week (http://poetry.about.com from last Tuesday through tonight).

I have also added a permanent link to Comprepoetica in our library of Poetry Resources & References (http://poetry.about.com/msubref.htm) & several relevant links under your name in our library of 20th Century Poets (http://poetry.about.com/msub20c1.htm).

(snip)

See you 'round the Net!
................................
Margery Snyder

19 November 2000: I decided I'd better put another note on my home page to apologize to people for having gone so long without updating anything, and to let them know I'll probably be too busy to do anything with the site until next summer at the earliest. But when I tried to save the new text, I lost my whole home page. I couldn't find a back-up. Fortunately, it's no big loss. Hardly anyone is visiting the site, and I learned from the new statistics provided--new since I last visited many months ago, at any rate--most people who come to Comprepoetica come because they used "love" as a key word in a search and were captured by, apparently, the heart that was part of the mathematical poem I had on the home page. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that serious poetry is about as interesting to most people as cucumber juggling, and that superior innovative serious poetry is about as interesting to most poets as cucumber regurgitation.

20 January 2001: for the past three weeks I've been getting columns of mine online, one per day. I'm hoping slowly to become reasonably active at Comprepoetica again. I've put some bios into their files, too, and hope to get caught up with them soon, too. Meanwhile, I've decided to junk the poetry voting thing. It never caught on. I'll count the votes and list them somewhere on the site eventually.

Note: when Yahoo took over GeoCities, they junked my counters. I finally added new ones a few days ago, but got a mess of Java error messages, and couldn't set any of the counters to zero. So to get a count of visits to the Comprepoetica home page since 16 January, you have to subtract 654.

2 February 2001: Today being my 60th birthday, I decided to see if I could set my counter to zero, and did so. It was reading something like 771 when I did so. That would mean 117 visits during the past 17 days or about 7 a day, a little over what I seemed to have been getting but certainly not much. Oh, well. Meantime, I've continued putting my Small Press Review columns online and have reached the year 2000. In less than a week, I'll have that section completely up-to-date.

1 March 2001: the Comprepoetica counter now says 168, which means I got an average of six visits a day during February. During the month, I put up six or seven new bios (most of them needing further work), but removed one after its subject, "the Vagabond Poet," Tony Selden, emailed me that he had not given me permission to put it up. (Later he e.mailed me that he had no idea how it got tome but that he was concerned that his street address and e.mail address were revealed. He had nothing against my site.) I continue to feel better about the site than I was when I was AWOL from it, and still expect to do Good Things with it when I'm not so busy with other things, mainly my substitute teaching job.

10 March 2001: This afternoon, I added an introductory note to the Comprepoetica home page. I hope it will encourage those who visit and aren't interested in what's so far here to send me bios and other stuff, anyway. The home page is certainly not classy, but it should download quickly.

25 January 2002: Interesting--it's been almost a year since I entered anything in this journal. I just haven't had a chance to do much of anything with this site. It continues to get around three visits a day, which--frankly--is not enough to make me want to spend time keeping it up-to-date, much less improving it. I have at least kept my columns from Small Press Review up-to-date, though. I do expect I'll eventually do more with it, for I expect to either entirely retire from my substitute teaching job, or cut down on the number of days I sub sometime in 2003. It's a worthwhile site; certainly there is nothing else comparable to it on the web. My impression is that there simply is close to NO intelligent interest in poetry in the USA.

8 October 2002: Back to the site for the first time in quite a while. I put a year's worth of Small Press Review columns on-line. Whee.

7 January 2003: I am still not keeping Comprepoetica up. A week or so ago, I successfully applied for social security payments, so I should soon be able to cut down on my substitute teaching hours. That, I hope, will allow me to better take care of my Comprepoetica responsibilities. Meanwhile, I note that halfwits are still sending me long-known poetics terms for the dictionary--without definitions.