The Latest Score

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Small Press Review
Volume 29, Number 10/11, October/November 1997

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Score, Number 14, Winter 1997;
edited by Crag Hill and Spencer Selby. 64 pp.;
Score Publications, 1015 NW Clifford Street,
Pullman WA 99163. No Price Given.

 

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Its text is shaped, though, billowing like a cloud of smoke, which fits its oozy, magico-meditative tone. And its many melted-together words (e.g., “onscovhoOriintrusive”) are strongly suggestive, visually, of the geology the poem seems much about (the quoted word, for instance, containing “intrusive,” and being directly followed by “granitic rocks”). The poem’s scattered large O’s add holes or bubbles equally persuasive as zeroes or peepholes to the mix. Again: a geological–or archaeological– jumble of questions and answers. The poem, in short, is more than moderately visiophoric (or visually metaphoric), a hallmark of the richest visual poetry.

It wouldn’t be that wide of the mark to consider Basinski’s work a sound poem, either, considering how archaeo-blurry and strange its sounds are. For me, though, the persistence of its fissuring and deformation of the language make it significantly more an infra-verbal poem than anything else. Take its fourth and fifth lines: “ziteotilowoeshipped throughout panic the southwesterJ belts bells/ onglo of Paleozpic(?) of the ice age metamorphie yan” The first of these lines is only twice infra-verbal, at “ziteotilowoeshipped” with its suggestions of pre-columbian Mexican civilizations and “woeship,” which not only Joyceanly refers to bloody gods, but releases “ship” from “worship” to emphasize its voyagery; and at “southwesterJ,” with only its J off-convention (and succinctly speaking both of “diverJing” and “verJing,” and showing them).

The second of the lines revs up the infra-verbality. First there’s “onglo,” which is “on-glow,” “on-go” and “anglo” (acting more to connect early Mexico with Anglo-Saxon England than to Hispanically denote a white person). “Paleozpic” wonderfully adds “Oz” and “optics” to the “epic” it hints of–with its “ic” about to melt into “ice” three words later, something one would never notice in a less infra-verbal poem. “Metamorphie” is the the central word of the poem, making a dance of “metamorphism,” which has to do with the deformation of rock due to heat, etc. And, of course, the word speaks of all kinds of other changes. As for “yan,” I haven’t quite figured it out. “Yon” works, and maybe “yin” and “yang” combined.

Toward its end, the poem peaks with the word, “workcs”; no big deal until you realize in this poem of metemorphism that “workcs” = “(w)rocks.” A visual as much as an infra-verbal effect, I suppose. We’re definitely into a border blur where taxonomy is quite difficult. So it is with no little shakiness that I finally classify the poem as a visually-enhanced, auditorily- enhanced infraverbal poem. However fuddled my taxonomy might be, though, it’s a great tool for grappling with a poem like this, it seems to me. You can’t classify without deepening into what’s concretely there.

Other pieces, some quite good, are easier to classify as not visual poetry: e.g., an amusing illustration of Jesus that Ficus strangulensis has cut out from some religious hand-out and added a (probably slightly-altered) romance-comix cartoon balloon to, making Jesus say, “I couldn’t go back to sleep last night after I dreamed your husband flattened me today”; a drawing of a wine bottle rack that W. Mark Sutherland has captioned, “Theory and Praxis”; a prose piece by Johanna Drucker with short texts in larger letters scattered throughout it, growing in size-of-print as the piece proceeds; a fascinatingly odd collage by Paulo Brusecky with a giant eye in it but no words–or letters, even; and two of Pete Spence’s letter-centered but asemantic urban- maplike designs. Or: two captioned illumages, one typographically-enhanced essay, one pure illumage, and two textual illumages. (Note, for those of you new to my oddities, “illumage” in my lexicon equals “visual artwork.”)

Among the pieces that few would argue aren’t visual poems is a strongly inner-cityish, graffitiic “xollage” (as its author terms it) by Dave Chirot. Part of it is of a lotful of junked cars; another, of a stenciling of the alphabet, resonates with the cars, for me, as a second sort of dead traffic; but the alphabet, much of it barely visible or invisible, jumps into the word “DEFEAT” to an infra-verbal gaze as it goes from “D” through “EFGH” to the bottom half of an “I.”

Another specimen of a “genuine” visual poem here is Jake Berry’s remarkable “Phaseostrophe 79,” a combination of tendrilly curving lines and fragments of text going off in different directions. Although the whole is labeled, “jasmine-crucifer-ring-Math- domain, and includes the fraction “dew cluster” over “xum,” it doesn’t strike me as math but could be (1) some kind of chart of the skies (the astronomical sign for Uranus and the word, “Neptune,” being in it; (2) a meteorolgical map, one part of it labeled, “cicada fuse(!)/ blood to fire/ raining” (my exclamation mark) with an s-shaped arrow pointing toward the afore-mentioned “dew/cluster” fraction; (3) a map of a river-valley; (4) a medical illustration of nerves and/or muscles and/or the circulation (with one location labeled, “agnonicon viscera”; or (5) a neo-astro-alchemical Master-Chart, as indicated by the line, “Uramapa bears our light through chasms in the sky.” Whatever the work is, it’s a major lyrical poem, surprising the auditor into manywhere-at-onces of constellations and insect- circulatory systems; rivers and nerves; high science and ecstatic transcendence . . . Jake Berry is the most unself-consciously, integratedly everywhere-going poet I know.

There’s a plethora of other first-rate poems here, but I’m afraid I’ve reached my space-limit.

Well, another fine collection of visio-textual art and related work has come out: the fourteenth issue of Score. It starts with an introduction about visual poetry by Bill DiMichele which puts a newcomer nicely into the variety and energy of the field. I question how many of the works in the issue are truly visual poems, though. One of the questionables might be my favorite work in the whole magazine: Michael Basinski’s “Heebee-jeebies I,” which is entirely words.

 

A Vacation Trip to Boston, Part One

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Numbers 9/10, September/October 1998

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Poems for the Millenium: The University of California
Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry
(From Postwar to Millennium, Vol 2),
edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.
1998; 912 pp; University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles CA. $25.

 

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My year so far has been pretty lousy. I had a bad winter, finding out I had prostate cancer late in January. My spring was worse, for my cat Sally suddenly died of cancer in April. She’d been with me for almost thirteen years. My summer has been much better, though; for one thing, I learned in early August that the treatment I got for the cancer (radiation and seed implants) seems to have knocked it out. I also had two super vacation trips (having, as a substitute teacher, ten weeks off). I’m going to yak about the first of these here because it included a literary conference in Boston that I was on a panel at.

The trip started with a grueling 24-hour bus ride from Port Charlotte, Florida, where I live, to Washington, D.C., where I met my sister, there with husband and 21-year-old daughter on holiday, the daughter visiting a genuine congressional intern like what’sername, this one working for Senator Olympia Snow (whom I wouldn’t’ve bothered to mention except, wow, what a great name!). While staying in the Washington suburb of Arlington, I came across a bookstore with a window containing nothing but poetry books! One of them, an anthology called Poetry for the Millennium, I later thought worth writing a brief review of for the Amazon Online Bookstore, which will post reviews by (1) the author of a book; (2) the book’s publisher; or (3) someone just happening by; as well as excerpts of reviews from the mass media–which I think a great idea! Here’s what I said (misspelling “Ashbery” with a “u,” which Amazon was nice enough to later fix for me):

This is the first poetry anthology published by a university or commercial press that covers just about the full range of today’s poetry, as I know it. True, in many areas (e.g., pluraesthetic poetry, or poetry that mixes expressive modalities such as visual poetry) it’s twenty or more years behind the times, but when you compare it to such duds as David Lehman’s Wilbur-to-Ashbury “best American poetry” anthologies, which are forty years behind the times on all fronts, and the Norton thing on “post-modernist poetry,” which is only within twenty years of the times in its inclusion of specimens of “sprung-grammar poetry” (my term for what most people refer to as “language poetry”), it’s hard to fault it for that. Hence, I recommend it to all serious readers of poetry.

To that I might add that the book contains photographs of some vintage innovative visual poetry from the seventies in the form of bookworks by Karl Young, and a great semaphoric poem by Hannah Weiner that’s an important precursor of a kind of visual/ cryptographic poetry that I particularly like (and compose).

Speaking of Karl Young, it looks like I’ll be plugging his website frequently from now on, for it’s always getting excellent new material. The latest includes a collection of top-grade Australian visual poetry at thalia.htm, and the beginnings of what looks to be a major d.a.levy site at dalevy.htm which already has reproductions of three of levy’s paintings available nowhere else that prove him to have been a remarkably talented abstract-expressionist among all else he was–for tragically too short a time.

The conference, to get back to that, was called “The First Boston Alternative Poetry Conference.” It took place 17-19 July–at, I like to boast, Hahvahd . . . (Square). It was run (and apparently entirely financed) by poet Aaron Kiely, assisted by fellow poet Sean Cole. On the night of Friday, the 17th, Kiely introduced the conference as an attempt to showcase poetry in opposition to the kind of “best poetry of the year” material the mainstream is concerned with. Aside from Will Alexander’s, which was quite interestingly jumpöcut/surrealistic, the works read Friday night to launch the conference did not strike me as very “alternative.” Nor was much else I heard until Sunday morning, when the panel I was on was given. Some fine work was read, though, including Kiely’s and Cole’s, Lisa Jarnot’s, Fanny Howe’s, Rosemarie Waldrop’s and Caroline Knox’s.

