Higher order poetry case #1: The semantics of distribution

Higher order poetry case #1:
The semantics of distribution

John Bjarne Grover

In this article I discuss the poetic function of the book "If you're going to København", the second last book in my 'Endmorgan Quartet'. It is a book about the distribution of words in poetic language. This is one of the (possibly 16) types of poetic function in the work.

There are two dimensions of distribution or 'ratio' phenomenon in this book which contains 207 poems:

1) The local distribution which is on 'book' level: If you take poem #100 it is ratio poem 100/207, and if you take poem # 100/207 x number of poems in a book of the same poetic type from literary history, you will find that my poem is a parallel to this poem on the same ratio point. This is a strong hypothesis which can be confirmed by empirical investigations. I discuss some examples. If the hypothesis turns out to be corroborated by further studies, it means that my poetry book is about this poetic phenomenon which, as far as I know, has not been described before. It is a variant of the phenomenon of poetic universals discussed in the article on 'crucial time forms'.

2) The global distribution which is on 'work' level: Each line in the full work is annotated with the date it was written, and the whole work was by and large written linearily from beginning to end. Take a certain word and study the intervals between its occurrences in the full work: That gives a series of time points (of writing) and the intervals between these time points define certain ratios, typically one prominent ratio, which can be used for selecting the poem on the same ratio point in the book "If you're going to København". The distribution of the words in my full work is of such a kind that the poem selected by this procedure tends to contain as many lines as there are occurrences of the word in the work and each line in this poem defines the semantics to the context of the corresponding word.

Which means that the semantics of each global occurrence is updated by the semantics of the local poem in this particular book in the work and vice versa. It means that the resulting poetry is not the one on the printed page but on the contrary is a virtual text floating on a sort of magnetic pillow - where the poetic functions are not defined in terms of discrete symbols such as the alphabet.

This is one of the 16 poetic functions in the work. If each poetic function has a corresponding architecture, it means that the 'magnetic pillow' is composed of a complex web of poetic functions. In the following article, I discuss another poetic function in another of the 16 books.

The philosophical basis for this revelational poetry tells that the poetic space is primary and the physicalist space of matter is secondary and is a projection from the poetic space by way of the poetic functions. This means that we can define a new physics and new exact sciences by studying the poetic logic in this projection - which again means that the barrier of information transfer which the speed of light entails does not apply to the information transfer which can be obtained by way of this poetic logic. This is the revolution of information technology which should have taken place on basis of Jewish philosophy from about 1830 or thereabout if British nazism had not stopped the whole thing and dumped it in the cruel holocaust. Time has now come to return to this point of departure and try and get out of the mythomaniac bogs of nazism and make this new non-symbolic information technology which can take us beyond the narrow belt of a few lightyears which surrounds earth within the current scientific paradigm.

The poetry for this technology is necessarily revelational. It means that humans are not automata but mysteries about which we have to believe the best and take faith in their fundamental goodness if we are to continue the conversation. We cannot define eternity bottom-up from the symbolic level such as Cantor seems to have proposed but we have to understand that the eternity contains things which we simply could not guess in advance. However, we can make some models of the poetic functions which map from eternity into our historically constrained cognitive system wherein reality certainly looks not exactly as is does in heaven.

I show the architecture of this second last book (on word semantics by distribution) in the wobbrk with the following examples.

The local distribution

In my "Endmorgan Quartet" there are some 15-16 books, distributed on 4 main parts. The last part contains 3 books, the mid one being called "If you're going to Köbenhavn" and is about 'ratio poetry'. (Which is the real poetry - and the nazi variant of 'radio poetry' is a tragic misunderstanding). It is a poetic discovery of mine that such 'ratio poetry' exists and it is a part of the achievement of this 'Endmorgan Quartet' of mine. The second last book among the 15-16 ones in the work is about this phenomenon (the other books are about other poetic phenomena). It contains 207 poems. The poem I am going to discuss here is poem #113 which is an exploration of the phonological, semantic and graphic aspects of poetic form. Here is the poem:

#113

So if you can forward this to the queen -
everything under the wrought, so in this case:
God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
Every one has his eget.

