2002 Annotated Edition Books FAQ

Readable & downloadable copies of Waking
25 years after "Waking the Poet" - Interview
Archive FAQ
Archive Journal - Volume 1, Volume 2

These "loose leaf" pages (or scrolls) will remain "under construction" until Hell freezes over (a Dantean prescription) or I go under (whichever comes first) and if you've questions, queries, wonderings about my poems, the subjective world within which I made poems, the makings with and from which I made poems, the hyperperfect-binding and etyping (ewriting) I use for this 21st century publication or the annotations I'm adding to poems at this roll-over of centuries ...send 'em along.
This page is a FAQ dealing with Waking the Poet.

Gene Fowler
acorioso@earthlink.net

June 1, 2007. From today until this box disappears from the page, you may have a copy of the 1980 Waking the Poet as a perfect-bound paper copy. It's a lot more fun than the digital copies. you can carry it around, mark it up, write poems in the empty space on a page. Of course, you can do all these things in the downloaded copy you put in your eDen, but you have to be able to use html punctuation. No cost. You mail or email an address I can send it to. Use g_fowler@earthlink.net. Put Waking the Poet in the Subject line.

To jump from question to question, do a repeated
SEARCH on "A:". Use this instead of "Q:" so the question
will be ABOVE the found line at the bottom of the screen.

Q:

Waking the Poet is a how-to book, so just what are you teaching and how do you teach it? How do you teach these crafts?

A:

Take what I wrote on the cover. If you're reading the online digital copy or a downloaded package you may not have even looked at the cover. You have to click for it on the TOC page, the table of contents. It's the first thing you see on picking up the paper copy. "Acquiring the deep seated rafts usually called 'talents'" tells you these are not what are usually put forward as the skills making up a poet's craft. Usually, you're shown how to scan, how to listen for the varying stress levels of syllables and to group these into recognizable patterns called feet.
     I guess somebody labeled these patterns feet because you're pacing off, in a sense, the lines. So far as can find in a quick check, nobody much mentions that listening for these patterns. and nobody relates these feet to pacing off, by your action, the phrases, lines, sentences, passages. Williams, at least, spoke of the variable foot, feeling the need for, but not calling by terms used, a lighter, more flexible movement.
     What that boils down to is that nobody seems to think in terms of the "deeper" (more background, less foreground) doings. There's talk of "phonetic" spelling linking letters to sounds, which gets you "deeper" than whole word spelling, which uses visualization techniques. But as a poet, at least, you better start thinking in terms of phonemic spell-binding. Not just any sounds. These are meaningful sounds, or in language, semantic sounds. I won't get off into either of my main two lectures on that. One is on how these sounds relate to one another and on playing the phonemic instrument. The other is on how these sounds are meaningful and the glyphs pictures of how we make them.
     My teaching message on that cover is this:

     No book on
     the crafts of the poet
     you've ever seen
     even touches on the crafts
     this book presents
     in clear, readable
     'how-to' text!

     What I said just before quoting from the cover prepares you a little for what the cover message is saying. You could say these crafts are worked with down in your cognitive innards. It has to do with listening, perceiving, imagining and speaking and imagining into language, your, in a larger sense, tongue.... It's a how-to book, so I suggest things to do and that's more or less what I guess you could call teaching. Here is something on a scrap of paper in an old, marked up copy of Waking I'm using right now...
3 levels of "teaching"
(a) I teach the doings I say I teach.
(b) I teach the doings I give as utilized tasks
like the movie making & condensed
sensory note taking.
(c) I teach the knowings latent in my examples &
illustrative materials.

Q:

The perfect-bound paperback book has a lot going on, on both front and back covers. It competes with how to books on self-improvement or popular culture or things like that. Why?

A:

The paper book, which is now free while they last to anybody who sends an address I can mail it to, is an artifact. It's like the rubbable lamps of Arabian nights or the magic mirrors of fairy-tales on through children's imagination manuals like Harry Potter. The outer package is very much a book with all the marks of a book: cover design, rakishly slanted lines of print, back cover "blurbs". Inside, on the title page an intriguing imprimatur is present. Start into the book and the Foreword, like the Afterword, has chapter-like writing. But the units between Fore- and Afterword are hours, not chapters. Near the end of the Foreword a reader, potentially a listening reader, is told how to turn the "hours" into daydreamed movies in which he or she is listening, and watching, in a workshop. I over-designed the book to make it almost surreal, almost too real a book. It's an artifact, then, a magic book to serve as a portal into your daydreaming place.

Q:

Why did you write Waking or, as you've said, rehearse a workshop by daydreaming into and through language?

A:

I took my task to be to tell a listening reader how I make, not write, my poems, how I bring my experience, as live stuff, and my interior power, for lack of a better term, into that making. By a "listening" reader I meant a reader who, knowing or sensing that language is speech played on a language-in-body instrument,will subvocalize to feel the making of speech, becoming even visibly articulate in untangling complex speech. A myograph can show that even a schizophrenic produces the voices he or she hears. I shared my rehearsing with that actively reproducing or "listening" reader.
     

