Column091 — January/February 2009
New Substantials
Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2009
Words & Junk
By C. Mehrl Bennett
2008; 45 pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods,
137 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214.
http://www.lulu.com/lunabisonteprods.
$18.48–or $4.50 to download.
Permutoria
By K.S. Ernst and Sheila Murphy
2008; 117 pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods
37 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214.
http://www.lulu.com/lunabisonteprods,
$27.50–or $5.00 to download
Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008
By Mark Young
2008; 412 pp; Pa; Meritage Press,
256 North Fork Crystal Springs Road,
St. Helena CA 94574. $24.
http://www.meritagepress.com.
Mad Hatters’ Review
Number 10
http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10
The tenth issue of the webzine, Mad Hatters’ Review, not only has two poems of mine in it, but a review by me of C. Mehrl Bennett’s Words & Junk, so naturally I had to bring it up here. It’s got much else: a video interview of mIEKAL aND and Camille Bacos, for instance; a substantial gallery of vispo curated by C. Mehrl Bennett where my poems are, along with stunning work by Marilyn Rosenberg, K. S. Ernst, Bennett herself, Nico Vassilakis, Crag Hill, and 15 or so others of equal merit; an audio text collage by Davis Schneiderman and Don Meyer; fiction, poetry, four reviews besides mine, cartoons, drama, music and cartoons. And other stuff. There’s even a computer-enhanced picture by C. Mehrl B. of me in the contributors’ section.
Because part of this installment of my column will be dealing with C. Mehrl, I thought I’d steal a portion of what Mad Hatters’ Review says about her in that same contributors’ section for use here. I, for one, like such bios, not being a pure enough literatus to scorn personal data about artists whose work I admire. Anyway, according to Mad Hatters’ Review, “Bennett comes from a fine arts background; B.A. in painting and drawing, spent many years as a mail artist, and has an art exhibit history from the 80’s and early 90’s that focused on junk assemblage. . . . She lives in Columbus, OH, with spouse (they met through mail art), poet John M. Bennett. Her word art has been published in Lost&Found Times, Vispoeology, Otoliths, Naked Sunfish, Womb, Word For/Word, and Black Box.”
About her book, Words & Junk, I said in my review that it “is a collection of 43 visio-textual artworks in full color, one to a page, plus a diptych, on facing pages, which may be my favorite piece in the collection. That’s odd, because it is the least colorful of them, and I love the frequent risks Bennett takes at the borders of too many colors, and too much clash of colors, always triumphantly. The diptych consists mostly of sine-like waves of black lines on white, a brownish discoloration singing much of the white. There is a strong pop-art effect. On the image to the left, a sort of inset shows a letter R being moltenly formed in steps under the word ‘REA.’ The rest of the image, to the right of the R, shows O’s turning into D’s. ‘READ.’ With that action’s magnetic lines of force prominently depicted.
“In the second image of the diptych, the same graphic is shown, except shifted left to reveal the D’s multiplying off into a darkness. Above them is the word ‘ZEN.’ To make, ‘REAZEN,’ and–for me–a wonderful visual poem about the trans-rational reason that the best reading can raise one into.” I hope that’s enough to give you some notion of what’s in her fascinating book.
Permutoria, a collection of collaborations by K. S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy, is out of the same territory as Bennett’s book. I blurbed it with “Who could give such an enormous range of smashingly interactive fusions of poetry and visual art as this book contains the blurb it deserves? I sure can’t.” Many of the pieces feature a single (colorful) letter. Each is a delightful design–but also unexpectedly potent semantically, for those susceptible to minimalism. One depicting a semi-transparent P, for instance, situates the P partly on a pink and beige shape on the left, and partly on greens and whites to the right. I immediately spelled it into “pier” (because it struck me as something projecting from a shore) and then “peer.” Just one plausible interpretative drift, but the many others possible make a strong case for the ability of letters to be piers, and of art to allow us to peer enthrallingly far beyond the facts of the day-to-day.
Moreover, the one-letter pieces provide a continuingly enriching set of variations both “merely” visual, and linguistic. They add and subtract from all the other pieces in the collection as well, many of them much more complex textually. In short, the collection deserves a much fuller discussion than I have space for here.
No doubt the laziest thing a critic can do when discussing a collection of poetry (except for re-cycling bits of his old reviews like I’ve gotten in the habit of doing) is to quote something from it, but it’s also the best thing he can do. So, here’s a representative poem from Mark Young’s collected works, Pelican Dreaming:
Young’s multitude of poems here range widely in style and form, although almost all of them are solitextual (solely words). Among those not is one called “Mountain to Sea” which is on a chessboard with one white word on each black square and one black word on each white square. The engagent is thus arrested by each word long enough fully to appreciate it, and the slow connection it makes with the next, and all the other words in the poem, left to right, right to left, up to down and down to up. Diagonally, too. Hence, just the words in the first two squares in the top rank, and those in the two squares directly under them, “mountain” and “children,” “orchids” and “silence,” by themselves do a lot more than most much longer contemporary poems.
Young, a New Zealander now living in Australia, is too little known in this country. I hope this book will change that.