29 November 2006: This entry won't be from scratch, after all. It's about the following poem, "Found My Sock": Actually, what I wrote about it was from scratch three days ago. It was one of the first poems I treated when I finally started writing up my impression of the visiotextual art in the avant garde section of the Ohio State library that John M. Bennett presides over. It's to become an introduction to a catalogue covering that collection to come out sometime next year. Why not use some of what I'm writing here, I thought. Yeah, lazy oaf that I am, but also in hopes of snaring some worthwhile feedback as well as providing a little advance publicity. In any event, here's the first draft of my exploration of Bennett's poem: "Found My Sock." In some ways this is a cartoon. A lineated text forwarded as a poem, so a poem. But equally, or more, visual. "I found my sock" is its entire text. But even by itself, the text is a visual poem, for its sub-demotic scrawl tells us loudly how much its speaker struggled to find his sock--in the process (underconsciously) finding his cock (repeated by the upward-pointing screws above the text). And what a struggle it was-- inside, it would appear, a furnace. Surrounded by teeth, no, by fangs. A joke, of course: some lout with a third of a brain, if that, has gotten his quotidian day right (and exultantly regained his manhood). Or, one of us, reduced by the agony of a missing sock (and I say that seriously remembering how trivial things can genuinely upset one, make one think God or the equivalent is not in his heaven), has become, through his own efforts, whole again. Yow! John is sending me a full-color copy of this which I'll post when I get it. As I looked the poem over while posting it, I thought of a little more I wanted to say about it. The frame is like a stage that aesthetically distances the engagent from the poet, putting him more readily and energizedly into the aesthetic parts of his brain. I think it may focus him more strongly on the poem's text, in the process. This thought really has to do with Bennett's use of an overt frame in many of his poems, something I want to discuss in depth in this essay--the above is a poor first try. I say better things somewhere else about his frames. Have to go find them. While talking to myself, let me say that I have vowed to do at least one critique of works in the show daily until I'm ready to work what I have into a polished intro. I've now done this for three days--but not today, so far.

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