In the sixties and seventies, Gene Fowler rode near the crest of the tsunami (wave) of the "mimeo" and "small press" expansion. All his books, chapbooks, anthology and magazine sets are in an "out of print" oblivion, now. However, Gene is gathering everything, digitized,  in 2002+ annotated editions browse-able, readable and downloadable as e-"bound galley proofs" at http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm#books. In 1980, he published an unusual book in which the crafts of vision (envisioning) are used to teach those crafts. "Waking the Poet" was published in 1981 and "we [the folks at the magazine -g.f.] thought, in 2005, it was time we brought it into our series of craft interviews."

 

"Waking", too, is freely available in digital form in a "glass" archive, visible from anywhere on the globe. Gene has some paper copies he will send, while they last, to anybody who emails a ground mail address. It all starts at http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm#waking.

 
March, 2005

 

Jared Smith queries Gene Fowler, 25 years after "Waking the Poet"

 

 

Jared Smith:   Before one even thinks about whether one can teach poetic vision, it seems one has to separate craft from vision.  How do you separate them?

 

Gene Fowler:   We slow down what we do, and then we can differentiate out some patternings we work with and control that patterning, even formalizing it so it becomes craft and we use it consciously, even deliberately. We can be taught to scan syllables and syllable groups, feet, if you like the image of pacing off your lines, and we have a scaffolding for building metric schemes. We can take credit for such teaching. But almost from the beginning, infants learn to talk by watching mothers and others talking. They see the use of face, lips, tongue and teeth, of face-muscles, and they see living throats and chests, too. They scan the speaker and, later, the heard talk, embedding that in the physical whole they observe and feel in a kind of interior mimicry. They learn, later, to let it drop down into their cognitive innards, to go subliminal. So, you can teach somebody to scan syllables, pulling that out of still subliminal scans of the phonemic flowing and phonemic figures. We can add to our metric schemes our rhyme schemes. We can catch "similar" syllables and tack them onto a beat, to get, say, end-rhyme. Then, we can syncopate or otherwise have rhyming that plays with, not on, the beat. We can poke into rhyme and use assonance and dissonance or alliteration. We can use Coleridge's concealed alliteration, where m-b-p and n-d-t are "felt" alliterative rhyme, and we can add ng-hard=g-k and other sets. But then, we're dropping down into the rapid subliminal phonemic flowing. All this is felt pacing and heard sounding—but, it's all part of vision, envisioning.

 

JS:      You make a lot of important points there, and I want to leave them in context, but also maybe we can go back and break down a couple of them.  You talk about phonemic flowing and phonemic figures.  Those are terms that may be unfamiliar to some readers.  Can you discuss what those are?

 

GF:      Yes, but I only want to suggest listening to a flowing within the flowing of syllables. And I let a listener hearing what I say think primarily of the sounds, without voicing, the sounds we link to letters. We're focused on writing and our written poems. Phonemes and letters, the fascinating glyphs that, themselves, tell stories of how we shape our talking, how we produce our phonemes. The flow, then, of our making of these sounds. We hear them, but we also feel them, feel our making them. And that's what we want to work with when playing what I call the "phonemic instrument". This is similar to any instrumentalist feeling his or her playing, making the "horn" talk, and feeling it in the muscles playing the horn....

 

JS:      And these phonemes relate back to some of the earliest mouth movements and facial expressions that we make as a species, even in the womb before birth?

 

GF:      When we talk, we use our faces and bodies. We're listening and looking around. We're thinking and feeling. Nothing, certainly not our talking, is isolated. But we'll concentrate here on how we produce the flow of phonemes. Our letters give us clues. I've read that the m is a picture of waves. Free association. But, as infants we learn to talk, to handle the instrument, by watching mother and others talk. We watch the face and throat and chest, we watch the lips and, seeing into the mouth, teeth and tongue. We call languages tongues. We see how phonemes are made and we play at making them. I see the m as the lips brought gently together. Maybe the w is opening lips. The m is surely lips, the n tongue and the g the glottis, back where the g, k and ng are formed. Those who made alphabets, which could encode different tongues, were probably still watchers. Learning the other fellow's "talking" meant not just listening and taking notes, but watching him "play his horn". You learn to play his instrument. When you get into playing poetry, you play line-breaks, for instance, and don't just "place" them according to a scheme or even the sense of the text apart from your playing it. Talking involves facial expression and facial expressing involves talk. Even if sound is stopped, the sound of breathing continues and keeps the presence of speech alive. Facial expressing and talking blend into, and accompany, one another. Writing, we count on a reader "filling in" this surround of the sound.

