POETICKS

Finishing Off 2007

Small Press Review,
Volume 40 Numbers 1-2, January-February Year

      Concrete! Producer/Director: Sara Sackner.
      DVD 2003, running time 72 minutes;
      Padded Cell Pictures, 1105 North Signal Street,
      Ojai CA 93023. $35 ppd.
      http//:www.paddedcellpictures.com

      Mark Sonnenfield, Writer. November 2007.
      Marymark Press, 45-08 Old Millstone Drive,
      East Windsor NJ 08520. np.

Thanksgiving is here, so I have five days off from substitute teaching, and have vowed to get this column done during it. I am beset with problems. A major one is that I’m no longer getting many zines in the mail, anymore. I attribute that to (1) the dominance in innovative literature circles of the Internet (witness my last half dozen or so columns) and (2) the shitting down of almost all the zines I used to write about (and for), such as Lost & Found Times. There’s also (3): the fact that when I do get a zine or other item worth writing about, I lose it for two or three years in the chaos of books, rough drafts, stacks of paper with print on one side I plan to use a second time, videos, dvds, cat hair, dust, dirt, clothes being aired, garbage (in proper containers, I want to assure everyone), cords, dried-up lizard remains, pencils & pens, bills, receipts, ets and ceteras, that I haven’t gotten into my twenty filing cabinets or fifteen bookcases or various closets and cabinets.

In short, it’s hard to find something to write about. So, I’ll start with the biggest news of 2007 from here: I bought a new toilet. I had two but only one worked. I won’t bother describing its layers of biota and calcification, but will just say that I had a bucket in my bathtub for flushing it (because everything in the tank was broken, including the flush- handle, which was also gunked immovably in place). No big deal: I was used to it, until the shut-off valve to it had gone on the blink, so water kept going into it, and I was afraid it might flood the house. So I got a plumber in, and we decided the most rational thing to do was put in a new toilet. He put in a new shut-off valve for nothing to seal the deal. I did not compose a poem about it, but did write it up at my blog.

Next is something that actually has to do with experriodica, which is supposed to be this column’s subject. It’s Concrete!, a pleasant documentary on a DVD of a visit to the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, starring the extremely personable Ruth and Marvin Sackner themselves, with guests appearances by Tom Phillips, the author of A Humament, one of the most important works of visual poetry ever, and the central artist in their collection, and Johanna Drucker and Albert Dupont. I saw it several years ago when it first came out, but didn’t get around to ordering a copy until just a few months ago. Its coverage of visio-textual art can not be complete, given there were over sixty-thousand items in the archive at the time the film was made, and its emphases are different from what mine would be, but it’s good on the early contribution to visual poetry of such artists as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kasimir Malevich, and the generation in England and America that included Bob Cobbing, John Furnival, Emmett Williams. One flaw in it, for me, is its making too much of big names like Gertrude Stein and Roy Lichtenstein, who are marginally important to visual poetry, at the expense of just about everyone active in the field in this country after 1970. It’s a wonderful survey of the field, though, and something anyone seriously interested in the field should have.

Something I can always find is my monthly envelope of poetry and who-knows-what from Mark Sonnenfeld. That’s because I have a folder in one of my filing cabinets for what he sends me. Make that, several folders. He sends me (and others he’s in artistic sympathy with) little broadsides, sheets of paper that look mimeographed, and saddle stitched chapbooks and other publications with enough different poets and illumagists in them to qualify, I think, as zines. His November batch contains three items (less than his envelopes usually contain). One (which I almost lost while just sitting here at my keyboard) is just a sheet of white paper with two short reviews by Andy Ford. One is of the first issue of a zine called Stronger Than Dirt. This, according to Ford, seems to be produced by “a high-school age dude,” but is nonetheless first-rate–“with tons of flyers, interviews with WHEN LIBERTY DIES and FLOWER VIOLENCE, and interesting art.”

The other concerns two chapbooks by Mark Sonnenfeld, 14th St. Sta. Found Items and An Anonymous Artist. About the first Ford concludes with “A modern survey in trashsites, 14th St. Sta. Found Items proves once again that art is not limited to the canvas, the reel-to-reel tape, or the museums.” The other chap Ford describes as “one of the more narrative and comprehensible chapbooks of (Sonnenfeld’s) that (Ford) has read.” Pages from the reviewed publications share the page with the texts of the reviews but are too small to be of much use, I fear.

Also in Sonnenfeld’s November envelope are two chaps, one on yellow paper I only have space to give the title of, Jerk off Guitar Players, by Sonnenfeld and Tom Hays, the other on green, by Sonnenfeld alone: I am a (u r b a n) cassette ‘sound’ collagist. First poem (or stanza of a poem, I can’t tell which):

or  I       didn't  care if I fit  a       shirt  POCKET  twopart-  look down  a     simple  path

A later poem asks one to “imagine a piano hammer crashed in flowers.” Get on Mark’s mailing list. I don’t know what he charges strangers, probably nothing. But even if he charges postage, or a few bucks more, he’s worth the investment.