Of the four panels given, I most enjoyed and learned from the one on biography/criticism. It included Kristin Prevallet, who is dealing with Helen Adam; Jarnot, whose subject is Robert Duncan; and Lyman Gilmore, who discussed his already-published book on Joel Oppenheimer–and also read one of Oppenheimer’s poems, one of the highlights of the conference, and intriguingly similar to certain poems of levy’s at the Light & Dust site that draw movingly on the Jewish background of its author. David Kirschenbaum, who is energetically investigating the life and works of levy (though, for me, with insufficient emphasis on levy’s bookworks and other visual poetry), was on this panel, too.

Needless to say, I thought the panel I was on was the best! It, also needless to say, was the least well-attended of the panels, but it drew thirty to forty people. The other panels didn’t draw too much more, but some of the readings drew a full house of seventy or so. Mike Basinski, organizer and moderator of our panel, started it with an over-view of the many ways poetry of today is genuinely spreading into the New, then performed a cutting-edge chant/wail/song/incantation-off-a-visual-poetry- score with his talented daughter 12-year-old Natalie, and talked about the kind of “amuleting” (my characterization) he was most interested in achieving as a poet. Scott Pound showed and discussed some of his visio-conceptual poetry, including an appealing two-parter in which (if I remember it correctly) a small “i” is labeled “question” and the same “i”, with its dot exploding, is labeled “answer”–or vice versa, as Scott said . . .

Sorry. Either I’m becoming ridiculously long-winded or I have a lot to report (albeit not that much to say). In either case, this will have to be continued.

 

Diana Price’s Brilliant Work of Propaganda Against Shakespeare

If you for some reason were consumed with a need to use any means whatever, however dishonest, to convince airheads that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him, it would be near-impossible for you to do a better job of it than Diana Price did with her book of 2001, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.

Needless to say, it would be futile to try to demonstrate this to Price’s admirers, none of them minimally blessed with critical sense.  Still, a detailed analysis of so near-perfect an example of propagandistic techniques, done effectively, should do much to advance the study of the nature and application of what I call Phobosophy, for hatred of truth.  Hence, this essay.

Price’s assault on Shakespeare–as Shakespeare-deniers from Delia Bacon on have for over a century-and-a-half now have–by coming up with a “Shakespeare-Elimination Mechanism.”  The traditional one has been one I term the “Appellational Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy.”  Obviously, the biggest thing Will (as I will henceforth call the known author) has going for him regarding his authorship is his name on title-pages.  Hence, the almost-immediate employment of this ploy by those against him.  It is simply the claim that the use of Will’s name on any document must do more than name him to be useful evidence for his authorship; it must also have corroborating evidence that it is a reference to the man in Stratford attached to it.  Only something along the lines of  “William Shakespeare of Stratford,” for instance, or “W. Shakspere, player with the King’s Men,” can count as meaningful appellational evidence that Will was an author.

Of no importance at all to those using this ploy is the fact that scholars concerned with literary history need only his full name (if that, since sometimes a set of initials is enough) to accept any other author of the time as the man named but John Davies (c. 1565 – 1618) and John Davies (1569 – 1626).  Those two they generally, and understandably, require more for: his place residence (Hereford) of the first, his honorific (“Sir”) of the second.

I would never disagree that a name alone is not sufficient to prove it refers to a given man who uses that name.  Shakespeare-deniers, however, seldom, if ever, stop there.  Their tendency to be excessively prone to what I call “anti-continuumism” (i.e., either/or thinking, or the excluded middle logical fallacy) causes them to dismiss a name alone as evidentiarily irrelevant!  They treat “William Shakespeare” on a book’s title-page where one would expect an author’s name  not as merely more weakly naming the actual author of the book as others would but as not doing that.  True, none of them, if pressed, would deny that it is indeed evidence of that, but they act and write against Will as though it were not.

Be that as it may, over the years this ploy has been been shot down too often for even Shakespeare-deniers to be comfortable with it.  The monument to Shakespeare in his hometown church, for instance, includes too much more than his name for the play to work, as well as describes him as a writer equal to Virgil.  And Leonard Digges speaks of his Stratford monument, and acting career in a poem praising him as a writer in the First Folio.  A better version of the ploy was needed.

Gradually the Chronological Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy evolved.  It is based on the proposition that a name doesn’t (really) refer to an author unless employed while he was living! This was a brilliant move because, by chance, there was for a long time almost no known reference to Will as an author while he was alive that is accompanied by any text clearly and instantly corroborating that the name applies to him.

There was some, though, although it consisted of combinations of evidence rather than a single piece of evidence.  Will’s bequests to Condell, Heminges and Burbage in his will which directly identify him as an actor in the troupe responsible for almost all the premieres of the Shakespearean plays is half of one such combination.  Or a Herald’s College reference to “Shakespear ye Player” which includes the coat of arms of the Stratford Shakespeare family can be substituted for this.

One of the following can complete the combination: either of two poems by John Davies of Hereford which states that Will was both an actor associated with Burbage and a poet; the references in The Return from Parnassus, Part II, in which Shakespeare is referred to as both actor and playwright; and the reference to “Shake-scene,” who is clearly Shakespeare the author, because a line from a play by Shakespeare is said to be his, in Greenes Groatsworth of Witte, as an actor.

Ergo, some evidence from his lifetime demonstrates that Will was as actor named Shakespeare, and the same actor was the poet Shakespeare.  It fails to do nail down his having been the poet as unarguably as the monument inscription or Digges’s poem does.  What does do that are the handful of references to Shakespeare the poet in which he is given the honorific “Mr.”  Since Will was the only Shakespeare in England besides his father, and the only William Shakespeare while he himself was alive, qualified to use this honorific (so far as we know) these instances of “Mr.” are single pieces of direct explicit evidence from Will’s lifetime as strongly in support of his having been The True Author as the First Folio and the monument.  Because they have become part of the case for Will only very recently, however, it is understandable that so few of his deniers have dealt with it.

Price’s first and, in my opinion, finest move was to do something about the chronological Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy’s ever-more-visible ineffectiveness.  She didn’t discard it, though.  Indeed, it is the first weapon in her arsenal against Will. Just as previous wacks had kept the Appellational Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy even though its proposition that names don’t count without an address or the like was no longer able to eliminate Will by reshaping it ever so slightly as the Chronological Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy proposing that names don’t count without an address or the like that are not from the named person’s lifetime, Price came through with a reshaping of the chronological play!

In her standard Shakespeare-denying hunt for evidence that Will doesn’t have, which is the sole evidence that can be used against him, she was the first to notice that no one during his lifetime indicated that he knew him in person when referring to him as an author!  (Or so she thought, or thought she could get away with claiming.  I will later demonstrate that she was wrong.)  The result: the stunningly clever Personal-Knowledge Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy which holds that names don’t count without and address or the like that are not contemporaneous (i.e., from the names person’s lifetime) and from the pen of someone stating he was personally acquainted with the one named!

Price was extremely lucky, for further research turned up 24 authors of the time all of whom had, or could be shown by artifice to have, what she was calling “personal evidence” for their being authors .  Now she had a list of 24 Elizabethan/Jacobean authors, for whom she could claim 24 personal evidence existed in contrast with Will, for whom none did!

There was one problem.  That so many authors had personal evidence Will didn’t have was useful to publicize, no doubt, but not what you’d call dramatically compelling.  Ever resourceful, Price came up with another bright tactic: subdividing her personal evidence into ten kinds.  Now she could say that she could name 24 authors of Will’s time for whom personal evidence of authorship existed, there was NONE for Will, although TEN kinds of it existed!

Actually,  there are quite a bit fewer kinds of personal evidence if one divides them honestly.  P also has a difficult time fitting some kinds of evidence into boxes she needs them in.  She needs to draw on her considerable skills at misleading  even to defend some of her alleged evidence as evidence, too.  Demonstrating how ineffectively she carries out all these, and related, activities will be my main focus for the rest of this essay.

To begin with, I propose to shred her ridiculous taxonomy of personal authorship evidence, which I will take to mean testimony of evidence of authorship by someone at the same time providing evidence of being a personal acquaintance of the person he is speaking of.  That’s as close as I can get to what I believe Price’s definition, which she never gives (a tip: propagandists never define their terms since to do so who prevent them from contradicting them when they need to).

My own definition would make more sense.  It is testimony by one person concerning another person we have evidence he was an acquaintance of.  So if Joe says Harry has a dog named Fritz in a letter to Barbara which does not say anything to indicate that Joe actually knows Harry, it would be personal dog-ownership if Joe also wrote, “I visited my friend of twenty years yesterday,” in a letter to to Sam, but not necessarily to Price.  (And we can leave P now since everything I will be discussing now is entirely by Price, and I won’t be saying anything about her honesty or lack thereof–I don’t think.)

Note: we must remember that when Price speaks of “personal records,” she means explicitly personal records. Note also that she does not define these.  Indeed, now that I mention this, I realize that her final masterstroke as a propagandist is just this Either/Or Shakespeare-Elimination Ploy, this pretense that what counts is explicit personal authorship evidence against versus evidence that is not explicit personal evidence.  That way, she can ignore the copious amount of authorship evidence for Shakespeare that may well be personal, such as–well, any of the title-page names since the printer responsible for type-setting it may well have personally known Shakespeare.

A non-propagandist would never split any kind of evidence in two the way Price splits her personal evidence.  He would do as I will do in the final portion of this essay: divide it into many categories on the basis of its strength–in other words, not into just two categories, one for valid, the other for invalid evidence, but into six or more starting with one for “almost certainly valid” down to one for “almost certainly not valid.”  Responsible scholarship.

* * *

 The most important part of Price’s book is her appendix. It contains her “Chart of Literary Paper Trails” followed by documentation. She introduces the chart with the following paragraph:

“Just as birds can be distinguished from turtles by characteristics peculiar to the species, so writers can be distinguished from doctors. actors. or financiers, by the types of personal records left behind. This chart compares personal and literary records left by Elizabethan and Jacobean writers during their lifetimes, with at least one record extant for any category checked. Category 10 includes evidence dating up to twelve months following death, to allow for eulogies or reports of death. Documentation follows.”