 

 

JS:      I can't help but observe that at least one of these basic phoneme structures is the "O-m" that was so important as a mantra to Allen Ginsberg and many of the Beat poets.  These structures do have a viscerally important meaning that transcends words, don't they?

 

GF:      Mantras, like poems, like all our talking, can have viscerally, emotionally, intellectually important meanings wrapped into them. That's what we've evolved these tongues for. Right now, in craft talk, we're focusing on feeling ourselves producing the phonemes and their flow. The oh uses the mouth to shape and focus the sound going out through the mouth. The ah is the open throat or unshaped sound. So, the oh suggests the potential for shaping or closing off the sound. The m shuts it off, bringing the lips together. You can maintain the m sound, deflecting the flowing through the nose. You can feel yourself playing the instrument. We play ohm and it seems to draw some sense toward itself, being the rhyming part of a syllable, as in home or dome or roam. It fits easily into words, as in omega. You can use it as a mantra or have it as a recurrent sound in a poem. You can close the oh off behind the teeth, too, with the n. You relax the shaping early with the w, so it's owe-n or own. But now sense is coming up out of it, as part of the sound. We've a word here, and the felt playing merges into and hides in the sense. We get all sorts of "house of echoes" polyphonic rhymes, with one or won (w-uh-n) and even now (n@w), and now is a temporal echo of the spatially-located one. This sound playing is in our nature. We can't not do it.

 

 

JS:      These sounds in themselves might also constitute an ancient tribal drum, in a sense if you kept them going and repeating through internal rhythms, rhymes, and so forth?

 

GF:      Yes, you keep them going, build rhythms among them and play variations. Did somebody take howls, grunts, moans and edgy mouth-shaped noises, shape them, vary them and bring them down to where he "made the horn talk"? If anybody is going to work that through, he will have to go down into his innards and play what might have been played. We've never dug up a skull with a working tongue in it. But I like the senseme of the phonemes as a complex tribal drum, ancient at least in its origins. I use senseme in place of image, but it's far more subtle than a generalized "image" involving our other single-organ senses and our myriad human senses. The sensemic flow and our fourth lyre, a sensemic instrument, extend our playing. I'll come back to that. In a manuscript I called The Makings, I spoke of the "pool of sounds" and the phonemes were darting life in this pool. In WAKING, I build a phonemic instrument and caress the design of a ship, with a keel and with port and starboard sides, though our actual hardware is more like a complex front-end on a bagpipe.

 

 

JS:      Is there a craft that applies to the surface features of poetry that can be taught?  What is it composed of, and how can it be broken down?

 

GF:      You can see in my first answer how I imagine that we pull crafts out of the mix and formalize them for teaching. It's not that we have a craft that is apart from all we do and, then, apply to what we're doing. That's the flip side of how we get described crafts. Coleridge didn't say anything about concealed alliteration. He probably didn't consciously hear or feel himself playing the off-alliterative soundings. Kenneth Burke dug it out and made craft of it. So, we have all the crafts anybody isolated and described. And different crafts to employ in your playing. You can get line-ends by playing "feet"-sequences, say writing in pentameter. Or, you can take a more musical way, and, like a jazz club player, play line-breaks as a kind of riff-definer. However you get your line-ends, you can then play across them in a variety of ways. And that's the music of  vision, envisioning.

 

 

JS:      Is there a craft, or maybe one should differentiate for now by saying a set of tools, that applies to the deep features of poetry that can be taught?  What is it composed of, and how can it be broken down?

 

GF:      Well, now there's the descent into our cognitive experience-making, where we're doing the whole of what we're doing. We've got to use our crafts of vision (envisioning) to teach those very crafts. I wrote WAKING as a ten-hour seminar. In the Foreword, written as a chapter in a book, the book that's wrapped around the seminar, I end with some instruction in how to read the hours as if creating a hypnotic descent into our creative "cognizing". I use the third and fourth hours, for instance, to help a listening reader hear the phonemic flow, with its phonemic figures, within the usually noisy syllabic flow. I toughen my home-made craft by building a phonemic instrument. A poet's third lyre. Later, I do what I can about a sensemic instrument and sensemes, a revelemic instrument and revelemes, an awareness of relations and patternings that comes up. My three lyres here are St. Ezra's melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia. I say lyres because it's all, for the poet, within the language, within the talk.

