In a digest that came in this morning, I noticed some of your regulars wondering out loud (TOL) about having short stories in Juice. What matters isn't whether or not this is a good idea or even feasible. What matters is that MOAPG-folk are restless and thinking about Juice, in a sense, as theirs, something they've an interest in and a connection to. And before that, they're talking and not just when commenting on work. They're talking about what's going on, what might be going on. They're guessing about what might be interesting, useful, worth trying out.

As a contributing shaman, I like the image of "sand paintings" for my messages, "deep" but ephemeral, as life is.... How do you do a sand painting? Well, Tim wasn't clear about the point I was making or trying to make. I forget how he put that, let's see, here it is, "In fact I'm not clearly sure what point you are trying to make..." So, a sand painting. All about pointing. He didn't seem to have noticed as he didn't notice anything except "ART FOR ART'S SAKE" - which he countered by saying, "art for the artist's sake". Uhhmmmm. So, I make more sand paintings and try to disengage. I was suggesturing, and gesture is more comprehensive than pointing, even crafted pointing, that anybody shaping up some motivation, some energy, needn't choose between seeking recognition and being driven by mysterious forces within. It's possible to build something because it's interesting and tests your edge of the envelope self-handling. And it's possible to become concentrated on, or in, the task so you forget to go to dinner or even to get up and pee until it's been painful for a long (unmeasured) time.... I might have cracked through the habitual responses by inserting "the" and writing ART FOR THE ART'S SAKE and give away, to the inquisitive, practicing the craft to advance the craft if possible, or at least test yourself against it.... But even that...! Most think that each "loosening" of old crafts allows escape from demands, makes it easier and allows anybody with a "sensitized unconscious" that might help out, to dream of fame and fortune or at least a moment of dazzling attention getting. There's no more free verse than free lunch, to paraphrase somebody or other. Articulating ain't just talking out loud, it's thinking, imagining, envisioning out loud, and if your skeleton don't dance,

The spreaders become masters of edges and that starts, to borrow something my friend Jeff Duntemann (editor of PC Techniques and Visual Developer) said, "edges are interfaces". There's never, really, an edge you can fall over to nowhere. Take how you do your annual Juice. Lots of people have done annual issues and they've taken time to edit, maybe most of the year and a little before the previous one came out. Okay, being out in the hum in the phone lines (whether or not those lines are in wires), you can do that editing out in full view and, in fact, anybody who c'n draw you into communicating can be involved to some extent, not just your staff, authors with whom you communicate about the work they've shown you, and people you talk to who are close enough geographically to drop by. The "draft" issue is out in view. And you don't have to do physical paste-up, print and mailing as with paper. You might have a changing "dummy" of a print issue, but you can't show it to many or to a many that can carry it off and look at it in the quiet of a long night (of the soul).

How do you make a sand painting to capture all this. Something to put some edges around your description of what you're doing. You modify or invent words, catch phrases, descriptions built up from these. You make a tale of it. And that, not really the underlying faith, is what you spread. Formally and informally. You don't throw out constraints, or make this "interactive" editing or anything. The editing is like it's always been. The correspondence and conversation is out in the open because of the MOAPG group as a semi-open in-box for a lot of it. Mostly, people looking at the "issue" through the year can see changes and not just additions (along with some subtractions). By talking this up, by talking in letters, signatures, bulletins, postings, and other destinations, you spread the idea of thinking this way. You also bring back readers for subsequent visits and, maybe, while thumbing through the "dummy" they'll eventually read and get something from a poem they didn't notice on a single visit. Looking to see what the editors want, visiting poets might actually read what the editors seem to be publishing right now. By "right now" I mean it's in a live dummy, not just a current issue. A subtle but huge difference. And all this results from how you talk about what you're doing, which is essentially what you've been doing. And how you spread that talk.

You can further strengthen the talk, by talking, as I just did, about what you couldn't do until the ezine and hyperzine. You'll invent terms as you go, as I just did, like "live dummy" and the re-reading in subsequent looks at the dummy, reminding your listeners, too, that any poem in the issue will be changed by the changing context, the other poems in the issue. And that feeds back into what I've been spreading with talk of playing sets, which differs from writing sets, because it's the current club date, reading, live recording. You can't start thinking about how your poems will fit in the same auditorium as somebody else's if you don't know how they might fit with one another. I sometimes pace through the house, reading aloud some of my poems, picking one from here another from there, reading part of a poem and skipping to another, for the echoes. You have to develop faith, in your sense that you know what to read after what you just read. You have to sense where your listeners, or your listening readers are....

