|
On punctuation: As anybody my age was, I was taught about
punctuation in some strange ways. I remember being given sentences
and paragraphs with punctuation removed and carefully inserting my
best guesses. This does not lead to a dynamic sense of
blazing a trail for your reader and because my stubborn nature
resisted the training, I came to write my eTypewriter,
eWriter,
treating even html and xml tagging as punctuation. But I've a different rebellion to cite here. Remember the old rule which, looking at current literate writing I see still holds, which says about quotes embedded in a sentence, and at the end, that periods or commas go inside and question or exclamation marks go outside, as do colons and semicolons. Think about it. It's crazy. The rule should be that punctuation, any punctuation, that's part of what's quoted goes inside and that punctuation, any punctuation, that's part of the wrapping sentence goes outside. And you might need both: "...where will you go?". The question mark inside and a period outside. I felt my way for a number of years and I suppose I'm not completely consistent even now that I've thought it through. But mainly, I now put what marks quoted material inside the quote marks and everything else outside. If I appear "uneducated", so be it... |
| These essays, though published in a sense, are un-"edited for publication" or are raw text. One day I will come back through and edit them, probably doing some rewriting. Reports of typos or obvious wrong words (that the spell-checker accepted) or questions about sentences from which you were unable to dig out any sense, arriving by email, will go on a stack and be very happily received when I sit down to do that editing. You see why I speak of textwriters rather than the more familiar text editors...? Writing is a more stimulating task than editing. |
In the huge June/July/Aug 1998 issue of Jeff Dunteman's Visual Developer Magazine, I had a letter in the Dialog section. The caption was: Outloading Patience.
I'm picking up Dialog's paper-screen-patience thread but looking beyond the "where is reading easiest" musings. We live in a world where content to be read will be everywhere on everything. Reading can't be passive now, and the reader has to think about preparing the material.
For starters, print it on paper. Every browser, mail program, and text editor prints. Color ink-jet printers are cheap. Beyond that, rework the content for your screening and printing. A long text letter in Eudora? Copy to a text editor, slap HTML, empty HEAD, and BODY tags around it, <P> between paragraphs, and BLOCKQUOTE around quotes (remove all ">" or add <br>). Read or print from a browser.
Web pages? Save View Source and rework source for your reading of what's displayed. Chunk pages. Rearrange and prune. Use color and size. Put in markers and marginalia. Set up your reading — just as you now head for that favorite chair and lamp and highlighter.
Use active and "doubled" reading. Work with the "engine" (manuscript) and "interface" (displayed) copies. (In Eudora they are collapsed into one.) Add notes and headings. And, yes, print both copies. Take a little time for your preparation for a "main" reading.
Patience isn't out there. You outload it. Some situations seem more inviting than others. So, work on the situations. A reworking of materials is your initial overview read. — with a vengeance.
The architect of that mail manager you've called for can add tools for this kind of reading, as can browser, text editor, and word processor makers. Content producers can write "into" this new way of reading.
I'd begun building a homemade typewriter in 1996. I called it PocketPad (pcketpad.htm), a 16-bit "replacement" for Microsoft's Windows 3.1 Notepad. And in 1997 I'd started building my 32-bit 21st century e-typewriter (ew_then.htm), eWriter (ew_main.htm). I was seeing the Web as something beyond paper and a new way of writing for this new print. I knew everybody else was thinking from the viewpoint of the publisher and editor. Look what they called their writing instruments. Text "editor" and word "processor". They looked on the HTML tags as a layout artist's page markup. I saw it as a writer's new punctuation.
The writer and reader use very inclusive text for talking and thinking. The writer is talking to a listening reader and the reader carries that talk into thinking. That's the activity I described in my letter to Jeff.
A new way of reading. You get right down "into" the page and exteriorize much of the thinking you're doing as you read. A new way of writing. Whole systems of punctuation opening up for use. and a reader who re-punctuates, in a sense, to work into his or her reading. I've been primarily a poet since the early sixties and have always used interlaced systems of punctuation. Our familiar marks and, then, white space. I use line breaks and white spaces to force phrasing and multiple "readings" of a sequence of words. Read The Transfiguration and then think about what those last lines say about what's carved and how. I always used (from the appearance of the Selectric typewriter in 1967) italics as a form of voice shifting, as punctuation. I did this earlier, of course, in poems for publication. But the manuscript was always uncomfortable in my innards, with underlining and the margin note to print in italics.
These new tags, with semantic content, well,....
Jeff had written an editorial about The Patience of Paper and that led to the letter I repeat above. That was what underlay the virtues (or some of them) of paper. But I was probing at the idea that it wasn't paper that was patient, but our response to paper. We can project a similar patience with this new substance. The reference to outloading (and inloading) to replace uploading and downloading comes from another aspect of my recognition of this new substance our Web is woven of. We've got to consider the "sense" our words carry ...and use words that carry the best sense possible.
All this enters into the sense of purpose that drives my archive-making.
Return to IndexI'm not setting up a Web site to simply make my poems available in accessible digital form or to show off my poems and some of the three million plus words of "letters". The poems do not form a "collected works", either. Nope, this is an archive. There isn't a formal definition available to express why it's an archive rather than a "works", whether collected, selected, or other. It might be simply a feel, a heft, what's here has for me. A subjective thing.
In a sense, too, it's a very different, 21st century, kind of archive. The differences matter. My work is in many archives of the familiar kind, some of which I know about. All my letters to Bucky (R. Buckminster Fuller) are archived at the Buckminster Fuller Institute because Bucky kept all of them beside the Chronofile which included only selected ones relevant to the Chronofile's time-line inclusions. I don't know of other collections of my letters or of correspondences including them of that sort. But, my participation in the small press (literary) revolution of the sixties and seventies is captured in many archives. Mostly, it will be publishers' archiving of their presses activities. Paul Foreman's Thorp Springs Press archive at UT-Austin and A.D. Winans' Second Coming Press archive at Brown University come to mind.
If you had an interest in archived writings of mine, or those of anybody in these archives, you'd have to find out what archives the work was in, go there, go through some procedure to gain access, and, after all that, probably feel constrained by scholarly needs and not at all free to rummage around and come upon poems or chunks of thinking held in letters.
Coming upon a poet's work by chance requires you to hang out in book stores or to pick up magazines that include poems in an issue. From the point of view of the poet, the chances aren't great that any particular poem is going to be stumbled upon frequently enough that the poem is likely to come unexpectedly into the hands of somebody who ...well, truly benefited by coming upon it just then. Yet, every poet, writing each poem, has fantasies of that happening cooking on some back burner.
But, ...the poems, the bits and pieces of thinking, in this Web archive? All those wanderers in Google (and other search vehicles) may bump up against a poem, a page from a letter, in contexts that will frame the bumped-into with a context that provides a door. Suppose you have, say, a geologist's interest in the substance obsidian. And you've heard of research at UCB (UC at Berkeley). You put "obsidian" and "Berkeley" in Google. You get papers on this research and notices of lectures by the researchers elsewhere. You also get my poem Obsidian, about an all night walk in Berkeley, on a page from Fires. The opening lines (on the Google page) draw you in. When you come out, the substance obsidian is, itself, a "doorway". Picking up a piece of it, holding it on your palm, looking into it ...forever changed.
OBSIDIAN
A pilgrim's processional
"your poems carved from obsidian"
A way of telling me
I have the Evil Eye.
. . .
Night is 300,000 steps
on spongy knees
under broken lips and icicle nostrils.
Dawn is pale piss.
Everybody out and hurrying, hands in coat pockets.
And it's warm enough
to sleep on wet grass
dreaming a woman's warm belly
and smell of breakfasts
while ants crawl in my eyes.
Uncarved obsidian.
Of course, the archive itself is accessible and its "entrance" is itself likely to be stumbled upon in all sorts of Web wanderings other than those hunting for it or things like it. It's housed in a glass building seen from anywhere on the globe.
The books of poems, the bulk of the letters, are from the sixties and seventies. The "archive" is centered there. The work and the world lived and worked "in" as I experienced it make up a whole captured in the archive. That's why it is an archive. That's why I even brought in the covers of the books and why I did not "collect" the poems, but kept the structure in the books and the sequence of books. The feel and heft of the books are part of the story. I did not open shrink-wrapped copies, but scanned the covers of often read copies. The cover of The Quiet Poems was on ivory-white and the jpeg on the site catches a look of weathered ivory ...waking a sense of time lived through....
