I begin this third part of my eletter to Stephen
with a Flashback in which I skim what I was doing by taking the letter
parts into an ending, fairly complex, poem. Psychedelos in part 1 and
and Cosmic Language in part 2. I end this third part with
Night Desert and it ends the whole three part eletter. A smaller,
simpler (maybe) poem. Nothing I say in Waking has much meaning
apart from my poems...
----- 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 -----
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 7:40 PM
Subject: Re: ...from heaven! Echoes on waking...
Bookstore browser from ...heaven ! Echoes
on waking...
Flashback: I ended each of
the first two parts of this with a poem. The poem likely seems to be attached,
an inclusion or addendum, but that's not the case. It's written in.... In
part 1, it's Psychedelos and I was talking about word play, but hardly
the word play that comes with playing with words as words, as toys, as things
that exist apart from their being freshly made in each use, and easily,
therefore, twisted, morphed.... All through Waking I stress
music and the use of "instruments", so it's not too big a jump to say I play
words rather than that I play with words.... In the phonemic flow,
they're something like, but not too like, chords....I'm not a musician or
composer, so I can't borrow nuances I'd like to borrow and assume are there
...in any human activity. Anyway, from word play to playing
words.... Knowing that c'n allow a listening reader to skate
on the bright surface, enjoy it all, but to go, too, with his or her
"reflection" down under the surface, into the poem. Is it a poem only for
reading, or at least "reading along" with someone reciting or reading aloud...?
No, given an oral reader who can enunciate as old Shakespearean actors were
taught, the shifted words can be forced into the waiting ears. and for the
tougher ones, spaces can be created....
At the bottom of part 1, is Stephen Morse's not to
the Mother Poetry (motherofallpoetrygroups) group with a subject of only "book".
In my "Re" I played that into a sinuous line.... The "book" message made sense.
I'd offered paper copies of the book and laid out something of a path into the
book, to be continued in an old brochure "advertising" the book that I'd
stuff into each book sent. A little later, I sent a note suggesting that
questions, comments, or, better "taking off from" the book, "thinking out loud",
be sent to Mother Poetry. Under that, I gave the original notice, rewritten a
bit. More path blazes.
Part 2, ends with Cosmic Language. It's
the third of three "walking" poems that are pillars supporting Fires:
Selected Poems: 1963-1976 — 2002+ Annotated Edition. In the poem all
three of the poems are linked to in my online copy of the book, though all three
are in Juice Online 04. The three poems, taken in the context of understanding
why I approach things as I do in Waking, show steps in
a process.... The first walk, is an all night walk through San Francisco and the
second is an all night walk in Berkeley because that's where I lived,
precariously, in a poet's world. Cosmic Language is a walk indirectly
into the poetic, or creative, imagination. And that's why the particular scenery
that's there. For the rest, it's just a poem. I'm playing the language, the
cosmic language.... I'm a small chamber group. A couple phonemic
players, for polyphonic effects, a sensemic player, a revelemic player.,
Or, maybe a small orchestra, several of each.... Entering the poetic imagination
...sounds pretty mystical, doesn't it? Some other state of being? How do you do
it? How do you know when you've done it? and is that only after, or can
you wake in the imagination for some lucid imagining?
You see, that's why I did what I could about
writing a Waking. Nobody else seemed to be doing it. I
looked for the common, everyday entering that nobody notices. I knew a lot of
authors talked about using dreams and I thought okay, but that seems
like an Olympic triple jump, really. But then, there's daydreaming.
Everybody does it. I expect most writers, or most people writing, will daydream
content, but ...daydreaming the writing? While you're doing it? Well, It was a
place to start. So, I started the Sixth Hour with it.... I think of musicians,
who aren't by the numbers, daydream in their playing, as they play all the
parts.... Cosmic Language (and the title tells you something, or I
thought it might) is not an easy walk, though there's nothing to "figure out",
nothing to be difficult, or hard, in a school sense. It's just a long hike over
wild terrain, your own breathing becoming hurricane winds.... To get out of this
flashback, before my letter to Stephen (and Mother Poetry, maybe), I guess I'll
come out of that pure poetic imagination, just to the edge of it in my poem
A Day at the Beach and the middle section which I call...
