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
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 11:11 AM
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