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tags:artliteratureminimalismpoetry
NOTE
I was discovering examples of minimal writing, particularly poetry. I found myself attracted to the strangeness of it, and how it was challenging. I wanted to understand more, so I found this book.
What kicked the search off though was this botched google generated query (which contained some unintended poetry)
How long is to long for a poem?
rel:Found Poetry It is correctly too long for a poem, but to long as in there’s a longing for it. Long distance…Some examples:
M SS NG Thiiief!
How is it translated? It’s not a standard character. I’m missing the rules here. Wouldn’t there be poeticism to halving it? and thus shortening it. How can this be bested? Divisible character, just like a serif or something and making a poetic statement out of that. Kolmogorov complexity of a poem, language compression.
I was watching this film from this year “Amanda” (2023) it was fairly good. There’s this segment I wanted to talk about where Amanda is in the car with some guy. There’s a hint of romantic interplay at the scene. He says roughly as I can remember, “I always tell this story here and women always like it. I was on this road and I saw a deer.” And Amanda goes “that’s not a story, a story has a sequence” etc. The story after years becomes the Andalusian Dog’s split open eye scene, just the serif remains.
Introduction
For me, part of the appeal of studying minimal writing is that it is the antithesis of the kind of work I wrote about in my book, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing
I made the case that such “unreadable” or repetitious works responded to the information abundance of modern societies. Perhaps counterintuitively, the rise of minimalism in the 1960 s can also be understood in relation to new developments in media. Many minimal works may have been austere in form or spare in content, but they were often gigantic in scale, and fantastically complex in their implications.
Can there be a one-word poem in isolation? And if so, how is it seen, heard or remembered?
Idea
Have a one word poem that is embedded in all instances of text.
Now, I understand:
John Ashbery - “The New Spirit” I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave it all out would be another, truer, way clean-washed sea The flowers were. These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place.
Generally speaking, Ashbery, opted for a maximal style in which “put it all down.”
“There is a tension set up between my titles and the pictures. The titles are not the pictures nor vice versa, but they work on each other. The titles add a new dimension, they are like new or added colors, or better yet, they may be compared to varnish through which the picture may be seen and amplified.”
Mallarme: “my work has been created by elimination” (how much concision can literature take?)
Robert Grenier:
Is it a long poem if you look at it long enough?
If minimal poems truly foreclose all possibility of meaning and the sequentiality of syntax, are they a kind of anti- poetry aimed only at teasing readers?
eyeye - Aram Saroyan
The students immediately noted that the poem was a palindrome, and that the poem was a homophone for “I, I” as well as “aye- aye.” They also pointed out that the poem was effectively stereoscopic or binocular: we look at the poem with two eyes, and the poem looks back at us as with two eyes. I asked the students if they could think of any possible translations of the poem. A Spanish- speaking student offered “ojojo” as a possible translation, and we noted that, like the original, “ojojo” was a palindrome of five letters total, but composed of only two letters.
rm - (extra shoulder)
Written in the summer of 1965 , the strange new letterform was created with an X- ACTO knife at a print shop where Saroyan worked. 46 The poem was subsequently dubbed the world’s shortest by the Guinness Book of World Records. One might approach this poem/letterform simply as a visual pun and not as a word— it contains no vowels, nor does it seem to refer to anything or anyone in particular. But one can also approach the poem as suggesting either “mm” or “I’m” or possibly even “mn.”
NOTE
Sub letter text, like a subpixel dither. It defies SEO and easy rendering, post typewriter days.
The poem could also refer to the contraction for “millimeter.” Or it might suggest a unit of length even shorter or longer than a millimeter. Trapped Projectstrapped-projects A poem such as this creates meaning out of the most molecular components of language. We might speculate but it remains “mum” about its denotative meaning, if it has ones. These poems can be contemplative, annoying, gimmicky, and revelatory.
(creative writing programs have little interest) because it does not offer “kind of craft and depth required of academic poetry”
Dick Higgins:
“Literature is a poor man’s art, since not only is there no money in working so directly with ideas, but even a poor man can afford to do it.
Maurice Merleau- Ponty, “True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world.” Substituting two words (or five letters) in that formulation, I propose that “True philology consists in relearning to look at the word.”
