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From au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Tue May 7 20:26:29 1996
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 09:33:51 -0500
From: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
To: pauls@etext.org
Subject: TRee #5b: chapbooks
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Issue #5.0, section b: chaps 8/94
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TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground,
and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years,
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we
began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications, primarily language-oriented. This posting
is the first section of our 5th full electronic issue, containing
most of the short Chapbook reviews; the second section contains
most of the zine reviews. We provide this information in the hope
that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs.
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:
au462@cleveland.freenet.edu
Requests for e-mail subsctiptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting--
(a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve).
I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues.
Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review
material--in issue #5: features on the Argentinian experimental
poetry movement _Paralengua_; the LA micropress Found Street;
the Russian transfuturist artists Rea Nickonova & Serge Segay;
recent French writing-in-translation, the new magazine _Apex of
the M_; plus features on work by Nathaniel Mackey, Bill Luoma, and
Ivan Arguelles. TapRoot Reviews intends to survey the boundries
of "literature", and provide access to work that stretches those
boundries.It is availablefrom: Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood
OH 44107--$2.50 pp.
Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright
1994 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit
educational corporation. Permission granted to reproduce
this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this
introductory notice is included. Burning Press is supported, in
part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council.
Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each
review: Mark Amerika, Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, Jake
Berry, Luigi-Bob Drake, R. Lee Etzwiler, Steve Fried, Chris
Funkhouser, Jessica Grimm, Bob Grumman, Roger Kyle-Keith, Joel
Lipman, Stephen-Paul Martin, Susan Smith Nash, Kurt Nimmo, Oberc,
Charlotte Pressler, Dan Raphael, Andrew Russ, Mark Wallace, Don
Webb, Mark Weber, and Thomas Willoch. Additional contributors
are welcome: drop an e-note or send SASE.
*** Many thanx to all of our contributors. ***
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CHAPS:
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Akhter Ahsen, ed.: NEW SURREALISM: THE LIBERATION OF IMAGES IN
CONSCIOUSNESS--Brandon House, PO Box 240, Bronx NY, 10471. 538
pp., $25.00. Ahsen maintains that Surrealism is an enervated
methodology of literary and artistic transgressions. It needs
rejuvenation, a megashot of adrenaline in the buttocks, and the
editor supplies this via his own field of clinical psychotherapy.
In true Andre Breton fashion he proclaims it in a manifesto. The
late J.H. Matthews, world authority on Surrealism reacts to
Ahsen's ideas. Can science come to the aid of art? We know what
C.P. Snow said about the two cultures. Supporting documentation,
including case histories, reflect the supposed efficacy of Ahsen's
new engine of revitalization.--as
Ron Androla: PERFECTLY SANE LIKE EXCESSIVE INEBRIATION--
Translucent Tendency Press, 3226 Raspberry Avenue, Erie PA, 16508.
12 pp., $2.00. This collection of fuck poems would make a
politically correct feminist cringe, because it captures the male
side of copulation in all it's chauvinistic glory, both the
glorious and brutal sides of it. Ron rips into the violence, the
physical cramming, the pushing and shoving and taking and physical
side of an act so romanticized that the sweat is forgotten. But
Androla's war goes beyond lovers--and tears into factory politics,
drunken pissed off dreams, and the world of working class heroes
who got no place else to go.--o
Ron Androla: THE BOOK OF MEDITATIONS--Smiling Dog Press, 987 Fritz
Rd., Maple City MI, 49664. 5 pp., $2.00? A prose poem, in
seventeen parts, by Erie, Pennsylvania poet Ron Androla. Small
town angst surfaces here; the poet is unemployed, he admits his
sympathy for the president because we live in "the strangest
exploding times ever dreamed in history," and arrives at the
decision to "fit into society by smiling alot." He understands and
inwardly shudders at the slow economic and political decomposition
all around--and vents poetically tinged diatribes against the
media and government on his attic-room word-processor. Sexually,
this long poem is pure Androla--due to an S/M allusion involving
Hillary Clinton, a literary magazine in California strenuously
rejected MEDITATIONS before this SMILING DOG publication. Dean
Creighton's letterpress edition is tastefully rendered with a
linoleum print cover in three colors.--kn
Androla goes Eastern Philosophy in these short meditations
based on the tales of philosophers like Lao Tzu. There are 17
bursts of wisdom, seemingly inspired more by drug abuse and whisky
than spiritual enlightenment, with deep lines like "2. chain-
smoke. smoke another bowl. gulp more coffee. consider tolerable
alcoholism" and "12. avoid the kissing wife, pull away from her
sad, shivering hug. make her slap yr face & curse yr very
existence."--o
Bud Bracken: CIRCUS THRU THE FOG--Poetry Harbor, 1028 E. 6th St.,
Duluth MN, 55805. 28 pp., $3.95. Pat McKinnon of POETRY MOTEL
once claimed that Bud Bracken was the actually the editor, because
Bud hated poetry--if Bud liked a poem, it got into the mag,
because there had to be something there that was special. Bud's
poetry kicks ass, and you'd never know he hated the stuff by the
clean crisp lines in this chap. These are vicious poems, filled
with love, hate, and a strange emptiness that makes you want to
hide in the shadows even where there are no threats on the street.
They tell me poetry is supposed to rearrange the universe and make
us look at things in a different light. I don't know what light
Bud is using, but it sure as hell is powerful in all its
subtleties.--o
Dennis Barone: THE MASQUE RESUMED--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle
Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 16 pp., $2.00. Three short pieces of
nearverse that collage images, ideas, situations and parts of
speech with great dexterity. In and out of story, in and out of
sensation, in and out of reflection, in and out of in and out...
& sundry blossomings like "Was not a husband informed tonight to
seclude the heart of shuddered property?"--bg
Michael Basinski: WORMS--Veighsmere Series, 411 Parkside Ave.,
Buffalo NY, 14216. 4 pp., $1.00. Four sets of appropriately-
mismated fragments of (my guess is) zoology texts, scholarly
discussions of mythology, and who-knows-what that turns the human
condition from it's worm-lowest shudderings up to where its
"brightness sanctuaries" are into multiply-meaningful poetry.
--bg
E. R. Baxter III: LOOKING FOR NIAGARA--Slipstream, Box 2071,
Niagara Falls NY, 14301. 120 pp., $10.00. This is a marvelous
book of a man and a city (Niagara Falls, USA) and a river: The
Niagara, which leads to that which is also marvelous: Niagara
Falls (the natural wonder). This is a poetry where all history is
contemporaneous with the poet and the poet's life--his history,
his changes and he moves in a man's time and the river moves in
geographic time and here then is this mill town, tourist town,
paradise lost--well you have poetry. Frankly written, clear
thought through the fog and rain, dreams and facts, youth and age.
An exploration in the wonder of the self as a place. Collage--
bric-a-brac beauty of a store with endless merchandise of memory
and fact--Baxter III--it is how to see--read a life.--mb
E. R. Baxter III: WHAT I WANT--Slipstream, Box 2071, Niagara Falls
NY, 14301. This item is a one poem chapbook printed as a
supplement to SLIPSTREAM Issue #13. WHAT I WANT is an eight page
wide ranging poem of parallel construction in which Baxter reveals
the pantheon of his desires. He discloses the variables that
compose a poet's existence. He wants to smoke a lot of
cigarettes, have frequent sex with multiple partners, and he wants
the animals to talk. The poem proclaims and documents the value
of the individual in a complex world, without sexual fear, with a
sensitivity to nature, with the despair that cigarettes are
unhealthy, and with the generosity that thanks the human world for
its support. Baxter ends his poem from the heart of his soul. He
writes thank you. When was the last time anyone said that to
you?! "Thank you. Thank you."--mb
Guy R. Beining: DAMN THE EVENING GARDEN--MindWare, 310-762 Upper
James St., Hamilton Ontario, CANADA, L9C 3A2. 28 pp., $8.00.
Twenty-six haiku-like three-line poems, each beginning with, and
illustrated by, a different letter of the alphabet (in proper
alphabetical order). The illustrations are splotch, expressive,
and apt; the poems sexedly Bible-based, e.g.: "Damn the EVEning
garden/ it catches/ ALL the hOles."--bg
Dodie Bellamy: ANSWER--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY,
14213. 16 pp., $4.00. This installment of The letters of Mina
Harker actually includes a letter from Bob Gluck to Dodie Bellamy,
a letter to Mina (Dodie) from Cassandra (Ron Day), and the letter
in answer, from Mina to Cassandra. In her answer, Mina works in,
around, through, and ultimately in spite of the request which Bob
has asked of Dodie: to write "5-10 observations of aspects of
having a woman's body." Mina's response is alternately playful,
exasperated, pissed off, and ultimately takes off in its own
direction--a thinking, a sexy and fabulous world embedded in a
letter. Bellamy's writing sparks and whines, glides, pulls you up
short, engages in bouts of the limbo beneath inhumanely low bars.
This little book is a great introduction to the wonders of
Bellamy's work.--jg
John Bennett: THE NEW WORLD ORDER--The Smith, 69 Joralemon St.,
Brooklyn NY, 11220. 85 pp., $10.95. John Bennett (not to be
confused w/ John M. Bennett) is a small press survivor, though I'm
not sure if he would agree with my assessment. THE NEW WORLD
ORDER, with all quirkiness of style and subject, is a paean to the
fine art of survival in modern America. There are 25 short pieces
here; they encompass varied subjects--alcoholism, mental decay,
Vietnam, childhood trauma--and the message is unmistakable: one
must bounce back, hold tight, weather the odds and survive. "Each
day," Bennett writes, "I rise up from the world of dream into
illusion... and ask myself: what next? Receiving no answer, I set
about the all-important task of recreating myself." From this
departure, Bennett transmutes into the various personalities of
this book. Not surprisingly, John Bennett wrote a book entitled
SURVIVAL SONGS, which appeared in two self-published mimeograph
volumes. Bennett is a literary dynamo, an avowed outlaw on the
fringes of literary convention. This book sharpens and hones his
alienated, rough-and-tumble vision of a chaotic world "that
embraces insanity like a succubus, living on the brink is what
sanity is all about: torque resistance, crystallized perception
full of sunlight and terror."--kn
John M. Bennett: BLANKSMANSHIP--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland
Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 24 pp./90 min., Book $5.00; tape $6.00;
both for $10.00. For years Bennett's two word instruction-poem
"Be Blank" has been drifting through the otherstream, on stickers,
postcards, magazines. And though this sense of the non-projecting
mind pervades all of his poetry, in BLANKSMANSHIP he manifests it
more masterfully than usual. And to have the poems on the page
and literally in our ears via audio tape is sheer delight. The
individual poems are longer than usual for Bennett, allowing us
to experience deeper revelries of body and soul, mind and matter,
convulsing to be; each piece ending with five words or
combinations of words that can be associated freely with one
another, with the poem, with the book as a whole or all of the
above, or perhaps best, being blank, to simply let them be what
they will at each hearing/reading. For instance these five at the
end of "Number Wing":
Downflight hurricane wet land urinating hive
The general body of the poems heard as well as read surge and
flow with moments of epiphany and entropy--the two finally the
same. So much of Bennett's poetry is dependent on individual
perception, even differing states of mind in a single individual
can produce wildly different reactions.
Bennett is a man possessed of reality triple intensified.
These poems have an otherness, to be sure, but that otherness is
intimate, as close as our thoughts and viscera. Side Two of the
tape is a classic performance of the same piece with James Weise.
This is prime Bennett, put on the headphones, open the book, and
strap yourself in; you'll be ripped apart and love every minute.
--jb
John M. Bennett: BOOK CLASSIFICATION--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 5 pp., $1.00. Five Bennett
poems with an etiquette book pictured on the cover, and again on
the inside of the cover--but with fish skeletons diving into it.
The poetry, as usual, is out of "the kitchen drawer where's
burning limits snore."--bg
John M. Bennett: REVERSION: PILES OF THAT--Luna Bisonte, 137
Leland Ave., Columbus, OH, 43214. 252 pp., $30. 00. Gahhhhh!
Well over 400 poems by the renowned spitter, teeming with
Bennettisms like: "Where the why whys! Where the pause lie!" from
"Why Whines"; and "So I langoured, breathed a wall" from "A Glance
Back Cast." Results a mutter-to-utter maxitrosity by a poet who
more and more seems to be the Jackson Pollock of contemporary
poetry--because of his disorienting originality; crudity; size and
plain old self-publishing Americanness.--bg
John M. Bennett & Johnny Brewton: DRY--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 8 pp., $2.00, (coproduced w/
Pneumatic Press, PO Box 170011, San Francisco CA, 94117) Graphic
images, mostly of watering cans, by Brewton; poems by Bennett.
Like many of Bennett's poems, these have anti-titles, uppercase &
catty-corner to their main titles. A mere eccentricity 'til you
start thinking about it, about text sandwiched between titles,
titles clashing or harmonizing; or is the anti-title the first
half of an inevitable next poem's title? Bennett keeps on makin'
you work.--bg
John M. Bennett & others: MISCELLANY--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 1 pg. @, SASE. An assortment of
some twenty 4" x 4" cards, each with a poem or other artwork on
it, mostly collaborations between Bennett and people like Serge
Segay; also some intriguing drawings by John's sons, Also and Ben.
