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The Otherstream 19 Years Ago, Part 2

Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2012

Poeticks.com, Webmaster: Bob Grumman http://www.poeticks.com/bob-grummans-small-press-review-columns/june-1993

I’m pleased that you’re reading my column, whoever you are, but–wow–would I love it if you would let me know what you think of it.  You could do it with an anonymous (or signed) post to my blog, address above, or to me at [email protected].  Sorry to pester you like this, but in the almost twenty years I’ve been doing this column, I think only one person neither a friend or relative of mine has ever written me or Small Press Review about it.  I truly believe I could improve the column if I had some kind of idea what people want from it–aside from consideration of their own poems and publications.

One question in particular I’d like feedback on is an idea I’ve been considering: doing some interviews of other people in the world of poetry.  Whom would you like an interview of most, if I started interviewing?  What would you like to know about the interviewee?  Would you yourself like me to interview you?

I have lots of other things I’d like to find out from you, but I think it’s time for me to get into my main topic, which is again a trip into the past.  In my last column, I wrote about my first SPR column; in this one, I’ll breeze through my next three.

The first of these three was about two zines that should by now be on English majors’ required reading lists, or at least on their lists of recommended outside reading.  I doubt either means anything to anyone but those who had poems in them, if even to them, however.  I’m speakng of stained paper archive, #1 April, 1993, edited by Gustave Morin, and Found Street, #2 Spring, 1993, edited by Larry Tomoyasu.

In my column I went into detail about several of the pieces in stained paper archive.  Sample: “one piece, by Greg Evason, features the image of a fork without its handle–but, isolated (and black), it takes on eerie tooth-resonances (sharp black teeth going up, blunt white ones descending), and hints of archaeology, with its emphasis on bone-fragments.  It also suggests something of the power of Motherwell’s imagery.  Sharing the page with the fork is the near-word, ‘nife.’”

In what I wrote abut Found Street I highlighted two minimalist pieces by Brooks Roddan.  One consisted of the bar code, price and other commercial data dot-matrixed onto the record jacket of a recording of a Bach standard (“the Goldberg Variations”) by Glenn Gould.  Its title said it all: “The Genius of Glenn Gould.”  Roddan’s other piece was even simpler: just an upright black rectangle.  But, from its title, “Rebellion,” we know that the rectangle is also an I, isolated from the many but squarely, resolutely, and broad-shoulderedly committed to its cause.  I make a point of mentioning Roddan because he’s one more highly talented artist I wrote about once, then (apparently) never again.

Tomoyasu himself contributes a fine full-color cover drawing called “End Art,” in which a Shahnesque man is shown running out of a mixture of music-score and verbal text with a grandfather-clock/coffin under one arm.  Elsewhere in the issue is a typical Tomoyasu illuscriptation consisting of the words “Jesus Door” and the image of an upside-down headless doll.  There are many other intriguing works in this issue of Found Street, including a droll pair of cartoon faces (or awkward mittens, or cow udders, or who-knows-what) by well-known mail artist, Ray Johnson; the two faces or whatever are identical except that one is labeled, “Ray Johnson,” the other “Jasper Johns.”

I spent all of my third column on John M. Bennett’s Lost & Found Times, #31.  Along the way I got into a discussion of “the many difficult-seeming poems in the issue.  Some of these seem dada for the sake of being dada, and I sympathize with those who would reject them out of hand.  But I’m not convinced that any of them is dada only.  What they have that such poems lack are two or more of the following: (1) flow; (2) an archetypal hum;  (3) a wide range of vocabulary and imagery; and (4) a low cliche-to-fresh-phraseology ratio.  By ‘flow’ I mean mostly such old-fashioned qualities as rhythm and melodiousness; by ‘archetypal hum’ I mean intimations of some large universal archetype like Spring, Ocean, or the Mating Instinct.

