POETICKS

I’ve lost any enthusiasm I had for this project, but I’m continuing it, anyway–today with just excerpts from my diary, some of them repeating stuff I already have somewhere in this manuscript.  Sorry.  But who’s reading?

8:30 P.M.  Thursday  30 January 1992

The mail was moderately interesting for a change: letters from Arnold Falleder and Jonathan Brannen, and forms to fill out for that international Who’s Who company that David Thomas Roberts recommended me for, and for this year’s write-up on my press in Poet’s Market.

10 P.M.  Saturday  1 February 1992

I had what seemed good ideas concerning my sonnet, especially just after retiring for a nap this afternoon.  Geof had said last night that he thought I was a maniac for continuing so persistently with the sonnet, but that it was a form of greatness.  He also said he preferred one of the versions of the poem three or four before my “final” one better than the final one, which was what got me thinking about how to improve it again.  I got awakened from my nap by a call from C. L. Champion, of all people.  We talked for about two hours.  He seems quite bright but is only around Surllama’s age.  He was quite taken with Of Manywhere-at-Once, which was encouraging.  After talking with him, and Geof, who called a second time because he needed the title of David’s book, I had another idea or two.  For a while I was very happy with the new version of the sonnet but now I think only two changes good ones, and they’re both minor.  I’ll probably try to think of yet more changes.

10 February 1992.  I need some kind of success soon–I seem (as I’ve been thinking every once in a while for several months now) that I’ve become addicted to favorable attention, and start having withdrawel symptoms if I don’t get some kind of applause or the equivalent, however small, every week or so–like the acceptance of a poem, or a compliment about one of my essays from a colleague.

8 P.M.  Tuesday  18 February 1992

I heard back from Laurel Spence.  Nice letter but she didn’t seem much interested in Of Manywhere-at-Once, saying that it wasn’t the kind of book she looks for for review.  She sent me a copy of one of her poetry collections–not bad, though more quotidian in subject matter and thought than I consider the best poetry to be.  Self-expression much more than exploration of the language, or a quest for higher meanings.  I’ve always considered her too set in her ways to be open to the full world of poetry, and her response is further evidence of the validity of my impression.

9 P.M.  Thursday  20 February 1992

I got an encouraging postcard from Dana Gioia.  He said he didn’t have time to start up a correspondence but that if I sent him some of my reviews and poems he would look them over and send me comments on them, when time permitted.  This evening I got together a packet of things.  Unfortunately I don’t have many textual poems to send him–he specified that I send him material in print.  (Mediocrities always need a previous mediocrity to verify any writer’s worth before being able to devote serious attention to the writer.)  If he’s got any kind of ear and/or brain, he should like my criticism, though.

9 P.M.  Saturday  22 February 1992

A box of new products from Geof, without a cover letter.  The latest issue of Alabama Dogshoe Moustache I particularly liked, for it had a wonderful couplingual poem by George Swede, which I quote in full, “graveyarduskilldeer.”  Geof also sent me a list of the words he’s found relating to verbo-visual art.  This is the skeleton of his historical dictionary of verbo-visual art.  I have a few problems with it, the main one being that he includes a lot of terminology that doesn’t have anything to do with verbo-visual art, such as my own term, “alphaconceptual poetry.”  He also wants to use “An” with “historical” in the title, and I hate this exception to the rule that “an” goes only before words beginning with vowels.  Some of the entries seem weakly defined, but that’s no doubt because this is just a rough draft.  I approve of the effort and hope I can help but it looks like it’ll require an incredibly large amount of work.

11 P.M.  Monday  24 February 1992

A Letter from Len Fulton.  He has decided he can’t run as it is because it is a review of a book I published.  But he made up for that by inviting me to review a collection of d. a. levy stuff–and he suggested I revise my Kempton piece so it was a discussion of a kind of poetry which used Kempton’s pieces as examples.  Of course, that’s how I saw the piece to begin with, but I made some changes that I hope will make it acceptable to him–and accepted his invitation to review the levy book.  I also spent an hour and a half at the library helping Bernice Weiss set up the Tuesday Writers’ Group display that Bernice got Nancy, the librarian, to let us do.

9 P.M.  Tuesday  25 February 1992

Metropophobobia, an otherstream store I’m sending 3 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once and some other items on consignment.

11:30 P.M.  Wednesday  26 February 1992

I worked fairly hard most of the day, but the main result was my deciding I was all screwed up about what alphaconceptuality was, and that the version of the Kempton piece that I wrote for Fulton this morning to replace the one I sent him Monday needed itself to be replaced, which I just finished doing.

10 P.M.  Thursday  27 February 1992

My response to the Core Questionnaire on Visual Poetry (nothing, alas, profound, and it tired me).  Next day a letter to Geof on the changes in my poetics terminology.  New term: “Portmanteaual Poetry.”  Plus work on my next Factsheet Five column, which I will base on my Sontag piece.