Seeing what Bennett's poetry inspires from others made me flash on
the possibility of one of these dimension X aliens who abducts
neurotic human women while being, himself, abducted by some alien
from dimension Z... if you see what I mean.--bg
Gina Bergamino & tolek: TWO SIDES--xib publications, PO Box
262112, San Diego CA, 92126. 12 pp., $2.00. None of the poems in
this slim chappie are credited, so it's difficult to tell who
wrote what. Yeah the similarity between Bergamino's and tolek's
styles is intriguing. In some instances, gender references give
away the author. Overall, though, these poems are very similar,
and in many ways typical work of the authors. Not for the
kiddies; some naughty sex and adult subject matter.--rkk
Jake Berry: BRAMBU DREZI--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port
Charlotte FL, 33949. 70 pp., $10.00. For several years I have
been reading (and seeing: some have major visual components) these
pieces in magazines and anthologies, and while they never fail to
intrigue as separate works, the effect of encountering them all
together intensifies (and clarifies and enriches) the experience
exponentially. The texts are connected and/or contrapuntal, and
at times they are graphically absorbed into the texts that follow,
or are even obliterated by them. There are sheets of words, slabs
of anaphor, paralinguistic passages (like the title itself), words
scattered in graphic formulae, and almost purely visual sections.
The whole represents an inherently impossible but at the same time
inherently necessary voyage of total consciousness beyond language
within the context of language (or symbolic representation), from
the opening "legion swollen faces drift through sentient blue-
orange empty space..." to the closing "I vanish and everything is
everything/ is everything/ like nothing idiot singing." The
concerns of this vast, almost musically constructed work, are
consciousness and language as its vehicle, a universe structured
as a somewhat destructive (or dynamic) conflict of under- and
over-realities (which perhaps, the work suggests, derives from the
mind's struggling to perceive), and an evolutionary but a the same
time circular process of psychic or mythic history. This is not
"literature" as "good writing" but literature as an attempt to
know (control) what might be. It has, however, passages of such
intensely charged writing that, as a reader, one is compelled to
engage with and grow from Berry's work. A major work, only
glanced at here, which will become essential reading. Includes an
introduction by Jack Foley that provides a useful
contextualization of Berry's work in the spectrum of American
Poetry.--jmb
Terence Bishop: HEADS I LOSE, TALES I LOSE--ATH Press, 2177
Steward Dr., Hatfield PA, 19440. 32 pp., $2.00. Bishop seems to
thrive on existential angst--predicting the worst will happen,
knowing it won't, and feeling like he's come out on top--which
breeds a strange hopeless optimism that shows up in his work. In
the short story "Scene From Hollywood Apartment No. 425," for
example, a couple is flirting, but not really caring if they fuck
or not, and when they don't there's no disappointment either way.
It doesn't matter what they do. "The Birth of Lonely Man"
chronicles some easily recognized drinking habits: going to a bar
because of boredom, being bored at the bar, hitting a liquor
store, then going home to drink alone. While this collection
includes a lot of poems, the fiction is clearly Bishop's strong
point--the three stories are easily worth the price of the chap.
--o
David Bromige: A CAST OF TENS--Avec Books, PO Box 1059, Penngrove
CA, 94951. 96 pp., $9.50. David Bromige's A CAST OF TENS is a
series of musings and reflections upon the full range of human
experience. In his exact adherence to a form (ten-line sections
usually broken into a few stanzas) and an inner form (phrases or
sentences start with a capital letter, ending at the next capital)
Bromige inserts as much variation and insight, where other writers
may have found only restriction. A very "human" text, A CAST OF
TENS proceeds in its unique voice with a quiet intensity never
losing sight of its goal.--jg
Bromige is a master at probing the irreducibilities of
symbolic logic, and his playful yet outrageous equivalencies
explode the neat, cut-and-dried tautologies of Wittgenstein: "The
old man is 112 pages long / and so is the sea / They are deeply
symbolic (psychotic)." Bromige's structures are sinuous and
mathematic, and they evoke the tonal colors of Schoenberg, Satie,
or Cage, successfully evading what Bromige has characterized as
iambic pentameter's "echoic invasions."--ssn
David Castleman: I STAMMER IT TO ANGELS--Dusty Dog, 1904-A
Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301. 31 pp., $5.95. Part fiction, part
essay, part autobiography. Heck, it's actually one long
philosophical discourse! No, really, it's a story. No action to
speak of, minimal dialogue, lots of third-person commentary and
observation. And none of that pop psychology junk, either. Real
thinking-man stuff spun out over the course of a story which
pretty much is background to the thought process. For the
literate crowd with time enough to actually read, not skim.--rkk
Alan Catlin: IN THE UNDERGROUND--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House,
3113 Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234,. 28 pp., $1.00.
A gripping albeit conventional story about paranoia and futility
in an urban subway. Can't think of anything else to say about
it.--bg
Leonard Cirino: POEMS OF THE ROYAL CONCUBINE LI XI--JVC Books,
Rt. 2 Box 440C, Arcadia FL, 33821. 40 p., $4.95. The soft
fragrance of the boudoir, the coiled tension of expectation,
the moist honey of lubrication, the softness of yielding flesh,
the gentle descent into rapture, the intimations of release, the
swelling force, the soft fleeting bursts into the perfect world
and then... the end. Youth, decline and final decrepitude of an
imperial concubine. Hot sex in the beginning, resignation in the
middle, wisdom at the end. Not just another chapbook about a poet
humping his girlfriend. Cirinao has taste, discretion, and a full
view of life.--as
Brian Clark: APOCALYPSE TAO--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113
Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234. 16 pp., $1.00. Jump-cut
prose partly unsparing revealing autobiography (in part about the
author's bisexuality), with references to some pol named Bill here
& there, and all kinds of other ravings that include neat words
like "befinneginning."--bg
William Clark: UNTITLED--Primal Publishing, 107 Brighton Ave.,
Allston MA, 02134. 10 pp., $2.50. (#2 in the Primal Publishing
Singles Club). Clark's stories of drug disintegration in the
wilds of western Pennsylvania reminded me of a ride I got hitching
through that state in 1973--half a dozen hours drinking in pool
halls, doing tranquilizers the driver had to combat schizophrenia,
and wondering if I'd ever see the interstate again. The country
people I met that night were every bit as fucking crazy as any
inner city hoodlums I ever ran into on the street. This story of
the rape of a handicapped girl brings to light such an unsettling
anger and confusion that it made me want to write Clark a blank
check for the rest of his published work.--o
Norma Cole: MARS--Listening Chamber, 2420 Acton St., Berkeley CA,
94702. 114 pp. Norma Cole's writing is complicated, beautiful,
straight to the heart and always about the mind. What the mind
does. This book, in 6 sections, is about living, dying, loving--
having lost, having done all those things, and its proof is its
presence. The writing, often intricate, and moving from one form
to another, conveys a thinking that is convoluted and deeply
personal. And because the writing is so felt, the reader insists
that the "sense" comes through, grants that it does, and moves on
with the work. There is a pain in writing, or perhaps it's that
all writing is a moving beyond tragedy. Cole, in this book, shows
us that. A gorgeous cover collage by Jess makes this one of the
most beautiful books, inside and out, that I've seen in awhile.
--jg
Norma Cole's MARS is a witness to the event, a coiled serpent
ready to strike, danger under the surface of the words she
propels. At differing times full of wisdom, a careful observer
with a plain-speaking mode of address, or an abstracted voice
(many voices here). MARS shows Cole's interest in critical theory
as it informs a thread that increases the dimensional thrust
accompanying concepts, every word mattering.--pg
John Robert Columbo, ed.: WORDS IN SMALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF
MINIATURE LITERARY COMPOSITIONS--Cacanadadada Press, 3350 W. 21st.
Ave., Vancouver B.C., Canada, V6S 1G7. 96 pp. Make it small and
do it in 50 words or less. The microtext for your delectation.
Most of the sources are SF, but all bear the requisite hermetic
compactness. A commentary follows each selection. This is truly
the age of the sound byte--will it become the age of the lit byte?
As technology causes attention spans to drop, such concision will
be a useful skill in the grim determinisms of literary Darwinsm.
--as
Edmund Conti: EDDIES--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte
FL, 33949. $3.00. By playing with words, inverted them, turning
syntax and insight inside out, Conti opens a new way of seeing.
These tiny poems are self-referential often, but the in-joke is in
our minds and we find ourselves joining the play and
reinvestigating the possibilities of language, poetry, and
thought. For instance, a poem titled "Embellishment" reads, in
full, "To be/ Ornate to be". Or the poem "Wry": "I drink/
therefore I am/ what I drink." Even the title of the book could
be construed as a pun on the poet's name. The poems are
accompanied by equally playful line drawings that have some
revelations of their own. This is a good book to have around when
friends drop in, certain to stimulate inventive dialog.--jb
Marc Cooper, Hannah Holm, Barbara Pillsbury & The Zapistas: THE
ZAPISTAS, STARTING FROM CHIAPAS--Open Magazine, PO Box 2726,
Westfield, NJ, 07091. $4.00. (#30 in the Open Pamphlet Series)
On January 1st of this year the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation, consisting primarily of Mayan Tzetal indians, declared
war against the Mexican government and took control of the city of
San Cristobal. The various dominant news organizations presented
this as just another guerrilla insurgence, a five minute story for
a few days, then forgotten amidst the pig circus malaise of
Washington, DC. But there was more to the story than that, and
this pamphlet fills in the pieces. For the most part it amounts
to a group descended from the indigenous peoples of the area that
have organized themselves to demand justice and genuine democratic
reform. Included here is the story of their struggle, as well as
documents from the Zapatistas themselves. The fact that the
revolt began just as NAFTA took effect and that the Mexican
government was willing to negotiate testifies to the power of
their organization. Is this the beginning of a broader revolt?
Like the rest of the Open Magazine series, this is vital
countermedia, an antidote to the usual information tripe.--jb
Judson Crews: HENRY MILLER AND MY BIG SUR DAYS--Vergin Press,
PO Box 370322, El Paso TX, 79937. 47 pp., $5.95. This memoir's
just a slice from the long and complex life of Judson Crews. Yes,
he talks about Henry Miller--and Anais Nin and lots of other "well
known" folks. The core of this stream-of-consciousness autobio
bit (reportedly culled from more than 10,000 pages of notes and
journals) is a year he spent at Big Sur, often in the company of
Henry Miller. An intimate look at Miller & surrounding people,
the times, and Judson's own state of mind. But it's not plodding,
introspective stuff--as Belinda Subraman says in her forward,
unlike "Anais Nin's... artfully, self-conscious diaries" this is
"candid, thoughtful... a perspective on Henry Miller and the Big
Sur days that would be quite different from any others."--rkk
Judson Crews: MANNEQUIN ANYMORE THAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration
Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 34 pp., $5.00 Judson is one of
those dirty old men I'd love to bring to a family reunion, knowing
he'd get me written out of so many wills, and would leave such a
trail of gossip and stories, that while I'd never inherit a
fortune, I'd certainly be a part of family history. In this
collection we get that lusting action again, tales of Buddha and
Casteneda, scents of strong feminine feet, topless bars, being a
charter member of N.O.W., reverences to Henry Miller, bouts of
masturbation, and freshened Scotch & Seltzers at 3:00 in the
morning. These are the stores my uncles used to tell when they
were drunk, the stories my grandfather wanted to forget as he
tried to claw his way to heaven.--o
Elanor Earl Crockett: WI, GEE, IT MUS BE CRAZY LIKE A DOG (pts. 3
& 4)--Bonton Books, 1500 Eastside Dr. #219, Austin TX, 78704.
24 pp. + cassette. Elanor Earl Crockett is a poet and performance
poet from Austin whose taped productions show an amazing
liveliness and variety of voices. This compilation includes work
from a period of several years and would serve as an excellent
introduction to her work. On the tape, the poems are performed
against a variety of noise an/or music backgrounds, although the
sound and voice are often deliberately at the same level, so that
neither is dominant. It is fortunate that the tape is accompanied
by a booklet of the texts, which stand alone very strongly as
poems on the printed page. The poems take a great variety of
approaches, from first-person narration to word and/or dialect
play, to anaphoric or conceptual structures, to an almost
Language-like allusiveness in a piece called "Phrases," a
collaboration with "SW":
which to choose
aerobic animals will see light
pocket manufacturers
trapped in the gravel mica glinting
from this vantage the trajectory
silence tears the evening
until at night and drive right into the ocean
The productions values of this work are simple (reduced
typescript, etc.) but the content is strong, polished, and unique.
--jmb
Doris Cross: REWORKS 1968-1953--Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New
Mexico, Box 2065, Santa Fe NM, 87504-2065. 62 pp, $15.00. The
full-color cover reproduction of one of Cross's dictionary-page
treatments alone is worth ten times the price of this catalog of
an 1993 Santa Fe exhibition of her work--at least to those
interested in visual poetry, for she was one of the century's
masters of the genre. But the volume also contains numerous other
excellent reproductions of her works as well as an excellent
introduction to it, and her, by Jim Edwards, and a wonderfully
poem-filled appreciation by Gerald Burns.--bg
Robin Crozier & John M. Bennett: HAW RAG--Luna Bisonte Prods,
137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 8 pp., $1.00. Bizarre
combinations of scrawled phrases, clip-outs, Chinese (or Chinese-
like) charactry, and on each page but the first word, "REALLY," in
triplicate, vertically, somewhere on the page with a large bold
"J", "R", or "B" in front of it. Sorta like some kind of rhythm
section to help us keep our bearings from movement to movement,
I guess.--bg
Richard Currey, CROSSING OVER: THE VIETNAM STORIES--Clark City
Press, PO Box 1358, 109 Callender St., Livingston MT, 59057.
$11.00. CROSSING OVER painfully returned me to those calamitous
years, now a full generation past, with all the accuracies of a
participant's historical memory. "Rose-stained bodies dumped in
the chopper's gut." Poetically-bonded, gritty, vivid details with
tersely understated emotion, thus might one characterize these
articulate wartime vignettes.
