Warning, this is going to be about one of my poems, so it will not be one of my dopily poor imitations of Al Ackernan. My poetry is way too important a subject for that. So give it your full attention.

The poem that is this essay's subject came to me while I was working up a review of the latest issue of:

xtant3. Autumn, 2003.
Edited by Jim Leftwich.
208 pp.; Xtant, 1512 Mountainside Ct., 
Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $20 ppd.

One of them, by JMB and someone whose signature I can't read, features an ink blot that I was extremely taken with. The blot, a large one, and many smaller ones, blitter through a lightly stippled tom text that begins with the word, "Woolen," thus suggesting moths. The remains of what seems a Bennett text is visible here and there. "Broke" occurs twice, and I found "stroke" near the bottom of the text. A blurred image of an angonized, open- mouthed head floats near the top of the page, with a smaller duplicate of it a little below and to the right ofit. A stroke victim?

My high enjoyment of the blot and what was stuck to it merged with my guilt about not having done a new mathemaku in a long while. (I found, when, toward the end of January, I was summing up the year which would end on my birthday, 2 February, that 1 had composed just four poems since my previous birthday--and that was more than I'd thought I'd done!) 1 decided to re-use the blot-graphic in a poem of my own. The latter followed almost at once, which is rare with me. Here is the final version, with a detail from it under it. Click on the top image to see it enlarged.

By now, I had decided to use my chunk of stolen poem as my dividend, mainly because of its visual appearance. So, multiplied by "emerald," it ought to yield something approximating the "quantity," January. "Wary glitter" quickly occurred to me. The rhyme of "wary" with "ary" was a factor, I'm sure. (Amusingly, Marcus Bales, my Internet nemesis, had recently insulted me in some way about not writing verse so I think it was in part a joke: i.e., I can rhyme, see?) Mostly, I simply liked the weird combination ofthe words. I also for some reason thought of the glitter of January as being wary. That would suggest its being secretive, making its glitter is mostly hidden. Also, January would be considering us its enemy, so hostile itself. An Other. Like Marcus Bales. Scratch that. I don't want to make the lout famous. He believes, among other things, that only those who write in meter are "real poets."

I thought I'd distort the letters of "wary" and "glitter" at first, but later fractured them to suggest fragmentation--and make the text a little difficult to read, the way January often is.

The remainder, "insistence," came out of nowhere, too. It arrived soon after "wary glitter." I kept it because it seemed to make sense while, again, seeming out-of-place. No doubt it refers to "the power and forcefulness of January," as Geof Huth guessed when discussing the final result with me. But I have spring in almost all my poetry, so it can relate, too, to the insistence of spring to come out that January contains. So: a kind of smear of related meanings, which is what I hope a poem of mine to have rather than some single "correct" meaning. (On the other hand, I don't want all meanings to work equally well.)

At some point, I'm now not sure when (perhaps as early as when I first saw the blot), I decided to delete the words from the stolen material--as being possibly inappropriate for my poem, but more because I wanted to replace them with something mathematical, mathematics being very "January" for me. It would provide something ighly abstract and organized for the concrete mess of the blot-complex to interact against, as well. Plus the metaphor, winter as tom-out hole in High Order. Other satisfYing associations were possible, especially with the idea of minutenesses having a large cumulative' effect as in the differential calculus which tbe blotched-over equations I used are from. Those particular equations ere my only second thought for the poem (except for the tinkering I did with "wary" and "glitter"). They replaced the random page from a calculus book that I first tried.

Probably because of my sometimes excessive need to pump as much significance as I can into my poems, I added the little whitish line to the blot that can just be made out in the reproduction of the poem provided. It is, "where wine flag catc," a broken-offline from "Canto XLIX" of Pound's Can/os that I wrote admiringly about in my Of Manywhere- at-Once. The complete line is, "Where wine flag catches the sunset." The canto is based on a Chinese text about a cold autumn, a river and loneliness. I assume wine flag is a riverplant, but haven't been able to find .out anything about it.

This is a minor detail, perhaps, and a nuisance because it makes the piece only hangable, since the line will be illegible in any book of reasonable size, and even on a compuĞ:r screen unless the poem is blown-up too large to be entirely looked at without scrolling. But I wanted the words very small--a hard-to-see strand of meaning, a just-there speck of beauty, etc. I like the possibility of their giving my poem a possible secondary meaning as a representation of the Cantos, too--and/or depicting something out of nature emerging out-of/over total conceptuality (the math table) that has been marred by chaos--kind of a compromise between the orderliness of the math and the disorder of the graphic.

Note: when I picked the line for my poem, I thought it was about winter. It's too late to change, so now I've decided autumn is appropriate--autumn deteriorating into winter times emerald equals wary glitter. It makes perfect sense to me.

Technical note: I used Paint Shop to add the Pound line to the blot, and to break up and arrange, the pieces of "wary" and "glitter," but not for the creation of the quotient, which I found easier to do on my Xerox.

Final note: the very first blurb for my poem came from G. Huth: "Wonderful." No further comments will be allowed.