In the Fourth Hour, you'll find this, after some pieces of it, drawn on the blackboard by the restless, lecturing poet...

phonemic instrument

It looks pretty formidable, doesn't it. Something for rote memorization? A complex semi-mathematical "diagram" provided by physicists, perhaps those fairly recent "brane and string" theorists - who, like the ancients, see Universe as dancing small bits of "vibe" or pre-material "string"...?
      I've only sketched an arrangement of phonemes, the sounds and moves we use to speak, on the blackboard. To give you an advanced picture for reading below, imagine that the "keel" line is just a line showing air flow from back behind your glottis out past your teeth and lips. I call the line a "keel" (as in a ship) and you can imagine the hull folding up from the keel on the two sides and along it's top lines the phonemes are placed. Our letter glyphs "draw" the apparatus with which we form the phonemes the glyphs represent. Our m is the lips touching, our n the tongue, the g the glottis. I've arranged the phonemes according to where and how they are formed. I've separated them into the "voiced" and "unvoiced". I put the vowels, from a horseshoe diagram in the same hour, as e-side and o-side and I'm not sure which would be more "voiced" than the other. I put them where I put them. I recognize r and l as vowels and I put l on the e-side, we write both as loops, a gift our ear gives us, and r on the o-side. I put a slash through a letter to replace the h that would follow it. My peculiar renderings were typable on a non-computerized typewriter and that was useful.
      Okay, you're ready, now, to understand my "ship in a bottle". My answer to Stephen's letter is on top of Stephen's letter, but on top of my letter is a link to Stephen's. You should read his first. He was delighted by my Third Hour and it free'd up some "energy" as a reminder of what he knew. The Fourth hour, though, seemed to ratchet that down some. So, I grabbed a "ship in a bottle" off the mantle and....
      Getting close, in this exchange, to talk at a coffee house table with, perhaps, a small blackboard to pass back and forth, rather than digging holes or spreading ink in paper napkins.

----- Page thumber:
Message offering the free book: a "kickoff" essay.
Message asking for responses, rewrite of the first essay....
Response to another message on "defining poetry" (relevant)...
Email to Stephen with his message ("Book") that I "answer" outside group messages.
Email to Stephen, part 2 of my "answer", weaving Waking into my poems.
Email to Stephen, part 3 of my "answer".
Phonemic instrument - a ship in a bottle? An "exploratory" essay...
Endpiece
Waking section on Archive page.
 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gene Fowler" <acorioso@earthlink.net>
To: "Mother Poetry" <motherofallpoetrygroups@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2004 1:41 PM
Subject: Re: Stephen on "Echoes on Waking" - The Book

Stephen's message to the group that I'm answering
>
> Stephen,
>
> You always start the conversation where you're supposed to and where,
> mostly, it comes as a surprise. Here, it's with somebody's poem you're
> working on, as before it was a half-sensed
> bookstore-of-your-imagination.
>
> You begin talking about the sounds you hear there in the middle where
> you felt the poem divide and you knew it ought to be in two parts. Hour
> Three and playing the sounds.... And you pretty much *played* the
> line break. No line break after universe and, for that matter not even
> a sentence break. In fact, you said line-break, but you *played* a
> stanza break.... And, then, another line-break....
>
> You've all your well-honed sensibilities about how poems ought to go
> together, with various "languages" for talking about it. If you only
> wrote, taught, or knew prose and the poet came to you with that poem,
> you'd likely have moved to what you played in that line. If it didn't
> seem too weird to mention, you'd tell anybody close by that it was your
> sense of "paragraphing". When you start playing phonemes instead
> of words, syllables, the untwisted syllables, the morphemes, though,
> even a dynamic like a sense of paragraphing changes, even
> violently and you invent poetry....
>
> Your writer in that poem has a musical ear for the line-breaks, plays
> them gently, phrasing neatly even within run-on readings.... Then,
> "that stops"  and a halt. You sense something is wrong (if you're
> listening to the phonemic flow) before you get to the gag-point,
> the glottis (g). Then, ...that tangle that you went into and sorted
> out....
>
> The music is all mixed up with everything else, all of language, and so,
> am I hearing music, or sensing how experience goes together when I
> suggest...
>
> > to gag just shy of  vomiting
> > out universe...
