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The British-American Panatomist Movement

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2013

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The New Arcana.  John Amen an Daniel Y. Harris.
2012; 115 pp. Pa; NYQ Books, Box 2015, Old Chelsea Station, New York NY10013. $14.95.
www.nyqbooks.org

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The New Arcana is a fascinating book, a kind of scrapbook of the literary cutting edge scene that has existed in the West for the past fifty years, with a partial inclusion of the Dadaists and the like from earlier times that is alarmingly accurate although completely hallucinated by its two authors, John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, whose photographs and bios at the end of the book position them firmly near the center of the post-art, meta-art, and inter-psychometastatic aesthetics their book is about.

I would place William S. Burroughs at the origin of what The New Arcana deals with.  Many of its forty or more characters seem modeled in one way or another on him–on his connection to drugs and violence (he accidentally fatally shot his second wife, I think while under the influence of drugs but am not sure) and seeming craziness as an artist, to be exact).  Take Jughead Jones and Sadie Shorthand, the book’s first two super-avant-garde super-geniuses.  Jughead (appearing without Archie but elsewhere the same comicbook hero he was for me well over fifty years ago) is quoted as saying, “Dad, what you call your life is just an epistemological construct,” on his tenth birthday.  As for Sadie, she is quoted a great deal, as when, during her school trip to France when she was sixteen, she commented, “Mathematics is a thousand ladders to nowhere./ Theology is a newborn sibyl cooing in the darkness.”  Daft, but . . . poeticophilosophically somewhere valuable, say I.  Her quote for her senior yearbook is, “To be God—now that’s a strange karma.” Elsewhere she wrote, “And is an illusion.”  Both die young, Jughead possibly having killed Sadie, for his trial is mentioned.  Little is for sure in this book, however.

Almost all of the book is very funny (always dead-panned) parody of impossibly intellectual artists and thinkers like Jughead and Sadie; and Enrico the Insouciant; Constance Carbuncle, who “before her first lobal earthquake,” was “dubbed a galactic prodigy, blessed with  four-dimensional visions, a truly acrobatic intellect, amygdalae pulsing with the electricity of a two hundred and eighteen point intelligence quotient,” whose competency hearing is the main subject of the book’s second section; Freddie Brill of Sir Adrian the Fob-Murderer; Klaus Krystog di Moliva (1874 – 1936), a forerunner of “Panatomism,” the main art movement chronicled in The New Arcana; Amanda O’Brien, who may be the sole semi-sane character in the book; Sir Walter Springs-Earwing III (an excerpt from whose Commencement Address, Harvard Divinity School, is quoted; and the murderer Banders Griffin, a photograph of whose four- or five-year-old smiling son holding a little American flag on 4 July 1992 is shown.  Many of these are more than just names.  Just about all of them are as nuts in similar ways as Burroughs but persons in their own rite (pun intended).  All kinds of violence happen to them, too.

The book is full of deftly-chosen exactly-right inappropriate illustrations, many in color. One, for instance, is of the sculpted head of a famous Roman emperor whose name I can’t remember—in the middle of a text about “contingent or concomitant psychic structures . . . as readily observed as is the concentric relation of a quark and an atom”—which the emperor may be gazing at.

Which reminds me to say that the collage by Mary Powers, “The New Arcana,” which extends from the back cover across the spine and over the front cover is wonderful as a stand-alone, but also a wonderfully full impression of the contents of The New Arcana.  I feel I could easily devote this entire review to it in such a way as to do justice to both the collage and the book.

The non sequitur is the literary device of choice in The New Arcana (as it has been in most literary academics’ idea of innovative poetry for the past forty years or more).  Here, for example are three sentences from a play featured in Section Two: “Bless the 1990s, my ancestors raised on Ecclesiastes and the hickory switch.” “Oh boy, kitsch, daiquiris, margueritas, beef jerky.” And “Who shall actually insist on the immutability of physics when his wax wings fail?”

I mentioned Amanda O’Brien earlier.  An excerpt from her essay on “The American Panatomists” is given two-and-a-half pages at the end of Section Three, 7/9ths of the way through the book.  The essay sounds to me almost Coleridgean, perhaps only because at least an order of magnitude less loony than most everything else in The New Arcana.  It does seem somewhat of a satire on the over-analyticality of too many academic critics, but it also makes sense (to me)—as when it says that “paradox and balance” are “the primary muses” of the American Panatomists (which you can take as the recent American avant garde).  “The Surrealists,” it goes on to say, “even at their least dogmatic, were essentially nihilists, at least theoretically, in terms of their relationship with egoic consciousness.  In short, they were clear about ‘what not to do,’ about who/what the enemy was: the conditioned mind.  But the Am-Panatomists are less rigid . . . (striving) for a precise balance when it comes to navigating numerous aesthetic and methodological antipodes: cohesion and dissolution, linearity and non-linearity, meaning and non-meaning, sequentiality and non sequitur, traditionalism and rebellion.”  In short, the essay makes the “Am-Panatomists” seem at least moderately not insane—and soon verifies it by quoting one of their poems with the formatting off because I don’t know how to get it right at this site:

Paranoia as the ivy sprawls.       When it matters least,     specks of justice.     Why must it always be rainbows or   geometry?             Most have natal anguish and repeat          themselves.             I think this has something     to do with ambivalence.

Part crazy, part child-dimwitted, but part edging out of the confused pretentiousness of most academic writing about the avant garde–particularly the “post-modern” avant garde (and even my own writing about innovative art at times)–into what seem to me compellingly valid statements about what art best is.  So I recommend this adventure as good for laughs, unexpected bubblings of poetry, valuable skewerings of bad critical thinking, and glimpses of paths into mental precincts worth exploration.  Amen and Harris are terrific clowns, but also occasionally poet-philosophers.