2 March: the mail was pretty good: a note from Jack Moskovitz and–surprisingly–a genial card from Dana Gioia, who said my package had arrived and he’denjoyed its contents.  He also sent me, separately, a review he’d done in 1977 of a collection of haiku, and an ad for an anthology of literary essays he had a piece in.  I ordered a copy of the latter and expect to write the author of the haiku book as Gioia suggested.  I also wrote a short letter back to Gioia.

I spent the afternoon of 4 March at a meeting of the arts and humanities council.  It was interesting but not very helpful.  I wanted to try to get something done about making my press eligible for grants but no real opening for a disucssion about it presented itself.  Too many people were there with competing concerns–concerns, moreover, that the majority of the other people shared, as they wouldn’t've my problems getting RASP eligible for grants.  I went to the meeting with the beginning of a headache.  I had planned to gulp down some aspirins before leaving but forgot to.  I was pretty shot on my return and still feel mildly crappy despite having taken two aspirns at 5 followed by two alka-selzers with aspirin in them at around 6:30.  In short, not a good day at all.

5 March I spent some time thinking about a proposal I hope to send the arts and humanities council about an improved artists’ and artworks’ registry.  It’s something that should appeal to them, and get me better involved with them.

11 March 1992.  I just finished a final revision of my response to the Core Questionnaire on Visual Poetry.  My answers were pretty pedestrian but sound enough, I suppose.  Next day a letter from CL Champion with a silly/amusing parody of my Sonnet–and a revision thereof!

14 March: a copy of the latest issue of the newsletter John Byrum edits, with the second excerpt from my book in it.  It was reassuring to see that the series of excerpts is indeed continuing.

16 March: a letter from D. T. Roberts that was very favorable about Of Manywhere-at-Once.

10:30 P.M.  Thursday  19 March 1992

The big event of the day was the coining of a new term, “textual figuration,” to replace “textual vizlation.”  “Figuration” is a standard English word meaning “act or instance of representing a shape or figure,” so it’s close enough to meaning visual art to use it for that, it seems to me.  A person practicing it would be a “figurateur,” I’ve decided.  The relevant adjective would be, “figurational,” to distinguish it from “figurative,” which has a conflicting literary meaning.

26 March 1992.  2 filled-out data sheets for the arts-in-eduation artists’ registry, one more or less properly filled-out, the other scantily filled out in protest of the kind of information asked for; my computerized arts-registry proposal; and a brief cover-letter to Jean Martensen, the Arts & Humanities Council executive director.

10:30 P.M.  Saturday  28 March 1992

A note from Len Fulton that he was using my infra-verbal poetry piece in the April issue.

10 P.M.  Friday  17 April 1992

Then the incoming mail arrived and included 3 pleasant items: 2 copies of the latest issue of the

Small Press Review with my guest editorial in it.

19 April 1992: a decision I made and might actually stick to: to drop out of the arts and council, and not get involved in any new organizations such as the local writers’ group I was going to try to get to a meeting of; also the writers’ conference I was going to try to get a fellowship to.  I’ve got to concentrate on getting the  RASPbooks done, keeping from falling too far behind with my correspondence, continuing to get material into print here and there, and–most of all–getting my next book done.  I mustn’t spread myself too thin.

8:30 P.M.  Friday  1 May 1992

Todd bought 16 books, including my Of Manywhere-at-Once.  He seemed nice.  Apparently he’s a recovered, or recovering, druggie.  Does photography and seems from the pictures he showed me to have a good eye.  He goes in for road kills, though, which aren’t my favorite subject matter.  He did a series of one corpse that recorded its “life” over a period of several days.  It had some quite interesting moments.

A list from my diary of my main micro-triumphs for the 1991:

(1) 4 different presses (all “micro-presses”) solicited me for material to make books of and I sent stuff they found acceptable to all four.  One is to be a book of just four poems, the second a book of seven poems, and the third a book of perhaps a dozen poems.  The fourth (Haw!) is  (probably–the main editor accepted it but it still needs the okay of some panel under him) to be a printing of Barbaric Bart Meets Batperson and her Indian Companion, Taco.  Sent Werebird to Sarasota, too.  (It was turned done, needless to say.  The play was accepted, then printed with the pages out of order.)

(2) Factsheet Five, the only magazine I’ve been doing a regular column for changed hands, and the new editor kept only two of the old columnists, out of ten or so: me and another guy.  A minor triumph, for sure, but reassuring (until somebody else took over and dropped me).