 

 

JS:      Does each one of these features that compose the deep structure of poetry have definable and quantifiable parameters that can be taught in a classroom?

 

GF:      When I wrote WAKING it was a "rehearsal" for a workshop I'd been invited to give at a non-mainstream "university", John F. Kennedy in Orinda, California. The later reality was a more usual workshop. People showed or read their poems. We talked about small fixes. I threw in whatever I could get anybody to listen to from my "bag of envisionings" I'd used in the book, such as actively seeing a five-point star in a pentagon into a pyramid observed from below and slightly "out from under". I think now I'd give "homework", in a workshop, that involves required "daydreaming" something like that I guide my reader into throughout the book and describe in the sixth hour.

 

 

JS:      And then these features all sort of interlock at some point and form what we call vision?

 

GF:      I prefer envisioning to vision, because we are dealing with what we do. Many look for vision to come as dreams come, but I suggest a common human activity, daydreaming, instead. Most humans daydream and work it into language, so it's just a case of becoming more skillful at these crafts. Another problem with a term like "vision" (and with "image", "magic", "imagination") is that we're lifted up into our heads. We've got to get our mind's body hooked up to our mind's eyes and our mind's ears. You can see what I mean. You can also grasp my meaning and roll it up into a ball in your mind's hands. If you want interior feelings, and not just their names, in your passages, you'll want to touch as well as see, and, finally, to feel.

 

 

JS:      Are there any MFA or graduate school programs that teach this sort of stuff, or does it mostly come out of the work of Noam Chomsky and linguists who have studied the roots of language?

 

GF:      I don't know much about MFA or other school programs. I don't know much about Noam Chomsky, either. I use two borrowings from Chomsky and his "transformational" grammarians in WAKING. In my Foreword I grab the idea of a "native speaker", a sort of whole me who takes over and does my talking in my native language. I use similar gathers around our other doings, and even for our poet. In the eighth hour, I throw away their notion of surface and deep language structures, the second, the deep structure, being ...well, complete. I didn't buy that we'd form these complete structures and then wreck them to get what we say. So, I used actual and latent. What was said and what could have been said through the spreading out ripples language lives in. My thinking draws mostly, I guess, on people who, from the fifties on, have been doing what's now gathered under the umbrella "cognitive science". I've developed most of what I know, first, in my poems. A fairly "open" example is my three cumulative "walking" poems, the third of which sets us up for this interview. All three are in Fires, as "primaries" in the book. A shifting "viewpoint" is shown in the titles: San Francisco Poem, Obsidian and Cosmic Language.

 

 

JS:      What is vision?

 

GF:      A useful, and familiar, handle. Like any handle that's spent a lot of time in a working human's hand, it's rubbed smooth and opaque. What I've been doing through this whole conversation, is to open out that handle, that tool-set, including even the tool-handler, that's, perhaps, our whole cognitive apparatus in action, which we use whether making a poem or just "daydreaming and talking" casually.

 

 

JS:      When you speak of a tool set, you are meaning that all the senses should be used in envisioning, that something as important as vision cannot be entrusted solely to the eyes?

 

GF:      Vision is a handle, a name we attach to a half-sensed reveleme, a webbed gather that doesn't jell into something we can grasp in our senses, let alone in an articulated concept. That's why I say it's a handle and why I say it's worn smooth and opaque. Smooth because we use it easily, opaque because we don't sense into it, our insighting isn't a developed sensing and we get only fragmented "insights". We don't "see" it because the eyes alone aren't enough. We need our whole cognitive apparatus and we haven't a handle on that. Our senses? We think we've about five. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. But already, we're spreading out into metaphor. We can touch with seeing or hearing. Touch isn't a nice stable organ-based sense, after all. We know what we mean, though, and we mean feeling with our fingers, hands, body. The organ used seems to be our whole working body, and we need a further sensing for what we can feel within our body. But what about our human senses? Our senses of time and timing, of distance and motion, ours and others', and all those complex "senses" formed from what's within our "storehouse" of experiential learnings?