What's the deep faith underlying my talk of playing sets, put together for the occasion? Even very good poets, essayists, other writers work from a platform of having learned in school to write a term paper. They're trapped in a "flatland' that's the surface of language. You saw me confuse Kits when I didn't do what others do when they suggest a "better word". I suggested a richer experience from which to select what her words captured. I metablabbed for a couple weeks trying to show what I'd done, in terms of the poem, though, talking about lines and words. She never said anything. Nobody did. I'm a fearsome creature, so I'm pretty much immune to anybody suggesting I'm full of it, with details, but I sometimes despair of ever making sense, digestible sense, to folks spreading faith.

You know that Robert Frost said free verse, verse without a definite metric scheme, would be like playing tennis without a net ...setting it as an impossible task, suggesting that the product wasn't verse, or at least not competent verse. He assumed no constraints if that one was "removed". And a collapse, I guess, into dead talk. I think that with evolving education and some technological applications used for monitoring, we c'n play tennis without the net - for a faster game that's a greater challenge to eyesight, reaction time, racket control and integrity. But, the correction isn't to argue (about whether art is for art's or for artist's sake). I took the other side of his image's anchors, referred to what he's trying to let go with.

'Course, it's a sand painting, vagrant currents lifting particles from the plain sand floor.... I'll leave metric schemes as halters for others to explore. I've no time, perhaps not enough brain cells left. But you see, it's all about the body and, then, as he's going to get the poem, hearing - the poem coming. Nothing like that, so far as I can find, ever enters into critical writing or talking. that's a big part of the faith I'm spreading in this, and other, poems. Anyway, in this poem, I'm handling writing a poem exactly as playing tennis. Swinging a racket or plowing a field, you move your shoulders, twice if you're the plowman and the horse, the tennis player and the umpire or reporter who's played. And from there to playing a set...? You watch a group playing a club date. Their shoulders move, they move the instruments around, change the relation to the audience.... There's chord changes, mood changes, world changes.

* The following paragraphs were my "pointing" paragraphs in a letter prior to the one I've taken this excerpt from. I can't link to a letter that might not be included in the same set. I'd posted in the motherofallpoetry groups (MOAPG) a "metablab" with a deliberately provocative title: ART FOR ART'S SAKE. One person had responded, but "under the table", and, sadly, didn't pay any attention to the mosaic writing of my posting. He did not respond to anything in either of these two letters, either. I can't blame him because I develop my "thinking" strangely. In this except, I'm responding to an included quote from his letter, but mainly I'm responding to his early statement that he was not clear about what point I was trying to make. This is why I try to nudge him into thinking about what pointing "is". Also, he uses the email code LOL (laughing out loud) a lot, a kind of typable hysteria. I try to deflect him toward TOL (thinking out loud), which I minted for the purpose.

"Anyway I can search around and get pieces here and there but would rather here it from you. Basically who are you ? What have you done..."

I could answer as Odysseus did, I'm nobody (in particular). 'Course, he was talking to a volcano, Cyclops (crater eye) that was ready to spit lava and throw globs hardening back into rocks at him. But, when you come to it ...I'm nobody in particular. But, if you want to know what I think, say, about ART FOR ART'S SAKE, you've just got to read the unboiled (down) rendering of my metablab, all the way down, with all its twists and jumps and jump-backs.... You said you were unclear about the point I was making. I responded by saying I was unclear about that, too. I wasn't making the single pointing that people, following the sequence of what's pointed out expect.

Here's a simple exhibit to, perhaps, clarify that. We use our hands to point. and we've a lot of ways to point, using our hand with it's foldable fingers and thumb. These are coded in the Arabic glyphs or numerals we use. Simplest point: 1. The index finger. No sense of here. The next "simple" point is the 6, but you've got to remember that finger wasn't curled until fonts came in. You've the same finger pointing, but look at your palm. Fold your thumb so the tip is in the center of your palm. I can't do that anymore, myself. Draw your line from the thumb tip, around its ball and out along the pointing finger. The palm-edge is the horizon disc, the here. So, you see how the mind c'n grow with the hand, how we c'n grasp

differently? But I want the first complex pointing that yields up angles and trigonometry and star-science and, with a turn of the wrist, the sextant and longitude and time. Point with two fingers pressed together and, then, rotate one finger out - so you're pointing, simultaneously and together, at the headland and the reef. That's all. With the 6, we centered ourselves, but we'd already done so much with 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.... It's all pointings. But just a little more in this exhibit. TOL.

You've seen Mercator and other maps on which the "spheroid" Earth is projected onto flat surfaces, the best of which involves rolling the flat surface "around" Earth (as a tube). Or we get perspective drawings pf rounded orange-peel slices. Bucky Fuller who explored polyhedra, figured out that the trick would be to project straight outward (no foreshortening) from every point on Earth, onto an icosahedrons, and then cut a few sinuses and unfold the icosasurface to form a flat surface. A different set of pointings. It's hard to be clear about what he's pointing at, what point he's making, when he's pointing in all directions at once and into a mirror....

Well, okay, here's some bio material...

http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/QP_bio.htm.