(3) I’ve been sent forms to fill out by two Who’s Who publishers, one the standard people here in the US, the other some people in England who do an International Who’s Who.  The U.S. Who’s Who is called Who’s Who in the South and Southwest and seems to be the Who’s Who one level below that company’s Who’s Who in America.  I got pegged for the international one through a friend who’s gotten into it; I have no idea where the other company got my name.  I’m only being considered for both but, still, any kind of recognition is encouraging.  (I got into both.)

(4) Just yesterday I got a letter from a new acquaintance who wants to do an article on me for a magazine he writes for.  If it comes off, and I’m sure it will, it will be the first article on me.

(5) I had some pieces in an international visual poetry show in San Luis Obispo that then went on tour.  One of its stops was in New York State, where my brother Bill went to see it, reporting that due to lack of space only ten of the seventy or so artists in the show had work  displayed–and I was one of them!  I also had things in shows elsewhere in the U.S., and in Italy, Ireland and Australia.

(6) Two of my visual poems were reprinted in a German anthology of American visual poetry.

(7) A slick magazine called Art Papers had a survey of mail art in which I was mentioned.

(8) A quarterly poetry magazine is publishing excerpts from my Of Manywhere-at-Once–and describing me as “a nationally-known poet, critic and publisher.”

(9) A poem I co-authored is to be translated into a foreign language (Italian).  (Ha, I had forgotten about that.  Iti did get translated, so I’ve now been translated into at least two foreign languages, Italian and Hungarian.  I’m pretty sure something of mine was translated into German, too–probably the words of a visual poem in one of the German publications I had work in.

10.  52 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once, 2nd ed., got into print.  The printer did an excellent job as far as I could tell.  Of course, I found defects, but they were my fault, not the printer’s.  I was quite satisfied with the book, overall.

Pretty weak.  The horror of it is that I’ve done little better since.

During the fall of 1991 I finished getting the revised edition of Of Manywhere-at-Once

I participated in my first local poetry reading on  Saturday  26 October 1991.  It took place at the Sea Grape art gallery in Punta Gorda.  My writers’ group friend, Ken Reynaud,  picked me up about 1:30 and got me there ten minutes before the reading began.  (A bicycle, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, by then was my only mode of transportation, other than my legs by themselves.)  The reading went quite well.  I would guess that about thirty people attended parts of it and 15 to 20 were still there when I did my presentation, around 4.  There were two featured readers.  The first was a 78-year-old lady who had just begun writing poems a year ago, but had written over three hundred.  She was amusing, and some of her poems were quite funny.  They were pure doggerel, though, and the seriousest ones were horrible-bad sentimental and uninspired.

At about 2:45 the main poet came on, a guy in his thirties, I would guess, Michael Haymans, who has since become a good friend of mine.  He was an excellent speaker, helped a good deal by having memorized most of his poems.  Free verse celebrations of Florida wildlife constituted perhaps half his poems, and they were pretty good, although not technically adventurous.  He threw in a few preachy b.s. poems and a couple of comic poems.  I talked to him later and learned that he’s part of a local band, which explains his effective manner as a reader.  (As does his being a lawyer, something else I soon learned about him.)  He’s part of the monthly “literary salon” that’s started up recently in the county, and that I heard about from Linda Salisbury, another local writer who does a humorous column for one of the papers whom I met (I believe) at one of my writers’ group meetings.  I hope to get involved in it somehow.  It meets evenings, though, so it might be difficult.  We had a break for cookies and apple cider after Mike’s stint, which lasted about an hour.  Five people presented material after the break.  The first was Claire Smith, whom I’d met at the Tuesday Writers’ Club once or twice.  She did some competent  light verse.  She was followed by the local Save-the-Trees radical, Louise Ratterman (I think that’s her name), who read just one poem–about a flower.  She read well enough vocally, but hunched up as she read, and didn’t glance up from her poem till the end.  She also wore a pink dress and thick glasses that made her look like a fifth-grader from the 50’s, reciting for a class assignment.

At that point I came on.  I was nervous but got through my first poem (“On the Outskirts of Westport”) without a mishap, and it seemed to go over reasonably well.   I left out a part of my first real line but said the important part of it and got through my second poem, the definition of visual poetry as ampersand cubed pretty well.  I got a laugh when I admitted that some friends had found the definition “not that helpful.”  My “nocturne,” which came next, got the best reception.  It elicited several oooo’s and ahhhs, in fact.  I think I might have over-explained it, but no one seemed to mind.  “The Serpent” got a few chuckles, and my final piece, the haiku about “the raw hues of lights,” did okay, I guess.  I got good applause, and then one of the ladies in charge of the gallery wanted to know what I was doing with my work, whether I was getting it out where people could enjoy it (she seemed to like it quite a bit), so I summarized the American visual poetry scene, as I know it.  Later she made a point of getting my phone number and address in case they had another reading.  I chatted a bit with Claire Smith, then left.  A good experience.