Q:

I was reading in the table of contents about the third and fourth hours and wondered about this phonemic instrument. I know about phonemes ad understand why they are involved in melopoeia, the music of the language, but but how do they form an instrument?

A:

People involved with poetry talk of the poet's ear but as having to do with how the poet writes and rarely is anything said about hearing, what's available to be heard and what poets might listen for. And all the talk, when sound is brought up, seems to focus on syllables so we have rhyme, focusing on the syllable behind its beginning, and rhyme schemes and internal rhyme and, then, isolating syllable "parts", assonance and alliteration. Even then we consider only close repetition of sounds. If, however, we listen to the phonemic flow hearing, as it were, the articulated phonemes in the flow and clusters of phonemes as figures and, say, vowel sequences or progressions rather than only repetitions, it's a fair surprise. We can play words as small tunes. My phonemic instrument mainly shows in graphical form "relations" among the sounds. A poet's ear is trained so that he or she hears the more subtlely articulated flow of language.
     In Waking's first chapter, one of two, my Foreword, I tell of how we do have a somewhat trained "native poet" much like Chomsky's "native speaker" within us, developed and exercised through our entire personal history. We don't have to have been exposed even to much poetry since these devices are employed everywhere in human speech and writing. This passage might send you into my book seeking answers:
But this strange being can be your being. And perhaps in rare moments it has been. You may recall a moment in which you heard with the poet’s ear. Whether listening to a passage of poetry, reading a piece of prose, overhearing somebody talking, or skimming somebody’s letter, you may have found that the physically sounded verbal structure suddenly lost its transparency, that you were aware of it, that you heard the sounds within it and their arrangement, and that you sensed those interior structures affecting your consciousness in specific ways. It’s unlikely that you associated such a moment of hearing with anything so exotic as the “poet’s ear,” but you may have had a sense of “new dimensions” opening to your ear.
     My next paragraph begins,
"You may also recall an occasion when you saw with the poet's eye. Or, more generally, sensed with the poet's full sensory apparatus."
phonemic instrument

Q:

I heard that you use NLP or neurolinguistic programming notation when talking about sensemes or chunks of experience so that A, V and K are auditory, visual and kineshetic experience and superscripted e and i are for exterior and interior "experiences". Ae would be exterior dialog and Ai interior dialog. Or Ke tactile experiences and Ki feelings. Are you using NLP's notation? and their sense of things?

A:

Bandler and Grinder probably found neurolinguistic in Count Korzybsky's 1933 book Science and Sanity. However, Korzybsky never used ii apart from the paired term neurosemantic.
     When B&G added programming they were likely paralleling Korzybsky's semantic reaction training.
     Korzybsky worked at training our nervous systems so that our meaning-based reactions were more usefully interwoven with our controlled responses. B&G modeled patterns so that somebody could acquire somebody else's aptitudes. So, they used a notation to write down a sequence of subjectively experienced perceptions and behaviors, while Korzybsky also used graphical and even sculptural models. And, of course, deliberate behaviors.
     The A, V, K notation was, and is, used by academic learning theorists and so is standard. Hubbard, in his Dianetics, used "audio", "video" and "somatics" (for the body senses). Makes more sense. But, K is rooted in bodily sensations. B&G misuse the i and e with K. As with the other senses, e should be experience and i imagination, to include memory, dreaming and knowing that's pumped into e-sensing. In short, the body's senses and the mind's senses. You need subscripts. Even in NLP notation the A that has to do with voices and verbal experience was Ad, the d being for digital. In my notation I use w for "words" and I apply it to V as well, for experienced reading or writing. Interior dialog, then, would be Awi. I use, when I need fine-grained articulation, an apostrophe before the letter if you feel yourself speaking or writing to get the physical action under the audio-visual experience. Lots of subscripts going with K to get all the possibilities and combinations of them as when Kbmp notes awareness of "body sensations", "your own movements" and "postural arrangements", probably dynamically. We note a cross section of on-going experiencing. You might be living your own running, or even be remembering it or vividly imagining it, as in a dream, though you probably won't take notes while dreaming. What we use the notion to accomplish is to sort out these chunks of an experience just as we sorted out phonemes in the bundled flow to hear more articulately.
     In my sixth hour, on page 6-23 in the paperback book, I have a chart of the subscripts for A, V and K. You might note that you are writing rather than reading by using the apostrophe before Vw, 'Vw. But, if the most important part of what you are experiencing is that you are writing and what you're writing is not what you are capturing here, you might want Kmwe.
     Another peculiar NLP use of e and i in free-hand conversation shows up when they are talking about spending time generally in the exterior world or the interior. They refer to the latter as "down time" which is computer-talk for the computer being offline, usually because of breakdown, though it might be for routine maintenance. Even before running into that in their writings, I just used e-time and i-time. Slang uses are important so we can remove the stiff "new shows" feel of our jargon.
     My senseme is not an image or "image" extended to cover similar tracings in other senses. It's more like "the thing itself" birthed in language prompting experiential presence. The notation is used in "taking notes" as you experience, subjectively, your real-time living.
     Here is a chunk torn out of my sixth hour talking and drawing on the blackboard:
     The invitation is to sense himself bending down, touching wet sand and pebbles, seeing wet sand and pebbles, and perhaps lifting the pebbles into a better view. We’ve used our sensemic instrument and its notation to sharpen our sense of the sense made in the experience the poem generates. What might previously have been a somewhat vague “sense of the poem” is now a “highly resolved” representation.
     My “i” usage invites his “interior monolog” as he tells himself what he is doing, feeling, touching, and seeing. The list of pebbles that follows