Currey is humanely aware, collagistic, and associative. His
tour as a Navy medic provided the insight for these understated &
exceptionally tight narratives. His skills as a writer, honed in
writing two solidly crafted earlier books about Vietnam, allow
this book of fewer than 40 text pages to vibrate with the hideous
corpses and limbs, the "legs that were not legs... that were
glutinous mire, that were ooze." A resurrection of "every
drowning ghost and airborne soul." A field notebook--beautiful
and dreadful.--jl
Joel Dailey: DOPPLER EFFECTS--Shockbox Press, PO Box 7226, Nashua
NH, 03060. 20 pp., $2.00 (?). Dead cats, car sex, seductive
Cheryl Dreams stories, and other weird juvenilia fill this
booklet. I don't know, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but this
seemed light weight. I tried to give it a handful of chances, but
everytime I had to let it drop.--o
Gary David: A LOG OF DEADWOOD--North Atlantic Books, PO Box 12327,
Berkeley, CA, 94701. 144 pp., $9.95. Labeled a postmodern epic
of the South Dakota Gold Rush. Gary David's work does attempt to
deconstruct a period of history limited to an active linear
journal-like format whereby most conventions are broken down &
accented with images from The Wizard of Oz, The Tibetan Book of
the Dead, the Old American West; utilizing Viking fury, Jungian
Symbolism, Sioux Legends, & even a touch of hard science.
Actually 49 presences, each a poem, each a day in the journal of
Deadwood 1876. From "Day 25": "...spear-shaker, you're gonna
cry/ 96 tears!" Or, from "Day 48": "I feel my days/ over the
mirror of its pages.//...white stone black stone/make.// Gung ho &
hard on/ rising red, but on the run."--rrle
Jeff Derksen: DWELL--Talonbooks, 201-1019 East Cordova, Vancouver
BC, V6A 1M8. 98 pp., $9.95. Derksen scrutinizes all; the pieces
in this book are the ongoing critique of living the life he
lives--the culture, the politics; nothing escapes, nothing
devolves into sentimentality, everything receives a keen, if
sometimes merely whispered, analysis. It is observation with
edge, with keen insight, with a fair amount of cynicism, and a
pleasing, sometimes brilliant, play on language. The pieces in
the book vary interestingly both formally, and in what they take
on. "Hold on to your bag, Betty" is a wonderful, resonant and
sometimes lush "report" from foreign lands; "Temp Corp", the final
piece in the book, is spare but emotionally packed, held very
close to the line of breaking, tracing a kind of emotional pain
that only loss engenders. A wonderful book from this up n' coming
Canadian writer.--jg
Paul Dilsaver: A CURE FOR OPTIMISM: POEMS--Sky and Sage Books,
PO Box 3606, Rapid City SD. 72 pp. And I thought that I was a
pessimist! The language of ultimate despair. Dark laughter drawn
from a sadness, a jaded contempt for homo sapiens and "the
blinding terrors of consciousness." Praying for amnesia and
oblivion. Extraordinary world weariness and misanthropy--as
John Dollis: BL( )NK SPACE--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port
Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00. Dollis writes poetry that appears
abstract and elusive on the surface but is rich in the depths.
He is dealing with the fundamental means by which we arrive at a
sense of ourselves, define ourselves, and communicate this sense
to the world at large. But rather than taking shelter in pure
philosophy he incorporates elements of the everyday, giving his
work a connectedness that normally is missing from such studied
introspection. He introduces an idea then detaches from it, moves
around it, rediscovers it evolving into the fibers of his own
intelligence, a fascinating process to observe and participate
in.--jb
Larry Eigner: WINDOWS/WALLS/YARD/WAYS--Black Sparrow Press,
24 Tenth St., Santa Rosa CA, 95401. 192 pp., $13.00(cloth).
Eigner has been the inspiration for many poets who have read him,
and read by many where he lives in the Bay Area, but he has never
received the audience he deserves. He is simply one of the finest
poets of a generation that included Robert Duncan, Charles Olson,
and James Broughton, not to mention the Beat Poets. This volume,
which covers the period 1959-1992, presents a large enough
selection that someone, having never read Eigner, would come away
with a good understanding of his work, not to mention a change in
his or her way of looking at things. There is an almost Eastern
sense of awareness in Eigner's poetry, a stillness in the imagery,
so quiet & yet so intense. You can see the images in your mind's
eye so clearly that when you move into an odd turn of phrase you
move through it and are changed almost without your noticing it.
The poem "July 22 87":
water splashes
At the surface
and hits you
whatever things
may be
or have been
But there is no way to do justice to Eigner's poetry in a
short review, or in a long one. If you like poetry of any kind,
from traditional to wildly experimental, you will be changed by
reading this book. Very highly recommended.--jb
Endwar: FOUR WINDOWS, ONE FRAME--Institutional Projects, PO Box
10973, State College PA , 16805. 12 pp.+tapes, $20.00. The box
this material comes in describes the audio tapes included as "four
antitapes (total time 2 seconds)." It's all in the packaging and
labeling. Yes, very Cagean, but no minor imitation--in fact,
about as appealing an extension of the genre as I've come across.
--bg
Endwar: UNTITLED--Institutional Projects, PO Box 10973, State
College PA , 16805. 6 pp., $1.00. A scrap of found poetry and
three business cards with little 2-part conceptual poems on them,
in two cases on both sides. Extremely clever, like the card with
"Bill of Sale" on one side and "Bill of Rights" on the other.
Fascination equation when you think about it.--bg
Michael Estabrook: STRIPPED & SHIVERING--BGS Press, 1240 William
St., Racine WI, 53402. 20 pp., $2.00. You get the impression, on
first reading these poems, that Michael Estabrook is a novelist--
not long ago, in a letter, Estabrook told me he'd tried to write a
novel, but he wasn't entirely satisfied with the result. So, I
imagine, he let the poetry take over. STRIPPED & SHIVERING
consists of 19 short poems, each poem a personality sketch.
Estabrook's lines are sharp, his words well chosen. Too many
poets make us plow through line after line, serving up too much
verbiage in the fat. Estabrook's poems are small, one-takes,
well-crafted arrows. They instruct, without didacticism, about
the hard knocks of life.--kn
Terry Everton: MANNEQUIN DREAMS ROTTING THERE IN MUGSWEAT AND
SUDS--Borderline Press, PO Box 741178, Arvada CO, 80006. 24 pp.,
$2.00. Jesus, with an opening poem like "mannequin dreams rotting
there in mugsweat and suds" where a drunk in a bar has a tooth
fall out, a woman buys it for five bucks, and when the man asks
her what she's going to do with it she says: "I'm building/ myself
a man/ one piece at a time"--I'd say, it's a winner. Everton
tosses the reader into a world filled with competitive hookers,
incompetent fabulous boyfriends who can't even kill their cheating
old ladys without goofing it up, bar farts, out of control fires,
german shepherds slaughtered for stealing chickens, and rats
fighting in alleys for the scraps left by drunks--action among
scavengers, and hard gritty survival tales of the down and out.--o
Lawerence Ferlinghetti: THESE ARE MY RIVERS New & Selected Poems
1955-1993--New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York NY, 10011.
320 pp., $22.95. Any library of 20th century poetry would have to
include the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is a connector
between contemporary and modern. Engaged in the events of his
age, moving through the world igniting sparks, illuminations--not
unlike the imagists in form, or the troubadors in romance, but
completely, purely Ferlighetti. There is no mistaking his voice,
a classic sensibility writing the poetry of a world spinning
sensless in dissolution. His poetry is real and direct, in
ordinary tongue, but rarely resigned, never hopeless. At the end
of "Assassination Raga," in part a commemoration of the Kennedy
assassinations, after facing the cold reality of bitter death he
says, "There is no god but Life" and leaves us with "People with
roses/ behind the barricades!"
The poems are his own selection from his books, and includes
an excellent selection of new work. Ferlinghetti has certainly
been a poet of our times, but has also certainly written in
eternity, suspending the events and his own flesh and blood soul
there, illuminations of the world.--jb
Huck Finch: PROGRESS--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113
Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234. 18 pp., $1.00. Striking
photograph-sequence in shades of day-glo green of some
unidentifiable road-killed animal's week-by-week decomposition.
With texts. Also a cover photo of the author kissing a deer head
at a roadkill art show at the University of South Florida... for
which action he was promptly ushered out.--bg
Charles Henri Ford: OM KRISHNA I--Bogg Publications, 422 N.
Cleveland St., Arlington VA, 22201. 20 pp., SASE (large). This
book, offered in Bogg's free-for-postage series, was published in
1979 by Cherry Valley Editions. Charles Henri Ford was one of the
"founders of the New York school" of poetry, but this book is not
a very good primer on that genre. OM KRISHNA I is an
uncomfortable mix of '50s styles, '60s subjects, and '70s me-
generation attitude. The book (mostly one long poem) combines
beat, subconscious stream-of-consciousness, flower-power pop
philosophy... a dash of Eastern mysticism and a fistful of pop
literary references. But it's not a savory stew. Ford published
his first volume of verse in 1938, but OM KRISHNA I sounds hippy-
dippy and temporal, a detour by a graying poet into the love-beads
scene.--rkk
Edward Foster: THE SPACE BETWEEN HER BED AND CLOCK--Norton Cocker,
PO Box 640543, San Francisco CA, 94164. 44 pp., $5.95. The roles
of critic and poet are merged in a poetic space that engenders a
work which expands the tradition of Shelley's "A Defense of
Poetry" and counters the smug extremes of T. S. Eliot. Foster's
preface, "Poetry Has Nothing To Do With Politics" is a refreshing
reaction to critics who suggest that their reductions of meaning-
generation processes in the poem are more important that the poem
itself. This is a welcome diatribe--we're getting used to seeing
Language poets people-pulped by Tiannamen Square vintage critical
tanks who have little or no love for the poetry itself, they only
want to smash the work into their own agendas. Foster's poetry
resists critical appropriation by refusing to confine itself to a
single form or prosodic arrangement. This is negative capability
taken to a new level & it feels good--like flight-simulating G-
forces in a jet built for oblivion.--ssn
Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston: CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN
FOREST--Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Ave, Staten Island NY,
10314. 80 pp., $8.95. Boston and Frazier are longtime Science
Fiction poets whose work combines a surrealist sensibility with a
hard technological edge. Their CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN
FOREST invokes a jungle gone botanically mad: "It is a Sphinx that
lifts the world upon its back and grows./ Its veins are road maps
that lead nowhere,/ its breath a cipher,/ its inscrutable eyes
spin mandalas that drift and blue/ shift in toward Armageddon."
Eerie and evocative, these poems effectively explore a terrain
most poets don't even realize exists.--tw
Celestine Frost: AN IMAGINED EXPERIENCE OVER THE ENTRANCE--Dusty
Dog, 1904-A Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301. 55 pp., $5.95. This
chapbook is a nice surprise--Celestine Frost's crafting is a real
find. It's exquisite work, dense and enveloping with a strong,
assured narration. Celestine is adept at both metaphoric work and
down-to-earth storylines--and manages to toss off lines like "O it
had come to the morning/ of the drug bitter end// with that
quality/ of a private bath" without being cliched or sophomoric.
There's only one literary price to pay for Celestine's imagery...
the reader needs to take a breather every dozen pages or so.--rkk
Peter Ganick: NEWS ON SKIS--Avenue B, PO Box 542, Bolinas CA,
94924. 61 pp., $8.00. In three parts; the first a wonderful play
on UPPER and lower case, a rant that becomes a mesmerizing
cadenced song; the second a visually compelling array of geometric
stanzas--an interesting tension created by the sense that the
language/content is there solely to fill out the (literal) form;
and the third, an Epilogue, is a series of ellipses, dash, and
period-ridden stanzas and lines. This book offers a pleasing
variety, in form, shape, and tone. The back cover blurbs are the
most loudly ironic I've come across--text is layered over other
text so that a sort of ulterior alphabet is formed--no word
recognizable, but the sentiment is clear. A fun book.--jg
Bob Grumman: EXCERPT FROM RABBIT STEW--Anatomy Floaters Clearing
House, 3113 Bernadette Lane, Sarasota FL, 34234. 15 pp. Perhaps
one would have waited for the complete work to appear before
attempting a review, but this little tidbit of a longer piece is
too tempting to let pass. It consists of a dialogue between Ned
and Fred (other characters intrude later) who refer to various
incidents of incest, necrophlia, and murder, all in a rather
absurdist, offhand manner. One wants to read more of this!--jmb
A portion of one of Grumman's plays, somewhere beyond
Surrealism or the antics of the Cabaret Voltaire. For the space
of a few lines the dialog is odd, but logical, then complications
arise, sometimes by intellectual extension of the dialog,
sometimes by poetic flight, and we tremble joyously as our nerves
are ripped out by these wicked imaginative turns. There are
problems with wheelbarrow theft, and beaten mothers, a man named
Wally drug around with a rope, and other things that begin to make
strange sense. Personas shift and veer into one another,
characters pontificate and confess. But through what could be
agony a sense of joy is dancing and the plays begins to reveal
itself in the mind of the beholder. This is a delight to read and
it would be better still to see the whole play performed.--jb
Mark Hammer: IRIS--Shuffaloff Press, 260 Plymouth Ave., Buffalo
NY, 14213. 12 pp., $3.00. A series of quite, precise lyrics each
with the title "iris" and dedicated to poets like John Weiners and
John Clarke. The poems often recall the crafted devotions of some
of Robin Blaser's work, another poet who is quoted significantly
in the book. But these poems work best because the accuracy of
their own insights is not overwhelmed by the writer's obvious
admiration for this illustrious and varied influences--despite
those influences (and very unlike a lot of recent poetry that
seems to try to imitate greatness) the carefully sharp vision here
is clearly Hammer's own.--mw
Keith Higginbotham: GLOOMY NEW LIFE--Burning Llama Press, 100
Courtland Dr., Columbia SC, 29223. 8 pp., SASE? Dopey pix
sprinkled with word and phrases in various typographies that warp
together a droll story that begins, "I grew up/ fucked in/ What
the Seventies did to/ gender, with boys/ and girls dancing in
separate/ rotes of pain/ Clamped to their/ unsensuous/ slang/ of
denial."--bg
A small booklet of collaged found texts and images with a
definite, if elliptical, autobiographical narrative structure.
