01/25/03
Paul,
Since you can’t go online and read the annotations I’m putting on poems in the editions of the books I’m keeping there ...I’ll sometimes build a letter around one of those “annotations”. This one is on The Experience Maker in Return of the Shaman. As a mini-essay on poetics ...it’s about as mind-hooking as I can make it.
The Experience Maker
The Greek name poet translates
into English as maker. Usually another word is affixed, as in shoe-maker
or watch-maker, but the poet is simply maker. What does e (he or she)
make? Poem-maker would sound kind of silly:
"made-thing"-maker. Actually, the poem is made of pure language, pure
communicating, speaking, thinking, imagining. What's truly made is
something beyond the crafted poem. Yet, it is singled out from all our talking,
speaking, reporting....
Thinking about what I was trying to do in a poem, and how I was trying
to do it ...I felt my best name for the poem was "a crafted tool"
and what I was making beyond the tool was experience. Not "an experience,"
...but just flowing experiencing, much like that in moment-to-moment
living. Still, edges, contours, shaping movements are built into it.
A maker, then, with e's (his or her) crafted tool, the poem
written for a listening reader, and e's poetics. The poetics, to
me, were imaged by the makings of the smoker who rolls e's own. The
tobacco is what grows wild and then is cultivated. Then, there's the paper,
that's man-made. Roll it up and seal it with spit that comes up from the
innards. Finally, there's the rolling dance of the fingers.
A few have wondered, from poems like Cosmic Language (one of the walking
poems in Fires) and The Experience Maker, and maybe from what
I've just said above (I've said it before), that I might tend toward solipsism.
I don't. We make our worlds, our universes, ...but we don't make them out of
nothing. In The Experience Maker, I tell of the void. It is
casually assumed to be The Great Empty, a nothingness, out of which everything
is made or at least comes. That was the best we could do, in early times, with
"a void." Now, we have Chaos theory. "Chaos" is rooted in gas.
So our void c'n have some sort of graininess to it and a potential for
turbulences.... We're coming to know that out of chaos, emergent order is the
perfectly natural and always occurring next thing.
We make our worlds and universes, ...but not out of nothing. This view of a
larger making would seem to come only from my sensibility as a poet and, in
recent times, getting support from cognitive science. But what of all of us
making Universe, the one we share? Here is Bucky (R. Buckminster) Fuller,
geometer, defining Universe in his book, Synergetics. "Universe is
the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated
nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences." That
"nonsimultaneous" catches Einstein's echoing sense of space-time
fields. The polysyllabics is a cost of the precision Bucky demanded of himself.
Besides, they're fun on the tongue as soon as you toss off any sense of
intimidation.
A poem is a focusing device, like the magnifying glass you c'n use to start a
fire in some dried leaves to, then, add kindling to...
For all this hinted at aura surrounding and permeating the poem, it's basically
a slightly ribald, deliberately light-hearted romp through poet's
"personal" history. Compacted time may reinforce that sense of
solipsism, but that's just a poet's dopplering....
[Return]
This is the second annotation I’ve sent you. The first was the one on Credo in Felon’s Journal. In a sense, each annotation must stand alone, but in another sense they are a single writing something like the epilog Whitman added to his last (1892) Leaves of Grass. He titled that A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads. Well, my annotations are An Outward Glance o’er Consider’d Roads.... Outward subsumes backward, of course, and a whole lot more. The idea is to wrap contexts into the poems and around them and into a “binding” constraining them all into some sort of an integrity. Not just a collected works, but, to the extent I can, an integrated works.
There are some poems, not necessarily the larger poems, for which I could write a half dozen each of these mini-essays. There are “universes” to open up around single lines. Take the XIth piece of Vivisection as an example.
XI
My knee tastes salty. Steel wall
Against my side tastes acid cold.
Knee,
buttock,
Shoulder, ear. Touch this shaggy beast.
We denizens darken and somehow dream:
I squat among my clothes
Before the fire; fire's tongues
Echo among the ruins; Night
Laughs; still I decode
Dead concepts, tracing formal
Symbols forever to know
A dead man. I see no sign
Of his world. Do not know him.
Morning light falls dead on the tier.
We stand to the bars - dream only of food.
Forgotten, the paleontological task and
Night fade and are lost; every morning
The task is lost. Such
Furies as we know shall
be set upon thee.