 

 

JS:      In much of your poetry, from Felon's Journal forward, this envisioning seems to erase traditional boundaries of time and space as well…as if the poet were envisioning things from many angles and times at space in one vision.  Is this important to vision?

 

GF:      Yes, but remember that time and space and boundaries, edges, contours, interfacings are all within envisionings. I suspect you're referring to the inmate's vision experienced in the adobe cell. It was an alarming vision having to do with orientation. My envisionings of the tables in the mess hall and the breathings in the cell block ...well, time and space are involved differently and not obviously. The journal entry and the poems in the book are large workings with the "deep" crafts done before I knew these were crafts or that I was a craftsman.

 

 

JS:      A phonemic chant, a mantra, would seem to help in this regard.  Perhaps because as

readers or listeners we feel the shift in perspective and start to experience it before we are consciously aware of it?

 

GF:      You know mantra and the traditions that utilize it, and it's one use of the phonemic instrument to lead, with language, envisioning. I work with, and through, playing the language, with its phonemic, sensemic and revelemic threads of the flowing we call talking, and the "heightened" talking we think of as poetry. We have the craft, the tools, trained "into our bones" and we concentrate on what we're playing. We're expressing opinions or feelings, we're envisioning, playing into existence, whatever we hunt. In the film Black Orpheus, those kids take a guitar out to play the sun up, because the dead guitarist had done that each morning. It worked. Never mind that it wasn't an original sun. It was the familiar one. Maybe those kids did feel "a shift in perspective" the dead guitarist sought again and again. Feeling a shift in perspective... now, that's bringing the sun up by a poet if a listener, or a listening reader, feels such a shift.

 

 

JS:      This envisioning and phonemic tool kit also get very tightly wound with the concept you

call gname-making.  I think that's a very important concept to really understand when thinking about deep structure.  Can you describe it a bit?

 

GF:      WAKING is a "bag of envisionings" put together to slow it all down and let us see, hear and feel the crafts we employ. Everybody knows the "gestalt switch". You see a white, opaque goblet on a black ground or you see two silhouetted faces against a white ground. With a few minutes practice most can switch back and forth. We can't really catch ourselves doing it, can't tell how we do it. So I set up a game. I ask a listener go to the board and draw a five-point star in a pentagon. Then, I have the drawer build a pyramid "in the sky", using the same ten lines, but drawing them in a particular order which leads an envisioning. So, gname-making. It's pretty obviously name-making, which we think of, carelessly, as "naming". Gname suggests (suggestures) the Greek gnomen, and the allusive echo is important to it. But in our slowing down, we sense the word as a ply-word. We can "peel apart" two words and have name/game. The quick sketch is  name/concept and the deeper meaning is name/reveleme.

 

 

JS:      A poet's ability to create visions and communicate them to others has a very important role in society then doesn't it?  I ask that because so many people, even institutions, today seem to view poetry as entertainment.

 

 

GF:      I figure we've four jobs the poet undertakes. The first three are familiar. The poet entertains, informs and transforms. What's transform mean? Well, if you move somebody with your poem and he or she doesn't move all the way back, you've some residual effect that's, however minimal, transformation. I'm convinced a poet's crafts are natural to all humans, so I see a fourth job a poet does in leading a listener or listening reader through the making of the poem. Somewhere in that other man or woman rests something watching the poet talk and learning how to talk.

 

JS:      Let's go after that fourth job a little further.  I'm not sure how to talk about it either, but we agree that something is being transformed…and there is that almost mystical feeling that there is indeed something watching the poet talk and learning how to talk.  Is it worth speculating on what that something is?

 

GF:      Milton Erickson, talking to a hall full of psychiatrists on the use of hypnosis, which is guided envisioning, says, "I know each of you has an unconscious mind and that your conscious mind and your unconscious mind are both in this room." This was a senseme, or an image, to catch the observation that we respond multiply to what's heard, and an awful lot of our responding goes on subliminally. The hypnotist, or poet, expects the two selves to be listening and talks to both. Probably we all work this intricate craft on each other all the time. But, we sure have to be aware of it when we talk about craft. It's vital to have a live senseme or image as Erickson has in that hall. The people in that hall believe in an unconscious mind. A poem's reader is aware of himself being entertained, informed and moved. The idea, though, of also, subliminally, following a poet and learning, by watching, to do what the poet does is mysterious. But it's natural. Small children watch and mimic. A child may follow a parent, mimicking the parent. Then, mimes made up as strangely colorful children, go into public parks and follow walkers ...mimicking them.

