Bob Grumman

Although modern visio-textual art has been around for most of the century, it has for a long time been without a satisfactory taxonomy, although a few scattered eccentrics, I among them, have named bits and pieces of the field. Now, however, it has found its Linnaeus–in the person of Me. Or so I will attempt to establish here.

My visio-textual taxonomizing began some twenty or so years ago, in the early seventies. Exposed then to the Emmett Williams and Mary Ellen Solt anthologies of concrete poetry, I realized that certain poems therein were not verbal! That is, while they had textual matter, they had no words! How could poetry, from ancient times a verbal art, have no words? The taxonomic solution to this seems simple now, but it took me a while to figure out. I simply separated art comprised of both textual and visual matter into two kinds, one in which the textual matter has precedence, and one in which the visual matter has precedence. I called the first of these “visual poetry,” a term others were using at the time for “concrete poetry” and which I thought more precise than the latter (as well as free of certain unfortunate socio-polical connotations that “concrete poetry” had begun accumulating). I tried various names for the other of the two, settling (after many years) on “textual illumagery,” the latter word being my term for visual art.

The two kinds of art together I came to call “vizlature” (for “visual literature,” even though I question whether textual illumagery is a kind of literature). Later I expanded “vizlature” to its present meaning as art that contains both textual and visual matter (or: visio-textual art).

The first poet outside the Solt and Williams anthologies whose work I tried my taxonomy out on was Karl Kempton. His vizlature split quite neatly into my two kinds. Take, for instance, his “JUMP/SKIP/FLIP/LEAP,” the poem directly following. On the surface, it depicts in op-art fashion exactly what the words in its title verbally mean–with consonance and a rhyme visually as well as auditorily collaborating in the process, and glittering into the pleasant surprise of the poem’s identical four smallest rectangular prisms. At the same time, on a subtler level, the poem forms a pulsatingly energized flower to visually serve as what I term a “juxtaphor” (or implicit metaphor) for the child- lithe love of the physical life that jumping, skipping, flipping and leaping express. In short, the poem’s words say what it is about, and its visual representation on the page expands what it is about into poetry. It is thus clearly a visual poem.

 

 

It is also an example of a classical concrete poem in that it contains nothing but text. There are still those who argue that a genuine visual (or concrete) poem should, like Kempton’s poem, rely on the arrangement of its text only for its visual effect. The poem by Clemente Padin below, with its boarded window acting as a juxtaphor for what the death of her husband does to a woman (i.e., both reduces her by a letter, and closes her) would thus not qualify as a visual poem. This is absurdly limiting–and a leading reason that “visual poetry” is in much wider use now than “concrete poetry” for speaking about these sorts of poems.
 

 

Another Kempton work, a piece from a sequence in homage to Erik Satie that he composed on an electric typewriter in 1976, nicely demonstrates what I mean by a textual illumagery, for although it is entirely textual, consisting of nothing but upper-case D’s, it has no (explicit) words. One at first wonders what the point of the D’s is–why D’s instead of A’s or Q’s or dots or dashes of purple? A study of the occult sciences and related disciplines might provide the answer, for I know Kempton to be highly conscious of the numerological, astrological and/or hermetic values of the letters he chooses. For those of us without a Jungian temperment, though, the letters’ suggestion of sounds and near-sounds, and of language, and their visual value as design elements are their only aesthetic value. That, however, turns out to be a great deal. As dots of sound or near-sound, the D’s here seem to chant the poem they comprise into unsilent being. Meanwhile, by severely reducing his D’s connection to language, Kempton alerts us to their visio-aesthetic charms–such as the tension between their rounded and straight sides (which brings sail-filling breezes to mind, among other things, for me).

 

But the D’s retain their identity as elements of language however asemantically Kempton has used them, so also suggest something of the way dots of language build matter. At the same time they build a second tension, this one between their ambience as abstract symbols and the Klee-like purely sensual appeal of the visual design Kempton has created. This latter, by the way, I see as depicting a fellow half-jumping as he holds up a poster bearing Good News (and how the D’s vivid change from outline to background accentuates that Good News!), but it is obviously open to scores of other equally plausible, and enjoyable, interpretations. By any standard, the work is a wonderful piece of art, whatever it’s taxonomized as, and I emphasize this to fight the misconception of so many in the field that to call something not a visual poem is to denigrate it. For me the best textual illumages have always been absolutely as good as the best visual poems.

For a while my simple division of vizlature into visual poetry and textual illumagery worked quite well. Then I began being exposed to visio-textual collages, like the work below, which is from Bill DiMichele’s 1983-4 sequence, (Above) At The Meeting Of White Witches. Here (and interactively throughout DiMichele’s sequence as a whole) the juxtapositioning of incongruous texts and graphics boils up a brew rich enough to keep commentators going for decades. Among the highlights: the wend of “in” from “brains” to “things” to “unkingly” to “thin”; the strange brother-or-cousin act of “briars” and “brains”–with each other and with “Tee thand things” (which calls to mind images of the brain as briars/teeth that catch things/cause pain); the relationship of Jesus, especially the Jesus of the Turin Shroud, to credit cards; the significance of the other references to religion, and to the chart of the “cosmic octaves of radiation” a part of which DiMichele shows here; the distorted man fondling the somehow sexually vibrant female carcass so near “briarsand brains”; the “thin fairgrounds” that consciousness, or reality, ultimately is . . . Such a combination of words and graphics had to be considered a visual poem–but it was so much different from visual poems like Kempton’s “JUMP/SKIP/FLIP/LEAP!” Moreover, if I defined it as visual poetry, wouldn’t consistency compel me to include comic books, cartoons, illustrated poems–any combination of texts and graphics, in fact–in my visual poetry category? I thought it would. So I added a third category to vizlature. I named it “illuscriptation” at first, then “illuscription.” The difference between an illuscription and a visual poem seemed easy enough to pin down: the first’s visual elements were separate from its textual elements whereas the second’s were fused with its textual elements. 

 

My taxonomizing gained momentum from that point on. Soon I was distinguishing visual poetry from “visually-enhanced poetry,” which is poetry printed in a manner that increases its ability to please but does not significantly amplify its core meaning; a poem written in a beautiful calligraphy would be an example, or a poem whose initial letter is in color and perhaps made into a picture as in certain illuminated manuscripts. So I decreed that the visual part of a visual poem had to work metaphorically with its verbal part. When this proved unwieldy, I backed down (though I continue to believe that most of the best visual poetry is visio-textually metaphoric). My definition of visual poetry became: poetry containing visual elements that are fused with, and approximately as expressively consequential as, its verbal elements.

For several years I was content with my four categories of vizlature: visually-enhanced poetry, visual poetry, illuscription and textual illumagery. Recently, though, “illuscription” became problematic. First of all, it covered too much that was clearly not poetry (like cartoons); it also covered visio-textual collages that almost everyone in the field called visual poetry; and it covered poems (illustrated poems) that no one considered visual poetry. Consequently, I decided to use it as my term for comic books, comic strips and cartoons only, and re-assign the poetries I had been calling illuscription to some other category of vizlature. I decided there were just two poetries to re-assign: (1) illustrated poetry, whose name should be self-explanatory, and (2) poetry containing but not fused with aesthetically consequential visual elements–which I named “visiocollagic poetry” because it is so often a kind of collage. The former I put in my visually-enhanced poetry category, the latter in my visual poetry category.Since I had previously considered only vizlature whose visual and textual elements were fused to be visual poetry, I now needed a name to distinguish such poetry from its new partner in the visual poetry category. I dubbed it “visualloyic poetry,” the adjective being a combination of “visual” and “alloy.”

“Visualloyic” and “visiocollagic” are stumbly long names but it shouldn’t matter much as it’s unlikely they’ll be used by anyone but connoisseurs and similar specialists. For such persons, however, they should be useful. Of course, if anyone were to come up with better names for these–or any of the other awkwardly-named poetries in my taxonomy–I’d be delighted.One other task I had to take care of was naming illustrated poetry’s now nameless partner in the visually-enhanced poetry category–the kind costumed in purely-decorative calligraphy or the like. I was straight-forward this time, naming it “typographically-heightened poetry.”

So involved did I get with my definitions and neologies that I finally recognized that the textual and visual elements of many pieces that even I at my most rigorous termed visual poems were not truly fused as I claimed they should be in such poems. The Padin piece below illustrates the problem. The hand depicted in it is not fused with its words although it is unarguably an intimate part of the sentences the poem half-spells (such as the amusing one about the unfortunate miscompletion of the delicate “idea” with a letter from the leaden “word”; or, going in an opposite direction, the one about how precisely the creative hand must place each letter to build something viable out of language). Ergo, I refined my definition of visual poetry to: poetry containing visual elements that are fused or otherwise clearly integrated with, and approximately as expressively consequential as, its verbal elements. 

 

As for textual illumagery, I now divide it into textualloyic illumagery and textcollagic illumagery, to parallel visualloyic and visiocollagic poetry. Textualloyic illumagery is art consisting of averbal textual matter that is fused or otherwise clearly integrated with its visual matter. (It can also contain verbal textual matter that is obviously of no semantic significance like a cut-out from a newspaper shaped to represent a man, the particular words in the news-stories having no real relevance–they’re just there to indicate that the man is composed of language, or of news, or whatever.) Textcollagic illumagery, like visiocollagic poetry, is visio-textual art whose visual and textual elements are separate from one another. It differs from visiocollagic poetry only inasmuch as its textual elements are averbal.

I continue not to warm to the idea of counting textual illumagery as visual poetry, but it seems few in the field are going along with me. And there is some sense in the argument that the textual elements of such art put an aesthcipient significantly in the verbal part of his mind as well as the visual: by providing a verbal ambience, and by being pronounceable (or nearly so), and in discussing language if not quite becoming it. So my position now is neutral: I offer textual illumagery as a form of vizlature and leave it up to the rest of the world (albeit mainly those working in vizlature as poets and/or critics, I hope) to decide whether it ought to be considered visual poetry.To round off my system, I include under vizlature a category which is for text-containing visual art that is not textual enough to be textual illumagery what my visually-enhanced poetry category is to graphics-involved poetry that is not graphic enough to be visiocollagic or visualloyic poetry: infoscriptioned illumagery. The adjective in that term comes from “infoscription,” my term for such things as captions, titles, labels and comic-strip dialogue-balloons (which can be considered elaborate labels for drawn characters’ speech). To put it simply, infoscriptioned illumagery is visual art that has labels or the like affixed that are basically informational rather than expressive. So a painting of a streetscene with the names of stores displayed, making it textual, would not be a specimen of textual illumagery.

Going the other way–to a taxonomical level above visual poetry, that is–I’ve set up the category, “pluraesthetic poetry,” for poetry that breaks expressive decorum by making more or less as much, and as important, use of one or more other expressive modalities than the verbal such as mathematics, music or visual art. It would exclude infoscriptioned illumagery as not poetry but cover everything else mentioned (unless it were agreed that textual illumagery were not poetry, either). Higher up in my system there’s “Burstnorm Poetry,” followed by Poetry, then Literature–which completes my taxonomy as far as vizlature is concerned. Needless to say, my taxonomy is not perfect. Not only are some of the names of its categories less than sonorous or memorable, but the sheer number of sub-divisions in it multiplies what bp Nichol called “border blur” to make subjective guesswork hard to avoid. What, for example, is a Grummaniacal Taxonomist to make of the following piece by W. Mark Sutherland?

 

This gave me all kinds of trouble. In a way, it’s just a picture of forks, with a peculiar label (plus a title), which would make it infoscriptioned illumagery. But the (to me, brilliant/hilarious) point of the piece is the abruptly “mathocentric” refusal of the label to finish, preferring to mispell what is of mathematical significance in the picture than to say what it depicts, and that depends on something visual, the absence of a letter. That absence could be just verbal–except that it wouldn’t be noticed if it didn’t happen in a designated frame, under a picture that seems to expect a fourth letter to finish naming it. The text and graphics of the piece assuredly work together to produce its main aesthetic/philosophical meaning–and do so integratedly. Therefore, in spite of first appearing to be too secondarily textual to even be textual illumagery, then–fleetingly–seeming perhaps visiocollagic, it finally proves to be a visualloyic poem . . . in my expert but subjective opinion.

 

Far easier to classify is jwcurry’s “LINE 4.” It is almost surely a deteriorated poem of some kind but now illegible. It is therefore a textual illumage–to be precise, a textualloyic illumage–whose subject is the disintegration of texts, or poems, or language, or whatever (bringing to mind Ozymandias, among other things). Or maybe it is about language slowly coming to life.

