11/22/02

 

cc: To Skanky Possum because I’ve written the pouch-keepers about Olson’s syllables and directed them to Credo in Felon’s Journal on the Archive site where the poem has one of these annotations. (I’ve even pushed the notion of doing “virtualized” books.) And the usual cc’ers, now and later, that you know ’ve always “bin there” Will I ever move from the letter to the essay? Not until I develop a work-ethic. Getting late for that at 71.

 

Paul,

 

You c’n see why I’ve put my annotations in pop-up windows on the poem pages in the 2002 annotated edition of Fires (Fires 3) and the other books that, collectively, make up my “legacy”. If there’s a paper edition later, these will have to be end-notes. But one thing is possible: Put the reference at the top of the page: “End-note 5, page 234” or whatever. Invitation is to find it before a (perhaps second) reading of the poem.

 

This particular note begins with something torn out of City Hunt. And it heads off automatic thoughts like “This is an ‘Indian’ poem, or a ‘persona’ poem.” It’s just ‘me’ doing some thinking-imagining in a frame of mind that takes in the place, others that’ve been there and left their ghosts, but used for my own talking.... And the underlying thinking, imagining, perceiving.

 

All the notes help in this way as well as by offering context, connections (among the poems), a little personalizing talk a poet might do at a reading. The annotations have to do with the book, not the poems. No annotation on Vivisection. It would break the spell. What needs to be “in mind” when turning to Vivisection is in the note on the title/TOC page (or, more accurately, scroll).  The next poem (new this edition) is Truck Stop Dance (from the 1975 Felon’s Journal, which is also online). The note picks up from that reading and moves forward, pointing beyond this version of Dance figure (St. Ezra).

 

A book, like a poem, exists in a readers head, even if not all at once (except for Mozart). Getting to know a book is mandatory if it’s not just a box. These notes will help. That’s why I consider them a legacy tool. I’m building my legacy as I think Whitman tried to do, sick and dying, in the epilog to that 1892 edition of Leaves. But I’ve time to do a much more thorough job – and tools not even dreamed of at the last “rollover” of centuries.  There are limits, of course, and I can’t write much about what I’m doing in a poem, how I do it. I’ve never done much of that in the letters – for several reasons. Sometimes when writing about other things. When telling of winning bucky’s 1966-7 Dymaxion award for replacement terms for sunrise and sunset, making the new terms not only post-Copernican, bucky’s challenge, but post-Einsteinian, replacing the ubiquitous farmer with the ubiquitous film-maker (seen working even far up the Amazon river), taking suntake and suncut as my terms. Putting the action inside the live human skulletarium. I’ve written that tale often and I’ve told how a poet can’t use such freshly minted terms (even allowing for having to explain the terms). But, what a poet can do is set up for words that will one day be in the common vocabulary. People spoke of the sun setting before there was a sunset. So...

 

...

Afternoon late, fall, earlier overcast
pulled back
and coming on time for a sun cut
by a rearing horizon

no sunset here
sun flashes, sun flooding, sun
pulses
a lessening, a loss of color
the horizon coming in

in slow motion
a series of paintings so hard

brushes are ripped from our hands
our hands
smashed, crippled, made claws

...

 

Making poetry and making language are, of course, the same thing. But it’s no very narrow doing and most certainly is never done “all at once” and, while it’s live ...it’ll never (quite) cohere. Life coheres only at death, and even then it can’t all be perceived at once by mourners or new life. Ain’t that a bitch?

 

The sun rises, travels across the sky, through high noon, and sets on the western ledge, a porch for a hard-working farmer, coming across his fields sets for a spell on. That’s a way of perceiving the world, eh? It’s subtly but seriously different if ...the man or woman takes the view of the sun when the eastern horizon rolls “down” and identifying the act creates an event. We get the film-maker’s “That’s a take!” And, later, “Cut!”, turns the attending to other matters, the day part of the day is done; night’s ahead. It’s human imagination that makes it all matter....

 

Staying for a moment with this old (1966-7) bit of word-smithing (as a poet goes about it), your own hearing will tell you I didn’t just take something that’d work. It “fits” the vernacular locally (Amerish-speaking areas and strata of the globe).... Do a “double take”, or at least “get a second take on it”,  for instance, and “Cut it out!” – bein’ the obvious immediate catches. That’s why a poet ought to be in on it. When you grow words, you’ve got to get roots down into the innards...

...

"All those stones in your poems.
You ever build a stone house?
Like Jeffers?"
Thing is…the words
keep raising blisters on my hands.
...

 

When I came back to this letter a couple paragraphs ago, I typed in that cc line at the top, mostly to tell Hoa and Dale why they’re getting a copy. That got me to thinking about the pop-up note on Credo. As you know, the poem looks like “projective” verse ...though there’s a whole lot more there. The note had to say what and, to some extent, why.  Anyway, I kind of got hold of something that ought to be brought into the letters. A working image, if you want. The gymnast. And that’d be the women gymnasts because you get artistry (in this quadrennium, there are even extra tenths for it on the beam). But for gymnasts, men or women, there’s the one skill at a time and “Don’t rush it!” which is needed as a reminder to those caught up in Olson’s pressure toward the pell-mell charge. That c’n become one of the key “rules”, to the extent that rules are much use. Working images are better. Anyway, since you aren’t online, but do have Credo, here is the note...

 

 

That’s on screen. Here’s the whole text...