My world captured, then, centers in the period 1963 1983, two decades in the last half of the 20th century. I was, without being overly aware of it, oriented very much toward the "rollover" into the 21st century ...as a continuation.... For instance, in The Quiet Poems I named a section of the book after a poem within the section, Zen 21. Often, more subtly, I wrote from a later sensibility. In Return of the Shaman, I have a poem, Doubling, in which I slash and burn the easy attribution of shamanic abilities to (psychic) "powers". I get a bit ribald, as I often did in my shamanic moods, and in the end I create what high schoolers today call "freak dancing", though I caught what is in the kids' subjective experience, not just what the chaperones see and are shocked by. Of course, they'd be more shocked....
My present day participation, apart from and "above" my using current letters among the included materials (because they are in digital form from the beginning) is the annotations I am adding to the books, inserting them as pop-up windows attached to particular poems in sequences of poems. This "annotation" is somewhere between the comment I might make at a reading and what I'd write in a lit'ry "memoir" of the poems' birthings. Not like the rather peculiar footnotes Eliot added to The Wasteland.. But perhaps somewhat more like the "epilog" Walt Whitman added to the 1892 (last) edition of Leaves of Grass.
I believe that, quite by accident, Walt Whitman produced the sort of archive for the rollover from the 19th to the 20th centuries rather like the one I'm feeling my way toward here. His epilog had some of what I put in the annotations and in notes like this one. If Walt heard me just now and agreed, it would be because he thought he was grabbing for a feel of Americans working, writing poems about the different jobs and places where the work was done. But that is not what I see as the common and defining thing. His was as personal and individual a "horizon disc" as mine. His main titles tell us that. It's his subjective world.
He didn't have to gather up his books, let alone scattered individual poems. He'd published only one book ...again and again. Leaves of Grass. That, too, made it something of an archive, updated with rewritten and added, and possibly dropped, poems. He wasn't so much getting single poems right as getting the collection right. Anyway, I see a parallel and, deeper than that, I see an approach to writing, a way of writing, of which that's an aspect. Walt wrote a book that would be an archive. And something in the fiber of the writing was already 20th century. I'm writing a "web" that will be an archive. And the fiber of the writing has been, for decades, already 21st century.
This will show the difference: Remember Walt's line, when he anticipated being criticized for not always being the same, "I contain multitudes"? Well, I add something to that in Who - 2 with...
& I contain
multi-
tudes,
e-
tudes.
Listen, the melodic figure.
WHO - 2
Who, your quizzical eyes ask, are you?
A fair question, but
roshis ask, gurus ask, all
those wise old teases
ask,
go find a self, and bring it back
alive.
So how do I answer
you -
answering the roshi, easy
enough -
but you don't want to know
the self
is only a style
& I contain
multi-
tudes,
e-
tudes.
Listen, the melodic figure.
Who am I? - to set my work up as a model archive at the roll-over of
the century marker? Would somebody else do as well? Probably. Would
anybody with a body of work do? No. Whitman did it accidentally and
certainly would have thought it was his content, his writing about
American life, about working men. So maybe Studs Turkle should be a
source. But it wasn't content. It grew out of his making new
editions of his book instead of a series of books or books of
"selected poems". He re-worked poems. And, for that last edition
when he knew his life was to be measured in months he wrote an
epilog, not a foreword. I don't know if he ever wrote a foreword. My
guess would be he didn't. There's nothing to say to a reader except
in retrospect.
In any case, the Leaves of Grass I think is there may be a
figment of my imagination. But there are characteristics that will
come out as I describe the intent and method behind my archive. The
major ones involve being conscious of what you're doing, having, if
you like, a sense of your poetics, which I call in English,
The Makings - and having more than "a sense" of the poems as
fitting together. When I was feeling my way into poetry, I was a
little older than others around who were also doing this. They'd
talk of wanting to "find their voices," one each. I'd answer that I
wanted my book to seem to be an anthology. I knew I couldn't escape
my voice (myself) and wanted a little elbow room in it. Now that I'm
annotating my books of poems in this archive, I try to assist a
reader in seeing the gestures and suggestures running
through a sequence of seemingly quite diverse poems. It's the
central thing this archive is about.
My publishing of poems runs from 1963 through 1981. The work isn't
more than in Leaves and is probably less. It's not in one
book and resists being so collected. The main book was
FIRES: Selected Poems, 1963-1976. Before that were four
chapbooks, Field Studies, Shaman Songs, Her
Majesty's Ship and Felon's journal. After Fires
two more books came out, Return of the Shaman and The
Quiet Poems. A fair amount of redundancy (reminiscent of the
"editions" of Whitman's book, perhaps) and meaningful structure or
organizing of poems. This held true when I'd have groups of poems in
magazines and anthologies. Anybody who came across my work was
likely to see poems he or she had seen before and others seen for
the first time. Always, I tried to "force" a reader (given a reading
of the poems in order) to have some inner querying of "Why these
poems here at this time?". Many poems, and then books, were
sectioned. Fires had no sections and the sequences of poems
were threadings through the book. Paul Foreman, writing the
Introduction, pointed to some threadings. All this enters into why
my work lends itself to being the sort of archive I have in mind.
What I'm trying to get hold of about the work applies more
importantly to ...well, I guess you'd have to call it the
subjective world of the poet. It comes to our cumulative
"making of our world" by pumping sensing into our knowing and
pumping knowing into our sensing. To really understand what I'm
saying here, grabbing at images to do it, you'll have to read a
handful of my poems and get a sense of my world. It's not separate
from me. It's alive. Language, thinking, imagining, perceiving,
acting, feeling, what-all ...can't be sorted out. This world is a
coherent whole. And that makes it a usable core for such an
archive to grow around.
I grew into this as accidentally as Whitman did. I just wrote the
poem at hand, though always with awareness of the other poems close
by. From the mid-Nineties, Paul Foreman, expecting a literal El
Dorado, has talked of, again, of publishing (Thorp Springs Press). A
first (or second, now that his Feather River is ready)
project would be a new Fires. Actually, that'd be Fires
3, since there was a Fires 1 before the 1976 book which
Paul published after Grove dropped it. He envisioned it taking in
the content of the other two. He'd write a new Introduction.
I began looking at everything. And the books, the chapbooks, with
redundancy that wasn't repetition, "the work" just didn't easily, in
my innards, come apart for re-gathering. I decided to see the
book, then the books. I put together Fires: Selected Poems,
1963-1976 in html'd text. Not just poems for the Web, but a
virtual book. The only way to see it. I typed it in my home-
made textwriter (proper translation for typewriter). I brought back
a few poems from the other books, but only a few and that redundancy
worked as it always did for me. The "later" books were not gutted.
and Fires was not changed, just completed. But I added to the
title: 2002 Revised, Expanded & Annotated Edition.
I did something else, too. The book was "in progress" in a sense,
because those annotations (somewhat akin to Whitman's epilog) were
a large task. I was attempting to catch the context, my subjective
world, and help at sensing the threads and gestures. I zipped up
copies of the book for downloading and dated the package. So, I
called the book e-"bound galley proofs". I'm fiddling with a
visitor's subjective world. I wrote about that elsewhere.
Recently, I've been bringing the other books and now even the
chapbooks up into the online segment of the archive. Annotations are
being woven into all of them. The annotation on the page is a live
thing. If Paul does a "paper" Fires 3, I guess they'll be
end-notes. Less live.
All else on this archive page, still called fires.htm, has to do
with the surrounding "mind of the poet". In the sixties and
seventies I wrote something over three million words of letter. Jim
(James K.) Bell, a friend from before 1963, saved carbons for
decades and, then, gave them to Paul. They are now stored in an
adobe-brick building in Folsom New Mexico where Paul owns a pair.
Paul has talked for decades of publishing these letters or at least
selections. Whether such a thing will ever be possible remains an
open question. Fuzzy carbons full of typos (I assume)? All these
will quite likely have to be the stuff of legend. But, I've typed
letters from the late eighties in digital form. Recently, too, e-
mail. So, less energy, even "lost' knowings, ...but some readable
ventures in thinking. Useful for the archive.