     dark agates
     veined in white
     dull bloodstones
                      blue-green bits
     of fossilized sea
     smoothed glass

allows the “outer senses” K and T to recede, and the focus is on V. But this isn’t prose, it’s poetry. And just as a hypnotist will focus the V on some spot in the room or, better, an image held in the mind’s eye to let the rest of the V field and the other outer sense fields recede in order to bring up the inner sense fields that constitute the hypnotic reality, I begin bringing up a good deal of experience in the “inner senses” to wrap about the “outer senses” V - that is, I “pump knowing into sensing.”
     Remember all the “levels” on which I was using sound to build sense in those first lines, “dark agates / veined in white”? All that is being employed for what we’re doing now, our sense-making.
     Notice just a few rough movements. Even as I focus on the reader’s V with the visually described series of pebbles, I open with the word “dark” - on the beat and opening the phrase, virtually the sentence, with it. It’s virtually a command to dim the vision. And it’s extended in sound values, the d’s and n’s virtually sounding the word dim. And, at the same time, I “bring up” the kinesthetic, the K, not only in the deeper levels we talked about in our fourth hour, but on the outer level with “veined” and “blood.”
     At a given point, find ways to notate what you’re noticing so you can refer back. Just for here, before I introduce a charted set of subcategories, we might take the device I’ve used above with V-1 and V-2 for two different seeings. Instead of 1 and 2, let’s use letters that hint at key words. So the urge, as we come into “dark agates” is toward focused vision and toward dimming vision, the dimming coming, in part, through the focusing or fixating of the stare.
     You aren't immersed in the daydream, here, but if you're at all quick you can likely move into it even as what's being dreamed up is described. And you can likely feel the awkwardness of me at the board in the front of the room trying to slow down my inner "cognitive" processes, in all their nuances, for this description and saying the notes, V or T, even as, presumably, I sketch them on the board, while avoiding complex notations and further slowing.
     What the poet does is not all that different from what a subtle hypnotist does and hypnosis is best sorted out as hypo/hyper-gnosis, as the everyday orientation fades and the underlying orientation is brought out.

Q:

In your Foreword, you use the concept "pump knowing into your sensing" and I pretty much understand it, I think. You give the example of looking up at a patch of white on the hillside, but seeing the white stucco wall of a house nestled in shrubbery. I guess the idea of an internal pumping intrigues me.

A:

I'm mapping somewhere between the actual neurological goings-on and the end-product of perceiving and I'm bringing our whole-body or whole-system working into my map. I see a kind of circularity, like the Chinese yin/yang symbol, in a mental breathing as we pump our sensing into knowing and, then, pump our knowing into on-going sensing, and our world comes to make ever more inclusive yet detailed sense. In my sixth hour I bring in the daydreaming place as the place in which we can build our poems, "place" here mapping process as we birth our language, hearing and feeling our forming of it. The Great Breathing is this growing of consciousness and within it is the Lesser Breathing of the formed-in-speaking articulate and rhythmic poem.

Q:

Why do you, in Waking anyway, direct us to daydreaming for playing with language, for reading and, I guess, for composing and writing poems?

A:

Anybody who says he or she doesn't really have creative imagination is usually told to look to dreams to see this imagination in action. And not particularly the plot lines, but the background scenery, the physically present characters and things. Well, some who've no doubt they do have creative imagination and know it from experience of their dreaming do write poems they say they dreamed though they likely rework the dream in writing it down. They're daydreaming the dream they just had or at least still remember.
     We all daydream and use it variously to replay and perhaps do better at old arguments, fights or war scenes. Or maybe romantic or sexual scenes. We make movies or speeches or, if working in language, perhaps poems. We're all practiced at it for some uses. Creators drift from daydreaming into serious daydreaming in in which they handle their tools and materials. We have all the techniques we've seen in films. I actually daydreamed Waking the Poet and, then, the hours as "plays within the play" in a sense - working it all out in language. Later, I gave a workshop course at an alternative university in Orinda, Califonia: JFKU. I gave what I could of the rehearsed material, though I couldn't evoke the quality of listening I hope for in a listening reader and everybody wanted a little help with things they were working on. I didn't yet hve the physical book to give them to take away.
     At the end of the fifth hour, the first on phanopoeia or sensory-experience making, I direct the poets' seeing as they go out for a ten minute break:
     I hope you walk out of here for your break with a real sense of what this business of “enlightenment” is, this shaman’s practice of “seeing into the dark” - and seeing differently, multiply, into the dark - to make it new and make it real.
     Just maybe, as you walk out into the hall, the grain in some wood, or something like that, will “hook” your attention and set you off into a slightly obsessive, even hallucinatory, bit of visual conceptualization or “envisioning.”
     If that doesn’t happen, perhaps it will later. Anyway, I’ll see you in ten minutes. And we’ll look into a poet’s implement I call the “sensemic instrument.” We’ll meet the senseme and learn to dream in “sensemic figures.”
     Take a break.
     What that sort of seeing in your daydreaming can lead to shows up in a poem I call The Sea. I wrote it in my coffee house days...
THE SEA

