Column081 — May/June 2007
A Visit to Another Webzine
Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 5/6, May-June 2007
Big Bridge, vol 3, #4.
Michael Rothenberg, Editor.
http://www.bigbridge.org/index2.htm
I don’t think books and magazines will ever be obsolete–except for those they’ve always been close to obsolete for. Sure, they can wear out, but–well-taken-care-of–they should be good for a lifetime, and none of their texts will suddenly change or vanish. Aside from that, they’re pleasurably, physically-engagably solid in a way that cyberbooks and webzines never will be, even when technology has perfected tablets you can page through by pushing buttons. But, yow, the advantages of webzines and cyberbooks below the level of art-objects are becoming staggering! Take the webzine, Big Bridge, which has a section I guest-edited, for example. My section alone would run about 200 pages if published as a book. It has nearly 300 works by 75 different artists (or artist-teams). What’s more, they’re in full color (although at times too small, something I hope eventually to get remedied by making them into thumbnails). Yet, my little section is just one of many of comparable length in the issue!
Here’s what is also there: a chapbook of 17 or 18 poems (one passage may be an untitled poem or part of the preceding poem) by Ed Dorn, illustrated by Nancy Victoria Davis; seven essays about Dorn by John Herndon, Stefan Hyner, Reno Lauro, Alice Notley, Richard Owens, Claudia Pisano and Dale Smith.
These two sections, let me interrupt to say, particularly pleased me, for Dorn has not goten quite the recognition I feel he merits–for passages like this from “Early Modern,” which is in Big Bridge: “Every Poet needs a chorus of Negro women/ And a friend in wing-tipped shoes.” And for being the kind of guy who, according to Herndon’s piece on him, said after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, that he would start “working on a series of poems called—Chemo Sabe.”
Okay, to continue my list, the issue includes a poetry section containing one to eight poems (and/or jokes, illustrations, collages, plays) by 35 poets (Ralph DiPalma and Michael McClure among them); a second poetry section containing the work of nineteen contributors (Eileen Myles and Charles Borkhois among them) guest edited by Thomas Devaney; a section of fiction, non-fiction, reviews and memoirs by 26 authors including Skip Fox and Tom Hibbard; a section of illumages (i.e., visual artworks) in full color by Rodney Artiles (13 pieces), Amy Evans McClure (18 photographs of sculptures) and James Spitzer (23 pieces); “Death on All Fronts,” a collection of 51 anti-war poems edited by Halvard Johnson; 13 collaborations between a poet and an illumagist–Jerome Rothenberg and Susan Bee, for example; Part Two of Karl Young’s fascinating history/memoir of his life in vispo; “A Tribute to Richard Denner,” a collection of six essays about Denner and his work plus some selections from his work edited by Jonathan Penton; Roma Amor (41 pages) by Allan Graubard; Joel Weishaus on Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder; an excerpt from What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? by Bill Berkson & Bernadette Mayer, and a review of the latter by Larry Sawyer; and, finally, brief reviews of the following “little magazines” followed by excerpts from each: Home Planet News, House Organ, Kickass Review, Moonlit, Plantarchy, Poesy, Spaltung, Versal, Xerolage. Enough already, right? Whew.
Here’s what Jonathan Penton said in the final section listed about Xerolage (which I have to mention because that zine is so experioddicalistic): “If the concept of freakiness was capable of having a standard, it might define itself as the long-running and consistently high-quality literary journal, Xerolage. Edited by mIEKAL aND, each issue of xerolage is a deep study of one experimental visual poet, presenting a thorough and varied look at some of the most varied creators in the world of art. Meticulously reproduced in the highest resolution black-and-white imagery, on simple white folio-sized stock, the magazine design of Xerolage simply gets out of each artist’s way, making each issue a mind-expanding journey into the expanded mind of another.” The excerpts that came after that were from issues 37 and 38, which featured the work of Andrew Topel and Peter Ciccariello.
One very minor quibble about the Big Bridge before I forget it: its sectioning tends to prevent serendipity–that is, an advantage of traditional magazines is that one might notice a poem sharing a page with a story one is reading, and read the poem, too, out of curiosity; this won’t happen the way Big Bridge is laid out. But I realize that weaving Big Bridge together to allow for accidental adventures would take way too much time and energy. Purity of focus is a virtue, too.
To finish filling my space (and provide a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes in the BigTime Experimental Poetry World), I’m now going to quote my preface to the selection I edited for Big Bridge: ” . . . It seems that Cleveland poet, glass artisan and gallery director Marcus Bales, out of nowhere, offered me an opportunity to curate a show of visual poetry at his gallery. What is interesting about this is that Marcus and I had for years been going at each other tooth and nail on the Internet about what poetry is. We particularly did not agree that what I call visual poetry is a form of poetry. A traditionalist, Marcus won’t even agree that free verse is poetry. He has also been negative about my attempts to taxonomize the entire field of poetry.
“‘Grumman wants to create a kind of taxonomy of poetry,’ he told Dan Tranberg, who wrote a flattering piece about the show for The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland daily. I’m against the very notion of a taxonomy of poetry on the grounds that poetry is an aesthetic field, not a scientific one.’
“I’m afraid to confess that we on occasion quite annoyed each other. I definitely personally insulted him on more than one occasion. He claims never to have insulted me, but I feel there were times when he wasn’t very nice to me. Whatever the truth of the matter, we were often scolded for intemperance by the moderator of the Internet poetry group (New-Poetry) we had our (sometimes incredibly long) ‘discussions’ at. In fact, Marcus finally got kicked out of the group. I didn’t only because I promised to behave better.
“So, why the offer of space for a show? I’m still not clear about that–except that he meant it as a kind of challenge: if I thought this stuff was disgustingly under-recognized, as I often sputtered in harangues against–you guessed it–The Establishment, here was my chance to prove it with a show. I don’t know that I proved it, but the show seems to have gone over well. Marcus extended the show for one week into May because the Tranberg review came out the weekend the show was closing. According to Marcus, ‘Sales were pretty good, considering the narrow swatch of the world that this appealed to. I think we sold something in the neighborhood of $1500 worth of stuff, retail, most of it in the $10 and $25 range, but at least one sale over $200.’” I priced each of my three (unsold) works in the show at $400, but doubt anyone would have bought them at any price. (Sorry to brag, but that’s the way I am.)