Criticism in the Otherstream   Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 3, March 1995             Taproot Reviews, No. 5, Summer 1994; 28 pp.      Burning Press, Box 585 Cleveland OH 44107. $10/4 issues.      Silent But Deadly, No. 6, January 1995; 28 pp.; USF #30444,      4202 Fowler Ave. Tampa FL 33620. SASE.      Poetic Briefs, No. 18, December 1994; 16 pp.;      UB Foundation, 31Parkwood St. #3,      Albany NY 12208. $10/5 issues. Good literary criticism is as important to the health of our literature as good literature, but there are even less outlets for it. If any commercial or academic periodicals exist that carry anything more than superficial reviews of best-sellers, staid appreciations of long-certified classics, or diatribes whose only engagement with art is political, I’m unaware of them. In my tiny branch of the cultural world things are better, thanks to such publications as the ones I’ll be discussing here (and, of course, to the one printing this!) The most wide-ranging of them is Taproot Reviews, a professionally produced tabloid edited by Luigi-Bob Drake that is now in its third year. The bulk of it consists of brief reviews (mostly of poetry) in two alphabetized sections, one devoted to zines, the other to chapbooks. In the summer issue each of these had something like 150 reviews by people in the field like Charlotte Pressler, Oberc, Susan Smith Nash–and me. Since some of its material is recirculated in Factsheet Five, TRR might best be described as an enlarged version of F5’s “Arts and Letters” section–but deepened as well as enlarged since TRR also includes a number of longer pieces that go beyond simple reviewing. Thus, the summer issue has a full page by Fabio Doctorovich on Paralengua, an Argentinean “post-typographic poetry” movement Doctorovich is active in; a critique of Ivan Arguelles’s Hapax Legomenon by Jake Berry; a discussion by Kristin Prevallet of translations from the French; a survey of Russian Transfuturists by Drake, accompanied by an interview of Transfuturist Serge Segay by Craig Wilson; and several other articles of equal substance. Although TRR’s main focus is on what I call the Otherstream, Drake does not scant zines dealing in plaintext poetry and other non-experimental art. Indeed, he is committed to encouraging poetry (and art) of all stripes. So if you’re the editor of any kind of art-periodical, send him a copy of it for review! Similarly, if you’re looking to publish your own work, you should be able to find appropriate publications to send that work to in TRR. A more intensely critical zine than TRR is Silent But Deadly, which Robert Peters saw and praised last year in SMR, and now contributes to himself (as do, needless to say, I). With each issue of SbutD, editor Kevin Kelly (aka Surllama), distributes four or five poems from among those that participants have sent him, or–sometimes–from his reading. Anyone interested, including C. Mulrooney, can then critique these, Kelly printing the critiques in the next issue. SbutD also includes miscellaneous illustrations, letters and poems, such as one in #5 by Mulrooney called, “Bob Grumman Teaching His Grandmother To Suck Eggs.” It consists of blocks of repeated lines about the operation of a Smith-Corona word-processor such as:             Bold Print – Highlight words for emphasis.             Bold Print – Highlight words for emphasis.             Bold Print – Highlight words for emphasis.   In the same issue John B. Denson prays for Mulrooney, though definitely not because of Mulrooney’s disrespect toward me! The zine, in short, is a lot of fun, and a great place to get close readings of one’s poems from all kinds of other poets. Poetic Briefs (pun intended) is, like Silent But Deadly, much concerned with the particulars of poetry–though it rarely focuses on single poems the way SbutD does. Issue 18 starts with a poessay by Stephen Ratcliffe intended to exemplify and simultaneously discuss writing that appropriates rather than formally quotes or refers to previously existing texts, in this case passages from Mallarme, and from a poem by Ratcliffe himself. The resulting language-poetry richness and mystery aptly introduces the rest of the issue, which is devoted to appreciations of the poetry of Clark Coolidge. The first of these, by Stephen-Paul Martin, is my favorite, for it goes into my kind of verbal subtleties, showing how the title of Coolidge’s The Maintains, for example, is both about the way the article, the, “unobtrusively maintains conceptual order in various forms of verbal communication,” and the way language acts as a “maintain” of the “zones of consciousness and apperception that poetry makes possible.” Cynthia Kimball says wonderful things about Coolidge, too, in a poem consisting of lines from Coleridge’s “Xanadu” that alternate with lines from Coolidge, while Coleridge’s name is shown dissolving into Coolidge’s–to provide a near-exact parallel to the way in which Coleridge’s tone and imagery marry into Coolidge’s with surprising smoothness. Suchwise does Poetic Briefs provide consistently intelligent and often lyrical insights into what’s going on in the best current language poetry. I can’t imagine any serious lover of poetry’s not being able to learn something of importance from it, or its allies, Taproot Reviews and Silent But Deadly.