Return to Index
Just passing through. Going
some place of my own
but a job along the road to do.
What is it? Well, I sing
the song
at the right ear
it'll build the
new City.
From The Experience
Maker
in Return of the Shaman
Some will look for poets who live lives like their own and might
have a little specific wisdom to offer or be their "voices", saying
things for them. Others, or the same people in other moods, will
look for poets who've lived very different lives and perhaps brought
back more exotic wisdom or, at least entertaining, provocative
tales. I can probable offer some of both. I've lived a life very
much within my time and culture. My basic world is pretty much the
common West Coast American worked. After a stint in the army (During
the Korean war), I got into trouble and went to San Quentin Prison
for armed robbery (not mugging or anything of that sort). I
served almost five years inside and just over three years on parole.
I came back to the Bay area, to Oakland.
I drifted from Oakland into Berkeley. that's a quick way to sum up a
subjective thread in the tapestry of on-going life. And if having
been in the army during a war (not in combat, being on Okinawa
during the Korean conflict) and in prison (with an interval getting
there, doing armed robberies in the central part of the state) all
seems a bit exotic, this "drift" was another kind of exotic.
Through people, I drifted into world in which people made music
rather than listening to it, painted or sculpted or, generally made
art, rather than purchasing it, and wrote, read aloud, and sat in
public places thinking out loud. Call it a bohemia.
The world shift, of course, was subjective. The world was made up of
different materials than it been before. To focus on a specific
difference that was to occur for me ...reading poems becomes
something quite new when you've begun making poems. I'd
thought from childhood that I'd likely grow into writing. But, to
the extent I thought much about it, I guessed it'd be stories. Not
poems. But I'm lazy. and I was coming into a world among people who
worked on the "intense moment" in a piece of improvised music, a
painting or sand painting, ...a poem. I was coming into a poet's
world. So I made poems. I did it like people around me were making
music, paintings, sculpture. I wasn't writing so much as
working language.
I can offer a live demonstration here, but it might take you a few
days or years to grasp the innards of it. You can go for a look and
come back. You go now and then, again and again, while you read this
entry in the journal. Felon's Journal is a 1975 chapbook, not
my first and pretty much my last before I got some square back
books. It's on line here. The gesture of
that "drift" into a poet's world, in which earlier poets as well as
contemporaries are among the usual suspects and the live poems made
and to be made are present, a subjectively altered world. The
"journal entry" and the poems and the annotations linked from
some of the pages together may give you glimpses (even on a
first reading through) of the world I was coming into....
Anyway, that's a nudge toward a reading of that small group of poems
from here. From anywhere else, what's in Felon's
Journal will likely be quite different. This is a condensed
book, a chapbook, meaning not a lot of pages available for it, so
some of the shifts, from one poem to another, c'n carry a lot of
meaning as shifts. The annotations help.
My life and worlds, then, might be entertaining, a bit exotic, or
interestingly outside your own. But if I lived down the block from
you, came out of a life duplicating yours pretty much, write about
what happened on that block (as Emily Dickenson wrote about what
happened in her father's garden, presumably) it'd be pretty much
what I've written, anyway. That's assuming I made the same sort of
subjective shift, of course.
Maybe you've experienced moments of ...well, call it negative
space. The spaces between people and objects come into the
foreground and the objects and people drop back. There's a
well-known gestalt trick drawing. You see a white goblet on a black
ground. Then, if you've a quirky way of perceiving or somebody gives
you a nudge, you see two faces in dark profile facing one another.
But if you're sitting in a coffee house a description of such a
moment in your life among people can get a little strange. Out of
the strangeness, though, you c'n dig new ways of perceiving. Here's
the moment. The title enters into it, too.
QUESTING
Among the tables
in Caffe Mediterraneum, air
is brittle, pebbles
of sound shatter
light into
a strobing pulse beat
and I look through this toward the women
hunched over tables, cups
protected by circling arms, or
flopped into chairs
or perched on them.
The air thickens and dries between strobing
flashes, light is momentary
tunnel openings - and to send
my voice through would be to see
it arrive as a twisted, garbled howl,
not discrete, shaped
phrases.
To walk from one table to another
is to become tunneled through, shattered,
one with the dehydrated air.
Locked into my seat, I look
through the dazzling flicker of tunnels
at faces, their flesh gathering and drawing apart,
squeezed and stretched and pock marked by
the pulsing light -
and the forest I hunted through
is now alien to me.
I've forgotten how to visit
the maiden in
the clearing.
Sometimes the sense of "communicating" with people seems like that.
The world I drifted into from downtown Oakland where I had some
cheap hotel tickets from the parole office and your world c'n meet
at a poem like this. What I found was a coherent world, call it a
real world, if you want, where I could expand awareness and, then,
work with language to make something from it.
It was a poet's world, which meant that, relative to the
everyday world, it contained much of what mystics, being oblique,
have called the invisible, intangible, and inaudible. A subjective
wholeness. People who've spoken in print have been perplexed by some
of my poems, or by what they think I might be doing.
One writer mentioned my Shaman Songs together with
Hiawatha. A wild stretch if you've read both poems, or even
skimmed the two. But being perplexed can be an emotional experience.
And what was anybody to make of Shaman Songs when Len Fulton,
Bob Fay and Andy Curry, publishers of dust magazine and
DUSTbooks, brought it out as my second chapbook? It's different from
anything in Field Studies (my first chapbook) and the scatter
of poems in magazines. Is it some kind of "persona" poem? An
"Indian" (American) poem? A poem about the Native American
experience? It isn't any of those things. Even what starts as a
light or skim reading should dispel any thinking along that line.
It's exploring what I c'n work up through language within my
coherent poet's world. Now, if you go to
Shaman Songs in Fires, you find an annotation at the top
of the page. Click on it and it brings up an annotation window and
note. You can see a picture of the note
over the poem. The note begins with a (visible) extract from another
poem, City Hunt, about reactions to Shaman Songs. The
songs are not auditory postcards. The journey through them is not
travel over surfaces. If you're given to musing about poems,
wondering why a given poem is ...given, wonder about what tribe(s) I
sing from, to, and for.
This is what a coherent poet's world is "about".
The fourth job of the poet.
If you've looked at my book about the crafts of the poet, you know I
think there's a poet, capable of making poems, in just about all of
us. It's a "next" way of working with language and it's been
growing wild and on its own from the beginning. As a result, I have
a notion about what I call the fourth job of the poet.
The first three jobs of the poet are pretty well understood by
everybody and have been written about a lot in different phrases and
images. Entertain, inform and transform. Most think entertaining has
to do only with content. But, to craftsmen, another's craft can be
entertaining, especially when innovation is managed. A sonnet-maker
can appreciate another's sonnet-making, particularly if the
sonnet is, then, The_Sonnet_Maker.htm
and hidden. Every aspect of the poem, then, can entertain or
fail to entertain.
A poem informs. A poem has layers (to grab an image here) of
meaning, strata of meaning, and every meaning is, or can be, packed
with knowledge, with experience. All you get from it
can be known to you already ...or it can open new vistas of sight,
new musics of sound, new gestures of feeling, new lines, or systems
of lines, of thinking, imagining, perceiving. All this is pretty
widely recognized in one way or another.
The poet's third job, and the final one, rarely done to anybody's
satisfaction and therefore an ambitious goal or a fortuitous
happening, is to transform a listener's or listening reader's
feeling and thinking, that person's attitudinal nature. We say a
poem moved me. Usually, this means feelings are roused, but
those feelings aren't just raw emotion, they're attitudes carrying
emotional charges. The "moving" can be weak or strong, transient or
...well, escaping the elasticity that brings the moved person back
to old positions. This is transformation.
What could be next?
If that special language-handler, a poet, a bundle of sensibilities
and capabilities, is to be wakened, a key exercise might be
to engage him or her in the making of poems and, if it's to
be done through the poem at hand, to make the reading a leading
through the ...well, writing's the name we'vbe got.
I brought up Shaman Songs above and included a link to its
page in Fires and a link to a picture, showing the annotation
over the preface or Shaman Song 0. Given that, you
might go to Shaman Songs, read the whole of that annotation
and go into the poem. Read lightly. Read as you might to be
entertained. Let being informed, or even transformed, take care of
itself. After you've finished, or even after you've finished a poem,
or sub-poem, like #9 or #10 - go back through a sub-poem like that
and feel your hand grasping a pen, or your hands on the keyboard, as
you, in your head and heart write those key passages, finding
the next phrase, image within your self, your lived experience. It
isn't easy. A poet doesn't read another poet's poem from the center
that way very often.