 

Similarly, the arresting “review” of (or response to) b. dedora’s he moved, which is also by curry, is a textualloyic illumage–which suggests interesting things about fading-or- congealing bits of language, in contrast with an established “word” (the “bihhh”).

 

But then there’s Mark Laba’s snark piece, which seemed similarly textual but not verbal to me. In another essay I said the following about it, “If some critic can paraphrase its verbal fore-burden and show how that connects with its visual matter, I’ll (ahem) allow it to be called a visual poem, but for now it looks to be a textual illumage to me.” Luigi-Bob Drake took up the challenge. Here’s what he said in an e.mail letter to me: “th top level, in stenciled letters, reads: “skitzofrenia is an i for eye”. schizophrenia is “misspelled”, with the substitutued “skit” homophone emphasizing the dramatic (as well as praps role-playing?) aspect of th clinical imbalance referred to. ‘skitzo-frenia’ is also partially obscured, whited out, as many schizophrenics attempt to hide or deny their condition–and as society, too, is apt in some circumstances to be in denial ov mental illness.

“next, visual cues, in the form ov the arrows, are given to force the vertical reading of ‘is’ ‘an’–an ‘unnatural’ direction, as well as a disjunction of the ‘ia’ from it’s preceeding word; in both aspects, the mode of perception is not the normal one, with iconic visuals taking precedence over traditional reading (thinking) habits. this leads to the last line, in which visual perception (“eye”) is somehow in transaction with the self (“I”) of the poem–traded for? substituted? or in place of? it suggests, to me, that th ‘I’, th schizoprhic subject ov the poem, has lost his ‘self’, or her vision of’ ‘self’, perhaps overwhelmed by perceptions too chaotic or distorted to be intepreted…

“But what ov the Snark, in the background level of the poem? obviously referring to the Lewis Carroll poem, in which the crew goes off in search of the elusive creature, only to find that the particular Snark they are hunting is in fact a ‘Boojum’–and coming upon a Boojum, ov course, leads to one’s own disappearance, as the hapless Baker finds out at the end of the poem. the hunt for the snark, and the resulting disappearance of the self, echoes th subject’s search for sense in a visual realm & loss of sense of self w/in the disease. when the Baker disappears, he’s in the process of saying ‘it’s a boojum’ but only gets out the first syllable of the last word–his final ‘”oooo…’ echoed in the background here, as well as echoing praps a cry of pain & loneliness that is so symptomatic of schizophrenia…”

So: the work is a visual poem, after all–a visualloyic one. And now that I’ve finally brought this essay into a patch of words by someone who knows what he’s talking about, I think it’s a good time to end it.
.

Establishment Hackwork vs. Art of Consequence

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Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2000

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Basinski, A Zine of the Arths,
Number 3, July 1999; edited by Natalie Basinski.
32 pp; Watching Monster Movies Press,
30 Colonial Avenue, Lancaster NY 14086. $20/3 issues.

Umbrella, The Anthology,
edited by Judith A. Hoffberg. 164 pp;
Umbrella Editions, Box 3540,
Santa Monica CA 90408. $20.

Vietnam Diary, by F. J. Seligson.
20 pp; tel-let, 325 West Tyler, Apt. B,
Charleston IL 61920-1865. $5.

 

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I’m annoyed again, this time over a hackwork of the establishment called Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Edited by someone named Chris Hudson, it has the usual editorial board of acadominants–except for the unaffiliated neo-formalist, Dana Gioia. It will cover the standard names (some 300, only two or three of them new to me), 200 or so standard poems, and forty or fifty topics such as “language poetry” and, God forbid, “expatriate poetry”–but not, needless to say, “visual poetry.”

But somehow Kenneth Patchen is one of its poets, so maybe whoever writes about him will give a line or two to visual poetry. Or there will be something on it in the entry for E.E. Cummings– though probably not in the entries for three of his poems that will also be included since they will not be his visually innovative ones, just the easy-to-like anthology pieces like “i sing of olaf glad and big.” Oops, I almost forgot–editorial advisor John Hollander has an entry (as do two of his works) and he’s done shaped poems that, technically, have to be considered visual poems, I guess, though their shapes are only decorative, as far as I can see. I’m sure they’ll get a line or two of coverage.

Meanwhile, the second edition of Richard Kostelanetz’s A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes is out. I don’t yet have a copy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t mention at least fifty American poets that the Hudson “encyclopedia” doesn’t, and no more than a handful that it does. A related piece of news is that Crag Hill and I are processing material for two volumes of a multi-volumed anthology of visual poetry and related art (Writing To Be Seen: an anthology of later 20th-century visio-textual art). We hope to do five or more volumes covering ten to twelve poets each. I can almost guarantee that no one in them will be discussed in a book like EAP for at least another thirty years.

Okay, enough of my sputtering. It’s time to go on to something more interesting, such as the following poem, which is from F. J. Seligson’s Vietnam Diary, a series of lyrical (albeit mutedly socio-politically bitter) haiku about a father and daughter holiday excursion (it would appear) through Vietnam:

until
day
re
turns
our
hearts.

I sometimes feel that the main difference between poetry and prose is that the former does its best to make its engagent spend maximal time on each of its words. Here a backwards slant of words slows a reader, setting up a tension whose release with the verb’s change from intransitive to transitive (from having no object to having one) is just-about-literally physically-jolting.

Other recent good news from my part of the woords, as Mike Basinski or Geof Huth–or both–would say, is the recent publication of various artworks, profiles, interviews and features from twenty years of Judith Hoffberg’s decidedly non- EAPian journal of museum art, mail art, book art (in particular), and even visual poetry (including a particularly informative ten-page interview of British visual poet Paula Claire), among much else. In a very attractive glossy cover. A must-have for anyone with a genuine interest in the arts.

Then, speaking of Mike Basinski, there is the third issue of his (14-year-old) daughter Natalie’s zine, Basinski, that would get my vote for best zine of the last year of the twentieth century if only for its labeling itself a “Zine of the Arths.” It’s got quite a variety of interesting stuff starting with a dopey-in-the-best-sense mix of graphics and nutto prose narrative by Jeff Filipski. Its graffiti-like but not amateurish cartoon melange covers a third of its text, making it inpenetrable to standard rationality, but it has swamp cabbage, a lion and cold beer in it.

Next are four pages by NBB (Nancy Burr) of highly sophisticated scribbles into the deepest secrets of pre-language’s struggle to become language, both in history and in any contemporary individual’s mind. A fifth page of NBB’s is a xerox of cut-out single short lines of text about “you” with thread carefully, then black lengths of paper wildly, woven through them, and a handlike outline emerging up from them, grabbing for what could be flung scarves. I could well steal from this, which is my highest compliment for any artwork.

A poem by Ed Kelleher follows that uses a kind of textual version of Philip Glass’s minimalistly repetitive technique that makes a dumb-starting poem about whether “Ed” is “still there in the ground” become a very undumb-feeling lament by its end. And three imitations of Hopkins by Kelleher that–well, one of their lines is “Their mystery must have missed me, Miss.” But they have a way of deepening if you give them a chance to.

I’m running out of room, so of the other good things in Basinski, I’ll only be able to get to Mary Begley’s very absorbing visual poems (that remind me a bit of Mike Miskowski’s stuff, mainly because, like his, they come out of a computer with that kind of squarish jitter such work has–and which can be very effective, exploited the way Mary exploits it here to suggest a kind of background mechanicalness to unregiment out of, or try to, or to somehow marry (as in her “bunches of love”). Okay, I’ll admit here that I may not know what I’m talking about–but I’ll stand by my main point, which is that Mary’s pieces have and exploit computer-awkwardnesses successfully.

And with that yet another installment of my column endeth.

 

Surrealistic Minimalism

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 35, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2003

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Investigations
Marton Koppany
72 pp; 2003; Pa
Ahadada Books, 3158 Bentworth Drive,
Burlington, Ontario, Canada L7M 1M2. $14.95.

Public Cube
John M. Bennett
8 pp; 2003; Pa
Luna Bisonte Press, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $5.

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I’ve always been strongly attracted to minimalist poems. Probably my best-known (and perhaps best) essay, “Mnmlst Poetry: Unacclaimed But Flourishing,” discusses such poems in detail. (It can be found at Karl Young’s Light & Dust website: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm.) Many of my own poems are minimalist, as well–and my favorite poem of all-time is Aram Saroyan’s extremely minimalist pwoermd, “lighght.” I’ve never had much luck persuading those not as automatically blown away by the best of such poems that they ought to be, however. My theory is that to appreciate a minimalist poem, you have to be seriously angered by their illogic–and then, almost at once, able to grasp, intellectually and hormonally, their concealed logic. The anger provides motivation and energy, and increases the happiness of the relief one feels upon “solving” the poem–if carried out quickly enough. Added to this is the satisfaction whatever the poem conveys gives you, once rendered coherent (or sufficiently coherent). So you have to be susceptible to the charms of poetry, too.

If my theory is right, you have to be fairly annoyed by the wilful misspelling of “lighght” when you first see it to have much chance of significantly appreciating it. Then, almost at once, you must recognize (with varying degrees of consciousness) that the extra letters are silent, so the word is unchanged by them and acts in its re-spelling as a brilliantly appropriate metaphor for the silent expansiveness of light. The result should be a joy in having solved something combined with a fresh, vivid experience of light. (Note: the more on has been exposed to similar poems, the more likely one will get this one. A good place to start are haiku. They are the protoype of short poems dependent on a reader’s quickly seeing/feeling a connection between images not immediately apparent.)

Hey, guess what? This is beginning to be An Important Essay! Or I’m in my manic zone for the first time in months. I know I’m not saying anything I haven’t said five or more times before in various places, but I think I may have just said it about as well as I’m capable of. In any case, it all relates to minimalist poet Marton Koppany’s terrific new collection of poetry sequences, Investigations, choicely packaged by Jesse Glass’s Ahadada press (no stapled in the corner hand-out, this).

The book’s exactly apropos epigraph is from Isidore Ducasse: “The phenomenon passes, I seek the laws.” Each of its poems takes place in a black-bordered rectangle. Nothing could be more formal and tidy. Nor loopier than what is investigated, which is not merely minimalist but (most of the time) wacko. For instance, just the words, or word, in cursive writing, “allofasuddenthesame.” Bern Porter is one obvious precursor of this kind of thing, as are many of the earlier Dadaists. But Koppany has gone at least an important step beyond any of his influences, I think, for his works are more reflective, less arbitrary than theirs. They are also sequential, so that each frame of a given work draws from and enriches the other frames–and frames of other poems in the book.

The book’s very first sequence, “Titles,” is my favorite, probably because I find a lyricism in it that is less apparent in the rest of the book, which tilts, I think, toward a kind of epigrammicry. The three rectangles of “Titles” are black. In the first, dominating the top half of the rectangle, is a torn scrap of paper with the word, “CATEGORY” in its upper lefthand corner. It looks like the prow of a ship. A mast-like vertical line sticks up out of the “ship.” A carefully cut-out rectangle substantially smaller than the “ship” is near the lower righthand corner of the work. In it, in smaller capitals than the ones in the “ship,” are the words, “STILL LIFE.”

First reaction? Anger at such obscurity, perhaps–though my anger, if any, was short, for I immediately connected to the Klee-like simplicity of the design–especially in a book supposed to contain poems, poems being verbal. But was the work anything beyond a mildly ingratiating design? Perhaps because I’m so wrapped up in literary taxonomizing, I found it to be a wonderful . . . investigation of “categorization.” Something about the size of the ship, “CATEGORY,” compared with the rectangle, “STILL LIFE,” got to me. Generality overwhelming the particular? But receding from it, having less and less contact with it–finally, in fact, to leave the still life all by itself, so in the final analysis irrelevant to it?

On the other hand, the ship was the life-containing object–non-geometric, mobile, its edges irregular. Conclusion: you got me. But what the poem unloads, however incomplete an expression of categorization and whatever else it’s about, coheres sufficiantly, for me. Incompleteness and contradictoriness are part of it.

Each of the other two frames of “Titles” consists of shiplike element with a mast and a second element that jar and harmonize with the objects in the first frame. I won’t say more about the sequence–or the book, just provide one more excerpt, which illustrates the kind of piece most typical of Investigations. It’s from “Valuable Coupons.” Like the pieces in “Titles,” its field (which is white) contains just two elements, in this case a price from a newspaper ad, “$2.00 off,” midway in the rectangle, and “I am using a reduced language” neatly typed nare the bottom. That should make you at least smile.

