Your letter came in just after April left for the post-office with my new letter on “the project,” or birthing that new renaissance, or at least putting one of the many levers into position with the Laughlin’s Barn image, story, and projection ...but with the new renaissance, it’s going to have to be made in an altered world from any earlier renaissances included even dreams of. Skanky Possum #6 had a paper from a conference’s panel member, the panel being titled 21st Century Poetics. Neither the paper reprinted not anything any of those panelists could write or even think had any hint of anything that would suggest that the century rollover meant a thing to them. An exciting, contemporary title for the panel. Maybe a hope that it’d rub off ...and people might think they were the new thing. Suppose, I wondered aloud in two letters to Dale Smith, ...21st Century Poetics meant something? (You c’n hand a copy of this letter to Dale. I don’t send him a copy because he never asked anything about what I did send along and I wouldn’t impose, but he might want to follow on with “21st century poetics” – and as another listener, you c’n ask him. A cc might be more or an imposition than even a third letter, chugging into non-responsive silence. As you know, you c’n send a copy to anybody else ...even as part of the Laughlin’s Barn and 21st century renaissance. After all, most of the people I write to aren’t born yet. I can’t get embarrassed by what contemporaries might think of my peculiar thinkings...)
You know from my many writings of the idea, in and out of poems, for forty years, that, for me, poetics is the makings. Not a tool kit, which would be the obvious metaphor, because I’d have to redefine “tool” in ways people could use to follow me. But “the makings” is a kind of tool kit, the tool and what’s made with it not being teased apart. It’s a craft tool. I got the image, of course, from the folks who roll their own smokes. That’s a craft and the makings are a craft tool, not an industrial tool, which makes groups of poets something of an oxymoron. A poet is alone in Universe. If some of e’s friends are also poets, ...well, that’s a social break ...but it leads to the most gawd-awful politicking, hyping, and assorted bullshits such as that panel on 21st Century Poetics. So: The makings. I was already in the 21st century when I put together the concept, though I didn’t know it, of course....
The tobacco, grows wild, but then people cultivate it, focus it, domesticate it. Then, there’s the paper with its line of glue. So there’s the industry (and industrious) in the background. This was made by man and with industrial tools in layers out to the periphery of Universe. The spit, is what somebody c’n pull up out of e’s innards, raw, and use for what it’ll do. But the human part of the makings, what Bundy and you are referring to above, aahhhhh, that’s in the rolling dance of the fingers. And it’s not a thing, a form, a pattern, though it subsumes all of those. It’s a dance, it works in time(s)....
Sooooooooooh, so we c’n look at what we’ve got in our makings – various people’s – as we’ve evolved them in the 20th century, building on what was available before that – in various histories – and, then, looking at the world that’s coming into being (coincidentally) with the rollover of the century and think about how those makings might be rebuilt, added-to, even subtracted from ...or, how we handle entropy, the 2nd law of thermotopics, what-all....
What about that world? What’s going to be different? Something to do with going online? Naw, that’s two superficial.... To affect a poet’s makings, e’s sand-painting kit, it’s got to be interior. It’s got to be what Bundy sensed beyond the picture he looked at.... I often start one sketch with Alvin (and Heidi) Toffler, the 1980 The Third Wave. Remember the old map drawn up in terms of (static) “ages” or “eras”? The agricultural, the industrial...? Then, what next, eh? The post-industrial era? Oh, there’s a powerful grasping into the future, a Promethean reach, eh? Okay, the information age? Trouble is, ...there’s an information industry, an IT (information technology) industry, a Gawd-damned marketing industry ...and gadgets, not (a poet’s) makings. I c’n work there. I wrote the 21st century’s first etypewriter. That’s technology. Maybe if I wasn’t a poet I couldn’t have written it, but would have written only one more text editor or word processor or Web “layout” program. It’s a first, it’s crude. But, then, my poetry is often crude, rough, trying to grasp sulkies ...that ain’t graspable....