A Key Vispo Publication

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2008

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       Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection
       Edited by John M. Bennett. 2008; 142 pp; Pa;
       John Bennett, Rare Books, 6070 Ackerman Library,
       610 Ackerman Rd., The Ohio State University. $30.

 

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I wrote one of the three introductions to Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection, the book this column is about. Marvin Sackner and its editor, John M. Bennett, wrote the other two. Four of my poems are reproduced in it, as well. And I personally know many of the others with work in it. Small wonder I’m positive about it. But if anything were holy to me, I’d swear by it that my bias has nothing to do with my opinion of it.

First off, it’s about as professionally packaged as anything of this kind can be: glossy 7.5″ by 10″ pages with nothing on one side showing through on the other; dazzlingly intense full color reproductions of some 250 works (the color very accurate, if the reproductions of my own pieces are any indication); and wonderful design and layout by Linda Lutz, Pamela Steed Hill and the staff at University Publications. The introductions, forgive me for bragging, are important, too. Sackner’s is a sharply discriminating, succinct overview of the catalog’s contents, Bennett’s an insightful discussion of what visual poetry is, mine a series of close readings of many of the pieces in the collection.

What makes it a “key vispo publication,” though, is its representation of just about all the best current American visual poets–and a fine sampling of first-rate poets of other countries–in something published by a bigtime university. It is a worthy successor to the first anthology of visual poetry put out by an American university (that I know of), the anthology edited by Mary Ellen Solt and published by Indiana University some forty years ago, Concrete Poetry.

It should be kept in mind that the pieces in the catalogue are simply a sampling of what’s at the Ohio Statue University Library. It is not intended to be a Serious Statement about the State of World Vispo. Bennett, the collection’s curator (with a “staff” of two student assistants at most and a severely limited budget) has done his best over the years to entice friends and acquaintances in the field to donate materials to the library rather than unrealistically trying to get work from every notable practitioner around (some of whom have already donated to other libraries or archives, or are procrastinating about letting their work go, or–like I–are waiting for Harvard or Oxford to offer a few million dollars or pounds for what they have). In any case, a number of important visual poets are represented in the book by only one piece: Joel Lipman, Karl Kempton, Julian Blaine, Crag Hill, Klaus Peter Dencker and Guy R. Beining, for example–although Bennett would love to have had more of their work at the library to choose from. With luck, this catalogue may inspire some of them, and others doing first-rate work, to start sending packages to The Ohio State University Library.

K. S. Ernst, Scott Helmes, Bennett himself (often in wonderful collaborations), Jim Leftwich and Carlos Luis are the stars of the show, each (deservedly) with four pages or more of pieces (in part, I understand, because of the size of their donations of materials to the library). The book is too loaded with just about every possible kind of visual poem for me to be able properly to characterize it in the limited space of this column. Instead, I will be lazy, and re-cycle a slightly-edited version of one of the attempts at a close reading I made in my introduction to it. It’s of a poem by Gyorgy Kostritskii, one of a number of poets whose excellent work I was ignorant of until this collection. My excerpt would be much clearer for someone reading it in my introduction, and thus able to turn to the work it concerns, but I hope something useful about the way text and graphic interact in Kostritskii’s piece (and, I should add, in so many of the other pieces in the book), and how one critical mind flickers and sputters in reaction to his piece, comes through.