Take, for instance, the very first poem in LAFT, Michael Dec’s, ‘Fish Nut.’  Its first two lines, ‘A bicycle in paradise – blue vinyl boots a fluorescent ceiling/ nails popping out,’ indicate a level beyond raw dada.  It at least flirts with archetypality (due to the reference to paradise), and it flows pleasantly through b-sounds, l-sounds, s-sounds.  It’s without either cliches or unusually fresh phraseology but its vocabulary and imagery start vivid and widen as the poem continues–and it eventually makes sense as an evocation of Macbethan futility, its final two lines being, ‘The tomorrow and tomorrow/ Think yrself into a corner.’”  As I look back on this, I don’t know how persuasive I was, but I tried!  At the very least, I showed a way of experiencing a poem that can be productive.

Nice to find I also wrote up a collage by Malok that was in LAFT. Twenty years later I’m happy to say he’s still active . . . but unhappy to add that he’s still ridiculously unknown.

My fourth column was taken up entirely with Core: A symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry, a collection of responses by 60 visual poets to a questionnaire sent by John Byrum and Crag Hill to 200 visual poets throughout the world.  I’m pleased to report that almost all of those answering the questionnaire, like Karl Kempton, Guy R. Beining, Jake Berry, Kathy Ernst, Geof Huth, Richard Kostelanetz, are still active.

My favorite answers were by Andrew Russ, who–under a pseudonym–defined poetry as a capital I, and visual poetry as a dotted capital I, then answered the rest of the questionnaire with various arrangements of i’s–and eyes.

Sad to say, Core seems not to have had much effect. It will one day be considered an important resource for scholars when they finally tire of writing about long-dead poets and their clones.

.

Cleaning supplies

The Arrival of The New Millennium

Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2000

Three-Element Stories, by Richard Kostelanetz.
224 pp (with matter on one side of a page only);
Archae Editions, Box 444, Prince St.,
New York NY 10012-0008. $?, ppd.

Koja, #2, Fall 1998; edited by Mikhail Magazinnik.
60 pp; 7314 21st Ave., Brooklyn NY 11204.
Website: http://www.monkeyfish.com/koja. $12/2 issues.

Mailer Leaves Ham, by John M. Bennett.
159 pp; Pantograph Press Box 9643, Berkeley CA 94709. $9.95.

This column is entering the third millenium 20 July 1999. I’m not excited. Incidentally, for you fans of writer’s block, mine had me for the past two days: I had a headache most of the first day for some reason, then impulsively decided to rest the next although I felt okay. All this after I’d done a column-a-day for two straight days. I suspect that my guilt over not having said anything of value during that streak was to blame. I’m too puritanically work-ethicky (lots of Presbyterians back to the 1600’s on my mother’s side of the family) to be able for very long to just wing it in my writing. So, to make sure this installment of my column is up there with The New York Times and PBS for Admirable Content, here’s the interior blurb I had in John M. Bennett’s recent Mailer Leaves Ham:

weighs off) course blub (garden spasm) downs me unblurbable MAILER LEAVES HAM unblurs him’s jugular rep’ dance by-pissing (salt cerebrum ((sifty eye ups “bulb” tops like’s at// you Jackson’s priesty, of chorus, deeps (of all, achieving more craft-extending major poetry in a single volume than there are hints of major poetry in any fifty of the craft-rehashing books the Literary Establishment has for twenty-five years been ignoring Bennett’s work in favor of

Others blurbed there, too: Jim Leftwich, Sheila E. Murphy, Peter Ganick, Al Ackerman, F. A. Nettlebeck and Bennett, himself. All seemed spot on (except, needless to say, Bennett, in spite of all my instruction). Here’s Leftwich: “We read within a narrative of visual noise.” Ackerman: “. . . a wholly original and unmistakable voice steers right through your hair’s big dog drool pool ped, and no more important book of poems will appear this year, actually.” (Ackerman, of course, knew that Knopf had rescheduled mine and C. Mulrooney’s collection, The Sorrow of Commaless Spittoons for Spring 2007.)

