Bob Grumman sighting or citing of

[jfor...@aol.com]

I noticed this paragraph in the first part of (thus far) two part essay... https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2023/01/unreadability-part-i

One famous and notably small example of the unreadable in the concretist tradition is Aram Saroyan’s four-legged letter, pictured above. Often called a four-legged m, the poem might indeed be that, or it may be a fused m and n, or three ns; the more you look at it, though, the more it seems to distort away from any kind of letter. In “MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing,” Bob Grumman described the poem as “the center of an alphabet just starting to form,” but it may be just as right to call it an alphabet deforming away from its signifying functions, a cancer of the alphabet. On its four legs, this poem looks oddly animal, oddly alive. This is Saroyan’s minimalism and interest in the aesthetics of typewriting taken both to their logical extreme and in a new direction. Further particularizing the isolated single words of his works Cloth: An Electric Novel (1971) and Coffee Coffee (1967), but adding the distortion of unreadability, Saroyan’s letter poem revels in a very simple shock—that the base unit of language’s written form has gone rogue. That the poem resembles the familiar letters of the alphabet is a part of its pleasure; looking at it we want to see what it would take to make it readable, to rid ourselves of the burden of its bad form. Indeed, the unreadable in poetry often teases us with an asymptotic relationship to the readable, approaching but never reaching legibility (more on this in part two of this essay). It’s a sign that unreadability and its opposites are contained  within each other. 

[Alexander Dickow]

Very nice! There's been a lot of memories of our lost friends lately; this is nice to see. Mark, Hal, Bob, wish you were all still with us.

Amitiés,

Alex

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 9:40 AM 'jfor...@aol.com' via NowPoetry <nowp...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I noticed this paragraph in the first part of (thus far) two part essay... https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2023/01/unreadability-part-i

One famous and notably small example of the unreadable in the concretist tradition is Aram Saroyan’s four-legged letter, pictured above. Often called a four-legged m, the poem might indeed be that, or it may be a fused m and n, or three ns; the more you look at it, though, the more it seems to distort away from any kind of letter. In “MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing,” Bob Grumman described the poem as “the center of an alphabet just starting to form,” but it may be just as right to call it an alphabet deforming away from its signifying functions, a cancer of the alphabet. On its four legs, this poem looks oddly animal, oddly alive. This is Saroyan’s minimalism and interest in the aesthetics of typewriting taken both to their logical extreme and in a new direction. Further particularizing the isolated single words of his works Cloth: An Electric Novel (1971) and Coffee Coffee (1967), but adding the distortion of unreadability, Saroyan’s letter poem revels in a very simple shock—that the base unit of language’s written form has gone rogue. That the poem resembles the familiar letters of the alphabet is a part of its pleasure; looking at it we want to see what it would take to make it readable, to rid ourselves of the burden of its bad form. Indeed, the unreadable in poetry often teases us with an asymptotic relationship to the readable, approaching but never reaching legibility (more on this in part two of this essay). It’s a sign that unreadability and its opposites are contained  within each other. 

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[Margaret Watson]

OH thank you for this…I too have missed posts.

Grateful still on the list.

[Skip Fox]

Missing Anne Ballardini as well.

Glad to see something from the list.

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 8:46 AM Margaret Watson <faraw...@gmail.com> wrote:

OH thank you for this…I too have missed posts.

Grateful still on the list.

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[Alexander Dickow]

Yes, Annie! Goodness, so many we have lost in the last few years…

On Thursday, February 16, 2023, Skip Fox <fox....@gmail.com> wrote:

Missing Anne Ballardini as well.

Glad to see something from the list.

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 8:46 AM Margaret Watson <faraw...@gmail.com> wrote:

OH thank you for this…I too have missed posts.

Grateful still on the list.

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