Playing Catch
i find
pebbles
in the wet sand
dark agates
veined in
white
dull bloodstones
blue green bits
of fossilized sea
smoothed
glass
taken from men
returned as pebbles
i
grind my knee
in the
sand
a rough wearing
a sound of the sea
an
erosion
scrape knuckles
taking up
pebbles
the sea has
left
i run heavily
in the tight sand
kicking up
foam
throwing the pebbles
far out
to sea and waiting
for them to wash
in
Stephen,
I "discovered" San Francisco on January 1st,
1964. I was born just over 32 years earlier in Oakland and had lived the whole
of my life - except for a few brief excursions - in the East
Bay.
The city was a silhouette. And
I don't recall looking at it very often or really seeing it. It might as well
have been New York, 3000 miles away. Or New Orleans, a ghost shimmering in
half-remembered movie sets.
The
night of December 31st, 1963, I was in a Berkeley apartment drinking wine with
a woman with whom I shared confusions about destiny and a fellow whose
meandering life sometimes intersected my meandering life so that we were
sometimes friends. My friend was just back from South America with a book of
his poems newly published. My companion was a folk-singer, a composer of songs
(even at least one "classic" English ballad, the Matty Groves tale from the
Lord's viewpoint), and we both wrote
poems.
Battling with the sealed rim
of a metal wine-bottle cap, I foggily decided I was a poet. Finally, the
clarifying point in the shimmering vision of
destiny.
Berkeley, of course, is a
cultural center." It has been for a long time. A major university and all
that. But, my friend assured me, San Francisco is where poet's crack the womb
and gasp in air and light. He wakened, with those remarks, the urge in me -
and events led to one more in the millions of births of San
Francisco.
He had an apartment on
the top floor of a great beast of a building on Eddy, just off Van Ness. (It's
gone now.) An old Victorian two doors away had a vacancy sign
out.
The next day, while my
companion packed, I went off with my friend and the last of the wine and
rented a basement apartment with little light from the above ground tops of
windows, an old metal bed that imitated a giant hammock and a stove with the
oven door wired shut.
Surely as any
science fiction hero, I'd stepped through a space-time warp into a "new"
world. When my companion saw the apartment, a great sadness passed over her
face. She was sad because she'd have to live in this Dostoevskian basement;
she was sad because I reminded her of the human condition - the great
unwisdom.
This was not the birthing
of San Francisco for her. She had grown up in the Fillmore. Her father, a
painter and sculptor, had set her, an infant, on the bar in Vesuvio's, while
he had his afternoon beer. She baby-sat Rexroth's daughters after being
baby-sat by Weldon Kees' girl friend (and one of Rexroth's wives, too). She'd
sparkled at Lowell High School among the precocious. San Francisco was
home. And this was a somewhat undesirable
apartment.
But I entered into a
magical world - unmarred by a wired shut oven. Not quite Brigadoon. More
subtle. Even raunchy. The city was about to be born. And
poetry.
California Living, San Francisco
Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
August 3,
1975
Discovered has a special meaning, here,
that is why it's here. I'd never lived far enough from San Francisco
that I couldn't see it from any near-by piece of high ground. And I'd been
in it. I didn't quite discover poetry that afternoon, either. I'd come out of
San Quentin in very late 1959. I had rent tickets for an old hotel, beat up but
clean, across from the Oakland police station on Fourteenth street
And meal tickets for a not-too-greasy spoon next door and a job at the Kaiser
hospital on Macarthur and Broadway. The hospital, or the old wing of it, with an
impossible Italian name, was the one in which I'd been born. I was part of a
squad who delivered record jackets and picked them up. Another member of that
squad was the friend I mentioned above, Luis Garcia. (My companion was Hilary
Ayer, her father Richard Ayer.) So, Luis pulled me toward Berkeley — another
place close by and a long way away.
What matters in my California Living piece
(I've others also online), is the "discovery" because I was indeed (and I just
typo'd that indeep, which seems an omen) opening out into what I guess you could
call the poetic, or creative, imagination, that "deeply" rooted (in the
sensory-motor mechanisms) imagination involving the whole or
holy heart-beat of pumping sensing into knowing and knowing into
sensing and involving all the human experience taken in from everywhere (and
when) directly or indirectly (which is what "Waking the Poet" and Cosmic
Language are about. Take this passage from City Hunt (also in
Fires) referring back to my Shaman Songs (also in
Fires) and the reactions of some in the poets'
communities...
snarling, whining
that i'd move up to the high
desert
get wind burnt, rip
off and wear the Indian's
skin
or
drift back farther in
coriolis
swirls
of
time,
wear mammoth
hide, rip off
the raw boned Siberian's
sighting,
but i
turn
more deeply
the thing in me'd
go
deeper,
farther back,
to be
again
a molecular sentience in primal
soup, the first hot sea, and
rebound
to fling itself
outward
and know wholly
our
galaxies
our
constellar
cities.