Again at the table.
My arms, just below the elbows,
calloused from the gentle
swells of the table pulsing
under these twin hulls.

And I watch intently
down into this paled sea
from which
forces of constant rising
push into the swells

those creatures that will burst
forth to flounder or find footing
on my beach
and tell me in their dying
gasps or first breaths of alien

ways that shaped them
beyond my ken
and sent them, in their
last moment, or first, to stretch
my ken.

     What might come up out of that sea I'm scrying? Well, here's something that came from those depths of time and place and apprehended energies...

The seafarer

Q:

I think I saw in a manuscript copy of your earlier book, The Makings, something about a "tapestry of sounds" and on page 3-12 of Waking you say what sounds like a section heading, "The beginning of hearing". In what follows until you do your sectioning again with "The phonemic figures", you are talking about the workings of the woven together phonemes, the spellings, that brought your tapestry to mind. Could you say something of how we hear this tapestry?

A:

The Makings was fun and rather chaotic. It wasn't published. I haven't looked at it in a long time. I got that title to be a translation of "poetics". The Greek poet translates into English as maker and as poetics roughly covers what's used to do the making, in Amerish (A-mer'-ish), at least, is "the makings". I got the term from the guys who roll their own smokes. I figured tobacco represents what grows wild but that we can cultivate. Paper is an industrial product, representing what we get from our culture. With or without glue, we seal the made thing with spit, something pulled up from our throat. But the human craft is in the rolling dance of our fingers.
     So, I called that tentative book The Makings. I was a long way from my phonemic instrument. I remember I had what I called the pool of sounds and the phonemes were similar but unique fishes swimming in the near depths where refracted light sparkled meaningfully from them. My "pool of sounds" image took other forms, of course, in my work, as in my poem In the Ataliers. Be a listening reader and listen for a tapestry in the phonemic flow, but listen, too, with all your mind's sensings and see if you can catch something like that pool of sounds, or a pool of other sensory fishes...
IN THE ATELIERS

Climbing up the mounds of old
skulls, stained
weathered ivory -
My ancestors, the humans, the rare
and hunted ones, run down
and stripped of flesh, fed
to jackals, buzzards, any-
thing that'd eat the evidence.
This skull . . . whose?
Homer? The singled out Homer the scribe
tracked down? Or Dante?
Sappho, Catulus, Chaucer, Gavin Douglas,
Golding, Coleridge, some savage
scribbler without a name?
Whose atelier this spidery cracked
near-sphere, jaw-rigged
sphere, reared half-dome?
What painted or sculpted or filmed in
this curved, now daylighted studio? What
kosmoses in this lined and
split planetarium, light
on my jiggling palm?
And here, another, smashed outward
in the back - some dream pro-
jected too forcibly, un-
holdable.
Sit naked and half cross-legged
on this damn pile of bones.
Thigh bone trying to get
up my ass, get at
a new pelvic socket, walk
out of this mess. Its pelvis, toppled,
hanging by a socket from my half
raised pecker - i'm the only fleshed
bones on this pile.
And my atelier is full of moist, warm
winds, and full of darting
schools of lives,
bright foods,
seeds,
uncoiling tales,
and tellers
within tellers,
and cries
of torn
joy.
     I don't recall, and can't remember, just where or when I waved the tapestry of sounds in that manuscript. But I've often used it in some six million words of letters written since 1961 or 2 and for different levels in our hearing, as in tapestry of words or tapestry of syllables. It's always about our use of language in what's of a piece, something woven. In Waking, I'm talking about phrases, lines, passages, and poems and the base-flow is of phonemes, interthreaded, in our making with flows of sensemes and revelemes as we work what we have to work with into shaped language.
     I have to move away from my sense of a tapestry for the weaving's result, though, because we're actively involved and that's how got to these instruments. The whole thing, the instrument we play, is language-in-a-body. Now, our weaving is linear, as language and music are, and we're, as speakers or players, like the jazz musicians that play in groups, but as groups of individuals.... To grasp this, you have to change some of the ways you talk and think. A player, plays punctuation. Americans make haiku as a three line poem, but the player knows it's a two line-break poem or, once you understand the difference, you can say a three line-break poem knowing that the third break can be played as a stop or as an ambiguity, hinting at something more possibly coming. A player does not simply write into a frame called "iambic pentameter" but makes pentiambic lines, and the lines, as entities, are played, a break is played. A listening reader may or may not hear those breaks, hear the lines as entities under how the phrasing is played. Here's my play with the weaving together of played sounds, and, of course, more. I started from Keats' frequently anthologized on the sea which is quiet and meditative, which is all right, and with a Greek goddess down in the mist-filled caves and all.... But, it's the North Atlantic. I was engaged in a poet's shop talk with Keats. A jazz man's shop talk. You pick up your instrument and sketch ideas, the actual playing. It's not discussion, suggestions, evaluations, except as your ear, both poets, if they're present, c'n talk about how it all sounds. you might want to play this one out loud, read for the music, and I think you will hear the breaks, the sea's breakers, grinding the coastline....
And sitting in sand, a weighted whisper around
Me of the sea, I watch the swelling gray
Rise thick and fall onto rocks and spray
The mouths of caves, wistful flights in sound.
I've seen it silver leaf, or glasses ground
To ornate mirrors, fitted carefully the way
Best to catch the eye, the frozen sway
And leap of it an escaped secret I've found.
And curling toes in sand, rest the eye
By letting it roll far and wild as the sea.
And rest the ear in a waking ancient growl,
The muscles with an unbending of the knee.
It's time to walk the beach, and time to prowl
The forests, time to taste the fleshy sky.

