Otherstream Poetries

At present one of my projects is to write a sort of summary of all my 110 Small Press Review columns, which go back to 1993, adding comments as I go along. As I write about my first ones, several things strike me: one is how terrific some of my discussions of poems were; a second is how genuinely good most of the microzines that were my main subject were; third—a crusher—how many times I mistakenly thought the mainstream was finally going to open a gate for us. The Otherstream remains as outside the BigWorld as it’s always been, I fear. What amazes me is that not one poet in what I consider the Otherstream has broken into prominence the way Ginsberg, for instance, did. Or Andy Warhol, the Ginsberg of visimagery. Nor has a critic writing about the Otherstream become widely recognized for his expertise the way Dana Gioia did with his obtuse essay on the state of American Poetry that appeared in the Atlantic in the early nineties, and is still being discussed.

Enough whining. What my project has made me want to do as a side-project is write short essays about the different kinds of Otherstream Poetry there are, since it seems to me there is a lot of confusion about that.

Infraverbal Poetry

One is a kind I long ago dubbed “infraverbal poetry” because it’s poetry whose poetic effect is generated by what is done inside words rather than in between them, in sentences. I believe it was invented by E. E. Cummings. Certainly, it was first used effectively by Cummings. His use of it has been recognized even by such out-of-touch publications as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which quotes the following:

The encyclopedia considers this a specimen of concrete poetry, which it is, but it is also a specimen of infraverbal poetry.  What counts in the former are visioaesthetic effects, in the latter verboaesthetic effects, in this case the breaking up of the word, “loneliness” into “l,” “one,” “l,” again, and “iness,” or “one-ness.”  Seemingly trivial laid out bare like that, but much more subtle in context, where it is also part of a visual metaphor for a falling leaf.

Cummings was an infraverbal poet long before he composed his poem about loneliness.  Someday I hope to do a history of infraverbality which would surely feature many of his infraverbal adventures.  Right now, though, I want to move to a living poet, Mike Basinski, whom I wrote about in my fifth column for Small Press Review.

Mike had had some poems in Poetry USA, a short-lived attempt to cover the whole spectrum of contemporary poetry.  Among them was his 4-frame “Odalisque” series, which I described as follows: “In each frame of this a ring of words and near-words surrounds a giant O. The near-word at the top of ‘Odalisque No. 1’ nicely demonstrates what an infra-verbal technique can accomplish. The near-word is “rammar,” the infra-verbal technique simple subtraction, the result a sudden ‘discon- cealment’ of a secret (and, to me, strangely enchanting) symmetry, which rattles the reader into full engagement with ‘grammar,’ ‘ram,’ ‘mar,’ and ‘mirror’–as sounds and signs, by themselves and intermingled.

“In ‘Odalisque No. 4,’ Basinski circles his O with twenty words containing a v–or V. What makes this interesting is that many of these words wouldn’t normally have a v in them–”vords,” for instance. This would undoubtedly seem a silly game to Gioia and his readers, but for me it was (yes) thrilling to experience a ‘down’ sharpened to ‘dovn,’ a ‘water’ turned Germanic and fatherly as ‘vater,’ and such unmodified words as ‘wives’ and ‘aggressive’ as suddenly alien objects, speared into—or about to spear outward. Or, best of all, to find between ‘wildevness’ and ‘festival,’ and opposite ‘wives,’ the wonderfully expanded ‘luVst.’”

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