Anthology News

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Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2001

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6 Contemporary American Visual Poets
(a catalogue for a show curated by Pete Spence).
6 pp; Pete Spence, 40 Bramwell Street,
Ocean Grove 3226, Victoria, Australia,
or [email protected]. $5 (in cash–but
contact Spence for details on this and
the other items discussed below).

 

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For the past six months or so, I’ve been suffering through a Major Project I’ve mentioned in this column before: a multi- volume anthology of visio-textual art that Crag Hill and I are editing. It would have been fun except that Sprout, the publish- on-demand outfit we were depending on to get the anthology out at a price we could afford, suddenly discontinued their publish-on- demand operation just as I was readying the master copy of volume one for them. They had three other books my press had done already in their computer, copies of which they were supposed to publish whenever required–indefinitely. Now if there is any demand for more than the few copies of these that I have on hand, I’ll have to have a second edition printed. Moral: he who uses a publish-on-demand company must bear in mind the possibility that it will fold.

I didn’t, so took a while for me to adjust to Sprout’s severing ties with my press. Eventually, I wrote to a few regular printing companies friends in poetry had recommended to me. I heard back from none, probably because I wanted to print only a hundred copies. I also used the Internet to find other publish-on-demand companies but turned up none but vanity presses. The best of these, Trafford, charges a $500 set-up fee (or more, if you want frills like a listing in their on-line catalogue). It then allows you to buy copies of your paperback for around $7 a copy (for a 200-pager)–for a year. To be able to continue to buy copies of your book after the first year, you need to pay them $84 a year thereafter. I found this last charge inexplicable.

Desperate, I tried to use one such enterprise for volume one of our anthology, anyway–until they demanded a substantial amount of extra money because of the many graphics the volume would use. Finally, two of the contributors to volume one suggested we form a collective and ask contributors to contribute part of the cost of publishing it offset. The others agreed, and one of our contributors, Karl Young, will now be publishing it under his light & dust imprint. I’m going to have to steal $2000 from one of my credit cards, at ungodly interest, to cover what the contributors can’t, but we’re hoping to sell enough copies to cover most of what I and the others have put in. Meanwhile, volume two is on the back burner of a stove on the farside of the moon. I’m determined to get that out, too, but probably won’t be able to for at least a year.

Which brings us, believe it or not, to the catalogue of an Australian visual poetry exhibition. How? Well, five of the six people featured in the show are contributors to the first volume of our anthology, Kathy Ernst, Scott Helmes, Karl Kempton, Marilyn R. Rosenberg and Carol Stetser. The sixth is me. And the catalogue seems to me almost as good a summary of what’s been going on in visual poetry in America over the past thirty years as our first volume. At any rate, it presents an excellently compact, quick overview. Two of its six reproductions are in color, too (just one of the anthology’s is).

As soon as I saw it, I wanted to review it, even though it’s only six pages long. That’s because of Kathy Ernst’s cover image. It consists of the sentence, “I feel so nice, like thousands of tiny boats,” printed twenty-two times right to left and twenty-two times sideways and perpendicular to (and crossing) the right-to- left lines. Most of the lines are in shades of blue, but five are in red. The result is one of Ernst’s “quilts.” So what do we have? A silly, banal-seeming but absolutely just-right expression of contentment: quilt-warmth, childhood delight (from the tiny boats), harbored security (since many boats are unlikely except in harbors), sea-gentleness (from the colors, and the rhythm of the printing), energetic cheerfulness (from the colors) and, finally, fun, due to the overprinted text’s needing to be figured out.

The other pieces are equally charged, however different–and mine isn’t the only one with math in it! Carol Stetser’s piece combines some algebraic equations with cave paintings and other matter to speak with her usual eloquence of, among much else, humanity’s quest for Meaning. Marilyn Rosenberg’s piece, all calligraphy as a form of music, is more about the quest for meaningful communication (as I see it), for it rises from wind- blown blotchiness through controlled empty lettering (i.e., outlined lettering) to substantial but still averbal script. There is much more to it I haven’t space to consider here. Karl Kempton’s contribution is one of his invocations of Vishnu that uses repetitions of one of Vishnu’s 108 names to form a gorgeously deep well out of the blank page to speak, among other things, of meaning’s rise from nothingness, and Scott Helmes pulls off a wonderfully swirly red and blue and black commotion about “No.”

On a little broadside separate from the catalogue, curator Pete Spence has put a negative of Kempton’s piece on top of a negative of (part of) Stetser’s, and added three doo-dads of his own; the result is a stunning study of the primitive versus final sophistication, and much else. Aside from that, it brought home the advantage visual poetry has over conventional textual poetry for aesthetic appropriation of this sort, which I deem perhaps the best possible way to critique/extend/counter/reverse, and otherwise improvise on, an artwork.

 

