4/26/01

Paul,

Well, a few more pages (probably) on the “Atlantis” business and the republication of Fires and, then, if I find them, two more of those emails to Carlos Fleitas, Uruguay, I sent you a while back. I went over a lot of old conceptualizing in those. I wrote a couple more after sending you what I had at the time.

I think it’s good for us to be thinking about Fires, Rover, and even the “letters.” But not for 2002 or 2003 or any year. Just projects. Write the new Intro to Fires (and one for Rover). I was delighted to hear that the investors were giving you $5000 a month and, hopefully, your travel money apart from that. I could stop worrying about you or feeling bad that you were buying us a pound of coffe, a tin of good tea. But I still think in old 1967 dollars. That’s only $60,000 a year. Doesn’t even get you a decent piece of George W’s huge tax cut. And you’ve still got a family. I’m glad you’re getting a few things into print, that Thorp Spring(s) still appears, that, invited to read in the English countryside, you c’n bring out some things that’ve come through a press. It was good to see the imprimatur on the Dale Smith book. But full-scale projects ought to wait until there’s spend-able gold and some idea of where in Hell there’s an audience (listening readers).... But as a spur to thinking, imagining, “reflecting,” ...well, I’m trying to point my mind back into po’try modes, ...just a bit, by thinking about the “book.”

[Go into Part I of critical path.... And how going back isn’t to find advanced civilizations, but to explore the human mind...working on what’s available.]

7/27/01

As you can see, that didn’t get finished and in the mail. What I thought useful in your letter to Colin wasn’t so much to do with notions of Atlantis (singular, multiple, or global [connected]). It was more how you were beginning to use your knowledge of the global, dynamic geology. As you see in the brackets, I was going on to push you to somebody else with a real sense of the global connectedness, if not in a “civilization” sense, going back to “prehistory.” That’s Bucky, and the book, in large paper as well as clothe, and with loads of used copies in any university town, is Critical Path. St Martins. 1981. You want the early chapters on pre-history. Then, I was going to go through my own work on the “Arabic” number glyphs as geometric symbols and how what’s available in any “peering back” is the human mind. But,

I never got to it.

Now, another visit. Conversation about doing Fires 3, a conversation we’ve been having for nearly twenty years. Well, it’s started me on a project. First, it’s not to get ready to do Fires in the Fall. That’d be great folly. Sure, it made sense on Woolsey Street all those decades. We were young, full of vision, and a world was growing we could push that vision into. We had some good rides. But repeating that now would be, at best, reproducing a relic. Nope, Fires has to wait until El Dorado comes up. There’s up-front money to do it right. No sweating one more signature to hold eight or sixteen more pages when something’s got to go in, or should go in. And no sitting Dale or somebody else down at an antique typesetting machine to type the whole damn book after I type the whole damn book to get decent manuscript. It takes a typesetting service that can take my digital manuscript and massage it into the formatted book. My manuscript will be in Microsoft Word 2000. Any publishing or typesetting equipment built recently will take it even though I, and they, will not be up to the xml tagging and all that the big tech publishing houses and possibluy, by now, the trade publishers use. The manuscript will be pretty much error free. I haven’t talked about the project, but will below. Anyway, when the Fires 3 manuscript is put together, April will be what I guess you’d call the manuscript editor. Not putting to work a wife with a good eye. She’s a thorough professional. That manuscript will be digital though with both printed and web versions made from the digital. It’s not the typeset, book-formatted copy. The printed version will be fitted to 8-1/2 x 11 inch paper. Lines in red print saying there is or isn’t a stanza break at the page break. The typesetters will know what to “extract” into their page-maker to fit it into your (book editor) design. I trust there’ll then be “galleys” of some sort for manuscript editor and author.

You c’n see that’s going to cost a bit.

In any case, you’re going to need whatever you can come by for to get that chunk of world set up where books c’n be birthed above ground: the bookstore, coffee house, “oasis” in Austin. When that oasis is ready, when you’ve got platinum bars in the safe, ...there’ll be a manuscript for you.

Paper and CD.

By Fall, you’ll have, on a CD, Foster or others c’n put in a Windows machine and bring up in any current (now or then) web browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, Mosaic). Nope, no Fires 3 on it. But Fires 2 will be on it, same poems, but all fixed. My original typos, Dick’s typos, and, too, spelling and all the rest. And the same for The Quiet Poems and Return of the Shaman. That’s the project. I’d do it (and, now, even the Fires 3, even if there was never to be any thought of publication. This is my “project” and what I owe to the work. October 5, I’m 70. I’m pretty healthy so far as I know. Get a physical check every year. Figure I can last awhile. So all the poems into digital form. And organized in the books they’ve been in but fixed for keeping. Not rewritten, even if I could do it, I’d damage what they are. The roughness, the not knowing what I wasn’t supposed to do is part of the strength. Other poets starting when I started, used to say they hoped they could find their voice...though mostly they copied Charlie Olson, who had no voice to speak of. I used to tell ’em , in my own droll way, “I’m trying to write an anthology, escape my voice, knowing it’s going to catch me wherever I go.” Pretty much, your voice is you.

