I saw and have been thinking about your update of Juice notice in a recent (maybe yesterday, day before) MOAPG digest. Next time, or even a kind of repeat of this last time, dropping "last ten minutes" phrase, but when something new has been done, and remind that it's a hyperzine, that it's being "transparently" edited for the full year. Always changes in the look, additions and changes in the poems and poets, and closure only at year's end when a new issue will replace the one that's been there and that one will move into archive status and be distributed on CD. Context is always good even in a very informal setting and, when it's a whole new conceptualizing of "publication" some forced context, forced conceptualizing, and some "waking" is in good stead. Talk about the "initially" seen as a hypercover. Etc. Keep it conversational, not "notice"-like.

Correction of a "sketch". In the same notes in which I'm saying one reason I'm staying out of the ftp space is that Juice online is, when you come down to it, as much a piece of your work as is a poem or, as I've tried to get Winnie, Dominick & others to realize, a book, provided that book is personally crafted and not just shuffled - I suggested bringing up the "cover" design by having a line like "Hypercover design by Juice Squad". I sketch suggestures. Maybe Judy might over a breakfast. But, it's your long, subtle riff. That line should be "Hypercover design by Stephen Morse". It's not only fairer, more accurate, but it makes the cover (look) more solid and a piece of art. It's a hypercover, too, because it isn't like the printed paper cover, but is a kind of "hovering" totality over ...well, pieces. It's a gather, an "assemblage" to use a term Castaneda's don Juan liked (in later books). So, sign your work. Other ways to "gather" workers into an apparent "Juice squad" will come up. That sort of senseme, like such things as my "ring of talkers", in this collaborative age will come up in the course of conversations in which an inner pressure to stretch available language to say something a little differently, a little more comprehensively, a little more, well roping in something usually left out.... We c'n always encourage this, demonstrate it, and sigh when it doesn't take. In and out of poems, even nicely made poems, MOAPG writers don't press the language. Sigh. You've heard people talk, clumsily, of, say American English and, to get slangy, say something like Amerenglish. Dead slanginess. Now, real slanginess gives us something like Spanglish, for the mixtures in, say, the southwest. Why does it feel live? Because you c'n hear the play in it, the music, the fun. So, I bounce back into the more formal name-making and I generate Amerish (A-mer'-ish). The current ear will always make it A'-mer-ish, so I give the pronunciation with it, maybe even in place. The ear is picking up from a German-protestant out-of-time community, the Amish. I wanted that and, then, a twist. Almost back to the 17th century and bounced forward. Now, it's A-mer'-ish, with Spanglish and Chineglish "outriggers" going into the 21st century. Note the outriggers point back to English, with the "g", because the farthest out form of our base was Amerenglish. Why did I by-pass that northern "g"? Why not, say, A-mer'-glish, which still echoes America? Well, we're not only "after" the Norman invasion, which started English to being an omnitongue, but after a good deal else, too. A-mer'-ish is ...well, "absorbent".

I'm getting far a-field, I know, or it likely seems that I am. MOAPG poets write a rather dead language, usually, as well as formal language and unreal language (as in provoking gods to get a tsunami). Want liveliness? Well, they'll try images, maybe, or something in the content, maybe even images as content. Language only for saying and, maybe, "expressing"? (Such vagaries as Truth or Beauty?) Willie, I understand had used only twenty or thirty thousand and, somebody wrote, Greenblatt, maybe, half of those he used only once. Yet, his language gets pretty lively. Sure, he uses all the tricks of playing the language, as an instrument, hell, as him, in all these characters, talking and strutting, fencing, slipping the blade in, rousing storms, tempests, and all the rest. When I changed John Barns' "crimson hands" to "crimson'd hands" I didn't shift or replace his image. I gave it a back-story. I fixed the language, the unanchored adjective became a past-tense verb, the action on-going.