Q:

I'm practicing being a listening reader, but I wonder about how I use the printed book as I'm studying it. what about margin notes, underlining, and all that? and how about marking text for the reading?

A:

It's a text like any other. You can do everything with it you always do. And you can do this with the online and downloadable digital copies, too, if you learn to read html source and to insert a few tag pairs with their contents. When you're thinking, though, about your use of the hours, at least, and the chapters too, as something you're going to read aloud, you will want to mark as for the reading, which touches on sense, the sense made of something spoken. The common habit is to read for sense but without thinking about how you read affecting that sense. As a listening reader, you "read to yourself". I was listening to John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Society talking to some of the RSC actors, experienced actors whose names you'd know. Barton was telling his actors they had to make the auditors, an audience as individuals, listen, by finding the words, and the urge to speak, in themselves. The actor has to truly be speaking so somebody hearing will listen to hear what's being said. So, reading to yourself is, in a sense, to split in two. You are reading to you as auditor and listening to you as speaker. You have to read, subvocalizing or even aloud, as this is where the action is. You can read as though to a listener and figure that you are also hearing as that listener. I know that's weird. Don't strain to do it. Just read as if speaking to somebody and let the rest happen.
     Another thing you can do is sort out little mini-essays in the text or scenes in the movie you may be daydreaming. It's just a little extra marking up of the pages. This creates wholes that you can comprehend more easily for their being pulled up out of the flow.


Q:

It seems to me you're talking about things we all know about and that we have words for. Couldn't you explain something of how you work with images without jumping to a term like sensemes or about insights, I guess, without revelemes?

A:

Maybe you think it makes little or no difference what you call the things you work with. Names as labels. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.... Of course, that isn't true. Names are storehouses of experience-based meanings, Here, this little tale is from a letter I wrote to a poet friend about as crazy as me in our good old days...
I don't know, maybe I'm putting on my poet's beret or my brujo's hat, a funky bird-stained old cowboy hat with a turkey feather (for humility) in the band....
 
Making art is like doing sand paintings in the "sands of time". Time is grainy ... little thumbs ... thumby ... the painting just sitting there briefly, breezes setting up little ruffles in it ... then winds setting hinted waves in it ... and it's gone....
 
You don't do your sand painting, or art, once ... a poem doesn't last beyond a reading. You've made your moves once and they're in the winds, the speech, but you paint it again through each reader. You can't even see what you're doing. And, then, it's gone, anyway.
 
Our colored grains ... the names.
 
A model of complacency, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Somebody who thinks about what he says, wouldn't say that. You might get away with "as" sweet, since sweet is left open-ended. The smell isn't absolutely said to be "always the same", But, still, the belief is there and it reeks with complacency. A devil potion from the fake Devil, since the real Devil learns from experience.
 
Imagine somebody who works in shit-ponds or paddies. Smell of shit, of methane, of nitrogen half-released in decayed organics, of the great bundle of a unique place.  E's never encountered a rose, wouldn't know one if e saw it, if nobody was there to name it. And a red rose is growing and e comes upon it. It's red and, since everything else is browns and yellows and greens, it's a bright spot. The previous night e lay all night on e's back in a grassy field near e's paddy watching the night sky when awake. Mars, the red star, was prominent in that night's sky. So, e looks at this thing. E sniffs at it, and the usual smell of the place has something added and it's kind of cloying. It's pretty. E names it shitmartian. E takes it home. E washes it. E sniffs at it. Still cloying. E takes e's shower, dries off, gets dressed and, again, sniffs at the shitmartian.... It smells about the same, but a thin wail of smell does come out more. That's the "cloying" thread, tangling in nostril hairs....
 
