Hi Squad,

Just wanted to say Gene, I ‘m giving your messages the once over (once is never enough) and mostly not getting much of anything (this is usually the way it works for me in round one) but have learned over the last year not to give up and to read it until I do get something …I always do and that something is always worth the trip.

I’m actually a couple/few messages back stuck and mulling over the distinctions between Drafts and Draftings –I see you talk about it again in this message—I’ll read this again when I have some uninterrupted time to really hear it (inside my head).

Being the cranky curmudgeon I apparently am (somebody actually told me I was one –ha!) MOAPG is bugging the bajeezus out of me lately. Why don’t those people just make a freekin’ stamp? “Thanks for the read and the comments” ---making “read” a noun chaps my hide and the unimaginative, insensitive repetition of the phrase just sets me on fire. In restaurants: “Hi, I’m Jeff and I’ll be your waiter tonight …” followed by a sing-songey memorized listing of “our specials” gets nothing but eye-rolling from me.

But MOAPG-ers are supposedly WRITERS …they should be able to express their gratitude a little more creatively than this …grrrrrrrrr. Kit’s recent snide remark about it being the “only permissible response” to comments made me shake my head in wonder ~where the heck did that idea ever get born?~

And now the feedback comments in response to the poems have nose-dived into: “Wow”, “Ditto” (the wow), “I like”, and “…get stuck for words beyond wow” I feel people ought to attempt to say what they like, what wowed ‘em, even just listing particular lines as examples of wowness would have some value. I know, Gene you once said people probably don’t know why they like a poem ---I agree, but think they ought to try and figure it out (and MOAPG is a great place to try it). It’s not necessary to succeed. There’s value (for both the author and the commenter) in the attempt. Without prodding for more than wow-I like-ditto wow, the group becomes indistinguishable from hundreds of other poetry groups.

Well, I’m very busy baking, decorating, and cleaning –preparing for returning children, etc. I’ve recovered from one light bout of flu but feel it still hovering at my elbow.

If I get on the computer twice a day for a short time I feel lucky. There is much about the holiday season I love (and what I don’t love I can block out) but it does take a lot of energy.

Well, I wanted to be counted as listening and sometimes nodding, often looking puzzled –but definitely here.

I’m wondering if we might get snow for Christmas (just a little for the beauty of it would be nice) It sure feels COLD enough. I hesitate to shiver in front of Minnesotans but I am so ...BRRRRRRRRRRR!

Yours in crankiness (ha!)

mugsy

From: April Corioso [mailto:acorioso@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 7:57 AM
To: Judy L. Brekke
Cc: Stephen Morse; Mugsy; April Corioso @ LMC
Subject: The strangeness of migrating seeds (among the winds)

The strangeness of migrating seeds (among the winds)

Judy,

"Thank you for reading my poem, your comments, and sharing of it with April. I feel honored (I am being serious) of the time you have given this poem."

Skimming the Digest, I came upon your poem and your note. Your note referred to formatting. And the version I saw then had minimal playing, which, in a static sense on completion, might be thought of as "formatted" I described it later (in the letters) as cascading down the left margin (not unlike its being etched on a hillside). Then, I saw "drafts", too, like printed sheets wafting down, leaves torn from neural trees, sere'd edges at an eye's edge ...even as they touch the floor and skitter into stacks.

But all this was after I read the poem, built my hello by borrowing your "high // in Berkeley Hills", presenting it as a bit of sensemic merriment, and dropping into your note to poke at it...,

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.)

You mentioned "formatting", as against, say, playing, crafting, even writing, and mentioned "drafts", not your draftings, playings of the poem. You do have the formatting "as you go" implied. So, I could not resist tucking that "ing" into "drafts". Anybody noticing it might scratch a side of his or her head and forget it. Maybe nobody would think of those drafts as live, as happening. But someone might hear those playings....

It was, however, too late. That tiny act and I was in a parentheses and saying you could withhold that delicate play on "high" until its second occurrence, the title being locator enough and the drop into the thistles getting the main music going.

My guess is that my "comment" on the etching was, then, mainly the etched poem, in the static formatting-view, which is why, later, I brought up Bucky's map. Maps, static, but map-making, involving projection, is dynamic, and with Bucky's map-making, the unfolding is equivalent to the riffer's playing. Anyway, at this point I was done. A suggesture about withholding a motif until it could emerge from the whole of the poem. For the rest, a couple things dropped along the path-side that might hook somebody's peripheral vision, assuming anybody was even following the thread to see what responses you were getting.

"The skies here are grey and it is very cold. It was to warm to a freezing temp but I am doubting that it will occur."

Later, I looked to see what others said, after looking only to see if my note had, in being passed back and forth, wrapped (it's plain text) okay. I saw Dean's comment about "blood red". As everybody is using language, not as an instrument on which poems are played, but as the way we write, he's right. But if we're playing the instrument ...well, you have all those other "associational" reasons for, perhaps, disorderly writing in a complex crafting.

This, however, was nothing to toss out on the MOAPG table. This would for a letter to the squad, and to April who's the only person, now, in my bonus years, to whom I talk across a physically present table, and, to, then, go into one of the folios I'm stuffing eletters into as part of my drafting of an archiving, never to be cleaned up, let alone completed, in the years I have left.... It goes into the hyperzining 06 folio that begins with that last eletter in Jo2005 and, perhaps, include a "hyperzining" eletter, which might even merge with the Make it new eletter I propose to be my rare sending for Jo2006.