Childhood, sexuality, class, history: a rich mixture of topics
roiling about in a visually stimulating and humorous format.--jmb
Lita Hornick & Poet Friends: GREAT QUEENS WHO LOVED POETRY: TO
ELIZABETH & ELANOR--Giorno Poetry Systems, 222 Bowery, New York
NY, 10012. 74 pp. A professionally produced perfect-bound book
with color illustrations, consisting of poetry by Lita Hornick in
collaboration with a variety of poets, mostly from NY, such as
Jeff Wright, Alice Notley, John Giorno, Ron Padgett, Rochelle
Owens, George Economou, Bob Rosenthal, Paul Violi, Anne Waldman,
Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky, among others. The poems are
generally in a conversational first-person voice, and have a
consistency of tone that is a bit surprising considering that
Hornick's collaborators are such a variety of differing and strong
poets. This suggest that hers in the dominant voice in these
exchanges. The volume also includes reproductions of artwork from
her collection, a "credo," and an essay, "Why I Love Gay Men."
An entertaining book focusing on a unique and intriguing
personality.--jmb
Tom House: NAZIS & NOSE JOBS--Tom House, PO Box 120661, Nashville
TN, 37212. 12 pp., $3.00. House has never been one to shy away
from trouble, and his strong political (if not necessarily
"politically correct") stances have always been clear. This time
House attacks media manipulation, government seduction, planetary
self-destruction, fuckin' the flag in the name of punk, politics
and pornography, televised evangelists, and a hundred other things
that piss him off so much that even the anarchists are afraid to
take him on. This is hard core, without pretense or plastic
presentation.--o
William Howe: TRIPFLEA--Tailspin Press, 418 Richmond, #2,, Buffalo
NY, 14222. $5.00. This is the first "book" from a brand new
press. Tailspin's project will be to challenge the notion of what
a book is, that is the form of a book itself. Tailspin will
produce concrete chapbooks. This first offering by William Howe
arrives in an envelope and appears to be ordinary until one opens
the "book." The pages not only turn towards the right but
alternate pages turn towards the left. It is as if two books
collided. This allows the free floating text on the alternate
pages to reform endlessly. There is no narrative poetry enclosed.
Words are grouped in clusters and as the pages combine and
recombine there is a fluctuating constellation or word units.
Here is a map of words that leads to the imagination.--mb
The first in a new series of chapbooks devoted to exploring
the physical possibilities of the chapbook format. The pages of
this book are folded over each other, so that opening the book is
like opening a series of doors, each of which changes the layout
of the words in front of the reader. The words themselves are
angry stutters of pun-filled language ("sometimes i change
my/ mem(shoes) ory" arranged in striking visual fragments; the eye
roves around the surface of the pages instead of reading from top
to bottom. The constantly changing field of words resists all
attempts at unity, a visual tripflea in a long dark night of the
soul.--mw
TRIPFLEA's readers can't escape their responsibility for the
order of the text they read -- but this is hardly a solemn
responsibility. Howe separates and isolates letters, words,
phrases, and spreads these fragments across the page;
deformations, klang associations, and polyglot puns yield the
"well puteed achaeans," the "wallaby wannabe," the "meatbook," and
"laus methedrine hydrochloride." This is the sort of book that
will make me think of Raymond Queneau's permutational sonnet
sequence Cent mille milliards de poe`mes, but there's a difference
in Howe's work. The mathematician Queneau's work is generated
from the formal structures of the sonnet, while the reader, who
would need a minimum of 190,258,751 years to read through the
complete sequence, is in effect made redundant. Once the
permutational principle is grasped, everything of importance has
been grasped. Howe, on the other hand, leaves much less room for
textual permutations (his unit is the whole page, while Queneau's
was the line). What's foregrounded, instead, is the reader's work
with the text Howe, as "simulated authorial figure," has put
together. But Howe (unlike Queneau) is very present in this book;
the reader will have to struggle with him in order to redirect the
text. And just as that struggle reaches its peak, the text itself
will jump many times its height into the air and land where you
didn't expect it to. Future concrete chapbooks from tailspin
press will include work by Ken Sherwood (of RIF/T) and Michael
Basinski.--cp
Robert Howington: SPIKED SLURPEE--UBP, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles
CA, 76147. 21 pp., $2.00. Howington writes like Mickey Spillane
on acid, with short short stories that carry all the black and
white film noir he can muster. This short collection was a fun
read--car jackings, bowel movements revenged by vicious kids in
Texas, wet dreams of Madonna, bad ass wannabes, killers passing
the time in bars, dog murderers, rapes, uzis, and other tales so
weird I'm glad Howington lives 1000 miles away from Chicago.
These stories remind me of early Bukowski--fun and playful and so
mean they make the kids in horror flicks look innocent.--o
Nine short stories, most under 1,000 words. His themes are
influenced by the crime genre, a combination of Todd Moore and
Charles Bukowski. In "Old-Fashion Grilled Pound Cake," a man is
shot to death outside a bar and Howington's protagonist offers the
killer the last of his beer. A woman witnesses murder in "The
Long Cool Drag"; she calmly remarks how it reminds her of "Miami
Vice." There are guns everywhere, especially in Texas--maybe too
many. I read along, patiently waiting for the author to change
gears, take me somewhere else. But he keeps on, driving home one
violent scene after another. Robert W. Howington knows how to
write--I just wish he'd write about something more than murder in
American streets.--kn
Robert W, Howington and C.F. Roberts: FUCK YOU!--Wormfeast Press,
PO Box 519, Westminster MD, 21158. 18 pp., $3.00. The shock
value of this chapbook would undoubtedly outrage Miss Manners.
There are images of murder, torture, flatulation, animal
copulation, vomit, and kinky sex. Robert W. Howington is
described as "poet, nut, admirer of serial killers & Bukowski,"
and C.F. Roberts is "sickly, sweet, painful, vampires and
goblins." Now that we have parameters, let me go on to say
Howington throws in crude stick-cartoons of oral sex. I don't
know why. Truly representative of the shock poetry underground,
the kind of stuff that you never show to children, and which
raises the hackles of born-again Christians and the prosecutor's
office alike.--kn
Don A. Hoyt: A NEW KERYGMA--Bootleg Press, PO Box 158, Uniondale
NY, 11553. 24 pp. Don Hoyt is a classic poet--that is, he takes
a single emotion, event or scene and draws it out through vivid
and complex language. Lots of similes and metaphors and that sort
of poetry stuff. Traditional work where the term "craftsmanship"
can still be applied. It's not the sort of poetry a person zips
through like a comic book, but the type that should be enjoyed
over a cup of hot java, a box of bon-bons and a snowy day outside.
>From philosophy to satire, Hoyt covers the gamut in these 15
poems.--rkk
Albert Huffstickler: CITY OF THE RAIN--Press of Circumstance,
312 E. 43rd St. #103, Austin TX, 78751. 36 pp., $6.00. This
collection of poetry started badly for me; with a rhymey ballad
about the absence of a "place to ease your pain/ in the City of
the Rain." The next poem concerned a rain that made the poet want
to scream (his description) because it "was my loneliness and
disenchantment." But then came some highly effective barroom
slices of life in the bitter-sweet Bukowski mode that redeemed the
book.--bg
Albert Huffstickler: THE DARK FLOWER--Press of Circumstance, 312
East 43rd Street #103, Austin, Texas, 78751. 8 pp. Small but
precious, easy to slip into your pocket when you are headed
somewhere and might get caught without something to read, the
subway, the restroom at work, behind the dumpster while the crack
heads shoot it out, or anywhere. Beautiful purple cover with the
poet's own artwork, and one long poem inside. "They found her
sleeping/on a large stone, curled up/child like, face soft."--rrle
G. Huth: DBQPPRODBOOQPDB #9--dbqp, 875 Central Parkway,
Schenectady NY, 12309. 4 pp., SASE. Actually this publisher's
catalog, but well worth sending for, filled as it is with
Joyceanated locutions such as "contradionary," "eternaphemera,"
and "stamge speace." Includes a number of Larry Tomoyasu's
thought-whirring illuscriptations; and presents through its list
of dbqp "merchandise" a rich survey of what's going on at the most
inventive margins of poetry.--bg
Geof Huth: ANALPHABET--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH,
44107. 28 pp., $10.00. Geoff's takeoff on a child's alphabet
primer is full of little delights. Instead of words beginning
with the letter, the letter itself is depicted:
A
and a caption is added:
An A
Then usually another frame or two is added to playfully comment
on the one above:
An
with caption:
A An
Lots of surprises as a fairly rigid form is bent and played with
in 26 different ways.--ar
Ruth Jespersen: THE BLINK OF AN EYE--7030 Evergreen Woods Trl.,
Apt. B-136, Spring Hill FL, 34608. 438 pp., $29.95. Originally
published by Mother of Ashes Press--publisher Joe Singer is gone,
but we can't let this book die! Ruth Jespersen has acquired the
copies from Joe's estate. This is one of the strangest novels I
have ever read. It's as if Anais Nin's love of self-display were
mixed with Djuana Barnes' peculiar gentlemen callers and Ivy
Compton-Burnett's conversational monomanias. Jespersen is
extremely funny, idiosyncratic and bizarre. This is a novel that
hinges on her fascinating and quirky self. It's the kind of work
that could, and should, have a cult following. A feminist work in
a sense, about a woman with an offbeat but healthy mind, always
being her own inimitable self.--as
Andrew Joron & Robert Frazier: INVISIBLE MACHINES--Jazz Police
Books, PO Box 3235, Lagrande OR, 97850. 60 pp., $9.00. Science
Fiction poetry spanning thirteen years of collaborative writing.
It highlights the difference between SF and other genres of
writing--the intensely shared, interactive, collaborative elements
of SF, since we all have a stake in the Future and a soul in the
Other. In his introduction, Andrew Joron sums it up well: "SF is,
in fact, a dialogical genre, one in which texts are written in
direct response to other texts, in which meanings are produced and
sustained by community effort... I believe the cross-pollinating
spirit of SF can be authentically transferred to the writing of
poetry." Illustrated with strange photos by noted surrealist
Thomas Wiloch.--dw
Karl Kempton: RUNE 6: FIGURES OF SPEECH and RUNE 7: POEM, A
MAPPING--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949.
$5.00@. With Kempton a typewriter is not a machine, but a ritual
device with which he articulates his magic. He has, over the
years, created a metalanguage, unique to himself, instantly
recognizable. In RUNE 6: FIGURES OF SPEECH we see figures, at
times human-like and sometimes something other. But these images
are organic, full of living creatures speaking to us through their
form. In RUNE 7: POEM, A MAPPING we begin with "poem" typed in
block letters then follow a metamorphosis and charting of the word
and resonances surrounding it. These two new books testify to the
power of Kepmton's continuing exploration in mythic fields of
poetic intelligence.--jb
Elayne Keratsis: JACK AND MISS CRACK--Firestarter Films and Press,
802 Euclid Ave. #102, Miami Beach, FL, 33139. 82 pp., $11.00.
Elayne is a princess of Pop illusion, with a smooth flowing voice,
and a sharp but mournful chorus which exerts an ironic presence;
dramatic, flirtful, bittersweet songs conducted with vamp/camp
wit. There is a dark side to her elastic alcoholic visions--
Elayne is one bitchy, funk-driven, charming, dynamic word-slave.
Her incendiary neo-beat talent makes poetry and short stories fun
again. --rrle
Arthur Winfield Knight: COWBOY POEMS--Potpourri Publishing
Company, PO Box 8278, Prairie Village, Kansas, 66208. 54 pp.,
$3.50. Fifty-two poems, more or less traditional free verse, all
centering on various 19th century outlaws and their family and
friends. Jesse James, Cole Younger, Belle Starr, Doc Holiday, Kid
Curry, Black Bart, and Geronimo are just a few . Knight has
extended the outlaw metaphor to include very human thoughts and
acts, utilizing empathy and understanding to create remarkable
personalities which makes them more hero and less villain in the
eyes of the reader. Like these words from Cole Younger: "...but
I'm not sorry about riding/ with Frank and Jesse./ I'm not sorry
about anything." or these words from Calamity Jane: "'I'm just
ahead of my time./ In another fifty years/ all women will be doin'
it." This is a fine collection for fans of the Old West, outlaws,
or revisioned details.--rrle
Michael Kriesel: LONG DARK--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE,
Albuquerque NM, 87108. 44 pp., $4.00(?). Kriesel mixes modern
mythology (Kryptonite, Cthulu, Bill Bixby, Dr. Doom) with his
post-Navy experiences in the long poem LONG DARK. Alienation and
disorientation is captured in lines like: "My lst week in the
graveyard/ and we're in this metal shed/ where all the people who
die/ over winter get stored because/ the ground's too hard to
dig," and "I've always been attracted/ to the wives of friends./
Perhaps because we have/ so much in common," and "You were 2 hours
of the/ best foreplay I ever had". There are explosions of
honesty, confusion, and anger. There is fruitless lust, and
endless pointless jobs. There is the America we live in today,
undressed, and without illusions.--o
T. L. Kryss: STRANGE ATTRACTIONS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr.
SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 24 pp., $3.00. Seventeen poems from
Cleveland's T. L. Kryss. "There will be no academic squabbles
about authorship or emotional influences on this work," remarks
Steven Ferguson in his introduction to this small chapbook.
