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.