All the all-days in the shit pond. The smell isn't on e's hands and clothes, it's in e's nostrils, in e's brain. E'd have to go where no shit existed to sort out the smells of all things against a new ground. Even that, assuming a place with no shit existing, wouldn't be "pure" enough to wash e's brain....
 
Complacency isn't easy to deal with. By time you c'n wonder about it, it's hard-wired in....
     All my references to e? In the seventies, everybody wanted to tack on pronouns that didn't distinguish between genders, men and women. They wanted a kind of pronomial equality. But all attempts to add anything, to change anything got out of hand. MS magazine and MIT university offered whole new lattices of pronouns - as if anybody fould use those. I looked backwards, back at what happened when we used our pronouns. We've an it-row (it, its, it, itself) for the non-personified. So, that's on one bank of the divide. On the other side, the personified. But we've no row. We have to make a second choice, the he-row or the she-row. and if we don't want to designate, we use the "honorary" masculine. And that's what got people stirred up. The solution is to insert a row to stand opposite the it-row and prior to checking anatomy.
     I made the simplest row possible exactly mirroring the it-row. I used the "e" that's in he, she, me, we and they. So, I got e, e's, e, eself. I didn't drop the possessive apostrophe to force pronunciation to ease and away from German or Spanish es. When you're daydreaming, moving in a poem, you likely won't use this, not easily at least, for a long time. I'm only mentioning this because I used e in the "story of the rose".
     New words for new concepts? Of course, everybody will agree with that. and they use strange borrowings and pastings and all sorts of "from the outside" goings-on. But look at the old words that are full of meanings, that tell stories, that gather experience and make sense of it. Take a word like daisy. It names a little flower that's like a sun with rays. But what's in the word isn't a sun, but an eye. You unpack this kenning. Day's eye, night's eye being a shimmering silvery eye of a goddess, maybe, because day's eye, the sun is surely a god's eye. Mothers tell mischevous children, as they go out, that it will watch. All the god myths can be pulled out of this small word naming a small senseme.
     At the risk of stetching this out, let me fiddle with a physical object you know and can, literally, handle. Any of the polyhedra. You know the hexahedron, usually called a cube, and the octahedron, the docecahedron because it's twelve pentagons hold a dsk calendar easily. You know these stange creations are closed as a sphere might be. But they're made of faces and points. The faces are angled relative to each other, s we get the "third thing" edges. An edge is actually two edges, one from each face, welded together. We could call the edges interfaces. Or we could call them framers.      I'm already pushing and pulling at how you swee these - especially if you're doing this in your mind's eye, since you likely don't have any but maybe the calandar-dodecahedron or some sort of cube handy. I've brought out the edges, now, and used them to frame faces so you have snse of a kind of basket, helped by seeing that the pointy spots are where edges meet. Where you had a thing, you now have a basket or, to use something leading to a conceptual sense, a system.
     An octahedron is an eight-faced thing with six points - with twelve framers making the basket or system. It's probably easier to see the image because everything fits together. The numbers have meaning in the structure, and it is a structure. You can understand it in a way you couldn't before when about all you could do was memorize the numbers of elements and associate them with a name, which counted faces, and a mental picture. With a tetrahedron if you are used to seeing it set as a little tipi, you won't recognize it if you're shown one looking over an edge. One last item. The cube or hexahedron has twelve framers like the octahedron. In other words, you can take your twelve framers and make two baskets.
     I want a name for any of the polyhedra that packs in the meanings we've experienced here. I want to replace hedron with something that catches the basket or structure nature. I used sys and the plural is syses. It suggests, but doesn't run into, system. Then, I want to count the framers, not faces or points - which are just fallout results. So, our octahedron is now a twelvesys (12sys). So is our hexahedron. We can separate them by telling the number of edges making a facial figure, three and four. We tack this on the end: 12sys3, 12sys4. Or write it out, twelvesysthree.
     It's like the lights are too bright or, for us, as poets, where's the lovely music and mystery of "octahedral splendoer..."? It'll gather in time. What you have to do is use the old names and in how you use them, in what you compose into language bring out these other revelemes available to you because as you write about the octahedron, you have the ordinarily concealed meanings stored in the 12sys3.
     Peter Brook, the director who changed contemorary approaches to Shakespeare with his 1973 Midsummer Night's Dream, talked of the secret play within the play, the play, I'd guess, Shakespeare was experiencing as he daydreamed it into language. In a sense, with that twelvesysthree within as you talk about the octohedron, or octohedral goings-on, you've a secret frame of reference or, better, in associative terms, system of referents, to help shape what you set down.
     You'd likely not include my phoneme among the new and unfamiliar words, but, in fact, push at my listener or listening reader to sense the unfamiliar in it. When talking about spelling, which is hooking up sounds to letters so we can code code talking into writing, we get enthusiasts for "whole word" spelling which means visualizing the word and reading off letter names and for phonetics which means sounding out the word linking to the letters as you go. In both cases, you are learning from book or blackboard. So, the visualization is done for you and you probe at it and get to know that word. And in the phonetics approach, you puzzle through clusters, to handle the gh in light, for instance. Never mind that in a time of less constrained pronunciation the gh had it's variant pronunciations and ties to, say, the German licht.... As a poet, you want to be alive to all this secret inward activity as you compose.
     But for that to happen, you've got to toss that abstracted "phonetics" and replace it with phonemics, your rose by another name. Not just any sounds, but these very sensual soundings, rooted in the depths of meaning, as you shape a word in your wrighting. In your secret poem within, are saying what you are writing and you feel yourself saying it even more centrally than you hear yourself saying it. And that's how you get your fibrous reality into it.
     Starting from this shifted sense of a phoneme, you can move toward the notion of a senseme and, maybe, by-pass the notion of its being a new name, like the rose's, for an image. In passing by the image you c'n notice that an image is, hwever many senses yo extend it to cover, a picture of something. A senseme is more a thing in itself made of language and meaning, in your cognitive innards, or in Count Korzybsky's terms, neurolinguistically and neurosemantically. I toss those in because an earlier question brought up the neurolinguistic half of the pair. Anyway, like magic or, better, sensemics "it's all done with neuros".
     Whew! I've rambled on some, but, as Milton Erickson used to say, "I don't teach to instruct, but to motivate". If you c'n think of language and meaning as a kind of clay out of which you shape the real or, as I've been saying since the sixties, make it real, and, then, as Ezra said even earlier, make it new. These two, taken together, add up to make it live.... Try looking at things around you as patterned. The voodoo "doctor" molding the little clay figure into which he, possibly she, will thrust miniature spears is after all simply copying God making Adam out of dust, and we can take Philip Pullman's dust which is, I think, particles of experience that cluster about growing and grown into adulthood humans, replacing ...well, innocence - or just doing what is wired in, mostly by others or unperceived experience.

