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From: Gene Fowler
To: Judy Brekke
Cc: Stephen Morse ; Mugsy
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2005 4:38 PM
Subject: Boosted up from the Cc line

Judy,
 
My post to you in MOAPG's digest is at the bottom of this letter.
post from digest
 
Well, your poem, ready for "feedback", provided a rare opportunity to kick you up from the Cc line into To space ...even if only for a "post". In keeping with hyperzining, I kicked at the static props of MOAPGers. The lesson isn't in the poetry, but in talking about everyday things. You said you'd been through many "drafts". So, I stuck a bracketed "ing" in there, creating "draft[ing]s". Think, and imagine, forward from...
 
Thinking point: We c'n use all sorts of sensemes to think with, whether it's a group of jazz individualists on the raised platform in a club or ...well, a gang of cartologists impressing the populace with their mapping prowess. Bucky (Richard Buckminster) Fuller, in the forties, developed a map with no distortions. A funny looking thing. But you could draw straight lines from any set of point As to point Bs and no distortion. No perspective drawing. Books much later than the forties on cartography didn't mention bucky. Not a footnote. In the late nineties, somebody wrote a book, "Mapping the New Millennium". Same thing. And he went into all kinds of mappings. If he wrote his book in this century, he would have included Bucky, but not Bucky's cartographic invention, which the damne Greeks should have invented. Anybody with a sense of the globe. He'd have included Bucky because a couple chemists (I think) working with Carbon-60 called this basket, a "bucky ball". The substance, buckminsterfullerine. This had little to do with cartogtraphy.
        You know the hassle. Projecting the globe onto a plane. Finally, the flat sheet was wrapped around the globe as a kind of tube and we got a huge Greenland.
        What Bucky did was, as soon as you hear it, obvious. He projected from the globe's surface onto a closed polyhedron. First he used a cuboctahedron because it was his vector equilibrium. That was prinred in Fortune Magazine. But soon he used the obvious choice, the icosahedron. Twenty triangles. As you move from a triangle's center to its edges, before the distortion becomes detectable, you're in another triangle moving toward the center. You cut along some seams and lay out a flat map with no distortion. Ombidirectional projection. I don't know that Bucky ever called it that, but he used omnidirectional and omni-other-things in other context.
        Soooo, we c'n think of our projections into a poem as even more comprehensive omnidirectional projections. Maybe, forgetting both phonemes and revelemes, concentrating on the apprehended surfaces, we can speak of our sensmees in an omnisensorial projection. This is just to shake loose from habit. As a concept it's only a certificate to hang on the wall that cries out about added degrees of freedom. We c'n project through all our dozens of senses as dimensions, degrees of freedom. We c'n switch senses turning our images into sensemes and changing the "angle of perception".
        In the letter (to Judy) in which I embed this thinking point, I demostrate what I'm suggesting here, but in the jazz playing metaphor. This is only another way to think, and imagine, about it.
 
...saying draftings instead of drafts. Drafts are, imagined, a sheaf of pages or screens with written down poems on them. But, draftings are a sheaf of video clips. You've seen on TV, programs like Entertainment Tonight, where a scene is on a thin TV screen, and then that screen will angle and move off, the scene still visible in it. And you may have a sheaf of these.... So, now that we're musicians, or muse...icians, maybe, playing our instruments, you don't just have these pieces of sheet music, these written poems, but you have the notated and evoked draftings.... You don't have to just look at what you wrote, but you can, play it again from the written down, and infusing it with recalled and remembered prior playing.
 
Will many go from that "draft[ing]s" to such imaginings, such sense of drafts as playings, "arrangements"? Unlikely. It's a shaman's power object lying by the roadside, maybe among the barbed thistles....
 
True, I tossed in a textual suggestion and played a bit of mystery (with the right hand). You had "high // in Berkeley hills" at the beginning and at the end. I c'n hear that musically. It's what I played with up in my comment. But your title, "Berkeley hills" is locator enough. Drop from there into "thistles". Your poem as I saw it cascaded down the left margin, like the eucalyptus smell cascading down the hillside. Later, I saw that other commenters had seen a print of it played pretty wild, like the tangled brush, maybe, and the long sights. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter where "thistles" is, relative to the margin, as a first word. You don't have to move anything cutting out that little framing shot or epigraph.... So, I wasn't fiddling with "formatting"....
 