REPRODUCTIONS of the pieces I read or showed here.

The very next day I again was active marketing myself, this time at a fair that began with four guys parachuting into the county auditorium parking lot while the Charlotte High School Band performed.  Once all the parachutists were down, the band marched into the auditorium.  The tables and booths and what not within the auditorium were attractively arranged.   Quite a lot of visimagery on display but none of it even slightly interesting to one of my refined taste, none of it post-impressionism, and hardly any of it even impressionistic.  I met Linda Grotke Salisbury and her husband, with whom I was to share a table.  Nice people.  I left all four of my books plus copies of my seaquence (REPRODUCE) plus a number of my Score Sheets and Score Reviews–and my ampersand piece with them.  I returned at around five.  Linda said she’d sold quite a few of her own books but none of mine.  The author’s presence helped, she said.  I bought a copy of her first book and read a few pieces from it when I got home.  She has a nice breezy, amusing style.  The usual kind of Bombeck et al subjects but well-done and well-packaged.

Around the middle of November, the first excerpt of my book appeared on the front page (and second) of the newsletter John Byrum edited, and my piece on John Bennett’s “The Shirt, the Sheet” was on page three.  Bennett had a review in the issue, too, and Geof’s article on the art strike was reprinted as well.  The highpoint of the issue for me, though, was a reference to me as “a nationally-known poet and critic.”  When I read that to Mother, her response, after a laugh, was, “Not internationally?”  Later, Lee made the same remark when I read the line to the Tuesday Writers’ Club.

Meanwhile, I got a letter from some Who’s Who people saying I had passed some preliminary screening process.  A text about me was included.  I was to correct it and return it.  This I did.  The letter was mainly about an opportunity I was being given to buy a copy of the book for only $120 or something in that range.  I wouldn’t pay $5 for it, even if that guaranteed that I would have an entry in it.  I was annoyed by all this, for the first letter said nothing about a series of screenings, and there was no point in getting corrections to my text until it was certainit would be used.  It’s clearly a scam to get me sufficiently hepped up about being close to getting into the book to order a copy.

Throughout the month I stayed busy printing out (and continuing to revise) the pages of the second volume of Of Manywhere-at-Once.  I noticed quite a few passages that could have been improved but I just didn’t have the time or desire to go through the damned thing yet another time.  At around the middle of the month I had my pages all printed, but had to paste in the illustrations I wanted to use.  Having 100 copies of the book printed would cost around $500, I’d found out.  Plus shipping, which turned out to be a couple of hundred dollars, to my surprise and dismay.

All kinds of little chores had yet to be taken care of, like outlining my pages in blue to make sure the printer got the margins right.  Hence, the month was just about over when I finally was able to package my book and drop it off at the UPS depot.

13 December 1991 was a bad day for me: Annie Stanton called a with the news that Diane Walker had died of a sudden heart attack two weeks previously.  Annie and Diane and I had been particularly close while in Dr. Boston’s independent studies group.)   My Christmas card to Annie had mentioned Diane which made her immediately call me.  I think Diane was about sixty.  In any event, she died a lot too young.  She was the first close friend of mine I’d lost.

On Sunday, 15 December 1991 Diane was still much on my mind but a good (and sympathetic) visit from Mike Kettner provided some relief.  He arrived late, mainly due to my having forgotten that Midway Blvd, one of the two streets my house is on,  is shut down at both ends by construction.  He was here for two and a half hours, though (causing me to miss most of the Giants’ game that I’d planned to watch, which was fortunate, as they were again lousy).  Lots of anecdotes, about such things as the phone-sex business he was involved with for a while, about his turning pacifist during the Vietnam War as a green beret (the subject of a novel he’s trying to peddle) and later hiding out in Canada, his onetime heroin addiction, his meeting jwcurry who is a marijauna junkie (as is–less so, he says–Mike), the literary scene in Seattle, his job as civil service parking lot attendant at the University of Washington in Seattle and his troubles with his boss.  I did a bit of talking, too, about my less interesting life.

A few days later I heard from Jeff, continuing a philosophical discussion we’ve been having, as well as telling me the piece on my work will be in the second issue of his new magazine–and a short review of Of Manywhere-at-Once in a later issue.  He also said nice things about my Apollo poem.

Tuesday  24 December 1991 I put a copy of my book in a package and sent it in for review to the American Book Review.   Nothing came of that, probably because, like most such publications they didn’t then review self-published work.

A week or so later, I sent a copy of Of Manywhere-at-Once to Laurel Speer a fellow  columnist for in hopes she’d comment on it privately, and possibly in her column as well.  I was sure she would, for she’d written many columns about her struggle as a writer.  She did write back briefly about it but said it wasn’t the sort of thing she wrote about in her column or something to that effect.  Oh, well, she wasn’t too bad a poet and writer, but not what I’d call minimally adventurous in either poetry or prose.