Barton has his text rehearsals with a group of actors. Just the text. And they take it apart, word by word, stress by stress, line-break-and-pick-up by ..., and they think about it, they talk about it, different ones will try, different way, to handle some of the text. The idea, instead of having a generalized sense of the "emotion' of a passage, is to have the shifting feelings, sensings moving within the phrases. All that complex interplay. But, what about the performance, even later rehearsals with all the character work, action blocking? You forget all that working out of what the text says, its clues for the actor from the author. But it's what you know, what your character can draw on. And here's Bill Evans

You know Houseman's thing about poetry being dangerous if it comes to mind while he's shaving because the skin puckers and cuts c'n follow. So, are those poets who c'n write lines that register that way, Yeats, for instance, bein' good at it, another breed to be admired from a distance? Could a MOAPGer aspire? Why not? But they stqnd in their own way. Sure, there'll be images involved, but it's the language. A good image written about as if it was a diary entry won't do it. I know I'm not any special breed. And I c'n do this, so I'm in a position to say something about the how.

I'm always putting poems or pieces of poems in my "letters" to John (Bennett) and once in a while it's just a poem or a piece of poem, but usually the stanzas are working paragraphs in the letter and they're strange enough letters (like "Hairy Einstein & the Philosopher's stone"). But once I elicited the "goose bump" response in John and he generously told me about it and put the chunk of poem into his stream into the Great Cyberswirl, ...where, startlingly, others got the response and said so. It was the second of five sections of "shards of the Song". (In Fires 1976.)

II

Old men do not hunt the wild deer.
The strength is there, in gnarled old muscles under softened flesh,
and if the eye is weakened slightly, there's more mind within it,
but one's star-whitened image in her eye consumes the spirit.

Old men do not hunt the wild deer.
They dream of its light step
patterned softly in the roaring winds
of high plains,
where young men flash like lightning
on the soft runner's trail.

Still, an old man scenting the wild deer
might rage against the Law,
freshen his meat to youth, drinking blue light from high pools,
run again on the springing arch of time

and touch the shoulder of the deer.

SHARDS FROM THE SONG

I

My love of you is a sun!

A very old thing to say.
Lately, though, we've come to know
of suns!

A burning plasma held in invisible fields!

And if those fields break, will the brief fires
of our lives be consumed, drifting ash be our touching?

II

Old men do not hunt the wild deer.
The strength is there, in gnarled old muscles under softened flesh,
and if the eye is weakened slightly, there's more mind within it,
but one's star-whitened image in her eye consumes the spirit.

                           Old men do not hunt the wild deer.
They dream of its light step
patterned softly in the roaring winds
of high plains,
where young men flash like lightning
on the soft runner's trail.

Still, an old man scenting the wild deer
might rage against the Law,
freshen his meat to youth, drinking blue light from high pools,
run again on the springing arch of time

and touch the shoulder of the deer.

III

We touch as uneasy guests touch priceless crystal.
Light plays in the cut facets, full colors and dizzying fumes make
      us wild,
and we wonder at the thought of drinking.

The lights in the great hall are harsh
and the slightest shudder might explode the crystal.

IV

We wear protocol
                  as a kind of radiation clothing
so that, passing near
one another,
we will not 'spark'
and leave ionized signals
to wake those who sleep nearby.

V

In dark places i have made a mirror.

                  Bright purple, this mirror
of gold-aluminum alloy,

a mirror for my darkening passion, and another the
living green of gold-iron,

                              for the freshness of something fresh borne
in me, a growing light that is you,

and in these mirrors, i watch
through all the hours and am shown the bright play
of your deep fires
so long as they burn.

And none of these mirrors show me the child
i'm told you are.

They show me a living field rising in warm amber

                                 the fire becoming flesh.

p.s. Another possible set for 2006 would start with "Shards of the Song" and then the first five parts of "In the Garden of My Lady" and, for a strange ending, the lone ninth part of "In the Garden...". Six, seven and eight, were never written. This bores into the strangeness. My primary thought, because it puts me and my work in our time was Café poems, not the section from The Quiet Poems, but those pulled from all over. Still, it's all a Great Swirl. I'll put a small Intro at the top of a first poem in any case, placing myself and my work in its, or, I guess, our, time.