Notes from the Null Zone   Small Press Review, Volume 28, Number 10, October 1996      Blazin’ Auralities #3, January 1996; 18 pp.;      402 Clark, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2W 1W9. $5.00.      Taproot Reviews, #9/10, Summer, 1996;      40 pp.; Burning Press, Box 585, Lakewood OH. $5.00.   I’ve been in my null zone for some time, now. Have gotten almost no work done since my empty bank account forced me to get a job– actually two jobs–last November. One job was as a substitute teacher, the other a three-nights-a-week job with the local newspaper. Because I’d be off from the teaching job, I expected to catch up on my correspondence, publish a few new Runaway Spoon Press books, work on a book of my own, and knock off a poem or two over the summer. I’ve done none of these things, thanks in part to having had to work five or six seven-night-weeks at the paper because of people getting sick or quitting. And now I’m having to rush to get this done. So don’t expect one of my usual Incredibly Incisive columns this time. Mostly it’s going to be off-hand stuff, only loosely tied-together. Like a response to Kenneth Leonhardt, who complained in a letter in the July/August SPR/SMR about my saying in a previous column that “Mary Veazy’s stylishly-produced Sticks . . . has included work by Richard Kostelanetz and myself, so deserves mention here.” This, said he, “is so blatantly pompous that he has blown all pretense of objectivity. However, with such a high opinion of himself, I’m sure Grumman will have no difficulty getting his views published in even more prestigious venues than SMR.” More prestigious than SMR?! Where is this guy coming from?! As for his quote, note the three dots. What I really said (mispelling Mary Veazey’s name) was, “Mary Veazy’s stylishly- produced Sticks like CWM, is more knownstream than otherstream but it has included work by Richard Kostelanetz and myself, so deserves mention here.” Probably pompous but a sympathetic reader would observe that I was simply saying, however carelessly, that Sticks generally published knownstream material but also used otherstream work, such as Kostelanetz’s and mine, for which reason it ought to be mentioned in a column devoted to otherstream zines. As for my objectivity (and what connection that has to my pompousness is beyond me), that is irrelevant: what counts in a review is whether the reviewer has backed his views with concrete evidence or not. Ironically, because the column the quote is from was an overview, I provided NO concrete evidence that Sticks is the worthy magazine I said it was–except, of course, the fact that it includes work by Richard Kostelanetz, Mark Fleckenstein, X.J. Kennedy and *!ME!*, BOB GRUMMAN. If you really want to see a specimen of bad reviewing, see Vince Tinguely’s hatchet job on two John M. Bennett tapes in the third issue of Blazin’ Auralities. Here’s its second paragraph in full: “Coruscation Drain is a collabroation with the musicians of the Strangulensis Research Labs. On it, Bennett’s text is clearly recorded so we can hear how clearly bad it is. On Autophagia, Bennett’s words are buried under collaborator Mike Hovancsek’s sounds. This would count as a blessing if the music weren’t as monotonously unbearable as the poetry.” Nowhere in the review is a sample of Bennett’s poetry: that’s why the review is crap, not because I like Bennett’s poetry and Tinguely doesn’t. (Nonetheless, I still think Blazin’ Auralities a good place to go for reviews of spoken-word recordings.) Also in the July/August issue of SPR/SMR, just waiting for me to pop off about it, was a notice that for $95 you can get the sub-mediocrities at Writer’s Digest to consider your self-published book for some kind of prize. I wish I had enough influence to persuade all writers to boycott this competition, and all competitions that require a reading fee. And I don’t want to hear any sob stories from small-pressers who just can’t get by without reading fees: I say if you don’t love literature enough to suffer poverty for it, get out of it. Now to really cheat on this assignment, I’m going to quote from a letter I just wrote Luigi-Bob Drake, editor of Taproot Reviews (in which, as Kenneth Leonhardt will surely immediately note, I have a vested interest): “TR looks as good as ever. Best thing for me was the cover (collages by David Levy) . . . I hope to start making reviews for the next issue soon  .  .  . I just wish I had new zines to review–I seem only to have new issues of the same old stuff. It’s the same old good stuff, but  .  .  . Which brings me to my latest thoughts about how to make TR more widely appealing–unless it’s true that while millions write poetry, only thousands read it, and only dozens read about it. Maybe. Anyway, here go my thoughts, many, perhaps all, I’ve already thrown at you other times, I dunno. “First, I assume you’ve tried getting college libraries to subscribe? Maybe give them a discount? Otherwise, I have no marketing ideas. I do have some content ideas. One I know we’ve back-and-forthed on: it’s to have more People-magazine crap, except at a higher level: articles, I mean, on personalities in the field. A second is a repeat of your own editorial philosophy: to cover a wider spectrum of poetry. TR is fine on my kind of pluraesthetic material; it’s fairly good on language poetry, though the latest issue misses Susan Smith Nash’s entries. With Oberc, mainly, but also Basinski, TR is doing reasonably well by the neo-Bukowski school. But there’s too little on the dominant-mode–because you have no reviewers from the establishment (or do you?) Not that dominant mode poetry isn’t getting more than its rightful share of coverage allwhere else, just that TR might gain a larger clientele by doing more by it. “I guess we’ve discussed letters to the editors before, too. I think they give a worthwhile spark to a magazine. I think maybe surveys might work–but way too much trouble for the present staff, I should imagine. Here’s one: “What’s Language Poetry?”- -to be asked of all known language poets AND all academics, and, in fact, of everyone in poetry. Representative answers out of every main point of view reproduced and circulated among respondants for agreement/disagreement before results published. Another: “Is visual poetry poetry?” Others: “Who are the best poets in English and Why?” “Is innovation important in poetry?” “Who are the best poetry critics in this country and why?” “What good is poetry criticism?” “What prevents Taproot Reviews from being as popular as Harper’s?” “What good is poetry?” “Is Bill Moyers helping poetry?” “Should average people be able to understand a poem?” Okay, all of this is impractical but is something along these lines possible? “It’d be so nice if TR (or any serious magazine about poetry) had the value for the literate the NY Times Book Reviews apparently does, or the New York Review of Books. Impossible dream? I suppose so.” Readers’ comments on any of this welcome, even from Kenneth Leonhardt and C. Mulrooney I’ve been in my null zone for some time, now. Have gotten almost no work done since my empty bank account forced me to get a job– actually two jobs–last November. One job was as a substitute teacher, the other a three-nights-a-week job with the local newspaper. Because I’d be off from the teaching job, I expected to catch up on my correspondence, publish a few new Runaway Spoon Press books, work on a book of my own, and knock off a poem or two over the summer. I’ve done none of these things, thanks in part to having had to work five or six seven-night-weeks at the paper because of people getting sick or quitting. And now I’m having to rush to get this done. So don’t expect one of my usual Incredibly Incisive columns this time. Mostly it’s going to be off-hand stuff, only loosely tied-together.

The State of North American Vizpo, Part Five

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2010

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      October is Dada Month
      Edited by Marshall Hryciuk
      2008; 94 pp; Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly,
      30 Laws St., Toronto ON
      M6P 2Y7 Canada. $100.

      Visio-Textual Selectricity
      Edited by Bob Grumman
      2008; 44 pp; Pa; The Runaway Spoon Press,
      1708 Hayworth Road,
      Port Charlotte FL 33952. $50 ppd.

 

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Eleven of the 88 works in October is Dada Month are by jwcurry by himself or in collaboration with someone else. They are all a challenge for a critic, all Dada mysteries on the verge of some consequential meaningfulness just out of sight. Or, to put it less pretentiously, they are expressions of strange, hard-to-define moods. His “stigation,” for instance, has the “word,” “STIGATION,” printed sideways down the piece’s left half against some kind of mottlely who-knows-what background. “Instigation,” needless to say, comes to mind–someone’s been goaded to do something shady . . . Like make art?. Art? This particular piece of art?