So, I’ve got a pair of directory trees on my disk. One for the Word versions, one for the HTML versions. I export those from Word, too, rather than working over the text in my own eWriter (a 21^st century etypewriter I built in a programming language called Delphi, which is why our Abyssinian princess is named Delphie (short for Delphine). Anyway, the CD I’ll be sending along in a couple months (probably, though I’m not hurrying) will have the old stuff. In each tree there is an empty directory for Fires_New. I’ll be building the final fires. I’m figuring on writing in what I have of this decade. Maybe get a book.

Fires 2 was Fires: Selected Poems, 1963-1976. Fires 3 will be, at least as I sense the gesture early on, Fires: The early decades, 1960-1980. Then, if a book grows and the Fires has been out a year by, say, 2006 or 2007, I’ll call it The New Century. No Fires on it. I’ll reach back for things from the three books that didn’t get in Fires 3. Maybe even pull something from it. Or use the old miscellany...maybe...and if the book’s gesture c’n make use of them. Nobody better try to figure chronology for anything.

Take Fires 3, I’m not going to try to cram the other two books into it. I won’t keep all that Fires 2 had in it. The other two were chunked in sections. As you know, the power in Fires was that it was not chunked, not sectioned. A reader might try to pull threads loose, like the walking poems, and now there’s going to be at least one other before the main three. I’m just going to pull poems in and put them where they belong, sometimes at thread intersections. For instance, some of the Cafe poems from Quiet Poems. Some of Return of the Shaman. No looking for the best. Just what fits. I figure typing all these poems, and helping April type them, because you’ve, sometimes gotta feel the movement to get those weird in-line spacings to come out more or less as guides to a reader’s phrasing, might get me to doing it again.. She’s good at typing and copy-editing at the same time, a natural reader with a BA in English lit (she’s taught college level “critical reading”)...and she’s read all the great language handlers. C’n read Henry James for pleasure. And anybody who c’n unravel those sentences and get emotional messages from them c’n probably read even my quirky gestures....

What about your Introduction? It c’n be growing in your innards, I’d guess, as the book evolves because I’ll be talking about that evolution in letters.... I still feel the Fires 2 Introduction ought to be behind it. It’s part of the literature in its own right, best insight into what I was doing then I’ve ever been fortunate enough to see. Better than I could do now. And, just as I don’t try to mine my poems from then, I’d as soon you didn’t try again, now, to say what you said then, the use you made of li, etcetera. So if it’s there, In its own space-time, ...you c’n just start over from now. I c’n make a new gesture, oe bundle of threaded gestures, in the poem-placing. We’ll have us a new book. Fatter but leaner, too. Ain’t doing a salvage job. Or cramming everything in. I’ll have a couple blurbs on the Acknowledgements page. A comment about chronology and poem-time.

Then, a paragraph about the list of credits that block-quotes the one from Fires 2, and then says the new pulling is from the “mostly” from the three books. The list below will be the one from Fires 2 because I couldn’t remember then any better than I did...and surely couldn’t add anything now. Talking about handling the Acknowledgements even gives me an image of using the older Introduction in the newer. But that’s stepping on what you’ll write. So this isn’t a suggestion, only an image. You open your Introcution and a couple sentences in, you block-quote the one from from Fires 2. Then, you go on from there to Intro the larger, more comprehensive space-time of poem time, building on what you did. See what rebirthing anything c’n do to the thinking processes....

Reminds me...in the old Fires in digital form, I’ve put the title of Psychodelos into our alphabet. I could use the Greek letters in the MS Word version from a symbol font, but not in the HTML version. I decided against having the two different in even the recreated book. I put this among the “fixes.” Why? Well, I used the Greek letters partly for the feeding back to (one set of) roots to our hallucinating or visioning., but mostly to get a bit of a veil. Force some stopping before understanding. It was the height of the “psychodelics” period. Now, it isn’t. And the re-formed word, Psychedelos, the Greek suggestion in the form is enough. Sometime, when the newer books, Fires 3 and The New Century, are forced on generations of students and neophyte scholars, some scholarly edition of Fires 2, The Quiet Poems and Return of the Shaman may be produced and this semi-translation of that title will be really a good move, along with all the typographic and spelling fixes. Real scholars can go find copies of the “first edition” and live in the rough good times we lived in, eh?

BUT, when the whole book goes through the typesetting (digital)...those guys gotta put the characters in the old Introduction whether it’s contained in or following the new Introduction. And the footnote has to be there.

