Page 3 - The Irony Board

Introduction

Gluckman wrote thousands of small poems, most of them before
his fortieth birthday. The majority are ill-considered squibs, rants
and doggerel; a few, however, retain merit as thoughtful epigrams
reflective of the man and his era. He did continue, in a minor way,
to compose such works well into his later years. This compilation
considers only the pieces appearing in his salad days in sporadic
broadsides: Machine Time (1967), The Word Works (1971), Selected
Epigrams (1973), Apparent Motion (1976), Monkey Puzzle (1979) and Off
a Nonagon (1982).
Despite the brevity of these confections, their implications are
often abstruse, their construction convoluted and their wordplay
excruciating. It was perhaps the intention of their author, in some
case, to hide their meaning in plain sight; this despite his evident
faith in logic as a tool of clarification. Indeed, his view that irony is
in fact an unexpected logical relationship is in evidence here, a
reaction against its contemporary misuse as a synonym for
coincidence. Thus the necessity for annotation: the rapid
obsolescence of context within Gluckman’s lifetime renders many of
his concerns and conceits unintelligible to later readers.

Elements of form and style

Under the influence of Beat Generation authors (Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti, McClure) and earlier innovators (Pound, Williams,
Cummings), the author’s first efforts at poetry were sprawling,
stream-of-consciousness collages. They were soon followed by
prose-like verse in conversational cadences, a shift to single-pointed
narrative. By 1968 his efforts began conforming to his mature-
1
immature style, the ironic epigram. Not long after that, his brief but
intense study of Western astrology confirmed, reinforced and
endlessly justified that form as most appropriate to his disposition
and modes of thought.

1 Other types persisted, as well: narrative poetry (e.g., the “Plucky Lads” series)
and parodies of well-known songs and poems (e.g., “The Maven”).
1