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Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Three

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 11-12, November-December 2006

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Chris Lott’s Blog.
www.chrislott.org/2003/09/01/why-this-blog-sucks.

Mike Snider’s Formal Blog.
www.mikesnider.org/formalblog.

po-X-cetera. Blogger: Bob Grumman.
www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog

 

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Petulant Muse

Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! —
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!

You’ll be important when we’ve finished it —
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem taught in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!

And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.

Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.

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I’m sneaking this poem by Mike Snider into a column ostensibly about the Internet because it’s the first poem in Mike’s book, 44 Sonnets, which he advertises at his blog (where he also writes fascinating essays about formal verse), and because I say the following about it at my blog: “I’d call this a serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish, the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard to me, which I mean as a compliment.”

Ergo, the poem nicely serves to demonstrate the virtue of the Internet as a place where you can easily find out about worthwhile poetry you would have trouble finding out about anywhere else–and discussions of it (for nothing except the cost of whatever electricity your computer uses while you’re looking, and a fraction of your monthly hook-up fee). It’s also where you can sound off about poetry, as I did above. It’s an automatic publisher, and storer, of whatever you feel like gabbing about. Ideally, you’ll get feedback. I didn’t in this case, but sometimes I do.

The one large problem with blogs (like the small press, and–more so–the micro-press) is that they are near-invisible. I have lots of ideas about how this should be attacked, most of which I’ve rattled on about at my blog. One thing needed is a search engine you could key with names of poets you like that it would use not (merely) to get to blogs that mention those names but to blogs those names suggest you would like. A given name would go to some systematic overview of the schools of poetry now in operation of the kind I’ve been vainly calling for, for something like a decade now. Once there, it would pick out the schools you’d most likely be interested in and send you to them.

I’d need five columns to have space enough to mention all of my ideas for alleviating this problem, so will leave it for now to get going with my survey of the Internet. This time around the featured site is Chris Lott’s blog. Forgive the egocentricity, but when I went out to it to see what I could say about it, I did a search on it for my name. Here is what came up: “There’s another aspect of the approach of some of the post-avant weblogs and theorists that doesn’t sit too well with me, which I mentioned briefly in my longer screed below… the underlying (and not so underlying) sense of cynicism that comes out in some of the critiques. When I was first confronted with Bob Grumman’s Mathemaku poems, for example, I made a flip comment to the effect that they struck me as ‘pointers to poems’ or ‘ideas that could become poems’ when the real problem was that I hadn’t taken the time to really open my ears (and, most importantly, my eyes) to approach them with a generous consideration. The implication of my words was that the poet had not yet put in the work needed to craft a poem. I was called on this implication, and rightly so. Bob maintained, and I believe him, that he worked as hard on any one of these short, visual poems as any craftsman of mainstream narrative poems does. Maybe even more so, given that he is also creating/synthesizing a new kind of form.

“But for too many, this attitude of approaching the work on its own merits only applies as long as it is convenient. Those that decry the traditionalist lack of estimation are quite willing to posit theories about a poet’s ‘fundamental dishonesty’ in writing in a ‘received form,’ and they are quite happy to surmise about the laziness they are displaying in writing in an existing mode. If this isn’t, in itself, a dishonest and hypocritical position (and I don’t think that most of the post avant crowd is dishonest), then I am left to think that it must come from an essential cynicism or resentment that sometimes makes it impossible for the reader to separate their estimation of a poetic work from the life and personality of the poet, or their position in the academy. Hayden Carruth, for example, has written some great work. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, or refuse to accept his work on its own terms because he was well-educated and worked at a University.”

Yes, I like that Chris comes off here on my side–and that he says things I pretty much agree with beyond that. But I’m quoting him so extensively because his words provide so excellent illustration of his outlook and style–and of what blogs at their best can be: intelligent, self-critical, exploratory, tolerant.

Further Adventures of Me

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Small Press Review,
Volume 31, Numbers 3/4, March/April 1999

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The End Review, Number 1, August 1998;
edited by Scott Keeney. 64pp;
464 Somerville Ave. #5, Somerville MA 02143-3230.
price: donation ($3 – $5 suggested).

Comprepoetica,
Sitemaster: Bob Grumman.
Reocities.

Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume 1, 3rd ed.,
by Bob Grumman. 190 pp.; 1998; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press, Box 3621,
Port Charlotte FL 33949. $10, ppd.

 

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I have exciting news about Me, but first–to avoid 100% egocentricity–I want to mention Scott Keeney’s zine, The End Review, a welcome new foray beyond the mainstream (though nowhere not verbal) that includes both Charles Bernstein and his arch-enemy Richard Kostelanetz. Also Rosemary Waldrop, Bill Marsh, Henry Gould, many others. It boasts first-rate reviews that more than summarize, too, by such as Keeney himself, Steven Marks (who uses one of my words!) and Gary Sullivan (on Sheila E. Murphy).

Here’s just one of its poems, “Trace,” not to indicate the kind but the level of work in The End Review. It’s by W.B. Keckler.

“wing,” the prehensile writing
finger, phalanges
forager   (holding patterns
in dream.   bent
under a focused cone of light
pre-cinematic, avian-consciousness
warps space, convex:
a mixture
of breaths    (criss-crossing clouds
Sanskrit “vati,”       “it blows”
through Dan. & Sw. “vinge”
“wing-hand”
it stirs the minuses of words
Ovidian, as the Roman stylus
flying so fast, the person
under covert feathers
has two lateral times.  but we
are not binocular like that
left/right      (the pour of symmetry
faux-simultaneity
we’re clipped./speech

Writing as a form of flight? Our “left/right” equal to “clipped./speech”– or flightlessness a period makes emphatic versus speech, a speech clipped of a bird’s full vigor? Flying a form of speech? Whatever (and the poem is loaded with whatevers), such twinings as that of dream with “pre-cinematic” light with “avian consciousness” with breaths . . . of Sanskrit– and images like, wow, “the minuses of words” that writing (writing the word “wing”?) stirs up make “Trace,” for me, a master-poem (and The End Review a master-zine for having it, and other poems of equal excellence).

