To: Stephen Morse ; Judy Brekke ; Mugsy

Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2006 9:29 AM

Subject: "time alive" & other musings

Stephen, your revivifying of a "place" in time, on an Oakland hillside, and, then, Judy's reviving a place, in a grandmother's apron at a bitter, but, now, a bitter-sweet time.... So what's going on in the atmosphere of that house? These poems at the same time, but not at all the same except in the sensemic-revelemic sense, alive....

Don't get out your barometers, the question is rhetorical. You recently changed houses, so maybe your "new" house is haunted. Ghosts walk. Everybody, almost, assumes that entering a haunted house and encountering ghosts, spirits, unfamiliar creakings, is tied to events in the history of the house, quite possibly a secret history the real-estate agent didn't talk about. But always, the new inhabitants bring their own ghosts, fitting them in as they attempt to fit in. Anyway, all that is older culture. Now, it's just an increased tendency for live spots or places (spaces+times) to ...well, "surface", moving in as the people move in. And in surfacing, they enter into a poet's playing, riffing, jamming ...that's working up poems that "look" like they sound, sense, feel, suggesture, not how poems are supposed to look.

Time alive. The term, laid over its concept, has been alive in my thinking these last few days. A long time ago, Priestly (sp?) wrote a novel, "The Magicians", about three crazy magicians that show up in a situation. They're presumably Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and an Englishman, probably Nicoll who has a book, "Living Time". Throughout the novel they make people experience what ...well, what isn't actually going on. My last reading was decades ago. I remember, though, one of these being, on a pleasant evening, a snow storm brought up at the window.Priestly (I keep feeling I want another letter in there).

Looking into a "coal"...

Anyway, I like the notion of all our time being "alive" in us, so what we bring up in recalling, remembering, imagining c'n "in the mix" when we take from our experiencing to play our poems.... In my most recent post to MOAPG (I'm going to include it below), I bounced off Stephen's invitation to MOAPGers to put up poems that had meant something to them and their shaping as poets. This bothered me a bit. One of the "Laura"s had, previously, asked poets to say what poet had changed their lives. I hadn't seen any way to say anything about that and it was, likely, down in my swirl of living time, something to deal with - but, why? The group is sort of a "reading" group. People read each other and, I suppose, they're interested in what the others read. I suppose my post is a "metablab" such as I did last year and one of which, in an annotated form, you pulled out of Juice 2005's goodies and re-posted.

My post, sort of wrapped up your invite, if anybody felt like it, to put up a poem, more specific than just the poet, that ...meant something at a time when a poet is being shaped., as a category ("A") for a choice of a poem to post. Then, I added two more. And when I got to "C" I talked about "live spots" because a poem in this category, might be, as a whole poem, too large (in several senses) to post, let alone hope anybody will experience a "why it's there"

I intentionally leave all that vague. The posting is there for any reader of this to read. This, I think will be the closing letter in the Hyperzine 06 folio. Eletters bridging the 2005 and 2006 issues of Juice online, filling in the transition, so far as these folio'd letters go. I've "known" the live spots from the beginning and it's shaped me. To grasp the time alive, as something made of contained heat, try Shaman Song 9 (all four parts). But an earlier, though in fact the second, chunk of time alive after SS 2, is SS 6. A "coal" with "fire", ready to ignite larger, even raging fires, and ...well, "crust", "buffers", is a useable image. In SS 2 the "coal" is a word, but generalized, as comprehensive, perhaps as that in the NT. In "did you get the word?" sort of usage.

6

I have shown you
coals in the fire.

Words in the soul.

Look at one coal,
a single coal taken

up into my fingers,
safely in the flesh.

Look
deeply into the coal
til the eyes sting
til the eyes cry out.

Move closer to the coal.
The flame does not flare
but it has not coold.
It has grown in heat.

See
the deep rooted fires.
See
the dark private places

Move down into the coal.
Feel the flesh as flame.

Where is this place?
What are the names?

Who are the shapes
moving about you?

Who the live dark spots,
the living white flame?

Whose flesh is flame?
Where is your eye?

The songs, of course, are full of questions and, in the end, I don't give answers but only some assurance that those who listen, and only they, can work out answers, and that the questioning and answering and questioning will go on....