I ask, because most of the small words on the cut-out rectangles that are pasted here and there either parallel or at right angles to “STIGATION” speak of actions related to making a collage, like this piece: “he glued,” “rearrangement,” “he constructed.” Another rectangle has the phrase, “the text does not minimize.” Other words in an oval near the center of the piece have undecipherable words–except for several instances of “seem.” The muddiness of the rest of the entirely monochromatic piece contribute a feeling of mystery and illicitness to it. Along with the “stagnation,” “stigma,” defective sight (stigmatism), and (for me, at least) the Styx that the piece’s title-word hints of.

Is what I’ve said of any help? I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I spent over a month looking at the work and thinking about it before trying to critique it. Most of the better works in the anthology had the same effect on me. Something about them makes them impossible simply to dismiss, but near-impossible, too, to be cogent about.

Not quite from the same realm is Guy Beining’s “Upper and Lower Translation of Text for Beige City.” Beining has several varieties of signature poems to his credit, and this is the four quadrants one. I doubt the set-up is unique to him but he makes unique, uniquely

resonant use of it: it is merely the division by two crossing lines of the page into four sections, each containing a text or graphic or combination of the two on the piece’s central theme. In the piece’s upper left quadrant (but overflowing into the quadrant below it, the text, “BEIGE COPY/ THAT THATCH/ THAT TUFT/ THAT BLONDE BEIGE/ TERRITORY OF HER/ COMMINGLED EDGES/ FRAMED BY HER/ FOUNTAINED SELF.” Strange, but coherent. The other three quadrants contain texts that act as variations of the colors in the first text, blond and beige–for instance, “spit white on/oven fat/ bis/ bise/- – -/ yelowish-grey” in the upper right quadrant.

I’m going to cheat here and not try for a close reading of the above. That would require a full column by itself. I will simply tell you that I think I could come up with a plausible interpretation that made sense. Hence, the “not quite from the same realm,” for I believe the mystery here can be cleared up as well as the mystery in every halfway-decent (modern) poem can be. But you need all the text, and the extra elements in the piece such as the font selection, the intentionally low-grade resolution, the larger bold black “BLOND” off to the side of the upper left text (whose “blonde” has a line through it) to be able to follow me. One impression; that the piece is a rough draft of an attempt to capture some blonde, and each of its texts is a rough draft of a fraction of that attempt.

Beining has several other fine pieces in the issue, some of them in gorgeous full color. Another contributor with well more than one excellent piece in the collection is Daniel f. Bradley. One, “after,” resembles curry’s “STIGATION” in being a monochromatic Dada mood piece. At the top of it is a rectangle that suggests a blackboard with lots of old chalk on it. The words “after” and “air” in white type are super-imposed on it, “after” high and to the left, “air” lower and to the right. Oh, and a white comma is under “after,” with a white period below that to the left, a little higher than “air.” Underneath is a big 50’s televsion set, with a cat perched on it, looking a bit lost. That’s it.

Note for the finicky: the author of this piece considers it poorly reproduced. I find it

imperfectly but certainly sufficiently well-reproduced. There are many in visio-textual art who remind me of the kind of people who write authors of detective stories when they get some detail of a hero’s handgun wrong. Who cares? Not that I would not love everything to be perfectly reproduced, it’s just that perfect reproduction is trivial compared with the over-all design and meaning of a piece (and most everything else about it).

I find it hard to explicate the Bradley piece, but here’s an attempt: some event has happened whose aftermath the poem is describing, or trying to describe, but what it presents is a . . . well, a sentence that peters out after one word, hits a pause after a good deal of blankness, then stops when its period appears after much more blankness. What happened is hard to communicate. What follows is air. But air can transmit the electronic waves responsible for the information on a television screen. So here there’s a strong intimation of meaning inside the air spoken of. But the screen it apparently is being transmitted to is . . . blank. Waiting to be turned on? The cat is indifferent, but gives the scene an ambiance of Total 70’s Normalcy. Life goes on whatever in this case it is after. And it is serene, hakuable.

Another lame grapple, this explication of mine? Who knows. It’s as good as I can do at the moment. I hope it will at least suggest ways into an appreication of this piece–and others like it Melody Wessel’s charming visual poem, “Gossip,” I had less trouble with, for it’s a black-and-white design in which typography (many question marks and commas) suggests something I see as a lighthouse in the midst of a confusion of mad non-language. Its beacon seems a mad swirl from which a jumble consisting of the letters, G, O, I, S, S, P tumbles out.

There are many other first-rate works here, particularly Marshall Hryciuk’s “History of the Marketplace, 51st performatif,” Karen Sohne’s suite of entirely nono-verbal, non-representational artworks, and John Vieira’s “two strains of music.” The price of the collection is considerable. I would suggest trying to get the nearest college library to buy a copy, and visit it there every few months. Unless you’re more affluent than I.

 

 

