POETICKS

My Summer Vacation, Continued

Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 1, January 1995

 
 
 
     U-Direct, August, 1994; 42 pp.; Mary Kuntz Press,
     Box 476617 Chicago IL 60647. $4.

     Blaster, By Al Ackerman. 288 pp.; 1994; Pa; Feh! Press,
     200 E. 10th Street New York NY 10003. $12.95.

     The Big Schmooze, by Crowbar Nestle. 24 pp.; 1994; Pa;
     Popular Reality Press, 135 W. High St. Jackson MI 49203.
     $500.

     Chip’s Closet Cleaner, #11, Fall 1994;
     edited by Chip Rowe. 24 pp.; Chip Rowe,
     826 Aspen St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20012. $4.

For a while it looked like I was going to have trouble reporting on my August visit to the Big Schmooze at the Crowbar Summer Residence in Jackson, Michigan. I felt duty-bound to posterity to do justice to it, even if it took me ten columns–but I wasn’t sure my editor would approve of that. Fortunately, I’m now off the hook, for the Reverend Crowbar himself has published a pamphlet that covers the Schmooze in full, and includes numerous photographs of the participants, several in color. (Unfortunately, the reverend lost almost sixteen million on Wall Street after the recent republican victories, so had to jack the price of this “collector’s item” up from $462 to $500.)

Meanwhile, thanks mainly to my review of it, Blaster is about to slip past Calvin Coolidge’s Favorite Potato-Chip Dip Recipes into 6,094th place on the NY Times best-seller list. A second edition of 14 copies is planned.  Seriously, kids, be sure to get a copy of it–it really is the funniest book out there (for those of you who are as sophisticatedly above gentility as yours truly, that is). 

Okay, now on to the “First Annual Underground Press Conference” that I attended in Chicago on 13 and 14 August. It was somewhat screwily organized–as my being on a panel devoted to “marketing and distribution of small press publications” might indicate. (I introduced myself by presenting one of my poems, then claiming that giving one’s work a spiffy name like “infra-verbal poetry” was a terrific marketing device–which had the intended result: no one bothered me during the question & answer part of the proceedings.)  But the other people on the panel I was on, which was chaired by Cheryl Townsend, and included Ashley Parker Owens, whom I’d just met at the Big Schmooze, made up for me, and the other panels, which were on zine and chapbook publishing, the information superhighway, censorship, the underground press and cultural politics, and the role of university libraries as  collectors of underground publications, were well-received. I especially wish I could have attended the last of these to hear Mike Basinski describe SUNY, Buffalo’s policy of trying to buy just about everything the micro-press puts out. (If you’re a micro-publisher, you might want to write him at University Libraries, 420 Capen Hall, Buffalo NY 14260.)

Also on this latter panel was Paul Hoover, the editor of the newest Norton anthology, this one of “Postmodern” American Poetry. I wasn’t aware that he was around till the conference was over, so didn’t get to ask him why his collection, which he claims consists of “the avant-garde poetry of our time,” stops
with jump-cut and altered- syntax poetry, and includes such long-standard plaintext poetries as the beats’ and NY-school’s, but ignores, even in the afterword, such specimens of the avant-garde as visual and infra-verbal poetry. I’d also like to have heard *his opinion of Marjorie Perloff’s back-cover blurb, “Here at last is the ‘other’ American poetry written during the past half-century.” Blah. On the other hand, I’m pleased that a number of good poets like Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Padgett will now be reaching a wider public because of their poetry’s inclusion in Hoover’s anthology.

Not least of the positive values of the conference was the (premiere) issue of U-Direct Batya Goldman and Gabriele Strohschen put out to accompany the festivities. Much of interest in it, including an essay on Paul Weinman’s White Boy poems by Basinski; a report on police harassment of an anarchist trying to attend a poetry reading by the victim, Joffre Stewart; and a piece on black liberation radio and the attempts of the government to shut it down by Ron Sakolsky. I hope this periodical keeps going, for its coverage of the micro-press and related topics is first-rate.

The best thing about the conference for me, though, was simply meeting all the people I did, including Chip Rowe. I single out Rowe, whom I’d never previously heard of, because he provided me ith my biggest thrill of the conference by giving me a copy of his zine, Chip’s Closet Cleaner and pointing out that it contained a reprint of an essay of mine on infra-verbal poetry that had been in Poetic Briefs. This kind of reprinting without permission would be frowned upon in the mainstream, but it is the greatest sign of esteem in OUR stream (and reminds me of the non-monetary way that scientists gain status through what they publish). Rowe, by the way, got a review of the conference into the October issue of Factsheet Five, along with an equally excellent report on how the mainstream press has been covering the world of zines of late (even TIME having now run a characteristically superficial and misinformed story on the phenomenon). I am pleased that F5 is finally running features again. And with that observation, I have once again come to the end of my allotted space.