The fourth job, then, is to take a reader with you through the
writing, or, closer to the reality, ...through the making.
Language had to start somewhere. There had to have been a single moment when symbolic thinking insinuated itself into the stolid mentation of the animal world. Perhaps it began with that most basic of all human gestures – pointing.
The Alphabet vs. the Goddess
Leonard Schlain
1998
I've been thinking, day-dreaming and writing about this since the
early sixties, even working it subtly into poems, apart from the
obvious inclusion in that metaphor is a form of pointing and arguing
a form of pointing out. I talk about pointing directly and
indirectly. But this began elsewhere.
In the late fifties, Bucky (R. Buckminster) Fuller came into San
Quentin to meet me and talk to the handful of us who attended Norman
Harrington's Saturday morning "General Semantics" class. It was what
now would be called a think tank. Norman had begun as a guard and
worked up to inside parole officer. He's started because he thought
Korzybsky's work was worth implementing – and that he'd begin
with people at the bottom of the barrel who had no where to go but
up. He fought obstacles. He couldn't bring in Korzybsky's book. Some
rule. So, he tore it into chapters and made pamphlets, which he
could bring in. Shortly after Korzybsky's death, Norman attended a
GS conference in the east. Bucky was the keynote speaker. Norman
went up to him after his talk and said, "You may not believe this,
but we've an inmate in San Quentin who talks very much as you do.
This was overly generous, to be sure, but in spirit, not wrong,
though I had never heard of Bucky. I was pushing at language, not,
say, at geometry or modeling.
Bucky talked to us for just under four hours when he was forced to
quit because lockup was scheduled. The warden and is crew were
miffed that a celebrity had come in and not wanted to be entertained
by them. H was there to talk to people at the bottom of the barrel
who were thinking. At the end, Bucky invited me to
correspond. I was blocked from that by another (never enforced)
rule. You had to have known somebody for some minimum time before
going in. What a way to encourage new associations.
Anyway, I became interested in hand-built models and vector
geometry – a geometry of pointings. Many thinkings and day-
dreamings grew out of this, in many directions or dimensions.
But I was still fascinated by language, by how we named, imaged,
spoke of whatever we named, imaged and spoke of. How we spoke. At
the end of Synergetics I, Bucky had a paper he called
Numerology, after the pseudo-art of seeing meanings in
numbers. For instance, "4" has a meaning of stability. Why? Very
likely because a good, solid 4-leg table is stable (on a good floor.
Anyway, Bucky figured "4" might be stable because the twice 4-
marked tetrahedron (4 faces, 4 vertices, six "edges") was the
minimum so-called 3-D system and was, indeed, one of only three
completely triangulated (surface) systems that were, indeed, stable.
He saw this, too, as a way to connect number and geometry or
shape.
I worried about this, or "at" it (like a dog with a bone). It was
still, in my feeling, a chance or arbitray connection. Something was
taken up that had the number as a count of one of its elements or
aspects. Table or tetrahedron. Numbers showed up in counts or
measures and any number could be found all over the territory. Why
get characteristics from a thing that had such a count and assign
them to a particular number? Bucky's paper wasn't about this or
getting the table's stability into a better warranted object, and
until you've read about Scheherazade numbers, you've not lived....
But the idea that there was some way to connect our numbers and our
pointings wouldn't go away.
Since I was, as Shlain would put it, alphabetically literate, I
found my way in the glyphs we use for letters and numbers,
particularly what we think of as the Arabic numeral glyphs. I found
the origins of vector geometry and, for that matter, trigonometry,
in those glyphs that I came to know as hand signs. And here
was the connection between the counting, and accounting, and the
shaping and multiple-pointing that yields spatial organizing.
I'll only sketch the drawing, or story, here. I start before the
entry point I found. The Roman numerals and the well known tale of
the marks we make to represent, perhaps, fingers. Four and then one
across to make a block of five. The stylizing into Roman glyphs used
for numbers. The I, II, III, IV, V.... I think we've viewed this as
static marks, not dynamic actions. In one of the entries above, I
talk of how I, probably you, were taught punctuation, certainly
not as a dynamic action, blazing a trail for your reader. So
those marks were fingers? U, uh! The same finger, over and over. The
counting. I, I, III ...but skip, then, to V and X. The IIII isn't
written. Rather, it's V minus (or back) I, for IV. You can count on
your fingers through four. For five you want that "pointing" laid
across the four, and you can view it as point-finger and thumb. Not
the thumb back across the four. Just the crotch of closest finger
and thumb: V. That's the handful. Then, to back down, you'd let the
thumb go and have the four fingers up. In the writing, you keep the
crotch, but put a finger-off. Beyond five, you start on the other
hand. So, you've got two hand-crotches, wrist to wrist: X. Two V
glyphs, point to point.
The Arabic glyphs, looked at as also fingers ...have an interesting
characteristic. The fingers tend to be connected, at least 2 and 3.
So, something of the palm is there inviting cardinality as well as
ordinality. Most of our fonts show some palm on the 1, as you see
here. But as originally brought into Europe, there was no palm on it
and it was drawn horizontally. A hook denoted the tip. It was a
pointing.
It was a free point. Just a finger (hand sign for what would
in action be a whole arm pointing and guiding the eye of another. No
sens of a "here" being pointed out of. No sense of this in the
pointer or e's (his or her) companions. Attention directed and
thrust outward. But these glyphs came not from accountants, but from
sailors. Out on the water. Pointing out the direction of ripples and
current, pointing to things on the horizon approached or approaching
or as reference for some lateral move. Later, there will be a sense
of the horizon disk, of a here, and the replacement for that
free point will be the 6 (not the 9 for subtle reasons). Look at the
palm of your hand. Extend the pointing finger. Now, fold your thumb
across not to count five but to let the thumb-tip mark the center of
your palm, the center of the here. Draw a line from that
center, out around the ball of the thumb and out along the pointing
finger. There's your 6. If the 6 marks your sailing out, the
9 might mark your later sailing in. Inversion as a concept.
Representing counts, though, it's almost as though one glyph is
representing two numbers, tying them somehow to divergence and curl
(to borrow a pair of concepts from "the calculus"). What is 0? I'd
guess the closed fist, all fingers folded under the thumb marking
the center of here. All the potential pointings. The chaos
out of which order will emerge.
With 2, we get "duality" or reference. There's a headland and a
reef. So, point to the headland with two fingers (both arms). And
rotate one out to point at the reef. Two lines out from your center.
A crude trigonometry. Angle is birthed. With a simple sense of the
triangle, distances between far points can be guessed at. Turn this
on its side and you've a sextant. With 3, you c'n point between the
two. 7 is the dog-leg. Query, in the noisy sea (with breakers and
all). 3 or 7. Sail through or out around? Bisect the angle. 4. Used
to be open at the top, but that convergence was suggested and came
into fonts. Put your four fingers out with a little spread. Mark the
palm-center with your thumb tip. The four fingers of unequal length
can be viewed as two 2s. A line out from palm-center with lateral
lines on those two 2s converging define a complex pointing
using an invisible line. Abstract pointing, brings to mind
mental charts and the potential for drawing a navigator's course
plottings....
The 4, whatever use in the beginning, embodies the notion of complex
pointings, of chartings. But that dreaming, eventually an
attainable daydreaming, was always there. Unlike the Romans
with herds and warehouses of pots, these old sea people would load
up there boats with all they could carry and head off to where the
other clan-half was, unload everything, have a party, load up with
all they could carry of what was there and head home, reading the
tapestry of the sea's surface and the things appearing on the
horizon and, at night, the great drama in the sky, marked with
visible and invisible pointings.... No accounting, just
navigating.
Memory and the dream of chartings. In the 4. So, what of the 5, our
hitch-hiker's sign? Originally, the thumb was bent forward, not back
over the shoulder. It was a pointing. We've abandoned the palm and
its center. This is more like the fist, the 0. But the thumb doesn't
hold the fingers in a tight coil. It seems to point up out of them.
