http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm
From the “glass”
archive, globally visible, of
Gene Fowler Memo #1 on 2006 Juice online. Contributing.... “Contributing shaman” should be replaced by “contributing artifact” and as “artifact” has never been used this way, or any way like it, this won’t be the brief note it should be, though you c’n note the suggestion and stop reading at this point. A shaman’s final
2005 nod You put in “contributing shaman” by feel and I liked the heft of it, too. And it’s right for the 2005 issue, though it’s a safe bet nobody has ever thought about it beyond a reactive wince. I doubt very much that anybody thought the question, “Why?”. Certainly nobody asked, or mused, in an email or a post. I doubt that anybody looked at my set and noticed the first poem was “Shaman Songs”, which might offer a clue. I can safely guess what hasn’t gone on by noticing that nobody has ever responded to anything in any of my posts except to think that, perhaps, something I said was a veiled put-down aimed at the "main" addressee. My Subject-lines are often unusual, but no one has asked about one, or, conjectured.... Dominick and Randolph accepted my pointing out that their misreading had created what put-down they found as if I were apologizing and neither, and nobody else, went back to the original post or to the follow-up to read it. Certainly, nobody has thought about anything and taken off from it. I’m indulged, possibly because you seem to like me, or resented or, probably, both at once. Echoes of
“contributing...” Still, as, in time, issue 2005, completed, moves off into its existence as an artifact, it’s appropriate that I am “contributing shaman”. Not because “Shaman Songs” is included, but the poem is a place for the curious, tickled by the idea of a shaman’s live contributing to the goings-on, surely not pointing only at this poem among my others, and with an underlying mind that doesn’t settle for easy stereotypes, who c’n sense from “contributing” that this isn’t the easy pop notion of what a shaman “is”, what forms the “shamanic” function c’n take. Journey into an
artifact To understand why the next issue should have a “contributing artifact”, which has to sound strange to even those who skim along without thinking about anything, anyway, keep in mind this curious fellow contemplating the top of the Shaman Songs scroll. He or she gets a little context in a brief introductory note. Then, the context is torn away by “Hunting Song” but held by a thread caught on “a preface”. Then, a journey’s first step. Listening to a shaman singing? At a coffee house table, perhaps, just letting conversation tighten a little, take on a chanting quality, catching the key concerns from nearby tables, weaving them in, echoing all the protests the coffee house has been filled with, a list of all the worrisome folk.... At the end of this first song in the sequence, of course, a strange citing of the shamanic function itself. Who are the elders? What of that “bear” out at the edge of night, waiting to be tracked as vision? By the time all the songs are heard, through those patches of time when the listener is singing them, not me, perhaps “contributing shaman” will make a kind of sense. If what I’ve just sketched is something of what my “shaman songs” are then it’s a way, too, of sensing what my other poems are, “Vivisection” and the “three walking poems” and, yes, even “Credo”, well, maybe the whole of work, and me in it, is such a scape and as such an artifact and, as an artifact, a living artifact, it can engage in a “contributing” function. In fact, all my contributing, all the letters and posts and the rest, has been as this larger artifact, not just as the shamanic function. Watching sand
paintings in the sands of time or revisiting a
poetry skunkworks Briefly, I got a few people to try sketching ideas rather than making suggestions, so long as it was something as unimportant as “frogs” being handled. Not yet working conversation. But a little bit of playing together. Still nobody has said anything about “crimson’d hands” or, for that matter “beneath rumpled snowscapes”.... Nobody ever will, of course, Nobody had anything to say about juggling notes, like when I took a “the” went all the way to “our”, back to “the” and farther back to “a”. How you shift worlds, play in different keys, by shifting the words, even the little ones. Many are tickled by the idea of riffing. They c’n all love the metaphor of the musicians – but damn the metaphor. Take it literally. Maybe some will have down in their innards, now, that lines don’t exist unless you make them., create them.... Thanks to your note on caps, I realized that when poems were written in script, the sense wasn’t of ending the line so much as starting a new one. In a way, all the varied movements are before the mark, the new start. You still do all the same things. You c’n have a fem. ending and, then, an unstressed start, though it gets some stress being a start, so it’s a half-withheld start. We’ve had, from our beginnings, a Return handle or an Enter key. Intriguing. Well, I learned something new. Of course, we all know a lot about handling blank verse, the pentiambic “beat”. We’ve wrapped some concepts around the syllable handling in it and particularly around the “measures” or at the <br>s. So, when we got to talking haiku, and the 5-7-5 syllable count came up, I could see we’re dealing with the same thing though it’s syllables (well, in pentiambic we’re dealing with 2x5 or ten syllables, too) and it’s a little more balanced ...but we c’n use (to follow our felt language) all the techniques (justifications) we’ve worked up for our pentiambic. I don’t blow the form in allowing an “extra” unstressed syllable in the first line. I was writing, thinking, feeling, in the 5-7-5, like Willie in his pentiambic, and I had Everything... and I got “sleeps” and maybe even felt “asleep” first, since Kits had used it and it was a natural thought, but I balanced on a <br>, and,. being immersed in Barton and Willie and actors making audiences listen by how they read over the blank verse framework, gentled it into Everything sleeping and got the very breathing of all those sleeping everything.... And I felt the coming up “hush” of my third segment, y’see, and I held the blanketing off even longer with “beneath” and eased into it with the “neath”..., Everything sleeping so the 5-7 is delineated though a mere counter will