Now to the exciting news-bytes about Me! One is that my web- site, Comprepoetica, had its official first birthday last October. It was intended, as its name implies, to showcase poems, poetics and poets of schools and managed to collect something like fifty bios of various poets–and one critic–and samples of poetry from maybe a fifth of them in its first half-year. Some of my essays are on it, too–and the beginnings of an attempt at a dictionary of poetry-related terms. My rough first part of ’98, and happy but busy summer and fall, kept me from doing much, if anything, to keep it active with new materials and publicity, so it’s been drawing hardly any traffic (in spite of what I thought was my great idea of running a poll on favorite living and dead American poets (Ashbery leads living poets with 11 votes, Williams the dead with 22).

I’m now writing a weekly poetry commentary for it, and have put out word that I’d like to run reviews by others, once-a-week, if I can. So if you have any reviews, or material for review, send ‘em my way (1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952). I’m soliticiting Serious Essays, as well–and feedback on anything that appears at Comprepoetica. I bring all this up not only to publicize my site but to commend the value of running a web-site (mine is free but I’m required to keep commercial advertising banners at the tops of all my files; to use the Internet costs from $15 to $30 a month–and the investment of at least a thousand dollars, generally speaking, in a computer). The main virtue: you can write whatever you want to and know it’ll be published, no matter how long or intelligent, for your site can always take it. Good place, too, for old published material hardly anyone’s seen (like all my published material). And maybe (yes, the odds against are about ten million to one) someone in a position to help you will see something he likes of yours (and, yow, could I use that).

My other piece of me-related news involves my book, Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume One, which I’ve updated and had reprinted for the second time. Multiply this column by fifty and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what my book’s like. What should make you sit up, though, are the details of its printing: it cost me just fifty dollars to get ten copies done (perfect-bound with four-color, laminated covers, if I wanted them, and I didn’t because of the way laminated covers tend to curl)–that’s fifty dollars upfront! Five-dollars-a-book isn’t cheap if you’re doing a hundred copies or more, but it certainly is for just ten.

And now I can order additional copies for just $3.30 or so apiece as long as I want to. The company doing the printing, an outfit called Sprout (http://www.sproutinfo.com or 430 Tenth St. NW, S-007, Atlanta GA 30318), you see, is an “on-demand printer,” so it charges only to scan your master-copy (which you have to provide) into its computer, plus $25. (In my case, the scanning charge, which is 25-cents-a-page, was waived due to a special introductory offer.) I think it’s a great deal if you want to self-publish a book you don’t expect to get rid of very many of, and/or if you don’t have the five hundred bucks or more that you’d otherwise need. And it eliminates the need for warehouse space. I hope to use Sprout for the second volume of my Of Manywhere series–and have already also used it for the third printing of Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi, Volume One. It’s really gotten me excited!

A Visit to Another Webzine

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 5/6, May-June 2007

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      Big Bridge, vol 3, #4.
      Michael Rothenberg, Editor.
      http://www.bigbridge.org/index2.htm
 

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I don’t think books and magazines will ever be obsolete–except for those they’ve always been close to obsolete for. Sure, they can wear out, but–well-taken-care-of–they should be good for a lifetime, and none of their texts will suddenly change or vanish. Aside from that, they’re pleasurably, physically-engagably solid in a way that cyberbooks and webzines never will be, even when technology has perfected tablets you can page through by pushing buttons. But, yow, the advantages of webzines and cyberbooks below the level of art-objects are becoming staggering! Take the webzine, Big Bridge, which has a section I guest-edited, for example. My section alone would run about 200 pages if published as a book. It has nearly 300 works by 75 different artists (or artist-teams). What’s more, they’re in full color (although at times too small, something I hope eventually to get remedied by making them into thumbnails). Yet, my little section is just one of many of comparable length in the issue!
Here’s what is also there: a chapbook of 17 or 18 poems (one passage may be an untitled poem or part of the preceding poem) by Ed Dorn, illustrated by Nancy Victoria Davis; seven essays about Dorn by John Herndon, Stefan Hyner, Reno Lauro, Alice Notley, Richard Owens, Claudia Pisano and Dale Smith.

These two sections, let me interrupt to say, particularly pleased me, for Dorn has not goten quite the recognition I feel he merits–for passages like this from “Early Modern,” which is in Big Bridge: “Every Poet needs a chorus of Negro women/ And a friend in wing-tipped shoes.” And for being the kind of guy who, according to Herndon’s piece on him, said after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, that he would start “working on a series of poems called—Chemo Sabe.”

Okay, to continue my list, the issue includes a poetry section containing one to eight poems (and/or jokes, illustrations, collages, plays) by 35 poets (Ralph DiPalma and Michael McClure among them); a second poetry section containing the work of nineteen contributors (Eileen Myles and Charles Borkhois among them) guest edited by Thomas Devaney; a section of fiction, non-fiction, reviews and memoirs by 26 authors including Skip Fox and Tom Hibbard; a section of illumages (i.e., visual artworks) in full color by Rodney Artiles (13 pieces), Amy Evans McClure (18 photographs of sculptures) and James Spitzer (23 pieces); “Death on All Fronts,” a collection of 51 anti-war poems edited by Halvard Johnson; 13 collaborations between a poet and an illumagist–Jerome Rothenberg and Susan Bee, for example; Part Two of Karl Young’s fascinating history/memoir of his life in vispo; “A Tribute to Richard Denner,” a collection of six essays about Denner and his work plus some selections from his work edited by Jonathan Penton; Roma Amor (41 pages) by Allan Graubard; Joel Weishaus on Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder; an excerpt from What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? by Bill Berkson & Bernadette Mayer, and a review of the latter by Larry Sawyer; and, finally, brief reviews of the following “little magazines” followed by excerpts from each: Home Planet News, House Organ, Kickass Review, Moonlit, Plantarchy, Poesy, Spaltung, Versal, Xerolage. Enough already, right? Whew.

