Column072 — July/August 2005
Not To Be Found Again
Volume 37, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2005
Lost & Found Times,
#53-54, March 2005. Edited by John M. Bennett.
92pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods.,
137 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214. $10.
The final issue, or double-issue, of Lost & Found Times deserves more discussion than I had space for in my last column, so I’ve decided to devote this entire column to it. Let me begin with a poem in it by someone new to me, Steven Paschall. Names New to me have always popped up in Lost & Found TImes. It has been a leader, probably the leader, in introducing new names to the public. This issue has a plethora of long-known names, too: Richard Kostelanetz, Me, Sheila E. Murphy, S. Gustav Hagglund, LeRoy Gorman, Hugh Fox, John Grey–let me stop there to say that I remember Grey as a fine plaintext poet, but not very burstnorm, yet he begins a poem here, “ye ow puddle beef” and ends it with, “*r^A^Xi r-f- &.”–to indicate the effect Lost & Found Times has had on at least one poet. This, needless to say, is mainly due to its editor John M Bennett, and his partner, Al Ackerman.
Ackerman? What can I say? One of his many pieces here is a hack of a Bennett/Leftwich poem which begins, “A minder nuts sport can be viewed in two ways: / -exclude bronze nature/ -‘explode your clothes.’” If you don’t realize the importance of the quotation marks around “explode your clothes,” you’re missing a fifth or more of what’s going on in the poem. Bennett? The issue is full of his stuff.
At first, I was going to cover just one or two of his poems, but there were so many I finally decided simply to list all the new or semi-new (and certainly unmainstream) devices he uses in them: (1) wrong-sized, wrong-font letters three places into each line of “TAH” to vertically spell, “rietoietpk,” an anagram for “riet poetik” but much more, including “kite,” partly because an isolated k is next to the r at the top of “rietoietpk”; (2) “screen drip” spelled a letter at time up and (more or less) forward, from the first line of “kcolf,” to form a rectangle of lettering, except at the bottom where more weird things happen, and then down and forward until it is just above the line two words from where it started for who knows what reason (but many possible ones hover just beyond my mind); (3), a combination (done with Jim Leftwich) of scrawled lettering that suggests some kind of fracturing, and. smudged irregular cut-outs from (apparently) newspapers; (4} the frequent use of words spelled one or more times forward, and once or more times backward as in “.Dellecnac” and “Rudder,” a poem of Bennett’s I discuss in my contribution to the issue; (5), dots and/or umlauts over and inside various letters in a text with straight-edged margins, and two large circles overlain on the text, one to the right and more off the text than on it, the other the same to the left (this one done with Jessy Kendall)–I can’t articulate the point of this but think it has something to do with a mix of perspectives that almost seems a kind of opti-sophical illlusion in which two opposed ideas come into and retreat out of focus. . . (6) a Bennett frame of Rs half rectilinear, half irregular, around what looks in this tiny reproduction to be a mad finger painting (to which Thomas L. Taylor has contributed one of his signature Handprints, and Jim Leftwich done who knows what)–and (7 through 77), but I can’t spend my whole column on them!
So, to “*alternate version if color abilities are unavailable*,” the poem by Steven Paschall that I was going to begin this column with but got side-tracked from. It’s a warped mirror poem, the last line mirroring the first, the second-to-last mirroring the second, etc., lots of parentheses, and very ragged margins left, as well as right. In other words, Bennettian version of Cummings. Again, it’s hard quickly to articulate why this is effective, but there’s a shimmer to it conventional poems don’t have (aIthough, yes, you traditionalists out there [as if any traditionalists would be reading th!i!s!], conventional poems have virtues this one hasn’t.
Many great drawings by Ackerman are here. (Have I mentioned him before?) In the vein of Ackerman, Haddock has a 5-panel comic strip on how to “Swell Yr. Nuts to 10x their normal size!” (Wait, could that be Ackerman? He does use a lot of pseudonyms, but not John M. Bennett, whatever Dan Gioia has said.) But there is more than one hilarious tale by Rupert Wondolowski in the Ackerman vein in the issue, and I know he’s a real person!
Reed Altemus guests in one or more poems of Bennett’s. Pulp-Collagist Supreme Malok is here again, this time with a work that, among other things, features an inducement to “Teach your mouse INVISIBLE VALUE” partly under a very happy adult male face. John M.’s wife, C. Mehrl, joins in, as well–with a fascinating hack of a Washington Post article about Kerry in which words are deleted but nothing (except the title) changed. It begins, “But it turned out to tee up the foot and to/ take lumps for his various hard love,” and ends, “Kerry said he opposed gay marriage, but favored gay marriage./ His nuanced Kerry’s recent church of Kerry, ‘I’m going to question his soul.’”
Other treats include some great “melds” from LeRoy Gorman, such as “pubersty,” “breign” and “lostery”; John Elsberg’s ripply neato homage to Andy Warhol, which consists of the repetition of “THECAN’SBEAUTY- ISINITSUNSEENSTAINS” except that each line drops the first letter of the line above it, and puts it at its end, so the poem’s second line, for instance, is “HECAN’SBEAUTYISINITSUNSEENSTAINST”; and another fetching poem by someone I’m not familiar with, Murtagh, is just a five-line free verse poem with five is missing. Hmmm, a good paraphrase of it would be:
s mply
l ght
w thout
t me
Rats, I’ve run out of space with dozens of terrific pieces unmentioned. Sorry.