"I am not quite certain how you are using the word 'sensemes'."

Neither am I, but...

Talking about sensemes instead of images confuses people, no matter what definitions I try, but I work on minds by forcing a reading of the term and hope, somewhere along the line a few might, in a moment, actually read it and not translate it into a form (for the given sentence) of image. The weight of the language pushes the mind away. We don't just have iMAGe, but iMAGination, MAGic forcing us to accept a simple split of verbal / nonverbal, where nonverbal means visual.

You might say "tactile image" and your mind splits into what Milton Erickson dissociated into a conscious and an unconscious mind. What you notice yourself doing and what you don't notice yourself doing. So, "tactile image" If you're talking about a particular image, say "running in the tight sand", your c-interpreting puts the weight ("weight" is itself a somatic image) on tight. You understand that it's a felt quality of the sand.... But you u-mind draws on your early, and later, forgotten learning that's just part of how you speak and listen, write and read, the "tactile" is an adjective, the "image" is a noun (like "drafts"). Images are visual. You've some confusion in your understanding of the statement and as both statements are "in the air" as you read the line, you might have confusion in your making sense of the line. If I'd said, "tight is the key senseme here...", nothing visual lurks underneath, you know you've a bit of sensory material, you understand that it has to do with running on sand, you just easily fit it into place. You know what I'm talking about.

Unless, under the weight of all your experience of the language, you're trying to get an image, you're trying to see what I mean.

At other times, I use the weight of the language. I again and again say, for instance, that seed is a past-participial form of "see". So, a seed opened up will be an experience which we store mainly around the visual aspects. Of course, for the cognoscenti, when there are any, I might say, seed is a past-participial, or closed up, form of "sense". It's an opaque senseme. In a CSI television episode you see a body with a bullet hole in, say, the chest. The body is on a table and cleaned up. Grissom leans forward to look close up at the hole, but, in his iMAGination, he sees the bullet going in, traveling through the different tissues and, maybe lodging where he knows it lodged (no exit would). The entry wound suggests all that imaged knowing. If Grissom was Einstein, a muscle thinker, he might feel the body's sensations and pain since he can't project that sensing out into the body. He can't see what he's imaging in his own body. In any case, it's a thought experiment. Oh, Grissom is looking at the body and that is a seed, too, because what he's sensing (the sighted travel of the bullet and the empathic sense of tearing and cauterizing)involves the living person at the time and place the shot was fired and his living self in the morgue now.

You might say I try to change minds or, rather, the cognitive innards a mind uses to make its changes. But you see, I'm using TV (visual) pretty often here. Those draftings that are like pictured windows with video clips on them instead of sheets with written poems on them. You read the earlier draft, but in doing so you "return" to the time of writing it and you, in a sense, are writing it again within the reading.

At one point, I suggested sting somewhere around the etching images. What I did, if it took, was force a switch in "senses used". Get out, take your reader out, of a press of one sense's available things. All that etching going on on your skin. A nice time to switch. As you're imagining, you just switch attendings. Then, you can go back and get along to all those vistas coming up....

I called your "high // in Berkeley hills" sensemically merry - using "merry" in part because of the season, but sensemically, an adjective form I don't think I've used before. If I said "sensorially merry", people would be less puzzled, but, alas, think I meant some felt merriment, not some imaged, or sensemed, merriment in the very experience. Nope, the merriment is a quality of the sensemes, which means more than, but includes, the images. The "grabbing, scratching, etching thistles" are an adult's experienced walk on a hillside and a child's venture into the dark forest all together and, for all the scariness in the shadows, a merry event....

Well, as commentators say, "that's just me". You see why I kept it not just back-channel, but in a sense outside of time. Something to go into a folio.

"Willow is calling - must go for now."

Ahhhhhh, now that matters. All the above is just "thinking out loud" and casting seeds into the wind...,

After-thought:

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

high

in Berkeley Hills

Emeryville Mudflats, as the eye drops and the closest edge of the seen comes. Will many remember why this space is worth settling on? Remember the Arts & Crafts students and faculty making thier driftwood sculptures sometimes augmented with old hub-caps or whatever. On the back of Gary Snyder's Honda, getting a ride from the UCB campus to the city (he lived on Green street in North Beach and I lived out in the Haight...,

Along a bay shore highway,
wind falling loose, snapping tight with a whipped
crack at my ear, past drift-wood sculptures
on mud-flats - a sailing ship, a
locomotive, a huge & angry Indian -
movie sets, but with a looser texture, allowing
the different movements of sea & sky to show thru.
Past - leaning to the curve, headed for the tollgate
& the rise of the bridge.

From: Judy L. Brekke

To: April Corioso ; Corioso, April

Cc: Stephen Morse ; Mugsy

Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2005 1:21 PM

Subject: Re: your Re: Boosted up from the Cc line

Gene,

Thank you for reading my poem, your comments, and sharing of it with April. I feel honored (I am being serious) of the time you have given this poem. There are lots of seeds to be intellectually/poetically scattered only to see where they sprout. I am not quite certain how you are using the word "sensemes". I know you use it in your book "Waking the Poet".

The skies here are grey and it is very cold. It was to warm to a freezing temp but I am doubting that it will occur.

Willow is calling - must go for now. Stephen has been continuing work on JUICE 2005. I thank you for all your contributions.

Judy