>
> Or am I just walking around in the curbside litter kicking away old cans
> like "the" with nothing left in them? Oh, "the" still has what it
> originally had in it, from right down in our sensory-motor core, but the
> surface is torn label and rusted under-stuff. Check your pointing, your
> pushing, finger. It's your "the"-finger. "Here" is all around you. So,
> you push it away to get a look at it. It's "the here" or, compressed
> into a chord, "there". And "the now" is "then", "the at" is "that", "the
> is" is "this".... And so on....
>
> Hey, that's worse even than "folk" etymology. The etymological
> renderings of word histories don't talk about things like that. But
> remember ...*all language was birthed and raised inside human
> heads....* Those histories are just surfaces reflecting sunlight
> to pull explorers to where they're half-sunk in dirt or rock.... the
> baby doesn't listen to learn to speak, the baby watches it being
> done and some watch more skillful exemplars than others....
>
> But look at the sound in that "aauut"...transporting of universe.... If
> it seems like grabbing somebody's line and twisting, I'll throw in that
> I liked the "slide", the writer's "...just shy of..." which, for me, is
> live language, good jazz rendering.... Riffing through the passage,
> even if it did get a tangle in it.... Getting beyond just saying what
> you're saying.... Is it just being slangy? If you go beyond and the
> sound of it is what you're playing, *slangee* itself sings something
> on a high-wires psychic guee...tar....
>
> So, the third hour opens up some play. It's not play you haven't
> done before. My fourth hour may seem to close that down a little,
> setting up a system for rote learning, be some sort of analytic
> device. I lay the phonemes out on the table. All of them at once.
> I work them up into designs, and I go way beyond, but not
> along different paths, what's said about, say, alliteration fore
> and aft, about assonance. The differences between northern
> and southern European languages and "endings". The "n" as
> sealing, and "know" being *sealed* into "known". Watch
> meanings spread as we move from that pair of words to,
> say, "conscious" and "conscience" and think of the imposed
> handle that's been tossed into your innards.  Don't learn
> it, hear it, feel it....
>
> Picking up the phonemes, like pebbles on a beach or in
> the curbside litter, holding them in the sunlight, watching
> them make shards of light. Delightful. But ...this other
> thing, this phonemic instrument, ahhhhhh. Strange notions
> of playing the wind-strings with the muscles of throat,
> face and tongue.
>
> What I've built here, as an ornery old man, always an
> ornery old man, is a ship in a bottle. And the bottle
> is my reader's throat. Once I've pulled the masts up and
> locked them into place ...well, in this dream it's easy to
> gag, ...just shy of... choking on this rote (ating) barbed
> thing. Its structure, unlike, say, a cello's, which is equally
> unfitting down one's throat, past the glottis (g), glints in
> the fiber going dark in that dark place, seems
> analytic because it's structure. The cello isn't made of the
> notes played on it; so even choking on it, you don't
> figure it's got anything to do with the music.
>
> It's the inability to bring analysis to bear on my phonemic
> instrument in the throat, my vessel in the vessel, though,
> that brings up the notion of rote memorization rather
> than the feel, the choking feel, of, say, some guttural,
> guttering, "gutter" speech from way back past the gag
> point.... You can't hack it up to the neck of the jar
> ...where you can chew it up and spit parts onto your
> palm to look them over, roll them in your fingers,
> throw them into the sea to wait for them to wash up
> as pebbles....
>
> But, it's only an image... Coming up out of the hour,
> throat spasmed, is just waking out of the dream,
> though with "echoes" in all the muscles and cavities
> in your innards. Not the nutrient sounds of my third
> hour, but fading "felt" sounds "locked in place". All
> that'll be left, except for sands moving under foot,
> slipping skillfully out as you're lifting a foot and
> falling, is the next hour, the fifth and a little work on
> telekinesis....
>
> It's too bad, maybe, that we have the verbal, our
> conceptualizing, and, then, only imagination, magic,
> image ...only the visual.... We live in a world of
> apparitions... and we can choke on the "felt",
> the tangible. I hope when my packaged dreams
> have all been experienced, even if as mostly,
> apparitions, you'll maybe feel yourself talking....
>
> That reminds me of a poem, the old story-teller
> hamming it up at the artists' campfire muttering...
>
> THE PRINTMAKER
>
> The unfurnished rooms
> empty
> as caves, with old fire pits
> & bones of the eaten
> & the enemies
>
> & the sidewalks, hostile gray
> trails, square
>
> as hopscotch traps,
>
> & the coffee house tables
> where you lay out
> your cards
>
> for the last time,
>
> & the huge distorted
> faces screeching, "Why
>
> don't you go to work,
> you bum?"