Ganick: “. . . daring neologisms, dangling parentheses and quotation-marks, strange vizpo transductions of renaissance texts with ancient woodcuts, and his finely tuned blocks of poetry/prose.” Murphy: “. . . transromantic moments via repetition, fractal shifts, and concentrated stutterance . . . allowing very physical renditions of affection that distill the hearing space from mid-stream frequencies singing fluids of the body to full flower.” Nettlebeck: “. . . the true word warrior in a field of the intermediate and scared.” Bennett (who isn’t entirely in the dark about it all, some of my instruction having taken hold): “(My) body is what is in organic contact with all that is and my writing is an attempt to know that all; to create it. Thus the reversal, concentric, and inside-out structures of these poems, the multiple simultaneous ‘meanings’.”

The first five lines of my blurb took off from one of Bennett’s poems, with many of his words kept in, but I’m no longer sure which poem. It was a serious prank, as, I believe, are many of Bennett’s poems–i.e., Bennett’s work is not without a sense of humor about the world and itself. Its aim was twofold: to describe my attempt to fashion a blurb and to list some of what I’ve found, or think I’ve found, in Bennett, to wit: (1) punnery like “weighs off” for “way off” course (versus the opposite of “off course,” “of course”); (2) the lyric in combat with the anti-lyric (“garden spasm”); (3) Murphy’s “fractal shifts” as from “blub” to “unblurbable” to “unblurs” to “bulb,” which also plays off of (4) Bennett’s cyclicity, the early “blub” becoming the later “bulb,” and off of (5) his occasional coarse slanginess at expressing primal humanness (e.g., “blubbing”)–which returns us to (2), the anti-lyrical “blub” become the flower-or-light-related “bulb”; (6) a lot more I’d better not get into because I still owe some words to the two Richard Kostelanetz books, and the magazine, Koja, that I promised last installment to discuss here. One last clue, though: “Jackson” is Jackson Pollock and Jackson, Michigan, where I and Bennett and Ackerman met each other in person for the first time. Oh, and kudos to Pantograph which, with Mailer Leaves Ham and titles by people like Ivan Arguelles, Susan Smith Nash and Jack Foley, all deserving to be on any sane list of this century’s leading poets, has pretty clearly become the leading otherstream publisher in this country.

Now to Kostelanetz. His Three-Element Stories consists of three-word (or equivalent) stories, their elements scattered across the page in resonantly reader-editable disarray, among them the lyrical “abroad/ afar/ anon . . .” and the doubly minimalist, “A/ J/ R”; his other book, for which I have no publisher or price, so didn’t list at the top, is called Tran(i/s)mations, with its “i” super-imposed on its first “s.” It works the word-game in which a word is changed into other words, a letter at a time. One such sequence goes through over thirty such changes to get amusingly from “zoo” to “men” (but, oops, has at least one typo, and at least one duplicated word).

Koja has on its cover a wonderful sur-fractal nude male by Igor Satanovsky that is also suggestive of reaching fingers. Inside, a droll visual poem by Irving Weiss, “The Trojan Horse,” in which a giant A is depicted with all kinds of tiny lower-case letters partly sticking out of it, appropriately introduces the magazine’s contents. Also within are “Playboy Dream for 1995/January-December/,” a list of women’s measurements in various-sized letters by Mike Magazinnik that looks like a model’s hour-glass figure; and an absurdist short story, “The First Newton Law,” by Alex Galper, which ends after its hero, a high school physics teacher, has made an unruly boy recite Newton’s laws to the class while the teacher sodomizes him. We leave the teacher contentedly musing on how unforgettable he has made Newton’s first law to the class: “A good teacher could really make a difference. He really liked his job.” Koja is an uneven mix but wide-ranging, and definitely up-and-coming.

The Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Identifying Him as an Author

Anti-Stratfordians are notorious for wanting to know “why no one ever called Shakespeare a writer until he’d been dead for seven years.” The latest to do so in a book (at the time of this writing) is Diana Price, who presents a subtle version of the question in her Shakespeare’s
Unorthodox Biography. She phrases the question thus: why have we no contemporaneous personal literary evidence (CPLE) that Shakespeare was a writer? She then surveys the literary evidence concerning him and 24 other writers of the time, dividing it into “personal” (by no unambiguous definition she has been willing explicitly to state) and “impersonal.” Result: she has found some of the former for each of her 25 subjects but Shakespeare. She seems not to have convinced any real scholars of the usefulness of her discovery, but has gotten her fellow rejectors pretty excited, so I thought I ought to present a sane overview of the evidence for Shakespeare from his lifetime. I divide it among the following nine groupings.