Q:

In your tenth hour, on onomatopoeia, after your series of readings on what "third eye" might be, ending in the riff on its being the changing shift in brow-tension with tightening and loosening focus of interest, a kinesthetic eye, what you call a "rhythmic, cadenced 'attending'", you go into a description of just walking that goes on for several pages. And being aware in all senses. You tell how Erickson trains people to observe others' behavior by first observing their own and starts them off imagining themselves walking down a street in their own town. Then, you go on into just what you might "notice". And it's another almost eery riff. Just walking. Why is walking and observing what you're doing a good place to start?

A:

Well, a lot of our early learning is focussed on learning to walk and learning to talk. And we, in English or Amerish (A-mer'-ish), rhyme the pair of names. Learning to talk is learning muscular skills. We watch our mothers and other adults who bend down to our watching eyes. We watch the breathing, the chest and throat, and the shaping of sounds, the facial muscles, the lips and, behind the opening and closing lips the tongue and teeth. And we watch the handling of all these together, the skilled use of this talking apparatus.
      And we watch walkers. We pull ourselve about and we get up on our knees and hands and find ways to work these four legs together and we pull ourselves up using what's at hand and we try moving out - usually getting encouragement and destinations from applauding adults. Later, we slip into the walking methods of mentors portraying the roles we'd like to fill. So walking and talking are pretty much our central skills.
     You've heard, and read, me more than a few times saying that to observe my whole core learning of the experience of opening a poet's consciousness within myself what you want to observe are my three "walking" poems. San Francisco Poem, Obsidian and Cosmic Language. I'll put links in below. What matters is the layers and depths of awareness. In San Francisco Poem I was walking in San Francisco on a night in history, the night of the Watts riots down south, but I was walking through the "layers" of poets' worlds in this city and I was walking through my opening poet's associative and suggestive powers. All this was being birthed. Another all-night walk, this time in Berkeley, but the name, Obsidian, tells you, as do the opening lines, somethinmg else is afoot. And in Cosmic Language I'm walking where poets walk....
     A few months ago, I picked up Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars. It's not about all the people who are supposed to have written Will's plays and poems for him. I always tossed those arguments out on the obvious ground that nobody's ever mentioned, that anybody taking sabbaticals to write what Will was to write that year and then came back would not have their own, signed, work unaffected. Oh, another thing it's not about is all the biographical and missing biographical problems. It's all about wars being waged having to do with the texts. And that's where Shakespeare, or any of us, lives. In the chapter on Peter Brook, The Search for the Secret Play - and that's within a play, not some lost manuscript - Rosenbaum was listening to the tape of a talk he missed and Brook was talking about Shakespeare's "being alive" in a heightened sense. I'll block-quote what I'm taking from Rosenbaum and the quote marks cover what he's quoting from Brook. I hope I don't kill off the spirit in stripping it down a bit...
     Brook led up to the notion of a secret play by suggesting a sort of secret play going on within Shakespeare.
     He began with a deceptively simple inquiry: Just how alive was William Shakespeare?
     "...But to say someone is alive is not enough. You can be one percent alive, you can be twenty percent alive. ...a man who was not only one hundred percent alive, but perhaps a thousand, even.... Now what is the difference....
     "This person walking through the streets of London must have lived each single moment with an incredible richness of awareness. So many levels, infinite levels of meaning."
     Richness of awareness and levels, or depths, of meaning. What's alive here isn't a sharp eye for detail, though that has to be present, but a richness of associative and suggestive and creative energy. He see's somebody make a very human gesture, something distinctive that must be characteristic of that person, and he thinks of that as occuring in one of his kings, or of one of the stange participants in Prospero's strange place. But, nothing so specifci as that, of course, but just an atmosphere with latent potentials beyond those in just that London street in that hour, though that is likely rich enough for the hour. It's just that more is there. I'll leave this for now. I'd recommend reading the chapter in Rosenbaum's book and all of the book. Brook and his 1973 Midsummer Night's Drsam is the central lure, with that secret play within. Where he goes from the snippet I've pulled loose as he reaches to grasp the "bottomlessness" of Bottom's dream or when he describes a poet's crafting of experience when "Edgar is conjuring up the dizzying view from the top of Dover Cliffs for his blind father Gloucester". Shakespeare was conjuring Edgar's conjuring for his father for us and the four of us are experiencing that dizzying view and its visceral components. All of this is kin to what's in the alive Shakespeare on that London street.
     Here's a little of that walk in my tenth hour, pulled out of the middle of it...