Now, then, the strong implication of the text above is that Price will find characteristics distinguishing writers from other professionals. Yet one of her categories is “Evidence of Education.” which does no such thing since an education (a formal education) is a characteristic of many professions, and not a necessary characteristic of the writing profession. Similarly, her category for “Evidence of books owned, written in. borrowed or given,” has to do with a characteristic of many professions–and non-professions, since a housewife could own a book. An illiterate housewife, for that matter. I would grant that having used books is a necessary characteristic of a writer, unlike having had a formal education. In short, Price’s filter only contains eight appropriate categories.

They are described as follows:

(1) “Record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters”;

(2) Evidence of having been paid to write”;

(3) “Evidence of a direct relationship-to a patron”;

(4) Extant original manuscript”:

(5) Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters”;

(6) Commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams contributed or reveived”;

(7) Miscellaneous records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer)”; and

(8) Notice at death as a writer.

This last one, for some reason doesn’t have to be personal as Price defines the term: hence, for her, Joe Blow’s saying, “Tom Hawkings, the writer, is in bed sick” on 11 June. 1606 is not personal evidence that Hawkings was a writer, but Joe Blow’s saying the next day, “Tom Hawkings, the writer, died last night,” is. lt’s a stupid category, anyway, like manv others obviously made up simply to given Price ten categories. Why wouldn’t eulogies go with (6) “Commendatory verses, etc.?” and notice of death with (7), “Miscellaneous records (that refer to the subject’s being a writer. Indeed, it’s a completely superfluous category.   Any responsible scholar would remove it, as I now will.  Price is now down to 7 categories.

(3) “Evidence of a direct relationship to a patron” is another clearly bogus category since is is effectually the same as (2) Evidence of having been paid to write.” as well as a speciman of m”iscellaneous reference to the subject as a writer” of category (7).

And why should there be both (4) Extant original manuscript”and (5) Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters” since one category for “documents in the subject’s hand showing him to have been a writer” would have been sufficient for an honest scholar?

And certainly (1) “Record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters” is bogus, as well, since it would include documents that could go into (5) Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters”; and others that could go into (7) Miscellaneous records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer).”

So, how many legitimate categories would a responsibly revised Pricean filter have? (1) Evidence of having been paid to write”: (2) Handwritten manuscripts. inscriptions, receipts. letters, etc .. touching on literarv matters”: (3) Commendatory verses, epistles, epigrams, or other documents by others mentioning the subject as a writer or to others, mentioning them
as writers (although I’m not sure this last makes one oneself a professional writer).”

****

Here are the Pricean Categories again, as a scholar would have them:

(1) Evidence of having been paid to write”

This combines the categories Price has as (3) and (4).

(2) Handwritten manuscripts, inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters”

This combines the categories Price has as (5), (6) and part of (2).

(3) Commendatory verses, epistles, epigrams, or other documents by others mentioning the subject as a writer or to others, mentioning them as writers

This combines the categories Price has as (7), (8), (10) and the part of (2) not included in the category I have as (2). I’ve deleted the categories Price has as (1) and (9) because they have little or nothing to with a person’s career. By Price’s logic. If the records of Shakespeare’s time in the Stratford Grammar School turned up, we would have to accept him as a professional writer, which is ridiculous. Ditto if one book known to have been his did, or was even claimed in a letter to have been in his hands at any time.

Speaking of books, there IS a book extant which is inscribed with his last name. I believe it has “Mr. Shakespeare,” but am not sure. Another thing to check–or can anyone who knows–pass on the information? If it says “Mr. Shakespeare.” then it had to have belonged to either him or his father, it would seem. If it belonged to his father, wouldn’t it also–at least in a manner of speaking–belong to him. since his father spent his last vears. so far as I know, living in his son’s home? Even if not, how cold he not have handled it? Furthermore. how as an actor would he never have had a script in hand. and why shouldn’t a script count as a book? And what about the library his son-in-law had, presumably while Shakespeare was alive. Is it likely Shakespeare never touched one of those books? His close friend Thomas Quiney had a librarv. too. Was it off-limits to Will?

Note: Price claims he was a play-broker. Could he have been a play broker and never had any contact with a book?

If you want to make evidence of contact with books category (4) in my revised list of Pricean categories, fine. There is evidence of it for only 9 of the 25 possible authors on Price’s chart. It would seem that lack of such evidence more indicates a career as an author than evidence of it. Statistically.

Price deals with Marlowe particularly deviously. She counts a letter of Thomas Kyd’s to Lord Keeper Puckering stating that Marlowe wrote for a lord’s plavers which was written after Marlowe died, so shouldn’t be counted in Price’s filter. Price uses this letter in two categories, by the way! And she describes it as being to Puckering in only one, neatly disguising the fact that she was using it twice. (lnadvertantly, I’m sure.)

She also counts a letter from Robert Sidney to Burghley saying that Marlowe professed himself to be a scholar, but a scholar need not be a writer, so is ambiguous and shouldn’t be part of the evidence recorded in Price’s filter.

George Peele wrote a tribute to Marlowe about three weeks after he died that referred to his death and called him “the muses’ darling for thy verse.” But this is not personal testimony. Nowhere in the poem does Peele claim Marlowe as a friend or acquaintance. For some reason, Price waives the need for authors of notices of death to somewhere in their notices indicate they knew the deceased to count as personal.

Conclusion: by Price’s standards, Marlowe left no literary trail.

Here is a list of Price’s 25 possible writers indicating how many of my four de-propaganidized Pricean categories has evidence for each of them.

Jonson all

Nashe all

Massinger all but #4

Harvey all

Spenser all

Daniel all but #4

Peele all but #4

Drayton all but #4

Chapman all

Drummond all but #1

Munday all but #4

Marston all

Lyly all but #2

Heywood all but #4

Lodge all

Greene all but #2

Dekker all but #4

Watson all but #2 and #4

Marlowe none

Beaumont #3 only

Fletcher all but #2

Kyd all but #4

Webster all but #2 and #4

Shakespeare none

I would add that several pieces of evidence Price gives her genuine writers may be questionable but I haven’t time to check each one out. As for the list above. even if we give Marlowe credit for the one item I would but Price shouldn’t because it’s ambiguous (his calling himself a writer by describing himself a Scholar), you just have four categories that two writers are only on two of, and two are on only one of, and Shakespeare not on any according to Price, but on all if we accept the Thomas More fragment as his, which many scholars do; give him credit for earning money from his plays (as he certainly did) rather than having been paid for them) or assume Southampton was his patron as any objective scholar has to; give him ownership of the book with his last name in it; and accept any of the three or four people who during Shakespeare’s life seem to have made personal references to him as a writer such as Meres, Davies, and Buc.

***

It’s time now for a proper list of the authorship evidence for Shakespeare.

(A) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Personal

(B) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Almost Certainly Personal

(C) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Probably Personal

(D) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Slightly More Likely Than Not To Be Personal

(E) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Equally Likely to Be Personal or Not Personal

(F) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Slightly More Likely Than Not Not To Be Personal

(G) Literary Evidence That Is Probably Not Personal

(H) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Almost Certainly Not Personal

(I) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Not Personal

Any fair-minded anti-Stratfordian, and there are a few, will have to admit that such a division is more revealing, if less propagan-distically effective, than the simple black&white personal/impersonal one that Price uses. Not all the evidence is so easily classified of as she pretends.

I also differ from Price in that I use “personal” to mean “testimony by someone who can be shown beyond reasonable doubt to have personally known the person he is testifying about.” Price misuses the term to mean only “testimony by someone who states as he gives it that he personally knows the person he is testifying about.” (I should add that she is not fastidious about sticking to this definition when it suits her agenda not to.) All that concerns her is explicitly personal evidence, a category of just about no value except to propagandists. I also specify that I am concerned with evidence from the lifetime of the alleged writer concerned only instead of fudging things so I can use evidence from after his death when convenient, as she does.

(A) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Personal

I found no evidence for Shakespeare that I feel belongs in this category, for it is for only the most unarguably certain evidence a writer could leave behind, such as signed, holographic manuscripts, or letters in the hand of an alleged writer concerning his writing, with no evidence extant against their identification as his.. I would admit a some of the evidence Diana Price has found for other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. There is no such evidence for a substantial minority of the 24 writers in Price’s study, and only scraps for almost all the rest, just about none having left behind more than one complete manuscript copy of a play, for instance, and only a few leaving behind so much as one complete manuscript copy of a play.

(B) Literary Evidence That Is Almost Certainly Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

(1) the dedication to Venus and Adonis, 1593

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLY,
Earl of Southampton, and Baronof Tichfield

RIGHT HONORABLE, I KNOW not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a god-father, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content; which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world’s hopeful expectation.

Your honour’s in all duty,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

(a) Here we have a dedication in which William Shakespeare personally states that he wrote the poem, Venus and Adonis. One can argue that he didn’t really write it, but one can use that argument against any record someone claims is personal literary evidence for some author.  Unless one can provide some evidence against his personally stating his authorship, however, it stands as prima facie evidence that he did so.  Price certainly provided no such evidence, nor has anyone else I know of.

(b) This dedication is also the testimony of its publisher, Richard Field, that William Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis. Since it is near-certain that Field personally know William Shakespeare, because : (i) their fathers knew each other, Shakespeare’s father having appraised Richard’s father’s inventory sometime around 1590; (ii) Richard and William were from the same small town of some 1500 to 2000 inhabitant, and close enough in age that they would have gone to the same one-classroom school together; (iii) both had literary interests, even if we assume William was only an actor; and (iv) William had a character in Cymbeline, needing a false name, use the pseudonym Richard du Champ, french for “Richard Field.”

