Column099 — May/June 2010
The Latest in Word-Games
Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2010
Open Your I
By Endwar
2009, 58 pp; Pa;
IZEN, Box 891, Athens OH 45701-0891.
$18 ppd.
The Complete Works
By Dan Waber
2009, 4 pp; Pa;
IZEN, Box 891, Athens OH 45701-0891.
$3 ppd.
Between the Lines
By Carol Stetser
2009; 16 pp; Pa; Tonerworks.
Box 52, Portland ME 04112. np.
Xerolage 44
Edited by mIEKAL aND
2009, 24 pp; Pa; Xexoxial Editions,
10375 City Hway Alphabet,
LaFarge WI 54639. $20/4 issues.
irregularly published.
“In the beginning was the word,” Endwar’s Open your I, or–more correctly–] [, begins; “and,” it continues. “the word was ‘In.’” How do you review a book full of stuff like that except to quote a few of its pieces and tell the reader he ought to laugh at them, and then buy the book to see the rest? I should add, too, that many of them are cause for reflection–for instance: “every one is a number/ everyone is a statistic.” Here are a few more: “everyhere,” “instance / instant,” “rumurmurmur.”
Dan Waber’s The Complete Works is out of the same kind of sense of humor. This . . . product needs just a single sheet of cover stock folded in half (the short way) to live up to its title–absolutely! Its title is on its front followed by “by Dan Waber/ (and everyone else),” the “(and everyone else)” being an important extention of the work within. The inside of the cover has “An incomplete list of works by Dan Waber,” a copyright notice and an ISBN. The back of the book has various unattributed comments on it including “It’s all there, somewhere,” “Never has so little been used to exporess so much,” and “It’s uncanny, how anything you might have said, or even might say in the future, has already been anticipated in The Complete Works by Dan Waber.” These comments are all true.
The text of Waber’s work, aside from its necessary title, is less than a word in length. More than that I cannot say for fear of copyright infringement.
Xerolage has been coming out for well over twenty years no, each issue devoted to the work of a single artist or pair of collaborators. Only Score and Kaldron provide a comparably near-complete representation of what’s been going on in visio-textual art for the past quarter of a century. One of the leading contributors to that field has long been Tom Cassidy, aka Musicmaster, whose work this issue features.
In his amusing introduction to this sequence of around 50 frames (a few consist of two different-seeming images on a single page, but may be intended as a single frame), Musicmaster says he took April Fool’s day off from work in 2009 to avoid pranks that might “have consequences.” Because mIEKAL had the previous year asked him when they saw each other at a book festival not only if he would fill up an issue of Xerolage, including both sides of the front and back covers, but if he would take care of the assignment in one day (!), he decided to use his day off to carry out mIEKAL’S request. Which he did. Much of what resulted consists of texts, some in print, some hand-written, with drawings of biomorphic handyman tools like wrenches and clippers. and cords and little round things that look like birds’ eyes on top of neatly hand-printed poems. The texts on a couple of other pages look like answer sheets to a homework assignment in high school trig. A crazy book but it makes sense! (Aesthetic sense.)
Now a real treat for you. The latest issue of Kalligram came out early this year. I got my contributor’s copy early in March. It’s not listed among the items this column discusses because it’s a Hungarian magazine and my Hungarian ain’t quite good enough for me to get the magazine’s address, cost, date, etc., right. I can read Hungarian numbers, though, so can tell you it’s got 104 pages. It’s a slickzine (i.e., good production values, glossy cover, letter-sized pages). I had three of my conventional poems in it, translated (ahem) into Hungarian. By Marton Koppany, who’s translated me before. Not every American writer has work translated into a foreign language, much less Hungarian (!), and that kind of thing hardly ever happens to me, so I hafta brag about it.
More reprehesibly, I’m now going to quote one of the poems translated, “Poem’s California Career” (“Vers kaliforniai karrierrje”), in both English and Hungarian: “For hours/ a telephone’s unlocatable ringing’ kept the beach and the parasols/ flapping through/ the eyesight the ocean/ had been for so long/ struggling to become.” and (without the little marks above certain vowels it ought to have) “Orakon at/ egy beazonosithatatlan telefoncsenges/ csapdosta/ a vizpartot es a napernyoket/ a latvanyhoz, amellye valnia/ oly sok veszodsegebe/ kerult as oceannak.” What’s interesting to me about this is that I thought my weird use of English would be hard to translate, but in this poem I can see that all the weirdness is in the surrealism, not the diction, so was probably easy to translate.
Kalligram is well worth a mention here for better reasons than my having something in it, for it’s got a nice gallery of first-rate visual poems by Karl Kempton, Karl Young, Geof Huth, Endwar, Dan Waber, Nico Vassilakis, Roy Arenella and Tim Gaze. Looks like a nice variety of Hungarian stuff, too–including a six frame narrative (film clips?) by Juha Valkeapaa showing a young man in some kind of melodrama that begins with him facing a masked man in a dental chair (or some such chair) and ends with him happily whispering something into a friend’s ear while a number of smiling people watch.
Ah, I do have a URL for it: www.kalligram.com.