Varieties of the Minimal
Every word was once a poem - Ralph Waldo Emersonquote
By experimenting with the smallest elements of meaning, minimalist writers mimicked and explored some of the fundamental scientific and technological discoveries of modernity: particle physics, cell biology, and genetic encoding— or even technological miniaturization in a broad sense
A word outside of the mind is a set of ‘dead letters.
Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma:
Although typically categorized as a work of structuralist film, Zorns Lemma could also be classified as serial found poetry. The film’s forty- five- minute main section is composed of 2,700 single words found within the urban environs of Manhattan, mainly from street signs or commercial advertising. Each word/frame is a one- second unit, organized alphabetically. The title, borrowed from set theory, had been suggested to Frampton by Carl Andre, who also worked extensively with linguistic seriality in his 1960 s poetry. 62 The effect of this rapid- fire circulation of images is dizzying and sublime— making us aware that in any urban environment we are continually confronted with the language of branding and of basic communication. Zorns Lemma might also point to the long history of silent narrative film, in which film intertitles had to be minimal in order to achieve their purpose
code poem example: Alison Knowles The House of Dust - listing random qualities of a house in Fortran code
A HOUSE OF DISCARDED CLOTHING UNDER WATER LIGHTED BY CANDLES INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE
Close Viewing / Distant Reading / Readography
Franco Moretti - “distant reading” - aspired to find genre patterns by studying and comparing large numbers of literary texts.
Eric Kandel on reductionism:
Reductionism, taken from the Latin word reducere, “to lead back,” does not necessarily imply analysis on a more limited scale. Scientific reductionism often seeks to explain a complex phenomenon by examining one of its components on a more elementary, mechanistic level. Understanding discrete levels of meaning then paves the way for exploration of broader questions— how these levels are organized and integrated to orchestrate a higher function. Thus scientific reductionism can be applied to the perception of a single line, a complex scene, or a work of art that evokes powerful feelings. It might be able to explain how a few expert brushstrokes can create a portrait of an individual that is far more compelling than a person in the flesh, or why a particular combination of colors can evoke a sense of serenity, anxiety, or exaltation.
Close textual examination of works that have been overlooked because of their size or assumed insignificance
In research libraries and collections, we may capture the portrait of history in so-called insignificant visual and verbal textualities and textiles. In material details. In twill fabrics, bead- work pieces, pricked patterns, four- ringed knots, tiny spangles, sharp- toothed stencil wheels; in quotations, thought- fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross- outs
disattend track = Erving Goffman’s term for phenomena which are excluded from the primary frame through which a phenomena or work is perceive.
Bök
All ‘concepts’ for poetry may, in fact, depend upon a premise about the minimal element of composition for a text— its unit, or its ‘atom,’ from which a poem might build a poetics through recombinant permutation
Dickinson’s envelope poems, even the most fragmentary of her writings can be appreciated as poems.broken
The concept of the “atom” emerges in ancient Greek philosophy as the idea of the smallest hypothetical body. At the outset of the nineteenth century, modern atomic theory recasts the atom in chemical terms. In 1830 Emily Dickinson is born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is thirty- five years old when the Civil War ends, and Johann Josef Loschmidt first measures the size of a molecule of air. In the range of philosophic, scientific, and popular definitions for atom in the OED , we also find a dust mote, the smallest medieval measure of time, “the twinkling of an eye,” in this apt, obsolete meaning too: “At home.”
Absence of Clutter
Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just a minimalism or absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.
- Steve Jobs
monosyllabic rhyming poem:
I guess the house is a mess
Personal minimalism here becomes a panacea for every life challenge.
We have both too many and too few words to to represent things accurately as they are.
Twelve years ago, Nicolas Berggruen sold his apartment, which was filled with French antiques, on the 31st floor of the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. He said he no longer wanted to be weighed down by physical possessions. He did the same with his Art Deco house on a private island near Miami. From that point on he would be homeless. Now he keeps what little he owns in storage and travels light, carrying just his iPhone, a few pairs of jeans, a fancy suit or two, and some white monogrammed shirts he wears until they are threadbare. At 51 , the diminutive Berggruen is weathered, but still youthful, with unkempt brown hair and stubble. There’s something else he hung on to: his Gulfstream IV. It takes him to cities where he stays in five- star hotels.