(c) Several other writers left records stating that William Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis, and there is no good evidence that he did not write both it and its dedication.

(2) dedication to The Rape of Lucrece

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLY,
Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Tichfield.

The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

Your lordship’s in all duty,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

This dedication, published in 1594, is personal literary evidence from his lifetime not only for the same three reasons Shakespeare’s dedication to Venus and Adonis is, but for a subtle fourth reason: it includes implicitly but near-certainly the personal testimony for Shakespeare of a third witness. It states the Shakespeare had a “warrant” from Southampton, which most reasonable people take to have been patronage, won by Venus and Adonis.

That Southampton liked that poem is close to unarguable because Shakespeare had said in his first dedication that he would not compose a second poem if Southampton did not like the first, and here we have a second poem from him. Whatever the “warrant” was, though, Shakespeare got it, and it had to be delivered to him. One would think Southampton himself personally gave it to him, but even if not—as anti-Stratfordians argue—someone had to give that warrant to Shakespeare in person, as a writer. In other words, either Southampton recognized Shakespeare in person as a writer or his go-between did.

(3) Francis Meres’s Testimony

Meres (1598): “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.”

How would Meres know about the sonnets among Shakespeare’s private friends without being a private friend himself—or by knowing a private friend who was thus a go-between personally recognizing Shakespeare as a poet the way the deliverer of the warrant in (b) was?

(4) Sir George Buc’s Testimony (which I found out about from Alan Nelson’s website)

The Folger Shakespeare Library copy of George a Greene contains an annotation in the hand of George Buc (1560-1622), who was Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622.  It  reads as follows:

Written by ………… a minister, who ac[ted] the pin{n}ers part in it himself. Teste W. Shakespea[re]

Ergo, George Buc knew Shakespeare personally, which makes the following Stationers Register entry of Nov. 26, 1607 almost-certainly personal literary evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime that he was a writer:

“26 Novembris. Nathanial Butter John Busby. Entred for their Copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Thwardens A booke called. Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Banksyde vjd.”

(5) Thomas Heywood’s Testimony

The following, by Thomas Heywood is from “Epistle to the printer after An Apology for Actors” (1612): “Here likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that worke, by taking the two Epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a lesse volume, vnder the name of another, which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him; and hee to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name: but as I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage, vnder whom he hath publisht them, so the Author I know much offended with M. Jaggard that (altogether vnknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”

The work Heywood is referring to is Jaggard’s 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of poems, the title page of which said it was by William Shakespeare, but which contained poems known or thought to be by others, including the two poems by Heywood that Heywood gives the titles of, which were in Heywood’s Troia Britannica (1609).

Because the anti-Stratfordians have had trouble reading it (Diana Price, for instance, claims on pages 130 and 131 of her book that the passage’s “wording is dense, filled with troublesome pronouns” and therefore can’t count as evidence for Shakespeare), let me repeat it, accompanied by my paraphrase (in caps).

Here likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in

I FEEL I MUST TELL YOU HOW I WAS HARMED IN

that work, by taking the two Epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to

THAT VOLUME BY THE INCLUSION IN IT OF TWO OF MY POEMS (WHICH I NAME)

Paris, and printing them in a less volume, under the name of another,

AND PRINTING THEM IN A LESS SIGNIFICANT VOLUME ATTRIBUTED TO SOMEONE ELSE

which may put the world in opinion I might steal them from him; and he

AN ACT WHICH MAY MAKE IT LOOK TO EVERYONE LIKE I STOLE THE POEMS FROM THAT OTHER PERSON AND HE

to do himself right, hath since published them in his own name: but as

TO INDICATE THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER HAS SINCE PRINTED THEM AS HIS, BUT SINCE

I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage, under whom he

I AM COMPELLED TO ADMIT THAT MY POEMS ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE GIVEN SOME SORT OF REWARD, BACKED, OR THE LIKE, BY THAT OTHER PERSON, WHOSE NAME JAGGARD

(Note: “patronage” to modern ears, is a bit dense as a figure of speech, and the “he” that refers to Jaggard is sloppily used, but not so sloppily as to prevent any reasonable person from figuring out its referent, or for any other reading of the passage to work)

hath published them, so the Author I know much offended with M.

HAS PUBLISHED THEM UNDER. THE WRITER WHOSE NAME WAS SO USED HAS, I KNOW, BECOME VERY ANNOYED AS A RESULT WITH MR.

Jaggard (that altogether un known to him) presumed to make so bold

JAGGARD (WHO WITHOUT THE WRITER’S KNOWLEDGE) AUDACIOUSLY MADE FREE

with his name. These, and the like dishonesties I know you to be clear

WITH THE NAME OF THAT WRITER. I’M SURE YOU COULD NOT BE GUILTY OF SUCH KINDS OF UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR

of; and I could wish but to be the happy Author of so worthy a work as

AND IT WOULD PLEASE ME IF ONLY I WERE THE FORTUNATE WRITER OF A WORK GOOD ENOUGH TO

I could willingly commit to your care and workmanship.

TURN OVER TO YOU (THE PRINTER THIS TEXT IS ADDRESSED TO).

This passage is as clear as anything written back then (and no anti-Stratfordian at HLAS has shown where it errs). To say it is too ambiguous to count as a personal reference to Shakespeare is ridiculous, if not insane. Heywood in effect names him, for only Shakespeare’s name is on The *Passionate Pilgrim*; he calls him an author, and reveals personal information about him. That he knew him personally is corroborated by a later poem Heywood wrote in which he said that Shakespeare was not haughty, and known to all as just “Will.” Even if you decide Heywood did not personally know Will, he had to have gotten his information about him from someone who did know him personally and that he was upset with Jaggard’s misuse of his name.

(C) Literary Evidence That Is Probably Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

(1) Greene’s Testimony

The author of Greenes Groatsworth of Witte (1592), whether Robert Greene, as I believe, or Henry Chettle, as others do, states that William Shakespeare, the actor, was a playwright (since he is said to conceitedly believe that one of his lines makes him as good a composer of blank verse as Christopher Marlowe and two other playwriting associates of Greene’s). (See my essay on the Groatsworth for details.)

The Groatsworth author not only knows of this actor and that he was writing plays (or parts of plays), but pronounces him conceited, and a jack-of-all trades with some certainty. That strongly suggests to me that he personally knew him.  That would make sense regardless of whether to author were Greene or Chettle since both were entrally involved in the London writing trade.  Greene himself probably knew just about everyone in the theatre business.

But Shakespeare is only identified by his acting vocation, authorship of a line from Henry VI, Part 3 (said to be his in the First Folio and not attributed to anyone else anywhere else), and the nonce term, “Shake-scene,” to refer to Shakespeare, not explicitly. Hence, I put it in this category rather than into B–someone is probably, not almost certainly speaking of Shakespeare as a writer from personal knowledge.

(2) Henry Chettle’s Testimony

I contend that in his preface to Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), Henry Chettle identifies Shakespeare as a playwright he has met in person and found to be a swell guy. He doesn’t give this playwright’s name, but in speaking of him, he is clearly speaking of the Crow of  the Groatsworth (i.e., Shakespeare), for he is apologizing for offensive statements in the Groatsworth that could only have been directed at the Crow, the only one insulted therein who was an actor, or—for that matter—had both an art and a vocation. (See my Chettle essay for the details.)

(3) John Davies’s Testimony

In 1603, John Davies of Hereford writes of his love of actors, including a W.S. (coupled with an R.B.) whom Davies also loved for poetry and who, except for anti-Stratfordians, is almost certainly Shakespeare. Two years later he also refers positively to actors, particularly “R.B. and W.S.,” in a poem. I mention this to indicate the probability that he actually knew W.S. and R.B. personally, because of his fondness for actors in general, and them in particular.

In 1610, a more explicit poem by Davies about Shakespeare was published:

To Our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake-speare

Some say (good Will). which I, in sport, do sing,
Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King;
And been a King among the meaner sort.
Some others rail; but, rail as they think fit,
Thou hast no railing, but, a reigning Wit:
And honesty thou sowst, which they do reap;
So, to increase their stock which they do keep.

To start with, Davies describes Shakespeare as a dramatist, as Terence was. In the body of the poem, he speaks of Shakespeare’s reigning wit, and reveals his knowledge of comments about Shakespeare. This, for me, is suggestion enough that Davies knew Shakespeare, but the fact that the poem is one in a sequence of poems Davies wrote about various of his friends, all of them compli- mentary, though one or two are teasingly mocking, as well, makes it probably, for me, that Davies personally knew Shakespeare.

(4) the impresa

A 1613 record (“Item, 31 Martii 1613 to Mr. Shakespeare in gold about my Lord’s impresa xlivs. To Richard Burbage for painting and making it, in gold xlivs.”) would seem fair evidence of a payment to Will Shakespeare, probably in person, for creating some kind of clever/arty picture/motto combination of just the kind that Shakespeare the writer imaged so often in his plays and that Burbage would have had the talent to paint.  What other Mr. Shakespeare might it have been?

(5) The Testimony of the Title-Pages

Throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime title-pages of published plays attributed those plays to him. They are obviously literary evidence that he wrote them. I consider them probably personal because it doesn’t seem possible to me that none of the many publishers who published his plays and testified that he wrote them by placing his name on their title-pages knew him personally.

Diana Price, in fact, is sure that nearly all of them did—except that they knew him only as a play-broker, not as a playwright. Nonetheless, if they knew him personally, their testimony on the title-pages of the books they published must be considered personal literary evidence.

