Waking meets Mother Poetry

A further part of this letter to Stephen. Not a new letter. I'm still responding to his message "Book" sent to the Mother Poetry group. I'm continuing my "line of thinking" or "system-of-lines of thinking". But, there is a definite break. It is as significant as a paragraph break, a section break. My thinking is structured by such breaks. These breaks are punctuation and I do them as I write. I'm always writing ahead in my peripheral awareness, sensing branched paths ahead, and often I'm writing only in peripheral awareness and leave to do other things. This is what 21st century letter writing, all writing, is becoming, a kind of permanent-trace thinking and imagining "out loud". It's not just a "pretty face", the result of typesetting being built right into your typing. It's how your mind can move as you jump around within a scroll (usually mis-called "page") and among scrolls.... The "page thumber" and live cross-references and your ability to put in (with a little effort) bookmarks. You can even jump to a bookmark on another scroll. A reader can grab the right-edge of his or her browser and make the page content into an easy-to read column. And a reader can put in bookmarks, highlighting, marginalia of his or her own. We begin to commune...icate, to conspire.... I believe that's something people, particularly poets, hope to do, something that's pushed people toward inventing their poetics, the makings, enabling poetry.
I use my poems in my letters in what I think is an unusual way, though in all the usual ways too. I use them as power-object "pre-fab" paragraphs.... And when I "end" a letter-part with a poem, it is not just a coda or addendum, where the letter was moving to from my first impulse to write.
I ended part 1 with Psychedelos. I said it had to do with word-play or playing words, syllables, morphemes (the untwisted syllables) and phonemes. The other side of a looking glass.... What's to be found beyond the "reflection" is a poet's playfulness. if that isn't "on tap", always, however subliminally, even the most direct and serious work will lack animation. I end this part with Cosmic Language, the third of three "walking" poems. As the title suggests, the musing is on a poet's language and philosophy, on the makings.

----- Page thumber:

      The lights are never out.
      There is never that soft slipping into darkness for sleep. Sleep is a skitterish thing, slipping and sliding along the top of a sickly yellow light and footsteps ringing among the tiers of metal trays we live on and deeper rings of bars as a guard's flashlight taps on 'em. The funny out of phase breathing that both is and isn't yours. The heavy animal panting that builds up, a beat note, from the thousand breathings in the wing. The fluttering, terror stricken wing-beat breathing of a thousand celled me.
      A toilet flushing.
      An explosion of tubercular coughing—someone paying dues to the always wet cement building.
      Gurglings in pipes. Or my belly. Or his. Or one of the thousand bellies squeezing and pulsing around me.
      Sleep skitters over the slick, bloody, digesting surface of it. Skitters toward the edge.
      The wave of terror sits me up. My hair catches in bed springs. Tantalus got me by the hair.
      Talons slip in like knives.
      The talons are scarred: rune markings, counting the uncountable days that've flipped past...

From Felon's Journal

All those beings I talk about in the Foreword (which is still part of the "book").... Styles, not skill-sets. Does a "native speaker" come out, or do "you" go in...? It's probably as bad as that vortex full of corners on the "cover".... I surely don't want to clarify anything—particularly when there's nothing that needs clarifying. The "unsettling" is just a loosening up, allowing new settlings or, maybe, a continuing restlessness, with settlings always only provisional.... (And here only so they'll exist, for some moments, somewhere outside my head and this room.) So, I take an "Arabian Nights" approach and wake presumably "sleeping" whatevers, though I also include those gurgling pipes and talk of pumping knowing into sensing and dragging along the undergesture, the pumping sensing into knowing which suggestures an end point in cosmic language, a poem in Juice 04. Whatevers is about as good as I can do, entities and nonentities, native speakers and random pumpings....

All those tiny perceivings throughout Waking the Poet don't seem like a craft demo'd, practiced, described or explained. It all comes together, of course, in a poem that's sort of "about" the practice, Cosmic Language, which is why I call it "cosmic language (usage)" and not "cosmic walking" or something like that. I end this segment of "letter" with it, but it ought to read differently now, assuming you've sat in on a couple or three more seminar hours. The fourth hour, and, maybe, both the sixth and seventh. You've looked back, from time to time, at Waking's table of contents. Especially if you have the brochure at hand with the TOC in compact form, small print, good to cut out for a bookmark. Maybe you've felt that it's a poem. It doesn't respond well to "figuring out", but if you c'n pass through the opaque terms, as images.... So, the "looking glass" that's Waking can be passed through....

