Marketing and Teaching Poetry and Things

One of the problems that small publishers face is distribution, distribution that is, to places that pay for copies. Juice publishes online, but more permanently on CD formats. The CD's offer an opportunity to actually sell a product that has a chance of lasting beyond the ephemeral web sites. We used to sell a fair number of our print issues of Juice to Libraries. It was a wonderful combination of distribution and necessary supplemental revenue.
I wrote an open email to members of the Juice squad (Mugsy,Gene, and Judy) asking if any of them knew how to go about soliciting libraries and other interested institutions. The following is an excerpt from the nuts and bolts exchange.

Best,
Stephen Morse

***************

"Are you looking for a list of University/College Presses that publish poetry and their email addresses?" MUGSY

GENE:
 
I'm not answering for Stephen, but this all came from my working on those brochures and letters in which the audio set is used as incentive to elicit contributions for Juice online and, maybe in a larger context, for purchases of the growing chain of back issues...
 
Not markets for poets. Markets that matter for what's published, in this instance Juice online and, more importantly, the whole future of digitally preserved poetry. I only created a context ("dream world", maybe) into which to write. I call it the future. Someday (in the future) the present will perhaps match it.
 
Anyway, what I described went something like this. Universities , public and private libraries, possibly even museums or other institutions focused on culture or something like that, ...
 
... who have collections of small press publications, "little magazines", focusing on literature, not politics or something, and keep those collections separate from the general collections and rare documents collections- though maybe with links to the latter as they'll take on "rarity" in time.
 
People who are in charge of such collections, even if young, will have institutional, if not personal, memory of me. On my table of books on my site, I have an incomplete section on anthologies I was in during the sixties and seventies. This is a small piece of the gather from the past that makes me confident of that institutional memory. So, we c'n use the very photogenic presentation of the 3 Disk Set to penetrate into the awareness of a person who cares for one of these collections, and, once in his or her head, we sell not just Juice online copies, but the whole extension into "on disc" publications, audio, e-zine and, the mysteriously alluring hyperzine text+ publications. We push toward wrapping the "acquisition" activities back into the familiar paper acquiring.
 
But, that's all my "dream world" mumbling. Still, back in the sixties and seventies there was a poet around the little magazines, a name like Simon Perchik, or Perchek, I think (I might be merging two people), but he was very proud of a collection he had built and was maintaining, at a mid-western university. I knew of him and his activity only indirectly, mostly through shared contributor's copies of magazines with bio notes. It made an impression.
 
So, what might be out there in that vast left field? References to, and then web presences of the institutions with such collections. Finally, maybe, ground-mail and e-mail pointers to the holder and the individual caring for ...the collection. Maybe....
 
Then, we c'n see about putting my reading of that 1963-1976 book they possibly have (General collections have it all over the country, and my others books in various combinations), and they likely have my letters, already, in various collections. A. D. Winans has his Second Coming Press papers at Brown University and Bukowsky was his second most prolific correspondent. Paul Foreman has his Thorp Springs collection at University of Texas and he holds (they aren't primarily in there) a three million word collection of my carbons. I've no connection with those sets of papers, no idea if that, a very different sort of thing than "collections", being archival, indicates any interest in publications or collecting them. Both Paul and A.D. seem uneasy when (as I did just out of curiosity some time back) questions come up. Places to stand in the sunlight waken competitive hopes and fears. I doubt any truly believe me when I say I'm not competing for anything.
 
Someday, of course, most things collected will have been published digitally rather than on paper, and other things in both simultaneously, but the digital containing lots more in various ways. An example pops into my head. You saw the post, maybe some of the letters, in which I, and then Stephen, played with doing the haiku both horizontally and vertically, and you see in the new post to Dean that ...when I went vertically, I rewrote the poem. The so-called "formatting" changes (which were really different playings) opened up different (musical?) possibilities. So, in a digital magazine the divergent end products c'n be presented as a series. Back in the notes section there c'n even be some talk about it, A reader sees multiple possibilities and gets access to the workshops, too. Then, a poet's reading of the versions c'n be tossed in, too. An editor thinks not just is the work worth "printing", but, too, "Is it worth using to show this extra activity". Everything expands.
 
I suggested to Stephen, remember, that in Juice, those two, at least, versions of Motorcycle to Hell be printed together, one after the other (one scroll or page, though, maybe separated by a single line: "then..."). I'm already living in 2060.
 
Anyway, what's worth looking for isn't likely ever to be found in a Poetry Market book, but as I suggested to Stephen, who hasn't time for "left-field" gold-detecting, a letter, publisher to publisher, about getting dustBOOKs assets focused into this very useful for everybody search to produce a salable list.
 
"…that’s a highly complimentary take on my “left field” thing, Gene, most people aren’t quite that nice about it." Mugsy

GENE:
 
Most can't be complimentary about anything that's indirect, requiring connections to be made, as it scares the s**t out of 'em.... I look for it, as a basic sign of life. The nomenclature I worked up for "Waking the Poet" explains this. I started at the base. Take the interest in "phonetics" and the assignment of phones to glyphs.... that's not very good for teaching kids, but not because the whole word idiocy is better. Actually, the two should be integrated, awareness of wholes and parts together, BUT "phonetics" should give way to "phonemics". Not just sounds, but meaningful sounds, attached to meaningful glyphs. Anyway, not to write a new volume of Waking, allow that the phonemic flow, at least for the poet, ought to be there in writing and, later, in reading. That was my ground way in. Melopoeia isn't just to do with metric and rhyming, but is right down in the sounding of the language. So, I thought to kick off from that, from playing, and feeling yourself playing, the phonemic instrument that is language. So, my next thing was to do the same with experience to get our phanopoeia. Nor figures of speech, not even images. But, well, pieces of experience", pulled out of what Milton Erickson always referred to as our "storehouse of experiential learnings". I wrote about, then, our sensemic instrument to be played....
 
So, as we play, phonemically and sensemically, we are filling out our language flow, with the music of speaking and with the reality of experience, but we're still short of what accounts for the potential of indirectly encompassing something well beyond the literal, logopoeia, sometimes called (with the Greeks) the auric mystery, sometimes (in human terms) intelligence.
 
And here lies the player, who even if in the infield, say at short stop, is aware of, and drawing on, the vast "outfield" behind him or her, behind e, that is non-Euclidean, and in our Sphere of existence, always circles back, in all directions, to encompass human apprehending and comprehending of life.
 
My latest post, playing with Dean's [Dean Blehert] two haiku prods in this direction.
 