This must hold, also, for the title-pages of published plays they put his name or initials on that scholars are close to unanimous in considering not to have been Shakespeare’s work: if a publisher personally knew Shakespeare, and publically stated that he was the author of a particular book, then his testimony is personal literary evidence that that was the case (however easily counter-evidence might outweigh it). Interestingly, since no known published play of the times had the name of a non-writer on its title-page, even Shakespeare’s name on the titile-page of a play he did not write is strong evidence that he was a writer.

(D) Literary Evidence Slightly More Likely Than Not To Be Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

(1) The Testimony of John Weever

Here is John Weever’s sonnet on Shakespeare, which appeared in his Epigrammes (1599):

Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue
I swore Apollo got them, and none other,
Their rosy-tainted features clothed in tissue,
Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother.
Rose-cheekt Adonis with his amber tresses,
Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her,
Chaste Lucretia virgine-like her dresses,
Proud lust-stung Tarquine seeking still to prove her:
Romea-Richard; more, whose names I know not,
Their sugred tongues, and power attractive beauty
Say they are Saints, although that Sts they show not
For thousands vows to them subjective dutie:
They burn in love thy children Shakespear let them
Go, wo thy Muse more Nymphish brood beget them.

According to E.A.J. Honigmann, “Weever made (this poem) a ‘Shakespearian’ sonnet; of around 160 epigrams in his collection, most of them between four and twenty lines in length, one, and only one, is fourteen lines long and rhymes abab, cdcd, efef, gg. This can only mean one thing – that Weaver had seen some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and wished to signal to others in the know that he had enjoyed this privilege.” That would make him one of the friends Shakespeare circulated his sonnets among. Pure speculation, yes, but possibly correct.

(2) The Testimony of Antony Scoloker

In his preface to “Diaphantus; or, the Passions of Love” (1604), Antony Scoloker writes: “(an epistle to the reader) should be like the Never-too-well read Arcadia, where the Prose and verce (Matters and Words) are like his Mistresses eyes, one still excelling another and without Co-rivall: or to come home to the vulgars Element, like Friendly Shakespeare’s Tragedies, where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.”

If Scoloker was referring to Shakespeare’s personality, his use of the adjective “friendly” to describe him would indicate that he personally knew him (or that someone else who personally knew him had told Skoloker he was friendly); but since Scoloker here could be referring to Shakespeare’s “friendly” style as a writer, I don’t feel I can assume that he knew Shakespeare the man. (There are two conflicting questions for me: why insert an adjective about a man’s disposition in a paragraph otherwise entirely about writing; and why use the adjective in front of Shakespeare’s name rather than in front of “tragedies” if it is supposed to describe the latter?)

(3) The Testimony of John Webster

John Webster, 1612 (“To the reader” prefacing The White Devil):

“Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance; for mine own part I have ever truly cheris’d my good opinion of other men’s worthy labors: especially of that full and height’ned style of Master Chapman; the labor’d and understanding works of Master Jonson; the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher; and lastly, without wrong last to be named, the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, M. Dekker, and M. Heywood; wishing that what I write may be read by their light; protesting that, in the strength of mine own judgment, I know them so worthy that, though I rest silent in my own work, yet to most of theirs I dare, without flattery, fix that of Martial: non norunt, haec monumenta mori [these monuments know not how to die].”

On the surface, Webster’s praise is impersonal–the kind that is appropriate when “there was no personal relationship,” as Price’s husband put it in an HLAS discussion. Webster praises everyone’s “worthy labors”; the “style” of Chapman; the “works” of Jonson; the “composures” of Beaumont and Fletcher; the “industry” of the last three. I mention it here, however, because of its reference to Webster’s “beloved friend” Heywood, without a single adjective to indicate he was a friend of Webster’s.

But in 1612  John Webster a verse something “To his beloved friend Maister Thomas Heyood” for the latter’s “Apology for Actors.”  So, by including Shakespeare in the company of a certain friend of his, Webster may, ever so slightly, be indicating that Shakespeare, too, was his friend.

(Let me insert here that Price counts Webster’s verse as “Contemporaneous Personal Literary Evidence” for both Heywood and himself. On its face it suppports the claim that Webster knew Heywood and thought Heywood was the author of “Apology for Actors.” But how does it persuade us that Webster was himself an author? If Shakespeare’s dedications to V&A and RoL don’t count, Webster’s name at the bottom of a printed verse is no evidence of his authorship. There is no indication that Webster’s rough draft manuscript for the verse survives, nor does Heywood’s bio show any reciprocal record of esteem for Webster. This is not the only case where a commendatory verse gets counted twice in the CPLE data. I have to say it sounds like stuffing the ballot box.)

(4) The Testimony of Leonard Digges

In 1613 Leonard Digges compared the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of “our Will Shakespeare,” which is a pretty friendly way to refer to Shakespeare—and Digges was not only a close neighbor of Shakespeare’s in both Aldermarston and in London, his father-in-law was remembered by Shakespeare in his will, and served as one of the two overseers of that will. But Digges could have meant “England’s” by “our.” I’m also not sure that “Will” wasn’t the name everyone knew Shakespeare by, not just his friends. Given a choice between calling this piece of evidence personal or impersonal, I’d call it personal. Fortunately, with a sane way of arranging such items in a continuum, I don’t have to do that here.

(E) Literary Evidence Equally Likely to Be Personal or Not Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

This category would include just about all the literary evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime that is not explicitly personal nor consigned to the preceding categories. I don’t believe there is any known piece of evidence for Shakespeare that can confidently be described as certainly or even probably impersonal. Edward Alleyn, for instance, referred to Shakespeare as a poet; was the reference personal? I, for one, would suspect it probably was since it seems unlikely two such important figures in the London theatre world of the time would not have met, but we lack sufficient data to say one way or the other. The same seems true for all the other evidence for Shakespeare. So this category is the last on my nine that I will concern myself with here. And I won’t bother to list the pieces of evidence that would go into it, for I have covered most of them in the main body of my book, Shakespeare and the Rigidniks.

I will just say that it is ridiculously misleading for Price to give no credence at all to this kind of evidence merely because it is not known to be personal since it is also not known not to be personal.  She simply claims, entirely fraudulently, that there are two kinds of evidence, personal and impersonal.  But there are three kinds, a small amount known to be personal, a large amount neither known to be personal or known not to be personal, and a little known not to be personal.  When forced to admit this, she–unsurprisingly–calls the middle kind “ambiguous evidence.”  I’d call it evidence of unknown personalness.

Price’s book is preposterously propagandistic in many other ways I hope someday to trace in order to provide a sort of compendium of propagandistic practices.  The way she makes four or five different sorts of evidence into ten so as to make it seem many more kinds of evidence are lacking for Shakespeare than actually are seems to me the best piece of scholarly dishonesty yet invented by an anti-Stratfordian, better even than Looney’s preposterous lists of characteristics Shakespeare doesn’t have, according to him, and Oxford does have, according to him, that make the latter 100% capable of having written the works attributed to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, despite actual evidence, 100% incapable of having written them. One can only shake one’s head in wonder at such genius wasted on nothing more than libeling a great poet–for it wasn’t enough to enable her to find a replacement for him.

 

 

Before getting into my discussion of Márton Koppány’s poem, I want to make a few introductory comments intended for beginners in the appreciation of works like it.  First of all, it is a minimalist poem, so dependent for its effects on such small details as, here, its (mis)use of quotation marks.  What is done with these makes it a kind of language poem I term an infraverbal poem, or poem in which what is done inside its letters (or just outside them, in the case at times of punctuation).  I mention this rather dry fact because as a taxonomist, I believe knowing the names of kinds of poetry can significantly help one appreciate  a peculiar poem like this one that one has never seen before.  Why?  Because knowing in advance that what he is encountering is a language poem (as I define that) will (or ought to) alert the engagent to key on what the poem is doing with language beyond denoting, connoting or pleasing the ear and how that may contribute to what the poem is saying.  Knowing that it is an infraverbal poem should make how the poem’s words are spelled or punctuated and how that may contribute to what the poem is saying important to him.   Knowing in this case that the poem he is viewing is a visual poem, as well as an infraverbal poem similarly will alert him to what it is as a graphic design, in particular to why its letters are outlined and of the color they are, and why the quotation marks and background are the color they are.

I haven’t much more to say about the poem: just that it is a spectacularly simple evocation of dust and all it means consisting of no more than the single word “dust” on a dark blue page much larger than it and some star-hued quotation marks, and resonating with its creator’s understanding of Zen koans, as is the case with much (all?) of his work.  A yawn?  Sure, but only to those unable to click sufficiently with what its word and  punctuation are doing to allow us to seep into the eternal night we’re all enclosed in.  Or so it seems to me.

 

 

 

Marjorie Perloff’s Seminar on Visual Poetics

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Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Numbers 3/4, March/April 1998

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UB Poetics Discussion Group, SUNY, Buffalo; http://[email protected].

Nicholodeon, by Darren Wershler-Henry.
Coach House Books; www.chbooks.com

 

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Lately I’ve become a bit of an Internet-addict. As a result of that–and the fact that the publication of otherstream magazines (experioddica) is down of late–this will be another internet- related column. It will also be politico-vocationally squabbly, for it’s mainly about a seminar in “visual poetics” for grad students that Marjorie Perloff is teaching at Stanford this (winter ’98) semester. I found out about it at the poetics discussion group that Charles Bernstein hosts out of SUNY, Buffalo. Back in the fall Perloff had notified the group about her seminar and solicited suggestions as to materials to be taught. I posted a short list of things, notably the light & dust website, and Core, a Symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry–the website for its great selection of visual poetry, Core for its survey through interviews of what’s going on in the field–and both for their extensive lists of relevant zines and books.