“The text of Gyorgy Kostritskii’s ‘is of,’ ‘is of/ Has a/ And goes,’ is a conundrum. Something that is of something, possesses something . . . and goes. Is of–is part of something else, makes up something larger than itself. Words shorn of connectivity like this, and in a nothingness of confusedness, force their reader to either leave quickly or seep into thoughts like mine. Perhaps into the idea of ‘And’ going (on), or connections being made. Or is “And” leaving, and connections being broken? The work’s blots declare themselves an illustration of this text but clearly at the same time connect in no way with it other than geographically (by sharing a page with it). The scene is primordial: the most basic of words in black and white. Geography? I keep wanting to take the scene as a beach. Whatever it is, it seems to enclose the text–but has an entrance, or exit, for it or other texts, at its top. The highmost blob is difficult not to take as the sun, which makes little sense, but gives the work a feel of archetypality I also get from similar works of Adolph Gottlieb. Can the text be considered the color of this picture?

“The work’s text seems part of one of the two trails the other shapes in the picture make. It also hangs in about the same direction of the rest of the picture mostly does. So: is the black of the graphic portion of the work achieving verbal expressiveness? There’s something in it of text as quotidian–just something there with a small world’s other sloppy arbitrary shapes. The thing forces the engagent–me, at any rate–to read the text into the graphics, and see the graphics into the text. A mystery that won’t finally declare itself, but avoids irritating by being utterly, serenely all curves except where the tiny letters make their sharp angles, and by being pleasantly balanced. I’m not sure where this piece should go on my continuum. I find it an A-1 illumage with a text that prevents it from staying for long in the visual cells of one’s brain. Strictly speaking, it’s not a collage, but close enough to put among the other more legitimate collages on the continuum.”

I end this column feeling I haven’t done justice to the book discussed. I’ll be shocked if any other poetry publication of 2008 is half as important for poetry as it.

 

Here beginneth my knowlecular psychology blog.

This has been up for a day or so and has had three visitors!  I wasn’t sure anyone was interested in my totally uncertified theory.  Anyway, I think the three of you, even though you may all just be students of abnormal psychology.  (Actually, I think you’re all academics stealing ideas from me.  No problem.  Although I would like getting credit for them, I’ve gone too long without any recognition for even one of them to be able any longer to care much.)

* * *

Later note: this won’t work as a blog, I now realize.  Ergo:

Here endeth my knowlecular psychology blog.