Gene

Fleitas, Fowler, Haiku and beyond

From: carlosfleitas@netgate.com.uy
Date: April 7, 2005 7:17:39 PM CDT
To: acorioso@earthlink.net, smithjrw@comcast.net
Cc: ken@kbscorp.com, acorioso@losmedanos.edu, smorse@sigafoos.net

Yo, café friends.
 
After siping your (e) letter, i’m glad you brought up the Armstrong thing. As you well know, I love jazz, sometimes I think I want to bring to some of my poems a quick tempo, the one you can find in some of Wynton Marsalis, Bobby Watson, Jimmy Williams, Billy, Ed Thigpen Bird of course and many more, great great jazz musicians. So here is a poem I wrote sometime ago. Reader can get the gist immediately, but the real gist is its tempo I think.
Maybe after all poems should be read out loud, as they where in ancient greeks’ time, so to appreciate them more. Reading with your ear is not a bad approach, I guess…
Ty Hadman says after all, a good haiku is written with your legs….Reading with your ear, thinking with your legs… I am sure you got a lot more to add to these two ones…
Maybe this is one of the many wrinkles of space-time, Jared mentions as the 21st. century twist. After all neurology may became and old fashion science, compared with contemporary fisics.…

Mantras&frogs

 
mantras
& temples
issa and lice
basho and the frog
full moon ahead
emperors rule
& beggars asleep
in harsh dusty beds
full moon ahead
lovers & whispers
breezes & scents
everything is set
nobody in pain
the Buddha
Yawns....


Carlos Fleitas

 

          Best and thanks for the sip, café friends

        
 
 
 
 
Yo, Carlos...,
 
and you others sitting at the tables in our cafe this ayem,
 
Well, a letter the last third of which is a live poem, is worth its weight.... I've slapped Stephen onto the Cc-list because if I was the cyberjock playin' at the disc-o, I'd play this, nicely centered and wavy, behind (the edgy) Edges, before the 'omage, because, as Bucky used to say, there are no straight lines, they all sag, go wavy.....
 
"But, you know one gives up to temptations."
 
Yeah, and that's our strength..., finally.... Maybe Armstrong was warding off questions he'd rather answer with just his horn, after all. I was warding off bein' cornered maybe not bein' able to catch what was in a lyric moving past me. But for all my grumbling, I got some notions articulated (properly jointed)....
 
Your letter, like Jared's to you, which, mainly, you're "answering" is great because you just get going, questions in it, sure, answers in it, sure, you're thinking, imagining, talking and not hanging up on any questions or answers. Actually, you weren't answering (which is why I've added quote marks above), you were responding to it ...and ended with a poem. Now, we're going....
 
At some point, a poet has to feel constrained, or maybe just deadened, by his or her native (picked up in the course of growing up) tongue. The tongue feels a little thick and inflexible. A second tongue might have more lure than the prospect of relearning your own. If your native tongue is a European one, then English can have an extra pull ...because it's got roots in all the others, northern and southern, and that goes deeper than, say, just the results of the Norman invasion(s). Celtic "middle" Earth. But, by time you're looking around, But, by time you're looking around, listening to Monk, or how about Mingus who composes as is the Euro-habit, reading Kerouac ...it ain't just English. It's Amerish (a-mer'-ish, as in America, not a dactylic stretching of, say, Amish). It's lively, "high". In the southwest, we've even got Spanglish. Amerish, Spanglish ...it's all part of the "high" our whole culture is expanding into....And the intoxicant? The language itself, the tongue licking Universe. What about working our daydreaming into language...?
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!
 
Now, I c'n tackle some of the questions? Did drugs provide Elton with those lyrics? I'd guess only indirectly. He wasn't drugged when putting the poem together and he didn't write a drug-dream into a poem any more than a poet will write a dream into a poem or do more than borrow something from one. Dreams aren't vision, let alone envisioning. Neither are hallucinations. Does the drug culture enter into it? Sure, the slang, the language, is full of it. The precision tells you, though. He's playing with the images. The "high" culture will use some of that slang, too, but it's only an "edge".... It's only metaphor because this is a higher "high" (to stay with that "verticality" image) or the deeper "deep" (there's your wave and trough).... I'm just going to drop this wavering response into a poem, and go get ready to work out, clinging to whatever youth is still in me. You know I don't use drugs, haven't, won't. But I use the slang to write about a higher "high". My Psychedelos is a little like Juan Matus' Mescalito ...until you enter the "high".... Oh, why don't I say anything about the profound gifts you (and all of you) give me in the generous and loving things you say? The smile and nod of pleasure on my noggin is because of a deeper business. What you see in me has to be in you, or you wouldn't see it. I am honored and pleased to be a "magic mirror". Mo awards or formal recognition c'n stand up to that. Now, speaking of mirrors...
 
PSYCHEDELOS

      i

      silver backing flakes from the mirror, falls

                                bright snow

            from the direction of the Pleiades

                                             each platinum faceted pellet

         coming down
         fast as light

                              i catch them
                              with the grace and shout of a riveter

in a molecule thick membrane of hand

                        a hand filling the evening sky

                                                         at my equator -

      ii

outside my room a darkness

                  the trick           there is always a trick

      is in keeping an equalized pressure

      change it just a bit

      the skin of the room      waves like flags joined

                              along their edges

                              shape a floor
                              to the texture of a lovely girl
                              lie on her

                              if you can-can

                              if you can-can

      iii

Moon-woman laughs

                                 a harmonium at play

her breasts are cones
ice cream spilling over
                                   sticky

threads lacing stars together

                              O, Moon-woman
                              turn from the window

                              only a darkness
                              lies beyond my room

                              there is nothing to await

               and i am the great riveter

how much, in gold
coin, so i may carry your child

her nipples were gold coins

swollen to suns
in her quick pregnancy

            from across the raging room

                                    was our only way to love

i threw out my love
and when i missed, great furrows

                                    were cleaved in her flesh

            but when those silver pellets struck

                        she would throb and swell

and 300 things
would come to be in my room

      iv

Sun-man, armed with the compleat angle -er

                                explores in my room

      the room is rectangular
      by measure
      a block of oleomargarine

      sliced into thin sheets
      it is a Holy Book

      the light-globe people
      are writing in it

                                    their dazzling heads
                                    melting the pages together

      bright hieroglyphs
      lost in chunks of hardened
      Greece

                           Sun-man rocks on fat buttocks
         popping globes with silver rocks

i collect fragments
trying to read
over exploding shoulders

      v

                                    the crone
         read my palm, scraping away calluses
                  saving them
                                                in a stone jar

your life-line
is hollow-stump peculiar
dark-kitten irregular

however i rede
wherever i pick it up
it leads to the four corners
of the room

you must, my dear
pulling my hips from me, jarring
them with the calluses

                           you musk, my dear
                                          flared nostrils bat-flying
                                                    thru the strands of room