That was where things stood until 12 January of this year when Craig Dworkin announced at the Buffalo site that Charles Bernstein would be the first poet in the reading series that had been set up to accompany Perloff’s seminar. Other language poets would later be reading. I immediately fired off a letter that said, “As a long-time participant in and follower of the American visual poetry scene, I have to say that I’m disappointed that Marjorie Perloff, who has the cultural weight to do a good deal for such under-appreciated visual poets as Karl Kempton, Karl Young, Crag Hill, Miekal And, Liz Was, Jonathan Brannen, G. Huth, Trudy Mercer, John Byrum, Richard Kostelanetz, Dick Higgins, Bill DiMichele, Gregory St. Thomasino, Marilyn Rosenberg, Michael Basinski, Jake Berry, Scott Helmes, Harry Polkinhorn (and on and on, to speak only of those contemporary American visual poets whose names are on the tip of my tongue), chooses instead to kick off her graduate seminar in visual poetics with a reading by Charles Bernstein, who is a late-coming dabbler in the field, and needs no career boosts.”

Miekal And also complained. Then Luigi-Bob Drake posted a copy of Perloff’s syllabus, which he had found at the Stanford U. site. The only book in the field that I thought of any value that was on her list of required and recommended books was the out-of-date, never very complete Solt anthology of concrete poetry (which includes a number of pieces that are not by almost anybody’s standards, visual poetry). Not surprisingly, Perloff had not followed up on any of my recommendations.

A while later Perloff personally e.mailed me a greatly extended syllabus; it was pretty much the same as the one Drake had posted except for a quite long supplementary reading list. This, at least, did refer to the light & dust site (which had come up at the discussion group as central to current visual poetry and which I’m sure even Perloff realizes has to be recognized despite all the work on it by people she’s ignoring). On the other hand, just about nothing else that has anything to do with “my” visual poets was anywhere in her syllabus.

I responded after a while with a satirical syllabus of a seminar on language poetry that I’d have if the positions of language and visual poetry, and mine and Perloff’s, were reversed. All my visiting poets would be visual poets who have also done some poetry most people would agree is language poetry like Jonathan Brannen and Crag Hill. I ignored just about all the big names in the field. There was no immediate reaction to my piece.

One of the few genuine visual poets Perloff discusses in her course is Darren Wershler-Henry, a young Canadian who has a series of poems at the Coach House website. Johanna Drucker characterizes Wershler-Henry’s work as “a new synthesis of conceptual and visual poetics.” This is nonsense. He is merely a talented apprentice following, mainly, in the footsteps of bp Nichol. He acknowledges his derivativeness, and is even praised for it; but there is a difference between being derivatively derivative and being creatively derivative.

One of his poems on the net, “Grain,” consists of a square with a horizontal line crossing it about a quarter of the way up. While we watch, g’s appear and fill the square; then they cluster under the line; next their stems “sprout,” hoisting their heads above the “ground”; their heads fill with tiny g’s that are soon dispersed–to become the scatter of g’s that the sequence began with. This is nice, but visual poets, beginning visual poets, have been doing similar things since the sixties or earlier. Wershler-Henry also has a one-liner called “The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein by Marcel Duchamp” at the site: “a rose is a rose is a rose,” with all the letters black except the last, which is red. He has a nice Spencer Selby imitation there called “The Cutting Room Floor,” too. Nothing wrong with spotlighting Wershler-Henry, who does have potential, but why not spotlight a few of the host of older, better American and Canadian visual poets around, too, in place of people like Bernstein? Why not spotlight jwcurry, for instance–to name someone who, like Wershler-Henry, is a Canadian strongly influenced by bp Nichol, but who is many many-directioned miles beyond Wershler-Henry as a visual poet? Or . . . but I’m sure my drift is clear by now.

 

Out of the Ultra-Otherstream

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2008

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      Text Loses Time
      By Nico Vassilakis.
      2007; 180 pp; Pa; ManyPenny Press,
      1111 E. Fifth St., Moscow ID83843. $18.95, ppd.

 

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I coined the term, “otherstream,” over twenty years ago to stand for art that is outside the understanding, and probably knowledge, of all but a few college professors who teach some form of art. At the time I coined the term, Nico Vassilakis, in his early twenties, was already doing major otherstream things in Seattle, then perhaps the top city for otherstream poetry in the U.S., thanks to him–and to Trudy Mercer, M. Kettner, Ezra Mark, Joe Keppler, Jim Andrews, Jim Maloney, Nancy Brush-Burr and a number of others. (It wasn’t until the nineties that Port Charlotte, Florida, moved into first place.) Even then Vassilakis was active as a poetry-organizer and publisher as well as a poet, co- founding the Subtext Reading Series, which he still curates.

His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review–and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. Among his many chapbooks are Askew (bcc press), Stampologue (RASP), Orange: A Manual (Sub Rosa Press), Diptychs: Visual Poems (Otolith), Pond Ring (nine muses books), sequence (Burning Press), Enoch and Aloe (Last Generation Press), The Colander (housepress), Flattened Missive (P.I.S.O.R. Publications), Species Pieces (gong press), KYOO (Burning Press) and others. He’s even got a DVD out called CONCRETE: Movies. In spite of all this, it wasn’t until quite recently that Vassilakis had his first full- length collection published thanks to Crag Hill’s new outfit, ManyPenny Press, but that’s what you get for being otherstream.

Here’s its author’s statement about this collection, which is called, Text Loses Time: “This book intends to present both verbal and visual poetries as equal. Though notions of poetics have shifted and swerved, what has stayed solid throughout is that the alphabet, the word – however arranged – contains, within it, dual significance. First, the proto- historic role of the visual conveyance of represented fact. Second, the overriding desire of human utterance to substantiate existence. In conjoining these two models this book hopes to form a third, blurred value. Thought and experience are factors that accrue, while staring and writing help resolve and conclude. Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As one stares further, meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, spatial relations and visual associations emerge as one delves further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text one is reading. One aim, to this end, is to merge and hinge visual and textual writing into workable forms. This book collects some of these experiments.”

“Dear appliance, Dear container port,/ Frayed edges of a soluble fish/ Uninvited on arrival and completely soaked/ Investigates misspellings throughout the city./ Shows little regard for the pond./ The hair draped on purpose/ Something ecclesiastic in conversation./ Refrain from smoking please.” Thus goes the first poem in Vassilakis’s “Dear This, Dear Ampoule,” sequence of seven eight-liners to give you an idea of the wily-witted verve of the solitextual work that takes up a little more than half of Text Loses Time. To give you a very incomplete idea of what he does vispoetically, consider his Negative Alphabet Alphabet. His subject is, yes, the alphabet. He sets it down, two letters to a page, over thirteen pages–with each letter altered. For example, he removes the middle horizontal of his B, along with a bit of the curves it is attached to, and shifts the detached piece to the left of the B, but keeping it at the same height it was. Simple, right? Nonetheless, when Vassilakis does tricks like that to every letter in the alphabet in order, shifting back and forth between white letter on black and black letter on white, the result is a veritable symphony. This sounds like gush, but it’s not–because of alphabetization.

Alphabetization came after the invention of letters, needless to say. The latter was a primary landmark in the advance of civilization–but I claim that the invention of alphabetization was of great importance, too–however overlooked by most cultural historians. I don’t know when it occurred, but–well, think what it’s done just for orderly use of the computer. For infraverbal poets, it has provided a wonderful, accessible metaphor for Order, and Sequentiality, both of which Vassilakis has maximally exploited in Negative Alphabet Alphabet.

As his alphabet moves inexorably to its climax, the Z, each letter has a part of itself jolt out in an unexpected direction. I’m reminded of dance steps. The aesthetic key is that each “step” is just slightly different from the one before, just different enough to jar, but not different enough not to seem almost instantly “reasonable”–due in large part to the fact that each letter, being in alphabetical order, is–in the gross–fully expected. The sequence is thus a flow of the standard melody of the standard alphabet jazzedly accompanied by riffs off it that form a “negative alphabet.” Both flows reach the same destination–a Z that can pass for three Z’s–whose zing is set up by all the other letters’ seeming like fractured single letters.

I wish I had space to say more about Negative Alphabet Alphabet, and something about the many other equally ingenious but never even slightly superficial works in Vassilakis’s new book. I’m actually a little glad, too, if truth be known, because it’s hard to say just what it is about them that makes them so effective. Nick Piombino helps in that task with a fine afterword, however. My final word is a common one in my columns: if you have any interest in poetry beyond what you can learn from the academics, this is one of the books you really ought to have.

 

Last Column?

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Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2000

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Courier: an anthology of concrete and visual poetry,
edited by derek beaulieu. 56 loose sheets,
post cards, chapbooks, etc., in a manila envelope
(in a collector’s edition of 115 copies);
housepress, 1339 19th Avenue NW, Calgary, Alberta,
Canada T2M 1A5 ([email protected]). $60.

O!!Zone 99 – 00, Fall 1999, edited by Harry Burrus.
100 pp; O!!Zone, 1266 Fountain View,
Houston TX 77057-2204. $20.

 

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Here’s the scoop regarding the title of this installment of my column: two days from now my doctor will be telling me whether my prostate cancer, for which I had apparently successful radiation treatment a year-and-a-half ago, is back–seriously back, that is. There’s concern because my last PSA reading, the main indicator, was higher than it ought to have been. If the cancer is seriously back, that’ll be it for this column, for I’ll soon be either too dead to continue it, or too devastated by the extreme endocrinological abuse to which I’ll be subjected to keep me alive. So if I’m not here next issue, you’ll know why.

That out of the way, I have two new anthologies to discuss. The first especially pleases me, for many of its contributors, and its editor, are of the latest generation in visio-textual art–people in their twenties and early thirties–though there is a wide, wide range of artists represented in it (including me). And it looks like derek beaulieu, its editor, is well on his way to becoming the jwcurry of his generation of Canadians. Not only is his selection first-rate, but it looks like he put a lot of thought, aesthetically-sensitive thought, into the packaging of each of the items in it (for instance, pairing my mathematical poem with a similarly-shaped one by Karl Kempton). What follows are some notes about a few randomly-selected pieces from the anthology to give you an idea of what it’s like.

