Column 112 — July/August 2012
The Otherstream 19 Years Ago, Part 2
Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2012
Poeticks.com, Webmaster: Bob Grumman http://www.poeticks.com/bob-grummans-small-press-review-columns/june-1993
I’m pleased that you’re reading my column, whoever you are, but–wow–would I love it if you would let me know what you think of it. You could do it with an anonymous (or signed) post to my blog, address above, or to me at [email protected]. Sorry to pester you like this, but in the almost twenty years I’ve been doing this column, I think only one person neither a friend or relative of mine has ever written me or Small Press Review about it. I truly believe I could improve the column if I had some kind of idea what people want from it–aside from consideration of their own poems and publications.
One question in particular I’d like feedback on is an idea I’ve been considering: doing some interviews of other people in the world of poetry. Whom would you like an interview of most, if I started interviewing? What would you like to know about the interviewee? Would you yourself like me to interview you?
I have lots of other things I’d like to find out from you, but I think it’s time for me to get into my main topic, which is again a trip into the past. In my last column, I wrote about my first SPR column; in this one, I’ll breeze through my next three.
The first of these three was about two zines that should by now be on English majors’ required reading lists, or at least on their lists of recommended outside reading. I doubt either means anything to anyone but those who had poems in them, if even to them, however. I’m speakng of stained paper archive, #1 April, 1993, edited by Gustave Morin, and Found Street, #2 Spring, 1993, edited by Larry Tomoyasu.
In my column I went into detail about several of the pieces in stained paper archive. Sample: “one piece, by Greg Evason, features the image of a fork without its handle–but, isolated (and black), it takes on eerie tooth-resonances (sharp black teeth going up, blunt white ones descending), and hints of archaeology, with its emphasis on bone-fragments. It also suggests something of the power of Motherwell’s imagery. Sharing the page with the fork is the near-word, ‘nife.’”
In what I wrote abut Found Street I highlighted two minimalist pieces by Brooks Roddan. One consisted of the bar code, price and other commercial data dot-matrixed onto the record jacket of a recording of a Bach standard (“the Goldberg Variations”) by Glenn Gould. Its title said it all: “The Genius of Glenn Gould.” Roddan’s other piece was even simpler: just an upright black rectangle. But, from its title, “Rebellion,” we know that the rectangle is also an I, isolated from the many but squarely, resolutely, and broad-shoulderedly committed to its cause. I make a point of mentioning Roddan because he’s one more highly talented artist I wrote about once, then (apparently) never again.
Tomoyasu himself contributes a fine full-color cover drawing called “End Art,” in which a Shahnesque man is shown running out of a mixture of music-score and verbal text with a grandfather-clock/coffin under one arm. Elsewhere in the issue is a typical Tomoyasu illuscriptation consisting of the words “Jesus Door” and the image of an upside-down headless doll. There are many other intriguing works in this issue of Found Street, including a droll pair of cartoon faces (or awkward mittens, or cow udders, or who-knows-what) by well-known mail artist, Ray Johnson; the two faces or whatever are identical except that one is labeled, “Ray Johnson,” the other “Jasper Johns.”
I spent all of my third column on John M. Bennett’s Lost & Found Times, #31. Along the way I got into a discussion of “the many difficult-seeming poems in the issue. Some of these seem dada for the sake of being dada, and I sympathize with those who would reject them out of hand. But I’m not convinced that any of them is dada only. What they have that such poems lack are two or more of the following: (1) flow; (2) an archetypal hum; (3) a wide range of vocabulary and imagery; and (4) a low cliche-to-fresh-phraseology ratio. By ‘flow’ I mean mostly such old-fashioned qualities as rhythm and melodiousness; by ‘archetypal hum’ I mean intimations of some large universal archetype like Spring, Ocean, or the Mating Instinct.
Take, for instance, the very first poem in LAFT, Michael Dec’s, ‘Fish Nut.’ Its first two lines, ‘A bicycle in paradise – blue vinyl boots a fluorescent ceiling/ nails popping out,’ indicate a level beyond raw dada. It at least flirts with archetypality (due to the reference to paradise), and it flows pleasantly through b-sounds, l-sounds, s-sounds. It’s without either cliches or unusually fresh phraseology but its vocabulary and imagery start vivid and widen as the poem continues–and it eventually makes sense as an evocation of Macbethan futility, its final two lines being, ‘The tomorrow and tomorrow/ Think yrself into a corner.’” As I look back on this, I don’t know how persuasive I was, but I tried! At the very least, I showed a way of experiencing a poem that can be productive.
Nice to find I also wrote up a collage by Malok that was in LAFT. Twenty years later I’m happy to say he’s still active . . . but unhappy to add that he’s still ridiculously unknown.
My fourth column was taken up entirely with Core: A symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry, a collection of responses by 60 visual poets to a questionnaire sent by John Byrum and Crag Hill to 200 visual poets throughout the world. I’m pleased to report that almost all of those answering the questionnaire, like Karl Kempton, Guy R. Beining, Jake Berry, Kathy Ernst, Geof Huth, Richard Kostelanetz, are still active.
My favorite answers were by Andrew Russ, who–under a pseudonym–defined poetry as a capital I, and visual poetry as a dotted capital I, then answered the rest of the questionnaire with various arrangements of i’s–and eyes.
Sad to say, Core seems not to have had much effect. It will one day be considered an important resource for scholars when they finally tire of writing about long-dead poets and their clones.
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