Indeed, Kryss takes us to Treblinka, Cleveland's lower east side,
and even out toward the edge of the solar system. His poetry is
tight, concise, and unique in voice. Tom Kryss--along with d.a.
levy, William Wantling, and Charles Bukowski--remains an icon of
America's largely disregarded underground literary tradition.
STRANGE ATTRACTIONS, in addition to Tom's poems, is host to
several drawings by Harland Ristau, Dan Nielsen, Hilary
Krzywkowski, and T. L. and Carolyn Kryss.--kn
Janet Kuypers: LOOKING THROUGH THEIR WINDOWS--Scars Publications,
5310 North Magnolia, Chicago IL. 20 pp. I like Janet Kuypers'
poems, even if she occasionally dwells on the emotional
consequences of death and pan too much. Even so, for a poet under
30, her mastery of the simple word is exceptional. Too many
poets, when they attempt a change of persona (especially in the
first person voice), the result is often flat, unbelievable, too
forced. Not so with Kuypers. In the poem "Private Lives III, the
elevated train", she takes us for a ride with morning commute
yuppies on a crowded train to work. Suddenly the poet's disgust
for these middle-class workers surfaces; when she observes a woman
decked out in a full-length fur coat, her reaction becomes the
urge to spill coffee on the woman. "I'll bet they don't even know
what the animals they killed for this looked like," she writes.
Most of the other poems here are good, though Kuypers'
emotionality can become intense, if not bewildering.--kn
Lauren Leja: untitled--Primal Publishing, 107 Brighton Ave.,
Allston MA, 02134. 10 pp., $2.50. (#l in the Primal Publishing
Singles Club) Leja writes long spontaneous stream of
consciousness lines, and they always carry an edge. The first
story in this chap, HISTORY, crawls into the drunken confessional
of a woman just picked up by some guy who carries more luggage
than most tourists. The story QUICKSAND carries another self
destructive woman into the gutter... and i start to wonder why the
women in these stories keep walking into stupid fucked up
situations, as if they'd all just stepped off the bus from the
suburbs. And it is probably that element, that lack of street
sense and survival instincts, that makes these stories so
fascinating. The only complaint I have is that $2.50 is a lot
of money for ten 5" x 5" pages.--o
Lyn Lifshin & Gina Bergamino: WHITE HORSE CAFE--Mulberry Press,
105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 24 pp., $1.00. WHITE HORSE
CAFE is not co-written but divided in two sections; the first by
Lifshin and the latter half by Bergamino. As usual, Lifshin's
poems come wham-wham-wham in a torrent of words and visual
stimuli. This time she's talking love (or as close to it as Lyn
ever gets in her poetry!). Gina, too, talks about men lost and
found. The connector? Not a WHITE HORSE CAFE per se, but a
definite sense of place--bolting the feelings to a specific
locale.--rkk
Gerald Locklin: WOMAN TROUBLE--Event Horizon Press, PO Box 867,
Desert Hot Springs CA, 92240. 20 pp., $4.95. Locklin's character
here, a womanizing educator, looks for love in all the wrong
places. Even so, as a married man, he is in search of "something
closer to a regular family, a regular marriage," while
simultaneously looking for sex on the side. The main character,
Jimmy, "cannot afford a nervous breakdown," so he drinks, only to
end up in dread of what Hemingway called "The Fear," which the
rest of us call delirium tremens. He warns friends and associates
not to "take my drinking as an example or as anything manly or
romantic." Various women, as if sensing his perpetual horniness,
tease but do not bed him. In the end, frustrated, he masturbates
while remembering an affair he had with a "very anal erotic young
lady." Locklin, as always, knows instinctively how to shape and
steer good fiction, especially dialogue. He is a master humorist,
though I'm sure all of this would be lost on the hardboiled
feminist who'd likely find Gerald's fiction sexist. The rest of
us can laugh at the absurdity of Jimmy's chaotic existence.--kn
Colleen Lookingbill: INCOGNITA--Sink Press, PO Box 590095, San
Francisco CA, 94159. 61 pp., $8.00. Most of the work in this
book is in prose form, and explores some of the more interesting
corners of what prose can do. The sentences, while often
employing normative grammar and syntax, take a turn.
Descriptiveness is upended. "Fate with unkissed lips allowing the
wick to ignite a vigilant ear, mixing things up seemingly
indestructible after midnight at such an hour an entrancing
tableau." Run-on sentences at their very best. The words seem to
expand and contract to fit the space of their thoughts. This is a
solid and interesting book, well worth reading.--jg
Damian Lopes: 2 SLIDES OF A--Fingerprinting Inkoperated, PO Box
657 Station P, Toronto Ontario, CANADA, M5S 2Y4. 2 "pp." A work
of visual or concrete poetry presented as two 35mm transparencies
glass-mounted in plastic settings. The slides, negative and
positive images of a designed letter A, should be superimposed
any way one wishes and projected simultaneously. Bound in an
attractive printed small case rather like a matchbook cover.
A unique and intriguing production.--jmb
Catherine Lynn: THE SNAKE PIT--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine
WI, 53402. 34 pp., $3.00. Every once in a while I read something
that seems so brutally honest it almost makes me shy. The poems in this collection approach that emotional state. "Relapse"
captures a nervous breakdown with a panic reaction that left me
rubber legged, "Doctor Bastard" takes on a sadistic therapist who
thinks he's an exorcist, "Getting Your Money's Worth" captures
stealing food while in a hospital. These are real poems, honest
poems, full of life and weird worlds and therapy.--o
Elizabeth MacKiernan: ANCESTORS MAYBE--Burning Deck, 71 Elmgrove
Ave., Providence RI, 02906. 160 pp., $8.00. Imbued by the odd
charm that invariably derives from a wacky family, three sisters
exert themselves to the highest perfection of their
eccentricities. Understated and delicate humor of the kind that
our British cousins so pride themselves on possessing. Those who
delight in little vignettes and the featherlike touch will be
enchanted by it.--as
Stephen-Paul Martin: FEAR & PHILOSOPHY--Detour Press, 1506 Grand
Ave. #3, St. Paul MN, 55105. 124 pp., $8.95. The best collection
of meta-fictions I've EVER read. Its peak is a sur-novella in the
form of an essay--or; better, notes toward an essay, a definitive
essay--about Superman (and Lois, Jimmy and Perry), whose reality
(or, mare exactly, equivalence to my and your reality) the text's
very intelligent narrator takes for granted; and expects us to as
well. The result is hilarious satire, caustic porn, philosophical
fun, poetic brilliance, mad sanity--and a text for all-time.--bg
As we are daily deluged by infotainment and disinformation
the world narrows to the parameters of the delugion. We notice
nagging anxieties but are unable to notice anything physical that
might explain them. Exhausted, we relax further into the media
haze, only to become more anxious. Such is "civilization" as we
slide screaming through the final decade of the millenium. In
these stories, which often read like prose poems wired for speed,
Martin utilizes the very elements of our anxiety to shatter the
illusion in the mirror and release us into the world beyond our
collective dream. He demonstrates through a crucible of topical
paradox how the individual is continually undermined and buried
beneath a sea of consumerism until nothing remains but a hollow
hunger for gleaming new objects suspended before us, we become the
"hungry ghosts" of Tibetan mythology. But Martin takes this a step
further, bringing into question the very assumptions on which
civilization is founded. How much of what we call reality is based
on these assumptions? In the final section "Double Identity",
which is one long derangement of the Superman story, we confront
the essence of this conflict, "But in fact it was a fake George
Reeves who killed himself in Hollywood Hills. The real George
Reeves got caught on the silver screen, became pure seeming,
became what he had to become, became pure cytoplasmic screaming."
So much of what we identify as ourselves, as what we are willing to
defend to the death, is nothing more than "pure seeming", the
narrow mythos of a dwindling cultural apparatus. Driving to the
dark heart of our psychology, Martin reminds where true freedom
lies, or at the very least offers us the opportunity of finding
it for ourselves.--jb
Greg Matherly: SHACKLED IN 3-D--The Useless Press, PO Box 413,
Bristol TN, 37621. 28 pp., $3.00. The opening poem, "Better
Belief," captures homelessness with a bite that leaves scars: "A
cynic. A bastard./ A parody of our times./ I love you all...".
"Falling Together Again" reminds me of the kind of relationships
that make talk show audiences cringe with fear--an on again, off
again neurotic messes that go in circles, carrying love in fucked-
up cycles of despair. "Just Breathing" disputes suicide, casting
it against the living dead. And that's only the first page in
this chap..--o
Lisa McLaughlin: THE BODY'S EXECUTIONER--tel-let, 1818 Phillips
Pl., Charleston IL, 61920. 16 pp., $2.00?? Short prose vignettes
in various shades of surrealism. In one, McLaughlin beautifully
works Everywoman's coming-of-age depths and derangements out of
the following passage from a Natural History article on a
contemporary religious sect: "Young Hutterite girls often create
a secret world confined to a locked chest. Here are found bits of
the temporal world... cosmetics... and suntan lotion."--bg
Douglas Messerli: ALONG WITHOUT--Littoral Books, 6026 Wilshire
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. 90 pp., $11.95.
Intertextualities of death and its multiple others--this is a
"Masque of the Red Death" played out in a large British manor
house. Plague narrative weaves disparate parts together:
narratives by Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Bram Stoker, Samuel
Beckett, others; photo stills from Claude Ricochet's underground
film, SANS LONGTEMPS; voices intoning poetry of ruptured self.
Messerli's poems grip the sweat that pours down in the middle of a
back that has been long broken by the horrific thought that even
what we envision as heaven is lined with gargoyles. Fears,
contagions, contaminations mark the relationships: "Blood,
blood only/ binds us to the loving/ lived in the pact of acting."
Artaud's THEATRE OF CRUELTY is a linguistic shadow behind every
eye.--ssn
Thom Metzger: THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING--Autonomedia, 55 South
11th St., PO Box 568 Williamsburg Station, Brooklyn NY, 11211.
188 pp., $6.00. Occasional flashes of what might be termed
Maldororean rhetorical landscapes that give way to a generalized
irrational spewing. Rants and post-gnostic disgust! Anarchist
tirades! To my rational mind it seems imprecation for the sake of
imprecation. Is the irrationality to a higher purposes? That's
difficult to say.--as
Effie Mihopoulos: LANGUID LOVE LYRICS--Salome/Ommation Press, 5548
N. Sawyer, Chicago, IL, 60625. 70 pp., $ 8.00. Languid, yes
sometimes, but always soft, flowing, lyrical. Beautiful without
the edge, the hard-driving refrains which made her earlier book
"The Moon Cycle" a gift. Here Effie lets us see another side, a
magical, moody side applied to loves of all kinds, with exacting
allusions to Sirens, Medea, Diana, Satyrs, Salome, Angels, George
Sand, the sun, the army, and even a foot fetish. Her poetry is
infused with imagery, energy, and an impressive boldness: "The sky
is a brass drum that gleams/ pound on it/ you will hurt your
hands..."--rrle
Christine Monhollen: RAZOR MOON--Triage Press, PO Box 1166,
Sterling Heights MI, 48311. $7.95. The majority of the poems in
this collection locate themselves in the grasp of Eros. As the
poet notes, "The flesh speaks." Throughout there is a joining in
the act of love and made as a purled poem fabric from the intimacy
between a woman and a man. The center of the poetry is the heart
beneath the mesh of nature within the body self of the "I". The
heart is a sexual thing. And fleeting as is the apex of love
there is then loss, losing, separation, and the anticipation of
and finally the reunion, union, reunion. And so there is the
notion of death then in all of this life which makes this poetry,
"the combination becomes a whole."--mb
Todd Moore: ARMED & DANGEROUS--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine
WI, 53402. 16 pp., $2.00. Todd Moore shoots from the hip, would
never consider taking prisoners, and leaves a trail of blood and
guts, bullets and broken knives, wherever he chooses to go. In
this collection, with great illustrations by Dan Nielsen, Todd
rips into the masses with all of the fury and hate and survival
instincts he can pull out of his gut. In the love poem, "brenda
dreams," we get lines like: "...all/ roads lead to/ her father/
who talks to/ his shotgun/ before the/ shooting the/ wound in/
frank's back/ is a door/ brenda puts/ her face/ inside she/ can
feel his/ blood going/ w/her tongue". And that is just a quick
sampling of the turmoil that follows in the other 23 poems in this
collection.--o
Todd Moore: THE LAST GOOD THING--Bull Thistle Press, PO Box 184,
Jamaica VT, 05343. 24 pp., $9.50. In this new collection Todd's
words ring as loud as ever, while the chapbook itself is a thing
of beauty--hand sewn binding, wrap-around cover, handset type so
perfect and on the mark that if feels like a collector's item
you'd want to pass on to your grandchildren--that is, until you
start reading about blood and guts and lust, suicides and murders,
alcoholic psychosis, brass knuckles and blackjacks, and generally
a world you would most like to hide from your children if you had
half a chance. This is pure hardcore violence and libido
schizophrenia, and some of the best work I've read since, well,
Todd's last book.--o
Todd Moore & Gina Bergamino: AMERICAN CANNIBAL--Mulberry Press,
105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $1.00. Poems in
your face, straight as a razor and right out of the blood-drenched
reality of the daily news. Todd Moore, known for his multi-volume
long poem on John Dillinger (which has been abandoned midstream by
yet another publisher--this time Primal Publishing, two books into
it, folded...), is also a master of the minimal shock poem, a no-
bullshit arena where death, torture, and humiliation lurk behind
drab midwestern facades. Gina Bergamino recreates Jack the
Ripper, a modern-day reincarnation of the original who serves
blood to unsuspecting guests in beer. In "Schizophrenic Baby",
she details insanity; her protagonist smells quinine in the
shower, envisions "a choir of angels" hovering over her in the
hospital, and dwells on the abortions she endured before marriage.
