pink = zero

[Jack Galmitz]

It's my pleasure to publish it and see it show-cased!  Well-deserved.
All the best,
Jack

[Mark Harris]

before the warm glow wears off, I'd like to turn the discussion back to Eve Luckring's poem, and a thought I had reading through the earlier back and forth--

I think it's possible, and Luckring does this well, to subvert (metaphorically--she might prefer to say question) tradition without being disrespectful, to create a poem with layers of meaning, different points of view, even competing conventions, without contradiction.

[Jack Galmitz]

Yes, I think that's true of her work. I just received an email from her and she said she sometimes does write with capital letters beginning poems and she was still considering the differences, nuances, that the capitalization meant to the poem (as it initially was posted at THF).
She said she was looking forward to the discussion of the work, so I quite agree, she is open, original, respectful, artistic and capable of subversion without intended harm. 
Not to change the subject, but to broaden it perhaps if others feel like joining in.
I gave some thought recently to the basic differences amongst the art forms, especially music, writing, and dance.
My feeling was that all embraced playing with time as space.  Music was spatialization through changes of notes, tones (when  played) and musical scripts have figures, but the figures represent only sound.  Dance was the exploration of time by arrangement and rearrangement of figures without sound (necessarily) and certainly without meaning (modernist dance).
Writing was different in that its figuration had meaning in itself and it displayed time as space by changes in both figurative language and sound changes.  So, I thought poetry should be keenly aware of its mission:figuring time as space by attention to its own particular attributes: figure bearing meaning and sound; and couldn't we say that that's what Eve's haiku is, not what it's about?

[Lorin]

Just for instance, Chris.  In earlier posts some people were discussing capitalization of words in haiku as if was a practice that belonged to an earlier age, historically bound.  If you look at contemporary poetry, I don't think you would find this to be the case.  It's just something that was adopted many years ago by the haiku groups and became a near rule.
But, as I said earlier, really these same people write what are for the most part pastorals and yet they do not aver that pastoral poetry is outmoded and was a product of a time in the West when societies were essentially agrarian.

Hi Jack,
            It's morning here, so "Good Morning". :) And thank you very much for taking the time to look into it all.

That was me who mentioned that the capitalisation of what someone called 'important words' was a convention in Emily Dickinson's day and not just in poetry. It undeniably was. Not every poet capitalised 'important words' in those days, but in was common in eg hymnals, as well as in the shipping news and  advertisements of various sorts. It was a convention that Emily Dickinson adopted and adapted. But what I said was in context of and in response to the idea that the capitalised 'Words' had special significance in that it connected Eve's haiku to Emily Dickinson's work. I didn't make that connection of special significance, myself. It seems to me to be drawing a long bow. Perhaps if a word beginning with a cap. appeared in the middle of a poem it might remind me of Emily Dickinson's work, but not at the beginning.

To me, all the conventions of style are just that...conventions of style. In using all lower case in his poems, E.E. Cummings adopted a style which was not the norm for his day and many followed. In my 'long' poems, I've adopted various styles of presentation, depending on what I felt suited the particular poem.

As you must be aware, it doesn't bother me one bit that your haiku begin with a capital letter or that someone else's doesn't, but I don't attach special significance to the first word of your haiku because it begins with a capitalised letter, or discount significance to the first word of someone else's haiku because it doesn't. These sort of choices, surely, remain with the author of the poem.

I believe one must work with the whole poem, but differences in printing/ writing/ presentation style are not of the essence. What haiku has inherited from the concrete poem, the graphic aspect, can be interesting, but that doesn't mean that every poem or every haiku benefits from being rendered in a fashion after the concrete form. What began as an idiosyncrasy, the rendering of some common words in abbreviated style in poetry (yr for your, ths for this etc.) became much imitated in the 60s and still can be found in some poets work today. It's sometimes said that it helps convey a sense of informality and immediacy... perhaps, but I'm not so sure. It identifies these poets in a lineage, that's the major thing it does after it's been used for a while, and it's a stylistic convention as much as any other.

- Lorin

[Jack Galmitz]

Hi, Lorin.
Thank you for your explanation/explication.  Frankly, I never thought of Dickinson when reading Eve's haiku.  It seems I misunderstood what you meant by capitalizing "important" words; you're absolutely right that that was a nineteenth and earlier convention.
But what do you think of my last post and explication of her poem as meaning/sound/figure as her version of time as space, as her expression of what poetry is?  Doesn't this make that floating "words" detached from the flesh and bone reification and remind us that the abstraction of time-our experience of the poem-is only real when we are, when the figure(word) is both sound changes and meaning changes inseparable?  It is a body of meaningful sound, otherwise "words" float away.

[Jack Galmitz]

You're also right, Lorin, that capitalization of words within the body of the poem are more Dickinsonian than capitalization of the first words of a line.