Toffler’s third wave wasn’t much named. I wrote him about the name kicking around in my head, but I suppose I didn’t have contextual matter shaped up to make the why clear.... He didn’t get it ...but was friendly, talkative, liked my thinking about it. The third wave. Waves ...of what? Well, civilization, spreading out around the globe, through the biosocialsphere, so not an agricultural/civil or an industrial “age” set in place, but a spreading handing over of this and that into use by other people. So, if we don’t have an industry moving into top place, but a true world-shift (a whole packet of paradigm shifts with individual lags and spreadabilities), what’s the third wave of civilization moving out ...and in(to minds)? In a sense, we go full circle, back to the pre-first wave and what we had as our makings for getting to what began to spread in collections and constitute a wave. I call the new wave of civilization, the cognitional. I use the –al to match the other two and to solid up the cognitive tools to make that coherent wave (wave particle equivalence, process as thing).
We’re back to where we were before the first ripples of civilization. But then we’ve never left there except by sort of “throwing our minds” (a kind of ventriloquism) out into behavior-produced “exteriors.” Anyway, I ain’t giving a lecture on this. We make our Universe(s), but this isn’t solipsism because we don’t make em out of nothing!
Anyway, we c’n figure a new poetics, a 21st century poetics, is going to mean we get a new kind, maybe a highly structured new kind of ...spit. And new rolling dances of the fingers. But, if we aren’t faking that world shift ...then, we might have bioengineered ’bacco and new paper.... Well, you know from my many letters, emails (that I print out for you) and such that this is what I’m saying this ewriting is all about. New paper. Scrolls instead of pages, Alexandrian rather than Of Congress library, hyperperfect-binding, with glue replaced by nothing more solid than reference, “layout” caught up in punctuation, and all the rest....
One handful of dirt at a time
My mountains slide into my valleys
Overloading the rock mantle.
Some hidden fault yields
Some deep part slides against another
And the out-flying waves throw you back.
This is my flesh I speak
That was “reading instructions” for Vivisection, ...but, then, all the work, the couple hundred poems, the four million (approximately) words of letter, ...it’s all vivisectioning scans....
About part II:
Well, this is only part I of my answering letter. As you know, I just come down to “Which brings me to the real reason for my letter....” I need a part II for what I intended when I typed out (reading your long hand) the quote above. About the seers of mind, of the maker in the made. Then, maybe three to five more parts to dip in and play (as we used to with the vigor of youth to help) with your six pages from a long-pad. But, the vigor is less these days. I’ve used up a morning and a load of inURGy.... I’ll add here only that I was touched by what you said about reading a handful of my poems and then a handful of Eliot’s. It’s the right test and doesn’t leave anybody one-down. It’s just human preference which is what all of it comes down to. I won’t (in up-coming parts) talk about it except to illustrate the test and talk about its liberation of the reader from “critical impositions....” This may evoke curiosity in any you pass this along to and to Ken (Sawyer), Carlos Fleitas, and Kirby Urner to whom I think I’ll email it as a sample of how we “converse.” Yup, one name you could give this “age” is digital and the cognitive fallout of that is that any text, or music or video or most anything has the quality of being a shape-changer....
Oh, did you pass Dale Smith the Waking the Poet you picked up two visits back for him...? Anybody you’d hand a copy too in conversation that’d make your having a short stack on hand useful? My latest handling of them is to say, online, elsewhere, the “price” is sending me an address where the U.S Mule (and its foreign fellows) can unload it. Carlos has gotten a few people in several countries to provide addresses. That’s all Webbed-folk. Since this letter may begin wandering, here’s the TOC...
FOREWORD
The Nature of the "Deeper Crafts"
FIRST SESSION
Introduction to the Course
FIRST HOUR
Waking the
Poet: What it Means
SECOND HOUR
Tale of the
Experience-Maker
SECOND SESSION
MELOPOEIA or "melody making"
THIRD HOUR
The Eye
Assists the Ear (reading "music")
FOURTH Hour
A Poet's
Third Lyre: The Phonemic Instrument
THIRD SESSION
PHANOPOEIA or "Sense-Making"
FIFTH HOUR
The Art of
Sense-Making
SIXTH HOUR
A Poet's
Fourth Lyre: The Sensemic Instrument
FOURTH SESSION
LOGOPOEIA or "Revelation-Making"
SEVENTH HOUR
The Tapestry
of Words
EIGHTH HOUR
A Poet's
Fifth Lyre: The Revelemic Instrument
FIFTH SESSION
ONOMATOPOEIA or "Gname-Making"
NINTH HOUR
The Art of
Phrasing
TENTH HOUR
A Poet's
Sixth Lyre: The Rhythmemic Instrument
AFTERWORD
The Mastery of the "Deeper
Crafts"