Why the notation in my third and fourth hours? Where'd I get the idea for that and, then, the move toward building the phonemic instrument? From linguistics textbooks? Nah...! It's from written music and, in language, it's a finer grain catching of the discrete phonemes. You can be a musician without reading and writing music, but you can't compose, or even arrange, participate in chamber or orchestral groups. You might hum a fugue from scratch, ...but the musicality for that would just naturally hook up with the intelligence necessarily there as a whole lot of learned to read simply watching a mother reading to us.... So, my notations came from watching adults speak long before I tied it to what was on a page. That's why I knew (and linguistics people didn't) that m is lips touching, not "waves" and n is the tongue and that letters are not p[honetic, but phonemic.... It's an instrument, carefully made in experience, as a cello is.

But other things contributed to all this, all this jazz, such as my not being a touch typist (which is lucky, because I've got fingers laying over at an angle, now). I type sixty words a minute with two fingers and sometimes another, like the free-agent Bunraku crew, taping a dancing doll's leg as he passes for a step in the dance. Thumbs for the space bar. No blur, every key a distinct hit in my focal attending as I saw both keyboard and, then, worlds outside the room. The phonemic figures, the strange, fine grained motifs, ahhhhhh. and the "inside" rhymes.... Remember, my first feeling a way into a line for Alessandra to try to get that watching back in...? Both then and, later, when I set aside the two line solution that pulled in a world view and got a fairly neat and simple single line returning to her rhyme, use a lot more than rhyme, however set in, to link portions of the poem. Even syntax. And weight. Mark your accents in the line below, note the handle and whip, but the whip not lashing.... Accent is fairly straight forward in this new poetics, but you've got to think again about what used to be called syllable length, which is more basic, in a sense, because it's undercurrent. Not written length, since old sayings are still in there. And sound length isn't set because it's all woven into pace and all. You can sort long and slow, but not easily or to much benefit.

Syncopation comes naturally, and in both lines above a whole lot more is going on, of course.... This is why getting down into the phonemic flow, talking of eddies in it, of "phonemic figures".... So, is it impossible? Nope. It's our birthright. Our languages are made of it and we've all some tendency to play with it, to play it.... I sharpen the hearing and seeing of it with notation and metaphor and simple description. I encourage a little exaggeration. Then, you can drop back into your use of it and forget about it ...beyond hearing yourself as you right. Somebody said recently, or quoted somebody else, that poetry differs from prose by having (on our contemporary pages, I guess) shorter lines. Computer users know a paragraph is a line and, in a sense, a whole text is. The speaker was thinking, though, of margin to margin lines, broken by the eye's return. This is the dead eye of the mechanically trained reader/writer. Any latter day Homer'd tell you, looking up from his difficult working of his imagined reciting into the cramped alphabets available to him, "Play your line breaks, your between the glyphs times, and when you have your comma later, know the art of the comma and, then, the science, the knowing of the comma..."

play your line breaks, a kind of break dancing.... Not while you're up on stage reading, while you're writing. A composer isn't listening to instruments playing his or her thoughts, but feeling from inside, playing the instruments—whether or not able to do it. It all comes out of the sensory-motor "core", all cognition does. Watch the baby just starting to become the youngest child, watch it (not yet him or her, with far off distinctions looming unsensed) with its mother. Not listening, but watching. We learn to talk like we learn checkers or basketball—by watching somebody do it. Read Edward Hall on informally learning to ski, mastering the non-intuitive, non-head, "technique" for turning. We watch the use of throat, mouth, face, breathing.... And we get the hang of it.You can watch a "schizophrenic" producing the voices on a myograph.... You watch your mother's lips make the m-sound, watch the lips. And, in the flow, you can get, fill-in, the tongue, guess, and try, the completion of the n-sound. If you ever rhyme them, it won't be the careless blurring that's common, but a deliberate twist, a movement from outside the teeth back to the roof of the cavern behind the teeth. I knew what the linguistics folks had to say, but maybe the real tip I got was from, I think, Kenneth Burke writing about Coleridge and spotting what he called "concealed alliteration" and what Coleridge probably didn't call anything.