(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 propagandistically 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 vidence, 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 BARON OF 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. Aside from that, a false or mistaken personal record is still a personal record.

(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 (to repeat): (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 inhabitants, 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 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 third 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 Shakespeare—as a writer—the warrant in person. 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)

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:

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 Shake- speare’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 my paraphrase gets it wrong). 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.) That Greene (or whoever it was who was calling himself Greene) 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 strongly suggests that Greene personally knew him—as does Greene’s centrality in the London writing trade, just about everyone in which he seemed to know. 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.

(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 Greenes
Groatsworth of Wit (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.

(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 complimentary, 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.”) is further evidence that a William Shakespeare was an actor, albeit only weakly circumstantial since the “Shakspeare” here not only is not identified as an actor but may have been some other Shakespeare, such as John Shakespeare, the royal bitmaker Charlotte Stopes turned up in her researches. But Burbage and Shakespeare were associated together too many times for it to be likely that here Burbage was for the first and apparently only time associated with some other Shakespeare than Will, and that the other Shakespeare was constructing 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.

Rob Zigler agrees. In an Internet newsgroup post to someone arguing the contrary, he says, “To put it bluntly, the idea that the payee was not William Shakespeare is ridiculous. The fee was exactly split between Richard Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, so we’re looking for people who are likely to have been partners. I’m sure that you’ve noticed that William Shakespeare appears in a number of documents as a partner with Richard Burbage. I’m also fairly sure that you’ve also noticed that John Shakespeare, the royal bitmaker doesn’t show up anywhere else partnered with Richard Burbage. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read what Stopes had to say, but my recollection is that John Shakespeare makes pretty frequent appearances in the accounts of the King and assorted nobles and I see that E.K. Chambers says that he doesn’t start appearing in those accounts until 1617 Here’s yet another reason why Stopes idea doesn’t make any sense. Impresa shields were small and made out of pasteboard, so why would the construction process call for a man who made bits and spurs? What could he have done that would have been worth the relatively grand sum of 44 shillings?

“Actually, we know perfectly well what Mr. Shakespeare was being paid for. The task of creating an impresa shield can be logically divided into two parts; the design and the construction. The Rutland account tells us that Richard Burbage made and painted the shield, so the construction of the shield is entirely accounted for. That leaves only the design. Needless to say, designing a tournament impresa is something we know that poets sometimes did. (Jonson wrote an epigram complaining of not having yet been paid for ‘a gulling imprese for you at tilt’.)

“If we knew nothing at all about Mr. Shakespeare outside of this document, we’d assume that he was probably some sort of poet. . . .  Therefore, the Rutland document should count as part of a personal literary paper trail connecting Will Shakespeare to the profession of acting.” And, weakly, to the profession of writing, we can add.

(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 as a play-broker, rather than 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 thtile-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 childre Shakespear het the
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 Corivall: 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

In 1612 – John Webster writes “To his beloved friend Maister Thomas Heyood” for “Apology for Actors.”

( Let me pause here to ask why Price counts Webster’s verse as CPLE 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.)

Now, to continue:

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. In other words, Price’s policy of counting only testimony that is explicitly personal as personal evidence is improper. 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.

(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.

This is a list of contributors to a mail art show of SASEs Crag Hill gathered items for, then sent to me. I immediately kicked an attempted field goal with it that went fifty yards wide and seven miles long: just another of the many projects I overloaded myself into back when my Runaway Spoon Press was publishing a new book monthly and I was actually making poems and writing reviews of my own and never followed through on, or didn’t follow through enough on. It now strikes me that a Then&Now publication of the pieces now in my possession and new pieces Crag and I can get from the ones we have old pieces from with news of what’s been happening with them since they sent Crag their SASEs. I think it would be a great art history snapshot of the past quarter-century or so.

