Column005 — March 1994
A Bit of a Rant
Small Press Review, Volume 26, Number 3, March 1994
Poetry USA, Spring/Summer ’93. Edited by Jack Foley. About a year ago a guest editorial of mine appeared in Small Press Review. It concerned the number of different “schools” of poetry now extant in America, most of them ignored by the commercial and academic establishments, and themselves ignoring (if not inimical to) all rival schools. I started a list of them and invited others to add to it. My hope was to inspire someone eventually to publish an anthology of poetry that contained specimens of all the varieties of poetry currently being composed in this country–but I would have been content merely to have triggered a little discussion. So far, someone from New Zealand has written to say my list should include found poetry (he’s right), and two other people have offered moral support. 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. More recently, I sounded out the editors of Writer’s Digest on an article I wanted to write on otherstream poetry zines as a break-in market for poets not writing formal poetry or conventional free-verse (this latter representing “non-traditional” poetry for Writer’s Digest). I told them I thought my piece would augment the “otherwise excellent article on poetry markets” that’d been in their magazine a few months before. (Yeah, I have my moments of hypocrisy, too.) That they turned me down didn’t bother me. But I was annoyed by their claim that the kinds of non-traditional poetry I thought they’d neglected “actually . . . were considered” in their article. Of course, no one expects the people in charge of Writer’s Digest to know anything about poetry, or any other form of writing, but it’d be nice if they were a little less smugly certain of their omniscience. Despite these two grave setbacks for the cause of Otherstream Poetry, however, all is not lost, for there is, I am happy to report, an American magazine reaching more than a few dozen readers that is covering just about the ENTIRE poetry spectrum: Poetry USA. The latest issue, which is devoted to “the experimental issue,” contains not only infra-verbal, visual, and mathematical poetry (though no found poetry) but knownstream free-verse, rhymed verse and all kinds of other mixtures and who-knows-whats. There are fine illustrations and collages scattered through it, too, and a group of excerpts from a taped dinner conversation Robert Duncan had with Norman and Virginia Goldstein in 1970. Duncan’s remarks are all decidedly New Age and off-the-wall but often nonetheless insightful and invigorating, not so much about poetry as about being a poet.Rounding out the issue are a number of pertinent quotations on poetics from people like Whitman, Stein, Olson and Gioia (!) and letters-to-the-editor that include a report from Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino about his efforts to smuggle an issue of his unconventional art zine into the recent Whitney Museum Biennial, which was supposed to be devoted to “alternative” art but, although it included magazines, for some reason ignored . . . experioddica.
Among the too-numerous-to-mention-them-all high points of the issue is Michael Basinski’s 4-part “Odalisque” series. In each frame of this a ring of words and near-words surrounds a giant O. The near-word at the top of “Odalisque No. 1″ nicely emonstrates what an infra-verbal technique can accomplish. The near-word is “rammar,” the infra-verbal technique simple defacement, the result a sudden “disconcealment” of a secret (and, to me, strangely enchanting) symmetry, which rattles the reader into full engagement with “grammar,” “ram,” “mar,” and “mirror”–as sounds AND signs, by themselves AND intermingled. In “Odalisqu No. 4,” Basinski circles his O with twenty words containing a v–or V. What makes this interesting is that many of these words wouldn’t normally have a v in them–“vords,” for instance. This would undoubtledly seem a silly game to Gioia, Writer’s Digest, and those who read them, 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, best of all, to find between “wildevness” and “festival,” and opposite “wives,” the wonderfully expanded “luVst.” Basinski also contributes a version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” that lists all of Poe’s words in alphabetical order. This, for me, yields nothing less than the subconscious mind of the story, eerily achieving a narrative interest in its own right as it blends or clashes with what Poe wrote–as in the following passage: “shriek shriek shrieked shrieked shutters silence silence simple since since single single singylarity sleep slept slept slight slight slipped…” or “how how however human” followed by 120 instances of “I.” I was also impressed by the issue’s many excerpts from Jake Berry’s visio-mathematico meta-scientific master-poem, “Brambu Drezi”–and the excellent introduction to it that Jack Foley, the editor-in-chief of Poetry USA, provides. Strong long poems by Ivan Arguelles and Michael McClure are in the issue, as well. How sad that slickzines like the Atlantic and Writer’s Digest will no doubt continue forever to ignore publications like Poetry USA.
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