                           feel a map
                           lest you forget this room

                           when the magic physic
                           is done
                           and you shrink to solid-state

uncallused fingers
sorebright from cracked safes

weave life-lines
thru points of light

with a quick stitch
and a soaking up of colors

      vi

               Sun-man is lecturing upon
litters and scions

                      advancing into awlcomy

               the equator is one who equates
               the equated an equature

               in the beginning was....

      teacher, tell us of the equinox
tell us      again      of the lovely equinox

               equinox is the coroner stone
               the frowndation
               of awl dumbocracy

               a contraction of 'equal knocks'
               - for awl
awl is an only bard of murdern kratosism

      vii

                                    WARNING

                  all mining must be confined to the interior

                                          the skin of the room
                        may be pushed back, arranged variously
                                    but must not be torn

                                                      or darkness will spill in

                  reductive mining is recommended

the miners are brawny fellows
cyclopian

corneal lamp peering deep in

to dig      what is kneaded
without cutting threads of the map

                        there are many bits of pellet-element
                  all held apart by chunks of rock
                                    the task of the miner, to ask

                              the bits to move inward from the rock shell
               and form an arrangement one might enter

the miners expose their veins

i wear the bright colors

      viii

                  mirror, mirror
                      on the wall

                           who is

                                    billowing clouds of cotton candy

must be packed into tiny ore-cars
      for delivery

the skin of the room hides

                                behind thickness, a sickness

            builds in my hope

   Sun-man is gone, out the window

            Moon-woman is dead

the old crone in her lace of answers

            retreats to a corner

                  of the ceiling

silver comets fly to the mirror

                              and strangers entering the room

                                                      are opaque

It's the same "place where poems are birthed" as we walk through in Cosmic Language, but differently experienced.... Here, the "troughs" and "waves" are more directly felt....

All these interpenetrating e-conversations are a "heady" business, which is why the new "high"s are temptations.... Temptation is felt as curiosity..., not some craving..., not fear or hope.... As I said last time, even God is changed by the lens of our "high" culture. God is no longer an omniscient, omnipotent Authority, but a Designer..., a builder of interacommodative processes. Maybe even a poet...,
 
Gene
----- Original Message -----

From: Carlos Fleitas

 
 
 
 

To: smithjrw@comcast.net ; 'April Corioso'
Cc: 'Ken Sawyer' ; 'April Corioso @ LMC'
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 4:57 PM
 
 
H i all!
 First of all Jared, thanks for your good words.
And you are right, making questions about meaning is surely a rational thing, and leads nowhere. One should figure out the 'gist' (as Gene says) in a one time look. There is a famous Spanish poet who wrote ( en preguntar lo que sabes el tiempo no has de perder, y a preguntas sin respuesta quien te habra de responder) Rough bad translation, "in asking what you know your time must not waiste, and to questions without answers who is the one who can answer them?"  In Spanish of course sounds a lot better, and better built.
 
But, you know one gives up to temptations. So i decided to write Gene about Elton John's lyrics. Matter is i am very curious and have a profund respect for Gene's judgement. And pop, rock, rap, hip-hop is some sort of another world to me, it's dificult to even get the gist with intuition. And i am amazed how contemporary USA English evolves, new terms, new blocks of language, new meanings, it's like a vortex. Our language at least here is not like this. Which i regret. Maybe English is reflecting "the space/time/weak-force/powerful-force continuum that the 21st century is currently trying to define", as you very sharply assert. And this thrills me! I want to be part of it. So i am trying to figure it out, or at least be aware of it. Gene's poetry is exactly in the turning point of a new kind of poetry he is the lead explorer all by himself. That's what i tried to express in the edges poem i guess.(The new Sutra, new Bible, lines....) All of this email exchange has brought new impulse for writing in English more.
 
Many thanks for your comments Jared, i love the Gene's poet's virtual cafe with new friends coming in, because i am learning always with people like you and Gene Ken and Stephen Morse. A pleasure to meet you. Hope in the future we keep exchanging ideas and best regards, and Gene please "keep the cafe always open!!!"
 
Gene:
 
Did not made comments about your poems. Well you know i admire them and i think that you are a contemporary poet (one of the few i known, i would like to be such), and your incredible resources handling language, and getting new and new chords (like Charlie Parker), well you are not only the present, you are the future i guess. Some say time comes from the future.... A couple of days ago i thought, What is happening in the USA?. Fowler should be one of the most recognized poets. Because his poetry is contemporary, it is not just about repeating the same old tune. It's fresh, daring, nowadays poetry.  And you now i mean it. It's no easy to get familiarized with your kind of poetry Gene, but once you learn to taste it, well the better it is. Remember Parker? at first i felt some sort of ¿huh? but i knew : this is really something really great, it's a real revolution, and also it happened me the same with Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" Same happens to me with Fowler's poetry, the ¿huh? dumb moment is fading, and the eureka is here at last!
Jared i wrote Stephen that i shared with him a "slow mind" comprehension of things. So it took me time to now what is all about Gene's poetry. I am concerning poetry a very patient person. It make take me years to figure out, a poet's work.
 
 I have always tried to explore language, and funny thing i think English as a second language and you Gene have helped me to be more bold, that is all about Edges, to be bold (in a good way) and explore. This i cant do in Spanish i do not know why. Same with haiku. I am in some sort of a latin crisis, i guess. Something is changing in me do not know what...
 
Funny thing Gene, i had a nap today and i had a dream. You and I met in New York (?), and all of a sudden you where writing a poem i guess it was a haiku, cause
it had three lines, and you made amazing variations changing lines, like music variations, remember the hailstones haiku, you helped me so much? So Gene,
you are helping me always to write better poetry (i hope so) with your amazing resources. All my "poetry way", has an enormous influence from you.
 
I guess one can write a huge book concerning your poetry Gene. It has so many "edges"...n+ edges...The Draughtmans shocked me, i pick just  one of the lines.
 
Catch Rembrandt in a definition
a rule
?
 
the ? line, is just unbelievable, it drives the poem to an enormous motion, and inner tension, that "blows your mind", that is the kind of art i like. Mind blowing poetry. The poem is pure electricity, pure energy, untamable, the 21st. thing Jared speaks about.
 
And one last thought, your poetry is not prose Gene, that's a great achievement, my poetry is sometimes prose but i am learning to get contemporary, or at least i hope so....Some days ago, i was thinking i will no be able to write in the future a poem in the way i wrote "The Monk" one...
 
Here is one of my last opus that has i think lots to do with what i have previously wrote, is sort of a twin of edges. I would like that it could have the "inner dynamics" of your poems Gene...
 

The trough

 

After the wave
The trough
I bend myself
Softly. Gently
Roaming
It's like waiting
for something to happen
and nothing to happen
It's like waiting
for someone to come
and no one to come

After the wave
The trough
It's like playing
Hide and seek
Not with the cat
Not like a kid
Just in and out
Up and down
At the same time

You can grab
Surf Hit
Watch Listen
Approach Escape
Drown Safe
Bless Damn
A wave
But unfortunately
You can't grab a trough

You can find everywhere
The Complete Cyclopedia
Of waves
It's handy. Fashion.Average
Printed and Reprinted
Once and again
Yet no one has found
Or ever written
The Complete Cyclopedia
Of troughs

Well, well, well.
What's your point?
Cut it short
Don't play cute, man!
Everybody knows
Reality is made of waves
Elementary Quanta, my friend!
So, what's all this nonsense?
All this chit-chat 'bout troughs?

The through is the rest.
The pause.
The silence.
Between two words.
It's the void.
The unseen counterpart.
Yet there it is.
The wave is the trough.
The trough is the wave.


Carlos Fleitas

 

Best regards, to ye all cafe friends!

Carlos
 
 
  
(Gene, I didn't copy Raymond on this response because he's working on a lot of things too right now and I hate to clog up peoples' inboxes.  I only send him emails when I really have to reach him...otherwise thoughts come out in the times we talk and I push things along to him if they've stayed with me and if I think he can use them.  As it is, most of my own thoughts don't have time to make the email post--the day is too short, as you know.  But Carlos writes good visions...)
 
Carlos,
 
Hi, I step briefly into the screen here because Gene was good enough to forward his last missive to me, and to make sure that I had noted your set on Juice.
 
Your visionings are excellent, as Gene has no doubt said as well...bright nonlinear images finding their own order in the construction of experience...sharply described with vivid color.  Your overlaying your poems as a set allows you to use that imaging very efficiently in driving experience toward a far more meaningful definition than single strings of word echos could do. 
 
I agree with Gene, though, that trying to ask what these objects mean is only a way to take their lustre and life away from them.  Do not define too closely with the rational part of your mind, because there are too many aspects of our reality that our minds are not conscious of.
 
For example, you speak of edges in some of your work, and of the edges in the world about us.  Those are, of course, only edges in a world we perceive imperfectly even on the physical level.  When we think of the very small--the parts of the parts that make up atoms, and even of the atoms that make up one material object and define it as separate from another--we find that the edges of boundaries are beyond our capability to measure by today's physics.  Our physicists tell us that...and that most of what we see is a void composed of space and electrical charges.  We live in a world of overlapping envelopes of shading.  It is a world the arts can speak of...but only if the arts confine themselves more to explaining connections by the experience of them than by describing them...and the sciences and logical thought cannot yet define.
 
As to Power places or locuses or whatever, yes I feel them.  I'm not sure what they are, they're probably all kinds of perterbations in the space/time/weak-force/powerful-force continuum that the 21st century is currently trying to define.  Certainly, we know that the underlying geographical features of each part of the earth are different from that of other parts to the extent that we can now measure gravitational differences between many of them--yet most people driving or walking over them are unaware of that.
 
Well...like Stephen Morse, and like you, I think slow because it is the best way to think.  It is good making your acquaintance. 
 
All Best,
Jared Smith
 

Some Conversation with Carlos Fleitas, Jared Smith, and Gene Fowler---email style, best read backwards

H i all!
 First of all Jared, thanks for your good words.
And you are right, making questions about meaning is surely a rational thing, and leads nowhere. One should figure out the 'gist' (as Gene says) in a one time look. There is a famous Spanish poet who wrote ( en preguntar lo que sabes el tiempo no has de perder, y a preguntas sin respuesta quien te habra de responder) Rough bad translation, "in asking what you know your time must not waiste, and to questions without answers who is the one who can answer them?"  In Spanish of course sounds a lot better, and better built.
 
But, you know one gives up to temptations. So i decided to write Gene about Elton John's lyrics. Matter is i am very curious and have a profund respect for Gene's judgement. And pop, rock, rap, hip-hop is some sort of another world to me, it's dificult to even get the gist with intuition. And i am amazed how contemporary USA English evolves, new terms, new blocks of language, new meanings, it's like a vortex. Our language at least here is not like this. Which i regret. Maybe English is reflecting "the space/time/weak-force/powerful-force continuum that the 21st century is currently trying to define", as you very sharply assert. And this thrills me! I want to be part of it. So i am trying to figure it out, or at least be aware of it. Gene's poetry is exactly in the turning point of a new kind of poetry he is the lead explorer all by himself. That's what i tried to express in the edges poem i guess.(The new Sutra, new Bible, lines....) All of this email exchange has brought new impulse for writing in English more.
 
Many thanks for your comments Jared, i love the Gene's poet's virtual cafe with new friends coming in, because i am learning always with people like you and Gene Ken and Stephen Morse. A pleasure to meet you. Hope in the future we keep exchanging ideas and best regards, and Gene please "keep the cafe always open!!!"
 
Gene:
 
Did not made comments about your poems. Well you know i admire them and i think that you are a contemporary poet (one of the few i known, i would like to be such), and your incredible resources handling language, and getting new and new chords (like Charlie Parker), well you are not only the present, you are the future i guess. Some say time comes from the future.... A couple of days ago i thought, What is happening in the USA?. Fowler should be one of the most recognized poets. Because his poetry is contemporary, it is not just about repeating the same old tune. It's fresh, daring, nowadays poetry.  And you now i mean it. It's no easy to get familiarized with your kind of poetry Gene, but once you learn to taste it, well the better it is. Remember Parker? at first i felt some sort of ¿huh? but i knew : this is really something really great, it's a real revolution, and also it happened me the same with Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" Same happens to me with Fowler's poetry, the ¿huh? dumb moment is fading, and the eureka is here at last!
Jared i wrote Stephen that i shared with him a "slow mind" comprehension of things. So it took me time to now what is all about Gene's poetry. I am concerning poetry a very patient person. It make take me years to figure out, a poet's work.
 
 I have always tried to explore language, and funny thing i think English as a second language and you Gene have helped me to be more bold, that is all about Edges, to be bold (in a good way) and explore. This i cant do in Spanish i do not know why. Same with haiku. I am in some sort of a latin crisis, i guess. Something is changing in me do not know what...
 
Funny thing Gene, i had a nap today and i had a dream. You and I met in New York (?), and all of a sudden you where writing a poem i guess it was a haiku, cause
it had three lines, and you made amazing variations changing lines, like music variations, remember the hailstones haiku, you helped me so much? So Gene,
you are helping me always to write better poetry (i hope so) with your amazing resources. All my "poetry way", has an enormous influence from you.
 
I guess one can write a huge book concerning your poetry Gene. It has so many "edges"...n+ edges...The Draughtmans shocked me, i pick just  one of the lines.
 
Catch Rembrandt in a definition
a rule
?
 
the ? line, is just unbelievable, it drives the poem to an enormous motion, and inner tension, that "blows your mind", that is the kind of art i like. Mind blowing poetry. The poem is pure electricity, pure energy, untamable, the 21st. thing Jared speaks about.
 
And one last thought, your poetry is not prose Gene, that's a great achievement, my poetry is sometimes prose but i am learning to get contemporary, or at least i hope so....Some days ago, i was thinking i will no be able to write in the future a poem in the way i wrote "The Monk" one...
 
Here is one of my last opus that has i think lots to do with what i have previously wrote, is sort of a twin of edges. I would like that it could have the "inner dynamics" of your poems Gene...
 

The trough

 

After the wave
The trough
I bend myself
Softly. Gently
Roaming
It's like waiting
for something to happen
and nothing to happen
It's like waiting
for someone to come
and no one to come

After the wave
The trough
It's like playing
Hide and seek
Not with the cat
Not like a kid
Just in and out
Up and down
At the same time

You can grab
Surf Hit
Watch Listen
Approach Escape
Drown Safe
Bless Damn
A wave
But unfortunately
You can't grab a trough

You can find everywhere
The Complete Cyclopedia
Of waves
It's handy. Fashion.Average
Printed and Reprinted
Once and again
Yet no one has found
Or ever written
The Complete Cyclopedia
Of troughs

Well, well, well.
What's your point?
Cut it short
Don't play cute, man!
Everybody knows
Reality is made of waves
Elementary Quanta, my friend!
So, what's all this nonsense?
All this chit-chat 'bout troughs?

The through is the rest.
The pause.
The silence.
Between two words.
It's the void.
The unseen counterpart.
Yet there it is.
The wave is the trough.
The trough is the wave.


Carlos Fleitas

 

Best regards, to ye all cafe friends!

Carlos
 
 
  
(Gene, I didn't copy Raymond on this response because he's working on a lot of things too right now and I hate to clog up peoples' inboxes.  I only send him emails when I really have to reach him...otherwise thoughts come out in the times we talk and I push things along to him if they've stayed with me and if I think he can use them.  As it is, most of my own thoughts don't have time to make the email post--the day is too short, as you know.  But Carlos writes good visions...)
 
Carlos,
 
Hi, I step briefly into the screen here because Gene was good enough to forward his last missive to me, and to make sure that I had noted your set on Juice.
 
Your visionings are excellent, as Gene has no doubt said as well...bright nonlinear images finding their own order in the construction of experience...sharply described with vivid color.  Your overlaying your poems as a set allows you to use that imaging very efficiently in driving experience toward a far more meaningful definition than single strings of word echos could do. 
 
I agree with Gene, though, that trying to ask what these objects mean is only a way to take their lustre and life away from them.  Do not define too closely with the rational part of your mind, because there are too many aspects of our reality that our minds are not conscious of.
 
For example, you speak of edges in some of your work, and of the edges in the world about us.  Those are, of course, only edges in a world we perceive imperfectly even on the physical level.  When we think of the very small--the parts of the parts that make up atoms, and even of the atoms that make up one material object and define it as separate from another--we find that the edges of boundaries are beyond our capability to measure by today's physics.  Our physicists tell us that...and that most of what we see is a void composed of space and electrical charges.  We live in a world of overlapping envelopes of shading.  It is a world the arts can speak of...but only if the arts confine themselves more to explaining connections by the experience of them than by describing them...and the sciences and logical thought cannot yet define.
 
As to Power places or locuses or whatever, yes I feel them.  I'm not sure what they are, they're probably all kinds of perterbations in the space/time/weak-force/powerful-force continuum that the 21st century is currently trying to define.  Certainly, we know that the underlying geographical features of each part of the earth are different from that of other parts to the extent that we can now measure gravitational differences between many of them--yet most people driving or walking over them are unaware of that.
 
Well...like Stephen Morse, and like you, I think slow because it is the best way to think.  It is good making your acquaintance. 
 
All Best,
Jared Smith

Gene Fowler talks about Haiku and Victoria (a mac voice)

Stephen,
 
Yup, faskinating...! You see, there are people out there, in unexpected niches and ponds, at least tip-toeing into bein' source...eror's apprentices, unable, finally, to suppress curiosity and unsupervised exploration into ...well, realms full of blinding light and great darkness. What kills cats, humans should be able to dare.
 
You know, Airchinigh is feeding his poem to this roboreader, Victoria, and it's a bit like Barton feeding Shakespeare's lingua pura (actually, it was John Milton's blank verse that got the name because Vatican scholars disdained to learn English and so Galileo, with Milton's assistance, could pt clues to finding the path to Illuminati gatherings in writings while under house arrest) to actors who had to relay it to listeners, forcing them to listen. And there's my recently "split" listening reader, trying to force the reader to read it, subvocalizing actively, to him- or herself and doing the things an actor, or a musician-actor, which the speakers of lingua pura (that's a Latin name, of course), the "pure" language, does.
 
To limit oneself;
Self expressing in Haiku,
Is Soul threat-ening.
 
The semi-colon is, he says, a cut, but the comma must be to keep the second and third lines from being run on (in the voice), so it must take the comma too and I'd guess it wouldn't, so it'd be better to not have it. For a reader from the page it violates the sense. He's finding the problem of using punctuation for voice-cues rather than as sense-cues also marked through punctuation. As a programmer, I'd say he needs a mark-up language to handle something like this. Those marks would be by-passed by somebody reading the text from the page - maybe reading along with the listened to roboReader. A kind of special html, or even the same one. Use the
tag.
 
Here, the semi-colon works okay - except it's ugly. And a reader has to sort out that it isn't, here, a semi-colon at all. The comma is worse in that there's no need for a breath-taking and so it just violates sense. Over all, do you threaten yourself to impose limits? Oh, the "threat...ening" gets the breath, and it's a hidden
like  the one of Frost's that I just deftly removed.
 
To limit oneself
Self expressing in Haiku
Is Soul threat
ening
 
Victoria is likely to be very confused. You see, I've pulled all of the marks. The period to tell Victoria, I guess, the sentence, with or without sentience, is ...over. His poem is verbal and there's no perception or cognition, no experience in it. It's, mainly, not even true. No telling why the first line goes with the other two or three. He made a good run at forcing Victoria with what she's got. You do want a voiced break after line 2 while you have a sense run-on. You get a little suspense, a little of the voice held "up". ...while you wait for to see what this is or does or fetches. and a break after "threat" works, because you get a noun phrase, "soul threat", and then the verb's motion. The larger sense of it, though, is ...well, weird.
 
Most on MOAPG and elsewhere at least see line ends and starts, if they don't really think about a line-break being there. Remember in MOAPG discussions somebody actually said that poems had shorter lines than prose - meaning they stopped short of the right margin, prose being assumed to have lines that went to the margin. But the margin does not cut lines except on the page. The actual term for what those lines do is "wrap around". Give a poem, you probably wrap it on purpose ...but it really isn't a wrap, it's an end. There's a start after that. But, of course, a run-on (like a wrap) sometimes. The start may be "moved". Lines are cut and placed. The simplest place-pattern is a stack.
 
...your mother plays, and I
play too...
 
A father to a son too young to know what dad's talking about. The sense runs on. But, not just a pause after I, unmarked, but whole voice shifts of a complex sort because the speaker is talking about being cuckolded. But, there are varied playings (to borrow the word) possible as actors find their own characters to speak this speech, trippingly from the tongue.
 
It's not only among our poets. I trust all of you have handled, or at least seen pictures of a tetrahedron. Four faces and triangles all joined across what are called "edges". Sit one face on your palm (unless it's a building, of course). now, it's like a little three-sided pyramid, the fourth side being on your palm, a base rather than a face. Okay. You've four triangular faces and four vertices or points, where three edges converge. Everything seem okay? You can visualize it and count faces, vertices and edges.
 
Except, you see a lie. Each triangle has three edges. Three times four is twelve. Our little palm-filler has twelve edges. These edges must be joined. You can draw a little design of four triangles in a pattern, cut it out, fold it up and weld together some edge-pairs to make your "solid" paper tetrahedron. Some edges are already welded together in the drawing before you cut it out. You must tuck under and paste tabs to join the others. We have sic joinings of edges. You think this hardly matters, that I'm nit-picking.
 
Well, most MOAPGers act as though we are nit-picking when we try to focus their consciousness on line-breaks, doing everything, Stephen, up to and including your putting in a poem of stacked short lines and typing in [Return] at the end of each line. You got responses to images and such in the poem and it seems nobody even saw the Returns typed in, they edited them out like spilled ink drops or something on the page as soon as they identified what one of them was.
 
Our "joiners" (which we call "breaks", because that's how we use them while playing) are as invisible to those around us. I got a little interest from Frost with my initial "line stacking" post. But he soon got lost back in content - dark, d a r k D A R K! The "joiner" / "separator" identity appears everywhere. On a flat Earth, you draw a triangle or trigon. You've three edges closed. You've an inside and an outside. The outside spreads out forever, shapelessly, until, if there's an edge to that, you fall off the edge. But, draw those three edges closed on a sphere and you've, essentially, drawn two triangles. One big, one small. The "edges" are where they "join". MY friend Jeff Duntemann, in an editorial in Visual Developer Magazine, pointed out that, always, edges are interfaces. So, in breaking our lines, we join them. And we've all sorts of joinings, fitting in those "feminine" syllables, raising and dropping or holding the voice, or all the other voicings we use to comodel with our listeners....
 
It's not just getting Victoria to read the poem, the haiku, but anybody. For instance, we c'n mark, usually on a line above the line of poetry, stresses. In lingua pura on the pentiambic frame, Shakespeare could signal his actors. Their "at home"ness with language told them of moved, elided or added stresses "in the ten". We kind of do this all the time. "Read it naturally -with some sense of the dramatic reality." Victoria won't know what you mean. I've heard that stress in the haiku is ignored, so ...do Japanese talk like robots? No stresses guarantees sleep, except, looking at that one haiku, all those "k"s, well maybe syllable to syllable is like walking on busted up sidewalk and you stay awake. In fact, how does Victoria manage stress. How even to assign natural stress, except in the dictionary, word by word. What about dual use: contract. But, the dramatic stress in normal speech? In the little bit of Shakespeare I gave above, the actor, and Barton, work it out. All that in a text rehearsal before other rehearsals. A reader doesn't know. And that's why, Barton says, people reading Shakespeare from the page usually can't make heads or tales of it. Even a try demands they go "out loud" and do some of the work an actor does, but without help. Whimbey, in Intelligence Can Be Taught (1980), says good readers subvocalize, maybe even move their lips. When the material becomes complex, they slow down, c'n be seen stressing words or syllables,
 
We poets don't just shorten, or break, lines. We use "white space" punctuation. Could Victoria be programmed to read white space - it's not just the blank you see on the page. It's codings. The hard-space (not collapsed by the browser), the tab (which is equivalent to spaces), the line-break, and these register line-ends and skipped lines. Victoria just ought to chomp that up - if you c'n get at her programming. She might use it in text to some extent to handle skipped lines between paragraphs. She ought to pause between paragraphs, let that structured unit sink in. Anyway, any "handling" of Airchinnigh's poem, such as getting Victoria to "read" it for listeners ought to assist him in "getting into it's natural delivery". His instincts about drafts and all are good.
One of the greatest problems in the writing of poetry is to stop the rewriting. There comes a time when the poem must be left alone forever, when it takes on its final form never again to be altered. It is precisely at this time of the release of the poem that it can be said to be finished, to be complete. It is also the time of the release of the poet from the poem.


But the poet remembers the earlier drafts and may have kept notes as well as the drafts. Here can be seen what has been changed in the process of the development of the poem. That word was replaced by this one. An entire line may have been reordered to achieve a more pleasing harmony of sound while keeping the sense invariant. Even entire verses may have been cut out from the final version.

Why should the writing of the poem end with the single final version? Are there not other nascent possibilities? Might not the poem have siblings? Might not a poem have a twin?

Why should the finished poem be static? Is there not room for the idea of the dynamic poem, of the poem that is always in a state of becoming?

Well, that's what you say you do, Stephen, every time you pick it up.... and this brings up my last "eavesdropping" piece, where I took off from your email about concrete and abstract. Concrete bein' with sensory information. Uhhhmmm. Concrete vs. abstract. I was thinking of concrete poetry popular twenty five years ago in mimeo'd poetry, 8.5" by 11". The lines wrapped to draw objects. So, the written down poem as a frozen shape. The played poem also ends up that way. What the musician wants is the single word, even syllable, "alone" in space.
 
in
the
hay
trough
 
I think I remember. No way the "in" ("inn", next time through) sounds alone, then the "the" and finally "hay", an image, now, then "trough" completing the image of the hay, but the "in" remembered, and on to the baby breathing there. We can't do that. The reader sees the whole, or the growing whole ahead of the sounded and that's good, a river-bed for the river. But, the pure sounding only for the livest listeningi reader.... Anyway, "in the" would sound fast, almost continuous, unaccented, moving us in....
 
Well, enough for he moment,
----- Original Message -----
From: Stephen Morse
To: Gene Fowler (w/o Cc's of one you're answering that I add above)
Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2006 7:05 AM
Subject: Re: Vertical haiku

Interesting ideas jammed in to these short thoughts. I wasn't familiar with the concept of a "cutting syllable," so I did a little researching, and discovered a fascinating essay http://crossings.tcd.ie/issues/1.2/Mac_an_Airchinnigh/
called Dynamic Poetry – Dynamic Haiku by Mícheál Mac an Airchinnigh of the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

The whole essay is fascinating and could certainly spark some interesting experiments. What is particularly interesting is the number of ways that it parallels our back channel discussions and experiments. I'm taking the liberty of quoting one "experiment that he hypothesized in which he mentions "the cutting syllable":
Equipment: Apple Macintosh iBook 2001, Apple's SimpleText editor, Apple's voice synthesis program ‘Macintalk, English’ and a range of synthetic voices of which I chose ‘Victoria, high quality’ as the most pleasing. (Of course one might prefer a different synthetic voice to achieve another effect, and indeed one may need to take the synthetic voice into account in the construction of the dynamic haiku.)

Experiment: The haiku on haiku [9] was inserted into SimpleText, and Victoria was ‘asked’ to read it aloud.

Result: I discovered that Victoria read lines 2 and 3 as if they were a single line. In order that Victoria speak the poem properly, it is important that a pausing mark be inserted at the end of the middle line. In addition, a hyphen inserted into ‘threatening’ was necessary, since Victoria was inclined to read the word as the bisyllabic word ‘threat-ning.’ Here now is the amended version of my original haiku to be read by Victoria:

To limit oneself;
Self expressing in Haiku,
Is Soul threat-ening.

I must confess that I was surprised by the results of this simple experiment. Victoria recognised the semicolon as a cutting symbol. Therefore, the syllable ‘-self;’ in ‘oneself;’ is a cutting syllable, or if one prefers ‘oneself;’ is a cutting word. To have written ‘oneself –’ in place of ‘oneself;’ would also be perfectly acceptable for Victoria. The repetition of the sound ‘self’ turns out to be particularly pleasing (at least to me). The resulting haiku sounds well.††

The use of a ‘synthetic personal voicer,’ such as Victoria, suggests new research directions for the development of dynamic haiku. In particular, it is clear that cutting syllables can be provided for English in a ‘natural’ way. New sounding units can be developed and experimented with. For example, replacing ’;’ by ‘f’ in ‘oneself;’ to give ‘oneselff’ makes ‘oneself’ strangely trisyllabic and sounds like ‘on-es-elff.’ I would never have supposed that, as a poet, ‘small modifications in written syntax’ could have such a profound change in sounding structure had I not used the synthetic personal voicer. As a mathematician this does make very good sense, as for example in perturbation theory and chaos theory, small changes in initial conditions have profound consequences. A theory of haiku partitioning may emerge as a result of methodical voice synthesiser experiments. The synthetic personal voicer may also be used to classify and rank partitions. Looking ahead along the technology trajectory into the future of voice synthesis it is obvious to me at least that there may come a time when the synthetic personal voicer will surprise us by its sounding of a poem, a sounding of which we might never have dreamt. This opens up the possibility of a new kind of oral tradition or an enriching of an existing one. Consensus on the collaborative ‘becoming poem’ or ‘poem to be’ may be based on a synthetically voiced version to which the collaborating poets have agreed. I am sure other avenues of exploration and experiment will open up as a result of adding this extra dimension of synthetic personal voicer to the proposed use of mathematics in the synthesis of dynamic haiku.

It certainly gives a new meaning to the word, "voice," of a poet. I know it's a bit off track, but it a wonderful example of how linked we all can be, and the potential for a collaborative creation in the sense of multiple takes on an idea or poem can lead to unexpected nuggets of influence.

Best,
Stephen

Passing along some Hugh Fox poems

These poems are going into the Juice online 2006 issue, but I thought I'd put them out there in my blog first, sort of in the tradition of hyperzine; everything linking and circling.

Best,
Stephen Morse

*******************


OK, my friend, here are a few poems with the same common denominator, DEATH. All very recent:


KISSING

Kissing my wife goodnight, the words “Little
old lady” come unconditionally and unwanted into
my head, I tell her, then add, “And I like it,
you as an old lady,” “Up to a point,” “No (her
arthritis crippling her, metabolism problems, urinating
too much, dying her hair twice a week, trouble
getting up and down stairs) , all the way,” another kiss,
I leave her, “Hope to see you in the morning,” never
quite sure I will, loving the idea of us aging,living
and dying together, TIL DEATH US DO  (NEVER!)
PART.


DEATH AGAIN


All day/night like a dog following me,
sunlight, shadow, wind, moonlight, 
Not long now, the days getting shorter
an hour a month now, Kaddish, remember
the dead, I was better off believing in Death
and Resurrection, instead of “Those who sleep
in the dust,” not that belief has anything to do
with
Reality.