I will receive a letter with just that you.
Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
[Sub]linguistically port
where one finds out that it is Jeien which is

intelligentia
but it could also be a very observant [...]
in the BBC, local 5,
c/o Rufiel.

Uggen

The poem is really about the relation between alphabetic and non-alphabetic poetry. My work can be said to be non-alphabetic in the sense of being about a non-symbolic eternity in relation to the historic reality by way of the interplay of poetic functions which creates the work. If nazism is defined as the reaction of the alphabetic technology against the new poetic logic, this poem exemplifies what the conflict is about. The alphabetic technology is printed on a sheet of paper and does not float on a virtual 'magnetic pillow' and can therefore be said to be contained in time.

The poem is #113 out of 207, and a study of poetic works from literary history of comparable type shows that there is a tendency for encoding of phonological-semantic-graphic running from the beginning to the end of the poems in that ratio slot. I call this phenomenon of universals of form on a certain slot (such as this #113 out of 207) for the 'rainbow'. The article on the crucial form at the end of the rainbow was based on material which was easy to find. However, each part of the poetic 'rainbow' seems to have such reflexes in literary forms. I here study ratio 113/207. One normally has to consult the original language which makes it a little cumbersome to study all details. I present a few selected cases here: The 'ratio'-corresponding 12 lines from works of Mandelstam, Dante, Petrarca, Keats, Heaney and Yeats will do. There are other poetic works which can tell that this 'ratio mystery' is a real mystery indeed. The principle of parallelism in this particular case is that the first lines in these selected poems from literary history tend to be phonologically or phonetically similar (in the original language) while the last lines tend to be graphically similar (or similar in a 'graphic' sense of it), and the mid of the poem tends to be semantically similar. Hence it goes from sound to meaning to graphics ('print'-oriented, that could mean). These 12 lines at 113/207 through some works follow similar patterns which means that there are universals in poetic structure. It means that there is a poetic reality which we can call eternal and through which information can be sent. That is where the new information technology will be found.

Mandelstam

First the poem by Mandelstam, no.44 out of the 81 in Struve & Filipoff's edition of 'Stone' (in fact it seems that precisely this 44th one has been inserted by editors from his unedited poems of the same period, which is a little interesting here) - I refer also to the translation by Robert Tracy in the translation of the full 'Stone' on Harvill Press (the transcription of the original poem here is from that book):

So if you can forward this to the queen -
Ot lenkoi zhizhni my soshli s uma
[my soshli s uma ot lenkoi zhizhni]
from liberal life we went insane,

everything under the wrought, so in this case:
s utra vino, a vetsherom pakhmel'e
in the morning wine, in the evening hangover,

God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
kak yderzhat' naprasnoje vesel'e
how to hold back the futile merriness,

Every one has his eget.
rumjanets tvoi, o pjanaja tshuma?
your blushing red, the drunk plague?

I will receive a letter with just that you.
v pazhat'i ruk mutshitel'nij obrjad
At shaking hands, that painful ritual,

Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
na ulitsakh notshnye potselui
in the streets at night kissing,

[Sub]linguistically port
kogda retshnye tjazhëleiut strui
when the river heavily flows,

where one finds out that it is Jeien which is
i fonari kak fakely gorjat
and the lamps like torches glow,

intelligentia
my smerti zhdëm kak skazotshnovo volka
we death await like some fairy-tale wolf.

but it could also be a very observant [...]
no ja bojuz' shto ranshe bsjëkh ymrjët
But I fear that before anybody (else), there dies

in the BBC, local 5,
tot u kovo trevozhno-krasnyi rot
that guy there with the anxious-red mouth,

c/o Rufiel.
i na glaza spadaiushaja tshëlka.
and at/before his eyes falls his forelock.