A month or two after I got my copy of Koppany’s book, I got the three latest offerings Of John M. Bennett’s Luna Bisonte press. I thought I might mention one or two of them here, so–just before writing the above–I looked them over. One of them, Public Cube, I at once noticed, consisted of minimalist poems in framed cut-outs from printed matter, with words of Bennett’s. I can’t swear Bennett was strongly influenced by Koppany but I am sure he was because: (1) I know he got a copy of Koppany’s book around the time he seems to have written the poems in his new book; (2) I know he greatly likes Koppany’s work; (3) I know him to be as influenceable as Shakespeare was; (4) his new poems have much in common with Koppany’s and (5) I myself immediately wanted to do frames poems like Koppany’s after seeing them (but am not as unlazy as Bennett, so haven’t yet)–in other words, Koppany’s poems seem very likely to inspire other poets who do similar things to use his devices.

Against this, it is quite possible that Bennett was not influenced by Koppany’s work, for Bennett has previously done poems not too different from them, and both poets have been influenced by Porter and other minimalist poets. Moreover, there are big differences in style between Investigations and Public Cube. But the latter does seem to me exactly the kind of book Bennett might have done after seeing Koppany’s book. All of which I report to show how the best poets inter-work (even if Bennett was working in parallel with Koppany rather than after him).

I’m already two hundred words over what I consider the proper size of my column, but I don’t want to end without saying a little more about Bennett’s book, so will provide a quick take on its title (and cover) piece. Its border is red–on a very white cover. (The book’s pages are a lighter shade of red.) Across most of its middle is the word, “sprawl,” in Bennett’s inimitable sub-literate scrawl. I first read this as “growl,” which fits perfectly (and proves the value of multi-interpretably “bad” handwriting). A cut-out of “Public” and a cut-out of “Cube” slantingly intersect with “sprawl,” one above, one below its “s.” Its effectiveness as a design quickly mitigates its verbal obscurity, for me, allowing time to see/feel urban geometry versus life (the former perhaps opening to emit the latter–or being shaken by it), hear the bigcity click and bawl of “public” and “cube,” and reflect on how that which is public might be not a mere square but a cube. (Bennett’s collection ends, I might add, with a poem whose text is, “kept plank,” if that helps, any.)

Adventures on the Internet

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Small Press Review,
Volume 29, Number 8/9, August/September 1997

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The Grist On-Line Home Page:
http://www.thing.net/~grist

The Light & Dust Home Page:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm

Hyperotics, by Harry Polkinhorn:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/golpub/polk/gpolkina.htm

The Electronic Poetics Center Home Page:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc

The ubuweb:
http://www.ubuweb.com/vp

 

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The hot news from here is that after a year of big bucks from substitute teaching, I was able this March to buy a sophisticated enough computer system to get on the Internet. The system cost around two thousand. I think it’ll turn out to have been worth it–and the $25 a month I have to pay for the Internet link.

Experioddicologically, the Internet’s major plus so far has been Karl Young’s Light & Dust Website. The number of its poetry collections approaches three figures and includes over twenty complete books. There seem as many free-versers as burst-norm poets represented: Wanda Coleman and Toby Olson (the latter new to me but worth investigating) as well as Experioddica stand-bys like Mike Basinski and Karl Kempton (and Scott Helmes, who also does mathematical poetry!) The Light & Dust site has several essays, too–including, yes, one by me. Most of them are on visual or related kinds of poetry. There are also reviews and a list of other sites worth visiting if you find the l&d one to your liking.

The l&d site is a sub-site of the Grist website, which is truly a super-site, umbrellaing not only l&d, but Jukka Lehmus’s neo-visio-scientifico-dada Cyanobacteria, Thomas Lowe Taylor’s language-poetry-oriented anabasis and Robert Bove’s Room Temperature, a more down-to-earth site, featuring plaintext poets like Michael Lally. The Grist site itself showcases a great deal of varied poetry and prose.

A second major source of visual poetry–and sound poetry–is the ubuweb. It’s especially good for its collections of historical visual poetry, starting with Apollinaire’s. It also has essays, and a useful bibliography by Ward Tietz of vispo-related books.

Then there’s the Electronic Poetry Center, which SUNY, Buffalo, devotes to “contemporary experimental and formally-innovative poetries.” There’s too much good stuff here to list it all. I’ll just say that you can get from it to the home page of just about any otherstream press or zine that has a home page, notably Taproot Reviews, with zillions of its reviews of the micro-press over the years. And that my favorite section of the SUNY site is its poetics list, which was set up by Charles Bernstein to encourage discussion and information-exchange among people like David Bromige, Marjorie Perloff, Nick Piombino and so on, but includes a number of lesser names from other poetries–including, now, me.

I haven’t yet generated much interest in my posts to the SUNY site (list members were as indifferent to my attempt to get a list of poetry schools worked out as readers of this magazine were a few years ago when it had an earlier version of it). Nonetheless, I’ve been having fun. There have been discussions on my kind of topics, like what to call the white spaces like              this that many contemporary poems have. My suggestion was “white caesurae.”

Most recently I’ve gotten into a “thread,” as they call them, on what the smallest unit of a poem is. Whether, for instance, it’s something smaller than a syllable. Tom Orange started it, and as of 18 June I had contributed four or five notes to it, including the following, with which I am now going to end this installment of my column:

“Much of my interest in what might be called micro-poetics is hard for me to defend. For instance, I disagree with Charles Smith when he says that it would not be ‘very useful to posit partial phonemes’ but I can’t offhand think of an example of where it would be useful, only that I vaguely remember from time to time being bothered in my writing by the lack of one.

“As for just calling s and t alphabetic letters, I generally do–but it might not be enough. What if, to take a crazy example, you were dealing as a critic with the line, ‘The twenty-two trucks turned.’ You could say its author used the letter t six times and the phoneme t thrice; but what if for some obscure reason you wanted to say he’d used the t three times as a part of phonemes? That is, what if you wanted to distinguish the fractional phoneme t from the plain letter t, and also from the plain phoneme t (which interestingly to me isn’t necessarily the plain letter t–which makes me wonder what the w is in the phoneme tw of ‘two.’)

“All of this got me rummaging through Cummings, master of the expressive use of the less-than-syllable, as in the following:

“Speaking of syllables-that-aren’t-words like ‘ent,’ just look at how much meaning he puts into ‘ness!’ And at the ‘ting(le)’ he adds with an incomplete syllable, and the zing/sing he gets from a complete but isolated syllable, and–best–the breakdown of the syllable/word, ‘are’ (reversing the expansion of ‘vast’), to show/say the scattered birds’ voices becoming one (with the hint of that one voice’s beginning some primal alphabet). In short, there’s much in poetry that’s smaller than syllables.

“(As Alan Sondheim beautifully demonstrated yesterday at this site with his ‘wundering wumb,’ utc.)

“Now a literary history question. I’m not very widely read but my impression is that Cummings (in English, at any rate) was the first poet to use the ‘intra-syllabic word-break’ to aesthetic effect–as in his breaking ‘inventing’ into ‘inven’ and ‘ting’ for the latter’s hint of ‘tingle,’ and ‘using’ into ‘u’ and ‘sing.’

“Does anyone out there know of anyone who did this kind of thing before him?”

 

The Otherstream Versus Wilshberia

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 11/12 November/December 2012

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“Poetry Wide Open: the Otherstream (Fragments in Motion)”
by Jake Berry                   http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Berry20%203.htm

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As my regular readers know, I use the term, “Wilshberia,” to stand for that part of  the American poetry continuum devoted to mainstream (i.e., conventional) poetry from around 1960 till now.  Hence, it covers the kind of formal poetry that Richard Wilbur is (deservedly) well-known for across the continuum to the random, abruptly non-sequential, conversational sort of poetry John Ashbery is (deservedly) well-known for (and which was new at the time “The Waste Land” was first published).  I call it “jump-cut poetry” (albeit that’s not one of my own coinages); another good name that’s been used for it is “paratactical poetry.”

Just about exactly halfway between these two on the continuum is the country’s most popular kind of poetry for the past forty years or so, Iowa Workshop poetry.  Just before, and perhaps a little after, John Ashbery on the right of the continuum are poets often incorrectly called “language poets,” like Michael Palmer, and–sometimes, Ashbery himself–who compose slightly varying kinds of jump-cut poetry. A few genuine language poets–those who have significantly focused over the years on conjuring poetic effects out of syntax, inflection or spelling–such as Lyn Hejinian–have become mainstream, or are about to.  Which means that Wilshberia no longer, or will soon no longer, represent the contemporary poetry mainstream.  For the purposes of discussion here, though, Wilshberia as it is now represents American mainstream poetry as it is well enough.

In his essay at Jeffrey Side’s Argotist Online (for which Side provides a deft introduction) Jake Berry does a nice job of laying out the basic problem for adventurous poets (i.e., poets taking some not-yet-certified pathway to achieve their poetic ends.  He begins with the way the availability of (serious) poetry has changed from 1900 till now, from its being generally easy to find in commercially-published books and magazines to its being all over the place, particularly on the Internet, in greatly increased quantities, much of it “very current—perhaps as current as the same day!”  And there we have the poetry problem, according to Berry.  How, he asks, does one with an interest in poetry deal with so much of it, of such a wide diversity?

Answer: consult authorities (almost entirely academics) and read what they direct you to.  This makes sense, or would if these people were guides rather than gatekeepers.  But they are gatekeepers of the worst sort, not opening gates to the most conventional poetry extant only, but just about never so much as mentioning that there are gates to anything else.

Berry goes on to say that “Poetry in the early 21st century is presented to young poets and anyone interested in understanding contemporary poetry as (for the most part) an uncomfortable, dissociated co-existence of . . .  two very different approaches to poetry,” one aiming for clarity and accessibility, the other celebrating polysemantic density and difficulty: Iowa Workshop Poetry and Language Poetry.  Or: Wilshberia, if you add a few other currently minor schools of poetry like the neo-formalists to the mix.

It is at this juncture that Berry’s essay wobbles a bit, for he claims that otherstream poetry is basically unlabelable because too widely varying and unknown.  Only here do I disagree significantly with him, for I think most of otherstream poetry is suffiently known to be labeled.  I have myself listed many of its main schools: visual, sound, conceptual, mathematical, performance, cyber, infraverbal, syntax-centered, inflection-centered and cryptographic poetry.  We in the otherstream must find names for our work and force those names on the academy.  Only then can we prevent someone like Marjorie Perloff from ignorantly asking, as she did in a reply to Berry’s essay, “What, then, is Berry’s complaint? Where are those important experimentalisms that the ‘university presses’ are missing out on? Where are the neglected bards of the present? Publishing today is extremely eclectic and—with exceptions like New Directions, which has a certain trademark–one can never tell who will publish what, where, and when. It’s a pretty open and fluid situation. Just when you label Princeton as quite conservative, they publish Andre Codrescu.”  Andre Codrescu?  As familiar with the otherstream as I am, I’ve never come across his name as a prominent contributor to it.  Which isn’t to say he is not, but . . .

To be fair to Perloff, she was the only widely-known academic of the several Slide asked to respond to Berry’s essay, prior to its publication who did so–although three or four little-known academics joined her.  Her response was pretty much as I expected it would be, but she did surprise me by bringing up a poet I would agree is otherstream, Craig Dworkin, to prove she isn’t entirely devoid of knowledge of poetry outside Wilshberia.  But she also surprised me by failing to comprehend (as many academics amazingly do) that Iowa workshop poetry is not something only written at Iowa, or by people with who have studied or taught there, but a kind of very standard poetry written by many poets, most of them with no connection to Iowa.  Her view of Iowa Workshop Poets is like a belief that an Italian sonnet can only be written by Italians.

As far as I’m concerned, she and the other respondents on academia’s side proved Jake’s point that academia is are seriously out of touch with poetry not using techniques in wide use for at least forty years or more is concerned.  I certainly understand the difficulty in keeping up with the current state of poetry in America.  However, even academics should be able to spend a few days a decade exploring otherstream websites.  Or, once a semester,  giving the following assignment to their students: find and describe in 250 words some American poet who is composing a kind of poetry this class is not teaching.  Do you really think more than two or three would ever consider doing such a thing?  (Post-publication note: actually, a fair number probably would, but only because so ignorant of the Otherstream as to be unaware of the danger of the assignment.

None of the prominent poets and/or critics known as “language poets” whom Side also asked, including Ron Silliman, accepted his invitation, by the way.   Altogether, sixteen responded: Ivan Arguelles, Anny Ballardini, Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, Norman Finkelstein, Jack Foley, Bill Freind (and that is how he spells his last name), Alan May, myself, Bill Lavender, Alan May, Carter Monroe, Marjorie Perloff, Dale Smith, Sue Brennan Walker and Henry Weinfield.

