Column075 — March/April 2006
Internet Report
Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 3 & 4, March-April 2006
Big Bridge. Edited by Michael Rothenberg. Website: www.bigbridge.org/toc.htm.
Improvisations.
Vernon Frazer. 697pp; 2005; Pa;
Beneath the Underground,
568 Brittany L, Delray Beach FL 33446. $45.
po-X-cetera. Webmaster: Bob Grumman.
Website: comprepoetica.com/newblog/Index.html.
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A few minutes before I started this column, I premiered a new section in my blog’s new home page called the “Quarreling with Morons Section.” My blog gets little traffic, but today drew someone who took umbrage at my calling prose poetry “ridiculously unchallenging to write.” Said he: “You play with Microsoft Paint, call your wasted half-hour’s junk a poem, and dare to say that prose poems are easy to write? Nice.
A few days previously, someone else, or maybe the same moron, took a shot at me, informing me that “Sylvia Plath never did the math, nor the meth which is what you must be smoking to think this is poetry.” Although this person didn’t say, it would seem he was referring to one of my mathematical poems, or maybe to all of them. The problem with crap like this, which you see all over the Internet, and taking up most of the space in any magazine’s “letters to the editors” section, is not the opinions expressed, but the stupidity of the way the opinions are expressed. It would seem that the vast majority of readers are only able to say yes or no to something (and the aye-sayers are just as irritating in this respect as the nay-sayers). It has never crossed their minds that it’s not that they are for or against something that matters, but what they can marshal in support of their view.
Despite the frequency of trolls, as they are called, the Internet is becoming increasingly valuable by the day. Evidence new to me of this is the literary e.zine–oops, make that “webzine”–Big Bridge. I was startled to find out it has been around since late in 1997. I learned about it my usual way–by being asked to submit something to it. The end-result of that was a section in the zine containing work of eight minimalist infraverbal poets, with my commentary. Here’s what I wrong about it in my blog:
“This issue of Big Bridge has a huge amount of poetry-related stuff, including what looks to be a Major Autobiographical Essay (possibly book-length), by Karl Young. A few years ago, I often thought while gabbing on the phone with Karl that he had to write up what he was telling me about his life, for he was much more into the American Literary Scene of the late sixties and on than I was, and seemed to know more about it than anyone. He’s begun doing this, most ambitiously (so far as I know) in his Big Bridge piece, the full title of which is ‘Some Volumes of Poetry: A Retrospective of Publication Work by Karl Young.’ It has a wonderful–visual poem, I’d call it–on its ‘cover page.’ Following that is a fascinating introduction to what is going to be a continuing Big Bridge series about Karl’s life in publishing. Each chapter of it will cover some group of books he’s published, and their authors. (Note: I later learned it will get into many other literary subjects, as well. More on that in future columns, no doubt.)
“My impression from reading these first chapters of Karl’s is that they will include much purely personal material. I’m all for that. Mainly, however, they will help cement a number of worthy poets (such as d.a. levy) into their rightful place in literary history. There’s some irony in this, for Karl has long argued that many of the poets he will be writing about have been victims of rival factions hoping to disappear them, and succeeding. He is most excellent disproving himself. For this, much thanks is due the editor-in-chief of Big Bridge, Michael Rothenberg, for getting him to do so.
“I’d give Big Bridge an A+ for Karl’s contribution alone, but–yipes–I just now discovered it has my ‘Arithmepoetic Portrait of Blue’ in it, too! That is part of a set of 3 pieces from the latest Spore that its editor, Crag Hill, no doubt told me would be in the issue but I forgot about. It looks pretty good to me! Accompanying it are Donna Kuhn’s solitextual (i.e., ‘solely textual’) ‘loquacious talky,’ with ‘lefthanded voice’ among its dotty deftnesses, and Andrew Topel’s also dotty, also fine, ‘The Shape of My Thoughts 3,’ which I’d call an (excitingly) illustrated poem but probably everyone else in my poetry circles would call a visual poem. I’m listed as a ‘contributing editor,” too, which I didn’t expect. That should be no big deal but I have to admit that it makes me feel important–or, I should say, less unimportant.
“Big Bridge also has work from fairly well-known poets like Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolige and Jerome Rothenberg, and there’s a section devoted to Tom Clark. It has some fiction and reviews, as well. Among the reviews are a group devoted to the recent work of Vernon Frazer, prominently including Improvisations, a thick large volume (1.5″ by 11″ by 8.5″) I got gifted with, one of the grand perks of being a Famous Reviewer.” It was (to add to what I said at my blog, and segue into a discussion of Improvisations) nice to see that one of the five discussions of Frazer, Dan Waber’s, of Frazer’s Avenue Noir, was not entirely positive, although much more so than not–not because I like poets to be dinged but because I don’t like cheering sections–as I may have made clear earlier in this column. . . . Jonathan Penton does an especially entertaining and informative review of Frazer’s magnum opus, the aforementioned Improvisations. Read it! An interview of Frazer also in the section is worth reading, too. In it, Frazer mentions Kerouac. Kerouac is at the heart of Improvisations, though the latter is much more cerebral and impersonal than Kerouac ever was. Impersonal in the sense of not concerned much with human relationships, etc. Here’s a randomly-chosen fragment from it: “a relayed flexure eat opprobrium and its formulaic textured mosaic.” Here’s one (of many) that boinked me (i.e. had a favorable effect on me): “pyramids against an archer’s sky.” The work starts with “I,” “I,” “IS” and “(by ear, sd Gloucester & I repeat” to give it an earned spring out of Olson/Pound. It is polyphonic, and typographically unconventional by mainstream standards. I don’t find its visio-poetic effects at the highest level, though–as a graphic artist here, Frazer is too Druckerianly rectilinear–that is, his text is generally laid out, as in the work of Johanna Drucker, like industrially-planned cities rather than wibble-wobbling into the high organisms that his best writing becomes.
I believe Frazer is probably less well-known even than I, so I am buoyed to find such a nice large section of a fairly widely-read publication’s being devoted to him. As I keep saying, the Internet will be the saviour of all us infra-marginals–thanks to people like Rothenberg and the others behind Big Bridge–and the great amount of space it can cheaply give to non-names.