POETICKS

EXPERIODDICA

Back to SkyViews

SkyViews, Vol.3, No.4/5, January 1989.
Edited by Phoebe Bosche and James Maloney
92 pp; Box 2473, Seattle WA 98111. $5.

‘blog and Writing Sample. Jack Saunders.
2014; 32 and 16 pp. Pa; Garage Band Books,
4809 E. 3rd Street, Parker FL 32404-7050. np.

www.thedailybulletin.com

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I was going to devote this column to the rest of my review of SkyViews, the zine from 25 years ago I wrote of in my last column, but something important intervened: I got two collections of writings in the mail from none other than . . . Jack Saunders!  Jack is still, I’m happy to say, fighting to break into the BigTime after several million self-published words by him and another few thousand published by others about him–including MINE.  Over the past ten or fifteen years, I’ve had a few sightings of Jack and knew he had a blog, even visited it, but I wasn’t really keeping up with him. For one thing, Jack cut down on his mailings after going north to take some new job.  And I was tripping all over myself in new endeavors too much to be able to keep with almost anybody else–thanks in great part to the Internet’s facilitation of easy, depthfree access to ten times as many people as the socially-deprived people before 1970 or so had.

His ‘blog has a quotation from a speech of  Florida governor Rick Scott as its epigraph: “We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state.”  Scott goes on to say he wants to spend money on “giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees,” so they can get jobs.  Just to give you an idea of what people like Jack (back in Florida now) and me are up against.  Jack brings us up to date on his life in ‘blog: ” . . . social security.  It’s not quite enough to cover (the family) expenses, what with the cost of paper, ink, a web host on the Internet, and the odd pamphlet, now and again.  Side-trips.  Art gallery openings and book fairs.  Postage.  I see that RETRAITE goes on the end of BEAT POET and the two form Tin Box: Report on the Suppression of Jack Saunders’ Work by Unknown Forces. I read Normal Mailer: A Double-Life.  It takes something out of me.  I mean, $50,000 to write ten-to-fifteen thousand words for The Faith of Graffiti.  What is my book if not a paean to mail art.  I quit.  This is it.  I declare my stack over.  No more books.  They aren’t books anyway if nothing happens to them.  They aren’t published.  I don’t get paid to write them.  They aren’t reviewed.  Art for art’s sake–it’s too sad.  Too disappointing.  I’m going to look for a job as a substitute teacher.  I’ll write GET A JOB about being too old for the factories.  I’m a free-lance archaeologist.  A free-lance report-writer.  A locum tenens.  Maybe I’ll call it REPORT WRITER.  Maybe I’ll call it WEBLOG.  Too old for substitute teacher.  Too ornery.  Publish my poems at The Daily Bulletin.  Here, Julius–hold this.”

Mostly short sentences.  Lots or repetition of things he’s said before.  The central . . . focus.  But you certainly get to know him.  And his writings cover a lot besides himself–his Writing Sample, for instance is “A Chronicle of Two Historic Digs and One Archaeological Survey,” as its subtitle has it, and is interestingly detailed about archaeological work from the (unromantic) paean-level.  Reportage, for sure–but so much better than ninety-percent or more of the writing making big buck.

Now to jump around in the art of SkyViews, shunned still by the mainstream, but rather different from Jack’s.  First let me quote two of the fourteen two-line stanzas from Geof Huth’s “viviD”: “th ese/ seseas//s and s/ and s”. Joycean wordgames  I hope Geof will do many more of, although I don’t think he’s done many since this one.

Facing “viviD” is a visiopoetic equivalent of a mobile in homage to the mobile’s originator, Alexander Calder, by Robert Ward.  Among the items hung on it are such texts as “moon  cow/ laughter/ toes/ cobweb/  bone    lollipops” and “brother   sister/ father   mother/      red yellow/ green & blue,” and two glued-in scraps of paper.

Then there’s a gem by Heather Barr, a poet I was briefly in touch with ten or twenty years ago.  It’s called “Safe Sex.”  Here’s its second stanza: “I dreamed last night of disposable men,/ Who are Biodegradable so they won’t clutter landfills./ (This is not a feminist poem – it’s just about sex./ So stay out of my diary, Gloria Steinem.)”  Barr has written a lot of good poems like this one.

I’d no doubt just skimmed the magazine when it first arrived.  Certainly, I had never bothered to read the short stories.  This time I read Mary Catlin’s “On Losing Everything.”  A conventional celebration of love that somehow effectively mixes high drama with telling understatement.  When I looked up Catlin on the Internet, I couldn’t find out much, but a Mary Catlin is still giving readings in Seattle.

Someone I’m wholly unfamiliar with, Grace Dager, has a number of excellently semi-strange drawings in the issue, by the way.  Bill Shively, whom I read and once or twice wrote about as a first-rate Bukowski-type whose poetry was mainly about his experiences in Vietnam has a good one in the issue, “What About the Bananas.”

Last of the works I want to mention may seem minor when described, but is, for me, a masterpiece: Joseph Keppler’s “ll/ov/ee.”  It consists of just two non-words, “loe” and “lve”: spelled downward, side-by-side.   Well, there’s also the rectangle the words are on that’s in someone’s backyard, it looks like.  The reproduction is monochromatic, but the original may well be in color.

At this point, I remember that I was going to write last time about Proper Reviewing, with a demonstration of it.  I certainly haven’t come close to doing that in the above.  Why?  One reason is the absence of attempts at Unexpected Insights that will unexpectedly raise the ability of one or two lucky readers to appreciate poetry forever.  I will now end with an example of such an attempt.  A person encountering “ll/ov/ee” should flow from reading into seeing two incomplete things, each of which has something (a letter) that can complete the other.  There’s more to the poem than that, but a good reviewer should not say too much.
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