Here’s what Jonathan Penton said in the final section listed about Xerolage (which I have to mention because that zine is so experioddicalistic): “If the concept of freakiness was capable of having a standard, it might define itself as the long-running and consistently high-quality literary journal, Xerolage. Edited by mIEKAL aND, each issue of xerolage is a deep study of one experimental visual poet, presenting a thorough and varied look at some of the most varied creators in the world of art. Meticulously reproduced in the highest resolution black-and-white imagery, on simple white folio-sized stock, the magazine design of Xerolage simply gets out of each artist’s way, making each issue a mind-expanding journey into the expanded mind of another.” The excerpts that came after that were from issues 37 and 38, which featured the work of Andrew Topel and Peter Ciccariello.

One very minor quibble about the Big Bridge before I forget it: its sectioning tends to prevent serendipity–that is, an advantage of traditional magazines is that one might notice a poem sharing a page with a story one is reading, and read the poem, too, out of curiosity; this won’t happen the way Big Bridge is laid out. But I realize that weaving Big Bridge together to allow for accidental adventures would take way too much time and energy. Purity of focus is a virtue, too.

To finish filling my space (and provide a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes in the BigTime Experimental Poetry World), I’m now going to quote my preface to the selection I edited for Big Bridge: ” . . . It seems that Cleveland poet, glass artisan and gallery director Marcus Bales, out of nowhere, offered me an opportunity to curate a show of visual poetry at his gallery. What is interesting about this is that Marcus and I had for years been going at each other tooth and nail on the Internet about what poetry is. We particularly did not agree that what I call visual poetry is a form of poetry. A traditionalist, Marcus won’t even agree that free verse is poetry. He has also been negative about my attempts to taxonomize the entire field of poetry.

“‘Grumman wants to create a kind of taxonomy of poetry,’ he told Dan Tranberg, who wrote a flattering piece about the show for The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland daily. I’m against the very notion of a taxonomy of poetry on the grounds that poetry is an aesthetic field, not a scientific one.’

“I’m afraid to confess that we on occasion quite annoyed each other. I definitely personally insulted him on more than one occasion. He claims never to have insulted me, but I feel there were times when he wasn’t very nice to me. Whatever the truth of the matter, we were often scolded for intemperance by the moderator of the Internet poetry group (New-Poetry) we had our (sometimes incredibly long) ‘discussions’ at. In fact, Marcus finally got kicked out of the group. I didn’t only because I promised to behave better.

“So, why the offer of space for a show? I’m still not clear about that–except that he meant it as a kind of challenge: if I thought this stuff was disgustingly under-recognized, as I often sputtered in harangues against–you guessed it–The Establishment, here was my chance to prove it with a show. I don’t know that I proved it, but the show seems to have gone over well. Marcus extended the show for one week into May because the Tranberg review came out the weekend the show was closing. According to Marcus, ‘Sales were pretty good, considering the narrow swatch of the world that this appealed to. I think we sold something in the neighborhood of $1500 worth of stuff, retail, most of it in the $10 and $25 range, but at least one sale over $200.’” I priced each of my three (unsold) works in the show at $400, but doubt anyone would have bought them at any price. (Sorry to brag, but that’s the way I am.)

Mad Poet Symposium, Part Five

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 35, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2003

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

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My presentation at the Ohio State Avant Garde symposium on 27 September 2002 was scheduled for 3:30, which was six-and-a-half hours after the proceedings began. Ergo: lots of time for me to become a nervous wreck. But the excitement of the presentations by others that I was able to see kept me from getting too wacked-out.

Said presentations, each a half hour long, began with Miekal And’s visiopoetic computer animations. He showed an especially winning one he had at his website called “After Emmett” that had gotten many hits for a short time because noticed by the mass media somewhere. Inspired by Emmett Williams’s “Voy Age,” it consists of squares made up of the nine letters of one, two or three words (e.g., “e v o/ l u t/ i o n,” “e a r/ v o y/ a g e”). The squares appear one at a time, their letters blinking arrestingly through numerous, extremely varied fonts–and spelling beyond, way beyond, simple denotation. Another I particularly liked was “SeedSigns for Philadelpho, an homage to South American visual poet, Philadelpho Menezes, who recently died. Here And formed the letters of “Philadelpho” with seeds that he placed on top of his scanner, then animated and danced through various yowwy gyrations. Both these works–and much else of high interest–are at http://cla.umn.edu/joglars/floraspirae/inhale.html.

Next on my schedule was Ficus strangulensis. He showed slides of many of his transforms, as Crag Hill calls such pieces (or “transmorfations,” as Ficus calls them). These are pieces in which a word or phrase–“live,” in one of Ficus’s–is graphically altered in discrete steps until some poetically appropriate new word or phrase–“live” becomes “erode” in the one mentioned–is revealed. I was familiar with most, but not with the details of how Ficus uses his computer to make them, which should help me with future poems of my own. He showed other works of his, as well, mostly textual collages. I had also seen many of these, but only in black&white, so was pleased to see them now in full color.

I caught Igor Satanovsky’s presentation after Ficus’s. Igor mainly showed and discussed stuff from his book, American Poetry (free and how), which I reviewed here some time back. Carlos Luis, whose presentation I next attended, went back and forth between Spanish and English. I may have understood his Spanish better than his English, and I don’t speak Spanish. But he’s a dynamic, extremely personable performer, so what he did physically more than made up for any words I missed.