 

 

JS:      What is the role of what we normally call craft, then, in writing poetry?  Is it possible to say whether the deep structure as you define it or the surface structure, the craft, is more important?  Or must there be an organic wholeness that we somehow perceive as sensitive readers or critics?

 

GF:     What we normally call craft is those things we do on top of our envisioning, pretty much on purpose and organized in definable ways called schemes. Metric schemes, rhyme schemes. We loosen or tighten schemes. We play with them and we play them. It's called knowing what we're doing. Poet translates into English as maker. So, what's a poem given this language. A made thing, an end-product? I think it's a tool, and our maker, freed up from limiting adjectives like shoe-maker or watch-maker, is an experience-maker. But the fun term is poetics. I borrow a translating term from the guys who roll their own smokes. "The makings". I even ride the image a way. Tobacco is something that grows wild, but that we cultivate. It's seemingly the main ingredient. Then, there's the paper and maybe glue on an edge. Industry. There's the spit for sealing. It comes up from within and we can place it just where it needs to be. But there's another ingredient, the ingredient that makes it all possible. You can even fake the tobacco. The human ingredient is the rolling dance of the fingers. Yeah, you must have the whole smoke or you've got a fallen open piece of paper and a scatter of tobacco.

 

 

JS:      Does this explain why we can read a poem written by one stylistic school and say that it is a good, well-crafted poem even when its craft and lay-out has nothing to do with another equally good well-crafted poem from another stylistic school?

 

GF:      I've no real education and I don't know much about schools or even styles. I'm (at 73) still that infant watching poets talk. I like a poem that entertains me, informs me, moves me or, especially, leads me through an intriguing making. Or just because I sense somebody at home in it.

 

 

JS:      You have developed a comprehensive, nine session plan for waking up the creative power in people and initiating them into a meaningful process for creating, polishing, and communicating visions as poets.  That is no trivial matter.  It would appear to allow a high level entry into poetry for people who have received most of their education in other fields, including those far removed from academia.  Is this then perhaps part of the answer for how to bring poetry back to a popular audience—while enriching its idea base at the same time?

 

GF:      I think what will always happen is what has always happened. A going-to-be-a-poet finds himself or herself hooked into following poems, following the making in them, and then into making poems. I think WAKING unfolds like a poem, and a reader can follow along and "descend" into his or her cognitive interior. I'd hope others might write such daydreams, some not even aura'd by daydream or dream scent, and pull students into playing with taking these apart, but only to see how they go together, as in those mobiles floating on pages of auto repair manuals, and playing, then, with putting things together — differently. Everybody who comes into poem-making will enrich the idea base, the experience base. Each brings his or her full storehouse of experiential learnings. A "popular" audience is a loneliness-busting 20^th century notion. You have to write to a common "want to hear it" and understand the willfulness within even a willingness to hear it. In a time when so-called "culture wars" rage, good luck. In our current 21^st century, there's no "population" for that "popular" to take root in.  

 

 

JS:      Usually, one can see definite changes in the handling of craft as one moves from one period of a poet's life to another, so that in many cases a reader can tell you just about when a piece was written.  Can the same be done in terms of complexity or clarity of vision?

 

GF:      Whew! The deeper into this test we get, the more I'm sweating here. I don't have the same sorts of vision now that I had at, say, age ten or thirty or fifty or, maybe, a year ago. But, what of the visions in poems written in the same few years by the same poet, on entering into "the place where poems are birthed"?  Use Fires, which you picked up in the Village almost thirty years ago. The visions in, say, Vivisection, Shaman Songs and the three "walking" poems. You can find me, but you're a poet and have known this "anthology of envisionings" for almost thirty years. A new reader will come to recognize me, or the "same" poet, but an awful lot of "surface" has to be burned through.  Still, "complexity and clarity". Greater ease with the craft, so maybe less tangle in the complexity, or sharper delineation in the clarity. After all, our craft isn't separate from our envisioning. Our "visions" are birthed in our store of experiential learnings, and that "grows up" as children say and "out".