Everybody looks at the "gestalt" puzzles. The picture that can be two faces staring each other down or a goblet. Most can pick up the mental trick of switching. Those are in hundreds of books. Or finding the snowscape dog in the snowscape. Here, you switch on the "defining". Magic. Delightful. In my fifth hour I take an activity that allows looking over the switch. It's a long way from seeing the five point star (our stars are really constellations, but Sumerians didn't differentiate, either) into that great pyramid in the sky pointing to the zenith to seeing those familiar three circles I use in my imprimatur into those Chinese rings which you move around Earth as great circles until you, as mind, lock them in place as two meridians and an equator defining the two pyre-amids pointing to Janus zeniths.... The habit of pushing thins around has to 've been cultivated. You have to 've played word games (we're talking about language, remember) that unsettle, loosen.... Take a term like frame of reference used to handle context, to allow therapeutic and philosophical reframing. Then, explode it! Into system of referents. Now, you can break the therapist's reframing, a kind of mysterious thing, to the long known, more greatly detailing, reassociating... and you're aware of manipulating context....

COSMIC LANGUAGE

Walking.
Lifting a foot and falling
forward, eye
hovering and darting.
A good swinging walk.
Prowling outward, birthing change,
climbing over
the long curve of the globe, while flesh
lets go,
skin sags over into pockets,
eyes swim.
Blue green flashes hover and dart
                                    over shadowed bronzing
of copper's orange glare,
dragonflies
flagging the far inward curve of world.
Restless breezes touch my nostrils,
                                       iced sea winds raging
outward,
curving in the far mist
and raging again
inward
and through me.

Cities fall away
and rain forests, deserts, mountains,
coiled and holding rivers, after looming over me,
and dried out, half caved away footprints,
from which grasses spring back,
and the grasses,
ship grooves and the waters
rushing back into them.
It all falls away,
falls out into distance
and curves
inward,
rushing through me.
All my walkings.

An opening night-journey through San Francisco,*
cavorting
in and out of the personae
of my predecessors
                    tickling infant lines
into mime.

A closing one in Berkeley,**
hunger gnawing reflections out of concrete.
Corpse rolling
through the rhythms, turning
on its spit.
Again and again.
Walking.
Nothing so simple as a city.
Or rain forest. Or desert. Or mountains.
Walking, now, with eyes open
to themselves.
Where do i put my foot?
Nothing there til it's placed.
The power. Never thought upon.
Used easily, when used, by all of us.
Doing it consciously? Hideous.
How many times to fall and get up and fall?

Amid fallen leaves
                           piled against the curb,
a stone
sparkling brightly with a quiver
of beginning life.
                                An unseen thing.
Called upon to summon it
school children twist in tortuous
agonies of mumbling
praxis.
Lapis philosophorum.
Black marks on the white sheet.
Nothing there but marks, tracks of articulating
bird-foot.
No meaning. No message.
Til the outpouring of an eye.
In that outpouring, the secret of our power.

The stone
cast out, to fall and roll in the leaves,
to blood leaves' edges,
to leap
and become light.
                              Network of light leapings.
We cast a net
outward in a great swirling disc of flight,
cosmic fishermen,
and haul in our load of order.
But our power? The order we net is our own,
sent out
and hauled back.
Nothing seen that the eye didn't make.

Walking.
Seeing nothing but what i dream,
touching nothing not of my invention,
smelling only
stray odors of my own passing,
hearing musics rising from my own sources, my muses.
Nothing.
No thing that isn't a man,
isn't me.

"Don't read things into what's there!"
There's nothing there, no there, but for my reading.
And how much dare i read?
What the Hell, why not
all of it?
And reading, i'm
walking.

coda:    A sea
            washes around my feet, echoed
            in currents of running sand, and
            half sunk, embedded in green-grey mush
            the half-rotted skull
            of some prehistoric man, some pre-man
            or urman,
            ants, who once dreamed of flesh-bits,
            petrified juttings of the bone.
            a recognition.
            How achingly long, this walk.
            The waters tugging at ankle hairs.
            The sands skillfully slipping out
            from underfoot.
            There's nothing there, no there, but
            for my reading.
            Lifting a foot and falling...