Uggen

This tuft of hair falling along the forehead in front of the eyes is a recurring theme at the end of the poems of this kind. It has a graphic representation in terms of the c/o: Two eyes and a little hair hanging diagonally in front of one of them. 'L-uggen' is Norwegian for 'the forelock', precisely that sort of hair. Hungarian for 'curtain' is 'függöny'. The first line can be rewritten rather well phonologically into the first line of my poem. Then it turns gradually semantic: "in this case" = "in this hangover head" etc. The mid two lines tend to be the 'most semantic' ones, before it turns graphic towards the end. A male news presenter with a red mouth is perhaps sort of 'graphic', but not as graphic as the last line. See also Petrarca below.

Dante

Next the fragment which is exactly 113/207 through Dante's "Divina Commedia" (Purg.XXI,81-92), the speech of a shady spirit in Purgatory, telling of his career (apparently involved in poetry) - here translated literally as well as I can, but leaving some uncertainties (see e.g. Cary's translation) - the following text is roughly transcribed, skipping some accents etc, from the Rizzoli edition:

So if you can forward this to the queen -
qui se', nelle parole tue mi cappia
quin e telle farole tue mi cappia
tue mi cappia farole e telle quin
so if ia can forale e telle quin
...are you, in the words you find me in (?)

everything under the wrought, so in this case:
nel tempo che 'l buon Tito, con l'aiuto
in time of the good Titus, with the help[ing]

God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
del sommo rege, vendico le fora
of the high king, revenging the wounds

Every one has his eget.
ond'usci 'l sangue per Giuda venduto
where flushed the blood for the traded/trading Judas

I will receive a letter with just that you.
nel come che piu dura e piu onora
in which more harder/lasting and more honorable

Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
era io di la rispuose quello spirto
were I [of/in her], answered this spirit

[Sub]linguistically port
famoso assai, ma non con fede ancora
very famous, but without proper faith.

where one finds out that it is Jeien which is
Tanto fu dolce mio vocale spirto
That much was my vocal spirit dear/sweet

intelligentia
che, tolosano, a se mi trasse Roma
that, with my Tolosan dialect, I was drawn to Rome

but it could also be a very observant [...]
dove mertai le tempie ornar di mirto.
where times granted me the myrtle (wreath).

in the BBC, local 5,
Stazio la gente ancor di la mi noma:
Stazius the people named me honorably.

c/o Rufiel.
cantai di Tebe, e poi del grande Achille;
I sang of Thebes and then of great Achilles.

Uggen
(ma caddi in via con la seconda soma)
(but fell on the road with the second burden)

'The high king' must be assumed to be God or Jesus. 'Jeien' is pronounced 'yeien', hence a purely 'vocalic' spirit. "dove mertai le tempie ornar di mirto" lacks a 'mi'? Cp. [...]. 'Spirto' is used twice, as if the spirit talks of its own shade: It means partly the shade or the spirit of the tolosan poet, partly it means the (tolosan) spirit of his poetry. Thebes: There were two Thebes - one with 7 gates and one with 100. This seems to be captured in the graphics of c/o. Hence there is a phonetic/phonological similarity in the beginning and a graphic in the end, and the mid lines should be the 'semantics'. It is the poetic spirit of the poetic spirit. Hence '[sub]linguistically port' or 'linguistically sub-port' and the 're-election by re-count'. The themes of the two fragments are also clearly related.

Petrarca

Next the fragment which is exactly 113/207 through Petrarca's year of 365 poems, hence #200. The mapping is not immediately one-to-one throughout. There is some additional parallelism to be observed by moving a line down from the 'long recount' - 'the loop of love' which may have imposed on the poem a certain 'loop' - which here are added in italics. Transcription is rough, from Garzanti edition. The translation is as well as I could make it without a control translation, so there may be mistakes here:

So if you can forward this to the queen -
Non pur quell' una bella ignuda mano
(REWRITE: ula bella ignuda mano no pur queen etc)
Not only this single pretty naked hand

everything under the wrought, so in this case:
che con grave mio danno si riveste
which with a serious damage to me has gloved itself

God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
ma l'altra, e le duo braccia accorte e preste
but the other, and the two arms sly [wise] and quick

Every one has his eget.
son a stringere il cor timido e piano
are constricting the heart, timid and silent ['mellow' or something like that]

I will receive a letter with just that you.
Lacci Amor mille, e nesun tende invano
the Loop [?] of Love a thousand, and none of them in vain,

Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
fra quelle vaghe nove forme oneste
between these vague new forms honorable/honest
the Loop [?] of Love a thousand, and none of them in vain,

[Sub]linguistically port
ch' adornan si l'altro abito celeste
which embellish such the other habit celestial[ly]
between these vague new forms honorable/honest

where one finds out that it is Jeien which is
ch' agiunger no po stil, ne 'ngegno umano
adding not only style, and talents human
which embellish such the other habit celestial[ly]

intelligentia
li occhi sereni e le stellanti ciglia
the eyes serene and the 'starsparkling' eyebrows
adding not only style, and talents human

but it could also be a very observant [...]
la bella bocca angelica, di perle
the pretty mouth angelic, of pearls
the eyes serene and the 'starsparkling' eyebrows

in the BBC, local 5,
piena e di rose e di dolci parole
full is of rosy (colour?) and the sweet words
the pretty mouth angelic, of pearls

c/o Rufiel.
che fanno altrui tremar di meraviglia
which makes another tremble from amazement
full is of rose (colour?) and the sweet words

Uggen
e la fronte e le chiome ch'a vederle
and the forehead and hair (forelock) which sees / has seen it [?]
which makes another tremble from amazement

di state a mezzo dì vincono il sole.
in summer half way through, captured [?] by sun.

One can experiment with movement to the appropriate position. Would the letter come just in time for the midsummer night? Notice also the immensely interesting 'forelock' hair once again. The looping structure, with 'pushdown' from line 5-6, makes for an ambiguity at 'l-Uggen': Partly it will be about a decent comment on the hair, partly it could be about 'amazing tremble', which perhaps could be about the ambiguity 'l-Uggen' vs. 'f-Uggen'. Is there a graphic imitation in the last line? Could be rose = 'o' and mouth = 'c', half open. 'Full rose' = 'ros-pien' = 'ru-fiel', which is not graphic, though, but perhaps more 'gravic'. 'c/o' anyhow refers to 'altrui'.

Keats

Next the fragment which is exactly 113/207 through Keat's "Endymion" is in book III, 196-207/208 (from Wordsworth poetry library):

So if you can forward this to the queen -
And, ample as the largest winding-sheet,
an forward-this-to / so i fyu ck the queen

everything under the wrought, so in this case:
A cloak of blue wrapp'd up his aged bones,

God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
O'erwrought with symbols by the deepest groans

Every one has his eget.
Of ambitious magic: every ocean-form

I will receive a letter with just that you.
Was woven in with black distinctness; storm,

Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
and calm, and whispering, and hideous roar,

[Sub]linguistically port
quicksand, and whirlpool, and deserted shore,

where one finds out that it is Jeien which is
were emblem'd in the woof; with every shape

intelligentia
that skims, or dives, or sleeps, 'twixt cape and cape.

but it could also be a very observant [...]
The gulphing whale was like a dot in the spell,

in the BBC, local 5,
yet look upon it, and 'twould size and swell

c/o Rufiel.
to its huge self; and the minutest fish
= 'c/o ruler/ruyal', with drop of F down (cp. also the 'pisces' discussed below)

Uggen
would pass the very hardest gazer's wish

The last line, under 'Uggen', corresponds to the 'chëlka' of Mandelstam, 'luggen' in Norwegian, Petrarca's forehead hair. Even Dante has some falling in that line, under a burden, though.

Heaney

A most convincing example can be found in Seamus Heaney's 'The spirit level' (1996) which contains 39 poems. This means 113/207 x 39 = #22, which is the poem called "The Butter-Print". This poem seems to be a perfect example of this canonical form, with phonetic-semantic-graphic move, albeit backwards (the lines are quoted from last to first here):

So if you can forward this to the queen -
At the relic knife as I stared at the awn

everything under the wrought, so in this case:
where healed and martyred Agatha stares down

God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
I might have been inhaling airs from heaven

Every one has his eget.
my breathing came dawn-cold, so clear and sudden

I will receive a letter with just that you.
until, when I coughed and coughed and coughed it up

Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
I felt the edge slide and the point stick deep

[Sub]linguistically port
my throat was like standing crop probed by a scythe

where one finds out that it is Jeien which is
when I was small I swallowed an awn of rye

intelligentia
as if its breast were scored with slivered glass?

but it could also be a very observant [...]
why should soft butter bear that sharp device

in the BBC, local 5,
a cross-hatched head of rye, all jags and bristles?

c/o Rufiel. / (Uggen)
who carved on the butter-print's round open face

Yeats

One can compare also with Yeats' 14-liner "Presences", which likewise goes backwards, in his "The wild swans at Coole", which is just a little off the exact 113/207 ratio but otherwise quite interesting. (One can say that the phenomenon tells of a displacement in ratio: The mapping is so perfect that it has to be recognized as a normal 113/207 but it is in fact displaced, which could be the intended point). The two last lines (listed first here) collapse to one and the rest seems to meet the form well:

So if you can forward this to the queen -
that never looked upon a man with desire, / and on, it may be, a queen.

everything under the wrought, so in this case:
One in a harlot, and one in a child

God created the visible world. The rest is created by mankind.
till I could hear their hearts beating:

Every one has his eget.
my great wood lectern and the fire

I will receive a letter with just that you.
They stood in the door and stood between

Would a long recount lead to another one be re-elected?
returned and yet unrequited love.

[Sub]linguistically port
all I had rhymed of that monstrous thing

where one finds out that it is Jeien which is
climbed up my creaking stair. They had read

intelligentia
in rustle of lace or silken stuff,

but it could also be a very observant [...]
that women laughing, or timid, or wild,

in the BBC, local 5,
from going-down of the sun I have dreamed

c/o Rufiel.
as if the hair stood up on my head

Uggen
This night has been so strange that it seemed

One can find more or less vague traces of the same phenomenon in recent Irish works such as e.g. Muldoon's "Hay" (backwards), which even is in a context which can be studied relative to the surrounding forms in my work - but not in Joyce's 'Chamber music'. However it is there quite unambiguously in Celan's 'Fadensonnen', the poem 'Unverwahrt' = 'so if you can forward', ending with the line 'pendelt sich ein' = the forelock phenomenon. The recurring theme of 'falling hair' at the end of these fragments (in addition to the other parallelisms that can be shown in them) tell that there is a basis for recognizing my poem 113 out of the 207 in "If you're going to Köbenhavn" in the corresponding 'ratio' position in these poetic works. It means that the phenomenon of the relation between my poem and the distributed words throughout the full work is not a hermetic phenomenon: Rather, it applies to the universals in the projection of poetic objects from eternity into historic time and pertains to the 'rainbow'. As far as I know, this 'rainbow' phenomenon on book level has never been discovered before - and it may be said that it is my 'revelational poetry' which discovers it. Without a revelational way of writing, preserving respect or the mystery, it is likely that these sorts of phenomena are hard to discover. It can be said that it is eternity telling us something which we did not know in advance - because we could not guess in advance what eternity is.

The global distribution

2012: see this file for discussion.

Conclusion

What do these results mean? I suppose they mean quite simply that my book is a good poem of a higher order poetry type. One should notice that it also means that the work is one long poem with complex internal structure - perhaps one of the longest poems ever written and with perhaps one of the most complex structures ever, and in such a form that it can be described. It is an attempt to write the poetry on a 'higher level', in a new poetic substance of potential information transfer through eternity. Nelly Sachs would have called it 'Fahrt ins Staublose'. The complexity is not only in the calendarial distribution - it can be followed even into the details of the semantics of the word studied for distribution, such as that either would be semantic or phonological etc.

The ratio 113/207 is on the 'rainbow' going from beginning to end of the (part of a) poetic work. But one can think of it as a circle as well. In which case the study suggests that it could also be about the zodiacal 'belt' - such as this is formalized through the poetic work into the plastic item - a wholly plastic medium - in the bathtub. (Notice also the three edges around it - as if for phonological, semantic and graphicb). This means that my work probably has a many-layered structure - with principles of structure nesting in many orders. It is in this structure that a word gets its motivation - and that is why one cannot just replace a word with another word. There is strictly speaking only one word which can stand in a certain position in the work and hence the whole work is like a snowball the size of the zodiac. This is also when each word gets a sort of creative force.

