Correspondance (act again alice)

act again alice although always another anything art between body certain
character come course does else even everything experience first form
gertrude get give go going great having hemingway herself however kind
know let life little lives living look looking love makes making may mean
might must nothing now object often others own painting part people perhaps
picasso place play point portrait question quite rather read reading really
relation right say see seems sense simply sister something sort space
stein story take tell things think three time toklas two understand upon
want woman women words work world writes writing yes

Notes
"Correspondance (act again alice)" is a found poem, generated by a word counting and assessment program that Amazon.com ran through my book, Passtionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein, in 2007. The words here are the 100 most frequently used words in a book that consists of 118,844 words distributed into 5,093 sentences.  The program also suggests that the book weighs in at 5,093 words per ounce, useful perhaps if you want to know what the cost of posting it might be. Would it sink if you put it in a bottle and sent it out to sea?  I don't know. Perhaps.

Photos are of a message in a bottle that washed up on our shore two years after it had been dropped in the water of of the shore of PEI. Some messages do arrive--somewhere.

Milk

6 April 2013
 
Why is milk good?
        Gertrude Stein, “Say it with flowers”

First play
So much milk
rivers of milk
my milk runneth over
    you mean your cup

    yes, a cup of milk for your thoughts

Second play
spilt milk
milksop
milk and honey and tea
milky t
milquetoast

don't sour my milk now

Third play
Here comes the milkman!
    Milkman who?
    Milkman Dead.
    He is?
       
Oh mother, we’re out of
milk again.   

Fourth play
Born in a stroke of milk
    mother’s milk
    father’s milk
under the milkweed

    (too rough for fishing today)

Fifth play
Hurry hurry, the sick won't wait
bring your brolly &
milk of magnesia

But I prefer jelly
&
poems.


(Last Act)
I photographed this shelf of cobalt blue bottles last summer in Billy Proctor's Museum on Gilford Island, Echo Bay, BC.  For more on Echo Bay, Billy Proctor and his museum, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/the-sound-of-something-vanishing-billy-procter/

The idea for dividing a poem into discrete exchanges or actions, each of which you might call a play--rather than a stanza--is borrowed from Gertrude Stein's early experiments with writing plays, in which heavy formal titles divide snatches of overheard conversation and wordplay. See for example, her Geography and Plays, first published in 1922.

Milkman Dead is a character in Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon, the boy who won't be weaned, and who then flies away.

The lines "too rough for fishing today" and the idea of visiting the sick with jelly and poems are taken from Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas's 1953 poem/play about the events of a single spring day in  lives of the coastal villagers of Llareggub, Wales. The piece, which is written as poem, radio play ("a play for voices") and for stage performance,  is filled with dreams and ghosts, inward musings and overheard gossip; it is a more highly structured, evolved, and palatable form of the sorts of play/poems Stein wrote.




(Last last act)
Why is milk good?
Is it?

Items Encountered in an Archive

scribbles sketches notes laundry lists love letters bills negatives pins photographs chairs heartbreak sorrow silly joy sheet music eye infection envelopes drawings paintings stitching clothespins rhymes wine stains examples of the colonial everyday the march of the zoaves money coins hate letters contracts empty notebooks reading notes glasses cigarette burns the smell of smoke lyrics instructions for new regimes of hygiene lists of names soap burma shave jingles yarn needlepoint brooches picture frames wine stains water damage evidence of mice insects ink spatters a bit of egg damnation pencils a pricked finger stop a drop of real blood

ii.
a sonatina followed by another is a sonatina played upon the ivory.
alone I mean.
tickle
me.
can tickle we
can tickle

iii.
Hinky Dinky
Parley Voo
Cheer up face
The war
Is thru

iv.
how's this for economy
how much there is for you in me