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Scatterings     Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 5, May 1995            Ampersand (said): MANIFESTO      Summer, 1994; 48 pp.;      Semiquasi Press, Box 55892      Fondren Station, Jackson MS 39296-5892. $5.        Prakalpana Literature, No. 15      Summer 1993; 120 pp.;      P-40 Nandana Park,      Calcutta 700034, W.B., India. $5.        Visible Language, Vol. 27, No. 4      Autumn 1993; 108 pp.;      Rhode Island School of Design,      2 College St., Providence RI 02903. $30/yr.        Tripflea      32 pp.; 1994; Pa; Tailspin Press,      418 Richmond, #2, Buffalo, NY 14222. $5.        SleVep      4 pp.; 1995; Pa; Tailspin Press,      418 Richmond, #2,      Buffalo, NY 14222. $5. For me, the funniest line in the spread on “contemporary” American poetry that was in the 19 February issue of The New York Times Magazine is, “What (critic Helen) Vendler is to more conventional poets, (critic Marjorie) Perloff is to the avant-garde.” My correction: what Vendler is to the most elegant plaintext poets of the mid-century and their contemporary followers, Perloff is to the no-longer-avant-garde language poets of the seventies and their contemporary followers. Meanwhile, the only significantly innovative poetry around (e.g., visual, sound, infra-verbal poetry) remains invisible to the likes of Vendler, Perloff and the editors of The New York Times. It is probably absurd for me to expect to change this state of affairs with this column. Anyway, informing the intelligent has always been more important to me than reaching the influential. Still, it’d be nice if the latter would occasionally read me, or otherwise dip into the otherstream, however briefly. Then they’d find out about people like William Howe, whose tailspin press is now two titles into burstnorm (i.e., experimental) poetry. One of these is Howe’s own Tripflea, a fascinating 2-spined bookwork whose pages interleave from opposite sides and are strewn with texts rarely larger than a word or phrase. Infra-verbal suggestiveness is a key here, as in the line, “dick shun airy dreeeeeeem z” that occurs on one page, and the “lept er” which starts the book among such phrases as, “may king/ the// Fabrick,” to speak, for me, of butterflies and spring, and the lombs they spangle out of. The other book from tailspin, Michael Basinski’s SleVep, is likewise not really a book but a bookwork, for its main structural elements, transparent celluloid pages that make its text seem vividly, concretely stratified, are nearly as expressively important as that text. A square of white posterboard is provided that can be slid under each stratum to capture its scattery, semi-sequential content, which includes the wonderful “O/ cl ear wooRds.” Just the idea of woods as “woo roads” makes me sigh, but there’s so much more in the passage. That much of the book’s other material is appropriated from medical books, anthropological research papers, and the like, gives Basinski’s often-erotic lyricism all kinds of registers (besides the palpable nothingness of the book’s pages) to emerge, delicately, out of. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in considering the Establishment particularly remiss in continuing to ignore Basinski. Several other first-rate poets (e.g., John Byrum and Richard Kostelanetz) who are unknown to (or ignored by) mainstream critics and editors have work in Vattacharjo Chandan’s Sanskrit/English PrakalpanA LiteraturE, which I mention though my copy is dated 1993 because it demonstrates how international a lot of the stuff I write about has become. I’m as late in discussing the Autumn, 1993, issue of Visible Language. Visible Language, though usually super-specializedly academic without much interest in aesthetics, is nonetheless almost always valuable for those composing or studying visual poetry. This issue, which is titled, “Visual Poetry, An International Anthology,” however, is not too dry, at all. Edited by leading American visual poet/critic Harry Polkinhorn, it is divided into sections of visual poetry (and commentary) from Brazil, Cuba (the weakest), Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Uruguay and the US. Among my favorite poems are “Le Pli – No 1″ and “Le Pli – No 2,” by Ana Hatherly of Portugal, which do interesting things with machine-printed texts that “degenerate” at the margins into handwriting; a study in non-euclidean geometry by Crag Hill in which the word, “parallel,” dissolves into and out of all sorts of parallels and non-parallels with repetitions of itself; and a weird landscape called “The Order of Things” that Polkinhorn has made out of texts seen from behind, or wrongside-up, or both. The multiple orders these texts achieve make a mockery of Polkinhorn’s title–unless they prove it by the final order they somehow achieve in a flesh beyond textual logic. The final specimen of burstnorm poetry I want to mention is A. DiMichele’s bookwork-of-several-covers-and-different-sized-pages, ampersand (said): MANIFESTO. Its largest set of pages consists of sundry enlarged or reduced or xerographically slurred re-utterances of the words: “is this it. diversion the/ vorticist teacup?/ sugar is information/ sleep is the secret of the/ ancients./ and linear./ it’s all been said./ now to wake up/ and unsay it,” and the bizarre but somehow related collage that accompanies them. Choice, is all I have space to say about this.

Columbetry, cuh LUH beh tree,  from “Columbus” and “”poetry”: poetry which either does something important for the first time, or does something important effectively for the first time.

Magnipetry, maahg NIH peh tree, from “magnificent” and “poetry”: poetry of the highest excellence.

Textual Design, TEHKS chew uhl dee ZINE: synonym for “textual visimage.”

Textual Visimage, TEHKS chew uhl VIHZ ih mihj, from “textual” and “visual image”: a work of textual visimagery.

Textual Visimagery, TEHKS chew uhl vihz IH mihj ree, from “textual” and “visual imagery” : visual art containing textual elements but no meaningful words.

Visimagery, vihz IH mihj ree, from “visual” and “imagery”: visual art.

Visual Poetry, VIHJ yoo uhl PO eh tree: poetry containing visual elements whose interaction with its words results, in the view of the majority of reasonably knowledgeable, objective observers, in something of central significance to the poem’s full aesthetic meaning.

M@h*(pOet)?ica　– PlayDay, Part Three

How’s that for a happy start? From which I jump to a haiku by Wharton Hood:

This is not intended to have anything to do with mathematics but is here as a near-perfect interpretation of the algebra preceding it. And also as a terrific haiku¹ by another of my under-recognized friends in poetry. It’s here, too, finally, because I just happened to read it while looking for something else to put here—a poem actually having to do with numbers (which I still haven’t found).