 

Credo

I came out of San Quentin at the end of 1959, after four years and nine months, with three years and three months of parole in front of me. By 61 or 62 I'd drifted from Oakland into Berkeley. That's why I put Flowering Cacti before Truck Stop Dance. After watching that highway across the section of bay from the San Quentin gym, I could have found the dawn under the gas pedal at any time, and did. The dancer on the table, though, had to wait until I'd entered a poet's world.
      I ran into poets in Berkeley and San Francisco. In 63 I sat in the front window of the Blue Unicorn coffee house on Hayes Street and Bob Stubbs offered me my coffee if I'd start some Wednesday evening poetry readings. Why not? My friend Hilary Ayer was already getting us some dinners there by baking her orange cake. A lot of poets came around. And a good many of them seemed excited by Charles Olson who'd written some essays on "projective verse" and "composition by field" and "breath" and "syllable". No way I can capture this here in a footnote. The things he said weren't true or untrue. They were ways of talking about how he thought he wrote, I guess. But, they were ways that physicists talked about, fields and such. So, ...there was an imagery hovering there. And correspondences....
      It was an imagery to go through, just as his syllable (distorted "morpheme") had to be passed through to the phonemic flow, the phonemic figures, to get to Pound's musical phrasing (rather than the metronome).
      In short, I began to hum a new Credo in my head.
      Let the metronome go, but not your "felt" beat.... Olson spoke of going beyond phrasing to "forces just beginning to be studied" that integrate as impulse. He wrote (in a quote I just found on the Web), "...get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen."
      Don't hurry it. Like a gymnast, do one skill at a time. Chunk it. Then, fast, slow, it's always full of time. Mark off the relative times. Sit at the center of it.
      Anyway, read Credo aloud, more than once. I mark the phrasing with punctuation and with white space. Take your time, but move like a gymnast, a particular sort of dancer.
      When you're done, let that last figure reverberate, then, step lightly and quickly over into 305 Honda. (named for a bike, a motorcycle). Now, you're back in ...well, not quite the ordinary world....

[Return]

 

Credo is NOT a parody and no man or woman’s work, or thinking about work, warrants parody. Use of the page starts with my counter-pointed systems of punctuation, marks (to include italics and such) and white-space and moves off to include everything marked on the page. Sure, in Credo it’s ...well, extreme. But the imagined and thought determine that. It’s about “fields” so the page c’n be used as a field. The inverse parentheses marks, in “) clusters (” for instance suggests, and you can suggest in sound when reading aloud, a squeezing of the field. Can you count on your listening reader sensing that squeezing, as you read the line or set it in these marks? Of course not. So, do you rush by so nobody will be distracted, wonder, whatever? Uh, uh. That’s the gymnast. Don’t rush the skills. If you don’t want one noticed ...leave it out. Drops the start-value, but doesn’t cost you tenths for sloppy moves and mistakes.

 

Didn’t bring it into Fires, or the later books. It fits into the gesture of Felon’s Journal....

 

Still hoping to push you toward a computer, the Web to see my legacy as I build it. Then, too, you can do some of your publishing online, too. One thing. You’ll need an ISP that gives you free Web space. Don’t go after Web locations that give you free Web space. They bother your visitors by throwing up other windows and ads and all that. I had a great local ISP. CCnet (Contra Costa). Then, Verio bought them. And Earthlink bought them. But everybody has given me the Web space. Earthlink is a good bet. They’re still $20 a month if you buy a year at a time. That was the price on CCnet, though I had only one megabyte. I paid on $15 a month (not $19.95) because April is on the faculty at the college. Verio kept charging me the $15 and gave us 5 megabytes. Earthlink charges the $19.95 and you’ve got to prepay a year – or it goes to $22.

 

You don’t have to know how to write 21st century English, which adds tag-punctuation to the marks and white space. Get Microsoft Word (word processor) and it will turn your pages into html and help you mount it. But if you want to do anything resembling my books, you’ll have to either use one of the heavy-duty html page makers and end with something you can’t read (in manuscript) and can’t fine tune very easily or you’ll have to download my eWriter (an e-typewriter or textwriter), get a text on html (HTML for Dummies is not for dummies but is pretty simple), and read source for my books, even using my recurrent pages as templates (as well as models). Selling a book done this way? Well, you use it to sell the paper book. Or don’t put up the .zip file with the whole book for downloading. Put up a copy to read. You can sell the emailed .zip copy or a CD. (When you get your computer get a CD-R (NOT CD-RW, blanks are costly and you don’t need write-over). You’ll get Adeptac light for burning CDs.)

 

Hey, if somebody downloads the book one page at a time of  “manuscript”, that’s somebody who can’t afford to buy it and really wants it ...and, meeting those criteria, ought to have it. Here’s something 21st century for you. A personal copy of a book of poems. Suppose you download my felons_journal.zip. Unzip it twice in two folders or directories. Call one Felons_Journal. It’s a copy to read. Copy the other into a folder called Felons_Journal that’s a sub-directory of one called Personal_Library. Take the “source” for a page into eWriter (or into Notepad if you  don’t mind massive typing BUT NEVER INTO A WORD PROCESSOR OR ANY SOFTWARE OTHER THAN A TEXT EDITOR OR YOU WILL RUIN IT AND NEVER DO ANY FURTHER WORK IN IT. Plain text. Period. You can put in highlighting, marginalia, popup notes (not the full popup window, just alert boxes). You can even add to the notes in the annotations files. You can put in links connecting poems and places in a poem. You can link to other folders and computers. If you have a lot of marking up in a copy of a poem in your library, you can link to the reading room copy. Then, you can read it without notes from where your notes are.

(An 01/25/03 letter on annotations in the books of poems)

Gene Fowler
acorioso@earthlink.net
Poetry, Archives:
http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm
21st century e-typewriter (homemade):
http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/ew_main.htm