Much of the poetry here is impulsive, not unlike violence and
insanity itself. AMERICAN CANNIBAL is stark realism. Not for
the weak of stomach.--kn
Gustave Morin: RUSTED CHILDHOOD MEMOIRS--Runaway Spoon, PO Box
3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00. According to the
introduction this book is the result of Morin's destroying some
of his early poems. I did not read any of those early poems so
I cannot testify to their value, or lack thereof, but their
destruction has produced an astonishing volume of vizlature. The
pages are starkly original and beautifully organic, as if an alien
from some other world had collected scraps from our world and
assembled a series of language maps accessible only by intuition.
They also function as a series of paintings consisting of letters,
pen and ink scribbling and drawing, xerox images and fingerprints.
Moving images in collision at the crossroad of millenniums, rusted
childhood memoirs is hauntingly, wonderfully weird.--jb
Sheila E. Murphy: TOMMY AND NEIL--Sun/Gemini Press, PO Box 42170,
Phoenix AZ, 85733. 90 pp., $12.95 paper/$20 hardcover. A book of
poetry with an unusual premise: each section consisting of 36
poems written to one of the poet's brothers, on the occasion of
each's 36th birthday. The volume is professionally produced,
bound in signatures with color covers, and wider than tall to
allow ample space for some of the poems' long lines. The poetry
is personal and intimate, addressing the issues of a particular
family and particular relationships, but there is nothing maudlin
about the writing, and it contains none of the usual cliches of
"confessional" discourse. The language of these poems moves
seamlessly between what Janet Grey, in a comment on the cover,
calls the "pre-grammatical" and the "narrative"--this is a major
factor in creating the sense of intense but relaxed caring and
attention directed both at the subject/objects of the writing (the
poet's brothers), and at the act and process of writing itself.
The book is a treasure; accessible and elusive, personal and
universal, innovative and immersed in the most traditional of the
functions of poetry: to illuminate living.--jmb
Susan Smith Nash: LIQUID BABYLON--Potes & Poets, 181 Edgemont
Ave., Elmwood CT, 06110. 54 pp. A remarkable sequence of poems
bound together by a posture of oblique autobiography, which goes
far beyond being merely confessional. These poems shift back and
forth between the first and third person, and between levels of
involvement in the events, situations, and states-of-mind that
serve as context for what is at hear a movement toward
cohesiveness within a process of change and loss, of knowing and
feeling. A poem from the series "Water Shard Night" illustrates
some of these qualities: "Unblemished by cigarette or exudate of
denial--I am/ paid to sing like this, every note reminds me I've
lost you;/ under paralleled spaces in our roaming, desiring gasps/
phrasing not music pearls beryls sapphires agates/ mistures of
unprecious to inlay ceremonial life-in-/ wartime--your eyes
flutter down drinking wines."
Apparently an hors-de-commerce limited edition--it is to be
hoped that the publisher will make more than 42 copies of this
excellent book available.--jmb
Susan Smith Nash: MY LOVE IS APOCALYPSE AND RHINESTONE: THE
LETTERS OF MARILYN MONROE--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr.,
Norman OK, 73072. 40 pp., $4.00. The usual issues revolving
around MM are raised here (person vs. icon, ideas of the feminine,
the manipulated and/or manipulating doll, etc.). But along with
the standard themes of the grotesqueness and destructiveness of
mass image-making is an entirely different process, a use of the
topic of MM to create a fuller consciousness of self and self-in-
its-history and culture that has a positive and life-affirming
quality about it. The poems vary a great deal in their techniques
and dictions, going from a discursive series of "Letters" in MM's
voice, to the illusive, collage-style stanzas of "Pyroman Norway
Air Till God Passengers Flying": "my skull will infer like fish--
probable molting w/ syntax / wrinkling little or now dorso-
ventrally crushed, preserve/ tunnel for dreams or lipstick or
abdomen-flexured sex-/ restrict virtual, applaud--Pava Temple
leaning vertical / all Guatemala "you look everything" real
forebears..."
This book is not simply another spin of the Monroe prayer-
wheel, but an investigation into how that wheel continues to
exist, and how it connects to the world we inhabit. Whether
you're interested in MM or not, this book is well worth reading
and pondering over. It concludes with an essay by Thomas Lowe
Taylor on Nash's poetics, which is a useful and enthusiastic take
on what she does here.--jmb
Susan Smith Nash: PORNOGRAPHY--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd.,
Mentor OH, 44060. 28 pp., $4.00. PORNOGRAPHY is like a slightly
wild trip out west, where you're not too sure of the terrain, not
too sure of the condition of your trip at all, but there you are.
America does you, or you do America. Nash takes us along. Photos
provide travelogue "action" at a similar remove. Interesting,
provocative, worth a look. We all get to be voyeurs in this
one.--jg
Dan Nielsen: INSINCERE FLATTERY & THINLY VEILED SARCASM--BGS
Press, 1240 William St., Racine, WI, 53402. 16 pp., $2.00.
This wonderful little chap with its 15 poem by the Wisconsin's
voracious, wildman poet-artist-publisher Dan Nielsen is
provocative, thrilling, head-wrenching, and almost as much fun as
a bucket of psychotropics. Most of these have previously appeared
in publications like TIGHT, PEARL, BOUILLABAISSE, IN YOUR FACE,
etc. His poetry is startling, tight, compressed, etched in absurd
realism, bulging with comic relief, or sardonic sadness. Nielson
has a butcher's-eye for splintered cultural bones, and he is
serving up a soup of choice social satire, laced with bizarre
line art by Greg Evanson. Damn nice.--rrle
Dan Nielsen: YOU'RE OUT OF MY MIND, BUT SO AM I--Fell Swoop,
3003 Ponce De Leon St., New Orleans LA, 70119. 16 pp., $3.00.
Dan Nielsen is a natural master of the tongue-in-cheek poem.
He is minimalistic, drives for the point, and his lines are
unadorned, straight-forward. The absurdity of childhood and
sexual relations predominate here. In "And It Paid Off" he
writes: "I remember/ my father/ asking me// what I was doing/ to
prepare/ for the future// 'I'm hallucinating,/ dad." When the
poet attempts to instruct his son how to recognize a crazy
person--describing the way they look and act--the son wants to
know if his father is crazy. In the short story "Joe Got Hard",
Nielsen introduces a character stoned on acid who attempts to have
sex with a fat woman; the situation quickly deteriorates when the
woman's biker husband arrives. Much like a real LSD trip, the
short story is surreal and disconnected from reality. Nielsen's
absurdist observations are a welcome digression from a large body
of poetry that is too serious, academic, or often
incomprehensible. In addition to his poems, there are drawings
and collages, all of which are unmistakably Nielsenesque.--kn
Kurt Nimmo: SUNFLOWERS OF VAN GOGH--Undulating Bedsheets
Productions, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 90025. 18 pp.,
$1.75. Nimmo writes with a precision you wish those engineers
who design jets that explode had. When a writer puts you into
situations you aren't familiar with, you need to trust their
abilities to get you out--Nimmo carries that authority, that
illusion of competency you need when the air under your plane just
isn't enough. In this three story sampling we get meditations in
both poetic and essay formatted hysteria--the residue of Vietnam
on modern life. Nimmo is Camus tossed into a suburban Detroit
trailer park; these stories leave you with that dry heaving
madness comes from surviving way too long.--o
Mark Nowak, ed.: ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN IDEOPHONICS--227
Montrose Place, Apt. C., St. Paul MN. 92 pp. An assemblage of
all kinds of texts about the arts but most about "Ethnopoetics &
the Poet as Other," the title of the first selection, which is by
Jerome Rothenberg. Among the many other highlights: an essay by
John Olson on the value of sound for transforming words from
denotations to things, and a discussion of H.D. and Robert Duncan
regarding "the poetics of non-market values" by Greg Hewitt.--bg
Mario Rene Padilla: REACHING BACK FOR THE NEVER ENDING--Red
Dancefloor Press, PO Box 7392, Van Nuys CA, 91409-7392. 86 pp.,
$9.95. "I am the author of my own memories, a child of his own
making," states Padilla in his prologue, and this collection of
twenty-five urgent, moving poems reaches out with a semi-lyrical
free verse style which startles and slides, prods and evokes with
Mayan beasts and cello notes, the legend of the Nagual, and the
decapitated body found in a wrecked car thirteen years after the
accident. Yes, this is a hodgepodge of versatile occurrences and
manic voices. "I feel the slow coming to an end/ like unwinding
wire from a wire roll/ or the drip buckets easy sway/ against the
wind/ I feel the coming end." Padilla is a poet who deals with
realistic coincidence, class-conscious images, and American myths.
He overcomes time, reaches into his autobiographical self and
pulls out poetry which is active and indulgent... "...like twelve
against one/ just take the baseball bat I thought/ and go lecture
them about 'one-on-one'/ but my son's matter-of-fact tone 'pop,
they're all packing guns'"--rrle
Clemente Padin & Jorge Caraballo: SOLIDARIDAD URUGUAY--Clemente
Padin, Casilla Correo Central 1211, Montevideo URAGUAY. 40 pp.
Documentation of articles about various mail-art and other network
efforts to free Caraballo and Padn from the imprisonment they
suffered at the hands of the Uruguayan military government from
1977 to 1985. Caraballo and Padn were well-known mail artists,
writers, and visual poets whose case attracted a lot of attention.
It is good to have this documentation, complete with reproductions
of pieces of mail-art, of a grim period in this continent's recent
history. Articles in Spanish or English.--jmb
Mark Pawlak: SPECIAL HANDLING--Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn NY.
90 pp., 10.00. There aren't many, if any, poets writing like Mark
Pawlak. His poetry has conscience. It actually deals with
issues, political issues. It calls attention to the world class
structure and the crushing power of wealth and privilege. I've
been in dozens of conversations that revolved around the fact that
poetry has almost no audience. If there were more poetry like
Pawlak's than every person earning less than 50 grand a year would
be all ears. Need comparisons? Like Reznikoff. Pawlak has a
gift for the ironic. A fragment of his poem "Progress in
Honduras": "in outlying hamlets/ where doctors had been unknown/
the stooped peasants/ lugging sacks of corn// now ease their
backaches/ with aspirin at bedtime/ thanks to U.S. medics."--mb
John Perlman: ANACOUSTIC--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines,
Morris MN, 56267. 16 pp., $2.00. This collection of poems seemed
mostly discourse on discourse at first. But then it turned into
"sky & all the/ unstunned stars the moon just/ fallen short of
full..." and the like, to seem more communion- than discourse-
centered, a notion supported by my later coming on the word
"paten" ("plate; esp.: one of precious metal for the Eucharistic
bread"--a word I've started seeing a lot of in poems lately).--bg
John Xerxes Piche: GRUMBLEPHUCK--Love Bunni, 2622 Princeton Rd.,
Cleveland Hts. OH, 44118. 48 pp., $3.00(?). Apparently one of
those dreaded personal zines, written by a Reverend John Xerxes, a
survivor of the Subgenius hysteria that terrorized America in the
80's. There is the expected incoherent rambling; fictionalized
essays; a confession of his posing as Diane in the personal ads of
"Maximum Rock & Roll" magazine to solicit mail from males (in
order to "relate to the female experience"); a decent essay on
being disappointed by GG Allin's death; some bad porn; a funny
piece on SEXUAL ATTRACTION IS NECESSARY; drug use analysis...
and so on. Either the writing of an isolated psychopathic
schizophrenic, or the words of a genius.--o
Laurie Price: EXCEPT FOR MEMORY--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643,
Berkeley CA, 94709. 74 pp., $8.95. Suzanne Brooker's cover art,
a collage of antique watches, brings to mind the idea of temps
perdu ("lost time"), which is perhaps the emotional point of
departure of this collection. "Pry" peels the dial from the hands
in order to create a state of suspended animation: "The watched
clock never stops/ bordering reasons held in check." Influenced
by an imagist aesthetic, Price's lyric poems are highly visual,
and privilege the supersaturated colors of the dream.
"Sleepwalkers" is a good example: "A tangerine figure/ approaches
from the curb/ lightens the street/ flooded by blues."--ssn
Stephen Ratcliffe: PRIVATE--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St.,
Buffalo NY, 14213. 12 pp., $2.00. A poetics of intervention,
interruption, and subtle insinuations of voice which intrude in
the form of enclosed parenthetical asides and French shifts. The
effect is magnificent: "to speak of returning before/ (think)
objects--several/ intervals or (less)/ the knowledge of her
possessions." Ratcliffe's collisions of public and private
literacies create a tension between the voice and the voiced.
--ssn
Pam Rehm: PIECEWORK--Garlic Press, PO Box 1242, Stockbridge MA,
01262. 25 pp., $5.00. Velocities of transformation heat up as
the poems refuse to back down from the place in the brain that
makes connections. "Neurology: A Theory" places the limits of all
figurative language, particularly metonymy, squarely in the region
that attempts to fence in perception in what Sir Philip Sidney
referred to as a jail-cell of flesh. Observes Rehm: "One gets
stuck in, what is evidently,/ describing oneself." A subtle and
intellectually engaging read.--ssn
Werner Reichhold: SENSESCAPES--AHA Books, PO Box 767, Gualal CA,
95445. 62 pp., $8.00. Huge pages (17" wide, 11" high) containing
twenty-eight 2-page "projects" on which gorgeous surrealistic
collages (often using material from Dore) face similarly potent
surrealistic texts, e.g., on that begins: "Ajax, is this the town/
that eats men and women/ copper for breakfast?// Yes, but look at
the phone book,/ is it broke yet?" ready to ignite in any
sympathetic aesthcipient's redeeming connectives.--bg
Jeff Rentsch: THE STORY OF TWO MEN--InDigest, PO Box 480, Denville
NJ, 07834. 52 pp., $1.00. The full title of this text&graphic
collage novel is "the story of two men walking across the room to
the sofa and what happened on the way there to change both their
lives." What happened is violent, and told a micro-second at a
time in understated, flat sentences and surrealistic graphics that
work as well together for the full course of the narrative as any
I've ever come across.--bg
Joan Retallack: ERRATA 5UITE--Edge Books, PO Box 25642, Washington
DC, 20007. 64 pp., $8.00. This book is a series of five-line
take-offs on (from) errata slips. Retallack starts with a
correction explaining a correction, saying what the prescribed fix
is ("read poisonous snake not snack")--and from there she goes
somewhere else altogether. These pieces are full of lingual
shorthand, anachronisms, bits of foreign words, roots of words.