Except for some strange concepts like pumping
knowing into sensing, I seem almost to shrink the horizon in
Waking, to focus almost on the single phoneme as I
talk of the phonemic flow and put that on the felt flow of air out of the throat
and through the mouth, guided and punctuated by the goings on within the
mouth.... And so my strange drawing of the phonemic instrument and my
"discovery" of it in the glyphs or "letters", the "litters and scions". That
line is like the keel of a ship, comes out of the throat and on out the mouth,
and the two "collections" of descriptions or meanings above and below are like
the curved up hull and its two lips, coming, really, to be one mouth with two
makings. Odysseus' "ship". Coleridge played it in what Burke called his
"concealed" alliterations.... And in that, we then see the child, or the true
and complete illiterate, as early alphabets come inside his or her horizon,
watching a speaker to learn to talk and daydreaming talking into
a writing (or wrighting).... How could the m-sound not be lips,
and why not then become the m-sound leading off in all those Latinate words for
the sea with it's waves? If it's the sea within.... The poetic, or creative,
imagination....
Nature of the work...
It made a difference in my path that I was opening
to the whole of an innards and not some surface or shell within it where a
discipline has formed and can be taken onboard.... And I learned a larger
discipline, by chance. I looked to see what poets did. And the poets looming
large, of course, from earlier, the ones people wrote about, were Pound and
Eliot. These two did things in their poems, took on jobs of work. The young
neo-Turks wrote about Pound, a vast industry — because you could go into the
Cantos and write a couple books and a dozen or so essays, articles,
poems, and maybe never come out. And the young neo-classists wrote about Eliot,
and job after job, Prufrock, Waste Land, Ash Wednesday. Figure them out? You
didn't have to. But could in almost infinite "parallel"
tracks...
I thought that's what poets did! And I carried that
into even my small poems. After all, Pound, certainly, and Eliot often, did. So,
I wrote Vivisection (not a prison poem in the usual sense), Shaman
Songs (not an Indian poem, though taking up much of what they left in the
continent's soil, Natural History of Woman (about film-making — sort
of) and on and on.... Which explains my "archive", a glass archive
visible from anywhere on Earth.... I am gathering, and annotating, my "body of
work". It's not been read as a body of work. I don't think any of those poems I
just listed, or any others, have been read in terms of what's undertaken and how
its tried. Over the years, maybe, googlers wandering in by unintentionally,
might.
it doesn't matter too much. I'm doing it as, in a
way, finishing up the writing, the daydreaming....
In Waking, I push at some of what
I call the makings. I pick up pebbles on a beech and I hear sounds
coming out of them and I find hyp-gnosis, hypo/hyper-gnosis in and around
them.... The details of that are in the Third Hour. And in that hour, and
in the fourth, I talk of the phonemes as "pieces of gesture", which relates back
to the sensory-motor core where everything is born. It's physical. You
likely knew on hearing where I got the makings as my translation for
poetics (as maker is our translation of poet). The
guys that roll their own smokes. We know now it's dangerous. But there's
something to take from it. I liked the image. We have the tobacco. Something
that grew wild and that we, then, cultivated. Then, there's the paper, an
industrial product, though it was birthed in craft with papyrus and skins
and.... Anything we could mash, dry and get a surface on. To seal it, our spit.
Something we bring up from inside and spit out. But, the human part is
the rolling dance of the fingers.
The closing...
I'm going to close off this tri-part ramble about
Waking not with another prowling around my sea's edge, but with
something simple, more "everyday" (or every night). The sensemes moving around,
blending and then unblending, like Chinese Rings in a magus'
hands....
NIGHT DESERT
Sun
glare left over
out of the dream,
street lamp
framed in the
window.
Roll over, put my hand on
a moist haunch
- sprouts an arm
to pat me
dismissingly.
Mist around the moon.
Rain
tomorrow.
Mist around the street lamp.
Rain any minute.
Sun glare burns
gristle out of sockets;
desert sand
shifts,
flowing
in slow motion
currents
through flesh.
Cup a warm breast.
Evoke a shove.
Keep
changing. If you lie down
among the visions
you'll never get
up.
They'll find bleached principles
along the roadside
or in a
gully
miles from any road
or on gritty flatness where even winds
twist
down into gasps.
The last white bone
catches the glint of light -
moon
- lamp - sun.
The roadside drifts around
always
pointing
another
way.
Gene
Gene Fowler