Next another vain attempt to get a little publicity, and maybe more, this time from William Dickey, via what I think was a good, amusing short letter in a padded envelope with my Of Manywhere-at-Once.  I had thought several times of sending him the book, in its previous form, mainly due to what I considered  its similarity in several ways to his Self-Interviews and Sorties, and because, what the Hell, he might turn out to be a decent sort.  Anyway, I chose now to send him the book purely on impulse.  Doing it made me feel good, but by mid-morning the day I mailed it went dead on me, I don’t know why.

On  Monday  27 May 1991 My internationalization continued when I threw a copy of my book into an envelope for Christian LaPorte of France, who is interested in visual poetry, among other things.  The next day  I heard from Pete Spence.  He offered to send me a visual poetry show.  Urp.  I’ll see if I can find a place to put it on at.

Two weeks later, my brother Bill telephoned to say he’d gone to see Visualog IV, a show Karl Kempton had curated in California then passed on to Bill Keith for a showing in a town in New York a bit to the north of the Big Apple.  Bill reported enjoying it.  My Shakespeare piece was part of it as well as my pluraesthetic poetry essay (the one the Atlantic form-rejected, I believe).  Bill said the building was nice, the pieces attractively displayed, in good lighting.  There were benches, one of them near my essay, so that people could sit in the bench and read what I’d written.  There were only works by ten or fifteen artists, according to Bill–unless he missed a room or something.  So I guess I was particularly honored by my inclusion.

8:20 P.M.  Thursday  20 June 1991 The mail was vaguely interesting and included a copy of a James Kilpatrick column that had appeared 3 February but which I hadn’t seen.  It had a paragraph about “vizlation.”  Kilpatrick described my rationale for wanting it added to the language pretty well (describing me as “a word-hunter from Port Charlotte, Florida,” but not mentioning my name).  He said he thought it ought to be deported but asked for other nominations, which suggests that he agrees a word for “visual art” would be useful.

9 P.M.  Friday  26 July 1991 The mail was pretty interesting.  I got a letter from Pete Spence denouncing my taxonomizing, and my admiration for Cummings.  He said he would no longer be sending me his visual poetry show.  What an asshole.  (We were mad at each other for a year or two, but I still said good things about his work, which I admired and still do.  I’m not sure when we made up, but we did.  I believe he is the only one in my field I ever had a Major Break-Up with.  Except for Karl Kempton: I have Major Break-Ups with him every other month.   I think he just got into a bad mood when he severed ties with me.  We’re pretty good Internet friends now.

10 P.M.  Thursday  1 August 1991 I got a letter from John Martone in which he (1) thanked me for a very good job on his second RASPbook; (2) said he’d read and very much liked my Manywhere-at-Once book; and (3) invited me to submit something for the little press it turns out he’s running.  That works out to THREE micro-triumphs!  I like (2) best, of course, but hope I can respond to (3).

10 P.M.  Wednesday  7 August 1991 I got a form to fill out from the Who’s Who people, the real ones.  I filled it out.  It will be screened, then if I satisfy their criteria, I will become a Who’s Who of “the South and Southwest.”  I wonder how they selected me to begin with?  I’m sure I won’t pass their second screening but it’s interesting that I got even this preliminary attention.

I also got a nice little catalog of stuff in that Irish mail art exhibit I sent my colored work to some months back.  My contribution was reproduced and looked okay.  Nice to see it in the catalog.

10:30 P.M.  Thursday  8 August 1991 I’ve been feeling pretty good today–not, I hope, because of that Who’s Who letter.  I would hate to think that all my weariness has been due to lack of public recognition, or–if so–that so trivial an occurence as being nominated for inclusion in a book 20,000 others are already in, and which I almost certainly won’t get into this time around could instantly cure it.  But who knows what goes on in the side-zones of my cloddish brain.

3 September 1991  Aa letter from Len Fulton turning down my offer to do columns for his magazine, but saying he’d like to run an slightly extended version of the sample column I’d sent him as a guest editorial.  Sounds okay to me.  I also got a short form letter from some editor wanting a response to Mike Gunderloy’s getting rid of Factsheet Five.

11:54 P.M.  Monday  9 September 1991  I just got off the phone after two and a half hours with David Thomas Roberts, who called me from Mississippi.  We had a good chat about all sorts of things.  He was very complimentary about my writing, and interesting about his own.