The fingers are stacked coils, like the ship-board ropes in
storage. Static stacked "here"s. Uh, uh, the rope is dynamic,
coiled, not stacked. Circuits made, experiences of the navigated
gathered, coiled up in the hippocampus. The life-tale or tail. The
Devil's pointed tail, in another imagery, though its drawn
at the wrong end of the spine. Anyway, pointing the way gone
before. The full hand, and a count of five, can be shown another
way. Spread the five out. It's half a horizon disk. So the two,
wrist to wrist, yield the whole horizon disc.
So, we've one left. 8. Looks like those coiled circuits "unfoled" so
you have (a token) two laid out. But, as a point, what have you got.
The two fingers of the 2, but crossed. The hex sign, so the 6 is
involved, maybe as a line defined by the two, the cadeseus. The
currents and the course. The far circuit is open. The past
and the future in the uncoiling...? Why not.
Here's a picture of the hand signs.
And for another telling of the
tale...
Rather than adding another link, I'm dropping in a fairly long block
quote—which you may choose to skip over. I've pulled these
paragraphs from an August 2004 letter to Kirby Urner. It was a long
letter on "open sourcing" code (exposing source code to users so
they can modify it), and exploring my brand new notion of "open
sourcing" concepts. I went on to redo my explorations in
systalk, making some new headway in implanting these new
concepts for the "polyhedra" into our cognitive innards. Then, I
said, "The other thing in my Bucky pouch...." And I went again into
numerography and finding the birth of both number and geometry in
our human hand. I give it all very compactly and swiftly and even
find a new sense, a very human sense, of what the "stability"
represented by 4 probably is. Not the stability of a four legged
table (the old numerologists' image) or the tetrahedron (Bucky's),
but ...well, you'll have to read the quoted paragraphs for that...
The other thing in my Bucky-pouch, the putting together of number and geometry, making numerology numerography, image rather than logic, and letting the image grow didn't need an edifice. Dropping in something on the level of fourbod [a precursor to sixsys] was sufficient. Bucky's paper on Numerology certainly doesn't stop at letting "4" represent stability because it references the tetrahedron rather than joining numerologists in using the idea of a well made table (discounting the necessary floor). He goes on into modular numbers and Shahrazid numbers and.... All things beyond those children and me. I look for the joining of number and geometry inside the child or me or you. It's not in the models we make so much as in our making of them. Both start with pointing. The birthing of both number and geometry is in the point. The action, not the target. Roman numerals. Each point(ing) marked with a slash, no doubt being a Cheshire cat's "finger". Iteration. So the Roman's made that an I. For five of these (a handful), the crotch of thumb and first finger, V. For 10, two of those, wrist to wrist, X. For a (comprehensive) hundred, round the finger and thumb, suggest the horizon disc, C. For a thousand, two fists, knuckles to knuckles, M. Oh, those subjective origins are buried in something thicker than the fogs of time and cognition. All gesture, and suggesture, is lost in eerie, E.A. Poe-like buried casks....With all our phrases, like pointing out what the other fellow has missed, or getting to the point or moving from point a to point b... Well, you'd think we were conscious of just what our basic skill is. But, as with punctuation, made up of points, we let it deaden, go solid and static. We think a point is ...well, what you draw with a dot. Like the Roman strokes. A point is in fact something done. Coming to the point isn't coming to an end, but to a whole. You're going to have to contemplate that for awhile. And think about what contemplate says: With the template. Uhhhmmmm. See what I mean about our language(s)? How much in them do we actually hear or actually read?
Soooo, along come the Arabic numerals with mysteries gathered from Greece and Indus Valley peoples and, maybe the preceding "red" men and those old sea folks coming up out of the southern waters. And people see, hinted, in the first numerals, at least, a connecting of fingers. The 2 and 3 show this. So, we think of "serial" group numbers. But, wonders the player in toy room, what if those numerals came up from those sea-folk and were something else? We still have our landlubber sense of number and while we see the hand grasping, something the Romans didn't see it doing, we don't yet see any pointing beyond that simple iterated pointing to count. No geometry. Just number. Sure, Kirby, you know where I'm headed. Ed doesn't. And I don't—because it might come out differently this time. The Arabic numerals when they first showed up had a horizontal 1 and there was no base, no hint of the palm. On my machine, the 1 I just typed has no base, but most fonts put a base on it. It's always vertical. But keep that original in mind for this reading. The 2 and 3 show the palm and the 1 does not. This is key to understanding or substance. what is the palm?
I figure the palm is the horizon disk (in this manifestation). For the old sea people, that'd be pretty much the here. Assuming yourself in the hand of God, it'd be what's graspable. So let's take that 1 the Arab travelers carried into Spain and Majorca. No touch of palm on it. And let's assume that maybe all the numerals could be laid out horizontally or lifted up ...toward the zenith. So with the 1 let's take the 6. I'd venture a guess that 1 was a free, unselfconscious, point. All attending is out along the point to the target. Here is just undifferentiated feeling. But take the 6 as a way of pointing. Looking at what just printed on my machine, I'd say straighten out that "finger". Suppose this is a map of the palm. You draw a line from the center touched by the tip of the bent thumb (I can't do that so well, anymore) along the thumb, around the ball, and out along the pointing finger. Now, you are pointing at something from an awareness of here.
The 2. Point at the headland with two fingers (probably arms, in practice) and rotate one out toward the reef. Or turn your hand on its side and use the horizon and something in the sky for your "doubled" point. Here's the birth of trigonometry. In the hand. With the 3, you chart a channel through the two. Unless you think there was an Atlantis with an almost telepathic advanced civilization rather than just humans like you and me lying on rafts at night, with no city glare, looking at the wondrous sky and its patterns and dynamic patterning and remembering how it was last night and last year and last eon, you might think that from here on out I'm lost in fantasy and not detecting resonances. The 4, drawn open at the top, like four fingers or closed at the top as in the one I just typed (on my machine), the same message is there. Take what Toby Danzig called our "old" words that go over the etymological horizon, like four, for, fore, far, fare, foresight, fear.... Spread the four fingers. You've two 2s, angled. Draw two lines at the forward edge of the two 2s and have them cross. Now, "see" a line from the center of here out through that crossing point.Remember, each of those 2s is an "arc" in the horizon disc. This might be one hell of a meaning for the stability of "4". It's the steady aim!!! It's humans making stability, and using it. No table, no polyhedron, nothing is anything like it. (At this point, we may pat one another on the back as truly fabulous critters.)
What of 5, since 5 is always thought of as the essentially human number? Spread the five fingers (the thumb as finger, not being moved in opposition) and you've spokes to half the horizon rim, modeling the view width, I suppose. And using the Roman wrist-to- wrist we'd get our ten spokes to the whole rim. But the 5 is no such hand-sign. It looks like the hitch-hiker's sign. In a sense, it is, though the one the Arabs brought to Europe pointed forward over the curled fingers, not back. The hand, then, is sort of the bent thumb pointing out of the curled fingers. The fingers like a sailor's coiled rope. But, also a stack of connected heres. Or the sailing of known or past circuits. Pointing the way ...out of experience. Then, 6, the simple point again. Now, all those coils are melted down, integrated in stored knowing, and it's just the here the old sailor points from. 7 the dog-leg point (to avoid pirates). You point around, in effect, into an arc. 8. The pointing into the sea-sky with crossed fingers. Not for luck. Close in is the completed circuit and farther out is an open circuit ...the unknown, with the known piloting. The 9, the inverted 6. Pointing into here from some other here or this here earlier, pointing a return. The 6 and the 9. The twins. And the cipher, the 0. All the potential pointings, curled inward, into a fist....
That's geometry in the hand. We know about number, the iterated pointing, the sized graspings, in the hand. How are they "unified". The ordering of the pointings. I took the numerals in their familiar order. But the pointings fit into that order. Whichever you consider, number or geometry, the order of the glyphs makes sense. Any piece of the order introduces sense. Why 7 before 8. 7 suggests an arc, a turning, and 8 generalizes to that "unclosed" circuit. And these come between 6 and 9. Is this just my fantasy? Of course...!
I'll start this with a very long epigraph of sorts. The first paragraph was in a letter from a friend who'd just been reading my Waking the Poet. It explains itself. A little farther along he said, "Strangely enough, my poet seems to be attracted these days not to the writing of poetry but rather to the writing of prose." This sentence was actually in my thinking as I copied his earlier paragraph into an editor and drafted my reply...