After Carlos’s half-hour, I went to a reading from his translations of Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-Plastique by Irving Weiss, with the silent, knitting accompaniment of his daughter, she all in black, he all in white. Lots of sharp observations, a few not-so-sharp, but fun. Fairly sex-centered, many of them. Scott Helmes’s presentation followed. It included some ravishing new pieces from his Visual Specere series of cut-outs from magazines which he claims are not collages. I think he’s right, as they are narrative, as he also claims, and more linear than collage in that there are definite starting and ending points for their reading. He brought up his and my disagreement as to whether they were poems or not, John M. Bennett and others saying they were, which made me yell out that they weren’t–in what I considered a humorously annoyed fashion. Later Scott said he’d asked people their opinion on the question, and about half agreed with him, half with me.

I wandered around the campus during the lunch break, one of the very large, rich muffins the library had out for snacks making up my lunch–with some cracker jacks I had bought during my bus ride to Columbus. I got lost, naturally, but was helped back to the library by a few nice people (it took more than one!). When the symposium began again, I took in John Byrum and his wife Arleen Hartman’s “Generator & Another Incomplete Understanding.” It used two slide projectors and a boombox. Two walls of images, in other words, one of which I wasn’t aware of till more than halfway through the presentation, for it was behind me. Lots of interesting graphics, some usually who-knows-what texts. While the slides were shown, John read some kind of jump-cut, numbered list whose contents I now forget but which held my attention at the time. And I remember seeing a lot of fascinatingly resonant-in-the-context networks (tree branches, nerve branches, river systems, capillaries, etc.).

The presentation beginning times were not in synch, so I missed the beginning of Dave Baratier’s presentation, but think I got the main gist. He said some provocative things about letter-writing and read some letters from a published collection of letters of his. They sounded like poems to me. Certainly they were full of arresting lines–but, alas, I was too out of it to take notes, so can’t quote any. Equally enjoyable was Sheila Murphy’s later reading, with lots of genial, interesting commentary in-between poems. Just before Sheila’s reading, I went to Kathy Ernst’s slide show of various works, most of which I was already familiar with, but enjoyed seeing again, particularly her pieces from Plaisir D’Amour, which I’d call a break-out work, except that she’s always doing break-out works.

At 3, almost everyone went to John M. Bennett’s reading. I’ve been at a couple of John’s readings, though, and heard him a lot on tape, so went to Michael Magazinnik’s presentation. Mike read in Russian and English along with and/or against overhead projections of visual material. The highlights included his consonant poetry, and a piece incorporating a toy musical box. Mike ended early, which gave me a chance to appropriate five or ten minutes of his time and show and try intelligently to comment on Karl Kempton’s fine “In Her Own Words” sequence.

My own presentation followed. I probably hurried a little too much but still didn’t get through all my pieces. Here’s what Igor Satanovsky later said on the internet about me: “I have seen some math poetry before, but nothing like Bob’s work. He specializes in Mathemaku (his hybrid of haiku and math poetry), which he creates by constructing weird division formulas, where instead of numbers we find entities like ‘spring’, ‘woods’ and ‘memory.’ What I most admire about Bob is his ability to pick up the most cliched romantic notions and turn them into poetry.” He said a little more, but it wasn’t sufficiently flattering for me to quote it here.

The day ended with a panel discussion on collaborating. I don’t think anything truly memorable was said, though Marilyn Rosenberg said some particularly sensible things, and Scott Helmes started things off well by admitting that his main reason for collaborating was that he was lazy. My main pleasure was listening to people whose presentations I’d missed or who hadn’t presented, and fixing names to faces, especially of Lewis LaCook and Jesse Glass.

Whoever William Shakespeare really was, it was during the late 1500’s and early 1600’s that he composed the poems and plays attributed to him. Only a few of the era’s other writers commented in print on “The Ouevre,” as I will most of the time be calling those works. What they had to say about it was generally favorable, but only once or twice exceptionally so, and for several decades after Shakespeare’s death, Ben Jonson—in the view of most of his countrymen—was the greatest of recent English writers, not William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare steadily gained in popularity, though. By the middle of the 1700’s, he was widely considered to be for England what Homer had been for Greece, Virgil for Rome. Unfortunately, his reputation rose even higher. By the middle of the next century, he had become one with the gods for many of the culturati of his native country (and America). It was at that point that it began to seem implausible to some that “William Shaksper,” a haphazardly-educated commoner from the small, out-of-the-way town of Stratford-on-Avon, could have had anything significant to do with the plays and poems so long ascribed to him. The most committed of these anti-Stratfordians, as they have come to be called, began writing articles and books advancing their theories.

They have not stopped. And they seem to be gaining respect: in recent years; there have been several highly-visible articles about who really wrote Shakespeare in such publications as Harper’s (April 1999), Time (15 February 1999) and History Today (August 2001). Moreover, in January 2002, the Shakespeare Folger Library’s Gail Kern Paster debated anti-Stratfordian Richard Whalen on the authorship question under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institute—an event that occasioned an article in the The New York Times (10 February 2002). At about the same time, Michael Rubbo’s movie about the question, Much Ado About Something, was released nationally. Just about all the articles mentioned have been slanted against poor Will, the Times article particularly so. Much Ado About Something unabashedly advanced Christopher Marlowe as The True Author. More recently, in November 2008, Hal Whittemore spoke about his book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he believes the Earl of Oxford wrote, at the Globe Theatre in London. And Concordia University in California opened a $15,000,000 Shakespeare Authorship Research Center in the fall of 2009, the first of its kind in academia. It is directed by another who believes the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s works, Professor Daniel Wright. In short, those opposing Shakespeare have definitely been on a roll.