say, “You’ve an extra syllable in your first line, bub!” Even Barton says, “Sometimes Shakespeare doesn’t scan right”. He attributes this to the amount of time-constrained writing Willie had to lay down in his Mozartian (hardly a blot) fashion. But the hush is one syllable. The counter can jump up and down on my chest. “How is THIS, now, a 5-7-5, Bub?” Ahhhh, it’s because the 5-7- calls for 5, and when a soft word known from the mouths of mothers and healers and the children who heard them is sounded, it spreads to cover the snowscape in a placental readiness.... Everything sleeping ‘Course, to really see the power of treating our borrowed (Japanese) 5-<br>-7-<br>-5 syllable count as if it were a blank-verse framework, allowing all our knowledge about fitting spoken language to that framework, we c’n go back and cannibalize a prior handling of this hauntingly singing ku. We c’n drop the perceiver’s hush and go to pure perception. Everything sleeping The language fights against the rigid “sleeps/creaks” but is live in the “sleeping/creaks” concealed rhyme.... Now, our early riser hears a sound in the hush, a far off creaking and is it just under the blanket’s weight or the light step of another early riser, somebody coming home...? Suppose, moved by our present day, we titled this ku? “End of a distant war”. Would a skimming reader wonder, ...and stop? Feel the syllables, and their stresses, clustered around a <br> and how that carries the flow of our speaking or thinking? Hunkering down for
winter... looking back and
forward to Spring (all my
sets) Well, I’ve run on. The only message here is that in 2006 Juice online, I should be a “contributing artifact” rather than a “contributing shaman”. In the spring I’ll send an HTML’d eletter for eletters and I’ll fill it in under Ezra’s Make it New! And in the fall I’ll write one on being a body of work and being, therein, an artifact. The spring one will explain what I’ve tried to do in posts, beneath the obvious one of goading people into thinking, imagining, and crafting poems. You know, there’s another quote from Bill Evans that I’d insert here, about what I was trying to do with my posts..., “I can remember coming to New York to make or break in jazz and saying to myself, Now how should I attack this practical problem a jazz musician, as making a living and so on? And ultimately I came to the conclusion that all I must do is take care of the music, even if I do it in a closet. And if I really do that, somebody’s going to come and open the door of the closet and say, Hey, we’re looking for you.” All I must do is take care of the music. Well, I’ll elaborate in 2006, that pair of eletters and who knows what else. I’m thinking about my set. While I was a contributing shaman I better have the first poem in my set be “Shaman Songs”. (I built a set I pretty well knew nobody would wade into, let alone through.) Then, behind that, “Zen 21”, These tour de force poems follow a recurring pattern in my work. In the first section of “Return of the Shaman” the second poem is “Who” and a few poems later, another Who, “Who 2”. In the set I follow with “Credo”, and I do pull one of my annotations and offer it as a Note, and then, as in “Felon’s Journal”, I go right from “Credo” into “305 Honda”. Another Bill Evans quote, “...understanding music most profoundly requires only careful listening...”. Another popular version of that thought: There’s no free lunch. In 2003, I had only a single poem? “Conference of the Birds”. Wonder what anybody made of that? 1965 UCB Berkeley Poetry Conference? Sufic lore? Chaucer? Myth...? In 2004 I had the most “set like” sequence. My three “walking poems”. My 1976 “Fires” had no sectioning. Threads rather than sections. Paul (Foreman) helped in his Introduction by isolating some things, including these three poems. In “San Francisco Poem” I find my “door in the wall” and enter a poet’s world. It’s not the activity, overlapping scenes, poets in San Francisco, the bay area and elsewhere, though if all that weren’t there I’d not have seen that “door” and gone through it. Then, “Obsidian”. I wonder what people make of titles. Does anybody ever stop, wonder, Why this title on this poem? I’ve given a dozen different “themes” the poem might be fleshing out. Most recently, in a note to Mugsy, “a long night’s journey into day”. 1975. Paul and I are trying to cram a book, “Fires” 2, onto the available paper. These two poems are pointing at something and I’d like to have it for the book, maybe the only one I’d ever have. How did I get my poems made? I leaned back from my little portable Olivetti. I heard the sea. And I started typing and I was walking.... When it was done, I knew its name: “Cosmic Language”. So, three poems, a set, and the whole story, the whole craft. For the set, I added “Rushlight”. This small poem was the next to last in the book, followed only by “Ancestors”. Later, you added “The Seafarer”, complete with a reading, the sea washing back in, and a whole life-course in it, and I thought, Yes, that’s a fitting looking back and forward, a Janus facing.... So, what’s next? Maybe just café poems, since I have many, and that puts the artifact, me, my body of work, back in its time and place, where, apart from any timeless existence in the archive, it, I, belong. I’m certainly sort of stranded on the beach so far as what’s going on now is concerned. I think, standing on that beach, or a headland near it, looking out over the cybersea, of my poem "The Seagull" (in "The Quiet Poems"). I guess nothing's changed much over these decades.
[ If you add “Jamming on ‘Ballad of the Yellow Sky’”, which I sent as an HTML browser ready file, sending it twice with corrections, after “Metablabs for Metablabs Sake” to finish my shamanic eletters, you might want to add this, to bring it back to the first, the poetry skunkworks eletter. If so, tell me and I’ll try to trim an HTML version. I used MS WORD instead of Outlook Express and I’ll try to clean out excess that’s mostly just there for converting html back to .doc even after emailing. A lot of that’s in a .dat file easily tossed. My hunkering down for the winter will be in my archive. Working on annotations. FAQs. And those letter “folios”, though they’ll never go up. They’ll just be in the basement in workshop directories and an eDen. Every once in a while I’ll Frisbee off a few dated site mirror CDs to off-site storage of some kind and the basement will go along. –g.f. ] |