>
> & the hoarders of the works
>
> blood filled mouths
> screeching, "Why
>
> don't you go away?"
>
> - & the uncoiled sheet
> of my brain
>
> is crushed down, again &
>
> again
>
> on this etched inky
>
> stone.
>
>
> But, I'm inventing now. I'll leave it.... I guess this
> morning's image of my phonemic instrument as a ship
> in a bottle, masts pulled up, the whole thing shoved
> and locked into a live throat, is....
>
> I'm going to count down from three to one and when
> I say one, you will be fully awake and feel refreshed
> and that ship in a bottle is just sitting on the mantle
> where it was before you dozed off over that weird
> blue and white book....
>
> My fourth, like my third, hour is only a playful
> demo'ing of *relations* among the phonemes...,
> not to be taken too seriously. It's all just gesture
> and suggesture....
>
> Be well, and Judy, too, because that playing, back in
> the eighties, sounds to me like treasured memories
> and I appreciated (both of) your sharing them in
> "the" note to me....
>
> Oh, live (pulls in...) poem visioned and re-visioned....
>
> Gene
>
>
> Message: 11  (Digest 1592)
>    Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 18:07:33 -0600
>    From: Stephen Morse <smorse@sigafoos.net>
> Subject: Re: ...from heaven! Echoes on waking...The Book
>
> Gene,
>
>      I alluded to (frankly played ) "hour three" of your book  in a
> recent poem submitted here:
>
> > energy
> >
> > stopped up  with its fullness
> > lips on the nipple
> > the milk traces warm lines around the mouth
> > mother and child recreate the sounds
> > and language of life and love
> > that stops
> > to gag just shy of  vomiting
> > the universe, jesus
> > you pray poetry
> > held back  pent up
> > to remember breasts
> > In  hiss,
> > a name salvation.
>
> Looking at it again (the re-vision step)  I see that there is a two
> part poem here, or at least there should be a line break after the
> universe..it should read:
>
> > to gag just shy of vomiting the universe
> >
> > jesus,
> > you pray poetry
>
>    with the "you" actually being jesus
> je (gee) s (zuh) us (ussss); hence a holding back (gee) and the hiss of
>   release that includes "us"; hallowed be his name, a memory of life,
> and salvation in the name.
>
>    It is a self-conscious  playing of the phonemes  back at their roots.
>    I've always explored words and their origins, feelings, history, and
> where they formed in the mouth ( I love my Oxford English
> Dictionary)... and that is the easy thing that anyone could get  from
> hour three and four from your book...the whole idea of tracing sounds
> used (phonemes) in words (morphemes) to some sort of primal (for lack
> of a handier word) meaning in their own right.   It was fun to play
> with words and their sound meanings.
>
>   Judy Brekke (my wife, lover,  and only constant friend ) wrote a
> series of poems in the 80's that played with the "morphemes" she
> associated with individual letters in a word, or the object that word
> created (usually nouns ), a sort of whimsical  poetry created without
> any conscious regard to denotation.  It was a less analytical approach.
>   It worked for her, and it was, to use your notion, a playing "of"
> words rather than a playing "with" words (too many young poets
> underestimate the power of a preposition).
>
>     I frankly got lost in "hour four"  of *WakingThe Poet* ...once I had
> the idea, I was reluctant to yield to your perceptions totally, and
> your system of notation seems personal  and experiential.  Accurate for
> you, but arbitrary for me and others who might sit through the hour.
> In fact, I felt the familiar closing down of effort that I experience
> when I feel that the speaker is taking me off my path of understanding
> and entering a sort of rote system.  I scanned through it, resolving to
> forge ahead and come back at some further point of understanding.
> This took an enormous amount of mental energy for me and I have only
> begun to dip into hour 5 (which also promises to provide  fun
> instruments to play).
>
>     I've passed your last email to me on to Mother's after  printing it
> out and reading it.  It seems like a very good supplement to hours 3
> and 4, and the poetry and information is entertaining  (entrance to
> owning) and informative.
>
> To any group members who have read this far in absolute mystification,
> hang in there, and email Gene for the book if you haven't already.
>
> Best,
> Stephen
>
>
>
> On Dec 27, 2004, at 9:40 PM, Gene Fowler wrote:
>
> > Bookstore browser from ...heaven ! Echoes on waking...
> >
> > . . .
>