Problem Pictures, by Spencer Selby. Frame 1: “refuse/// to see,” in crisp, large lettering, formal & clear, over/under an indeterminant background that looks like a detail, hugely blown up, from a conventional representational photograph. Frame 2: here the textual layer is cut off at the sides, the graphic layer enlarged beyond the ability of its printed dots to blend to become just-decipherable as possible trees filling the far edge of a possible field with a certain, albeit very roughly represented, woman in it, between the textual matter, a second kind of woods . . . Frame 3: another enlarged reproduced photograph over/under “Ludicrous pro-/ portion between immense possiblity,/ and the result.” An explanation, to a degree, of the frame to the left, with the woman in it. Frame 4: the text here is, “below the/ burden of/ our choice”; the graphic, two men shown from the rear who seem to be moving forward through what may be high grass; it is distortedly over-expanded like Selby’s other graphics and, also like them, in vigorous tension with the crisp print of the textual layer over or under it. So, two on foot, into, or out of, or through, textuality, toward some “immense possibility”; and we have jump-cut textcollagic poetry, developing sudden by-images of some force as it depicts, at the same time that it draws us into, an archetypally tangled search for meaning.

Steve McCaffery has contributed two wrynesses, one of them a cartoon of the left half of an H which is thinking, “form,” while its separated right half thinks, “content.” This happens, as the title tells us, at the specific time of 4:46 PM 8/11/77. McCaffery’s other piece shows what looks like a not-too- interesting design of squares and short, wide rectangles, the latter mostly to the right, the former mostly to the left and growing larger as they descend. The words, “see,” and “sea” cross the page in fairly large type. Toward the bottom is a third word, “seize.” To its right the lowermost and largest of the squares encloses the lowermost of the rectangles. With reflection one should SEE the puzzle turn lyrical-deep as vision assimilates–as well as contains like a sea–the sea . . . at the same time that “seize” does something verbally comparable.

Jennifer Books’s piece here consists of fragments of letters that move in and out of identifiability. The main draw here (for me) is the use of color, for Books delicately forms her partial-letters via cross-hatching in various colors, sometimes using one color for a letter’s vertical lines, and another for its horizontal lines. The result is not only pretty, but (literally) vibratory. And we have what seems to me a textual illumage (although I can make out, I think, the word, “MAP”) in which a merely arresting non-representational design is kept marvelously from dissolution–is held at its center–by just-enough-textuality . . . or a sense of some language which underlies all things drawing chaos toward meaning.

Another exciting, however simple-seeming, use of color occurs with three texts excerpted from Johanna Drucker’s The Public Life of Language that Jill Hartman of Semi-Precious Press in Calgary has printed on three different-colored transparencies. The use of color hints at what printing on colored transparencies, and reading various combinations of the texts, one on top of another, against the light, might do for poetry–which Drucker’s near-prose isn’t. But I did enjoy the following punwork amongst its jump-cut condescensions toward mass-taste and mass-thought: “brought straight into the CAPITAL from the outlying districts/ FRESH AS/ PAINT/ nation state/ the brain aches/ looking in its/ pockets for/ change.”

There is much much more in this collection, enough for one of the commercial or university culture magazines to devote five to ten thousand words to reviewing, if there were a commercial or university culture magazine with any genuine interest in what’s going on it poetry using techniques that weren’t in wide use fifty or more years ago.

The latest O!!Zone anthology of what its editor calls “visual poetry” is au currant, too, but I have space only to say it’s a fine collection, some of it textual and graphic, some of it graphic only, but little of it both verbal and visual enough to qualify as visual poetry.

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And now the report from two days after I wrote the above–isn’t the suspense killing you? It is, happily, that my PSA level is down, so it looks like I may get through this year without croaking, or having anything major done to me medically. And mine column shalt continue. Urp.

A Visit to Pottersville

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 9-10, September-October 2007

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      Postcards from Pottersville, Volume 3:
      Adventures in the Underground.
      Edited by Jack Saunders. 212p; 2007; Pa;
      Pottersville Press, Box 35038,
      Panama City FL 32424. $18 ppd.
      http://Pottersville Press.

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In the November/December 1994 issue of Small Magazine Review, I wrote that Jack Saunders, who will soon have written ‘100 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood,’ has a simple mode of operation: every day he sits at his computer for 37 hours or more and, like his hero Jack Kerouac, writes whatever comes into his head– which is mostly a defense of writing whatever comes into his head. Much of this is repetitious–but mythically so, and vastly reassuring to his fans (I’m proud to be one) who, my guess is, are similarly “marginal” writers who won’t give up in spite of NY and Hollywood, and are grateful to find Jack’s leaky but still somehow seaworthy dinghy bobbing along with them no matter how many time zones left of the closest shipping lane they find themselves in.”

I seem not to have mentioned Jack in SMR since then, probably because he is mainly a novelist, not a poet (and not what I’d call burstnorm). I’ve tried to keep up with his ouevre, though, and exchanged a card or letter or two with him every once in a while. Sometime last year he invited me to send him a piece for an anthology of writings about what I call the otherstream he’d been commissioned to edit. I threw together a half-assed bit of megalomania about how I compared with Shakespeare as a writer (not unfavorably) and when the anthology, Postcards from Pottersville, Volume 3: Adventures in the Underground, duly came out, it was embarrassingly in it. Actually, I’m not too mortified by what I wrote, but will be making a few changes in it if I ever have it reprinted.

According the website of the anthology’s publisher, the writers represented in the book include “roots musicians, folk artists, and independent filmmakers who share the do-it- yourself ethic that inspired the civil rights movement, environmentalism, women’s lib, gay pride, the peace movement, clear on back to the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey’s bus, Fuurther, with Colored Power written on the side.” Names? There are twenty-six including Al Ackerman, Ron Androla, both John Bennetts, Mike Dean, Lyn Lifshin and Small Press Review’s Number One Alumuna, Laurel Speer.

Those who have been reading Jack since his sons were small will be pleased to find an interview of one of them, Balder Saunders, now grown and playing guitar for an apparently moderately successful reggae-bluegrass fusion band with three CDs to its credit, Dread Clampitt, Warck & Ruin, and Geaux Juice. Of his dad, who ran a website for the band for a time, he says, “Saunders is a loose can on the deck. We just hope he doesn’t get too far afield.”

Among the many interesting pieces in the collection is one from a Canadian point of view by Leopold McGinnis about the differences and similarities between Canadian and American otherstreamers, the former having the double burden of being misfits as innovators in a philistine society and as Canadians in an American society–when, as usually happens, they give up on their native country as writers and try to make it across the border.

Jeff Potter is especially informative about how a DYI (Do-It-Yourself) type can at least make a living in small press publishing. In 1990 he launched a bike magazine called Out Your Backdoor. Here’s how he describes what happened: “I typed up a few brief articles for my zine, scanned in some photos, printed out a master copy and made more copies downtown, stapled up the 5 doublesided pages and mailed it out.

“I realized that it was like a letter to a friend. I had been writing lots of big letters, so I sent this first issue to my usual pals. I also sent it to everyone else I could think of who might be interested.

“I then discovered the world of zines. And it discovered me.

“The underground anarchist types of zinesters opened a bunch of wacky windows of ideas for me. And there were outdoor adventure zinesters, too–quite a few bike zines, in fact. We all started sharing what we were doing. We swapped mailing lists, too. The zine scene boomed in the early 90’s, and OYB boomed along with it.”

Potter learned of Jack Saunders through Popular Reality, my old friend Rev. Nestle used to publish when he was still a male. Potter was sufficiently intrigued by Jack to visit him in Florida. This book was one outcome of the friendship the two and their families developed when Potter later created the Pottersville Press.

I rather doubt that anyone after National Acclaim and/or big bucks will model a career on that of any of the writers’ and other artists contributing to this book, but it presents material that should be of value to sociologists of the future interested in the near- invisible, as many sociologists are. And who knows, one of these long-shots may yet come in, and make reprints of the book mandatory reading in future university English classes. Best, it should prove entertaining for anyone interested in American Culture, and soothe others struggling against the gate-keepers the way the contributors to this book are with the knowledge that they aren’t alone.  Here’s how Jack ends the collection:

      

I had me some adventures and wrote about them.           That’s what the hero does, in myth.                     Sometimes, when he comes back, Joseph Campbell says, the           old men, the tribal elders don’t want to hear what he has to           say, because it throws their hustle into doubt, causes           confusion and unrest, disquiet.                    Nothing must change.           They try to make him shut his pie hole.           What can he do?           Again, Joseph Campbell says, quoting Nietzxche, “Behave           as though the hour were here.”           Disintermediate now.           Don’t wait for permission.           Start from where you are. Get better by doing it. By and           by, a cult will form around you. You’ll be respected by           your peers. You’ll be known in the narrow world of           what you do as a mensch. A stand-up guy. A soldier.           The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.           Red could stay, because Red was not a bugler. But           Prewitt had to leave, because he wanted most of           all to stay.           Prewitt had a call.

Who are Prewitt and Red? I read the book from cover to cover but can’t answer. It doesn’t matter: they are the generic company man and the Saunders alter-ego. Jack’s still strummin’ the strum in his dinghy–with me and the rest of the Prewitts trying to not get too far astern of him, or running along the shore, cheering him on.