There are three kinds of lines here. Two are marked out by the use of italics. The second marked off group are parts of what the courts said ...in my head. The first holds something of the night’s dreaming. The main set of lines, beginning and end, are steel-hard lines But what of
We denizens darken and somehow dream
Strange (in this poem) words, denizens...? Darkening...? Already the hypnogogic dream stuff preceding sleep, entering sleep in the darkening.... ...and somehow dream.... Beyond the sense, the line itself. Among free, vernacular speech there’s now a line of hypnogogic imagining and within it the ancient Anglo-Saxon alliterative four-beat, the heartbeat, the primal cellular pulsing deeper than a heartbeat....
A single line, moved over as if you were a shadow of something passing, all that within the line within a few stanzas within a long, segmented poem. How would I work this into an annotation? Yet, it represents something different, and useful, in a poet’s kit of makings. But the annotations won’t hold that kind of shop talk, though it’s shop talk for readers, not just writers. This kind of shop talk has to do with what, since the mid-sixties, I’ve called the fourth job of the poet. The familiar three are : entertain, inform, and transform. that applies to all aspects of the poem, the whole working. Take the formal aspects. For people who write, and truly read, sonnets, the sonnet-form’s handling c’n be entertaining. Transforming someone? Well, we go beyond just moving a reader, force our way past the emotional shift with its elasticity, it’s return, and affect attitudinal change. As you likely remember me saying (even over and over), the fourth job is for the poet to take a listening reader, or a listener at a reading, with e (him or her) through the writing or making of the poem, of the experience beyond the poem. The challenge is to take a reader of XI above through that line quoted above to the dream and have that listener experience something of the hypnogogic descent and the somehow dreaming, affecting the dream read. That is where the crafting of the poem enters in. That’s why in Waking the Poet I talk of “...deep-seated crafts usually called ‘talents’”. What chance do I have? Well, as I say in Waking, we’ve all learned something, at least, of the poets’ crafts just from what’s around us all the time, even as we all learned to speak, at least prose, even before formal education in it was wrapped around us to squeeze us through the twelve year Jupiter’s orbit....
Whether it’s rap-talking, lyric singing, ad-copy, mag-pages, we learn, or at least see and hear, all the tricks of phrase handling, of rhyme and subtler sound patterning, of mid-phrase breaks (line breaks), of white space or silence, and the internal materials projected into silence or onto white space, the mind free’d and pulled back.... Any “stepping stone” into writing as though you’re doing the fourth job? All I c’n suggest is the way I’ve always written when making poems. Have a sense of moving through the lines. I sort of do this when writing any kind of language. It’s why I’ve always imaged punctuation as trail-blazing markings, helping the reader pace e’s (his or her) following. It’s why, in that annotation on Credo I countered Olson’s effort to induce spontaneity by rushing with the admonition not to hurry it. Work like the gymnast, do one skill at a time. Watch a capable gymnast and you see all the spontaneity you want, but it’s well punctuated and it’s only at the punctuation marks that you see the movement changed from what was anticipated....
And I savor the flavors. After some steel-hard lines , moving into that we denizens darken ...and somehow... dream..., “felt good” on the tongue.... Some won’t be able to follow. It might sound as though I’ve gone poetic on ‘em. Sigh! I still have some training of that reader to do.... I shifted reality on ‘em, that’s for sure. It’s up to me, my best try, to move ‘em along by what I’m saying, what I’m imaging.... So, maybe, the line works in the innards mostly after that listening reader has moved on into the dream. Coming out of the dream is just a break.
Morning light falls dead on the tier
Well, the night’s dark light, too. Has anybody ever read this line this way, or heard meaning in the shift of diction and that Anglo-Saxon 4-beat chant heard briefly “under” the line? I don’t know. I read that every time. When I read it aloud, I hope a listener c’n hear it in the very timbre of my voice. On the page it’s just potential. As my friend Jeff Duntemann wrote, when arguing that the macros in Microsoft Word (a word processor) documents that virus-makers exploited were a bad idea in any case, "A document is a program that runs in your head. A document that requires arbitrary code execution to be effective in that role is either a sign of weak skills of expression on the part of its creator ...or a cover for something darker." That's the “Breakpoint” essay ("A Deficit of Stupidity") on the last page of the May/June 99 issue of Visual Developer Magazine. I’ve put in italics.
