Column103 –January/February 2011
The Contents of a Mailbox
Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2011
The New Criterion
Volume 29, Number 3, November 2010.
Edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball
Monthly, 80 pp; The foundation for Cultural Review, Inc.,
900 Broadway, New York NY 10003. $7.75/copy.
ZYX
Issue 55, February 2011.
Edited by Arnold Skemer
3 times yearly; 10 pp; ZYX, 58-09 205th Street,
Bayside NY 11364. write for a copy.
The other day two very different magazines arrived in the mail, The New Criterion and ZYX. I’ve long subscribed to The New Criterion, a review of the arts and society that is basically an organ for neo-conservatism, not too much of which I go along with. I enjoy its opposition to political correctness, though. But the main reason I subscribe to it, is that it is about as far as can be from the experioddica I write about here. And a number of fairly good, entertaining writers write about the middle of mainstream culture when not discussing seldom-undiscussed dead art eminences. Hence, The New Criterion helps me keep up with the exhibits of painting, concerts, and dance and theatrical productions going on in New York City and our country’s other centers of provincialism.
Its main critics of poetry, John Simon and William Logan, are near-worthlessly devoted to books published by BigCity and University publishers, although Logan can be instructively hostile about some of the larger names in the field. The two cover everything of interest to the American Poetry Establishment, however, which is useful.
Its critic of music, Jay Nordlinger, writes gush about performers (generally of standards like Beethoven’s Fifth). He rarely discusses music beyond telling us what its name is and who wrote it, and maybe some gossp about the latter. He sometimes mentions music by someone living, but only if a name performer has deigned to perform it., Karen Wilkin, the magazine’s main visimagery critic, is excellent–although limited to mainstream visimagery. The magazine contains occasional attacks (hardly ever by Wilkin) on exhibitions of contemporary work, but I enjoy them, because the contemporary stuff on exhibit at the Whitney and such museums in the Big Apple that The New Criterion discusses, are almost always crap. Criticism of the other arts seems okay to me, although–again–rarely about anything innovative. I find Laura Jacobs’s pieces on the dance quite helpful, as it’s the art I know least about, and–unlike Nordlinger–she tells one about the art she treats as well as those involved with it.
Almost the antithesis of The New Criterion is the other publication I got a copy of, SPR reviewer Arnold Skemer’s ZYX. I’ve been getting it ever since Arnold started it 15 years or so ago, and have reviewed it once or twice here. Devoted almost entirely to the literary arts, it’s worth consideration because of its openness to the full range of contemporary poetry, which Arnold not only publishes but intelligently reviews. He also covers the literary life, generally with highly entertaining belligerance against the Establishment.
He doesn’t often publish his own poems in ZYX but has three in this issue. They’re in the Jack Saunders school of poetry: clear, incisive and contemptuous of the Philistines mindlessly thwarting any poet daring to be adventurously unmediocre–although one is about hope in general, as something you have to believe in even though it’s a fantasy. Arnold is not what you’d call buoyantly positive about life. His front-page essay, “Reacting to Contempt” carries on his campaign against “people who choose to degrade you because you are a lowly poet.” I feel he overdoes it a bit–I’ve met a few people who seem to have believed I wasted my life by devoting so much of it to poetry, but most people are polite about my vocation, and some seem in awe, sincere awe, that I would have been brave enough to follow it (which horrifies me!). But Arnold has a different persona from mine, which is that of the amiable screwball–the strange but harmless Lewis Carrollian uncle so many British families have.
Among the poets whose works Arnold crowds into his zine (48 poems, altogether, some of them much more than sonnet-length) are Britisher Cardinal Cox, if what look to me like prose pieces are indeed poems, Guy Beining, John Jacob, Luis Cusuhtemoc Berriozabail (in very tiny print, so I may have misspelled his name), Vernon Frazer, J. J. Campbell, B. Z. Niditch, and Alan Carlin, the latter two frequent contributors.
Beining is represented by an intriguing poem called, “Spheres of Clouds and Skulls,” which alone puts the zine at the forefront of experioddica. Here’s a passage to give the flavor of his “Sphere of Clouds and Skulls: “Prior to heat there is worship.// barely audible one hears- who is the guest of/ the dead bird? Who holds a hanger as grail/ upside down in water?/ the corpse in all of us moves out/ a bit & on spigot we watch a form rotate/ spawn clouds between legs and along tongue.// Direction is a hazard that makes us move.// beyond cloud cover there is the public dance.”
What is most wondrous-fine to me about the poem is what Beining does in it with clouds (particularly “cloud cover”), constantly, weirdfully, working out under-deepening variations of them and ending the poem with a moon’s view of them.
At the other end of the clarity continuum are Carlin’s vivid contributions such as “The Chess Masters Last Match:/ Marcel Duchamp Plays Samuel Beckett Like a Cranial Harp,” which is as zappingly colorful as a thirties gangster novel, but fizzingly nails Dada and Absurdism. Here it is: “An overturned ash/ can is the table// base and an iron/ grate the top// a chess board is/ laid out on:// the artist sits black/ and the poet sits white// in damp unheated/ room meager light// provided by a single/ bare light bulb suspended// from a ceiling swaying/ in perpetual motion// in slow syncopation/ like a metronome or// a minute hand of/ an unseen clock”
Just about every issue of ZYX has an equal assortment of goods–that no one but I seems ever to mention anywhere. . . .