Nostalgia Break

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2002

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With this issue, my column beings its tenth year. Hard to believe. From a negative point of view, I can’t believe I haven’t yet been picked up by one of the big boys by now (although I surely, out of Grand Loyalty, would have continued contributing to ); from a positive point of view, I can’t believe I’m still managing to turn out a column every other month, and that Len Fulton is still allowing me to.

Every once in a while someone mentions in a letter to me that he’s seen one of my columns, and a couple of times a reader has written a letter-to-the-editor complaining of the obscurity of the poets I champion or, in one case, getting on me for my grammar, so I know the columns are not going entirely unread. Nonetheless, I feel pretty solipsistic when I write them. That has its good side: it means I don’t have to worry about satisfying anyone but myself. Hence, this column, which may well be the most self-indulgent one I’ve yet written, which is saying a lot.

I’m just too beat, who knows why, to even pretend to review anything this time around. I do hope no one will be cruel enough to write me that it’s therefore my first good column. Anyway, I’m just going to shoot the breeze about me and Small Press Review. I first came across it in some kind of rack in what I remember as a college library somewhere in LA, where I spent the seventies and a few years at either end of them. I was taken by (1) its coverage of literature not mentioned in the mainstream and (2) Robert Peters’s pungent column. This was some thirty years ago. I was around thirty–not that young, but unpublished and with no literary friends, so I fantasized about someday being a Robert Peters, read by a slew of high-level readers, the way some small boy watching a light- years-out-of-reach baseball star on television daydreams about one day playing on his team.

I didn’t keep up with SPR too well, as I was moving around a lot, and not fully committed to Poetry. Of more pivotal importance to me were the Dustbook directories, one of which was what finally got me into the Literary Scene. From it I got the address of Karl Kempton This was in the early eighties. Karl was then and still is the editor of Kaldron, the number one American visual poetry periodical of the last century. He rejected the apprentice visual poems I sent him, but via a real letter! And he gave me names of other editors and writers of visual poetry, such as Crag Hill, with whom I just recently co-edited the first volume of Writing to be Seen, the only serious (300+ large pages) anthology of visual and related poetry published in this country in the past thirty years. I’m not bothering to indicate where it can be bought because, amazingly, there are just about no copies left for sale. Perhaps not a surprise since we only had (only could afford) to have 500 copies printed, but a surprise considering it costs $24 and nothing else I’ve ever been involved with has sold more than 200 copies–except, I guess, Richard Kostelanetz’s A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, now out in paperback, to which I contributed a dozen or so short entries (some of them re-using material first published here, I might add). Oh, there was also the volume of the Gale Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series that I had an essay in, but that was sold in bookstores, I don’t think.

I apparently started my still-continuing subscription to SPR with the June/July 1985 issue, for that’s the first one in my file. Odd to find names of people I barely noticed at the time but later corresponded with such as Arnold Skemer and Bob Black in my earliest issues. By 1990 Jack Saunders’s name popped up! I only noticed one reviewer early on, even before she became a regular columnist (in the September 1986 issue): Laurel Speer. She had a verve most of the other reviewers lacked–and seemed almost as distant from my part of the galaxy as Peters had. As far as I can tell from my records, my first contribution to SPR was a guest editorial about infraverbal poetry called, “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry” in the April 1992 issue. It is still one of the best things I’ve written on poetry. A month later, my first review appeared–on the front page! It was on da levy, “Cleveland’s Warrior Poet.” These two publications were a highlight in my literary life.

A mere year and a month later I had a column in Small Magazine Review! It was a continuation of one I had had in Factsheet Five, whose editor had departed, leaving it with another editor, who soon sold it to someone else. Along the way, everyone or just about everyone, who had been writing for it was dumped, including me. So, for me, SMR came along at just the right time.

My column appeared every other issue for a while, but then SPR and SMR combined and became a bi-monthly. Since then, I’ve had a column in every issue. My hope, aside from getting discovered, was to establish the kinds of poetry I write about here in the Big World. That has not yet happened, but there’s still hope. Writing To Be Seen has recently had book launchings in the Miami area at Books & Books, and in New York at Printed Matter. In September there will be a similar event for it at The New York Center for Book Art. It was also featured at a visual poetry show in a gallery in Cincinnati and at the end of July it will be part of the festivities at the Ohio State Avant Garde Symposium. So we’re making progress. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging along with this column–and hope at least a few young writers think of me the way I used to think of Robert Peters.

 
 

Visio-Textual Round-Up   Small Press Review, Volume 28, Number 6, June 1996            Carved Erosion, by Guy R. Beining. 1995;      48 pp.; Pa; Elbow Press Box 21671,      Seattle WA 98111-3671. $7.95.      The Experioddicist, No. 14, July 1996;      edited by Jake Berry 4 pp.;      Box 3112, Florence Al 35630. SASE.      Score, No. 13, Fall 1995;      edited by Crag Hill and Spencer Selby. 74 pp.;      1015 NW Clifford St. Pullman WA 99163. $10. ——————————————————————————– Quite a lot has been going on in visio-textual art of late. Two key events were the publication toward the end of ’95 of a new issue of Score and of an anthology called CORTEXt. I’ve been madly reviewing both everywhere I can, which means–basically–in Taproot Reviews and Lost & Found Times. In neither of these have I been able to say as much as I’d like; in fact, I wasn’t able even to get to CORTEXt in my Lost & Found Times column. So I’m going to continue my coverage of these publications here. Score, after publishing a dozen issues in the eighties and early nineties, and becoming one of this country’s two leading magazines of visio-textual art (Kaldron being the other), went dormant for several years–and was even declared dead by its editors. But last year one of the latter, Crag Hill, decided to revive it, in editorial partnership with visual poet Spencer Selby. The result is every bit as good as the previous issues of the magazine, featuring work by long-time leaders in the field like Dick Higgins and Arrigo Lora-Totino, but also material from new-comers like Patrick Mullins and Adam Gamble. To give some notion of what Score–and contemporary visio- textual art at its best–is like, I’ve chosen to two representative specimens to concentrate on. The first of these, “fluxion modulus 9,” a visual poem by Guy R. Beining, uses random rhyming (of “obsidian” with “meridian” and–somewhat– “rubidium”). This seems purposeless, even with the unifying word “lapidary” (in caps) positioned between “obsidian” and “rubidium” (both also in caps), since “lapidary” has to do with, among other things, engraving on stone–like obsidian. Also positioned between those two words, with two-piece clumps of “LAPIDARY” distributed to its four corners, is a large rectangle. Part of the collage within this is an architectural rendition of an open doorway with a door-sized rectangle tilted out of it on which something that looks to be a Wright Brothers Era biplane is depicted. Behind these two images is a lot of micro-speckly xerox-grey that suggests granite. Quite a bit below them a person in what may be a jester’s outfit is smiling, the word “POP” just over his hat. The biplane and doorway immediately give the rhymes and “LAPIDARY” high lyrical purpose as a title for a diagram of the idea of flight. “Obsidian” is what The Creative Imagination carves that idea into or through, crossing a Rubicon–somewhat but not entirely arbitrarily derived from “RUBIDIUM”–in the process. Playfulness is part of this, or so the smiling figure suggests, and it is a high point, or so one lesser meaning of the word, “meridian,” suggests. I should add that there is also a set of “ow-phrases” in the piece: “eye shadow,” “bay window,” “over shadow” and “black widow.” It refers back to similar sets in others of Beining’s “Fluxion moduli”–such as #5, also in Score,” which has “whitlow,” “shallow,” “airflow” and “hueglow.” The four words or phrases of each set are distributed among the four compartments of a cross. The poetry-sequence within a poetry sequence Beining thus brings about I tentatively take to be expressing a “quadchotomy” of North, East, South, West, the same way that the collage of “fluxion modulus 9″ expresses the dichotomy of closure/opening. There is, needless to say, much more to the moduli that I lack space to discuss here. Beining, by the way, has a great new book out, Carved Erosion. It’s full of sur-haiku like “blueness of birds bones/ within/ an asian red nightmare” that are often enhanced with visual elements, and the wrenching of lines out of standard orientations. In the past year Beining has also had an issue of The Experioddicist devoted to his work, #14, which is well worth sending for. The second of the specimens from Score I’m treating here is Irving Weiss’s “From Here to There.” This seems at first doodling, then coalesces as a compendium of lines–with wiring, or a system of nerve-ducts, or a river and its tributaries thickly down the center of the page. The latter finally announces the higher meaning of the work as a consideration of Nature versus Symbol, or some similar dichotomy, for the–let’s call it a river-system–cuts off a number of abstract lines approaching it from the left. The topmost of these is straight, the next depicts sine waves. The third looks like a brain- machine’s output. A micro-scribble and some kind of nameless fissure follow, with a line that tries to spell “line” but stutteringly achieves only “lllliiinnnnee” at the very bottom of the stack. This latter runs into a tributary of the central river, coming out on the other side properly spelled, in longhand. Sharing the other side with it are a single line rectilinearly plotting an “L” from whose leg an “I” rises which is also the far-left vertical of an “N” whose far-right vertical is also the vertical of an “E.” The latter’s highest horizontal is drawn but nothing else, the rectilinearly-moving line only able to go forward, apparently. Lower on this RIGHT side of the page is a typed list in upper-case, of the four letters of “LINE,” starting with “LNEI.” What Weiss has achieved, then, is a demonstration of how much universe lines are responsible for, in a subtle lyric concerning–did I say, “Nature versus Symbol?” It is that, but also, deeper, emotion versus reason. Oops, I see I’ve just about run out of space. And once again I’ve failed to get to CORTEXt. I wanted to discuss a first-rate annual that’s devoted to America’s first visual poet, E. E. Cummings, and a great visio-textual anthology from South America, too–as well as shamelessly plug Al Ackerman yet again (because of the kickbacks he’s been sending me). It looks like I’ll need a part two to handle these duties.