I wrote a response to the responses, too, as did Berry.  Side and I also took on a fifth-rate critic who writes for the Internet tabloid, The Huffington Report, Seth Abramson, who well be more ignorant of the existence of otherstream poetry than anyone else writing about poetry in the U.S.  He wrote something ignorant about one small aspect of Jake’s essay, which we swiftly ripped apart, whereupon he dropped out of the discussion.  It’s almost always assertion followed by retreat for these sort of people.  At that point, the controversy we hoped to turn into a Serious Discussion of the State of Contemporary American Poetry with many participants blinked out.
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Henry Chettle’s Testimony Regarding William Shakespeare

I contend that Chettle speaks of the Crow of Greenes Groatsworth of Wit as a playwright in a preface he wrote for a pamphlet of his, Kind-Harts Dreame (1592). There, he mentions two playwrights who had taken offense at the Groatsworth, which Chettle edited or wrote.  Here’s the key passage: “With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I neuer be: The other, whome at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had, for that as I haue moderated the heate of liuing writers, and might have vsde my owne discretion (especially in such a case) the Narrator being dead, that I did not, I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he excellent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooues his Art.”

The first point I want to make may seem a trivial, even dopey point, but it will prove important, trust me. It has to do with the reactions of the two playwrights who complained about what the Groatsworth said. In the case of Playwright #1, Chettle says (immediately after the passage just quoted), “For the first, whose learning I reuerence, and at the perusing of Greenes Booke, stroke out what then in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ: or had it beene true, yet to publish it, was intollerable: him I would wish to vse me no worse that I deserue.” Playwright #1 therefore had to be complaining of an injury done to him personally since Chettle would not likely have thought, prior to meeting this man, that he “stroke out” a passage for him, or in his behalf, if the line were about someone else. That is, while Playwright #1 could have been upset over something said about someone else, Chettle would hardly, when readying the Groatsworth for publication, notice a passage that maligns Mr. X—intollerably—and at that point decide to take it out for someone other than Mr. X., in this case, Playwright #1.

In the case of Playwright #2, Chettle says, “The other, whome at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had . . .” Ergo, Playwright #2 had to have taken offense at an injury done to him personally (and specifically) because Chettle is speaking of now wishing he had spared him—as opposed to wishing he had spared someone else concerning whose treatment Playwright #2 was upset. Moreover, Chettle goes on to give as his reason for now wishing he had
spared him the fact he had “seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he excellent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooues his Art.” Would it make sense for Chettle to wish he had toned down words insulting Mr. X—Playwright #2, who had taken offense on Mr. X.’s behalf—has turned out to be a very decent and worthy fellow?

Now, if one accepts that each of the two persons took offense at having been personally maligned by something in the Groatsworth letter (and I think one must accept that, if nothing else I argue), it follows that the two must have been among the persons the Groatsworth letter
specifically mentions (and this is why my point was important to me to make). There were six of these, but two who were briefly mentioned but identified in no way toward the end of the letter are too insignificantly referred to, to count, even for the anti-Stratfordians I’ve read.

So, we’re dealing with just four persons: the Crow, and the three playwrights to whom the letter was addressed. So far as the playwrights the Groatsworth addresses are concerned, I agree with the consensus among literary scholars, a strong one, that identifies them as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and George Peele. Their identity isn’t crucial to any of the arguments I’ll be making, but it’s important enough to say a little more about it.

The first of them to be mentioned is spoken of as a “famous gracer of Tragedians,” a description that would have best fit Marlowe among the playwrights writing at the time, according to D. Allen Carroll, whose 1994 edition of the Groatsworth is the main source for my comments
on the Groatsworth. The Groatsworth-author also describes this playwright as having prosecutably wild opinions on touchy matters like religion, just as Marlowe was reputed to have had. The Groatsworth-author wonders if the cause of this is that “pestilent Machivilian pollicy (or unscrupulous cunning) that thou hast studied,” and not only did rumors have it that Marlowe was a disciple of Machiavelli, but Marlowe had Machiavelli serve as the Prologue to his play, The Jew of Malta. It is thus “by near universal consent” (Carroll states) that the
Groatsworth-narrator’s “famous gracer of Tragedians” should be taken as Marlowe.

The second playwright the Groatsworth-narrator addresses is believed to have been Nashe, like Peele and Marlowe, a known associate of Greene—and whoever the Groatsworth-author was, he is in this letter playing the part of Greene, which means the associates he refers to ought to have been genuine associates of Greene’s. Chief among the reasons it makes sense to take the second playwright as Nashe is that the Groatsworth-narrator calls him “yong Juvenall, that byting Satyrist” and Nashe, just 25 then (nine years younger than Greene), was the preeminent satirist of the time. The Groatsworth-narrator advises him to leave his targets anonymous so as to avoid getting “many enemies by bitter wordes,” and Nashe had more than once been attacked by those he had previously directed “bitter wordes” at.

That the third playwright is Peele is based almost entirely on the Groatsworth-narrator’s roundaboutly bringing in St. George in what seems a rather transparent hint at Peele’s first name—and the lack of anyone else better for the role. But the third playwright is also said to have been “driven to extreme shifts,” like the Groatsworth-narrator; that is, as Carroll points out in a footnote, the third playwright was, like the popular conception of Peele then and now, in “constant, near-desperate want.”

It is true, too, that the reference to St. George would tie into Peele’s reputation as “an outrageous jingo in politics, a fire-eater and mouther of marvelous patriotic hyperboles” (C. F. T. Brooke, Literary History of England, edited by Baugh, et al. [1948], 455)—as particularly indicated by the publication of Peele’s poem on the Order of the Garter, which makes much of St. George, England’s patron, in 1593, the very year of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit.

So, the four candidates for Playwright #2 are the Crow, and Marlowe, Nashe and Peele. To cut this number by one, we can in short order dispose of Marlowe—by showing that he was Playwright #1. This makes sense because Marlowe had by far the most reason of anyone
dealt with by the Groatsworth letter to have been upset by it, for it described him as a disciple of Machiavelli, and claimed he had said, “There is no God,” and gave “no glorie to the giver.” At the very least, then, the letter accuses Marlowe of atheism, about the most serious offense one could be charged with then, and of Machiavellism, which was close to satanism for the letter-writer, and many other Elizabethans. How could Marlowe not have protested?

Moreover, there’s Chettle’s saying that he “stroke out” something in the letter about Playwright #2 that “had it beene true, yet to publish it, was intollerable. Unlike Nashe and Peele—or the Crow (so far as we know)—Marlowe could well have been guilty of something it would have been “intollerable” to impute to him (homosexuality, the scholarly opinion is, though why Chettle would have viewed that worse than atheism, I’m not sure). Marlowe also seems to have been considered especially learned and more likely to have been “reverenced” for it by
Chettle than any of the other three. He was clearly irascible, as well—the kind of person one would not be surprised Chettle found hard to get along with, for he was twice involved in duels, and died in a tavern brawl (or the equivalent thereof—except for those who believe he
wrote the plays of Shakespeare). That Marlowe was Playwright #1 is therefore close to universally acknowledged.

Which leaves Nashe, Peele and the Crow as the only viable candidates for the position of Playwright #2. There is a definite problem with the Crow’s candidacy, one that I’ve avoided to this point for the sake of narrative flow. It is Chettle’s saying that the Groatsworth letter was
“offensively taken” by two of the playwrights it was addressed to, which would exclude the Crow, who was not addressed by it. I claim, however, that Chettle overlooked or forgot that the letter was not directly, only indirectly, written to the Crow. Chettle, in this interpretation, would have done this because he wrongly assumed the Crow had been one of the playwrights the Groatsworth letter addressed. Not a bizarre error on Chettle’s part, and quite plausible if he rushed his apology, as he and many authors of such bits of journalism in those days did (and still do in ours). That he did indeed rush his apology is strongly suggested by its slapdash nature. For
instance, Chettle says the Groatsworth was written to “diuers playmakers,” which suggests that he hasn’t a copy of the letter at hand as he is writing, or is not consulting it very closely if he does, since three is less than most people would take “divers” to mean. He then says that the letter was offensively taken by “one or two” of the play-makers it was written to—again, an inexactness that suggests hurried writing.

His reference to the offended pair, who “wilfully forge in their conceites a liuing Narrator,” is something short of respectful, yet just a few lines later he describes the second of the two in glowing terms and says he is as sorry that he let the bad parts of the letter through unedited as if he had written them himself—that is, his tone changes drastically, and he pretty much contradicts his earlier stance toward the second play-maker—evidence, again, of hurried, careless writing.

The only other point against the Crow I know of is similar. It is Chettle’s speaking of how well-known in book circles Chettle was for hindering “the bitter inveying against schollers,” which strongly suggests that he viewed them, as the OED has it, as men “who had studied at the university, and who, not having entered any of the learned professions or obtained any fixed employment, sought to gain a living by literary work.” The Groatsworth also uses that term to
describe the playwrights it was addressed to. Since the Crow can be presumed for several reasons not to have been a university man, he could not, the reasoning goes, have been Playwright #2. But, (1) that Chettle says he’s tried his best in the past to temper exhanges between scholars does not necessarily mean he must now be speaking of an exchange between scholars—he may be speaking of just an exchange; (2) he may have meant by schollers, simply “writers”; he does seem in this passage to use “scholler” and “writer” as synonyms (as do others of his time); or (3) he may have thought Playwright #2, whom he did not know, was a university man, or—not knowing whether he was or not—decided to be courteous and treat him as such,
or—again (shame on me)—have forgotten that he was speaking of university men.

Just to thoroughly confuse the issue, Thomas Beard in 1597 said of Marlowe that he was “by profession a scholler . . . but by practice a playmaker and a poet . . .” thus distinguishing between writers and schollers. Whether Chettle wrote his apology carelessly quickly or not,
though, there are good reasons for believing that the Crow was one of the two who took offense—reasons that, in my view, trump the two (weak) reasons against just given.

One is that Chettle makes a point (implicitly) of addressing the charges made in the letter against the Crow, point by point. To begin with, the Groatsworth charges the Crow with being riff-raff, a lowly actor, cruel and inconsiderate, ungenerous, a braggart; Chettle addresses this by asserting that the second playwright has a civil demeanor—is in fact, a decent fellow.

The Groatsworth is sarcastic about the Crow’s ability to create blank verse; Chettle speaks of Playwright #2’s facetious grace in writing, etc.

The Groatsworth couples the Crow with those who have, it would seem, unfairly denied Greene money in his time of need; Chettle speaks of the second playwright’s uprightness of dealing and honesty (or honor).

The Groatsworth scorns the Crow’s occupation, acting (the Crow is an ugly black creature without the dialogue supplied by his betters), but Chettle praises his “qualitie,” which he implicitly grants at least respectability as something professed.

Now, it might be protested that I’m claiming some care on the part of Chettle here, and full remembrance of the details of the wrongs done to the Crow—in direct contradiction to my previous picture of a sloppy, forgetful Chettle. True; however it seems plausible to me that Chettle could have checked that part of the letter that was complained of,it being the main reason for his apology, before writing the apology but not bothered with the rest. Chettle, to go on, speaks of wishing he’d spared Playwright #2 more than he did, not that he wishes he spared him entirely. This also favors the Crow as Playwright #2 because the Crow was manhandled not only personally, but as an actor, in insults of actors scattered throughout the Groatsworth letter. For Chettle to have removed all the bad that was said about actors would have disposed of just about the whole letter, so he could not have entirely spared the Crow. He could, however, have entirely spared any of the other two in the running by removing, in Nashe’s case, the only line that spoke ill of him in any significant way, one about his having been made to consider religion “lothsome” (and every other line that some anti-Stratfordian thinks could have offended him, like one saying he and his friends would be “base-minded” if they didn’t heed the Groatsworth-narrator’s words); in Peele’s case Chettle could have removed that same line, since it referred to him (and Marlowe) as well as to Nashe, plus a reference to him suggesting that he deserved to be poor since he’d cast his lot with actors. One additional point in the Crow’s favor is that only he among the playwrights mentioned in the Groastworth has some vocation other than his art, as Chettle’s text suggests Playwright #2 does, for it covers four of his characteristics: his demeanor, his vocation, his character and his art. It would be strangely unbalanced diction to speak of demeanor and vocation, and then character and vocation (as would be the case if the play-maker’s art was his vocation)—that is, to praise his writing twice in such a locution. This doubling of occupations strengthens the case for the second play-maker’s being the Crow since none of the other three playwrights of the Groatsworth letter had any vocation other than writing. It also tends to indicate that the second play-maker’s vocation was acting, the same as the Crow’s, Chettle using “qualitie” secondarily to imply that. What else would the man be professing whose excellance Chettle would have been in a position to judge? Aside from that, as several scholars have pointed out, “the qualitie” the Crow is said to profess was often used in Shakespeare’s time to mean specifically the acting trade.