Out of the Null Zone   Small Press Review, Volume 28, Number 12              Taproot Reviews, #9/10, Summer, 1996;      edited by Luigi-Bob Drake. 40 pp.;      Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107. $5.      A.BACUS, Number 96, February 1996;      edited by Peter Ganick. 6 pp.; Potes &      Poets Press Inc, 181 Edgemont Avenue,      Elmwood CT 06110. $4.      Avec, #10, 169 pp.;      Box 1059, Penngrove CA 94951. $8.50.      Antenym, #8, December 1995; edited      by Steve Carll. 50 pp.; 106 Fair Oaks St. #3,      San Francisco CA, 94110. $4.50.      Bleeding Velvet Octopus, #2, October 1995;      edited by Mike Halchin. 12 pp.;      Box 25760, Los Angeles CA 90025. $1.      Bullhead, #4, 56 pp.;      2205 Moore St., Ashland KY 41101. $5.   “The featured poet this time around in this one-poet-per-issue zine is deservedly Nortonized language poet, Ann Lauterbach, with twelve jump-cut, surrealistic poems that start with a ‘Harmony Clown/ from his seat on the shelf before Is,’ or situated in some kind of Ur (also mentioned here) of pre-perceptual imagination. ‘Is this field’s dementia, its prow?’ the poet asks. Next comes a strangely vivid list of situations and their colors–having ‘no boots to hike thru Jerusalem,’ for instance, ‘would be Black.’ Blake, Rilke, Stevens, Roethke and more.” Here’s another review of mine I want to quote from so I can claim to have reviewed a review of a review. It’s about Mike Halchin’s zine, Bleeding Velvet Octopus, which consists of “around 50 capsule reviews by editor Mike Halchin of (1) music, (2) zines/comix and (3) books/chaps. Halchin is usually informative in a breezy way. Here’s a sample line, about a Dave Alvin chap with a title too long to quote here: ‘Poems that hit across deserts, highways, small towns, relationships on their way to a hearse, and other intense such adventures.’ Of interest to zine- publishers is that Halchin sells ads to his zine and–from his list of rates–seems to have made $65 from them this ish, which should have been enough to pay for its publication. (And the ads are all about worthwhile otherstream stuff, so definitely do not detract from the zine.)” Among the other reviews in the issue is one about Antenym, which reviewer Jake Berry describes as “An excellent collection of poetry that seems to come out of the Language school, yet follows no approach absolutely. The poets’ names are given in the table of contents yet not on the page, which encourages the reader to see the work for what it is rather than who it is by. In that spirit, this sample: Dead attention is where I hang my hat, but for us to change seats you’d have to make the first motion. the book is a brick. these ripped oranged stuffed with hurry. drunk and lolling in the pools of shinning yellow paint. The work here is rarely so far out as to defy logical approach, rather it illuminates that approach, and expands the possibilities of analysis. Besides that, it’s simply a joy to read.” I singled out this review not only as one more sample of Taproot reviewing but to call attention to one of the dozens of worthwhile zines of the 115 or so reviewed here that I was unfamiliar with. 143 chapbooks are also reviewed. And the material covered goes, in editor Luigi-Bob Drake’s words, “from punk to pomo to LANGUAGE to dada to visual to even some pretty normal stuff.” I consider it near-final proof of the wretched state of contemporary American Poetry, in spite of what the hype artists on PBS and elsewhere proclaim, that Taproot still has less than a hundred subscribers. A second significant virtue of Taproot is its concern with not just printed poetry but with poetry on the net, and on video- and audiotapes. Berry’s review, for instance, also includes the e-mail address of Steve Carll, the editor of Antenym, and the website from which one can bring up back issues of his zine. My main reason for quoting Berry’s review, though, was to call attention to the wonderfully misused language of “these ripped oranged stuffed with hurry,” and the rest of the poem it’s from. Andy di Michele is equally adept at quoting, giving us Laura Moriarty’s “ordinary red precedes! imaginary yellow follows” and Rosemarie Waldrop’s “Milk weeds my thoughts” from Avec, #10. Outside its reviews Taproot more prominently displays a number of full excerpts from books and zines reviewed. Among them is a fascinatingly infra-verbal work from Bullhead, #4 by Joe Napora, complete with a fine accompanying illustration by Pati Scobey. In his poem Napora rearranges “heart” through “heat” and the like to “head,” which, he observes, (is) “too near to dead; then he precedes to the following magical juggle of the “each” in “reach”: “love we know/ within/ reach// each/ ache/ is fire”. Before leaving Taproot (far too soon), I want to praise one more characteristic of it, its remarkable stable of reviewers. Among the almost 30 in it are Karl Kempton, John M. Bennett, Ben Friedlander, A.L. Nielson, Karl Young, Nico Vassilakis, Cheryl Townsend, Ann Erickson, Peter Ganick, and on and on. So it’s a great place to meet superior poets from all schools in prose.

Please, Dear Reader, I implore thee: when you have read as much of this entry as you feel like reading, let me know whether you have found it worth reading in full or not by clicking “YES” or “NO” below. You would help me a great deal, and might even get me to make my entries more reader-friendly. (And for the love of Jayzuz, please don’t try to spare my feelings by politely declining to click the NO although you think the entry Vile Beyond Imagination. Oh, some of you may need to know that I am not asking you whether you agree with me or not!)

YES

NO

Note: I will be repeating this request in some of my entries to come. Feel free to click one of my buttons each time I do, but please don’t click either more than once a day.

The Coming of The New Millennium

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Small Press Review, Volume 31,
Numbers 9/10, September/October 1999

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Unwrapping Spheres of Cloud & Skulls, by Guy R. Beining.
102 pp (with matter on one side of a page only);
62-65 Saunders St., Apt. 3I, Rego Park NY 11374. $35, ppd.

Valley, by Mike Daily. 224 pp;
Bend Press, Box 886, San Pedro CA 90733. $13.

Chiron Review, Number 57, Spring 1999;
edited by Michael Hathaway. 48 pp;
702 N. Prairie, St. John KS 67576-1516.
Website: http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Nook/1748. $4.

Comprepoetica, Sitemaster: Bob Grumman.
website: http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492.

 

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BEINING, Guy R. (26 September 1938). A major post-Eliot/Olson word- and field-jumbler early in his creative life, most signally in his long series, Stoma (to this day incompletely published), Beining turned painter, as well, in his forties. The result has been an outburst of master-collages that combine texts (his own and found or appropriated), photographs (ranging from porn to high science) and his own inimitable, often figure-based doodles, in which Pollockian splash-strokes unexpectedly achieve a Matisse-like elegance, with hints of Joseph Beuys and Marcel DuChamp prominently in the background. In most of these pieces, varied fragments jar against and/or flow from one another (e.g., on the first page of his 1994 Unwrapping Spheres of Cloud & Skulls where the list, “clodde/ clott/ kloz/ ie./ block/ clud/ rock/ hillock/ clod/ clot/ klut/ ie./ lump,” flanks a photograph of a stairway up to a circular opening into a sky from which an over-sized man–probably Beining–looks down, and a photograph of some kind of modernistic dark-glassed container of candles).  Such works seem to be Beining’s present specialty.

