To: Stephen Morse ; Judy Brekke ; Mugsy

Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 9:53 AM

Subject: Thinking "out loud" and contemporary posterity

Bucky Fuller used to describe his "lectures" (scheduled) or "talks" (the way he thought about them) as thinking out loud and to the extent available time allowed he tried to resynthesize everything he knew.... Frequently, these talks would come to up to five, six hours at a session. He did everything to make just about every point in such a talk "open", so a listener (and watcher, as he was very active) could enter in and ride through the extended thought experiment with him.

When Norman Harrington, a San Quentin Inside Parole Officer (and ex-gun-rail guard) went up to him after he gave the keynote address at the first major General Semantics Conference after his friend's (the Count) death) and said, "We've an inmate who thinks very much like you do", Bucky came out to meet me and the little G.S. "think tank" Norman ran for some of us who liked to think. He talked about four hours and was, finally, asked by guards to shut up so we could be locked up for the evening count. That day, I learned what it meant to think, and to think out loud in the presence of others.... I put myself in such a situation even when writing a long letter in my cell that would never be mailed, because we could only mail four pages total a week. I've been thinking out loud ever since. I don't sell what I think, but keep it as open as possible. It's all live thought-experiment....

I posted the message below on MOAPG last Monday and have noticed the stillness and shadows around the lumber mill. The post explained it's occasion, of course, but not the sequence into which it fit. That'd be futile as nobody, assuming anybody read, noticed and remembered anything, would make the associations. Anyway, it begins with my Jamming on the Ballad of the Green Sky, goes through your playing with a poem of Brad's (no response) and comes through your recent one to Corwin, the new poet (which got an enthusiastic "thanks" but, mainly, for a reference to e.e. cummings who he likes).

So, "Beyond jamming, re-crafting" forcing structure back into the simple playing or riffing which people think they're doing if, I guess, they bounce a little. We need a Simon, such as the judge on American Idol who serves as a mirror for those who daydream that they c'n sing ...and daydream for an audience of millions. ('Course, you wonder how they got through layers of audition and if that's show production.)

Anyway, for you guys, just a footnote for one thing, goes right down to the craft of replaying, a kind of translation. Maybe a five or six part conversation might have allowed touching down to this "how to" level, though it's doubtful.

three deer,
a yearling
buck and doe
holding their breath
watch me watching them.

Remember this opening, and then my version...,

three deer
a yearling
buck and doe
holding their breath
watch me
watching them

I said I was dropping punctuation, since it was only that one comma and two periods, anyway. Then, I seemed to rearrange, indenting "a yearling" and pulling "buck and doe" back, seeming to lose the building rhythm. But here's where "translation" comes in. You, Stephen, did something with that comma. The only one in the poem. I just got the "white space" punctuation equivalent, placing the next line out there, pitch, tone, volume ...depends on the listening reader. So, out there, the next build is a drop back, not a farther stretch ...unless the deer were going to fly or something.

Comma holds, and it's not a dash (you know, Emily Dickenson was a cubist, with no brush but a dash with which to practice cubism) or a comma with implied "and", or anything, so I hold it tight under the forward edge of three deer....

So that's how you feel the playing ...in your muscles, chest throat and mouth and whole body....

The comma, and e.e. cummings would have loved it, his thing being largely visual and modeled on Sappho's torn fragments of manuscript, was to me, also visually, kind of ugly. It wasn't meaningless or somehow not part of the composed piece. So, the next couple lines got rephrased. This is what I mean by doodling around on the podium. Or, wherever you are and passages are running through your head. It's where shop-talk goes when it passes beyond mutual admiration (which, in negative phase includes put-downs) or working on everybody's literacy. A few people c'n play a single passage back and forth. "Try breaking this line here" or "Look, try a stutter on this, keep the reader trying to finish it different ways, his mind jumping forward and coming back, like doing triple jumps in the Olympics".

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know what I was doing, what this thinking out loud and thinking live "thought experiments' was about and to get a good piece of poem-playing into my Hypersize06 folio.

Message: 14   (Digest 2154)
   Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:16:05 -0800
   From: "April Corioso" <acorioso@earthlink.net>
Subject: Stephen's re-crafting "Before Dawn"

April's (ret. @ddress) husband, Gene Fowler, writes...

Beyond jamming - re-crafting.

