I'm a college student in a literature class in Indiana. I am in the middle of the book's section (Portable Literature, Kirszner and Mandell) on visual poetry, and was doing a little research on the meanings of the poems in the text book. I ran across your blog and was amused. I did not expect to find such a candid outlook on my text book from one of its contributors. Interesting that you were never paid for the inclusion of your work! Being new to visual poetry, and awful at math...I can't say that I understand your mathemaku entirely. I do get the concept of long division.

I was wondering if I used your Grummanisn illumagery to apply to the poem by Bernstein "this poem intentionally left blank", would the professor write in the margin -is this a word?- like she did with my use of the word ideation.

Peace,

Karen Brown

Congratulations for being (as far as I know) only the second college student to research that poem on the Internet, Karen! It's not generating the interest I hoped it would. I thought at least five students would have e.mailed me about it by now!

The poem is fairly simple. At least, I think it is. You just have to do the long division: the heart, which represents love, courage, emotion, childhood (to a degree because kids draw hearts a lot), and many other things, multiplied times poetry gives you a momentary widening (the happy moment when you catch on emotionally to a poem you like). This is not quite equal to what you're dividing into, existence at its highest level (because the word representing it is italicized), so you have a remainder--existence at its mundane level. Since a remainder in a long division example is always much less than the dividend--it this case, existence--the poem is thus mathematically claiming that existence is really trivial without poetry.

Hmmm, maybe not that simple. Anyway, thanks for giving me an excuse to once again try to explain the poem. I'm weird for a poet in that I enjoy explaining my poems more than I enjoy composing them.

As for "illumagery," do try it on your teacher! If you do, you'll be the first one ever to use it but me (except to quote it, usually to say it's dumb). And I'd be interested in the teacher's response. If you're questioned about the word's definition, say it's a one-word term to distinguish "visual art" from "art-in-general"--and allow the term, "textual illumagery." The latter is visual art making significant use of typography with no significant verbal meaning. Thanks for writing.

--Bob