– Bob Grumman, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Schirmer, 2000

Beining, Guy. Stoma 1322. Toronto: Curvd H&Z
(#2 – 856 Somerset W., Ottawa, Canada, K1R 6R7), 1984.
______. Piecemeal I through VIII. Port Charlotte, FL: Runaway Spoon, (1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952), 1989.
______. Stoma: selected poems. Huntington, WV: Aegina Press,
(59 Oak Lane, Spring Valley, 25704), 1990.
______. Carved Erosion. Seattle: Elbow
(Box 21671, 98111-3671), 1995.
______. too far to hear. Morris, MN: Standing Stones
(7 Circle Pines, 56267), 1997.

 

Ho, the third millennium of the current era will be here soon (at midnight, 1 January 2000, not 2001, according to my definition of millennium: a period of time equal to one thousand sanely-countable years unless some fool or group of fools has played around with it, in which case it may be only 999 years in length, as with the first millennium of the Christian Era). I have taken its arrival as an excuse finally to go completely off-column, possibly for good. That is to say, I plan in this and at least two more columns to write whatever I wantz to, and call the mess an end-of-the-millennium round-up. Except that I will mention at least one piece of genuine Experioddica–or something close to it–in each installment. Hence the mention at the top in the list of items I’m reviewing of Guy Beining’s highly satisfactory collection of collages and text, and drawings and text, and drawings and collages and text, Spheres. It’s as expensive as hell but what isn’t, and besides, there are only a few copies of it around, and a little of it is in full color. Each copy, too, is autographed by Beining and has a unique colored artwork glued on its title-page. Its being mentioned here guarantees its price will hit six figures by 2002 at the latest (and is, of course, why Beining gave me a free review copy of it).

Actually, I got the free copy because Richard Kostelanetz was preparing a second edition of his Dictionary of the Avant Gardes (for Schirmer’s, believe it or not) and had invited me to do some entries for it, one of them to be on Beining. So I wrote to Guy for some information about himself and what he’s most recently done to add to the much I already knew about both. He sent me some great photographs of full-color works I have to return, alas, plus the review copy of Spheres, and lots of other nice stuff. And I made the entry at the start of this column. I did entries on ten or twelve other people, too, but feel bad because I didn’t do ten or twelve–or fifty–more, mainly for lack of time, and insufficient data (mostly having to do with such trivial matters day, month and year of birth). So, apologies to all I ought to have written into Richard’s book but failed to.

So far this column doesn’t seem that different from my previous ones to me but here’s where everything changes, for I’m jumping into my next subject without one of my wonderfully professional transitions! It’s a novel called Valley about which I wrote its author, “It reminded me somewhat of Bukowski (as novelist) but a Buk of a different generation/slant/style . . . mostly because usually so to the point, understated–a sort of bumming around into minor epiphanies. . . . I liked the collage-effect” (Warp Magazine accurately spoke of it as jumping “from genre to genre . . . (by using) a pastiche of journal entries, newspaper clippings, poetry and screenplay scenes”–graphics, too, I would add. Oh, the valley it’s about is the San Fernando Valley and its characters are mostly twenty-somethings–sort of Hemingwayesquely feeling their way into literature and life as in The Sun Also Rises, it now strikes me–but it’s been a long time since I read that (without the enjoyment that I read Valley), so who knows.

My poetry website, Comprepoetica, is in the list at the head of my column because I was going to get into a millenniatical spiel about all that’s happened this century and all that will be happening next century which I expected to deposit me into some Serious Reminiscing about things like my SMR column, which first appeared in June 1993 and, with this, has now reappeared 36 times, and started to appear early this year at Comprepoetica, too. I was a little leery of rereading them, as I had to, to get the website editing right, but after I did, I felt okay about them. Enough to say more about them in my next installment of this series of columns.

Because I thought I ought to list some magazine above, too, and had a bunch mine editor, LF, had sent me lying around, Chiron Review made this column–even though it’s not at all out of the experioddica universe. It’s half contra-genteel, half mainstream poetry and prose–Marge Piercy, for instance, and an essay on Sharon Olds by Ron McFarland, some neo-Bukowski (very funny) lineated prose by Joan Jobe Smith about Bukowski, and several short reviews of books and magazines, including a good-heartedly supportive one of Lee Thorn’s Fuck, which is out of the experioddica universe–at least to the degree of having poems in it by John M. Bennett. For that alone Chiron Review deserves this mention.

 

A New Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art, Part 1

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Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2011

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Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia
Guest-Editor: Andrew Topel
Script, Issue 2.2, June 2011,
Edited by Quimby Melton, with 8 Associate Editors

http://scriptjr.nl/issues/2.2

Andrew Topel has recently done visiotextual art the signal service of gathering large samples of some of the best work in the field (the international field, I should emphasize) from the past thirty years or more, and putting it on display as an issue of SCRIPTjr.nl, a wildly far-ranging Internet publication (“cyberzine?”) devoted to . . . well, the intro to the zine starts out, “The editors started SCRIPTjr.nl to explore literature’s last frontiers. Primarily interested in the theory and interpretation of filmscripts and teleplays, SCRIPTjr.nl nevertheless recognizes that these literary artifacts exist in a hinterland populated by other abject textual forms.” Such as visual poetry and what I call “textual visimagery” (for visual designs featuring textual elements sans significant verbal meaning like those of Fernando Aguiar I’ll soon be discussing ).

The artists represented are Fernando Aguiar (Portugual). Dmitry Babenko (Russia), Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany), Márton Koppány (Hungary), Hassan Massoudy (France), Constantin Xenakis (France), Ebon Heath (USA and Germany), and Americans K.S. Ernst, Scott Helmes, Karl Kempton, Loris Essary, Kaz Maslanka, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Carol Stetser, Andrew Topel and Paul Zelevansky. Karl Kempton provides an introduction which my friendship for Karl prevents me from saying much about–except that his term for calls the works gathered, “Sound Illumination,” is the least helpful term for such art I’ve yet come across.

To continue being cranky, I feel I need to mention that I found getting around the exhibit somewhat difficult at times. It would have helped me if instructions like “click here to return to first page” were provided–instead of, or along with the icons that one can click to get around. True, the latter will tell you where a click of them will take you if you rest your cursor on them, but one as computer-unfluent as I may take a long time to figure this out.

My one other general gripe is that I found most of the show’s participants over-represented. This is a subjective view. As Karl told me when I complained that the site quickly wore me out in spite of–actually because of–all the good things in it, I could easily have dipped into it for a short time, left, then come back later. But that’s not for me. I would prefer a carefully edited collection of, say, five or six superior works from each artist with links to where one can view other works of theirs–at the end of the full exhibition so as not to distract from the central viewing.