This means that one cannot read a few lines from the work and then produce an opinion. One must in fact read the whole work for being able to mean things about it - and then it is likely that some readers may not even discover that the events which follow in their minds derive from or at least relate to the reading of the book. If it is deeply enough into the cognitive basis of reality, people generally may not associate the effect with the reading. See the article on the function of 'aspect'. I personally understood well the title 'A saga Hume' when a few times I have tried to read up to the end of the third part and stopping there. It is an amazing and fascinating and emotional reality which follows, untill one day one discovers that one will never be able to reach the exquisite goals sailing up in the horizon. It develops into a sort of funny despair - chasing one's own competitive shadow running a step or two ahead - which has no good explanation or solution - untill one understands that the solution quite simply is to read the fourth part as well. Then the fantasms which had piled up dissolve and the solutions emerge with a revelational and mystic quality which could not be predicted in advance - but which clearly also relate to the reading of the first parts and the struggles with getting them right. But they do not follow (at least I cannot do it) if one continues running after the wellmeant and positive dreams and struggles and mirages of the third part. However, it is not so easy to see this connection right away.

With this sort of distribution combined with the phenomenon of 'ratio poetry' (such as #113 etc) with parallels in other works from literary history, it follows that the poetic form of the work cannot have been constructed deliberately by counting days etc but necessarily has been written by 'inspiration' or 'revelation'. My view is that this complexity, to an extent which can open for a new technology with the capacities for creating reality from the poetic space (from eternity) via the poetic functions, can only be obtained via a revelational view on the poetry which in the last analysis comes down to something which probably must be considered a form of goodness-driven economy in some sense of it or other - which is the political part of the story - and which makes nazism and the hardboiled competitive attitudes of administrative and often terror-based logic (which perhaps can be associated with attempts to construct a model of eternity bottom-up from the symbolic level in a 'Mengenle[hre]' framework) an impossible political framework for the future. It is likely that the poetic form of my work cannot be constructed even with computer if it is supposed to meet the forms in the local distribution as well. The other parts of the work seem to exhibit similar principled forms and poetic functions, but of different kinds. See the next article on another interesting (higher order) poetic function from another of the 16 books. If one considers the complexity in only this single book discussed here relative to the 100.000 words in the total work, and compares this with the complexity of this other book on 'aspect', and conjectures that each of the 16 books contains a comparable complexity relative to the total work, and in fact also relates to the structure of 'holy texts' which constitute a traditional interface of the linguistic and religious community to eternal matters, it follows that the single long poem has a very complex structure indeed and has to relate to the real world and its interface to eternity which gives the revelational basis for its composition. When this complex web redefines and updated not only the semantics but possibly even the references to the poetry, it follows that the resulting poetic language may be potentially rather different from what you see on the paper. 'The emperor's new clothes' could be a jocular term for this phenomenon. The phenomenon can be observed when one reads the book and then looks it up the next morning and feels that one hasn't seen it before.

I notice also that the 'keys to heaven' is a scientific discovery which I made after the meeting in the park in Paris.

This also means that this is my own poetic work and not a product of political intrigue. If there has been a political project on my person, as seems to have been the case and maybe still is, this work is nothing which that political project can consider its achievement. Rather very much the opposite. I hope the work can be published through an ordinary serious publisher, even if the nazi revolution has come alarmingly far and there are dangers that the world is steering into the bogs of superstition and mythomania rather than the poetic revolution which there should have been. I consider my book a part of the poetic revolution. Will the present article on the internet lead to anything but aggressive british propaganda against it? Hypersonics over the magnetic pole etc for telling that this is a british project of a more or less national character? And then they put their 'best brains' on the task of surfing on top of my work for creating a 'new algebra' or something like that, without even mentioning my work - which is not even published? Nazism, such as in british traditions of the 20th century, is perhaps not much more than a reactionary resistance against precisely this poetic revolution.