The whole is an astonishing, melodic, humorous song. While any
traditional "sense" is denied, the pieces begin to take on a
wonderful logic of their own, flowing. In an odd way ERRATA 5UITE
in its core of misreadings, misspellings, and alternate meanings,
presents us with just the required poetry corrective. We get it
right this time.--jg
ERRATA 5UITE lets the error stray in a fluid movement among
the "zero sum ergo blather" of systematic thought. Error,
corrected, leads to the progress of knowledge? The "allreasonable
dog stranded on causal plane", "apostrophe's tragik musico
philosophicus" will "read land and math for lang and myth," "for
the undeniable is all they seek"--"God upon His solemn Review
finds not one Erratum in the Book of Nature whole as writ." But
"she la cantatrice whenas she goes without a trace" sics Derrida
on this (philosophy is a boys' club if there ever was one)--"she
read I now (know) this Kant bee rite"--read "cum for sum (ma) la
logical." Or so would go one of many possible wanderings through
this suite. Another would start with the delightful
"conversations of the (alphabetized) philosophers" Retallack
makes, in conversation herself with Richard Rorty's way of reading
philosophy playfully.--cp
Joan Retallack: ICARUS FFFFFALLING--Leave Books, 57 Livingston
St., Buffalo NY, 14213. 16 pp. ICARUS FFFFFALLING collaborates
with Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, and with Retallack's students at Bard
College "who when asked to go out and photograph Icarus falling
found him everywhere." Icarus: boy wonder who won't follow
Daddy's advice and stick to the middle way; son who by sacrificing
himself covers up his father's jealousy and murder (look up the
myth of Daedalus and Talos); Leonardo/Daedalus the artist building
machines of destruction; "Dead-o-Lust founder of Socrates circular
line"--but this is too simple a reading already. Make it messier:
"a boy rejoicing in bold flight deserts his leader why this desire
for open sky in species w/out wings"--not easy to refuse this.
And question poetry itself: "have you noticed that poetry was one
of the noble gases ripening the pomegranate never a cantaloupe or
banana"--the "noble gases" are those that don't mix with others in
chemical compounds. They remain pure--"and the grief remains
buried in the obscurity of the Latin" as if it were one of
Gibbon's chastely quoted Roman obscenities--"dis pathetic Roman
tic nihil est how to: have hi-flyin ideas under fallen yellow
arches." The theme of the pharmakos runs through all the myths of
Daedalus and his kin; drug, poison, healing medicine, and also
scapegoat, the pharmakos in ancient Greek ritual was thrown over a
cliff into the sea, but provided with wings that might break his
fall and let him live, though in perpetual exile. Take note:
Retallack's not dealing here (or elsewhere) in the sort of cozily
Jungian archetypes this might suggest; the languages she weaves
together are as complex as the twenty-five or so centuries of
painful aspiration and destruction she has gathered in this short
poem.--cp
Elliot Richman: THE WORLD DANCER--Asylum Arts, PO Box 6203, Santa
Maria CA, 93456. 110 pp., $9.95. Richman's many voices--dark
eroticist, Vietnam testifier, visceral viewer of art and the
adumbrations of irony--come scattershot from his small press
exposures and in more unified rushes from chapbooks like "Fucking
in Stupid Hope: Love Poems for the Death of the '80's"
(Slipstream: Niagra Falls 1989). But not 'til THE WORLD DANCER
from Asylum Arts, a press committed to risky material, do we get
Richman whole. Unlike some fragments, he's no hellbent macho
cynical kicker against the pricks, but a compassionate
comprehender of, though never apologist for, human inconsistency.
His vision--less the self annihilating gaze of Van Gogh or
Hemingway, who become his croney-doppelgangers in these poems, and
more the consummate witness to edges of art, love and loneliness--
is more like the swordlike zen brushwork he honors and emulates:
...My features are painted
on that octopus in the print by Hokusai,
tentacles wrapped 'round Katrina's naked body,
my giant head fused between her thighs,
enormous black pupils scanning her skin
as she swoons in pleasure, holding tightly
to one of my suckered arms, the cruelty
gone from her features, so lost in sex.
(from "The Portrait of a Poet")
Here's complex, violent art coming into a maturity that will take
us to new places, and help make sense of some of the hardest old
ones.--sf
Steve Richmond: MY WIFE--Deadtree Press, PO Box 81305, Lincoln NE,
68501. 20 pp., $6.00. Infectious, self-reflective, easy-going
plainstyle poems, like the "gagaku" in which the author admits
he'd like best-sellerdom but decides, "fuck it/ (instead of
writing a hot novel) I'll stick here/ in the/ short devastating
poem/ the demon poem/ the mad poem/ the sick poem// where I'm/
comfortable."--bg
Sheryl Robbins: OR, THE WHALE--Shuffaloff Press, 260 Plymouth
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14213. The title is half of MOBY-DICK, OR,
THE WHALE--and the half that is this collection of poems is the
feminine. Yes, women voyage also. That dark stuff of guilt and
19th century creeping American protestant gloom isn't here. The
puns and metaphors, the images within the poetry, and the titles
of the poems are carved from Melville's novel. Sure that provides
the book with a spine, but rather than darkness and death within
this poetry there is at each vertebrate a love and a light, some
white magic, an irresistible intoxicating ring of bone Isis
white.--mb
Thaddeus Rutkowski: SUPER NATURE--Power Trio Press, PO Box 187
Cooper Station, New York NY, 10278. 16 pp., $1.00. Unlike many
"performance" poems, these stand up powerfully on the page, as in:
"Walk to the water circle,/ dive to the bottom/ and nail your
question/ to the dragon's door" (from "Mother's Advice").
Poetry-slam winner, art-history scholar, forbidden fantasizer
Rutkowski has packed arresting lines, inspired graphic design,
and innovative weirdness into these 4x4 pages. These 14 brief
poems each slice a heretofore wholly unsuspected microsection
from the murky interface of consciousness and world, like "a
test pattern from the right half/ of a hare's brain" ("Half a
Thought"), or suddenly shift the disturbingly untoward into
sharpest focus: "a tiger pouncing on a zoo-booster/ a wife shaving
her housekeeper's head/ a kidnapper guarding his capturing box"
("Assault With a Deadly Plotline"). Finally, having read, we can
"Skim some rain./ Whirl in surf./ Dream of hair" ("-plasm").--sf
Leslie Scalapino: OBJECTS IN THE TERRIFYING TENSE LONGING FROM
TAKING PLACE--Roof Books, c/o Segue Foundation, 303 East 8th St.,
New York NY, 10009. 82 pp., $9.95. Scalapino's critical writings
might already be familiar to readers of poetics journals; this
anthology includes pieces on H.D., Robert Grenier, Danielle
Collobert, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge,
Lyn Hejinian, and others. There is also a selection from THE
FRONT MATTER, DEAD SOULS, political writings she began during the
last presidential election. (She calls this "a serial novel to be
published in the newspaper," though the newspapers she submitted
it to refused to run it.)
Scalapino practices the poetics of language writers, who
insist that the division of labor between poet and critic be done
away with. It is what I might call, borrowing one of her lines,
the "putting of thought to thought"--but as something done, an
action, not a view from above, or a statement of logically prior
conditions. Criticism that co-exists with the writings it is
"about" (and "about" here becomes a kind of adjacency to or
perambulation of the writings) will problematize its own form, as
Scalapino says: "The form of rigor itself has to undercut its
concept." Here, her stated aim is to "allow the shapes of the
structures of the texts being considered to emerge." But there is
a characteristic Scalapino line as well, and its structure,
familiar to her readers since "That They Were at the Beach," may
at times overlay the structures of the texts she is writing about;
this at least was my own feeling about her Collobert piece. But
not always; her writings on Grenier are "within the way his text
sees." And then there's the lines from "The Front Matter"--"Our
vice president tries to turn us against the 'cultural elite.'
Here, the cultural elite are simply people who can read at all."
It seems her remarks have not lost their topicality.--cp
Spencer Selby: SOUND OFF--Detour Press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St.
Paul MN, 55105. 64 pp., $7.95. A collection of poems illuminated
by ironic double entendre: "sound off" as protest literature by
poets voicing their rage at toxic-waste dump Americana, or,
equally, as a state of being akin to watching t.v. with the volume
turned down. The condition of language echoes the condition of
our world: "Extensive straightforward meaning/ goes funny before
it's written / in the face of impending disaster." Because linear
forms of writing and thinking yield nothing but distorted copies
of what has come before, Selby advocates a poetic language
informed by experience: "Walk the path and live for knowledge/
that's exasperated by what you see."--ssn
Tim Shepherd: DEAD ROSES FROM A FRIEND--Drew Blood Press Ltd.,
3410 First St, Riverside CA, 92501. 21 pp., $2.00. This
chapbook, first published in 1990, was perhaps a pioneer of the
sadly growing list of "AIDS memorial" chapbooks. As such, it
doesn't have a lot of lilting language, melodious rhymings or
crafted imagery. It does have anger, profanity, and a wrenching,
tangible sense of loss and bitterness. Some of Shepherd's poems
come off as hopelessly melancholy; others unnecessarily foul-
mouthed; and some as on-target with a profound sense of grief.
Not overly poetic; but undeniable work for those interested in
a reality dose of what a real AIDS death means to those left
behind.--rkk
Bill Shields & Elliot Richman: DISPATCHES: FROM VIETNAM TO THE
GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS--Boog Literature, PO Box 221, Oceanside
NY, 11572. 16 pp., $3.00. War poems from a coupla folks who know
war, and poetry, first hand. Richman's war takes place in Iraq,
and draws us into the interment of Iraqi soldiers being buried
alive, while Shields talks about the distancing of killers from
their victims through modern warfare techniques. These words
crawl into you, and leave you shaking, scared, and pissed off.
The realities of slaughter on these scales makes you wonder if
hope will ever be an option again.--o
Florentin Smarandache: ANTHOLOGY OF THE PARADOXIST LITERARY
MOVEMENT--Ophyr University Press, PO Box 42561, Phoenix AZ, 85085.
174 pp., $17.95. More of a chrestomanthy than an anthology, since
the genius of Smarandache is predominant through out. After
reading his NON POEMS last year I thought Paradoxism an
interesting development, though I would have had difficulty
defining it. Here are manifestos, stridency and curious writings,
but also gnawing doubts that arise when one suspects a tincture of
hucksterism. When something new and different comes out of
thewilds of Romania I am curious and ready to give it credence,
but I am beginning to wonder if Paradoxism is all that it purports
to be.--as
Charles Smith: ALIEN LOVE POEMS--BGS Press, 1240 William St.,
Racine, WI, 53402. 12 pp., $ 2.00. Black, samurai-swift
imagination and humor as hard as a jackhammer's heart, Smith
captures candid incidents from youth to present with images which
could have been reflected from a fun-house mirror. "It's my turn
to wear the dog collar.// I mount you, oh so slowly/ I am slashing
my wrists/ the blood mixing with your hair..." Here is rage,
pathological enough to be trivial, trivial enough to be cool and
seductive. There is a spontaneous, unmediated emotion here, a
delicious sexual darkness. Suicide, sadomasochism, punk bravura,
child abuse, academic failure, self-depreciation, spouse abuse,
drunken sex, miscued allegories, old age dread and drawings by Dan
Nielsen. How can it get any better than this?--rrle
David H. Stone: SPECULAR SHARDS--O!! Zone, 1266 Fountain View Dr.,
Houston TX , 77057. 76 pp., $10.00. Clipped, usually anecdotal
free verse, freshened here & there with puns and pun-couples--like
"sir spent"/ "sir spit" in a poem about Adam and Eve. Several
strong poems about the work-a-day world, and (mordantly) funny
ones about law and politics.--bg
SuZi: CARNIVAL IN THE AGE OF KALI--Ourobourous Press, PO Box
533613, Orlando FL, 32853. 9 pp., $1.50. SuZi knows the street
from experience. Though she's in New Orleans now, she definitely
left her mark on Chicago. She's still tough as nails, but there's
a fragile sensitivity beneath the tough veneer. These poems bring
the street into your head, with lines like: 'Hey sister/ didja dig
them bad-bootied bands?/ the sister on the tuba from Saint Mary's
and/ the covetous lovey dove eye action from the marine/corp?",
and: "the earhole of damnation/ and she was held more than a/ day
after/ the judge said go/lost in some sheriff scuffle shuffle."