23 September 1991  C L Champion accepted the visual poem I’d sent him, so that was a plus, and he sounds bright and suitably enthusiastic about the right things

8:30 P.M.  Friday  27 September 1991 I did have one long phone call, though,  Surllama called me.  Turns out he’s a 21-year-old by the name of Kevin.  Seemed a nice kid, and very interested in micro-press publishing.  Wants to do his own magazine.  We talked for a little over two hours and he’s going to drop in for a visit next Thursday.  He’s not very literary but interesting.

9 P.M  Thursday  3 October 1991  Kevin-slash-Surllama, as he now calls himself, was over from 2:30 till 4 or so.  He’s rather striking-looking, with hair that’s almost white, and blue eyes.  Five eight, I guess.  He seems rather narrow in his focus but amiable enough.  He now wants to go ahead with a mail art show and I helped him with a collage for the flyer he’s going to send around.  I said I’d make a hundred copies for him.  I got little hint that he has too much in common with me esthetically.  Scatology and sex and violence, he likes, but also unusual juxtapositions of word and/or images.  Probably doesn’t have much literary background but is fairly literate.  By the time he left (I told him I had things to do with my mother at four and so would have to “close shop” then), I had another one of my headaches–due to social pressure?

On Saturday  9 February 1991 a double-letter arrived, with messages from both Crag and his wife Laurie.  Crag disappointed me by not having read the essay on short poems I had sent him, but Laurie made up for it by accepting two poems I’d sent for inclusion in her issue of Score, to follow Crag’s.  Crag’s main matter was finding out if I’d help him co-publish an issue of Score to be devoted to Austrian visual poetry.  He used four of my pieces I found out a month or so later–and the one by Virginia Hlavsa I sent him, which made me happier than his acceptance of my things.  I’m a jerk in many ways, but I really do enjoy getting the work of others I admire a showing as much or more than getting my own accepted.

A literary note: I rewrote the first stanza of my sonnet out of adolescence, dropping the hitherto sacred “underspell” in order to allow a new rhyme that in turn allows for a smoother flow, I hope.  I’m not sure if I improved the poem, and have been feeling uncertain about “anthem-skyed,” too.  I attribute the latter to my general feeling of unkk, however–and a need for a vacation from my sonnets.  I wish I could get into some new textual poem.

Two days later I was working again on volume two of what I was referring to as “my poetixetera book,” Of Manywhere-at-Once. The lay-out.  From 17 through 25 February 1991 I fine-tuned the book.  Among the changes was my removal of my characterization of colleges as “conformity-validation centers.”  I liked it but needed to cut down the size of a paragraph so it would fit on its page, so . . .

March 1991 began with another of my futile attempts to get somewhere careerwise, this time by trying for help from the Charlotte County Arts and Humanities Council, of which I, either on my own or as a representative of the Tuesday Writers’ Group was a member of.  Whichever, it got me into an open meeting.  I met a few nice people, including the two main people, the executive director and the chairman.  I  seemed to go over well, especially when it came my turn to introduce myself to the gathering and I described the Runaway Spoon Press as having published people from all over the world, then paused before confessing that that meant that I’d published a couple of guys from Canada, which got a big laugh.  I hadn’t meant to say I’d published people all over the world–I was probably thinking of Kaldron or Mimi’s show–but I saved myself with the ad lib.  About twenty people attended the meeting, none of them avant garde–or probably aware of its existence.

About a week later, I found out that another career move had thunked: an essay I’d written on pluraesthetc poetry and was sure would entertain ordinary readers came back from the Atlantic Monthly with a form rejection slip.  “When will I learn?” I asked myself in my diary.

A couple of weeks after that I got an ad from its editor, David Detrich, for a new magazine called, yes, Innovations.  This was of particular personal interest because it was billed in advance as something Major, and I’d had a visual poem accepted for it and an essay on the work of Doris Cross that I thought Extremefully Good.    Karl Kempton had gotten me into it.  We thought we’d get paid for our contributions, but not it looked like we wouldn’t even get free contributors’ copies.   By then Karl had gotten a copy of the magazine, managing as co-editor to cop a freebie.  He wrote me of his disappointment with it.  Lots of typoes, and poorly organized.  One of its errors was the attribution of a work by Doris Cross to me!  It was supposed to go with my article on her, but didn’t.  I could only hope Detrich hadn’t mangled my text too badly.

The day I heard from Karl about Innovations, I packaged some visual poems for Pete Spence’s exhibition, too, which I mention to show what an International Bigshot I was by then as a poet, Pete being an Australian.  About that time I sent off a Poem poems to Geof, who would be publishing the first non-self-published more-than-a-few-pages chapbook of my stuff.

Geof had become by then my chief correspondent and otherstream friend.  he often used stuff of mine in his Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage.  My “whomb” appearing in an issue of that devoted to pwoermds around this time.  Jonathan Brannen’s “laugnage” was, too.  It was my favorite pwoermd in the issue–after not thinking it much at all for several hours (me, who wrote the definitive study of the use of n’s as u’s, and vice-versa, in Manywhere-at-Once book and elsewhere!)   Another I liked was Geof’s “li’ve,” though I wasn’t not sure what it was doing–and still aren’t.