My final argument for Playwright #2 as the Crow is the unlikelihood that the Crow, maltreated personally as a bad but very conceited would be playwright with a cruel heart who, it is implied, was party to ignoring the dying Greene’s needs—and was, on top of it, an actor, and thus about as degenerate as can be (see the line about “Epicures” again for just one piece of evidence of that)—would not complain. It seems to me that I have now established the Crow as a viable
candidate for Chettle’s second playwright. But what about the other two? Might they not be even more likely candidates? I believe not.

There are several reasons for eliminating Nashe, whom I will take first, from consideration. He may have been treated a little condescendingly in the letter, but it’s hard to imagine he could have taken offense at it, particularly inasmuch as he was also flattered. (The letter terms him a “byting Satyrist” who ought to “inveigh against vaine men, for (he) canst do it, no man better,” but he ought not to name those he’s satirizing. The Groatsworth never personally insults Nashe.) And the compliments Chettle directs at Playwright #2 would do nothing to address any complaint Nashe would have had about what the letter said about him personally.

Besides that, whereas Chettle states that he had not previously met either of the playwrights who took offense, he probably knew Nashe. Both he and Nashe specialized in pamphlets, were on the same side in the major disputes of the time, and were intimately connected with
Danter, who published the Groatsworth and pamphlets of Nashe’s (though it is unknown whether they both knew Danter when Danter put out the Groatsworth). Moreover, in Have With You To Saffron-walden, Nashe asserts he’s not some contentious maniac who attacks everyone
without reason: “…I neuer abused Marloe, Greene, Chettle in my life, nor anie of my frends that vsde me like a frend; which both Marloe and Greene (if they were aliue) vnder their hands would testifie, euen as Harry Chettle hath in a short note here,” which indicates that he and Chettle were friends at some point in their lives. As does Thomas Dekker’s A Knight’s Conjuring, in which Chettle is described as an “old acquaintance” of Nashe, Marlowe and Greene.

It should also be pointed out that Nashe publically denied gossip that made him the author of the Groatsworth. It would not seem likely that anyone would suspect him of that had the letter contained anything maligning him seriously enough to be complained about.

As for Peele, the Groatsworth letter says of him personally the following: “And thou no lesse deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferiour; driven (as my selfe) to extreme shifts, a litle have I to say to thee: and were it not an idolatrous oth, I would sweare by sweet S. George, thou art unworthy better hap, sith thou dependest on so meane a stay.” This seems to me a pretty weak denigration, though Jerry Downs feels that someone “of Peele’s
pretensions” could have been quite hurt by being described as poor. I doubt that but even so, what would all Chettle’s compliments of Playwright #2 do to assuage such a hurt? Why wouldn’t he have found “divers of worship” to say Playwright #2 was thriving?

In conclusion, while there is evidence both for and against each of the three candidates for the role of Playwright #2, the evidence for the Crow is much stronger than the evidence for the other two, and the evidence against the Crow much less reliable than the evidence against
the other two.  From this, it follows that Chettle testifies that the Crow was a playwright, thus corroborating my argument that the Groatsworth-author said that. This additional evidence that the Crow was a playwright, in turn, helps confirm the Groatsworth’s identifying him as the particular playwright, William Shakespeare.

That Chettle also speaks of Playwright #2’s civility, something Jonson, Heywood and others noted about Shakespeare, and of his “facetious grace in writting,” which is close to the way Shakespeare’s writing style is often thereafter described, is strong secondary evidence that laywright #2 was the Crow aka William Shakespeare. In conclusion, Greenes Groatsworth of Wit and Chettle’s preface, taken together, are sufficient to pretty much confirm that William Shakespeare was an actor/writer, by themselves. But we knew that already, right?

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B. Cobbing, B. Keith, P. Grenier, A Lora-Totino, H. Tanabu

Capacity X
B. DiMichel

The God-Shed
A. Falleder

This Word
H. Fischer

Heavyn
L. Gorman

An April Poem
B. Grumman

Ghostlight
G. Huth

Khwatir
J. Leftwich

Fields/Pitches/Turfs/Arenas
R. Kostelanetz

Transentence
d. lopes

Until It Changes
S-P Martin

far human character
J. Martone

Artist as Autist
J. Moskovitz

Mockingbird/ Litmus
L. Tomoyasu

Artaud What
N. Vassilakis

Cheer
D. Waber

Photo Script
P. Weinman

Night Rain
T. Wiloch

Viscosity Induction
C. Winkler

WARNING: THIS PAGE IS A PAGE-IN-PROGRESS

It will be difficult to read until I have time to get it in shape, which I expect to be doing very slowly.

The Runaway Spoon Press

Box 495597, Port Charlotte FL 33949

The information listed below is up-to-date as of Fall 2005–with titles published after Spring 2001 in red, and unaccompanied by full particulars. Prices and availability are subject to change (some titles are temporarily out-of-print, or close to it). Note: most Runaway Spoon Press Books are saddle-stitched with card-stock covers; the price of each includes postage, handling and taxes; it is, in short, the thing’s price–in US dollars, that is.

MIEKAL AND

The Quotes of Rotar Storch

Introduction by Crag Hill

A collection of avant garde collages, illustrations and poetry that playgrounds all of existence. 50 pages, 8.5″ by 11″. Publication Date: 6 November 1989. ISBN 0-926935-23-2. Price: $10

MIEKAL AND & LIZ WAS

Fluxonyms

A collection of alphaconceptual poetry or: exploratory breakdowns of polysyllabic neologies. 30 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 23 February 1989. ISBN 0-926935-09-7. Price: $5

IVAN ARGUELLES

Madonna

23 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 22 June 1998. ISBN 1-57141-043-0. Price: $8

TOM BAER

Roller Rink

One-act play about Hollywood high-rollers. 24 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 14 May 1994. ISBN 0-57141-001-5. Price: $5

DAVID BARATIER

Estrella

Linquexpressive Poetry. 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 2002. ISBN 1-57141-059-7. Price: $5

DENNIS BARONE

Tempura Fugit

22 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication Date: 28 June 1998. ISBN 1-57141-044-9. Price: $8

MICHAEL BASINSKI

Abzu

with visimagery by WENDY SORIN

Poems about Abzu that “previgilage mispeeling.” 8.5″ by 11″. Publication Date: 3 June 2003. ISBN 1-57141-060-0. Price: $10

The Flight to the Moon

Eight myth-based circular visual/infraverbal poems about the moon12 pages, 5.5″ by4.25″. Publication Date: 16 July 1993. ISBN 0-926935-81-X.
Price: $5

Red Rain Too

A visual poetry sequence that recreates the archaeological investigation of ancient American Indian texts. 17 pages. ISBN 0-926935-64-X. Price: $5

[Un Nome]

Magnamythic visual infraverbal poems. 26 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 24 August 1997. ISBN 1-57141-039-2. Price: $5

GUY BEINING

Inner Insights

more of Beining’s ridiculously
little-known text&graphics collages5.5″ by 8″. Publication Date:
18 July 2005.ISBN 1-57141-068-6. Price: $8

M-Factor

Wildly socio-techno-sexual adventures in
illuscription30 pages, 8.5″ by 5.5″.   Publication Date: 2
July 1993. ISBN 0-926935-82-8. Price: $8

Piecemeal

Introduction by Harry Polkinhorn

A both slick and coarse, x-rated dislocational collage sequence that alleys profoundly through just about the whole of modern life and art308 pages in 8 volumes, 4.25″ by 5.5″.

Publication Dates: 17 April 1988 (volumes 1 & 2), 16 April 1989
(volumes 3 & 4), 10 December 1989 (volumes 5 through 8). ISBN
0-926935-25-9, 0-926935-26-7, 0-926935-27-5, 0-926935-28-3, 0-926935-29-1,
0-926935-30-5, 0-926935-31-3, 0-926935-32-1, 0-926935-33-X, the last being
for the set as a whole. Price per volume: $5; per set: $30

Vanishing Whores & the Insomniac

Haiku of bigCity
squalor stunningly illustrated with collages and pen&ink
drawings38 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date: 27 June
1991. ISBN 0-926935-57-7. Price: $5

BENNETT, ERNST, GRUMMAN, HELMES

12 Colorborations

four visual poets each collaborating oncewith each of the others in full color

8.5″ by11″. Publication Date: 17 June 2004.ISBN 1-57141-066-X. Price: $200

JOHN M. BENNETT

SH ONE

sample poems:

foNo act
ectic
sUre wAs

c rock an
bee p an

j erk an

lip an id

Span

Introduction by Ivan Argüelles

Demented lyrics of the everyday

39 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″; Publication Date: 20 December 1990.

ISBN 0-926935-44-5. Price: $8

spinal speech

A collection of burning poodle
poems48 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 24 May
1995. ISBN 0-57141-013-9. Price: $8

Swelling

Visimagistic Introduction by Al Ackerman

The first Runaway Spoon Press collection of burning poodle
poetry from the originator of the genre, or: surrealism,
animal-urgent38 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date: 11
August 1988. ISBN 0-926935-05-4. Price: $5

JAKE BERRY

Brambu Drezi

A spectacular weave of disjunctional poetry, amuletic illumagery and ideas and images out of all known–and several other—worlds

61 pages, 8.5″by 11″.   Publication
Date: 17 March 1994, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date: 23
February 1989. ISBN 0-926935-94-1. Price: $10

Equations

Introduction by Harry Polkinhorn

Wildly disjunctional poems about science, mythology,
human existence with wonderful accompanying illustrations by the
author43 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.   Publication Date: 16
February 1992. ISBN 0-926935-63-1. Price: $5

CARLA BERTOLA

Interferences Suite

print&handwritten collagical
visual poem sequence.8.5″ by 5.5″. Publication Date: 4 June
2003.ISBN 1-57141-062-7. Price: $8

JONATHAN BRANNEN

Ethernity

Introduction by Dan Raphael

Shaped poems dealing somewhat dislocationally with the eternal verities of summer, the moon, language….

28 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 29 July 1989. ISBN 0-926935-19-4. Price: $5

Sunset Beach

A sexually-charged prose montage that
swells “after-words” into summerful major visual poetry50 pages, 5.5″
by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 24 June 1991. ISBN 0-926935-54-2.
Price: $50

Warp & Peace

Introduction by G. Huth

A visual poetry sequence exploring the eternal cycle of human destruction
and regeneration18 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date:
19 April 1989. ISBN 0-926935-17-8. Price: $5

JOHN BYRUM

Conflatio

Introduction by Bob Grumman

A visual poetry sequence about the branching of trees, blood vessels, axons,
language, thought itself….26 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 14 February 1991. ISBN 0-926935-40-2. Price: $5

Text Blocks

Appropriated texts combined with notes to
create a lyrosophical text that ends with the word “yond”52 pages,
5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 24 April 1995. ISBN
0-57141-004-X. Price: $8

Text Blocks, Drawn

Abstract-expressionist
verbo-visual companion to Byrum’s Text Blocks24 pages, 5.5″ by
4.25″.   Publication Date: 24 April 1995. ISBN 0-57141-010-4.
Price: $8

ARTHUR BULL

25 Scores

Zen-like meditation pieces concerned with
listening25 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date: 21
December 1994. ISBN 0-57141-006-6. Price: $5

JOEL CHACE

O-D-E

Images, thoughts, sentences, phrases, words
broken up, repeated with new matter in ever-slightly-varying combinations
which are scatteredly dreamed into “a floating world” that is all music,
design and lyrical connotativeness63 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 30 December 2000. ISBN 1-57141-055-4. Price: $5

DORU CHIRODEA

Alethea Raped

Introduction by Neil S. Kvern,
Illustrations by Giulia OretttiJaunty, often satirical
surrealistic poems about things like “squeaky lobsters” and “caouchouc
wethers.”31 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.   Publication Date: 8
December 1989. ISBN 0-926935-36-4. Price: $5

Of Metascrotum and Infradeaths

Introduction by John M. Bennett, Illustrations by Giulia
OretttiSquirming dark poems in a brilliant dark surdiction36
pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.   Publication Date: 20 December 1990. ISBN
0-926935-41-0. Price: $5

nonathambia

Rawly visceral idiolinguistic
poetry26 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.   Publication Date: 20 June
1995. ISBN 0-57141-014-7. Price: $5

DAVE CHIROT

Anar Key Ology

Alley-raw graffiti-influenced visual
poems blowtching sunward21 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.  
Publication Date: 24 October 1999. ISBN 1-57141-015-1. Price: $5

