T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

27
year instead of four and a half years. I intended the poems to culminate with my marriage to
Kassi, to whom they are dedicated. I was also thinking of Pablo
Neruda’s 100 Love Songs when I conceived New Songs. I wanted not
to top 6x36N in quantity, but to match it in wide, deep, breaching
scope.
6 x 36 Nocturnes profoundly changed my ideas about
poetry, about the canvas size I could & wished to use. Whatever its
worth, I found my voice full, a desire to plumb deep as possible
within & without, & return with strange words to describe what
found. New Songs, a title alluding to Rilke’s New Poems, continued
my pursuits, a wish to raise the intensity of every poem, short &
long.
February 2005 saw the late release of Cenacle | 53 |
October 2004. Despite, maybe because of, its lateness, it’s a good issue. In looking it over a
couple of years later, I notice especially the visual art it contains. The cover features a
rendering of my friend & Cenacle-featured poet Judih Haggai, done by her friend Anemone
Achtnich & remixed by me. The back cover features a remix of the remix. Also notable are
the pictures I took while living in Connecticut, I think a kind of therapy I pursued while
living there in 2003-2004. Another graphic image was one Kassi & I made together, a collage
of images of Ravenna Park in Seattle. There have been issues of The Cenacle where I didn’t
have much contributor art to go with, so I became more conscious of my (unschooled) skills
with photography—& sometimes Photoshop. I believe the new technologies of the past
decade or so have made it possible for people without natural genius talent in a given art to
breach into valid creation. A good camera combined with Photoshop allows me nearer my
old dream of painting beautiful canvases, lets me feel a little bit of that magic in the visual
medium I’ve often known with written language.
The writing in Cenacle 53 is good, too. Contributions by Jim Burke III, Judih Haggai,
& the continuing serialization reprint (from the San Francisco Oracle issue number 7) of “The
Houseboat Summit” held in Sausalito, California back in February 1967 by Allen Ginsberg,
Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, & Gary Snyder—plus my 6 x 36 Nocturnes, New Period, & the
2001 chapter of this narrative comprise the issue.
In Jim Burke III’s C53 letter to me, he considers the idea of a “Supreme Being” &
argues that no definitive yes or no can truly be defensed. He argues for a “third alternative”
that would be the “solution to all thought,” for possible answers in the “mysteries not
bounded by time, space, or yes and no.”
I look over Judih Haggai’s poems from this issue & no lines leap out at me but
instead I marvel at a consistent atmosphere in her poems of parts humor, restlessness,
yearning. She sees the world’s strangely colliding parts, or parts colliding strangely, & finds
her music in these collisions, their sounds of laughter & moan. Her music croons & wishes,
moves rhythmically & often without the encumbrance of forethought, or regret.
The next section of my serialized fixtion New Period appeared in Cenacle 53. Because
my fictions are so long, & only so much to an issue, & only so many issues a year, I found
myself publishing pages I’d written in early 1999. They bear the sweet of my ongoing truth
among the must of old thoughts & passions, fierce hours gone, & gone. A decade of
publishing my prose in this singular venue had long revealed these advantages & drawbacks.
With the exception of cyberspace, or some unimagined Scriptor Press venture, I can see no
better one.
The Cenacle | 60 | December 2006