There’s another one, too, in my River Dream on page 74 of Fires 2.... It’s the Chinese for Spring and the word Spring (with the Cap missing) is in parentheses. The poem evokes visual awareness and ending on that drawing. It’s a drawing first, then its the ideogram and the translation accrues to it.... That’s how things work inside the head of a reader with both English and Chinese reading along in English, with the visual stimulation taking over.... In the Word and HTML versions I’m making here, I’ll just put the whole works there in parentheses, something like this:

(Chinese ideogram for Spring with the word Spring in parentheses)

Actually, in the Word and HTML versions I might just write in Spring but with an asterisk and the above as a footnote.

If this fixed Fires 2 ever goes to print for that scholarly edition, they c’n do it right. what I might do later for what I have here is see if I can get a scan to gif or scan to jpg at Kinko’s or somewhere and put that in. That wouldn’t work for the Introduction because the smaller (and it’s more complex) ideogram has to go inline. Doing that with an imported image might not make desktop publishers blink...but it’s beyond me. Gotta have the typesetting service do things like that. I’m a bhludy amateur, remember.

08/06/2001
08/20/2001
08/28/2001
09/03/2001
09/06/2001
09/13/2001
09/23/2001
02/13/2002
03/03/2002
Begins second group (heavier duty): 03/05/2002

Well, here’s a bit o’ manuscript...

The Seafarer

Hang it all, Ezra Pound

there can be but one “Seafarer.”

But Seafarer, and my Seafarer?

Allow, a tired man th’ tellin

a all he’s got, th’ hurt an th’ past.

Th’ storms an’ damages? Those I’ll tell

ain’t like none yew’v bin told.

It’s brine soakt bread, an’ moldy,

was all t’ eat, an’ th’ old hull

can’t count th’ angry seas

hev beat its boards, bent its sail;

an’ I’v stood alone, near topside down,

close enuf cliffs I cud touch ’em, feart

m’ drownin, an’ God allus meant for men

t’ stay aground an’ suck th’ soil.

Fearin t’ drown an’ m’ feet near froze.

Th’ night wind ’d come up cold,

make a man’s eyes int’ ice.

I’d look int’ th’ sea, stare in th’ sea.

I’d see faces a uncles an’ cousins

an’ fancy I saw th’ face a m’ sweetie.

An’ th’ faces ’d break, split an’ grin,

th’ laughin of a albatross in th’ water.

Ice on m’ hands an’ m’ eyelashes.

Th’ whole winter, haunts wooin

me, gamin me in m’ grog.

Storms, on th’ hard bord we followt;

off th’ cliffs, ice feathers

fell on th’ stern; th’ eagles ’d scream

spray wingd.

Not any knowin

’r havin ’ll make a man happy

if th’ sea-smell sucks his head.

It seems mad t’ th’ solid settlt

with makin money an drinkin wine.

A night comes, snow from th’ north,

an’ cold ground comes thru m’ boots.

Th’ ground is too hard t’ dig again.

Th’ howlin an’ bumpin in a late bar

ain’t nothin t’ a star on a clear night

pointin a way a man kin go.

I git a edge, go all restless.

They laugh an’ gloat; I hunt a ship.

A man with hair in his ass won’t stay

his life one place from born t’ dies.

There’s a whole world t’ win

for a man with brain an’ muscle an’ eye.

Given any here, there’s more,

much more, t’ be had with a turn a sail.

Th’ winner, th’ rich, th’ well-wed:

each has a wish he’d bin t’ sea.

Holdin m’ sweetie, I see a star

along her shoulder, white past white;

an’ nothin but salt, water n air,

not beauty a woman nor beauty a land,

will hold m’ head, will hold m’ heart.

Th’ lumps in th’ bar smell no sea,

hear no waves grindin a hull.

There’s a world burstin m’ head

an’ they’ll never know it’s there.

I’ll go as whales go.

I’ll suck ocean an’ spit foam

an’ be a eagle, fly away.

What’ll I save, stayin sheltert?

Th’ life is loand an’ men on land

spit a lung or wrinkle t’ death

or curse it away in blood n bile

on a knife’s dirty edged suck.

Ain’t no man lived always.

An’ every big man eggs

on those who live t’ say his name,

t’ sing his lauds, t’ lie his death

away with tales a deeds he done,

Revel in deeds.

Dry rotted

days an’ who cares what’s won?

Th’ winnin ain’t what it was.

Th’ big spenders hev baggd th’ spoils.

Wha’ever’s bin won is all a joke.

There’s nothin to it.

Men die, th’ world stays.

Women ’r riches? Worries rest.

Th’ grave is quiet, th’ blade rustet.

A man gits old, his blood gits thin.

They’r gone. All gone.

Th’ best I’v known ’r buried bones.

Nary a one got a woman,

moves a hand, makes a dream,

feels any quiver left a hope.

If he poundet coffins out from gold

he’ll find bones th’ only hoard.