Okay, mostly positive thoughts from now on, thoughts that will sprawl over two columns,  so much is here to discuss, or at least mention.

The most prominent form of art in the show is the visiotextual collage. There are two kinds of such art here. One consists of atextual graphic images seamlessly merged with textual elements to make a unified, usually surrealistically arresting whole. Among the very best of those composing this kind of collage has long been Fernando Aguiar, with 26 samples of his work here. Rarely if ever do the textual elements he uses make words. They generally represent language or something made up of language rather than act as language, as in one of my favorites of his works in this collection in which the sonnet rhyme scheme, “abba abba cdc dcd,” crosses a river out of a young girl’s mouth.

Another first-rate example in the show of such collages is Dero Abecedarius, a 31-frame sequence by Klaus Peter Dencker. Dencker describes this as having “two principles of order: it develops alphabetically and uses New York’s Statue of Liberty as a primary motif. (It) presents the statue, a sort of public-relations symbol, in several variations.” These allow him collagically, with long flowing lines of cursive script in German, to treat freedom versus “the somewhat absurd representations of it that abound in consumer culture.” Also in the show are eight of his selected works, all of them equally effective combinations of graphics and text–in the way of the best magazine advertisements, which I don’t mean as a criticism (since they treat much larger issues than ads, much less predictably–and since many ads are extremely interesting aesthetically).

The other kind of visiotextual collage consists of what seem to be cut-ups thrown together to suggest haphazard spontaneity–that nonetheless (“accidentally”) result in often wonderfully unexpected sensibility- enlargers. Two exponents of such collages are represented in the show, Dmitry Babenko and Paul Zelevansky (albeit the work of neither seems truly “thrown together”).

Babenko’s image-packed work reminds me a bit of the packed eruptions of Wisconsin wildman Malok (who just about never has work in collections like this one, which I can’t understand). Each of Babenko’s 15 pieces consists of more than one closely inter-related frames, and all of them together very likely form a more or less unified sequence. Certainly their colors–browns, tans, greys and dark reds, for the most part–do not change much from one to the next. Not speaking Russian, I can’t comment on what they do verbally, if anything.

Paul Zelevansky only has 13 works here, ten of them illustrating different definitions of the word, “sweep”–amusingly–but, if one stays in each of his poems long enough, one finds them vividly insightful as well, and even more amusing. In the first, for example, he depicts a sheet of paper rising out of a typewriter with the line, “TO WIN OVERWHELMINGLY ALL THE GAMES,” five times, starting about an inch or two below the piece’s title, which is also, “TO WIN OVERWHELMINGLY ALL THE GAMES.” About an inch below the rising sheet of paper is a huge “ALL” in a box next to a second box containing a version of “THE GAMES” with the E of “THE” repeating downward in a stack, then sideways, then back up to its place in “GAMES.” There a hammer is giving it a good smack. The need not merely to win but dominate absolutely could not be more dynamically expressed. Nor how ridiculous it is, particularly considering the patently low quality of the typing. The rest of the sequence is similarly deft, and climbs into another level of amusingness via its interactiveness.

TO BE CONTINUED
.

aberrateur, aah BUHR uh TUHR, noun, from “aberration” and “teur” as it occurs in such words as “saboteur”: one who makes a significant but extremely defective contribution to world culture–Sigmund Freud, for example.

accelerance

accommodance

apollonian, AAH puh low nee aahn, noun, from “Apollo,” Greek god of the sun, whom I consider the ancient god with the most to do with clear thinking:  a person whose aesthetic appreciation is more logic-based than anything else.  OBSOLETE

behavraceptual awareness.

carticeptual awareness

charactration

compreceptual awareness

 

compreplex

contradiction

Long ago an animal’s ability to tell when something in the environment contradicted its expectations had to have evolved. Certainly, human beings have such an ability. In knowlecular psychology, it depends on certain antagonistic pairs of urceptual (i.e., innate) knowlecules called dichotocules. The ways it works is straight-forward. When one dichotocule of such an antagonistic pair is activated, it automatically suppresses k-unit release (i.e., transmission of energy to other brain-cells) of the other to the degree that it is activated. When both are activated at the same time, sensory-cells sensitive to that will turn on a contradiction knowlecule (also urceptual). That neither of the two antagonistic dichotocules can become active will cause frustration–directly or indirectly. As a result, the subject will (or should) lower into accommodance.

Most contradiction knowlecules are activated by some motor or endocrinal dispute such as an arm’s trying to raise and lower itself at the same time (e.g., a child’s parent says not to make a sound, then the child sees a man aim a gun at the parent and tells his vocal cords to yell at the same time that he is continuing to tell them not to yell.) Other natural contradictions may exist, as between black and white, night and day, male and female. . . .

crank,  kraahnk, noun: pseudosopher who draws on untenable premises to construct, with extreme logic, theories whose internal inconsistencies, however gross, and contradiction by external data, however damaging, his lack of exploratoriness prevents him from often encountering, his lack of critical intelligence prevents him from recognizing when he does encounter them, and whose inflexibility would prevent him from doing anything effective about if he did, yet never concedes he may be in any way wrong.

culturateur, KUHL chuhr uh TUHR, noun, from “culture” and “teur” as it occurs in such words as “saboteur”: one who makes a significant  contribution to world culture.

dichotocule

dionysian, DAI oh NEE juhn, noun, from “Dionysus,” Greek god of wine (and, for me, of instinctual pleasures): a person whose aesthetic appreciation is more instinctive than anything else.  OBSOLETE

egoceptual subawareness

egosocioceptual subawareness

evaluceptual awareness

evaluceptual frustration

evaluceptual resolution

expressilyst, ek SPREHS ih lihst, noun, form “expression” and “analyst”: a person whose aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is primarily based on how the poem presents its content, or its manner os expression, rather than with its content.

freewender, FREE wehn duhr, noun, from “free” and “wend”: one of the three temperament types posited by knowlecular psychology, the freewender is characterized by superior accommodance.  Roughly similar to David Riesman’s “autonomous personality.”

frustration, see evaluceptual frustration

fundaceptual awareness possible obsolete

hermesian, huhr MEE jee aahn, noun, a person whose aesthetic appreciation is more experience-based than anything else.  OBSOLETE

heteroteur

human activities

     Art is the serious pursuit of beauty–by artists.  It is not the passive enjoyment of beauty.

