April Corioso's (of the ret. @ddress) husband, Gene Fowler, writes...

Modern's deep root lies in the Latin modo, meaning "just now", so I suppose post-modern could mean "later" - and be a form of
temporary farewell: "Later, man...". And in that is birthed our whole complex of tensings, our tense-forms. We use tensings to move in time, to return and to venture forth.... while moving in spaces with easy imagining....

"Modernist poetry felt that it was possible to make sense of the world if one only saw it clearly enough,

that there was meaning to be discerned,

and that it could be expressed in words..."

--Stephen
(writing about post-modernist poets, not his own
philosophy)

We practice post-modernist arts, we live and work in our post-industrial societies, we concern ourselves with post-life, with post-life heavens and hells.... Sadly, we rarely think of post-anything as pre-anything-else. Or wonder at the chaotic surfaces and decaying and emerging patternings underlying those "nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping" realities....^note

"...postmodernists have declared that since all reality is a personal reality,

then there is no reality;

...words can mean many different things

to different readers with different experiences

...that words are therefore, meaningless.

--Stephen"

So poets (artists, and others) have seemingly embraced randomness, or apparent randomness, which not only feels counter-intuitive but is really impossible for humans. Try to spew out random numbers from some range and watch in despair as sequences form, or, a more difficult task, spew random syllables or, heck, even random phonemes. You can't do it. You make sense ...even under the most hostile (to sense) tasking.

"Words can mean many different things" and if you don't sense a source of power in that, ...well, you may remain forever a source-erer's apprentice....

Ah, well. You (each "you" reading this) say you are not interested in post-modernist poetry, dadaist poetry, or surrural (lock up the chickens, Maybelle, they're eating the seeds [seed bein' a past-participial form of "see"]) po'try...? But look at even your sitting in at our motherofallpoetry "round" table. You toss out a poem among the virtual pizza plates and coffee, or beer, mugs. You want "feedback". Does that mean some indication that somebody discerns some meaning, some something? ..."gets it", "groks it", understands it, see's beyond the immediate in it? Discovers treasure chests and half-hidden doorways in it?

And if you do start to discern something in another's sacrificial work stretched out on the alter, you may feel an urge to move something around, trim something else, pull some ...well, call it meaning, into a relation you might think of as "foreground". Then, you counter the already leaked urge with, "...but this is only me.". It's always "only me" and the chill wind isn't just because you might be ...well, call it "wrong" (the deep bell-tone).

Ahhhh, like the modernist, the post-modernist is only a man or a woman, a human, or a child, an apprentice human, wearing one suit of clothes in place of another, but always doing what we do. We make sense. We breathe. We feel the inner vibration, the inner bi-breathing, the inner inspiration/expiration cycle; one half, we pump sensing into knowing, the other half, we pump knowing into sensing....

"since all reality is a personal reality,

then there is no reality"

-- from the quote above

These regimented folk fear ...individuals. Individuality is our original sin. Religions are authoritarian, and to be an individual is to deny authority and, ultimately, Authority. Other institutions (starting with family) copy religions to the extent the exploiters can get away with it.... Exterior rules and ...the implantings....

Is life blissful if you just hang-out in the garden and leave everything to the gardener, God, or Savior or Prophet, and confine your participation to obeying the rules handed down. Mostly, don't do anything. Abstain from what you're told to abstain from ...in this (for humans) hypnotically fascinating (along many paths) Universe.

Think Universe is in one piece, out there, a box you're in? Are you unnerved by hearing that since "all reality is personal reality there is no reality", a nihilistic sort of solipsism and a horrible aloneness...? The despair rests on a typo, a "spell"ing error. Try this liberating retyping, "all reality is personal realities..." and suddenly we've birthed community, communities, of course, but, ultimately, in a sense a human community ...that doesn't squash individuality, but is birthed in it....^note

Bucky (R. Buckminster) Fuller, a thinker, writer, even a poet, and a model-maker, an artist and scientist, used, usually, this definition of Universe. Bucky liked, sometimes, to wrap his tongue, hell, curl his tongue around polysyllabic words, maybe as much as the fellow who recently sent in a poem where almost every word started with s, sh, zh.... The untangling helps you grasp the fairly simple picture that you'd slide across if you caressed it too lightly, given your (okay, our) probable attention-span....

"Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences"

-- Bucky Fuller

If you fly a plane, you know that sometimes you have to fly on instruments alone and communications. You can't, directly, see what you're doing. So, our post-modernists, brought up against the (should have been obvious) awareness that we, individually, are the only instruments we (collectively) have, shouldn't have denied that we exist at all. Of course, they meant only, by my guess, that words were mere words, a put-down, perhaps, for people who could get more out of those words than they could. Of course, that's only me - and I have a rather deep-seated feeling about people who generate manifestos and gather people up into congregations they figure they c'n speak for.

The "meaning" (pointing, indicating) of words, is, indeed different for different people and for one person in different situations, contexts, moods, times of life.... It's all a juggling, a sensitivity to the different audiences you address "all at once". Somebody (who I don't recall at the moment) said, or more likely wrote, "the meaning of any communication is the response it gets.". There's all those "personal realities" crowding around. But you can know something of many of them. Heck, your own is probably not the one you know most about, though it's the one with which you've direct contact. It's your instrument as well as being you.

"Postmodern poetry is one of those hard to define

styles of poetry."

