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20 February 2005: I've long intended to put my friend, Geof Huth, into the upper echelons of infraverbal and visual poets where he belongs by honoring him with a mathemaku featuring something I've stolen from him. This morning I finally did so:
Having just given a presentation this past Thursday on pwoermds, among them Geof's "ghohshthshs," to a small class of home-taughts, ages ten to thirteen or fourteen, I was primed, I guess, to do the poem above. I'd also been feeling like I ought to start making poems again. My first idea for the poem was simply to try to divide a line into Geof's word. Since ghosts are nothingnesses, the empty rectangle quickly occurred to me as a good quotient. A bunch of silent h's for the interior product was my next thought. To layer them was practically automatic. I was blank on what the remainder would be but remainders can be just about anything, so that didn't worry me.
Although, as usual, my idea seemed terrific when I first had it, it disintegrated fairly swiftly. So swiftly that the only thing I did with it for a couple of days was sketch it on a scrap of paper. This morning, though--mainly to give me something for this entry--I renamed a long division poem I have on my Paint Shop screen, "ForHuth" (although the proper name of the poem I came up with is "Mathemaku for Geof Huth"), and started erasing all but its division shed and remainder lines. I had to cut a hole in the shed's roof to remove a graphic that'd been there. The hole seemed worth leaving. I'd already decided to tilt my rectangle--something to give my idea interest; now I would delete part of it, too.
While layering the h's, I unintentially left holes in my design there, too, and concluded I liked them. It took me a while to get a shape I liked. Putting a fisheye distortion in thanks to a tool Paint Shop has. The remainder was the last thing I thought of. It was first "slivers of moonlight." That evolved into the slivered word above once I realized I'm a visual poet. Oh, and the truncation of "ghohshthshs" wasn't intended: I simply had the print too large for the word to fit under in the dividend shed, then realized it'd be appropriate simply to chop off the part that didn't fit.
The result is pretty simple but I like it better than any of my other recent efforts. I think it's a keeper.
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