Although this is a short collection of SuZi's work, it's strong
powerful writing in a voice so unique... let's just say she's
good. Damn good!--o
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: EKPHRASIS--Pygmy Forest Press, PO
Box 591, Albion CA, 95410. $5.00. The title, referring to a test
that is its own explainaint, is in one sense an apt description of
these self-referential poems, but in another sense they are not,
since they often have a haiku-like ellusiveness/allusiveness, the
meaning-ripples spreading out in all directions so they "mean"
everything and nothing, The irony in that title is functional,
and is part and parcel of the beauty of these works:
EKPHRASIS No. 16
Mechanic a
Spit o'
Ecstatic re
Lease
Javeliner
Crested
Quiver a
Gog stride
The collection consists of 15 poems, in a nicely produced
booklet. These pieces have an intimate and enigmatic quality that
keeps this reader going back to them.--jmb
At the crossroads between intelligence and intuition, where
the mind grasps to contain experience but does not have the logic
or syntax, and the entire being is filled with sensation and
strange knowing, the creative impulse rises. We are taught very
early, though usually not directly, to ignore such impulses and
direct attention toward a knowable object. St. Thomasino
understands that to allow the creative impulse to culminate in
action is a means of expanding the field of perspective and
thereby knowledge in its deepest sense, of insight. These
selections from his Ekphrasis series are brilliant examples of
that understanding, and like all great poetry are doorways to that
deeper knowledge. The words seem to rise from that critical
moment, they are utterances of the voice and mind in awe of direct
experience of unlimited sensation. Sometimes the words fall into
a phrase that seems to make logical sense, that relates something
specifically, sometimes not. It doesn't matter. It is the
impulse, the life shining through these poems that's important.
Certainly, an exhaustive analysis would reveal a variety of
interpretations, but something would still be missing. Ordinary
syntax cannot contain their light. From "EKPHRASIS No.11":
Inter
Missive
Juncture
Unthinkable
Scenes
Dovetail
A
Ha a ha
--jb
A selection of St. Thomasino's ongoing series of state-of-
the-art language-centered poems full of locutions like "Will o'
sea" and "Out'r quart'r lo!" Consequently, one seems in tho ages
of discovery at once: Columbus's, Drake's & Cook's; and ours.--bg
Michelle M. Tokarczyk: THE HOUSE I'M RUNNING FROM--West End Press,
PO Box 27334, Albuquerque NM, 87125. 56 pp., $6.95. This book of
poetry was published a few years ago, but it demands a reading,
particularly if one is interested in women and work. And the
fears one encounters after living a working class life and
attempting to "make it" in a profession, herein examined. What
makes this poetry so exciting is its legitimacy. This is not a
book by a poet that lost her diamond while riding on her third
best polo pony. Oh no. But this is not the grit of a saloon
either. Nothing dark here. Just the hard work of a white ethnic
in working class America struggling to maintain simply a life of
dignity and peace, which because of the American grind... What do
you think? Can you relate? Or will you ponder a rose is a rose
is a rose?--mb
Cheryl A. Townsend and Paul Weinman: MY NIPPLES RISE EYES--Watson
Publishing, 2774 9th St., Cuyahoga Falls OH, 44221. 20 pp. This
chapbook is so steamy that I'm amazed it didn't arrive with damp
pages. Townsend and Weinman trade sex-saturated poems here.
Cheryl is the initiator and Paul follows suit. Each poem is
short, never longer than eight or nine lines. The cover has a
Blair Wilson graphic--a stylized cartoon of a woman's breasts,
limber as deflated innertubes, that reach out and smack a cartoon
man in the face. There's an added bonus stapled inside this
chapbook; WHITE BOY CUMS 2, with a suggestive, as-always
pornographic John Howard drawing. Even though I enjoy the rat-a-
tat-tat minimalism of both Townsend and Weinman, the continual sex
dulls after awhile. I begin to look for new poetical vistas.
Cheryl Townsend is the Anais Nin of the small press poetry scene.
Even so, she is at her best when she digresses from the fuck-fest
and writes about other subjects. A good example of this is her
small chapbook MOTHER TENDED BAR, which is truly remarkable in its
emotional and descriptive intensity.--kn
Cheryl Townsend: VESTIBLES--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty Rd.,
East Meadow NY, 11554. 10 pp., $2.00(?). Cheryl is the publisher
of IMPETUS, and her poetry carries a seductive touch that could
make you fall in love with a stranger. While Cheryl still carries
that sexual lust and subtle confusion between people who don't
know how to relate to each other, her words get cleaner and so
crisp you often feel like her poems are dried flowers waiting to
break in the wind. In lines like: "I could smell the
anticipation/ when we met on Tuesday for lunch" and "Snuggling
into a dream/ that lasted well into Monday" you catch a glimpse
into a world filled with sensual confusion. Cheryl is one of the
few women poets covering this turf, in poems that work and convey
the inside story.--o
Paul Trachtenberg: BEN'S EXIT--Beach & Company, Cherry Hill
Editions, PO Box 303, Cherry Hill NY, 13320. 123 pp., $7.00.
When I read a book I want a total pure honesty, or hard core
sensationalistic crap. This is not sensationalistic crap. It is
about real life adventures, academic politics, relationships (gay,
straight, and otherwise), Disneyland, the brains of serial
killers, metaphysical mysticism and scientific exploration,
plumbers and surfers, California earthquakes, the end of the
sexual revolution, AIDS, and so many other things it's hard to
make up a comprehensive list. This book made me feel ripped off,
not because it was bad, but because it was so good I didn't want
it to end.--o
Nico Vassilakis: A NAME FOR RADIO--Electron Elbow Publications,
PO Box 21671, Seattle WA, 98111. 12 pp., $4.00. A wonderfully
lyrical jump-cut mini-epic about the quest for knowledge--I think.
At any rate, electro-magnetic waves play a large role in it; sound
waves and water, too: "sounds are delicious, the scent of
musicality of noise. we never imagine noise in water. water is
large enough for thoughts to co-exist."--bg
An exquisitely produced miniature book containing a single
long poem, which is a meditation on the body and the mind
revolving in consciousness of each other, and a meditation on
meditation: "abrupt, aboutnd, ablutions, abingo, abongo/ aconga, a
smooth rumination, a jolt shattering/ the nervous system, the
electric formation of/ receptors singing in a naturally occurring
quiet./ immediate environments the beatitude of/ neighborhood."
This is lucid and evocative writing that perfectly embodies
the ideas and aperceptions it speaks of.--jmb
Nico Vassilakis: ARTAUD WHAT--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port
Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. One can always count on Vassilakis
to stir the imagination and summon a few demons. This is a book
of associations between words and images that appear in the text
to be cut up, but may only be so in the mind of the poet and/or
the reader. For instance, "a day spent proving/ light and she is/
another room. we say/ particulate", a schizoid dismemberment of
syntax that is magically reconnected in the mind. The poems
function as juicy hallucinated haikus and distorted and collaged
pictures that perfectly reflect the texts, not as illustrations,
but enhancements of the effect. Psychoactive.--jb
Janine Pommy Vega: RED BRACELETS--Heaven Bone, PO Box 486, Chester
NY, 10918. 32 pp., $5.95. Composed while traveling through
Nepal, these poems function as a travelogue of the trip and of
the soul. Torn between lover at home and the search the poet
continues, drawing in clear direct verse the image of the world
she moves through, her yearning for experience and for home. She
makes it easy to feel the struggle as she feels it and by doing so
allows us to some extent to gain from her experience. But RED
BRACELETS is better an emotional experience than intellectual.
Vega isn't trying teach us, but relate generally, from the soul.
And she does this very well, coming in the final, title, poem to
sing, as if in a fire of transcendence of "red bracelets/ for the
mother of love."--jb
Fred Voss: GOODSTONE--Event Horizon Press, PO Box 14645, Long
Beach CA, 90803. $15.95. I remember telling Fred about how I
almost beat the shit out've some dude at my post office job and
Fred wrote back suggesting I try to keep my cool. How Fred
managed to keep his composure long enough at Goodstone to write
this masterpiece I'll never know. Such incompetence, immaturity,
idleness, lifelessness, idiocity, on-th-job drunkeness & insanity
as can be witnessed in a Breughal painting. This book is about
the end of the Industrial Revolution as personified by the day-to-
day workings of a bomber aircraft factory--it certainly documents
the coming end of the United States' long-held boast as #1
industrial nation of the world. One wonders if morale picked up
at Goodstone during the "crisis" in the Persian Gulf--did this
insane asylum begin to sing & dance for the rich boy's money & oil
war? This book is a knife stuck in the guts, and twisted. And
somehow Fred has done it all without getting caught up in the mire
of hatred & spite that most of his fellow workmates have lost
themselves in. Our dear Whitman would bawl his eyes out if he
read this book and found out what has happened to his beloved
workers of America (though I imagine every late-20th century
factory in the world is like this, except maybe Japan's).
Not for the patriotic or squeamish. 180 poems machined from
solid steel, cool sweat & the catastrophic humorous eye of Voss.
One might consider taking the train after reading this. And every
time they fire up those jets, 5 blocks from here at Kirtland AFB,
Albuquerque, I'm gonna run for cover.--mw
Fred Voss & Joan Jobe Smith: THE HONEYMOON OF KING KONG--Zerx
Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 40 pp.,
$3.00. "Machinist Poet" leaps right into action with "D.H.
Lawrence would've liked this man/ as much as I do, how he offs
his/ blue collar when he comes home to/ drink chardonnay with me,
read aloud to me, The Subterraneans until Kerouac says,/ "It was
her little face I wanted to enter,"/ and then he stops reading to
enter/ my face, too, with his quick tongue." In "The Eve of
Destruction" the words are clean, honest: "In her kitchen/ my
fiancee's daughters compare their/ 6 and 8 months along/ pregnant
bellies and/ bounce them/ off each other/ again and again doing
little swinging/ dance steps and giggling uncontrollably/ as I sit
in the corner drinking and trying to feel/ as much/ like a
bachelor/ of 37 years/ as I can." These are fine warm words by
real people, people I'd love to have for neighbors.--o
James L. Weil: BILL'S SHAKER CHAIR--tel-let, 1818 Phillips Pl.,
Charleston IL, 61920. 20 pp. Self-effacing, diffident poems
dedicated to William Bronk, as this one called "Imperatives
Composed for Bill's Voice": "What I write makes no/ difference.
I write// indifferent to/ the difference it// does not make.
It has/ nothing to do with// our undoing. There/ is nothing to
do,// all done. I write. I/ love you. Love me. Write."--bg
Hannah Weiner: SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL--Tender Buttons
Press, 54 East Manning Street #3, Providence RI, 02906. This book
continues Weiner's obsession with formally radical representations
of multiple voices that has been central to her work at least
since CLAIRVOYANT JOURNAL. The poems here create a broad,
sweeping, and tense historical context for understanding how
voices have come to her. What this book teaches us is that
history--written accounts of people's lives and actions--is always
about the struggle for voices. But Weiner has no sentimentality
about multiplicity--the many voices of her text are framed by
conditions of power, and their desire for it. In such a context,
language itself is revealed as a hesitant, embattled, sometimes
obscure and always resistant medium. Finally an autobiography,
SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL is not a story of triumph, of
social conditions overcome by a saving mastery of language.
Rather, this book returns its readers to the condition of their
own lives and languages, teaching us that listening is something
we must learn to do in our own circumstances, however
tentatively.--mw
Paul Weinman: IN THE FISHTANK--Strangulensis Research Labs, Rt. 6
Box 138, Charleston WV, 25311. 16 pp., $2.00. Collages and other
graphics by Harold Dinkel masterfully wrong-step Weinman's
crackling plainstyle poems, one a near-perfect evocation of a
nursing home in which "the here and there teeth/ pok(e) through
sentences, postponing/ putting words in order until never;" but
one man asks the narrator "if racial/ demographics are changing,
yet."--bg
Simon Wickham-Smith: FEW--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port
Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00. Consisting of three distinctly
different and equally compelling experiments, FEW is a challenge
to ordinary consciousness. The first section "Six Short Fictions"
is a sort of elliptical, or parenthetic poetry, that dances
around, or beyond, absolute meaning, excellent poetry. The second
section is a long series of connective hieroglyphic-like images
that develop as they proceed down and across the page, and from
page to page, suggesting an investigation of how we associate
meanings with lines on a page. The final section is a repeated
visage which can be interpreted differently from page to page as
words are added. Stimulating and provoking, FEW can be many.--jb
Bob Z: YUCKY STIFF--Panic Button Press, PO Box 14318, San
Francisco, 94114. 30 pp., $3.25. The author's note says this
one's about "looking hard at the seamy filthy unpleasant side of
life" and sure enough, it is. Words tumble over each other, slam
together in a mosh pit of imagery to create a space for
themselves, push thoughts and events at the reader as quickly as
Husker Du (the band, not the child's game.) Repetitive, dirty,
funny, and pocket-sized to boot.--rkk
Mickey Z.: REMOTE CONTROL--PO Box 9103, L.I.C., NY, 11103.
26 pp., SASE? "Poems to Watch Television By," this one's in
the style of Bob Z. (family resemblance?) and the form of Paul
Weinman's "WhiteBoy" series. Poems for couch potatoes with short
attention spans, but hoping to shake 'em out of their video-
induced stupor. The final poem, "One Last Question", is
representative: "So, why do you/ think they call it/
PROGRAMMING?"--lbd
Nicholas Zurbrugg: THE PARAMETERS OF POSTMODERNISM--Southern
Illinois University Press, PO Box 3697, Carbondale IL, 62902.
184 pp. The quintessence of Postmodernism crammed into tiny
microchapters. What it is. How it manifests itself. The
leitmotiv here is the "B effect" vs. the "C effect". The B effect
is here defined as a needlessly catastrophic sense of critical &
creative crisis propounded by such writers as Burger, Bonita-
Oliver, Barthes, Baudrillard etc.; verses the C effect, a more
optimistic hypothesis of postmodernist practice, which Zurbrugg
associates with John Cage among others. Postmodernism posited not
as a doomsday machine, a sterile lunar landscape, but rather as a
source of insight into human experience, just as other literary
-isms have been.--as
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Issue #5.0, section b: chaps 8/94
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