You said, Stephen, that if asked, you'd say "why". So, I suggestured trying to "experience" what might lie under the explanation you'd give ...before asking for that explanation. Of all that you might have sensed, felt, thought, in the context of the "old time" and, then, in the context now as you pull that poem of Williams into that post. The "other" (remember the first shaman's song) as "coal to be looked into".

A good one to end the folio with, and quite a trip from notions of a poetry skunkworks and "wild jazz on the other side of the line break" to notions of categories of shaping encounters nudges toward finding where the poet comes from, when and where did the multiple birthings of a poet occur...,

----- Original Message -----

From: Gene Fowler

To: Mother Poetry

Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2006 11:44 AM

Subject: Re: Natural, eh - nautical, er, I mean Nat'l Po'try moth, er, math...

Stephen, et al,

Uhhhmmm. Like the 24 hour ebook madness we were just told about in these "pages", this muse-ridden month seems a desperate seeking of Carnival before unreLent....

I'd throw in a couple categories here. You've got one. I'll designate it "A". Poets that influenced you (or any poster) as a young poet and one of his or her poems that meant something, something specific to that poem, to the young poet. Need a footnote: A young poet isn't necessarily a young boy or girl, woman or man. Just beginning to take shape as a poet. Or to guess there's a shape to take. A "new" poet might be better. And that means new to trying it. But if you started at age four, well, "new" for our purposes here has to mean after you've gotten to where you can read "poets who are around".

Category "B". This one is probably harder, maybe, for most, impossible. What you want is a poem that ...well, nettled you, maybe even pissed you off, ...but it sparked something and contributed...whatever it is that gets contributed to the shaping of a poet. I don't mean the content, as opinion, politics, religion, Hallmark sentiment, or anything else. Something down there in the nature of the poem, the way its made, where you sense power even when you hate what the poem's "saying". Or when you love what the poem's saying but are nettled, anyway. This, too, might be from when you were a new, or definitely a re-new, poet before you learned how to ward off such intrusions.

Category "C". It's something like "A" and something like "B". Something you wrote, in one of these "new" eras that ...well, in the extreme case, changed your course and your shape as a poet. Not in poem in which you found something after you'd written it or one where you went into it with something already pushing at you and, somehow, didn't lose that while "wrighting" the poem. Category "C" is a moment, when you were writing, that you pull up now. There's a new recognition. We're all shape-changers, anyway, as you worked your way through a poem. And you knew it afterward. Finding any of these three re-steerings among all the poems you've written that might someday be somebody else's "A" (or maybe, though it's rare, "B"), and among the three re-steerings to find that one that came up virtually as part of the poem, is ...well, like catching, not missing, something barely glimpsed" at the corner of your eye". You've got one, but it's kind of long. Well, then - you look for the "live spots" in it and you print it with ellipses (...) so it's just those moments when the torque was applied.... Don't get hung up on "best" lines.

The flip side of the record (remember those?) Going to ask Stephen why "The Red Wheelbarrow"? Or figuring there's no need because you know the "never-ending tale"? I listen to PBS in the background a lot. The other day I was listening to, I THINK, Gross, Terry interviewing a playwright whose name sounded like Ann Chrone (sp?). She said something I stopped and write down: "Other people aren't you with their experience laid on top". You know Stephen, you've seen his poems, heard him talk about others' poems. Write out a guess. Put it below your name when you ask (above your name) for what he seemed to want to say. He's going to Reply. Tell him to reply BEFORE looking at your guess. Then, his post has both. You both learn. And other's can take off from that.

Same with anybody who posts something, "A", "B" or "C".

Gene

(Fowler, April is m' wyf)

Message: 18     (Digest 2224)
   Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 17:57:00 -0500
   From: Stephen Morse <smorse@sigafoos.net>
Subject: National Poetry Month?

     I don't know who decides these things, but apparently this month is National Poetry month. So, when I think about it this month, I'll post poems that meant something to me as a young poet by poets that influenced me. In other words, poems that I think are worth reading. Feel free to do the same. If asked, I will explain any choice I make (in complete violation of normal policies).

Best,
Stephen
******

The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams
------------------------------------------------------------------------

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.