POETICKS

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Notes From an Anthology Contributor

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 46, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2014

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Shadows of the Future. Edited by Marc Vincenz.
2013; 166 pp. E.book.  Argoist Ebooks.
Downloadable for free.

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Early in 2013 I was invited to write an introduction to an ebook anthology, Shadows of the Future, which I happily accepted.  As is my practice in introductions to poetry collections, I devoted about a third of what I wrote to commentary on various poems in it, to prepare readers for what they’d be in for.  But Jeff Side, the anthology’s publisher, nixed that whole section, so I removed it.  I’m not sure why Jeff opposed it, but probably because he’s one of those who believe a poem should stand on its own, without any need for explanation.  True enough for poems not doing anything that readers haven’t been taught for decades how to appreciate, but not, I believe, for poems like the ones in Shadows of the Future that few readers have yet been taught much about, and the not inconsiderable number of ones (like my visio-mathematical ones I contributed to the anthology) that just about no one has even been taught exist.

In any case, I was abruptly left with some poetry commentary I thought well of but had no venue for (except my obscure poeticks.com blog)–until I remembered this column!  It was just the place for it!  (Praise be to them what’s in charge of SPR,  who don’t never cut nuttin’ of mine!)

Before  getting to what I said about a few of its works, I should say that the anthology’s subtitle is “an anthology of otherstream poetry.” As I put it in my introduction, “otherstream poetry” (a term I coined in the eighties, so consider myself the world’s leading authority on its meaning) is simply “any poetry ignored by the Contemporary American Poetry Establishment,”   I went on in my introduction to define and discuss the latter at some length, quite irreverently.  My aim was to be provocative, but so far (as of this writing, early November), the Contemporary American Poetry Establishment has completely ignored what I wrote, and the rest of the anthology.

Now, for those who are interested in what’s going on in poetry you’ll never find specimens of, or critical discussion about, in publications like  Poetry or the New Yorker, here are some of my excluded thoughts beginning with the title and first few lines of something by the John M. Bennett, whom I consider the most insanely creative otherstream poet on earth (because innovative in dozens of ways, in dozens of different kinds of poems)–as in the following language poem:

I’ve called him “the Jackson Pollock” of poetry because of so many of his poems’ struggled ascent from the reptilian bottom of human feeling into a sub-demotic splatter that eventually coheres into a kind of finally understood momentary but full state of mind.  If you stay with it long enough forebearingly.  Read all of X and you may find a war memory from 1970 tying together the gas in the head above its sprinkled/wrinkled  negative neck with sweaty/eaty rifles and twenty or thirty other details it goes on to speak of, that dwindle at the poem’s end to “just all a ,mot/ ion” With no final period.  You should find a lot else, for Bennett’s poem, like many others in Shadows of the Future is–to understate it–multi-interpretable.

Earlier in the book you will see how Bennett has corrupted Ivan Arguelles in the latter’s “Vergilian,” which is dedicated to Bennett and begins: “towel simpering but minded/ crammed to the silt a libyan/ seal arena’d and ’mptied/ foul o’er the buskin’s weed . . .  Later David Tomaloff builds an intriguing poem from texts by Bennett.

Similarly hard (at first) to follow is editor Vincenz’s “The Uh-Huh” which seems to me to track life (with a kind of mordant wit) in seven two-line stanzas from “The demystified./ The wrack and ruin.” to “The Uh-Huh./ The consequence of love.”  Or is it love that is tracked?  Read it, and decide out for yourself.  As I just put it, there’s a good deal of multi-interpretability in this book.

Perhaps my favorite poem in the anthology is completely mainstream, albeit by Jack Foley, who is most often in the sound-poetry or performance-poetry part of the otherstream.  Its title is “Noir.”  “She stared at me the way an empty tin can stares at a cooked peach,” it begins. A wonderful, affectionate parody in verse of the school of detective stories Raymond Chandler, among others, did so well.  Then there’s Larissa Schmailo’s “Oscillation,” which begins, “Cellular grandfather, pity me: once it was understood/ how things were done, how the boiling ferns invited the/ glaciers to come, how the dinosaurs asked to die. . . .”  A compelling bunch of off-thoughts and images on the evolution–astronomical, geological and biological–of the earth.

Marcia Casoly, and “Music Box” by Camille Bacos, are “simply” hued map (I take it as) overlaid with a paratactical poem (or collage of locutions) having to do with women’s combination of fear of and interest in surgery both cosmetic and medical.  A verbalized surgery seems to be plunging through, occasionally occupying, the territory mapped’s female body . . . and/or mind’s interior?

Bacos’s piece is a photograph of part of a somewhat run-down hotel overlaid with a fragment of sheet music that instantly turns the hotel metaphorically into a vividly-lyrical box of remembered music (and all that “music” can connote).

Then there are “Piece,” by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, and “Ascemic,” by Jurgen Schmidt.  The Kervinen is not so much a graphic with an overlay as a graphic with typography added.  A road past a fenced-off dark area is depicted, with some text representing language-in-general, for me, going interestingly down it, the importance of its undertaking (whatever it is) emphasized somehow by a large sign with a 5 on it, and containing about the only colors in the work–arrestingly.

The Schmidt is a drawing (pen & ink or black magic marker) of a simple landscape dominated by a temple that points to heaven, and seems to climb into it, cheered on by a huge-lettered text in a language I can’t read (and accompanied by other texts drawn in smaller lettering in the same–middle Eastern–language?

I end hoping this fine collection of artworks will be the one that finally gets the gatekeepers to acknowledge the value, or at least existence, of the otherstream, but I rather doubt it will.

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