Thinking about what I was trying to do in a poem, and how I was trying to do it ...I felt my best name for the poem was "a crafted tool" and what I was making beyond the tool was experience. Not "an experience," ...but just flowing experiencing, much like that in moment-to-moment living. Still, edges, contours, shaping movements are built into it.

A maker, then, with e's (his or her) crafted tool, the poem written for a listening reader, and e's poetics. The poetics, to me, were imaged by the makings of the smoker who rolls e's own. The tobacco is what grows wild and then is cultivated. Then, there's the paper, that's man-made. Roll it up and seal it with spit that comes up from the innards. Finally, there's the rolling dance of the fingers.

A few have wondered, from poems like Cosmic Language (one of the walking poems in Fires) and The Experience Maker, and maybe from what I've just said above (I've said it before), that I might tend toward solipsism. I don't. We make our worlds, our universes, ...but we don't make them out of nothing. In The Experience Maker, I tell of the void. It is casually assumed to be The Great Empty, a nothingness, out of which everything is made or at least comes. That was the best we could do, in early times, with "a void." Now, we have Chaos theory. "Chaos" is rooted in gas. So our void c'n have some sort of graininess to it and a potential for turbulences.... We're coming to know that out of chaos, emergent order is the perfectly natural and always occurring next thing.

We make our worlds and universes, ...but not out of nothing. This view of a larger making would seem to come only from my sensibility as a poet and, in recent times, getting support from cognitive science. But what of all of us making Universe, the one we share? Here is Bucky (R.Buckminster) Fuller, geometer, defining Universe in his book, Synergetics. "Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences." That "nonsimultaneous" catches Einstein's echoing sense of space-time fields. The polysyllabics is a cost of the precision Bucky demanded of himself. Besides, they're fun on the tongue as soon as you toss off any sense of intimidation.

A poem is a focusing device, like the magnifying glass you c'n use to start a fire in some dried leaves to, then, add kindling to...

For all this hinted at aura surrounding and permeating the poem, it's basically a slightly ribald, deliberately light-hearted romp through poet's "personal" history. Compacted time may reinforce that sense of solipsism, but that's just a poet's dopplering....

Gene Fowler