To tell the truth, the Hood poem is not “a near-perfect interpretation” of the algebraic poem—which is by LeRoy Gorman. I do think that its wonderful image/concept “absolute morning” is pretty close to that. But its top line will put half of the poem strongly in what I call a reader’s “anthroceptual awareness” (i.e., people-related perception area) of the brain whereas the Gorman poem is equally strongly half in the “matheceptual sub-awareness” of the brain.² Half of each poem will inhabit the brain area all poems must (to be poems), the verbal area (oops, I mean the verboceptual sub-awareness).

I need to point out that LeRoy’s poem doesn’t quite make sense throughout. Adding an s to un quite logically results in “sun,” but how, I wonder, can s be something that can be subtracted from up? Wait. Inside up is a compressed s which I now say verbally stands for “secret.” Release this secret and up becomes an “un.” Actually, it’s inside the p—which becomes an n without it. In some secret manner.

I know, I know: we don’t need this kind of analytical rationality to enjoy the sun as ultimately that which is up, and a representative of “no” being the sun with the secret of its yesness ripped out of it. I contend that those who appreciate the poem, very likely as soon as they see it, as I did, will have experienced the reasoning I’ve confusedly described in a better way than mine unconsciously, as I also did, but being a critic had to try to translate into something my consciousness could deal with.

Here’s another by LeRoy:

This is unarguably both verbal and mathematically logical—that is, if any mathexpressive poem is. The two terms shown are verbally equal because consisting of the same letters. They are mathematically equal because us taken to the power of any integer (“n”) obviously equals the source of all life, the sun. Oh, Apollo, hear me and grant me thine agreement!

I mistyped “hear” as “here”—then mine brain bubbled into what “here me” would mean, what—that is—can we make of “here” as a verb? I say “to give one who is somehow unlocated a place to be, as the sun, or Apollo representing it, can be said to do.” If it’s a PlayDay and you have a weird brain.

Okay, hold onto your hats, we’re now going into a fearsomely philosophical discussion based on an exchange I had with Kaz Maslanka over at

http://mathematicalpoetry.blogspot. com where Kaz runs what I believe is the only blog primarily devoted to what I call mathexpressive poetry. The initial subject concerned the following work, a copy of which Marko Niemi sent Kaz, first in German, then in Marko’s translation, which Kaz turned into the estimable visimagistically-enhanced work³ below:

Here’s what Kaz said about the German version: “Marko tells us it was written by the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel in the 19th century. Even though I can not translate it, I do know the beauty of dividing by zero. Although mathematically dividing by zero is undefined, the limit as you reach zero approaches infinity. In other words if you graph 1/x you can see the asymptote blow up in your face right at zero and it is a wonderful sight!”

Kaz provided Karl Kempton’s take on dividing by zero, or—in the following case—by nothingness, to suggest (as I interpret it) the Taoist/mobius mysticism one of the right temperament can follow the division into:

Taoism, Wikipedia says, is a Chinese doctrine that “the (eternal) tao is both the source and the force behind everything that exists.” It is undefined, like infinity—and, I’m afraid I’m evil enough to add, non-existent, since it is a relationship, not a material entity.⁴

That the Schlegel equation was formulated so long ago brought up the question as to whether or not it may have been the world’s first mathematical poem. I said in my blog, where I posted Kaz’s version of it with some comments of mine, that it was not, because it was not a poem. “It seems mostly informrature to me–i.e., intended to inform rather than provide beauty, as literature is intended to do (in my poetics),” said I. I conceded, however, that it was “a marvelous step toward what Kaz and I and Geof and Karl⁶ are doing, perhaps a pivotal one (although I don’t know of anyone who was inspired to create mathematical poetry by it).”