Do they have a case? No. The authorship question has been answered for over four hundred years. Nonetheless, I am treating it at length in this book. Why? Partly to help those who haven’t time to study the question sufficiently to see how wrong the anti-Stratfordians are. But chiefly to try to settle a question that interests me far more: how seemingly sane people can go off the rails when it comes to question of who wrote Shakespeare’s works. My answer? Because certain defects of temperament make them either what I call “rigidniks” or followers of rigidniks. In the last third of this book, I will explain the psychology of each of these in detail according to a theory of temperament types I’ve developed over the years (as part of a full-scale theory of psychology). As I do so, I will show how their cerebral dysfunction compels them, each in a different way, to become unhinged where Shakespeare is concerned. (The first two-thirds of the book will demonstrate beyond rational doubt exactly how irrational the anti-Stratfordian belief system is.)

Before getting to all that, I want to comment on the one statement that, of all the statements that have been made about The Ouevre, bothers me the most. It is that it doesn’t matter who was responsible for it, the works themselves are what count. While I can understand the impatience of some for the intrusion of scholarly and pseudo-scholarly intrusions into what should be untroubled encounters with story and verse, I find it short-sighted. Not only does it matter who wrote The Oeuvre, it matters significantly. First of all, it’s only fair that the person responsible for a body of work be given credit for it. This is no abstract sentimental gesture toward a person long dead who is unlikely to care much, but an encouragement to present-day writers who, human, want to know that they will get credit for what they write—and keep it. At least as important, the identity of the author of any work of literature is part of history, and history matters, even literary history. Where would studies of creativity be without it, for instance? Nor should the ability of knowledge of who wrote what to give later would-be writers accurate role-models to emulate and be inspired by be sneered at. Then, too, there is such knowledge’s ability to add to readers’ appreciation of literature by clearing up the cloudier sections of particular works, and adding colors to its surround to make it not just literature, but literature and a place, time and human being.

In short, I have no qualms about devoting an entire book to the Authorship Controversy rather than to Shakespeare’s plays and poems. That the latter, in themselves, are clearly more important than how they came to be does not mean that how they came to be is a trivial question.

 
First Chapter here.

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A New Vizlature Anthology

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Small Press Review,
Volume 31, Numbers 5/6, May/June 1999

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Word Score Utterance Choreography,
Edited by Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton,
160 pp.; 1998; Pa; Writers Forum,
89a Petherton Road, London N5 8QT. np.

 

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Sometime in 1998 I and some forty other verbo-visual artists got a letter from Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing inviting us to participate in the 750th publication of Writers Forum, a London publishing enterprise known throughout the world outside the literary establishment for pioneering in sound, visual, and related poetries. Somehow they’d gotten a Lottery Grant for this publication, which was intended to examine “the relationship of visual to verbal, not necessarily linear, poetry, both on the page and in performance.” We forty odd were asked for three pages apiece: one of visual poetry, one of verbal, and one of commentary on the relationship between the two (the latter, needless to say, really revving me up). Word Score Utterance Choreography, which came out in the fall of ’98, was the result.

And it was a happy result, though, like any anthology, it has a few duds (but is blessedly free of stupid claims of “best poems” or “full coverage”–though it does include a fair spectrum of internationally-known–and first-rate””verbo-visual artists, including American Jackson Mac Low, Arrigo Lora-Totino of Italy, Austrian Ernst Jandl, Ukrainian Myroslav Korol, Hiroshi Tanabu of Japan, Uraguayan Clemente Padin, Pierre Garnier of France, German Franz Mon, Patricia Farrell of England, and Canadian Mark Sutherland). It is also marred, albeit only slightly, by a rather simple-minded introduction by Robert Sheppard that spends too much space quoting academic banalities on the materiality of language, etc., out of the writings of Steve McCaffery, Joanna Drucker and Marjorie Perloff, and too little delving into what actually goes on in any particular artwork.

What goes on in Mac Low’s two poems, which he is good enough to carefully explain in his commentary, particularly interested me. His “verbal” poem, “Prime Apartment Now,” is basically a jump-cut poem (consisting, according to Mac Low, of what I’d call “found thoughts”). It starts in high coherence, however telegraphic (” . . . the bears’ numbers will dwindle/ the Aleutic may lose everything they cherish      tore-those-letters-up”), then spills severely surrealistic at times (e.g., “Offenbach – tutu interplanetary lobster subway – assemblage”) but remains unified by the apartment-image to the end, regardless of how multi-crazed-around that image gets (and I regressively feel all poems need some unifying principle). Along the way it flurrs often into a lyricism both high-cultured (“Kandinsky rain     limited-reflection abandoned indoors”), plain-cultured (“the flight of a garter-snake astonished a smiling cat on the edge of the/ Ganges”) and both (“imitation Rothko casual/ eatery handsome door at six”). In brief, a fine poem–but, although containing, as an aid for performers, notation marks I didn’t reproduce and spaces I tried to, not especially fascinating technically. Except for the use of it Mac Low makes to fashion his second poem.

What he does is take the first word in his first poem that has a “p” in it and make that the first word of poem #2. He makes poem #2’s second word the next word in poem #1 with an “r” in it–and so on until he, so to speak, spells the title of poem #1 (“Prime Apartment Now”) three and a fraction times. Meanhwile, he typographically enhances his text with underlining, through- lining, and different sizes and font-styles; and adds letters before, or removes letters from, his words from poem #1, in order to place his key letters properly according to his system, which dictates that “p” must be the first letter of the text it inhabits, “r” the second letter of its text, “i” the third of its, and so forth. All this gives his derivation a verve that is both visually appealing and infra-verbally resonant (as in “AK APRICE FEAR OVERTY mplete”–which, by the way, “spells” “apart,” by Mac Low’s code).

The poem holds together beautifully not only because it’s made up of Mac Low’s own already rich words and tones but, in my view, because it is systematically accidental–and its system shows through. It thus provides a kind of framing security, an earth for the wildlife of its words to war across.