Imagine that you do such a quarter block walk to the curb and stop or don’t stop but step into the street. What do you do? After imagining this walk, run a brief description of it in your head. Erickson asks somebody what he or she did. The person says something like, “I walk along pretty straight because I’m not dodging other people; and when I come to the curb, I stop, in case a car comes; and then I go on across the street.” Erickson begins to ask questions. Do you really walk in a straight line? Are you doing anything while you walk? Are you walking in any particular way? What body parts move and how in the walking? Any other movements in your body? And he begins to point out that a great deal is going on during that “empty” walking. You don’t just “walk,” but “amble” or “stride” or whatever. And, in fact, you might shift from one sort of movement to another as some whisp of thought blows through your mind: perhaps that you’re late or that you’re going to arrive too early or even that you’re over-exerting or not using an energy welling up. And, if you truly observe, you’ll notice that, even with no dodging to do, you don’t walk a straight path. You tend to veer, perhaps only slightly, toward or away from shops or window content, peripherally noted, that might minimally attract or repel you. Those words, remember, at-tract and re-pel, refer to movements induced in you. You might even deliberately change your path to see something, identify it, if puzzled, or simply see it more clearly. You might build up a little lateral momentum and fall into a sailor’s rolling walk. This might come from a number of causes. One would be little flickers of “starting to dodge” as whisps of memory throw up some old near collision on that street as some hurrying businessman rushed toward you or a young mother’s pulled stroller jack-knifed. Your head moves about, led by your eyes. Looking to see if somebody isn’t really coming, traffic about to roar into view ... or to “see” why nobody is around.

Anyway, you’re doing quite a lot beside just “walking” as an automaton might “walk.” You’re responding to a great flow of events within and without. And, as you walk, you speed and slow. It isn’t a “straight path” in time, either. As you approach the corner, you probably look up, note the condition of the light or the sign. If you’re going to stop, by habit or to check, you don’t just come up to the curb and stop. You probably slow, the steps become different. You “come to” a stop, perhaps toe the curb, even caress it, set yourself for a start. And so forth. As you note the condition and timing of the traffic lights, you might slow or speed to “fit into” that timing ... so you won’t have to stop or so you can stop and take a breather. As you approach the curb, you slow, change the “shape” of steps. And you might have little slowings and speedings in those last steps. A regular stopping dance or a coming-to-a-stop dance. A “rhythmic figure.” Or a sensemic “melodic figure” from which a rhythmic figure might be extracted.

By now, if you’re imagining that bit of walking, under my prodding, you realize there is a great deal going on. A great tapestry of behavior to observe and read. It’s not just an “empty” walking - or a “walking” that is just the abstracted form of “putting one foot before the other.”

Now, suppose you look really close. You might catch the rhythmic figures in, say, the constant eye scan, whether scanning the realm of V-super-e, that of V-super-i, or transiting between the two. Then, the build up figures as you scan into other sensory channels, but still with eye movements leading. Or what of those larger rhythmic figures in your breathing patterns - as those patterns change under the prodding of the physical exertion and things responded to and maybe a somatic playfulness?


San Francisco Poem
Obsidian
Cosmic Language

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