"At first, I was very frustrated with WAKING. Rather, frustrated with myself because I seemed to be unable to stay with it. Then at some point I realized that what was happening is that my poet was taking over and pulling me away from the text. I’d hit on some intriguing thing in your text and my mind would just grab it and run and I somehow suspect that this is akin to what you were aiming at with the seminar students."You can find a lot of starting points if you're going to talk about how we make poems or any other live thing in language. I'll start, here, with the idea of the phrase. We c'n pull it out to look at by thinking, here, of it as the free-floating phrase. Just handle it a bit, as if you're a jazz musician, wandering around on your instrument, in this instance, language. You c'n do things with that phrase. Play it through, repeat it, hold it up in the middle, let the suspense become tight, then finish it. You c'n break it, then pick it up again tacked onto the front of another one.
Yup, what kind of guy would I be if I said I was talking to wake folks up and, then, when somebody WOKE up, get bothered about it? Waking is a seed pod (where seed is a past participial form of see). But I keep talking until somebody else pops awake...and so it'll go for the next hundred years or so until Amerish passes too far beyond Amer-English for folks to follow me.
Sure, the poet c'n want to write prose. I don't know how many words in my poems, but I've over four million in my letters.... Waking is only sent, sometimes sold, to people who think they want to write poems and are reading what people have to say about that. Read the first paragraphs of the Foreword and you c'n see I'm saying that poet is there in everybody, at least in our culture. Any lit'rit feller (or lady) has read poems, somewhere in school or The New Yorker (well, ...). Old fashioned ones. They've got shapes. Then, in Harry Potter stories they likely get "spells" in verse. The magics. Seeable, hearable. Even when it seems to throw away those frames, just being phrases, they come in lists, the eye tumbling down the page, then, some pulled back into a single line, and that one breaking in mid phrase, some moving out from the left, out and back, like a trombone slide....
Now, all them people drawing on the magics writing EVERYTHING. In ad copy, it's all on purpose, and someday all the innards and outards of po'try will be everywhere, just part of the language, aspects of literacy, and an actual made poem will be a matter of emphasis. Maybe that's how it is already, though a book of poems c'n at least be a quiet place.
in my opinion these lines [in Primer -gf] can easily be made into long lines, you're only using them because short lines = poetry. Those jangling Victorian hymns used the IP as an ornamental kind of thing because feeling had become bound up with form. It isn't, of course. [emphasis added -gf]If you're making lines from "feet" or "syllables" or any other counted element, I suppose, then you indeed have short lines or long lines and really long lines which, in a word processor or the browser you're using now, would be paragraphs, each paragraph having only one line-break. The browser "breaks lines" softly at the window edge as well as where the line-break tag is in the text.
/ - / -First, there isn't a binary system if it's read with some life. Degrees of accent? Oh, yeah. No two are equal weight, and it's always relative weight with all else that's gone on, moves from whisper to yell. Their is "drop under" stress as well as "rise over" stress. Then, there's a problem with the "like" in line two. "Just" and "like" are both accented with non-metric weight because a "saying" is being articulated.... The accenting built into the language, the pronunciation-accent, is being meddled with....
Name the poet.
/ - / = / - /
Just a man like other men,
- / / - = / / - / - /
a man, maybe, who loves more than he is loved
/ - /
while alive.
/ - / / - = / /
He is loved, later, when no cost
/ - / - /
enters into it.
What about that comma before "maybe" and another after it? An empty syllable in each spot? – or nothing affecting stress except indirectly? Don't answer too fast. Remember my writings about all punctuation as not marking types of pause so much as blazing a trail as you pause and do things backstage, set up after-pause movement. The comma may be a pause, a rest, a change of location – in "placing" your voice. Everything you do becomes intertwined with everything else you do. You can't "ignore" these commas in gathering your stresses into groups (feet).
- / / - = / / - / - /
a man, maybe, who loves more than he is loved
The other poet callingNow, let's pull out the haiku:
back
over his shoulder,
the voice cut loose, drawn thin,
wavering, snapping past my ear.
Gone. Missed.
A strange wind-eel, wavering, curious, vanished.
The silent wind-eels crawling like ropes
over my forehead, thru my hair, down my neck.
Vanishing.
Wind-eels edging around my glasses, pulling
at them. Testing my vision.
Crawling into my eye-sockets, changing the shape
of things seen -
the shape-changers, the wind-flowing
& sounds of rice-paddy girls
& distances.
the wind-flowingVisually, I have 4-7-4, but, if you can read the poem, caught into the rhythms of the wind and bike that the poem embodies (and sings about), you feel the "missing' syllables, coming out of that comma and, then, "cut short" and held in the wind at the stanza-break. So, 5-7-5 – by feel. In the flow of the larger stanza, accents are read, syllables are stressed or not, stretched or contracted, and it's within this that those "empty" syllables fill up.
& sounds of rice-paddy girls
& distances.
A preface of sorts
My two entries immediately above and one to follow make up a set
that I call Prosody in a new key. "Key" may not be more than
a place-holder concept. Just about everything discussed as having to
do with prosody has something of the static about it. Measure may
suggest, depending on how you use it, measured movement. But
even that is thought of in a static way. My sense of what prosody
ought to be about is dynamic, and at the front-edge, the right-now,
of movement.
I've sought to break not the sense of measured pacing, but
the fill of only filling in the larger picture. You could say, I'm
caught in the slightly comic battle between "free will" and
"determined" (externally) willing. This is why I use present-, not
past-, participial nouns – especially when I want to liven up
elements dealt with as plurals. I speak if thinkings rather
than thoughts. My greatest explicit battle is for a
reconceiving of what we're doing when we punctuate. We are
not marking off, but are blazing a trail so that another may
travel the same way.
A comma isn't a pause only or
necessarily at all; it doesn't mark off a segment of the trail. It
marks a shift the writer is going to make and, then, may mark off
something, as that's part of the going. what follows may come out of
a pause. Whatever it is, a speaker makes a similar mark vocally,
though sometimes it may be so subtle you'd think it's in the
thinking, imagining, going with the speaking.
I'm an old man, far away from my k-12 days, but I suspect that
punctuation is taught as it was. Rules are applied (and they are
useful) that have to do with structure. A "subordinate clause" is
set into a sentence within a pair of commas. And a reader's voice
will shift in delivering that clause. In my homemade e-Typewriter, I
help a writer think about moving into and out of a sub-clause
by making the key combination Ctrl+Comma type ", |," – where
"|" is the insertion point, where you type after keying Ctrl+Comma.
Ctrl+"(" gives you both opening and ending marks, the insertion
point between them. While moving you do not "forget" that you are in
a subordinate clause or parenthetical remark. I call this
frame punctuation. I even have "input" punctuation, so you
are asked for content to go between or within tags. So, I am
not opposed to "the big picture" and structure. I couldn't write
without this sense of where I'm writing anymore than I
could write without a piece of paper under my pen tip.
Remember, though, that teacher handing you a paragraph with no
punctuation in and asking you, and twenty to thirty others, to fill
in the punctuation. Not quite five-letter code groups. Clues in
words like "which" and in caps to open new sentences. Recognition
is enough or at least guides "figuring out". The over view is all.
And the knowledge is a knowledge of structure and rules.
Using punctuation as you write takes a related but
different know how than what I guess you'd call editing.
When writing, and dropping into a subordinate clause, that lead
comma out there in front of you, and some further punctuated
decision points (at least a period) are close-in and farther-out
goals or take-off points. You sense, in a punctuational sense,
where you're going – more or less. Sometimes you go
elsewhere. Sometimes you have to ...well, back out (while maybe
spinning a wheel in soft mud).
The bulk of my writings on that 21st century
e-typewriter, eWriter, focus on this way
of thinking about punctuation. Since eWriter is used on the Web, I
have "html" implemented in it. I introduce html (hypertext markup
language) not as page mark-up, a graphic designer's concept, but as
punctuation, a writer's tool. Just as Ctrl+Comma types
", |,", Ctrl+I types "<i>|</i>" and you type the
word or phrase you want shifted into an italic voice.
In the three neighboring journal entries, I go into prosody
in that same spirit or way. Ezra Pound wrote of the musical phrase.