A program that runs in your head.... Well, programs don’t just run in computers, though in fast, easy conversation, such as Jeff’s article, that’s the layer of what’s happening to describe in getting on to his point. The computer, with some prior layers of software, run the program. The program cues that running. And that’s where we find what’s useful in this image of the document, whether manuscript or typeset publication or mediaset outcasting (broad or narrow). We decode or interpret what we’re handed and, for the most part, we do a rather minimal job, to get some main line of meaning.... We all speed-read or speed-listen. Largely, we divorce reading from listening – which is one reason I’m always crying out for a listening reader. This doesn’t mean I’m composing “oral” poetry and writing it down as a way of mailing it to a listener. I want a listening that uses ears and eyes together, that uses all our senses to ...listen.
We hurry our reading, mostly. In poems, when it’s there, we read the rhythms, but as content, not as cues for our reading. A reader might detect the Anglo-Saxon beat in that single line in XI (above), might later even think about it, wonder why it’s there, but shift the way, and pace, of reading? Or take the line as a river crossed, so that the lines within the dream are, themselves, read differently than the lines before that rowed across river from mythology...? Many talk about writing poetry as something different from the other writing they do. I’ve never heard (or read) of anyone saying that reading poetry was something done differently than other reading, of the two “ways” of reading being carried to the other sort of material. No thought that reading, at least of poetry, might be somewhat akin to, say, ...reading music. People reading poetry aloud will take some clues, such as line-end rhyme, even to becoming sing-songy, while ignoring line-end “breaks” or white-space “holds”. Sigh! You know that you need a musician’s subtlety. A strong line-end rhyme-scheme requires a softening of the rhyme sound, letting it rest in the tapestry of sound and, if syncopating, the line-end breaks, the white-space holds may require a little exaggeration. To read music you have to become something of a musician. A musician doesn’t just pick up a piece of music and read it, but reads ahead while reading, catching the cues and executing them in the reading, reading the end result when, say, conducting an entire orchestra or playing a single instrument.... To read poetry, you have to become something of a poet, even of the poet you’re reading. Or at least be sensitive to the cues.
By chance, I had a special training. I knew from about age eight that’d I’d end up a writer, but between then and around age thirty when I drifted into bein’ a poet and not much of anything else – I never did pick up touch typing. I could type fifty, sixty words a minute out of my head so I’ve never needed touch typing to do my writing. I’m only peripherally watching the keys, mostly watching the paper or screen. But I’m very conscious of the letter-by-letter and of that as my sub-vocalizing phoneme by phone. It’s little wonder that I came up with the melopoeia as I develop it in Waking the poet. The phonemic instrument and phonemic figures, one example of would be the tiny melodies compressed into chords in the multi-key phonemes. In a word like “rough” I hear the “f” at the end, but I also hear the “gh” (from other words) as overtone or, in this case, undertone.... that’s where I got into the rhythmic playing of the keyboard. And to the present sense of attacking upcoming notes, of playing the “notes” as they come up for playing.
Most might not have that help. And maybe it’s the older, formal poetry that c’n suggest that something’s up in the way flow is set up. My use of flow c’n sound strange. Most think of the forms of language as static frameworks, of punctuation as boundary marks, but I talk all the time of punctuation as trail-blazing signs and that’s why pulling in the tagging used in e-text, semantic punctuation that c’n tell you that the name written into the text is an employee of a particular company: <q-company employee> Harry Smith </q-company employee>.... Those start and end tags won’t show in the typeset copy, so it’s information that is only in the manuscript copy or a reader’s head. If you read aloud from manuscript ...that’s “typeset” copy. If you read in your head the sounding of the poem skips the tags, but you see them, they’re part of the knowing pumped into the sounding, the sensing.... Does this seem exotic and new? Reading has always been like this. The listening reader is not just sounding out, probably by sub-vocalizing, the poem, but taking in more than e (he or she) might get from hearing somebody else read aloud, though there, too, e gets “more” and “different” than the person reading aloud may deliver, and there’s more of that than that reader intends to deliver. But, if you’ve got that reader who reads the music ahead and plays it – well that changes a lot.
Anyway, you c’n see that I’m trying to involve a reader in the subjective world my poems come out of. I’ll include just one more annotation here. I added Vision flight at the end of Fires for the new edition and added an annotation, the last of the book. So, you’ve three to look at. The one on Credo (in the earlier letter), the one on The Experience Maker (above) and now this one. An annotation has the same title as the poem it’s attached to, but that title becomes the title of the essay, too.
Vision Flight:
