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
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
posted by Stephen Morse at 10:33 PM
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