My lightly played mystery, I just said, "I sense your etchings". Key word is sense. I saw later that Dean, I think, called you on "blood red". Didn't need "blood" he said. Actually, you don't need "blood red", "blood", or "red" for decription. But maybe you do, maybe you don't, for your poem. All sorts of things. If a sunset was coming in later, you might want that color, tattoo'd, as a forevision of the sunset. Or you just might want, like a wild little horn thing, the forced close, close-up. BUT, if you don't, you just want the reality of that etching done by thorns, then remember you're not locked into the visual, into images, and you c'n work in sensemes, in all our dozens of human sensings. You've got
 
grab
scratch
etch
blood red
drawings
on arms
legs
 
You've got options like
 
grab
scratch
etch
drawings
stinging
on arms
legs
 
A smell rides down the hillside, and etched drawings sting, again, more senses.... I've pulled "etch" into the foreground by italics, here, but that's only pushing and pulling in the delicate playing. Suppose you've got those other reasons for keeping "blood red", or just musically you need that heartbeat beat.... Then to ward off Dean, who's a great guy and sharp as a tack and doessn't really deserve warding off, you gotta do something with, maybe, "drawings". They aren't, really, drawings, and are as tangled, as the brush they came out of. So, maybe,
 
grab
scratch
etch
blood red
tangles
on arms
legs
 
...and you've got the weight in that "blood red", that's the jazz-center of the stanza, and you've got earth's tangle "etching itself" on your arms and legs. You'll look at 'em later, coming out of the shower, and you'll see the etching hillside....
 
And "tangles" has "tingles" in it for those who commented that you'd pulled them onto that hillside, or one in New York state, IF they hear language at all. You pulled 'em in with your main images. Everything else is fine-tuning.
 
and see where your power was, to reclaim what I c'n fine-tune in.
 
grab
scratch
etch
 
Follow the phonemes. Just pull out @/@/eh, verbs. Hear your progression. that's why you WENT from there, and I could, too. If you stay with "blood red" you get uh, eh, tying back into "etch" while "tangles" ties clear back to "scratch" (and "grab"). And that's just vowels. Y'see...?
 
Oh, you c'n use tangles with stinging, too:
 
grab
scratch
etch
tangles
stinging
on arms
legs
 
Well, this is intrusive, maybe, but Dean might pull you down to words as words,, usual feedback, and away from playing ...so I had to unfold my playing hidden in "I sense your etchings".
 
Gene
 
------ the post ------
 
Message: 10       
   Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 09:02:22 -0800
   From: "Gene Fowler" <acorioso@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: high ...in Berkeley Hills

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

Judy,

It's a sensemically merry

"high

in Berkeley Hills",


Gene

A suggesture, an added "ing" and a surgical cut, down in your preface.


Message: 12
   Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 23:22:27 -0600
   From: Judy Brekke <jbrekke@sigafoos.net>
Subject: Berkeley Hills

I cannot tell you how many draft[ING]s* this poem has gone through  -
although maybe not a finished piece I am ready for some feedback.  I
hope the formatting stays intact.

*  Must have been live doings...! -g.f. ( you COULD drop from title
into thistles, leave framing shot for end.... And for devilish readers
to softly play into punning "little blues things for the right hand" as
Billy Evans might.... I sense *your* etchings.)

Thank you.

Judy


Berkeley Hills


high

in Berkeley Hills


thistles
scrub brush
grab
scratch
etch
blood red
drawings
on arms
legs

menthol scent
of eucalyptus
flows
down hillside
mixed with
pungent smoke
from miniature
steam train
filled with
gleeful children

burgundy
manzanita
reach out
amidst rocky
terrain

rattlesnakes hiss
heat simmers
breath quickens

a glimpse of
Golden Gate Bridge
SF Bay
Alcatraz Island
Emeryville Mudflats

high

in Berkeley Hills