I’m posting the list of participants in hopes many of them will see it and send new SASEs to me at [email protected]–with an update on their lives. I’m also hoping non-participants in touch with anyone on the list will let that person know about it. Otherwise, the list will at least let people know whose mail art will eventually be appearing on my blog (poeticks.com).

And, hey, if anyone has a few extra bucks to mail me for postage and other expenses that are sure to hit me, don’t be shy about doing so. I’m plunging way too rapidly into credit debt the way I did as a publisher. A friend bailed me out but I’m not sure he can again. Apologies for bringing this up, but . . .

(Ellipsis compliment of Marton Koppany: it may look normal, but . . .)

(Previous ellipsis is mine–although greatly influenced by Marton’s.)

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Finishing Off 2007

Small Press Review,
Volume 40 Numbers 1-2, January-February Year

      Concrete! Producer/Director: Sara Sackner.
      DVD 2003, running time 72 minutes;
      Padded Cell Pictures, 1105 North Signal Street,
      Ojai CA 93023. $35 ppd.
      http//:www.paddedcellpictures.com

      Mark Sonnenfield, Writer. November 2007.
      Marymark Press, 45-08 Old Millstone Drive,
      East Windsor NJ 08520. np.

Thanksgiving is here, so I have five days off from substitute teaching, and have vowed to get this column done during it. I am beset with problems. A major one is that I’m no longer getting many zines in the mail, anymore. I attribute that to (1) the dominance in innovative literature circles of the Internet (witness my last half dozen or so columns) and (2) the shitting down of almost all the zines I used to write about (and for), such as Lost & Found Times. There’s also (3): the fact that when I do get a zine or other item worth writing about, I lose it for two or three years in the chaos of books, rough drafts, stacks of paper with print on one side I plan to use a second time, videos, dvds, cat hair, dust, dirt, clothes being aired, garbage (in proper containers, I want to assure everyone), cords, dried-up lizard remains, pencils & pens, bills, receipts, ets and ceteras, that I haven’t gotten into my twenty filing cabinets or fifteen bookcases or various closets and cabinets.

In short, it’s hard to find something to write about. So, I’ll start with the biggest news of 2007 from here: I bought a new toilet. I had two but only one worked. I won’t bother describing its layers of biota and calcification, but will just say that I had a bucket in my bathtub for flushing it (because everything in the tank was broken, including the flush- handle, which was also gunked immovably in place). No big deal: I was used to it, until the shut-off valve to it had gone on the blink, so water kept going into it, and I was afraid it might flood the house. So I got a plumber in, and we decided the most rational thing to do was put in a new toilet. He put in a new shut-off valve for nothing to seal the deal. I did not compose a poem about it, but did write it up at my blog.

Next is something that actually has to do with experriodica, which is supposed to be this column’s subject. It’s Concrete!, a pleasant documentary on a DVD of a visit to the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, starring the extremely personable Ruth and Marvin Sackner themselves, with guests appearances by Tom Phillips, the author of A Humament, one of the most important works of visual poetry ever, and the central artist in their collection, and Johanna Drucker and Albert Dupont. I saw it several years ago when it first came out, but didn’t get around to ordering a copy until just a few months ago. Its coverage of visio-textual art can not be complete, given there were over sixty-thousand items in the archive at the time the film was made, and its emphases are different from what mine would be, but it’s good on the early contribution to visual poetry of such artists as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kasimir Malevich, and the generation in England and America that included Bob Cobbing, John Furnival, Emmett Williams. One flaw in it, for me, is its making too much of big names like Gertrude Stein and Roy Lichtenstein, who are marginally important to visual poetry, at the expense of just about everyone active in the field in this country after 1970. It’s a wonderful survey of the field, though, and something anyone seriously interested in the field should have.