     Verosophy is the serious pursuit of truth–the addition of understandings of existence to world culture, not merely the passive study of others’ understandings.

     Utilitry is basically, engineering of some sort or another–the active construction of things or understandings whose purpose is to facilitate other activities as opposed to being carried out entirely for their own sakes, as art and  verosophy are.

     Sustenation is simply what we do as animals to stay alive and reproduce.

     Quotidiation consists of such quotidian activities as gabbing with friends, taking a walk, playing with a dog, that are too trivial to count as art, verosophy or utilitry (but can include passive involvement with those).

     Dominantry is what politicians and warriors of various sorts do to achieve positions of power which allow them to tell others how to live their lives.

     Recreation consists of activities, mainly sports and games like Bridge and Parcheesi, that I consider more important than the activities covered by Quotidiation.

instacon, IHN stih cahn, noun, from “instant of consciousness”: the shortest unit of psychological time, or length of time it takes for a person to be aware of anything.

instinctilyst, ihn STIHNK tih lihst, noun, from “instinct” and “analyst”:  a person whose aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is based primarily on the amount of instinctive pleasure it affords by means of its attention to stimuli normal human beings are automatically attracted to like a 3-month-year-old happy baby.

Internet troll, IHN tuhr neht TROHL: a psychopath who intrudes on Internet discussions seeking solely to damage, or–better–utterly destroy, someone else’s self-esteem, probably out of jealousy over not having any of his own.

(the) is-flip

knowleplex

likenry

magnipetry, maahg NIH peh tree, from “magna” (large) and “poetry,” noun: the best poetry

 

 

maxobjectivity

milyoop

long-term remembering,

milyooplex

 

musclaceptual subawareness

objecticeptual awareness

objectivity

 

phobosopher

pre-sequevaluative process

protoceptual awareness another term for fundaceptual awareness

(the) pre-verbal Is

(the) pre-verbal Is-Not

pseudosopher, soo DAH suh fuhr, irrational seeker of truth

psychevent, SI kuh vehnt, noun, from “psychological” and “event”: all a person experiences during a single instacon–that is, the combination of percepts caused by sensory-cell activation by environmental stimuli and retrocepts caused by simulteneous activation of master-cells in the cerebrum.

reality, ree AAH lih tee, noun: that which causes a conscious mind perceptually to experience it; there are two kinds: subjective reality and objective reality; the former is what one person perceptually experiences or believes himself to have experienced but which few or no other persons have also perceptually experienced; the latter what many people have perceptually experienced.

reducticeptual awareness

repetiteur

resolution, see evaluceptual resolution

rigidnik

rigidniplex

 

sagaceptual awareness narrative-awareness. (This, to be very brief, has to do with a person’s awareness of himself as the hero of a saga and is the basis of goal- directedness, deriving from the
hunting-instinct that I believe even primitive organisms have; it also derives from the predator-avoidance instinct we all also seem to have–in which case one’s sagaceptual goal is escape from an evil rather than
acquisition of a good.)

scienceptual awareness

 

sequevaluative process

short-term remembering, noun, the use of the mnemoduct to awaken memories of recent experiences different in no way from the awakening of long-term memories, but favored by the brain because at the time of their creation, dot-routes are primed.

socioceptual subawareness

supra-apollonian, SOO pruh AAH puh low nee aahn, noun, from “supra” (“above”) and “apollonian”: an apollonian strong  either or both dionysianly and hermesianly.

supra-dionysian, SOO pruh AAH puh DEYE ow nee juhn, noun, from “supra” (“above”) and “dionysian”: a dionysian strong  either or both apollonianly and hermesianly.

supra-hermesian, SOO pruh AAH huhr mee jee aahn, noun, from “supra” (“above”) and “hermesian”: a hermesian strong  either or both apollonianly and dionysianly.

urcept

urceptual persona

dichotomous anthroceptual personic sub-awarenesses: 12

SELF AS                        OTHER AS

child/slave                        father/master

father/master *                 child/slave

nonconformist                  anti-model

conformist                        model

befriendee                        friend

friend *                            befriendee

vicariant                           hero

mother/nurturer **           child

child                                mother

combatant *                    enemy

pet-owner                       dog/cat

male or female                 sex-object

 

 

urwareness

verosolyst, vehr AH soh lihst, noun, from “verosophy” and “analyst”: a person whose aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is based primarily on its truth (according to its freedom from or contamination by contradictions).

verosopath

verosopher

viscraceptual subawareness

wendriplex

KNOWLECULE: a brain’s record of a unit of
knowledge (e.g., a single word in a poem, when taken at its simplest
face-value meaning–as “horse,” for instance, would be when
considered to mean the animal. It would include all that the word
connotes for the indicidual involved.

KNOWLEPLEX a brain’s record of any closely related system
or network of knowlecules–“horse,” for example, when it represents
all the make up a horse, such as a heart, lungs, legs, etc.

KNOWLEXPANSE the representation (or recording) in the
brain of all the data a vocational field or the like, such as
literature requires

KNOWLECULINK a link between two knowlecules; used to
transmit energy from one to the other, or vice versa

NEOWLECULINK a knowleculink which is new for the
individual forming it

NEOWLEPLEX the knowleplex formed when a neowleculink is
laid down

MICREATIVITY (short for “micro-creative”), the creativity
that results in a neowleplex that is a neowleplex only for the
individual it arises in, not for society as a whole.