Kaz discussed my comments at his blog, continuing to hold that Schlegel’s work was a poem because of the beauty he found in it. I wasn’t aware of what he wrote until I much later visited his blog to steal the Schlegel for use here. I then amplified my stand, slightly, this time specifying that the “beauty” a poem aimed for was aesthetic beauty, which in my philosophy is sensual, not ideational, although the latter can achieve a kind of beauty. For me, the Schlegel work is a philosophical attempt to state what God, the Poetic Ideal, is the same way Einstein’s E = MC2 is a scientific attempt to state what energy is. I simply can’t see/feel/understand it as something for us to enjoy sensually the way Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion is. Yes, perhaps it is intellectually beautiful the way Einstein’s incredibly compressed (to some, transcendent) equation is. But that one will experience that beauty in a different part of the brain than one will experience oratio or poem.

I did not give Kaz a chance to reply to the above before publication for fear of a back&forth that would make this entry too long, but I’m sure we’ll go another round or two after he sees it. In any case, the Schlegel whatever is certainly potent evidence of where a mix of math and words can uniquely transport you.

For a change of pace from all this heavy thinking, here’s another piece by Karl Kempton:

Next, several pieces by Václav Havel at http://www.doctorojiplatico.com/2013/04/vaclav-havel-antikody-1964.html> that Irving Weiss sent me to. The pieces there are basically concrete poems, published in 1964—and incredibly capable for a man who went on to win an important political office. The first is all plus signs, which gave me the excuse I needed to post it here:

 “Decadence?” I’m sure there are many ways of looking at this but I see it as the essence of the totalitarianism all nations eventually degenerate into: a perfectly regimented set of positive conformists—”positive” in being sure they’re right, but also “positive” in requiring the perfect happiness that modern totalitarians capture them with promises of—the communists in Havel’s time, just about every political party in ours.

On the other hand, it can be taken much more simply as a satire on art at its most decadent: entirely symmetrical and, again, positive. The “satirical construction” that follows seems a variation on “Decadence”:

The next piece is all numeric, so also qualified to be here:

A bit sardonic, yes? I left the lettering small (and blurry) because more expressive of what it’s saying that way, I think.

I liked the two remaining pieces in this collection of Havel works too much not to include them although neither is mathematical or even simply numerical:

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Each, however, is conceptual, so will probably appeal to someone in science more than one not.

I also have some more poems by Ed Conti. The first is about prerithmetic (i.e., counting), which I hope you remember from my last entry:

It’s from Ed’s Hic Haiku Hoc, a book I liked so much that I’ve been telling people for years that my press published it. Actually, I now learn it was actually published by an outfit called The Poet Tree—back in ’94. So was the next one:

FOUR OUT OF FIVE CAN’T READ ROMAN NUMERALS

fIVe

Roman numerals have inspired quite a few infraverbal poets. An infraverbal poets gets his effects from what he does inside words rather than from their external interactions with each other. Another example of Ed’s infraverbality but this time using the alphabet, something else often inspiring infraverbal poets, while not in any way mathematical or numerical is scientific:

THE PARTY’S OVER

Galaxyz

The fraction below is by the late Bern Porter, a fascinating poet/scientist whom you should look up on the Internet. It, too, is infraverbal, allowing a reader to disconceal⁷ all sorts of words, my favorite being, “posit.” It seems to me to represent any work of art as a ratio of its adherence to a formula (like the unifying principle I wrote about in my last entry) to its creativity, or that portion of it that exceeds rote expression . . . but it’s upside-down!

To conclude, I will turn now to a piece by Márton Koppány

I have it here only to set up a second poem of Márton’s that I hope to discuss in wonderful depth in my next blog installment. Its title is “Almost A Question.”  I’m not up to the commentary on it that it deserves now, but do feel obliged to give you one hint about it: Márton makes many poems with an ellipsis at their core; there is one in this poem. And that ends this PlayDay, except for the footnotes—but you’ve already read those, right?

* * * * *

¹ Because some of you may be bothered by this poem’s breaking the supposed rule that a proper haiku must have two five-syllable lines with a seven-syllable line between them, I need to point out that the more sophisticated American haijin, as composers of haiku are called, have for many years been breaking it, sometimes even more radically than Hood has here. As have Japanese haijin—including some of the very earliest. A haiku has probably five or six highly significant characteristics, of which brevity is certainly one—but the exact size of the brevity is not at all important. My From Haiku to Lyriku discusses this matter in detail.