Early in June I learned I was getting mostly threes from those responding to Mike G.’s survey, so will apparently keep my position with Factsheet Five.  I was afraid I’d get a lot of ones, meaning that the rater thought my column should be dumped.  I think the scale was one to five.  I would most like to have gotten 30% 5’s and 70% 1’s.  That anyone would give me less than a 3 considering I was covering a slice of the scene no one else was seems disgusting to me, but that’s the way most people are.  Pander to my interests, the hell with anybody else’s.

On Shakespeare’s birthday in 1991 my mail was sparse (and as I typed that in 2010, I remembered vividly how extremely important the mail was for me back then) included a copy of Innovations–with no cover letter–from Detrich.  A nice package but the contents weren’t too hot.  Detrich supplied a really vague and stupid over-view (in which, among other things, he said that a conversation he’d had with Marvin Sackner convinced him that visual poetry was important, or something to that effect).   Mediocrities like him need to be told by people they consider certified what’s good, what’s not; they can’t figure it out themselves.  And they are the ones in charge of the surface of our culture.

Getting back to Innovations, Harry Polkinhorn’s overview of Latin American visual poetry was barely more than a list of names.  Karl’s essay on typology was in my view worthless–mainly because he didn’t comment on my work in the field, and no one who knows my work in the field can responsibly ignore it in a discussion of typology and taxonomy in visual poetry.  Detrich mangled Karl’s “ensemble,” a visual poetry sequence I consider one of Karl’s best works.  What Detrich did was scatter the frames (though keeping them in order), and putting karl’s name at the bottom of each one.  As a result, they lost all flow as a sequence, and they only work as a sequence.  My poem looked okay.  So did my essay, though I haven’t yet read it through.  When I later did, I found a section hopelessly screwed up, a paragraph of more dropped–from somewhere in the middle of a paragraph to somewhere in the middle of a later paragraph.

An essay by jwcurry was okay but I’d seen it before and felt he could have done better in spots.  There were some nice pieces here and there but it could have been done so much better.  And  Detrich has a very blurry mind, it would seem.  The magazine comes across as just a hodgepodge rather than something pinning down current otherstream poetry that it could have been, and Detrich led us to believe it would be.  He did charge me for my copy–a fairly high amount, as I remember.  As you would expect, he went from this “achievement” to a place on the editorial board of some mainstream magazine whose name I forget.

A highlight for me of 1991 was Mimi Holmes’s 1″ by 1″ show which I guest-curated at our local library, as previously mentioned.  It came off  on Friday 26 April 1991.   Nancy Razposa, the highly supportive head librarian (whose name I no doubt mispelled), has already called one newspaper and expects that I’ll be interviewed about the show on Monday.  I wasn’t interviewed that Monday, but almost three weeks later a reporter for the News Press (aka Charlotte AM) got hold of me and we agreed to meet at the library so I could walk him through the exhibit.  His name was Mike, and he arrived at the library accompanied by a photographer named Kevin.   Both young, and nice.  Naturally, the library was closed, it being Thursday morning, but we got Nancy to let us in, and the interview went okay.  I wasn’t very up, though, and don’t think I was very eloquent or informative.  But it looks like a reasonably good story will hit the newstands Tuesday.

Both Mike and Kevin seemed to find the show interesting–as possible later participants in mail art.  After my interview, I attended another affiliates meeting of the arts and humanities council.  It went okay.  I even talked, asking for suggestions as to how our writers’ club might take advantage of the arts festival coming up in October (with readings was the main suggestion,
and not a bad one).  I grabbed a copy of the latest newsletter and found that my blurb about the mail art show had gotten into it, which was nice.

The newsaper interview finally appeared Wednesday  22 May 1991 in the Charlotte AM.   It was a good one, albeit necessarily superficial.  Nice picture of me, too.  Mike Podolsky wrote it and Kevin Moloney was the photographer.  At around noon I went through the rain to the AM offices to buy copies but only six were available, so I had to clean out a couple of dispensers.  I had bought 3 from a convenience earlier this morning, and ended having bought 22 copies.   I wanted to mail copies to participant.

I guess the show was up about a month.  I do remember that the newspaper story came too late to mean much in so far as publicity was concerned.  I fear the show was not too popular.  I left free hand-outs describing the show for anyone who wanted one.  Only a handful did, and only one person answered  the questionnaire I left for feedback.  Shouldda had some flamingo pictures in the show.  No visual arts show in the county neglects flamingos.