COBBING, GARNIER, and others

Light

One visual poem each by five poets from the US,
England, Italy, Japan and France14 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 23 July 1994. ISBN 0-57141-002-3. Price: $5

PAUL COLLIER

Petril Wava

Microherent poems suggestive of
mistranslated troubadour songs26 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.  
Publication Date: 2 July 1993. ISBN 0-926935-79-8. Price: $8

EDMUND CONTI

Eddies

Visual, infra-verbal and conventional light
verse33 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date: 17 March
1994. ISBN 0-57141-000-7. Price: $5

The Ed C. Scrolls

Light verse on the Scriptures and
related matters43 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date:
28 June 1995. ISBN 0-57141-011-2. Price: $5

JEAN-JACQUES CORY

Exhaustive Combinations

A permutation poem using just
five words over and over to say, eventually, rich things about
POSSIBILITY26 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 12
June 1996. ISBN 1-57141-022-8. Price: $8

JWCURRY

Re:Views:Re:Sponses:

Technically wide-ranging visual
poems which review other technically wide-ranging visual poems42 pages
(including one in full color), 8.5″ by 11″.   Publication Date:
16 February 1991. ISBN 0-926935-49-6. Price: $15

JWCURRY and STEVEN SMITH

Between

Illustrated by jwcurry and Bob
GrummanA poem that dislocationally follows the moon jouncingly far
beyond the conventions of June30 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 11 March 1989. ISBN 0-926935-12-7. Price: $5

BILL DIMICHELE

Capacity X

Introduction by Laurie SchneiderA
combination of non-representational line-drawings and dislocational poems
inspired by the multifarious meanings of X38 pages, 5.5″ by
4.25″.   Publication Date: 13 August 1988. ISBN 0-926935-08-9.
Price: $5

Heart on the RightAn almost incoherently
wide-ranging series of textual poems of the language-poetry school that
careen through cyanide darknesses but end “in loyalties only to the DNA of
imagination”33 pages, 8.5″ by 11″.   Publication Date: 11
September 1992. ISBN 0-926935-71-2. Price: $10

JOHN DOLIS

Bl( )nk SpaceHighly literate use of parenthesis-marks
and absences (e.g., ) to poetize personally and/or intellectually-charged
life-experiences58 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date:
6 December 1993. ISBN 0-926935-92-5. Price: $8

Time Flies: ButterfliesCerebral, often subtly funny
excursions through variously meaningful nullities35 pages, 5.5″ by
8.5″.   Publication Date: 15 October 1999 ISBN 1-57141-049-X.
Price $8

LLOYD DUNN

Inbetweening

Introduction by F. John Herbert

A multi-paged visual poem dealing with letters and the history of the animated cartoon

56 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  

Publication Date: 29 July 1989. ISBN 0-926935-22-4. Price: $5

CLIFF DWELLER

This Candescent World

Introduction by John Grey

Purely textual collages composed of found headlines that become highly lyrical, and readable, verse

32 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.  

Publication Date: 21 August 1993. ISBN 0-926935-87-9.
Price: $8

JOHN ELSBERG

Broken Poems for Evita

Fissional poems

25 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 24 August 1997.

ISBN 1-57141-041-4. Price: $8

Family Values

Wry visual and infra-verbal poems, the former generally consisting of repeated lines that form a rectangular design, the latter of subtly fragmented words

36 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.  

Publication Date: 31 December 1996. ISBN 1-57141-029-5. Price: $8

ENDWAR

Out of Words

subtle infraverbal poetry4.5″ by 5.5″.

Publication Date: 21 December 2003.ISBN 1-57141-063-5. Price: $5

HARRY D. ESHLEMAN

The Colors in the Sky

Ortholexical verse whose subject-matter ranges from a side-show strongman to blackbirds to the art of poetry to Florida to the colors in the sky.

24 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.  

Publication Date: 21 August 1993. ISBN 0-926935-86-0. Price: $8

GREG EVASON

NothingA series of typed/ mistyped/ overtyped/
scrawltyped visual poems counter-conscoiusing the normal mind60 pages,
8.5″ by 11″.   Publication Date: 30 July 1991. ISBN
0-926935-53-4. Price: $10

3 WindowsIntroduction by Nicholas Power,
Cover by Daniel f. BradleyA collection of dislocational poems
darkening out of contemporary urban living48 pages, 5.5″ by
4.25″.   Publication Date: 5 June 1988. ISBN 0-926935-04-6.
Price: $5

ARNOLD FALLEDER

The God-Shed

Introduction by Gerald BurnsLyrical poems that are exclusively verbal but so distinctively both knownstream and otherstream as to seem almost to occur in two sensory modalities at once

39 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 26 June 1991. ISBN 0-926935-50-X. Price: $5

Midrash for Macbeth

Introduction by David Castleman, Illustrated by Gerald Burns

More by the author of The God-Shed of whom Gerald Burns wrote, “Reading Falleder is like looking for the halo of oil–the ooze– given off by sentimentality, self-indulgence–that you know is there–and not finding it. The reader is tizzied. Arnold doesn’t know (you say) what he’s doing. How could he, and break so many rules? It’s like Kit Smart at a dinner party falling on his
knees and inviting everyone to pray, or a man really proud of his daughter at her Commencement.”

59 pages, 8.5″ by 5.5″.  
Publication Date: 5 July 2000. ISBN 1-57141-053-8. Price: $10

HENRY G. FISCHER

This Word

Perhaps the world’s only collection of visual
poems that rhyme54 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.   Publication Date:
18 November 1992. ISBN 0-926935-72-0. Price: $5

NANCY FRYE

Once Water

Quietly forceful free verse about relationships, crickets, womanhood, minnows, death . . . but above all about the divers forms of water

45 pages, 5.5″ by 8″.  
Publication Date: 20 August 1992. ISBN 0-926935-61-5. Price: $8

PETER GANICK

Logical Geometries Language poems about tendons and “the
consequence of dimensions”

26 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.  
Publication Date: 21 August 1993. ISBN 0-926935-83-6. Price: $8

SilenceMinimalist poetry contrasting numeric
sequence with chains of disconected words16 pages, 5.5″ by
8.5″.   Publication Date: 1 April 1996. ISBN 1-57141-019-8.
Price: $8

PETER GANICK & SHEILA E. MURPHY

-ocracyPart of an ongoing collaboration that begins
here with Section 5: “dust/ priestesses the/ floor of/ putty-mouthed
silencers…. densest comparisons…./ your face// treasured cages/
surgically remove/ from their inhabitants/ the credo/ “trust the
process”// one relates coned by color/ team-drift….wiser than…./
openers’ fitness roles”: language-jift at its most mubile.29 pages,
5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication Date: 13 September 1997. ISBN 1-57141-050-3.
Price: $8

PIERRE GARNIER

The Words Are The World

Simple line drawings with simple
captions whose “incorrectness” jars all kinds of poetry loose–as when
“three” captions a numeral one, a numeral two, and a straight line39
pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication Date: 31 December 1996. ISBN:
1-57141-028-7. Price: $8

DAVID GIANATASIO

Bend Backward for Better ReceptionShort textual poems
with quiet but compelling addle, as in the following, which is quoted in
full: “trees, like postage stamps”30 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication
Date: 21 August 1992. ISBN 0-926935-69-0. Price: $5

LEROY GORMAN

Heavyn

Miniature fissional haiku: e.g., “fencepo st air
to snow”34 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 19 August 1992.
ISBN 0-926935-74-7. Price: $5

BOB GRUMMAN

An April Poem

A multi-paged visual poem about rain and forsythia16 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 13 April 1989. ISBN 0-926935-16-X. Price: $5

Doing Long Division in Color

special limited edition, partly hand-made;collection of mathematical poems in color.

8.5″ by 11″. Publication Date: 17 November 2001.

ISBN 1-57141-056-2. Price: $500

From Haiku To Lyriku

A participant’s Impressions of a Portion of Post-2000 North American Kernular Poetry. Acknowledged by No Academics Whatever As Worth Reading. Over Four Copies Sold in 2008 Alone.

$20 ppd (with tax included in price) 255 pages, softbound

The Runaway Spoon Press Catalogue

Of Manywhere-at-Once: Ruminations from the Site of a Poem’s Construction

(3rd, revised edition)

Part memoir, part journal of a sonnet’s construction, part discussion of poetics that begins with
the practice of Shakespeare and Keats, moves to that Yeats, Pound, Stevens and Roethke, and ends with that of contemporary visual, alphconceptual and dislocational poets such as Karl Krempton, John M. Bennett and Bob Grenier

190 pages, plus glossary and bibliography; 5.5″ by 8.5″.
Publication Date: 20 December 1998. ISBN 1-57141-045-7. Price: $15

Poemns

a re-publication of the 1966 edition of the author’s first published visual poems: two or three dozen haiku strongly influenced by E. E. Cummings

34 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.  
Publication Date: 24 August 1997. ISBN 1-57141-036-8. Price: $5

SpringPoem No. 3,719,242

A 12-page-long 6-letter one-word poem18 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.

Publication Date: 20 December 1990. ISBN 0-926935-39-9. Price: $5

A StrayngeBook

A wacko, anti-censorship, illustrated bunny-bear book for Very Smart kids and 11 adults whose names cannot be revealed at this time. Over a hundred copies sold in less than 20 years!

38 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 6 September 1987.
ISBN 0-926935-00-3. Price: $5 ppd.

An anthology of works from the Runaway Spoon Press and a catalog at the same time, within a comic
narrative34 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 13 February 1989.
ISBN 0-926935-13-5. Price: $5

S. GUSTAV HAGGLUND

Jaguar Newsprint

Almost entirely non-representational
visual poetry sequence14 pages, 5.5″ by 8″. Publication Date: 12 June
1996. ISBN 1-57141-021-X. Price: $8

JEFFERSON HANSEN

Red Streams of George Through Pages

A visual language-poetry narrative about “george a suicide become god.”18
pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication Date: 16 July 1993. ISBN 0-926935-84-4.
Price: $8

SCOTT HELMES

Non-Additive PostulationsOne of the very few collections of mathematical poems by one author in the world24 pages,

5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 29 December 2000.

ISBN 1-57141-054-6.  Price: $8

KEITH HIGGINBOTHAM

Carrying the Air on a Stick

Gnomic, usually
surrealistic, often funny “clipoems”31 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.
Publication Date: 28 June 1995. ISBN 0-57141-017-1. Price: $5

DICK HIGGINS

Scenes Forgotten & Otherwise Remembered49 pages,
5.5″ by 8.5″.   Publication Date: 28 June 1998. ISBN
1-57141–042-2. Price: $5

CRAG HILL

American Standard

Introduction by John Byrum

A collection of often-playful, always ingenious-hearted textual poems
concerned with the English language34 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.
Publication Date: 16 April 1989. ISBN 0-926935-15-1. Price: $5

The Week

A series of sometime epigrammatic, sometimes
poetic, always reflective sentences that playground the size of a
week55 pages, 8.5″ by 11″. Publication Date: 14 February 1992. ISBN
0-926935-59-3. Price: $10

CRAG HILL and BOB GRUMMAN, editors

Vispo auf Deutsch

Verbo-visual art from 17 Austrians
and Germans58 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 26 November
1995. ISBN 0-57141-018-X. Price: $10

VIRGINIA V. HLAVSA

Festillifes

Charming visual poems about Nancy Drew and
other aspects of growing up, but also about owls, kingfishers,
sycamores–and black holes21 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date:
19 August 1992. ISBN 0-926935-73-9. Price: $5

MIMI HOLMES

A Selection of SelvesTextual Accompaniment by Jake
BerryA multi-styled series of onter-related visual
self-portraits50 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 26 June 1991.
ISBN 0-926935-51-8. Price: $5

WHARTON HOOD

House of CardsIntroduction by Marshal Hryciuk,
Illustrations by Richard BelandA collection of dislocational
haiku concerned predominantly with the pre-dawn a.m. of modern life59
pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 17 April 1989. ISBN 0-926935-18-6.
Price: $5

MARSHALL HRYCIUK

The Galloping Syntaxi StrandsDown ‘n’ dirty sequence of
various mixtures of visual poetry, textual poetry, and collages that
ranges from recondite interactions with antiquity to the
super-ephemerality of stock-market reports and magazines ads69 pages,
8.5″ by 11″. Publication Date: 10 September 1992. ISBN 0-926935-77-1.
Price: $10

G. HUTH

Ampersand Squared

an anthology of pwoermds edited by G. HUTH who also provides an absorbing introduction to the genre.