Something I can always find is my monthly envelope of poetry and who-knows-what from Mark Sonnenfeld. That’s because I have a folder in one of my filing cabinets for what he sends me. Make that, several folders. He sends me (and others he’s in artistic sympathy with) little broadsides, sheets of paper that look mimeographed, and saddle stitched chapbooks and other publications with enough different poets and illumagists in them to qualify, I think, as zines. His November batch contains three items (less than his envelopes usually contain). One (which I almost lost while just sitting here at my keyboard) is just a sheet of white paper with two short reviews by Andy Ford. One is of the first issue of a zine called Stronger Than Dirt. This, according to Ford, seems to be produced by “a high-school age dude,” but is nonetheless first-rate–“with tons of flyers, interviews with WHEN LIBERTY DIES and FLOWER VIOLENCE, and interesting art.”

The other concerns two chapbooks by Mark Sonnenfeld, 14th St. Sta. Found Items and An Anonymous Artist. About the first Ford concludes with “A modern survey in trashsites, 14th St. Sta. Found Items proves once again that art is not limited to the canvas, the reel-to-reel tape, or the museums.” The other chap Ford describes as “one of the more narrative and comprehensible chapbooks of (Sonnenfeld’s) that (Ford) has read.” Pages from the reviewed publications share the page with the texts of the reviews but are too small to be of much use, I fear.

Also in Sonnenfeld’s November envelope are two chaps, one on yellow paper I only have space to give the title of, Jerk off Guitar Players, by Sonnenfeld and Tom Hays, the other on green, by Sonnenfeld alone: I am a (u r b a n) cassette ‘sound’ collagist. First poem (or stanza of a poem, I can’t tell which):

or  I       didn't  care if I fit  a       shirt  POCKET  twopart-  look down  a     simple  path

A later poem asks one to “imagine a piano hammer crashed in flowers.” Get on Mark’s mailing list. I don’t know what he charges strangers, probably nothing. But even if he charges postage, or a few bucks more, he’s worth the investment.

col100

Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2010

      Comprepoetica
      Blogmaster: Bob Grumman
      http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff

      “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry”
      By Bob Grumman
      /bob-grummans-first-piece-in-spr

Congratulations to Me, for this (“col100,” as my computer calls it is the one hundredth column I’ve done for Small Press Review–for a department of SPR, Small Magazine Review, if you want to get technical. To be even more technical, I must state that SMR began as a separate magazine, so my first four columns, which were in every other issue of SMR during its brief solo flight, were definitely not in Small Press Review. I’m counting them as being in it, anyway.

Getting started as a columnist was about the only break I’ve ever gotten as a writer. It all began when Editor/Publisher Len accepted a guest editorial of mine, “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry,” for the April 1992 issue of SPR. Concerned with two “infraverbal” poems by Karl Kempton, one by Jonathan Brannen, and George Swede’s one-word poem, “graveyarduskilldeer,” it remains one of my best pieces of criticism–so much so that I’ve published at least five different versions of it since. I no longer remember I came to get it into SPR, but I vaguely recall it had to do with Len’s openness to visual and related forms of poetry, due–I believe–to his admiration for d. a. levy, and acquaintance with Karl Kempton.

In any case, I’m grateful to Len for accepting my piece. Despite the fact that it didn’t do nearly as much for me as I thought it would. Which was get me read by someone connected with an upscale magazine like The Atlantic, who–charmed by my style, and the subject of my essay–would persuade a bigWorld editor to solicit me for a similar piece. And I’d go on to fame as a bigWorld writer. What a laugh.

But it did help me when, not too long after, I tried for a position as a columnist for SMR when Len began that. I’ve been a contributing editor to SMR ever since.

In my first column I reviewed Meat Epoch, Dada Tennis, CWM, and O!!Zone, all now defunct, although the editors of two of them, Geof Huth and Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, are still active in the otherstream. I can’t say the column was brilliant, but I did quote a nice passage from a poem in Meat Epoch by Spencer Selby, referring to meaning as something “which gathers in emptiness/ and waits for all things,” and discuss one of my other favorite contemporaries, the ridiculously under-recognized Guy Beining, who had a number of pieces in O!!Zone.

My next column was devoted to Gustave Morin’s stained paper archive and Larry Tomoyasu’s Found Street. Both of these I considered state-of-the-art specimens of adventurous poetry. Neither is around anymore. Morin is still active in his native Canada, but I hear little from him. Tomoyasu seems no longer on the scene although I got a friendly note for him sometime during the past year.