A radium of the Word
F.T Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, called for “the destruction of syntax” in order to “fuse the object directly with the image it evokes, providing a glimpse of the image by means of a single, essential word.”
post-war minimalism is not equivalent to concision; minimal poetry, like minimal music often features serial repetition.
concision: has been described as “native to lyric” but poetic media influence its exercise. The terseness of epitaph is in part condition by the need to carve it in stone. Brief forms are suited to the spatial constraints of print culture in which poems must fit in magazines, on the subway walls, and in the pages of anthologies. (They are also suited, some would say, to the pedagogical requirements of academic settings) Some 21st century poetry exhibits the compactness of contemporary, character-restricted communications (text messaging, microblogging)
concision - reducing redundancy while preserving meaning.
Eugen Gomringer, silencio
silencio silencio silencio
silencio silencio silencio
silencio silencio
silencio silencio silencio
silencio silencio silencio
Thought
That middle silence, absence. But the meaning is the same for all of them, so the blank space there is closer to the actual word than the word itself.
Silence all around and within.
The One Word Poem
On crickets:
The column of “crickets” (like “not a cricket,” below) should be listened to in order to be appreciated fully. In the 1967 recording, the one word is repeated by Saroyan for eighty seconds, and it evokes that of which it speaks by onomatopoeia. According to the author, the poem “was written in the spring of 1965 in an apartment building on East 45th in New York City, proving that crickets are powerful creatures, capable of penetrating New York City itself.”
paralipsis - “i’m not suggesting you’re responsible, for this messy kitchen but no one else has been here all day”, an argument underplayed and indirect so as to soften the effect. A passing over with brief mention in order to emphasize rhetorically the suggestiveness of what is omitted.
Unintentional converge with Neologistic Error Words…
As Acconci well knew, many of the one- word poems were the result of felicitous typos or language appropriated from the ambient surroundings; and in fact, in many cases Saroyan’s method of appropriating text and sound was similar to Acconci’s, although Saroyan worked in smaller units
lightght
It was not until 1970 that the poem was to gain widespread noto- riety, when Congressman William Scherle decried the poem on the floor of Congress, noting that the National Endowment for the Arts had spent $107 per letter on the poem. In retrospect, the controversy over “lighght” was an opening salvo in the battle over NEA funding that continues to this day.
Saroyan:
“Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”
Gertrude Stein
“A rose is a rose is a rose” She said that was the first time the rose has been really red in English literature in the past two centuries.
lightght:
A number of commentators have noted that the poem evokes vibrating light waves. “Light” can be a noun, verb, or adjective in English. The extra “gh” is unpronounceable and intangible. Or perhaps one might elongate the word and stretch out the i sound. In practice, I’ve generally heard the poem read aloud as a list of letters, L- I- G- H- G- H- T , rather than as a single syllable— thus turning the poem into seven syllables.
The one- word poem inverts the graphomanic impulse— but it also plunges us into an abyss of linguistic vagueness, jolting us from a passivity in which we suppress the mysteriousness of language: where letters disappear into words and words disappear into sentences and sentences disappear into books and books consume their authors. Here, for the active reader, that process might be reversible.
The Transreal
Work of Norman Pritchard which was an attempt to transcend standard syntax, spelling and discursive meaning.
House of Dust (continued):
The computer is the most obvious incarnation of the Logos that The House of Dust strives to dismantle. Knowles designed her poem-score at a moment when scientific rationality was identified by forms of taxonomy and by the supremacy of mathematics in the field of knowledge, when logic imposed itself in the form of administration in the political and legal systems, and when computing started using algorithms to meddle in the control and configuration of language, as well as social and economic life. In this context, The House of Dust intervenes as a power of disruption. Even though the poem is laid out by an algorithm, language —that which it localizes, materializes and characterizes—is more than uncertain; even though its support (the perforated sheets of paper typical of the printers of that time) are emblematic of the administrative arsenal, they are read like the staves of musical scores, open to interpretation, and therefore unpredictable.
Really Reading in Robert Grenier
Sentences is radically “writerly”; its goal is to make the “reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text.”
Minimalists make art in units so small, and with so few clearly separable features, that they require us to examine ourselves and to fall back on our own experience rather than looking only ‘within’ one work.
Recursion
There is a potentially infinite one-word poem in English actually, so long as one is allowed hyphens: “police” can be both a noun or a verb. ‘Police-police’ are police who police the police. Police whose job it is to police the police-police are police-police-police, etc. Any number of recursions would be possible.