5.5″ by 4.25″. perfect-bound. Publication Date: 20 April 2004.
ISBN 1-57141-065-1. Price: $10

Ghostlight

Introduction by Bob Grumman

Haiku-vivid lyrical visual poems

36 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 20 December 1990.
ISBN 0-926935-45-3. Price: $5

WreadingsIntroduction by Crag Hill
A collection of alphaconceptual poems, or: metaphorically illuminating
Joycean neologies60 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 27
November 1987. ISBN 0-926935-02-X. Price: $5

WreadingsIntroduction by Crag HillA
second edition with new poems of a collection of infra-verbal pwoermds
such as “throught”64 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 21 April
1995. ISBN 0-57141-007-2. Price: $5
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BILL KEITH

WingdomIntroductions by Pierre Garnier and
Bob GrummanVisual poems about both actual flight and art as a
form of flight–and about all that both kinds of flight allow us to
experience22 pages. ISBN 0-926935-91-7. Price: $8

KARL KEMPTON

Fission

Introduction by Bob GrummanA collection of
one-word alphaconceptual poems, or: one-word orthographic explorations of
the language.56 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 4
January 1988. ISBN 0-926935-01-1. Price: $5

Charged Particles

Voyages into the very letters of
words to get at the heart of nature, life, and the quest to free “ego” of
its “e”41 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 21 June
1991. ISBN 0-926935-52-6. Price: $8

A Pond of Stars

Introduction by Will Inman

A collection of lyricking textual poems dealing with nature, archaeology and
ecology (and, scorchingly at times, techno-industrial anti-ecology)52
pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 24 February 1989. ISBN
0-926935-11-9. Price: $5

Portrait of Texture

A series of visual illumages
investigating the alphabet and textuality20 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.
Publication Date: 15 October 1999. ISBN 1-57141-047-3. Price: $8

Rose WindowA visual illumagery sequence featuring
the alphabet as a series of rose windows30 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.
Publication Date: 15 October 1999. ISBN 1-57141-048-1. Price: $8

The Voices of Aden

Deeply ethical reflections
transmuted to lyrical verse20 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 2 July 1993. ISBN 0-926935-85-2. Price: $8

Rune 6: Figures of Speech

Typoglifs semi-representationally schematizing such archetypes as the priest, the
scribe and dancers at the highest visio-lyrical level

27 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 6 December 1993. ISBN 0-926935-89-5. Price: $8

Rune 7: Poem, a Mapping

A masterful collection of typoglific investigations of the poem as toy, as rapture, as magic, as cosmos

30 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 6 December 1993. ISBN 0-926935-90-9. Price: $8

3 Cubed: Mathematical Poems, 1976 – 2003

One of the world’s very few books devoted entirely to mathematical and math-related
poetry by one author.

5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication Date: 3 March 2003 (03/03/03).
ISBN 1-57141-061-9. Price: $8

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U.S. Mailing Address $8.00Overseas $11.00You Like Me $6,000.00

M. KETTNER

Full Penny Jar

Introduction by Noemie Maxwell &amp; Nico Vassilakis

Haiku of ordinary objects wrenched into new resonances with each other

52 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; publication Date: 8 December 1989.

ISBN 0-926935-35-6. Price: $5

DAVID KOPASKA-MERKEL

Underfoot Introduction by G. Huth, Illustrations
by Sheila Kopaska-MerkelA collection of mostly ortholexical
verse whose subject matter is sometimes gothic, sometimes sci fi, but
which ranges everywhere44 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 15 February 1992. ISBN 0-926935-60-7. Price: $5

MARTON KOPPANY

To Be Or To Be

Subtle conceptual poems like the
title-poem, which investigates various ways of considering being and
nothingness45 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 31
December 1996. ISBN 1-57141-026-0. Price: $5

RICHARD KOSTELANETZ

Fields/Pitches/Turfs/Arenas

Introduction by Harry Polkinhorn

A collection of minimalistic but richly sense-turning visual poems

36 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 13 February 1991.

ISBN 0-926935-48-8. Price: $5

Fulcra

pwoermds each of which breaks into two
resonatinginner words such as “dozen.”2.75″ by 4.25″.
Publication Date: 18 July 2005.ISBN 1-57141-070-8. Price: $5

MoRepartitions

Minimalist word-play poems28
pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 17 March 1994.ISBN
0-926935-97-6. Price: $5

Poetry I Shall Not Make

a highly witty list of kinds
of poems the author wouldnot make such as ones “about sexism or
nuclear war orunpopular politicians”–a definite classic4.25″ by
5.5″. Publication Date: 22 December 2003.ISBN 1-57141-064-3. Price:
$5

Repartitions IV

Single words broken into
grag/ragm/gmen/ents of fascinatingly poetic resonance20 pages, 4.25″
by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 12 February 1992. ISBN
0-926935-67-4. Price: $5

JIM LEFTWICH

Khwatir

A long idiolinguistic multi-meaning prose
text43 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 28 June
1995. ISBN 0-57141-016-3. Price: $5

JONATHAN LEVANT

Five Days Shy of February

Levant, loose just shy of total linguistic irresponsibility in family matters, and breaking huge
chunks of poetry off them

30 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 24 August 1997. ISBN 1-57141-040-6. Price: $8

Oedipus the Anti-Aociopath (or Autumn
Angst)

Introductions by Pat Ronald, Carmen Wooster (who
is misrepresented as “Carmen Webster”), Martin Arbagi, Carol Gunther,
Judith Kitchen, Richard Rosen, Quentin R. Howard, John Horner and
James Brooks10 poems, 9 introductions24 pages, 5.5″ by
8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 15 February 1992. ISBN 0-926935-62-3.
Price: $8

NANCY LEVANT

Generations of Sara

A short story about a daughter with poems about a love affair20 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 23 May 1995. ISBN 0-57141-012-0. Price: $8

DAMIAN LOPES

Transentence

Acute observations of the everyday in
slightly gnomic but accessible verse28 pages, 5.5″ by
4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 21 December 1994. ISBN 0-57141-005-8.
Price: $5

Unclear Family

A visual poetry sequence about the
breakup of a family24 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication
Date: 15 February 1992. ISBN 0-926935-65-8. Price: $5
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CARLOS LUIS

Tell This Muchbrilliant pluraesthetic collagical
collaborations in full color with WENDY SORIN5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication
Date: 18 July 2005.ISBN 1-57141-071-6. Price: $30OUT OF
PRINT–BUT EVENTUALLY A SECOND PRINTING IS PLANNED

STEPHEN-PAUL MARTIN

ADVANCINGreceding

Introduction by Lloyd Dunn

a multi-paged visual poem dealing with the many varieties of two-dimensional
space44 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 21 July
1989. ISBN 0-926935-21-6. Price: $8

The Flood

Introductions by Harry Polkinhorn and Richard Royal

A hilarious conflux of Noah and Reagan in visual poetry of the highest ingenuity and originality

88 pages, 8.5″ by 11″.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Publication Date: 9 September 1992. ISBN 0-926935-70-4. Price: $10

Until It Changes

Introduction by Eve Ensler

An absurdist stream-of-consciousness visual poetry narrative
which eschews grammatical progression for a kind of stacking and
unstacking48 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 12
August 1988. ISBN 0-926935-07-0. Price: $5

JOHN MARTONE

far human character

Fingerprints coalescing with hurricanes and other inter-schematizations of textual and visual imagery
that subtly map into the vagaries of the human psychology16 pages,
4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 27 June 1991. ISBN
0-926935-56-9. Price: $5

primerA collection of short haiku-like poems mostly
about eay-to-day family life58 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 22 December 1994. ISBN 0-57141-008-2. Price: $8

Trousseau

Introduction by Larry Eigner

Delicate but fully-charged visual poems of childhood,
Judaism and medieval times40 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 17 February 1991. ISBN 0-926935-46-1. Price: $5

James McGinness
The Grass PoemsIllustrated by Wes
DisneyShort lyrical poems in equal partnership with Franz Kline
Grass jutting into all sorts of human shapes47 pages, 4.25″ by
5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 14 May 1997. ISBN 1-57141-035-X.
Price: $8

MICHAEL MELCHER

Parallel to the Shore

Meditative lyrical poems

19 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 15 February 1992.

ISBN 0-926935-68-2. Price: $8

DAVID MILLER

Commentaries (II)

Cutting-edge visual poetry sequence specializing in over-printing and the lyrical smear.

10 pages, 11″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 25 March 2000. ISBN 1-57141-052-X.
Price: $8

GUSTAVE MORIN

Rusted Childhood Memoirs

Visual poems accurately described by their title17 pages, 8.5″ by 11″.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Publication Date: 17 March 1994. ISBN 0-926935-96-8. Price: $10

JACK MOSKOVITZ

Artist as Autist

Introduction by Crag Hill

Arrestingly primitive black cut-outs and dislocational poems which combine in a powerful vision of psychological alienation

59 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 16 April 1989.

ISBN 0-926935-14-3. Price: $5

Isis SlicesDisjunctional poems about the darknesses
in affairs of the heart–with collages by the author31 pages, 5.5″ by
4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 15 February 1992. ISBN 0-926935-66-6.
Price: $5

SHEILA E. MURPHY &amp; PETER GANICK

-ocracy Part of an ongoing collaboration that begins
here with Section 5: “dust/ priestesses the/ floor of/ putty-mouthed
silencers…. densest comparisons…./ your face// treasured cages/
surgically remove/ from their inhabitants/ the credo/ “trust the
process”// one relates coned by color/ team-drift….wiser than…./
openers’ fitness roles”: language-jift at its most mubile.29 pages,
8.5″ by 5.5″. Publication Date: 13 September 1997. ISBN 1-57141-050-3.
Price: $8

JUDY MURRAY

The Soft Sighs of IfWarm-hearted but odd-eyed lyric
poems of “lemon flies,” “marshmallow moths,” and “playing if with no
cards”24 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 22 August
1992. ISBN 0-926935-75-5. Price: $5

OBERC

DemonsRaw plaintext poems of barroom/bathroom/bedroom
and parallel rooms of the mind by one of Bukowski’s most talented
followers12 pages, 8.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 31
December 1996. ISBN 1-57141-027-9. Price: $5

CLEMENTE PADIN

Poems To Eyevisual poems, many of them chargedly
political5.5″ by 4.25″. Publication Date: 12 May 2002.ISBN
1-57141-058-9. Price: $8

MARK PETERS

Falling DownLanguage poems nonetheless achieving
poignancy without sentimentality out of experiences with slow
learners27 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 24
August 1997. ISBN 1-57141-038-4. Price: $8

HARRY POLKINHORN

Summary Dissolution

Introduction by Dick HigginsA collage sequence combining a dislocational textual
narrative with visual imagery from music, anatomy, philately and similarly
wide-ranging and seemingly discompanionable subjects.

58 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 10 August 1988.

ISBN 0-926935-06-2. Price: $5

Teraphim

Visual poems by a leading burstnom poet/critic

60 pages, 8.5″ by 11″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 26 November 1995.