Note, I’m not posting my chapters in the order they’ll be in when I publish this book, just randomly as I come across material I think will make a chapter–or across an already written chapter.  This chapter returns to my diary excerpts starting with one from a Tuesday late in October 1990.

A lady from the school system visited today’s writers’ group meeting for a while, too.  She had talked to Nell about having members of our club give talks to local high school English classes and/or creative writing clubs.  She left before I could talk with her.  I’m fairly interested in participating.  I think it’d do me good to give a talk to a creative writing club.  I now tend to think nothing much will come of it.  The lady seemed very nice but I would have thought she’d have talked to us rather than just listened if she were serious.  (Nothing ever came of this.)

Wednesday  24 October 1990  was a Red-Letter Day for me: 2 copies of the latest Kaldron arrived from Karl, and two of my visual poems were in it, “Streetscene” and “Homage to Shakespeare.”  Excellent issue, as I had already decided before finding that I’d been included in it.   A few days later I heard from Jake Berry that he had decided to use “otherstream” as the adjective of choice to describe the kind of work he and others like him do. This word did catch slightly on.  I don’t think it’s much used anymore.  Nonetheless, it’s the only one of my coinages that has made it into even minimal use by the general public.

A few weeks later I wrote a letter to Bruce Bawer, a reviewer for The New Criterion to whom I sent a copy of my book, mainly because he spoke of teaching a course devoted to the sonnet in his last piece for the New Criterion.   THE LETTER, I BELIEVE WAS ABOUT WILLIAMS’S RED WHEELBARROW.  I eventually wrote about out exchange and about the poem but (naturally) can’t find what I wrote, which I wanted to insert here.  Hence, all the caps: they are to remind me to connect this with the red wheelbarrow stuff when I finally get it into my book.

Friday  21 December 1990  I glanced at Manywhere to get an idea of how much rewriting I’d have to do for a second edition.  I didn’t find out, but in the process I started re-writing, spending twenty minutes or so on each of  the first three chapters.  They seemed quite good to me.  Just one or two spots that needed clarification.  But the chapters did seem on a higher level than I thought they were when I was writing them.  In other words, they aren’t for the average reader at all.  I had hoped they might work for such a reader, at least in spots.  I now see no way of reaching such readers with the book.  It is for the cultured.  But I still want to simplify it substantially–to make it all for cultured non-specialists instead of in part for the cultured specialist only.  I’m enthusiastic at the moment about succeeding in that.  Certainly the first three chapters shouldn’t give any intelligent cultured reader any problems.

I concentrated on getting together a second edition of my book over the next few days, finishing my revision on the first day of 1991.  Here are some of the comments I made about the revision in my diary as I worked on it:

The paragraph about Pound’s opinion of  meter gave me a lot of trouble.  I wanted to redo it pretty thoroughly but got so tangled up with the rewrite that I ended hardly changing it at all.

23 December 1990: I plowed through six more chapters of my book.  I’m now satisfied that all but the last are about as good as I can make them.  The last is close to that, but is very long so I’m sure there are a few mistakes in it I missed.

30 December 1990  I got myself going just enough to try to fix up my equaphor chapter, which I expected to be the hardest to get right.  Well, I did pretty well on it, and kept going, taking care of the next two chapters as well.  One of them was easy–simply a matter of entirely deleting it.  The other was not all that easy, but not terribly difficult, either.  It was the one with the Klee analysis in it.  That analysis is now the only thing in it.  I’m feeling quite good about the book now.  I think I’ve gotten it better.  Certainly, it is simpler, and it ought to go more smoothly.  The next problem to be solved in the insertion of my new sonnet material.  Then I just have to simplify the parts concerning pluraesthetic poetry and I’ll be done.  I doubt that I have more than a full week-end’s amount of work left to do, so I should finish it before my birthday, which would be nice.

31 December 1990  I was eager to work on my book and did some good work on it for an hour or two in the morning, but got tired and left it till 3:30 or so when I worked on it for another hour or so.  As a result I now have it organized as I want it, with passages about my work on the sonnet coming more often than they did, and structuring the whole better.  I still need to revise the final six chapters, the last one needing an especially large amount of work.  I am convinced the final product will be quite good, though.  But I’m tired of the book again so probably will leave it for a while before doing the last part of my rewrite.  I’ll be terribly disapointed, however, if I don’t have it done before my birthday.

Next day: I worked on my book on and off right up to a little while ago and finished it.  I didn’t reduce the terminology as much as I’d hoped to but got rid of probably half the neologies it had before.  The glossary now has 72 terms in it, 30 of them my coinages.  The book itself is slightly less than 57,000 words long, or about two thousand shorter than it was before.  So it has to be a smoother read.  The problem is that it will still probably seem over-arcane to most readers, even intelligent ones.  At this point I don’t see what more I can do.  But maybe I’ll think of something.