 

 

JS:      This would seem a fertile field for academic critics, but perhaps they would be treading on the toes of psychologists if they tried to analyze the virtues or differences of visions?

 

GF:      Anybody whose toes don't have steel guards is fair game for treading upon. What you don't want to do is walk in anybody's shoes (or feet). Remember that analysis should just be pulling things apart to see how they came together. Don't snap the relations. Don't dump loose parts in labeled buckets and leave them there. Everybody, not just an academic critic who gets paid for it, seems ready to jump all over a poet's vision. I don't take the idea of our envisioning too seriously. We're just "rolling our own" smokes. Everybody does it all the time. It's human nature. Following the poet's making involves pulling the envisioning apart to know how it came together, how it works. When you've known an envisioning this way, you'll know something of its virtues and differences. If you're going to try a psychologist's following, don't walk in Freud's feet, he's popular with university writing programs, or Jung's, popular with the dream-seekers. You want a "psychologist" who works with envisioning. Milton Erickson is your best bet, and he's wrapped in a large and diverse collection of observers' writings.

 

 

JS:      Do you redraft your poems?  If so, is it to more clearly communicate the vision to the listener or does doing so help clarify the vision for you as well?  Does the vision in part come from the words?

 

GF:      I don't make drafts, I make poems. I never do switch from writing to editing and rewriting. When I change a passage, even a word, later, I just drop back into the writing, picking it up more or less "where I left off". Not long ago I made a change in San Francisco Poem, written one night during the Watts riots down in Los Angeles. You can figure the year from that. A couple months ago, I changed a line to "here's the city you'd love to bed". You can guess the "muse" image and the word replaced. For the poem itself, the new line goes past my exuberance and gets the almost Victorian (the city is full of old Victorian buildings) sense of "bedding the wench" to capture that layered history, the sense of the city as full of history and a more scenic awareness of the city's sexy nature. It leaves the cast-aside word for an occurrence in Obsidian, where it fulfils a complex purpose. The poems and groups of poems are carried, sometimes, webbed in my head as it's said Mozart carried whole compositions so he could write them down rapidly without mistakes. I'm not claiming a special capacity, but grasping a "revelemic" sense of how poems work in us.

 

 

JS:      Does deep structure help explain why something like Eliot's "objective correlative" works, that is that any number of careful readers exposed to the same images or stimuli will have the same and predictable response.

 

GF:      I'd guess that not only our general cognitive world-making, but detailed experience-making, is shared among people through overlapping "rings of culture" around each. We learn to be a lot alike. We pump sensing into our knowing and knowing back into our sensing and often make the same sense, a similar experience, as at least some others. Eliot's hedge would be in "careful". A cognitively oriented anthropologist will make a good guess why two women who come and go speaking of Michelangelo will react similarly to a whole range of phenomena, while one of those women and a woman from twenty miles up the Amazon likely won't. Every extracted concept, like Eliot's "objective correlative", will become "open source" for reworking by amateurs in new, expanding envisionings. As you know, I reworked the flat-Earth farmer's pair, sunrise and sunset, into suntake and suncut. These new revelemes are post-Copernican, as Bucky Fuller asked, because of the implied mind's shutter, and post-Einsteinian, too—a cognitively live "film"-maker's, not a non-traveling farmer's, workings.

 

 

JS:      Web technology has been making strong inroads into how people read or receive poetry.  There are, for example, some very good archives of poets reading or discussing literature.  Does technology affect how you go about creating a poem, or is it merely a matter for consideration in marketing or publishing poetry?

 

GF:      If a technology affects you, it affects how you go about creating a poem. If it affects people around you, chances are it'll affect how you create a poem. All the interrelating technologies affect the whole tensegrity (tensional integrity) of the human world ...and, for all human purposes, the world shifts, and you will create poems differently. Your general conversation changes, too, so it's not an isolated phenomenon. What you see going on around you changes. Not because it is, of itself, new, but because you are. It's that pumping.... A "deep" structure or "deep" process inspiration and expiration, a "deep" breathing....