I’d say that at least 75% of the other artists in this anthology merit as much (admiring) discussion as I’ve incompletely given Mac Low. Suffice it to say that, as a verbo-visual artist myself, I’ve already found a wealth of devices to steal in it, such as Upton’s remarkable use of white fragments of letters over a layer of black fragments of letters; John Cayley’s similar use of white fragments, but of typewriter-letters (apparently) rather than Upton’s larger Madison-Avenue letters; Bill Keith’s simple-seeming but pulsatingly under-currented arrangements of words into fused triangles, and fused rectangles; the “super-imposed segments cut from xerox overprints” of Peter Jaeger’s “acoil”; and the use of different-sized o’s that the late dom silvester houedard (to whom the anthology is dedicated) used against each . . . no, wait; I’ve already stolen that idea.

Word Score Utterance Choreography, in conclusion, is an ideal source for anyone starting out in visual poetry, or long in it, but eager for new ideas, or nimbly-executed old ones. It also should make an excellent text for students of contemporary craft-extending poetry, if there are any places that subject is taught.

Tip of the Knife, Issue 3 4 mathematical poems

The Otherstream Unlimited Blog, 6 March 2011 6 mathematical poems

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/lgrumn-1.htm 7 mathemaku

http://www.spidertangle.net/the_book/grumman.html

http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10/vispo_grumman.shtml 2 Mathemaku

http://www.concentric.net/~lndb/kal21/k21-bg.htm “Homage to Shakespeare,” a visual poem

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/bob_grumman3.html “An Eidographic Study”–a textual visimage

http://spidertangle.net/durban_segnini/grumman.html 4 mathemaku

http://www.spidertangle.net/the_book/grumman.html “Mathemaku for Robert Lax”

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=162 links to 9 poems demonstrating close to the full variety of the kinds I compose

http://www.williamjamesaustin.com/ForBillKeith2.html “Mathemaku in Memory of Bill Keith”

Seek Whences Four (mid-career) visiopoetic sequences, the last three mathematical, as well: “4 Views of the Sea,” “The Sky’s Understanding of Us: a Mathemakuical Sequence for Beethoven,” “Womendowment: a Mathemakuical Sequence for Michael Basinski,” and “The Odysseus Suite.”
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On Becoming Referenceable Small Press Review, April 1994, volume 26, number 4      Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes      by Richard Kostelanetz      246 pp; 1993; Pa;      a cappella books,      814 N. Franklin St.,      Chicago IL 60610. $17.      texture, 5      Fall, 1993; 60pp.;      3760 Cedar Ridge Dr.,      Norman OK 73072. $6.      The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee, #2      Winter, 1994; 36 pp.;      100 Courtland Dr.,      Columbia SC 29223. $3.50.      Grist On-Line, #3      December, 1993; 96 pp.;      Columbus Circle Sta., Box 20805,      New York NY 10023.      ([email protected].)      Free, if down-loaded. Something interesting happened to me as 1993 was ending: I was given an entry in Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. According to Kostelanetz (a friend of mine, needless to say), I have “become a major critic of avant-garde American poetry.” And–this I really appreciated–he quotes a passage from a piece I wrote for SPR to show why he thinks that, something far too few commentators on the arts do. On the other hand, I was irked with Kostelanetz for not mentioning such important figures as Karl Kempton, Jonathan Brannen and jwcurry in his book–while including people like Ogden Nash and Robert Benchley (who might have pushed known forms to their limits but never went beyond known forms). I recommend Kostelanetz’s dictionary, though: it’s opinionated but fun, and often educational about the kind of under-regarded art and artists this column is most concerned with. Another work by Kostelantez, WORDWORKS, also hit the bookstores recently. I mention this mainly to complain about its not yet having been reviewed in either the academic or the popular media, despite its being a landmark collection of Kostelanetz’s diversely from-the-otherstream poetry and part of a series that includes collections by such knownstreamers as John Logan, William Stafford, W.D. Snodgrass and Carolyn Kizer. This is a shame, for it is full of wonderful poems. (In my favorite, the letters, “SLE,” cross and leave the bottom of a page that the letters, “EEP,” cross the top of, going in the opposite direction, upside-down. Simple-seeming, no doubt, but how could anything be more illuminating about the off-the-page world we sleep into, and weightlessly, loftily, magically, dream back from?) Meanwhile, three zines of special interest to fans of experioddica have recently come out. One, Texture #5, includes a number of fine poems from the language-poetry school, and various hard-to-categorize prose texts. What most interested me, though, because of its rarity in the otherstream, were its critical discussions of figures like Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan and William Burroughs. Stein always having given me trouble, I quickly zeroed in on Julia Spahr’s take on her. Alas, I didn’t get much from it, for it never demonstrated why Stein should be considered more than a rambling village dumbfounder. Spahr does provide samples of Stein’s writing, but tells us little about what they do, other than pun, and repeat material in a way unlike the “domesticated and controlled repetition of traditional forms” such as the rondeau. Stein’s variations on “no since” to highlight nonsense’s lack of a causal antecedent, a “since,” is my kind of fun, but not when kept up for more than fifty words. Sure, as Spahr points out, this gives a reader interpretive room, which is fine, but I philistinely want to know what the difference between it and diffuseness, the defect of being excessively interpretable, is. Nonetheless, Spahr’s essay, and the others in Texture, are well worth reading, particularly editor Susan Smith Nash’s “interview” (2 short questions followed by page-length answers) of Gerald Burns. (Whose interesting answer in the December issue of SPR to my editorial on varieties of poetry schools appeared, ironically, just after I’d sent in my last column, in which I popped off about how little reaction the editorial had sparked. The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee #2 has no critical articles but makes up for it with a wide selection of visual and electrojunctive poems, and various kinds of collages. I’m pressed for space, so will let the following TITT poem by Jake Berry sum up my reaction: “Exodus/ fermenting/ in alembic/ vernacular// swimmer/ learns to/ fly, as/ clear as I/ know it.” Here heavy words about the process of distillation’s fusion with swimming-become-flying, and the latter’s fusion with an act of explanation that might seem incomplete but which performs rather than states its meaning, capture–for me–what the majority of TITT’s contents can do to lift an aesthcipient. Grist On-Line #3 is the last item on my list of zines to mention this time around. It made an impact on me because it’s the first specimen of electronic experioddica I’ve come across. It includes several first-rate cutting-edge textual poems by poets like Andrew Gettler, Jurado and Jerome Rothenberg (from 1968!). It also has a good variety of articles. One on the use of the Internet as a visual art show gallery by John E. Jacobsen should be right up the alley of my SMR colleague, Edmund X. DeJesus. As should Grist editor John Fowler’s recently-set-up electronic poetry bookstore. Fowler charges a nominal fee to stock books. I don’t know how effective the store will be, but my own press’s books are now on its “shelves”–because I’m eager to get in on the groundfloor of this kind of thing however small the initial pay-off might be.