Stephen,

What I have below is your original posting, though I'm responding to
your note, after thanking Winnie for her useful, more so than usual,
even, prodding at your "Before Dawn". I'd read Winnie's post and then
I read your post this morning, but didn't keep the Digest, though I had
the older one. So, I don't have what you were saying about starting from
a sequence of haiku, fusing them, wrestling with just about every word,
every phrase....

The main message in all that? The poem, fore and aft of dawn, matters
or you wouldn't stay with it, keep coming back to it.

Re-writing? Uh, uh. That'd be editing. Re-vision? Uh, uh. You're after
something different than images or, even more shallowly, making the poem
look like a poem instead of like a poem sounds. Gotta shake loose from
the eye and get into something experienced, the music and sensory
content and logos all emerging together. Jake Epstein to Ezra Pound, my
faulty memory degrading to paraphrase: You have to sense what's in the
stone and then chip away whatever's not part of it.

Anyway, I think I remember you saying that even, as you posted your
thanks to Winnie, that, maybe, there was still something not pulled out.
So, up there on the empty bandstand just doodling a little, like a voice
does, talking something into existence.

I remember Winnie loving "the distant road surf of cars" ...in which
the sides of dawn are mixed, the pre-dawn carrying the breaking surf
into the post-dawn dry.... But she, and probably you, bothered by
"arrive alert vacant eyes"....

That's a line to doodle with, just playing a light riff on the one line,
because you've got to fit it in the larger frame you've got going....
Oh, about the frame. that comma played after "three deer", like e.e.
cummings, playing Mozartian commas. The only other marks are two
periods so why not just kick all three. You're doing it with phrasing.
Hey, let me pick up my instrument here, "arrive alert vacant eyes".
You c'n just drop the pieces, like the landing

a pair of owls
arrive
alert
vacant eyes

look at me sideways

waiting for the light to
sleep

Waiting for the day's light so they c'n sleep? Or, waiting for the
night's light to sleep, releasing them to just be owls. I doodled it
loose, three pieces not one. Why? Because it's all their (all these
nocturnals) looking at you. I pull that out here. So, backing up,

three deer
                a yearling
buck and doe
holding their breath
watch me
watching them

the crow
          with its sleek black
          feathers
          and scimitar beak
          flaps wetly
in the dark

Just playing lightly, doodling, not changing a word, a phrase, though
some of the syncopation, to pull out the looking at you, and "the crow"
not looking, just

           flaps wetly
in the dark

You know, I reached for that "the" in "the crow".... Not "a" like the
owls? Then, "Uh, uh, it's THE (night's) crow, dark in the dark, no eyes
glittering, but it sees you.

After the dawn? Almost nothing. Just loosen up my playing muscles and
run through it just like it is, ...almost.

after dawn,
        only empty trees
        rooted in dry tangle grass
spread their leaves for the sunlight

somewhere a dog barks
the distant road surf of cars
morning has arrived
as
animals awake

             drinking
                       their coffee
                   black

Morning arrives, like the owls arrive, maybe headlights still on
from the night on an old 1976 pickup, or fog-lights, yellow, on an
old Studebaker....

Just doodling, sensing, maybe, that something seemed to resist your
pulling it out, finding just the right tone. Easier for somebody else.
And it had to be all that watching.... Clues in your "rhymes", eh? -
like the "arriving", the "watching". And the mixing of old night and
new morning. The trees still rooted in night down in the tangle grass,
in your tangled innards, pulling back on you when you pull what's in
there up.

Hey, that morning, though, is great, not just the road surf line. Pour
me a cup of that coffee. We c'n put our instruments in their cases and
grab one of the tables here before the clean-up people and the delivery
guys come in....

Gene

Message: 8  (Digest 2152)
   Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:58:06 -0600
   From: Stephen Morse <smorse@sigafoos.net>
Subject: subbed for comment:

This is a revision of a poem posted previously, so some elements may
seem familiar, but it is enough different to be treated as a new piece.

Best,
Stephen
***********************

Before Dawn

three deer,
a yearling
                buck and doe
holding their breath
watch me watching them.

the crow
          with its sleek black
          feathers
          and scimitar beak
           flaps wetly
in the dark

a pair of owls
arrive alert vacant eyes
look at me sideways
waiting for the light to sleep

after dawn,
       only empty trees
        rooted in dry tangle grass
spread their leaves for the sunlight

somewhere a dog barks
the distant road surf of cars
morning has arrived
as
animals awake
             drinking
                       their coffee
                   black.