Column101 — September/October 2010
col100
Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2010
Comprepoetica
Blogmaster: Bob Grumman
http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff
“Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry”
By Bob Grumman
/bob-grummans-first-piece-in-spr
Congratulations to Me, for this (“col100,” as my computer calls it is the one hundredth column I’ve done for Small Press Review–for a department of SPR, Small Magazine Review, if you want to get technical. To be even more technical, I must state that SMR began as a separate magazine, so my first four columns, which were in every other issue of SMR during its brief solo flight, were definitely not in Small Press Review. I’m counting them as being in it, anyway.
Getting started as a columnist was about the only break I’ve ever gotten as a writer. It all began when Editor/Publisher Len accepted a guest editorial of mine, “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry,” for the April 1992 issue of SPR. Concerned with two “infraverbal” poems by Karl Kempton, one by Jonathan Brannen, and George Swede’s one-word poem, “graveyarduskilldeer,” it remains one of my best pieces of criticism–so much so that I’ve published at least five different versions of it since. I no longer remember I came to get it into SPR, but I vaguely recall it had to do with Len’s openness to visual and related forms of poetry, due–I believe–to his admiration for d. a. levy, and acquaintance with Karl Kempton.
In any case, I’m grateful to Len for accepting my piece. Despite the fact that it didn’t do nearly as much for me as I thought it would. Which was get me read by someone connected with an upscale magazine like The Atlantic, who–charmed by my style, and the subject of my essay–would persuade a bigWorld editor to solicit me for a similar piece. And I’d go on to fame as a bigWorld writer. What a laugh.
But it did help me when, not too long after, I tried for a position as a columnist for SMR when Len began that. I’ve been a contributing editor to SMR ever since.
In my first column I reviewed Meat Epoch, Dada Tennis, CWM, and O!!Zone, all now defunct, although the editors of two of them, Geof Huth and Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, are still active in the otherstream. I can’t say the column was brilliant, but I did quote a nice passage from a poem in Meat Epoch by Spencer Selby, referring to meaning as something “which gathers in emptiness/ and waits for all things,” and discuss one of my other favorite contemporaries, the ridiculously under-recognized Guy Beining, who had a number of pieces in O!!Zone.
My next column was devoted to Gustave Morin’s stained paper archive and Larry Tomoyasu’s Found Street. Both of these I considered state-of-the-art specimens of adventurous poetry. Neither is around anymore. Morin is still active in his native Canada, but I hear little from him. Tomoyasu seems no longer on the scene although I got a friendly note for him sometime during the past year.
Two issues later I did a column on John M. Bennett’s Lost & found Times, a durable otherstream zine that continued in print until just a few years ago, and for which I eventually wrote a regular column. And so it went, this reviewing of zines and sometimes books that I considered superior by far to anything in the mainstream but which rarely lasted more than a few years, and never gained any kind of bigWorld acclaim, something I still don’t understand.
SPR hasn’t changed too much over the years, it doesn’t seem to me. The reviewers’ names have changed. And I’m the only columnist, although “Michael Andre” still makes occasional (always interesting) visits, and Len writes an occasional editorial. Laurel Speer was dominant when my very first piece appeared. I’d read her years before that with admiration, although she was never interested in my kind of stuff. Ditto Robert Peters.
I modeled myself to some extent on Speer’s way of incisively dealing with review material while at the same time injecting her own life in literature and outside it into what she wrote. I loved Peters’s caustic commentary, too–as well as his positive insights. She burned out, it would appear; he aged off the scene. A shame in both cases.
Amusingly, I didn’t think much of Speer’s column in the issue of SPR I made my rookie appearance in. It was on the page opposite the beginning of my editorial. She picked on a quotation of Roger Sessions’s, “The only alternative an artist has to being himself is being nobody,” which I quite enjoyed. I interpreted to mean that if, as an artist, you try to live up to others’ expectations instead of being true to yourself, you’ll end being a nobody. I don’t think she got it. Her point seemed to be that all the counts is what an artist produces, which has nothing to do with his self.
What is really amusing is that a one-paragraph review of one of John M. Bennett’s four-pagers, Tempid, by A. J. Wright shared the page Speer’s column was on. After quoting a few out-of-context lines, from Bennett, Wright averred, “I guess this stuff is supposed to be deep, but ersatz surrealism just sticks to my boots.” A little over a year later, I had a review in SPR (September 1994) in which I said of Bennett, “He makes ‘nets wider than sense,’ to quote (one) of his poems, by using words the way Jackson Pollock used paint: to tell of the urgency and violence they’ve been flung out of as much as to ‘mean’ in more conventional ways. Thus, they splatter, jerk back, go off-course, repeat, offend and baffle–as they build a world as major as that of any other current poet’s.” Something I still believe.
Hey, I had fun in them days, and hope to continue having fun here for a few more years. A big thanks to you, my few readers, some of whom have been with me since ’92. Even though you never helped me onto the pages of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or even The Hudson Review.