--Stephen (again, first sentence)

Style, the stylus ...a human's writing instrument, used in so many media (used by ancient folks to write on wax tablets, also, a pen, an etching needle, a phonograph needle, an engraving tool, a pointer on a dial or chart, the gnomon of a sundial).... What have I to say about style, in even it's usual sense? ^note Well, a poetic interlude....

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.

In December, Douglas Holder reported a statement made by Robert Creeley that "poetry can't be defined..." as a guest speaker in a context where, perhaps, young poets, critics, readers could possibly be further constrained than they already are ...a saddening, but frequent, occurrence. No way I could not respond. My response is complex and deals with all the ways, and levels, of defining that are quite possible and useful. Everything from dictionary definitions you can easily find, to definitions by skilled craftspeople that'll stretch rather than constrain the young of all ages, such as St. Ezra's "Poetry is news that stays news." If you want to see my whole spinning, with an Intro note, it's immediately at hand.

http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/DefiningPoetry.htm

The main thing I got to in my spinning, though, was the suggestion that you examine the definitions you are already using. Not that you know. Not definitions, rules, suggestions you know of, try to apply. Take those passages in which you were easily writing your solid drafts, when you've got something worth, in your eyes, ears and heart, worth working on, or putting out on the table to see if others will see, hear, feel what you've got. Read it like it was somebody else's, like some craft-oriented teacher told you to read it, read it again, study, ...and learn from it, learn craft from it....

You'll find that you have a whole lot of a poet's craft gathered even if you haven't read much poetry or any books on poetry or its writing. Why? It permeates our entire world. It's used everywhere for all sorts of purposes. It's part of the stretching of language that's been going on from language's beginnings....

And if you've a lot of education dealing, one way or another, with poetry as such? Well, don't throw anything out. You could not if you chose to. I'm reminded of something I wrote about the schools and styles of poetry, of the hierarchies and cliques and movements, of the manifesto gatherers, of ...just about everybody. This was a note sent to Joyce Metzger who had a poetry-reviews Yahoo group. I got on her list because she asked me for copies of a couple books A.D. Winans had published. A.D. didn't have copies and Joyce wanted things he'd published as well as things he's written (doing a biography of him). I sent the books and I read her digests. If it comes in the mail, I'm likely to send notes. Indirectly, this led to exchanges with Stephen...

Joyce,

Just reading Stephen Morse's note on Len's pulling together disparate pieces of the small press scene, which he surely did, but my mind drifted to all the references to the lit'ry and small press and other "scenes", and a world where the young seeker, off on e's (his or her) wanderjahr ...seeks the scene e c'n b'lieve in....

Actually, there's no scene, never was, let alone this scene or that one. It's all a sprawling bazaar, and every tent is mounted on a wagon. It's all traveling road-shows. In the tents, mirrors, which is their magnetic attraction.

Seems to me it's healthy enough. It's only those who think they've found THE scene, close the tent flap and never come out that ...well, who knows. Eventually, they're never heard from. Not out in that great sprawl, anyway. Maybe at award dinners or somewhere.

Happy Winter Solstice (ain't the stirring that precession yields somethin'?!). Maybe that northern light will start warming up now and extending its domain into the night....

Gene Fowler,
December 2002

Beware of writing from within formally offered constraints, even if they're informally presented or associated with hordes of "young Turks" or bands of "outlaws". Learn everything anybody will show you, BUT go into yourself to find how, and even where, it fits.... Any time you run into post-anything, know you're riding on the shoulder of a guide who's entered chaos and is cataloging losses, not looking for "the makings".... Example. Take post-industrial. Industrial civilization flowed out over the already, and constantly, expanding agricultural civilization and as the wave, so to speak, broke on the beach and seemed to be thinning and drawing back some, another sensed wave is already out, it's "weight" pushing the water ahead of it, coming in over the, now, industrial undercurrent.... The uneasy (with post-industrial) try to grab something and make it the new. Information age? Knowledge society? Uhhhmmmm. These are "industries" seemingly "in the fore-front". Industriousness is still the primary virtue.

But, shifts from the agricultural to the industrial civilizations changed everything, even the older wave. We need to recognize something that will be, indeed, as "weighty" a push as were the earlier two. Something that will change everything. All three waves, of course, were "in" us before even the first pressed outward. The third? Well, I call it the cognitional (to make the term match and to avoid merging with "cognitive"). Doesn't matter. What matters is that we find the source, and Universe, within us ...in "nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping" views.

I know I get to jumping about like a flea on a skillet when I try to cram all this into a note. Let me show you one last action across the boundary of the two waves. St. Ezra, who lived in the industrial civilization, said "make it new". Manufacture a new product. No patent infringement. You better live by this law, for sure. But, in this cognitional age, there is a deeper law you better also appreciate...

http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/Lost_Law.htm

Okay, end with a poem.... Why this poem? I truly dunno...

THE WAY

The wandering shaman

owes

to teach
'sposed to teach.

After five nights at the cookfire
dipping horned, cupped palm
into the pot
some bastard asks, "What
you teachin'?"

Damned if I know.
Better not tell 'em that.
Look,

The baby knows.
The baby has the secret.
The baby puts
everything

into its mouth!

Now, I learned how
to do that,
learned

to put everything
into my mouth.

Taste it!

Develop taste!

They don't look convinced.

Better edge over toward an
escape route.

Pebbles, metals, tree barks,
road tar, clits . . .
Everything.

Lips tell shape. Tongue tells
resistance.

Taste!

Gene

Gene Fowler
(April of ret. @ddress is m' wyf)
acorioso@earthlink.net
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