He understood dynamics within the poem, if anyone did. But he spoke
of the phrase. I think, and speak, in terms of musical
phrasing, which doesn't mean I'm a musician and know how to
do that. It's just that I naturally take a different verb ...al
sealing up. It's active, it's on the front-edge of process. And
moving into language, I think "metrically" in terms of "the phrase"
or phrasing and handling phrasings (okay, "phrases" in most
discourse, to seem not too odd).
So, my three pieces on prosody are "The free-floating phrase",
"Playing with the beat – laying down accents" and "The line
break". You can see from my titling tendencies that I want
the making (poet is maker) free'd up and kept live.
Now, let's back out and start over and think about book
binding and what is a book and where does it live?
Book-binding and the "unbound" book
I wrote my "typewriter" before I thought much about writing for the
Web. I thought textwriter was a good translation of
typewriter, but most would say "text editor". They live in worlds of
secretaries and editors. When I implemented html as punctuation,
those others would say I now had an "html editor". I figured I still
had a textwriter, but you could tack on an e- to get etextwriter.
It's still for a writer, not a typist or editor.
Writing for the Web had a profound effect on my sense of what I was
doing when I was writing. When you write a manuscript to mail to a
publisher, you visualize the typeset and printed copy
and even do some marking on the page. For instance, you underline
text to be set in italics and mark italics in the margin. Anyway,
the manuscript, after some editing, goes off to a typesetter. You
might see galleys but you won't see the real result until the work
is published. Using eWriter, I see my manuscript in the screen over
the keyboard. I save to a file and, on my Tools menu, select a
browser and click it. eWriter opens the browser with the .htm file
from my "active" (top) window already in it. I see the "typeset"
copy. Immediate feedback. It c'n change how you write....
More subtle in its effect on a writer is how a Web page is made in
the browser. It might be better to talk of Web scrolls than of Web
pages. Pages have to do with cut sheets. What we see on the Web will
be of a piece and, if printed, will be cut into pages. Unless it's
only one or two short paragraphs, you will scroll down the
"page" and back up. It's more like what was stored in the
Alexandrian library than what's stored in the Library of Congress.
Still, page or scroll, it's made "on the spot" by the browser.
In a print shop all the "elements" to go on a frame are made in
blocks and, then, are caught and held in a tightly compressed frame.
Then, it's inked and pressed against paper. The copy is put on a
stack. No frame in the browser. Everything is linked in. The
user can, by clicking some links on some pages, change what's
on the page. But, that linking in of page-pieces fascinated me.
This archive's core is a number of my books of poems, with pop-up
annotations instead of end-notes, and with book-pages centered in
Web pages. I have a table of contents for each book and clicking on
the name of a poem will take you to it's page. I even have links for
going straight to a section in a poem. At the top and bttom of each
page are links for going to the previous page and the following one.
At the top I have links for the annotation, if there is one, and for
returning to the TOC.
All this registers as a very book-like "book". How is the book
bound? No sewing, stapling, or gluing. It's held together, in an
ordered together, by those links. The two ends of a link is a
kind of stitch. How do I talk about this in a way that will
"hook" a human mind, spread this insighting, let the implications of
this light-weight, tensile-strong way of binding a book, for a life-
time or for a day, with variant forms of the book, gestures, easily
formed.
A name for this kind of binding flashed in my mind's senses. We've
hard- or cloth-binding. Stitched signatures, cover boards and
covering material, glue, of course. Then, we have the paperback
book. A stack of pages is pressed tightly together. The "spine" is
covered in glue. The paper cover is wrapped around the spine and
pressed tightly. This is called "perfect"-binding.
Text you can move around in, using links, is called
hypertext. that gives us the "ht" of "html" (the "mt" is markup
language.) The obvious name is "hyperperfect"-binding. I'm trying to
employ phanopoeia here and cast in your mind's eye a picture
of that peculiar stitching together of the ordered pages of a book
within which you can navigate by clicking on the stitches.
Sink this picture down into your (cognitive) innards, and it'll
loosen up your imagery of the other forms of binding. In your mind,
perhaps, even the hard-bound book, in massive leather covered
boards, c'n be seen in your mind's eye coming apart not in a pile of
materials and pages but something like the exploded diagrams in a
Automotive Repair Manual. The pages c'n "float". One c'n zoom up to
you so you see the poem, or at least its layout on the page. As a
Web page can throw up an audio or video file, a Web or book page, in
your mind's eye, can throw up some experience involving the book or
poem from your memory.
Your head holds the "unbound" book, though it's not
unbound, really, but bound by association within your
cognitive works, with dissociating and reassociating easily
working on it. Books within books can be pulled up, sequences
or gestures, and these can be pulled out to be broadside or
anthology sequences. You can read or write the "unbound" book.
I'll make this third part the last of Prosody in a new key. Links
back to the first two are at the end. I'm not sure I'll stay with the image
key, but it does keep to the musical capturing of the dynamic, so
it's the best I can do for the moment. I was kicked into this third part,
the idea of line, line length (using any "unit") and line break, by somebody
writing to me about short lines vs. long lines and about the unsophisticated
(or ignorant) thinking short lines = poetry. My initial response to
that was, "Huh?" It had never occurred to me that line length (along with
position on the page) wasn't a variable to work with within the poem.
If lines were approximately the same length (using any "unit") and stacked
along the left margin ...that was for an effect, or a bundle of
effects.
Pound said (my correspondent keeps pushing me to provide authority from
others for what I do), "Poetry that strays too far from music ... music that
moves too far from dance ...," and all sorts of dance exist, the only limit
being what the body will do in a local time and place. Yes, there's a beat
and rhythm, a measure and at least "felt" marking of it, but there better be
variance if anyone, dancer or reader-of-the-dance, is to remain
attentive....
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or al poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.If you've read anything I've written in the last couple decades, certainly since I worked on my home-made eTypewriter and took up html (and xml) tagging as punctuation, you know I feel the same way about prose, even the quietest prose. I'm not a "rapper" or a "break dancer", but I will do a little break dancing with line breaks. I'll do this in prose, too. To be effective in prose, the break has to pass over a paragraph break and be welded (so as not to seem a printing error) with a pair...
Ezra Pound
ABC of Reading
1934
The point is that people send me work and the lines are too short, the lines also end on weak syllables, and the line breaks cut across sense.I spoke above of all the potential "roads not taken" (and one, thereafter, taken)when a comma is laid down. The writer's questing mind, given free rein, will "sense" more than one of those paths, will choose among them even as each is full of mystery, fogged by time not opened.
Complaint by
a correspondent you'll
meet in the next section
2003
Down the dark halls ofIn English's felt iambic beat, here are line breaks falling again and again on, or after, weak syllables: of, as, ing. And even the break on disTURB, though on an accented syllable, seems a strange place to "suspend" the flow of sense briefly. If you read aloud, and preferably the whole poem, you will feel those breaks as cumulative "hesitations" in the rhythm....
her house: you will do as
I please –
nothing to disturb
me – I saw her wanting
to say.
from The Landlady
in Field Studies
----- Original Message -----
From: [ Poet currently doing an eZine ]
To: acorioso@earthlink.net
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 3:52 PM
Subject: Re: THE ENGINE
The point is that people send me work and the lines are too short, the lines also end on weak syllables, and the line breaks cut across sense.
Eh...yuh! Most people writing poetry, even the trained and experienced, think, mainly, of expression, not of crafting something. Nothing wrong with this. There's no set of rules (about what you're going to do with your poems) for applying for a "poetic license".
People will send their expressions to editors. If you're looking for craft, or sensitive to it, or its not being there, you will experience some sorrow. I'm not sure what a "too short" line would be, figure that ending on a weak (unaccented?) syllable might be to counterpoint the line break to the "ride over" foot (a concept I don't often use, this "foot", but useful for this thought), but the line breaks cutting across sense gets at something.
The line breaks, not long or short lines, together with "white space" are a form of punctuation, and you can run it with or against the "marks" punctuation.... You might want to cut across sense for a special effect, and, of course, to catch the breathing of emotion in saying the poem.... What's missing is a control of how the white-space punctuation is working, on its own and with the marks punctuation and just the natural punctuation (unnotated) in our used English.... This is all encompassed in the notion of phrasing....