ALPHA-CREATIVITY the creativity that results in a
neowleplex which is new to the individual’s culture if the
neowleplex comes to be highly valued by the individual’s society

DELTA-CREATIVITY the creativity that results in a
neowleplex which is new to the individual’s culture if the
neowleplex never comes to be highly valued by the individual’s
society: the gifted amateur interior decorator, or the Sunday
painter of talent, for instance, but not most people, who are
generally micreative

CREATIVITY any of the three varieties of creativity just
listed

CULTURATEUR maker of culturally-significant works of art,
science or some other equally major cultural field; always
alpha-creative

ABBERATEUR an agent of large-scale cultural abberation

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The Latest from the Otherstream

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 5/6 May/June 2013

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Addenda.  Márton Koppány. 2012; 56 pp. Pa;
Otoliths,8 Kennedy St., Rockhampton QLD 4700, Australia.  $24.95. http://the-otolith.blogspot.com http://www,lulu.com/spotlight/l_m_young

www.talismanmag.net
Richard Kostelanetz’s Fict/ions and This Sentence
(Blue and Yellow Dog, 2010)
www.talismanmag.net/finkkostelanetz.html

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Back-cover blurbs are usually useless, but Sheila Murphy recently did one for Marton Koppany’s Addenda, that I consider good enough to quote here.

“Conceptual art can be bountiful, spare, even beautiful. With an economy of presentation, Márton Koppány’s work uniquely captures, invents, and refashions installations on the page from unexpected sources. His works run the gamut of humor, politics, and philosophy. Each piece offers a genuine gift of perception. With signature purity, works such as ‘Asemic Volcano,’ showcase the potency of word-free realities.”

At this point, let me break in to say that in “Asemic Volcano” a red question mark is rising from a red volcano that looks like a pedestal–two objects only against a wide violet background–“word-free realities,” to be sure–utterly word-free, which puts them utterly beyond reason’s best explanatory means . . . except for the question mark elegantly labeling the volcano the final enigma at its most minimalistically reduced state that Nature is.  Reason may not be able to escape Nature’s eternal ambiquity, but neither can Nature ever free itself of conceptualization’s attempts to harness it.  Along the same lines, I might add, is “Utterance,” which consists of just an empty comic-strip word-balloon in a small grey rectangle inhabiting a very large all-white rectangle.

Then there’s “Emptiness,” which is a white page with “ness” in cursive taking up a small portion of it followed by any arrow going to the right. “Vibrant with lui-meme realization,” for sure, as Murphy has it.  “‘One Moment in Three Sections’ (or ‘Study’),” she goes on to say, ‘depicts a tiny triumph’” : that of a stick figure keeping a single moment’s “hurrah” (expressed by extended limbs rather words) in force for three frames of a little comic strip.

Murphy ends her blurb with an exuberant but, in my view, accurate reference to Koppany’s “Old Question,” and “Addendum.” In preparing us for ‘Still Life No. 2,’ these,  she says, are “a final reminder of the inherent interconnectedness among all things. The recombinant majesty of Koppány’s genius raises the bar for what is possible in the infinitely expanding universe of visual poetry.”

“Old Question” depicts a huge period wearing the kind of hat most American men wore 60 or 70 years ago. A hand is coming out of the period that clutches  the top of a question mark, using it as a cane.  “Addendum” depicts two question-mark-tops juggling colored balls (or periods).  The two, and others in the book, do indeed, set up “Still Life No. 2,” which may well be the most complex minimalist work in this long-ongoing series of Koppany’s, involving Nature, punctuation, colors, even arithmetic (so slated for an appearance one day in my Scientific American blog if I can afford the fee I’m sure he’ll charge me) and too much else for me to say more about it here.

As I was working out some close readings of Marton’s work for one of my Poeticks.com entries, I was reminded of my friend Richard Kostelanetz’s recently calling me better (ahem) than anyone at close-reading innovative poetry after a visit to one of my Scientific American blog entries.  I replied at the Internet discussion that Richard had made his remark in that if I was, it was only because almost no one else was doing close-readings of innovative poetry.  At that point others brought up names of quite a few who were, and were doing it well–although still not a huge number of them by any means.  Among those mentioned was someone I wasn’t aware of, Thomas Fink.

I got into a pleasant Internet conversation with him, learning of his having done a review of a book of Richard’s for Talisman, an excellent literary magazine that’s been around for quite a while, with now an online version anyone can refer to.  Because it gave me a good excuse to plug a work of Richard’s to pay him back for the compliment, but–even more important–to allow me to bring attention to a good critic of otherstream work, and to the value of close-reading, I thought I’d quote what Fink wrote.

“Blue and Yellow Dog Press has published two books in one by Richard Kostelanetz,” Thomas’s review begins. “Each starts on a different side and is upside down from the other.”  In one of them, Fict/ions,  words are shown infraverbally divided by slashes into two or three inner words–“boo/me/rang,” for example.  About this one’s narrative, Thomas says, “The sound of the flying object cutting through air is a ‘ringing’ (not subtle) denigration of the first-person narrator, perhaps because s/he is foolish to use such a dangerous implement.  Also in a reversal of  the startling transformation of ‘manslaughter’ to ‘Mans/laughter’ through a delayed slash, surprise is engendered by Kostelanetz’s decision to place the first slash one letter earlier (“boo”) than one would expect. I generally hear ‘boom’ in ‘boomerang’ but not ‘boo.’”

I tend to like most those of Richard’s fissional poems (as I call poems like his fict/ions) in which a change of punctuation is even more dramatic as in “Char/is/ma,” to which Thomas brings our attention a little later. “Similarly, the tangible result of a mother’s tragic (tragi/comic, I would say) burning in ‘Char/is/ma,’ he says, “is not evidence of the charisma that she might otherwise possess. The sonic disjunction echoes the thematic one. The juxtaposition of the single word and the three smaller ones indicates a displacement from a unified ‘hot’ or ‘glowing’ psychological quality to the disintegrative effect of actual heat.”

I would especially commend Thomas not only for his close-reading but for the many times he quotes Richard’s material–his “I/nun/dating.” and “Be/aches,” for instance. Or “Does not an encyclopedia of the world inhabit this sentence?” which is from the other book of Richard’s double-book, This Sentence, pointing out how effectively the word, “encyclopedia” in the sentence provokes a reader “to create a fragment of that encyclopedia.”  To put it banally, lo, the power of words–if a poet disturbs a reader’s expectation enough to make him truly reflect on them.

Here are three more of Richard’s sentences to finish pinning down what he’s doing, and because they’re fun:

This sentence is syntactically correct. . . .
This sentence correct syntactically also is. . . .
This sentence not correct is syntactically.

And then there’s possibly my favorite: “Clumsily is this sentence organized unfortunately.”  Thomas make several choice remarks on these and others of the “The Sentences,” but I’ve no room left to include them here.

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