Page 4 - The Irony Board

Introduction

Thus brevity and wit are both means and ends in Gluckman’s
work. He seems to take childish pleasure in expressing an often
serious idea humorously in few words, preferably with a final twist;
proverbs, slogans and newspaper headlines are his ideal. Minimizing
the word count creates an environment in which symbols both stand
out clearly and interact easily. A word, in his view, is surrounded by
a cloud of associations; the proximity of significant words is a factor
in the depth of their mutual significance. This fact is crucial in
setting up accidental homonyms and controlling the resultant
ambiguities in puns.
Short lines and stanzas also enhanced another technique to which
he was partial: shuffling syntax and repeating patterns to confuse or
bemuse the reader. This appears contrary to making sense, but it
reflects an opinion he held regarding the ambiance of a poem. The
mind accustomed to prose tends to race through poetry as well,
attempting to grasp single meanings in long strings of language. He
tries to operate against that process by forcing the reader to slow
down or stumble, to weigh individual words against others not very
distant, to squint mentally and scan a small structure for clues about
its construction.
This attitude is manifest in his architectural, rather than literary,
conception of poetry. To Gluckman, syllables, lines, and stanzas are
building blocks set into a two-dimensional grid. For that reason he
often did not capitalize the first word in a line nor routinely
punctuate in his early works, convinced that the conventions of
prose should not impose artificial emphases disruptive of flow and
balance. With passing years his attitude changed, and he often
revised such pieces by imposing upon them conventions of
prosody—perhaps in an attempt to make them appear less jejune.

Metaphor and image

On the largest scale, Gluckman aspired to create poems with at
least two interpretations, each of which could be mapped onto the
other. This requires close correspondence of word associations, and

2