² Now you’re finding out the real reason I’ve made this and my other two recent entries playgrounds: to let in my loony thoughts about the brain!

³ “Visimagistically,” as I hope most of you will recognize, is the adverbial offspring of “visimagery,” my term for “work of visual art.”

⁴ According to my philosophy, scholarly ethics requires me to say—but my philosophy is the only valid philosophy!⁵

⁵ Sorry for the outburst. I know all of you know this . . . but there are some who deny it! Ergo, I’m a bit touchy about it.

⁶ Four poets I know of that have dealt poetically with nothingness and infinity.

⁷ One of my very earliest poetics coinages, meaning to take some word partly or fully inside another out of concealment.
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Mad Poet Symposium, Part One

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 9/10, August/September 2002

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An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators.
80 pp; 2002; Pa;
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

An American Avant Garde: First Wave:
An Exhibit Featuring the William S. Burroughs Collection
and Work by Other Avant-Garde Artists
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
48 pp; 2001; Pa;
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

 

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It began with an afternoon open mike poetry reading on Friday, 26 September 2002, in one of the rooms in the main library at Ohio State. I was pretty out of it–a 30-hour trip on a

Greyhound bus can do that to you, and it was little more than an hour behind me. I recognized the first reader, though–Mike Basinski. He was grunting and howling–with a big smile. According to Dave Baratrier, who posted an impression of the proceedings to an Internet poetry discussion group (and kindly put me up the two days I was in town), Mike’s poem involved “all kinds of packing materials.” I remember things being thrown into the audience, I think, but it’s now hazy. I should have taken notes, but didn’t. I do know that ten or fifteen poets besides Mike eventually read something. Most hesitated to do so until it looked necessary, no one else seeming to want to. I hesitated near- maximally, myself. I had come thinking I would read something but got spooked by how far out the material being presented was. The poem I’d chosen for the occasion was text- only. It was purposely agrammatical at a few points, and used a number of portmanteau Joyceanisms but did not seem very unconventional. The ones who read seemed awfully good, too–and polished. So I quickly got the worse case of stage fright I’ve ever had. I even started feeling ill. That saved me, though, for it made me angry enough at myself to decide I had to read to prove I could. So I pushed myself up and did okay.

Among the other readers were mIEKAL aND, Peter Ganick, Lewis LaCook, Andrew Topel, Tom Taylor, Michael Peters, William Austin, Dave Baratrier, and Igor Satanovsky (who used a bullhorn for what he read, which included a hilarious harangue against “ski’s” or “sky’s” we could do without–like Stravinski, Kandinsky and . . . Basinski).

After the reading came an hour or two of visiting, and snacking on the excellent food provided, though I now forget what it was. Then, John M. Bennett, main organizer of the event, led us out of the building and across a few lawns to the Grand Lounge of the OSU Faculty Club. There we heard Marvin Sackner’s keynote address, which turned out to be a presentation using Powerpoint (a computer program for presenting computer images as though they were slides). He was very entertaining about his collecting activities, showing some of the works in his archive as he discussed them. Then he presented a survey mostly of work he owns by presenters. It took him worrisomely long to get to something by Me, but he made up for that at last by showing three pieces of mine! Among them was a visual haiku about a boy on a “s.wing.” This, he noted, was from 1966, which indicated how long I’d been doing visual poetry. After his speech, when we happened to be leaving at the same time, I thanked him for saying how long I’d been doing visual poetry, meaning I was pleased to be thought someone there in “the early days.” He took me to be jokingly annoyed with him letting out how ancient I was, so I’ve decided now that that was how I intended it.

So ended the events of day one of the two-day symposium put on by the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library as part of its An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit, which was at the library from 20 June through 3 September. I’ll be writing more about the symposium in my next few SPR columns, for I believe it, and the exhibit it was part of, were Of Signal Importance To American Culture. The catalogue that was published for the exhibit was a wow, too, and I expect to spend at least one full column on it. It, and the catalogue for the exhibit that preceded it last year, are well worth the money asked for them.

Note: to see pix of participants in the symposium, and some neato photographic impressions of the exhibit by Thomas Taylor, go here.

So far in this section is a discussion by Joey Engelhart of my mathemaku.