ISBN 0-926935-98-4. Price: $10

BERN PORTER

NeverendsIntroduction by Erika PfanderA
collage sequence whose subject is existence, from lightning through shoe
advertisements to flowers in bloom50 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 16 April 1988. ISBN 0-926935-03-8. Price: $5

NumbersIntroduction by Erika PfanderA
waggish collage sequence concerned with the varied ways numbers take part
in everyday life52 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date:
29 July 1989. ISBN 0-926935-20-8. Price: $5

Signs

Introduction by Erika PfanderThe final
volume of Porter’s four-volume investigation of human communication46
pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 31 December 1996. ISBN
1-57141-025-2. Price: $5

SymbolsSimple-seeming but eye-opening collages by
the master42 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 28
June 1995. ISBN 0-57141-015-5. Price: $5

BERN PORTER and MALOK

VocrascendsA satirical/lyrical high-art/crude collage
sequence by two legends of the mail art scene32 pages, 4.25″ by
5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 12 February 1991. ISBN 0-926935-42-9.
Price: $5

BETTY RADIN
Dreamdance
Visual poetry sequence graphically and textually making knowable
secrets of the ballet. . . .15 pages, 8.5″ by 11″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 13 September 1997. ISBN 1-57141-031-7. Price: $10

Hot Taters &amp; RazzmatazzVisual poetry sequence
sputtering with colloquialisms out of Victorian England10 pages, 8.5″
by 11″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 13 September 1997. ISBN
1-57141-032-5. Price: $10

ARNE RAUENBERG

dislimitationVisual poetry from Germany30 pages,
5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 24 April 1995. ISBN
0-57141-009-0. Price: $8

GLENN RUSSELL

The Plantings

Introduction by Greg BoydA
collection of short, montage-illustrated surrealistic fables concerned
mainly with metamorphoses47 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 5 December 1989. ISBN 0-926935-34-8. Price: $5

GREGORY VINCENT ST. THOMASINO

IgneMicroherent songs of literature, philosophy and
life20 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 24 August
1993. ISBN 0-926935-88-7. Price: $5

JACK SAUNDERS

The Husband of the Writer’s WifePlaintext poems in
tone and manner resembling Bukowski but with a plaintive belligerance
against all Literary Establishments unique to Jack–albeit with solidly
authentic and moving glimpses of his family32 pages, 5.5″ by
8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 13 May 1997. ISBN 1-57141-040-6.
Price: $8

STACEY SOLLFREY

Turning Sights in a Circular DrivewayIntroduction by
John M. Bennett, Illustrations by Louis Steven
AllamBreeze-fresh dislocational poems concerned with the everyday
world of ice-skating, tv, laundromats. . . .32 pages, 5.5″ by
4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 9 December 1989. ISBN 0-926935-24-0.
Price: $5

WENDY SORIN

Abzu

collages about Abzu with poems by MICHAEL
BASINSKI8.5″ by 11″. Publication Date: 3 June 2003.ISBN
1-57141-060-0. Price: $10

Tell This Much

brilliant pluraesthetic collagical
collaborations in full color with CARLOS LUIS5.5″ by 8.5″. Publication
Date: 18 July 2005.ISBN 1-57141-071-6. Price: $20

FICUS STRANGULENSIS

Transmorfations

A collection of poems each of which
consists of a word or phrase that is visually altered, step by step, until
it becomes a new word or phrase–with poetic ties to the original word or
phrase37 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 31
December 1996. ISBN 1-57141-024-4. Price: $8

DAVID STARKEY

A Year With Gayle, And Others

A disjointed narrative
about Gayle and others in sometimes aphoristic, sometimes lyric, sometimes
who-knows-what lines, one for each day of the year27 pages, 5.5″ by
8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 2 July 1993. ISBN 0-926935-78-X.
Price: $8

LARRY TOMOYASU

Mockingbird/Litmus

Weird but resonant (and frequently
funny) juxtapositionings of visual images and mundane but unexpected
texts32 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 20
December 1990. ISBN 0-926935-47-X. Price: $5

ANDREW TOPEL

Pain Tings

cutting edge visual poems

5.5″ by 8.5″.

Publication Date: 19 June 2004.ISBN 1-57141-067-8. Price: $8

NICO VASSILAKIS

Artaud What

An aburdist collage sequence17 pages,
5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 17 March 1994. ISBN
0-926935-93-3. Price: $5

DornobberIntroduction by M. Kettner,
Calligraphic Illustrations by John M. Bennett,&gt; Translations
into Greek by Helen and Mary BournasA wild short surrealistic
poem about dirt, pigeons, mothlight and . . . dornobbery33 pages, 5.5″
by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 9 December 1989. ISBN
0-926935-37-2. Price: $5

Stampologue

a sequence of blocks of truncated texts
that tell several intriguingly indistinct stories simulataneously5.5″
by 4.25″. Publication Date: 17 July 2005.ISBN 1-57141-069-4. Price: $5

JOHN VIEIRA

Points on a Hazard Map

Lyric poetry at times visual,
at times infra-verbal, about “ignorance whitened” and much else.32
pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 15 October 1999. ISBN
1-57141-046-5. Price: $8

Reality Slices

A collection of textual and visual
poetry34 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 1 April
1996. ISBN 1-57141-020-1. Price: $8

Self-Portrait with Demons

Mixture of visual and
textual poems50 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 14
May 1997. ISBN 1-57141-033-3. Price: $8

DAN WABER
cheer
$5 ppd from The Runaway Spoon Press,
Box 495597, Port Charlotte FL 33949.
ISBN 978-1-57141-073-3<br>

Sample Poems:

excla!m

1. l
2. i
3. s
4. t

DIANE WALD

Double MirrorJump-cut poems, their lines in
alphabetical order, their subject a human relationship37 pages, 5.5″
by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 9 April 1996. ISBN 1-57141-023-6.
Price: $8

PAUL WEINMAN

Photo Script

Introduction by Mike Gunderloy,
Illustrations by Walt PhillipsSatirical poems of social comment
starring the famed White Boy52 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 20 December 1990. ISBN 0-926935-43-7. Price: $5

IRVING WEISS

Number PoemsVisual poems and list poems about
numbers70 pages, 5.5″ by 8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 22 August
1997. ISBN 1-57141-037-6. Price: $10

Visual VoicesVisual poetry variations on poems
written before 1900, with commentary145 pages, 8.5″ by
11″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 24 October 1994. ISBN 0-926935-95-X.
Price: $20

For more information regarding this title, go to <A
href=”http://www.irvingweiss.com/visual.html”>Visual
Voices</A>.

SIMON WICKHAM-SMITH

FewVisual and language poetry31 pages, 5.5″ by
8.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 17 March 1994. ISBN 0-926935-99-2.
Price: $8

TOM WILOCH

Decoded Factories of the Heart

A collection of
surrealistic haiku with collages52 pages, 4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Publication Date: 23 March 1995. ISBN 0-57141-003-1. Price: $5

Neon Trance

Yet more often macabre, always
surrealistically-resonant haiku from the master of the genre30 pages,
4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 14 May 1997. ISBN
1-57141-034-1. Price: $5

Night Rain

Introduction by Robert
FrazierElegantly dislocational haiku interwoven with grandly
surrealizing collages53 pages, 5.5″ by 4.25″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication
Date: 26 June 1991. ISBN 0-926935-55-0. Price: $5

CHRIS WINKLER

Viscosity InductionIntroduction by Jake
BerryBawdy absurdist non-narrative collage sequence26 pages,
4.25″ by 5.5″.&nbsp;&nbsp; Publication Date: 22 February 1989. ISBN
0-926935-10-0. Price: $5

Copyright © Runaway Spoon Press 1997, 2009

.

Shakespeare & the Rigidniks
by
Bob Grumman

a study of cerebral dysfunction

8 March 2013.  On the spur of the moment, I’ve decided to put the entire text of my book, Shakespeare & the Rigidniks here, one chapter at a time (revising it as I go along).  I hope also to put comments here as I download the thing, and afterwards.  I hope those of you reading it will comment on it, especially those of you taking issue with anything in it.  You can, of course, copy parts or all of it.

You can also send me money! My address is 1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952. I’m currently on food stamps, never in my life earned more than my present income from social security or around six hundred dollars a month, and am barely making it.

As of the end of 2013 I had not gotten my chapters concerning the rigidnikry of the leading authorship skeptics in good enough shape to present them here–they only explain why seemingly intelligent people can refuse to accept Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to him five times better than James Shapiro does in his book on the subject, so–obviously–they need work. What’s here is the first truly full-scale demolition of the case against Shakespeare, and still by far the best.

 

 

PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

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EXPERIODDICA

September/October 2014

Richard Kostelanetz’s Latest Infra-Verbal Adventure

Ouroboros
Richard Kostelanetz
NYQ Books, Box 2015, Old Chelsea Station,
New York NY 10113. $16.95. 2014. Pa; 188 pp.

An ouroboros is a mythological serpent swallowing its tail, so an excellent title for Richard Kostelanetz’s collection of 188 words swallowing their tails, most of the time adding at least one interesting word to what they’re saying, as “ouroboros” itself does on the cover (when its s joins its “our”).  Those that do not use their first letter as their last to finish a word: “extrapolat,” for example, has only one e but spells “extrapolate” when made into a circle.  It’s fun to find smaller words inside them in Kostelanetz’s collection: “tea” and “eat,” for example, in “appetite,” which not knowing at first where the word begins forces one to discover rather than automatically read without thinking about it.  But can such objects be considered poems—rather than “curiosities?”  To use the term my Internet friend Chris Lott thought might be more appropriate for works like them than “poems”–and which turned out to be a term I’ve needed for my over-all taxonomy of verbal expression for a long time but never thought of!

The term seems right for some of Kostelanetz’s words, but only some of them–like “ouroboros.”  The addition to it of “sour” is amusing but, for me, not poetically enlarging enough to be a poem rather than a verbal curiosity—which I now define for use in my Official Taxonomy of Verbal Expression as “a text that states an amusing or interesting fact.”  That makes it (write this down!) “informrature” (i.e., texts primarily intended to inform) rather than one of the other two kinds of verbal expression in my taxonomy, “advocature” (i.e., texts whose primary intent is to persuade, or verbal propaganda) and “literature” (i.e., verbal art, or texts intended primarily to give aesthetic pleasure).  In effect, “ouroboros” as a circular word that “disconceals” the word “sour” states the fact that its letters can be used to spell “sour” following a certain rule, that being to connect the word’s end to its beginning by means of a circular spelling.

Not that such a word doesn’t veer near poetry (which can be succinctly if roughly defined as not-prose) due to its visual difference from conventional prose, its making a reader go slow (a major aim of poetry) and delivering more connotations than prose generally does.  But, for me, it is visually-enhanced the way calligraphy is, and infraverbally-enhanced the way “ouroboros” spelled “ouROBoros” to reveal one of its inner words, would be.  Yes, it looks good on the page, and makes us think about it more than it would conventionally printed, but it leaves us primarily with only the fact that “sour” can be produced by it (and “our” and “rob” are in it.

Take on the other hand, “appetite,” which swallows its tail to deliver not only “tea,” and “eat” but leads us into and around to “pet” and “petite” to go along with “appetite” itself, to present a little tea party, with a strong suggestion of little girls.  Then put “incandescent” swallowing its tail on the page opposite it to form “tin” while making us also aware of its “descent” and “scent”—due to its compelling us to read it letter by letter.  “Scent” is particularly significant because of the metaphoric jolt of the3 suggestion of something incandescent as a material scent, or of a scent as something immaterially incandescent.  The contrast of “tin” notwithstanding, the result is a fascinating scene occurring somewhere down Alice’s rabbit hole which, for me, makes the word a poem.

At this point I must contradict myself.  I now believe all of Richard’s circular words are poems.  I say this because I now feel that they do enlarge a reader’s experience of them significantly more than prose does, although some, like “ouroboros” do so to much less of an extent than others.  More importantly, this collection as a whole, I’ve come to perceive, is a single poem, whose ssspinning wheelsss free connotations whose interaction with each other disconceal sometimes fairly complex image complexes—as I’ve shown “appetite” and “incandescent” do.  The result is a loose collection of themes and counter-themes, occasionally next to each other, as with “appetite” and “incandescent,” but sometimes far apart—like “state, which amusingly becomes “estate,” where the tea party will take place, many pages from “incandescent.”

Kostelanetz’s sequence begins with “insurgent,” and as we go along, the presence of an insurgent, mainly, it comes to seem to me, a language insurgent miswriting words into circular revolts against monosemy establishes one of the sequence’s major themes (with the little girls’ tea party in feminine contrast to it).  For example, “Esperanto,” representing a language in revolt against the Tower of Babylon our world has become, supports this “linguicentric” reading.  Its disconcealment of “rant” backs up the tone of insurgence (in spite of “toes”—although that suggests “toe to toe,” for one really caught up with the sequence).  On the page facing “esperanto” we have “astonish,” which is indicative, I think, of what artistic insurgence’s aim in this story will turn out to be.  That the font Kostelanetz has chosen for his words, the highly dramatic “Wide Latin,” which is jabbingly pointed at all extremities, underscores this.

The book’s fourth word underscores this: “another,” or something other than.  But then the narrative runs into “hesitant,” which contains “Sita,” the name of the central female character, a sort of Virgin Mary, in the Hindu epic, Ramayana, and the narrative goes strange among “the,” “he” “sit”, “it,” “tan,” “an,” “ant.”  After the turn caused by “hesitant,” comes “entomb,” with its “bent” against something.  By the “men” of the later “enthusiasm?” The first peak of this insurgent flow is reached with “outlawing,” which causes “gout,” making the act of outlawing things unhealthy, and the insurgence begins to have the feel of anarchism.
I agree with you if you’re thinking one must have quite an accommodating mind to make the kind of connections I’ve so far made—but a main function of poetry is to relax one into doing just that.  I have to admit a lot of my interpretations are influenced by my knowledge of Kostelanetz as a long-time personal friend consumed (like me) with innovative insurgency in the arts and anarchistic distaste for political laws.

To get back to his sequence, it’s no surprise that “esoteric” forms the next spinning wheel with its esoteric lawless confusion of “ice,” “rice,” “sot.”  Some kind of drunken wedding?  Where are we going?  The point is that we are going somewhere, or more than one where.  And word-lovers who join us will be sure to enjoy the trip!

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