Out of split rock
blue geyser
climbing the air,
dropping back
coming again
water panting
and broken chunks of rock
riding it
dancing rocks
and wild cat-
aract.
Five miles outland the river
snaked,
headed
for the flat oiled sea.
Down through crevices.
Under the oiled top water.
And in it -
(from Xanadu, in Fires)
These are basic faults of beginning writers, who often think that poetry is all about short lines, the shorter the line the more inherently 'poetic' it is. Long lines are great, and can be bound together easily through alliteration, the basic characteristic of long lines in my view.
All the "tying together" goes deeper than alliteration, assonance, rhyme, ...down to the phonemic flow and, there, in our musical phrasing, to phonemic figures.... This is where your "in spite of" working c'n take hold, where the natural crafting does or doesn't take place.... Take the simple, seemingly teachable – something like alliteration. Look at my chunk of Seafarer [part of the letter omitted here] above. Think I, or you, anybody, could do that flow of alliteration on purpose. You get that by allowing the phonemes, working with the rest of your "deep crafts" down in the cognitive works, to search and find.... That gets you the next phrase with its anchoring words....
http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/Waking_TOC.htm will get you to my notes on ...well, I guess maybe, "prosody" of a sort....
----- Original Message -----
From: [ Poet currently doing an eZine ]
To: acorioso@earthlink.net
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: ADDENDUM
in my opinion these lines [ in Primer -gf ] can easily be made into long lines, you're only using them because short lines = poetry. [ Emphasis added. -gf ]
Guess you mean Primer.... You missed, or ignored, the point in my notes in the first reply. I use line breaks as punctuation, along with white-space, and I use them in the particular poem in no more rule-driven ways than I'd use commas, ellipses, italics.... I know, most use those forms in rule-driven ways, too. Remember the grammar school teacher telling you to plug punctuation into a paragraph in which it had been removed - to learn the rules for doing it. BUT ...if you use your commas, and all else, to blaze a trail as you go you'll find a different sort of driving rule....
I call the poem I dropped in Primer. Like first readers for kids. A handful of words, big print, on a page, usually with a picture. So, why don't I use big print? Or images? I don't recreate a kid's primer. I suggest it. You've gotta follow my suggesturing ...and stop letting line breaks bash you upside your head.... They must feel like the ruler some teacher slapped your hand, or your temple, with.... Is that really what you read when you read a poem? The line break doesn't do anything to the "delivery"? Try aloud, read it like a comma that just doesn't mix with other commas - for a start. 'Course, it's got be more "nuanced" than that.... Short line, long line, paragraph ...what difference do you think it can make?
A tape-measure ain't a useful writing tool. Short-lines = poetry? Hell, LINEs don't equal poetry! If you've gotta find bed-rock, short of the phonemic flow, well ...it's in the phrasing. That's what a poet's got to work with, his or her "sense of phrasing" (chunking) and everything else is punctuation (which ye need to phrase).... Even the deeper stuff is punctuation, but it's built into the language as you speak it....
Consider the variety of cadence and verbal tone in the opening lines of "Floating":The subject is prosody, ...so the urge is to begin by seeking a count of stresses or syllables, more subtly, maybe, of durations of syllables.... And to seek regularity.
Our canoe idles in the idling currentFor all its rhythmic diversity the lines do not vary beyond nine to eleven syllables (two thirds of the passage is comprised of hendecasyllables); there are four or five stresses per line, mostly four. Yet by unstrained employment of different punctuation, enjambment, and variable balancing of syllabic stresses Rexroth invokes in the reader an actual physical feeling, the sensation of being in this idle canoe, buffeted by irregular, lazy currents, exhausted but alert. It is a remarkable achievement of form, and is carried off with effortless sanguinity. The final four lines constitute such a balance of differing weights--the second line triadic, the third of almost equal proportions mounted on the fulcrum of that comma and balanced out from the middle by the repeated "songs, songs"--they can be compared to a Calder mobile. [Emphasis added –g.f.]
Of the tree and vine and rush enclosed
Backwater of a torpid midwestern stream;
Revolves slowly, and lodges in the glutted
Waterlilies. We are tired of paddling.
All afternoon we have climbed the weak current,
Up dim meanders, through woods and pastures,
Past muddy fords where the strong smell of cattle
Lay thick across the water; singing the songs
Of perfect, habitual motion; ski songs,
Nightherding songs, songs of the capstan walk,
The levee, and the roll of the voyageurs.
For all its rhythmic diversity the lines do not vary beyond nine to eleven syllables (two thirds of the passage is comprised of hendecasyllables); there are four or five stresses per line, mostly four.The line as an entity, as something marked by a line break, is defined not by that line break but by the "regular something" it isolates, though he is forced to accept approximations.
Yet by unstrained employment of different punctuation, enjambment, and variable balancing of syllabic stresses Rexroth invokes in the reader an actual physical feeling...Morrow runs into an insoluble problem, of course. Four or five stresses, nine or eleven syllables? It's always been a problem and in formal analysis it'll be taken care of by "substitution" of feet, necessary to apply these metrics to any lines, even those in which the "parts of speech" (words) are moved about and twisted out of position and the spoken "shapes cut in time".
It also helps to appreciate that lineation, as a dimension of MELOPOEIA, is an important agent of meaning. To break a line is to break a rhythm, and since rhythm is meaning it follows that to break a rhythm is to create meaning.That meaning c'n be, even if subliminally, a deepening suspense, an invitation to think, feel, to ...well, "read between the lines", eh? Not just the rhythm, but the whole bundle of characteristic qualities of speech is "broken", the whole sense is suspended briefly, even if it comes in mid-word. Sometimes a comma or a period will occur at the end of a line, and the questing ear should wonder, why both? What sort of confluence is this?
THE TRANSFIGURATION
Hardly the time for it,
no hope or
art
walking along some street
alone, and to where
I'll be alone
and hating it
til the roadside, formed of
weeds and litter, mounded dirt, broken rock, skitter
of paper, flicker of bottle lid,
is suddenly, in soft
sunlight
carved from
gems.
Addendum: Now, here's a poem I wrote to be a foreword to The Quiet Poems in which I force some very strange entries, exits and reentries through an almost Shakesperean twilight zone.... Here's the wild line break, rearing and dancing...
A QUESTION OF FAITH
Whose complacencies lie
so tightly woven a hood blinding
inner eyes of the hawk
that no gods
are seen walking hillsides,
no goddesses
turning breasts in pools
to catch the moon's
gleam on aureoles,
no demons breaking out
of root and brush tangles, no
beings slipping, eccentric
to the flesh, from
bodies, expanding
beyond bone held boundaries,
no silvered ghosts reaching
from the sleeping
lover for meta-
caress, no
realm and inhabitants
skewed out of the ordinary
to rest, demand
deposits to redeem
a poet's checks
and balances?
...is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.Sooooo, the cognitive dance in the experiential music, that's been allowed to drift away ...in this poetry of an awe-inspiring sunrise.... We don't feel Earth's rotating since, to our senses, it isn't whizzing around, creating a slip-stream forcing us to hang on (lest gravity prove too weak and we are ripped off.
Ezra Pound
ABC of Reading
Human ideas are, to a large extent, grounded in sensory-motor experience. Abstract human ideas make use of precisely formulatable cognitive mechanisms such as conceptual metaphors that import modes of reasoning from sensory-motor experience. It is always an empirical question just what human ideas are like....
George Lakoff and Raphael E. Núñez
Where Mathematics Comes From
Bucky [Fuller] observed that our common language lulls us into distortions of reality. The serenity and awe of a beautiful sunrise, for example, is a universal human experience. Yet, we have known for hundreds of years that the sun does not revolve around the earth, and thus does not "rise" or "set." What we experience as sunrise and sunset is actually a sun hidden and revealed by the earth's rotation.
Gil Friend of
Natural Logic in a page
that came up in some Web search
I ran...
...Anyway, that was one tale of getting some complex dance into the music.... You know, I'd get friends into using the terms I'd wrought and, then, an hour later hear, "The sun came up an hour early this morning." The event was renamed, but the underlying dance hasn't been relearned or the music transposed.
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
to hold, as stands hold, what we are given
...
2
tin cans in the compost
of the dump
almost silver
almost silver
rolling streaks molten
silver
the
