Day: April 14, 2022

ㅁ
While the Men Converse
         Went so. / for Wntr.
         / can y. undstd --
       In spc. mny types
      awt. the end.
        |
        |
      °°° ~ now the
    blue/bk. over / turned
    the eggs of Tps.
    To reveal to me the
       Vrts.
    That man dwells amidst * - c
  ? Id.s. ,,, / (,,,) -- ...
    / / / -- \ °°°
  Tps Vrts -- flowing like
lamposts on dusty grey
bookshelves --
While the Men.
Converse°°° °°

– A free-form poem, a guest-poem from my past. I wrote this poem in the summer of 1983, a point in time when I was keeping a fairly regular journal (a kind of analogue predecessor to this here blog thingy, right?). It was hard to transcribe – I was experimenting with what is called “concrete poetry” I guess. My handwritten letters and the spaces that I filled with bits of punctuation and pseudo-writing were as important as the actual text. I was being deliberately gnomic with my weird abbreviations and omissions of letters – most of them I can figure out, but in fact I’m clueless about the meaning of “Tps” in the above poem. I’m guessing that “Vrts” is “virtues”… maybe? So perhaps “Tps” means “typos” – that would please my notion of meta-referentiality, anyway. Let it be so.

So transcription is quite difficult. Here is the image of the original poem. And the facing page with its accompanying illustration.