 

My Summer Vacation, Continued   Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 1, January 1995            U-Direct, August, 1994; 42 pp.; Mary Kuntz Press,      Box 476617 Chicago IL 60647. $4.      Blaster, By Al Ackerman. 288 pp.; 1994; Pa; Feh! Press,      200 E. 10th Street New York NY 10003. $12.95.      The Big Schmooze, by Crowbar Nestle. 24 pp.; 1994; Pa;      Popular Reality Press, 135 W. High St. Jackson MI 49203.      $500.      Chip’s Closet Cleaner, #11, Fall 1994;      edited by Chip Rowe. 24 pp.; Chip Rowe,      826 Aspen St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20012. $4. For a while it looked like I was going to have trouble reporting on my August visit to the Big Schmooze at the Crowbar Summer Residence in Jackson, Michigan. I felt duty-bound to posterity to do justice to it, even if it took me ten columns–but I wasn’t sure my editor would approve of that. Fortunately, I’m now off the hook, for the Reverend Crowbar himself has published a pamphlet that covers the Schmooze in full, and includes numerous photographs of the participants, several in color. (Unfortunately, the reverend lost almost sixteen million on Wall Street after the recent republican victories, so had to jack the price of this “collector’s item” up from $462 to $500.) Meanwhile, thanks mainly to my review of it, Blaster is about to slip past Calvin Coolidge’s Favorite Potato-Chip Dip Recipes into 6,094th place on the NY Times best-seller list. A second edition of 14 copies is planned.  Seriously, kids, be sure to get a copy of it–it really is the funniest book out there (for those of you who are as sophisticatedly above gentility as yours truly, that is).  Okay, now on to the “First Annual Underground Press Conference” that I attended in Chicago on 13 and 14 August. It was somewhat screwily organized–as my being on a panel devoted to “marketing and distribution of small press publications” might indicate. (I introduced myself by presenting one of my poems, then claiming that giving one’s work a spiffy name like “infra-verbal poetry” was a terrific marketing device–which had the intended result: no one bothered me during the question & answer part of the proceedings.)  But the other people on the panel I was on, which was chaired by Cheryl Townsend, and included Ashley Parker Owens, whom I’d just met at the Big Schmooze, made up for me, and the other panels, which were on zine and chapbook publishing, the information superhighway, censorship, the underground press and cultural politics, and the role of university libraries as  collectors of underground publications, were well-received. I especially wish I could have attended the last of these to hear Mike Basinski describe SUNY, Buffalo’s policy of trying to buy just about everything the micro-press puts out. (If you’re a micro-publisher, you might want to write him at University Libraries, 420 Capen Hall, Buffalo NY 14260.) Also on this latter panel was Paul Hoover, the editor of the newest Norton anthology, this one of “Postmodern” American Poetry. I wasn’t aware that he was around till the conference was over, so didn’t get to ask him why his collection, which he claims consists of “the avant-garde poetry of our time,” stops with jump-cut and altered- syntax poetry, and includes such long-standard plaintext poetries as the beats’ and NY-school’s, but ignores, even in the afterword, such specimens of the avant-garde as visual and infra-verbal poetry. I’d also like to have heard *his opinion of Marjorie Perloff’s back-cover blurb, “Here at last is the ‘other’ American poetry written during the past half-century.” Blah. On the other hand, I’m pleased that a number of good poets like Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Padgett will now be reaching a wider public because of their poetry’s inclusion in Hoover’s anthology. Not least of the positive values of the conference was the (premiere) issue of U-Direct Batya Goldman and Gabriele Strohschen put out to accompany the festivities. Much of interest in it, including an essay on Paul Weinman’s White Boy poems by Basinski; a report on police harassment of an anarchist trying to attend a poetry reading by the victim, Joffre Stewart; and a piece on black liberation radio and the attempts of the government to shut it down by Ron Sakolsky. I hope this periodical keeps going, for its coverage of the micro-press and related topics is first-rate. The best thing about the conference for me, though, was simply meeting all the people I did, including Chip Rowe. I single out Rowe, whom I’d never previously heard of, because he provided me ith my biggest thrill of the conference by giving me a copy of his zine, Chip’s Closet Cleaner and pointing out that it contained a reprint of an essay of mine on infra-verbal poetry that had been in Poetic Briefs. This kind of reprinting without permission would be frowned upon in the mainstream, but it is the greatest sign of esteem in OUR stream (and reminds me of the non-monetary way that scientists gain status through what they publish). Rowe, by the way, got a review of the conference into the October issue of Factsheet Five, along with an equally excellent report on how the mainstream press has been covering the world of zines of late (even TIME having now run a characteristically superficial and misinformed story on the phenomenon). I am pleased that F5 is finally running features again. And with that observation, I have once again come to the end of my allotted space.