BACK



Going back, back, back to the clouds and the
cypresses and smoke,trees, mouldering twigs
and edge-of-dusk bats, skunk-smells,wild turkeys,
everything wild,  primal, before guns, torahs,
mosques, in the beginning was the sky and you
and I
evolving into the pre-buddistic-
buddhistic
everything
NOW.



ORIGINS

“Let’s go back,” I e-mail  her, a photo of her
lifesize on the wall, waist up, bare tits, “let’s
go back to Ireland, Wales, Scotland, to some
sort of Celtic backflash...,” back at least a few
thousand years, Stonehengeish and primitif,
“I’m Irish, like you,” she writes back, Lo Galluccio,
“my father’s Italian...,” back before the Roman
empire was ever heard of, just the two of us and
the zodiac stars, is there some village somewere in
La Floresta (between the Andes and coast) or in
the mountains themselves where you walk in and
everyone’s (The Apples of Immortality)
immortal?



NUMBERS


Red, pink, blue, white, purple
cotton candy clouds, we’re on the beach
at Lake Lansing when she starts in, “Those
skeletons we saw today in the MSU museum,
I mean dinosaurs and things...,” “A great museum,
isn’t it?,” “But elephants in Kansas 25 million years
ago....how much is twenty-five million years?,”
“It’s one hundred, one thousand, a hundred thousand,
a hundred hundred...,” “And how old are you, grandpa?,”
“Seventy-three.”

                       GLENNA

                         Je comprend le
                         silence,
                         our needs sliding
                         into soft chairs
                         and not much
                         need to move,
                         the passion as
                         soft as clouds,
                         re-assurance, clapping
                         on the back,
                         hugs turning into
                         falling leaves, another
                         cup of soy milk,
                         another oatmeal
                         creme
                         (Je t'adore)
                         cake, facing
                         the idea of the final
                         doors
                         closing.


Hugh Fox

Writing a poem -- a look at the process

This is an explanation of the process of writing a poem, and not a defense of outcome. I
don't usually do this sort of explanation of process because I think it
is at best, irrelevant, and at worst, defensive. But in the spirit of
being more open with the secrets of craft as modeled by Gene Fowler in his
tell all book, "Waking The Poet," I'm revealing some of the moments of
making writing decisions that are typical when attempting to balance
the nonverbal right brain (muse) with the oh-so verbal left brain
keeper of words. First, the poem, as originally submitted to MOAPG ( a discussion/feedback group for poets ):


Tilden Park

bonfire

in the far flung
sparks
burn

oceans
splash
sky

brass trumpets and merry go rounds

raucous clatter and bangs
punctuate around
around, around
and around

explosions light the moon
birds fly
above the eucalyptus
darkness and bright wing lights
flutter

painted nostrils carved to flare
ears swept back to stiff curled manes,
hooves and hard saddled horse backs
pierced with brass poles
whirl

brass trumpets echoing
the power and glory forever
in important small ways
an unseen bass drum
is beaten in the park.

there are no riders now
no waving hands
coming in and out
of view looking for father
for mother
for
someone
to see
someone
to applaud
some reason
to be

in the far flung sparks
of remember


On May 23, 2005, at 1:28 PM, Gene Fowler wrote the following as a suggestion for revision:

“I also dropped "sparks" down as in the opening. I put the vision-
sparks "on" not "behind" eyelids, keep an ambiguity, all those
painted eyes, open or closed, that might be on a carousel ...so, more vision,
or the birthing of vision...? Both. And, it is anti-climactic, forces
thereader back to the stanza just before it ...while closing the poem,
making it a gestalt, a whole ...or holy. As vision should be.

in the far flung
sparks
on closed
eyelids.”

I responded, saying,

“I like the "on" because it keeps the image exterior, and the dropping
down of *sparks* is one of those obvious things I should have done and
most likely would have done on the next visit. The location is "the
far flung" which is where the sparks happen to be. It is a noun a
sort of "squinting subject.", not a series of adjectives. So you're
right on the money with that shift.

I also like the image of eyes painted open, as they are on a carousel, and
the juxtaposition of closed eyelids. But it doesn't *sound* right to
my ear/muse, and of course there is no explicit image in the poem that
sets the combination up as well as it should be. What intrigues me
the most is that the last stanza, particularly the word, "remember" is
a "live spot" for several readers. In terms of actual statements, the
last stanza paraphrases really more like:

in the far flung
sparks
of remembering/remembrances of things past/passed.

But none of those words felt right and that's only a paraphrase.
It narrows the focus of meaning too much. It's the kind of glibness
that is accessible, but reductive. That's how cliches are birthed,
snatched from the close-enough pile of meanings that are so handy in
every day speech. I tried a number of combinations to close the circle
and decided upon "remember" as it might be used in the infinitive, "to
remember," as it might be used as either a subject or object.


The central image of the poem is a merry go round in Tilden
Park in the Oakland Hills, and a specific memory of watching and
listening to it with no one around except perhaps an unseen operator.
No children, no other adults. It's one of the "places that linger"
images, memories that keep surfacing, and those are often starting
points for a poem. If I were writing prose, the exposition and
exploration of those moments would be much as I have written here,
fairly clear and easy to comprehend. But, that presupposes that I
started with the memory and wrote a "picture" of it. Now, here's the
secret, the memories often come from the opening words that may have
started out as something else. The "working title" of the original
lines was "Genesis"

Genesis

bonfire

in the far flung
sparks
burn

Then the poem was set aside, with several attempts to pickup the
thread that the muse threw out there. But they suffered from too much
consciousness of theme and became wordy and philosophical, and I'm
really not comfortable with the poet as guru role. It was a poem that
was going nowhere fast. But I stopped trying to think it out and let
the images come as they might, turning the universe into a backdrop to
a moment in time. Then the lines, describing the "lingering memory"
jumped into focus, a place to gather energy from and to use as actual
models of composition, much as a painter might finally after a series
of sketches decide what the painting was going to be.

It is the still, yet energy laden quality of a moment that mattered
in some non specific way. It is the spark from the fire that flares
and fades to dark, even though the fire is undiminished and burns on,
an infinity of lifetimes, of sparks, like when you stand under the
stars and try to visualize the great explosion of existence that is
eternal because it is moving so fast that it stands still in time. And
even that doesn't quite get at what I sense there. That's simply a
prose approximation of what I can sense. The spark lingers in memory
which is just as real as anything I see today. But rather than tell
all of that, I try to present the stimuli in words that evoke rather
than explain.

Best,
Stephen Morse