Column 113 — September/October 2012
The Otherstream 19 Years Ago, Part 3
Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 9/10 September/October 2012
Poeticks.com, Webmaster: Bob Grumman http://www.poeticks.com/bob-grummans-small-press-review-columns/june-1993
My fifth column (March 1994) for Small Press Review (actually it was for Small Magazine Review, which for a short time was separate from SPR) concerned a Small Press Review guest editorial of mine that had appeared a year before in SPR about the number of different “schools” of poetry then extant in America. I listed some, then invited others to send me names of schools I’d missed. Two others wrote me complimentary, encouraging letters–but no names of schools. My column was a rant about the situation (which continues). Here’s one paragraph from it:
“That’s about it. Dana Gioia, on the other hand, got so many responses to the Atlantic article he wrote a year or two ago on the state of American poetry that he can’t even begin to reply to them, or so he claims. Since Gioia’s appreciation of poetry stops at around 1900, and even his academic knowledge of it is only up to 1960, I conclude from the opposite receptions given our articles even taking into consideration the relatively large circulation of the Atlantic) that the poetry community in America has almost no interest in poetry, or even mere discussion of poetry, that uses techniques not common by the fifties or earlier.”
Eighteen years ago, and the situation hasn’t changed! To illustrate it back then, I turned to an issue of Poetry USA just out which was devoted to just about the entire spectrum of contemporary American poetry. About Mike Basinski’s, “Odalisque No. 4,” I told how he circles an O with twenty words containing a v–or V, many of them not normally spelled with v’s–”vords,” for instance. This would undoubtedly seem a silly game to Gioia and his Atlantic readers, but for me it was (yes) thrilling to experience a ‘down’ sharpened to ‘dovn,’ a ‘water’ turned Germanic and fatherly as ‘vater,’ and such unmodified words as ‘wives’ and ‘aggressive’ as suddenly alien objects, speared into or downward. Or, best of all, to find between ‘wildevness’ and ‘festival,’ and opposite “wives,” the wonderfully expanded ‘luVst.’” (See my blog, entry 7.) Then I lamented that slickzines like the Atlantic would no doubt “continue forever to ignore publications like Poetry USA,” as, of course, they have.
In my next column, I spent some time on Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes–because he had an entry in it on me–as “a major critic of avant-garde American poetry,” no less! So far as I know, Kostelanetz’s dictionary failed to make much of a splash, but Schirmers around ten years later published a much fancier edition of it (that I contributed several entries to), which was an advance of sorts. I wrote some editor of a new edition-in-progress of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics recommending he check it for data available nowhere else. He didn’t write back. Their edition has just hit the market. I’m curious to find out if it covers any aspect of poetry discussed in Kostelanetz’s encyclopedia. Visual poetry, yes, for it has covered it (poorly) in previous editions. Infraverbal Poetry, perhaps, although not by that name. Mathematical poetry. No way on earth.
I went on from Kostelanetz’s encyclopedia to another work just out then by him, WORDWORKS. I complained about its not yet having been reviewed in either the academic or the popular media, despite its being a landmark collection of Kostelanetz’s most clearly major works and part of a series that includes collections by such certified poets as John Logan, William Stafford, W.D. Snodgrass and Carolyn Kizer. I think I may be the only one even now who has reviewed WORDWORKS. Nor has anyone, to my knowledge, written a book-length critique of all his work yet. Which is disgusting. Even more disgusting is the fact that, so far as I know, no such book has been published about any genuinely otherstream poet. I’m too poor myself to take on such a project with no chance to make anything from it–WHERE’S MY PATRON?!?!
After abandoning Richard without the 70,000-word treatment his work deserves, I discussed three otherstream microzines of the time, Texture (language poetry plus a commentary on Gertrude Stein by Julia Spahr that didn’t work for me), The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee (which I described as having “a wide selection of collages, and visual and electrojunctive poems–what the latter are I now have no idea), and Grist On-Line, the first online zine I’d come across with otherstream material (poems by Andrew Gettler and Jurado, neither of whom I’ve seen work by since–but Grist is still online). Its editor, John Fowler, set up an electronic poetry bookstore, I see from my column. I had books at it, happy to get in on the ground floor of such an enterprise. Nothing whatever came of that, needless to say.
My columns for the next two issues of SPR had to do with work at what I then considered “the Literary Cutting-Edge.” Alas, except for interesting computer- and Internet-related poetry, it remains the literary cutting-edge. I tackled two issues of Peter Ganick’s microzine, A.bacus, in one column and an anthology Peter’s press published, The Art of Practice in the other. Amusingly, the poetry in these was mostly by the langpo crowd that my vispo crowd–most of it, anyway, including me–was on bad terms with, but I not only gave my best critical attention to it, but was positive about it! I do believe I can be objective as a critic, and focus on whatever poem I’m analyzing, putting aside petty rivalries. And I didn’t actively dislike anyone in the vispo crowd, just wasn’t happy about the way some of them left us out of shows and anthologies they might have included us in, as we included them in ours at times, and–more important–failed to write about us, even as little as I wrote about them.
Anyway, in my encounter with the issues of A.bacus and the anthology, I did what I considered (and still consider) cutting-edge explications of poems I considered genuine language poetry. Not now though, for I’ve come to the end of what I consider my allotment of column-space.
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