Two issues later I did a column on John M. Bennett’s Lost & found Times, a durable otherstream zine that continued in print until just a few years ago, and for which I eventually wrote a regular column. And so it went, this reviewing of zines and sometimes books that I considered superior by far to anything in the mainstream but which rarely lasted more than a few years, and never gained any kind of bigWorld acclaim, something I still don’t understand.

SPR hasn’t changed too much over the years, it doesn’t seem to me. The reviewers’ names have changed. And I’m the only columnist, although “Michael Andre” still makes occasional (always interesting) visits, and Len writes an occasional editorial. Laurel Speer was dominant when my very first piece appeared. I’d read her years before that with admiration, although she was never interested in my kind of stuff. Ditto Robert Peters.

I modeled myself to some extent on Speer’s way of incisively dealing with review material while at the same time injecting her own life in literature and outside it into what she wrote. I loved Peters’s caustic commentary, too–as well as his positive insights. She burned out, it would appear; he aged off the scene. A shame in both cases.

Amusingly, I didn’t think much of Speer’s column in the issue of SPR I made my rookie appearance in. It was on the page opposite the beginning of my editorial. She picked on a quotation of Roger Sessions’s, “The only alternative an artist has to being himself is being nobody,” which I quite enjoyed. I interpreted to mean that if, as an artist, you try to live up to others’ expectations instead of being true to yourself, you’ll end being a nobody. I don’t think she got it. Her point seemed to be that all the counts is what an artist produces, which has nothing to do with his self.

What is really amusing is that a one-paragraph review of one of John M. Bennett’s four-pagers, Tempid, by A. J. Wright shared the page Speer’s column was on. After quoting a few out-of-context lines, from Bennett, Wright averred, “I guess this stuff is supposed to be deep, but ersatz surrealism just sticks to my boots.” A little over a year later, I had a review in SPR (September 1994) in which I said of Bennett, “He makes ‘nets wider than sense,’ to quote (one) of his poems, by using words the way Jackson Pollock used paint: to tell of the urgency and violence they’ve been flung out of as much as to ‘mean’ in more conventional ways. Thus, they splatter, jerk back, go off-course, repeat, offend and baffle–as they build a world as major as that of any other current poet’s.” Something I still believe.

Hey, I had fun in them days, and hope to continue having fun here for a few more years. A big thanks to you, my few readers, some of whom have been with me since ’92. Even though you never helped me onto the pages of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or even The Hudson Review.

Several anthologies of visual poetry were published around 1970 in this country, Anthology of Concrete Poetry, 1967, edited by Emmett Williams; anthology of concretism in Chicago Review, 1967, then as a separate book, 1968, edited by Eugene Wildman; Concrete Poetry, A World View, 1968, edited by Mary Ellen Solt; Once Again, 1968, edited by Jean-Francois Bory; This Book is a Movie, 1971, edited by Jerry G. Bowles and Tony Russell; and Open Poetry, 1973, edited by Ronald Gross & George Quasha with a visual poetry anthology of around 150 pages within edited by Emmett Williams (and A found Poetry section with some works that might pass for visual poetry edited by John Robert Colombo.   Then no more appeared for quite a while.  Visual poems kept being composed, though—enough of them toward the end of the eighties to make it clear that we were ready for another visual poetry anthology.  Lots of visual poets, particularly those in the post-70s-anthologies generation, jabbered about having one done, but nothing happened until around the autumn of 1999 when Crag Hill and I up and decided to get one done.  It was hard work but Writing To Be Seen, Volume One was the result.  More volumes were planned, one of them completed except for conversion to a form readable by computer-driven printers, but none published.

This essay is an attempt to present a rough idea of what is in Writing To Be Seen via samples of each contributor’s work, with my comments on them.  I welcome feedback. I’ll start with the cover illustration by K.S. Ernst, which I consider alone worth the $24 price of the anthology.  Next is the sample of the works within on the back cover, though not reproduced quite as nicely as I would have liked (because of my own limited technical means at the time).  They indicate the collection’s breadth and excellence.

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