Column 112 — July/August 2012 « POETICKS

Column 112 — July/August 2012

 

The Otherstream 19 Years Ago, Part 2

 


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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Column042 — January/February 2000 « POETICKS

Column042 — January/February 2000



The Arrival of The New Millennium



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




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

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

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

 


 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Personal Literary Evidence for Shakespeare « POETICKS

Personal Literary Evidence for Shakespeare

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

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

(A) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Personal

(B) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Almost Certainly Personal

(C) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Probably Personal

(D) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Slightly More Likely Than Not To Be Personal

(E) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Equally Likely to Be Personal or Not Personal

(F) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Slightly More Likely Than Not Not To Be Personal

(G) Literary Evidence That Is Probably Not Personal

(H) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Almost Certainly Not Personal

(I) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Not Personal

Any fair-minded anti-Stratfordian, and there are a few, will have to admit that such a division is more revealing, if less propagandistically effective, than the simple black&white personal/ impersonal one that Price uses. Not all the evidence is so easily classified of as she pretends.

I also differ from Price in that I use “personal” to mean “testimony by someone who can be shown beyond reasonable doubt to have personally known the person he is testifying about.” Price misuses the term to mean only “testimony by someone who states as he gives it that he personally knows the person he is testifying about.” (I should add that she is not fastidious about sticking to this definition when it suits her agenda not to.) All that concerns her is explicitly personal vidence, a category of just about no value except to propagandists. I
also specify that I am concerned with evidence from the lifetime of the alleged writer concerned only instead of fudging things so I can use evidence from after his death when convenient, as she does.

(A) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Personal

I found no evidence for Shakespeare that I feel belongs in this category, for it is for only the most unarguably certain evidence a writer could leave behind, such as signed, holographic manuscripts, or letters in the hand of an alleged writer concerning his writing, with no evidence extant against their identification as his.. I would admit a some of the evidence Diana Price has found for other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time.

There is no such evidence for a substantial minority of the 24 writers in Price’s study, and only scraps for almost all the rest, just about none having left behind more than one complete manuscript copy of a play, for instance, and only a few leaving behind so much as one
complete manuscript copy of a play.

(B) Literary Evidence That Is Almost Certainly Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

(1)    the dedication to Venus and Adonis, 1593

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLY, EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON, AND BARON OF TICHFIELD. RIGHT HONORABLE, I KNOW not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a god-father, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content; which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world’s hopeful expectation.

Your honour’s in all duty,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

(a) Here we have a dedication in which William Shakespeare personally states that he wrote the poem, Venus and Adonis. One can argue that he didn’t really write it, but one can use that argument against any record someone claims is personal literary evidence for some author. Aside from that, a false or mistaken personal record is still a personal record.

(b) This dedication is also the testimony of its publisher, Richard Field, that William Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis. Since it is near certain that Field personally know William Shakespeare, because (to repeat): (i) their fathers knew each other, Shakespeare’s father having appraised Richard’s father’s inventory sometime around 1590; (ii) Richard and William were from the same small town of some 1500 to 2000 inhabitants, and close enough in age that they would have gone to the same one-classroom school together; (iii) both had literary interests, even if we assume William was only an actor; and (iv) William had a character in Cymbeline, needing a false name, use the pseudonym Richard du Champ, French for “Richard Field.”

(c) Several other writers left records stating that William Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis, and no good evidence that he did not write both it and its dedication.

(2)    dedication to The Rape of Lucrece

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLY, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Tichfield. The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

Your lordship’s in all duty,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

This dedication, published in 1594, is personal literary evidence from his lifetime not only for the same three reasons Shakespeare’s dedication to Venus and Adonis is, but for a subtle third reason: it includes implicitly but near-certainly the personal testimony for Shakespeare of a third witness. It states the Shakespeare had a “warrant” from Southampton, which most reasonable people take to have been patronage, won by Venus and Adonis. That Southampton
liked that poem is close to unarguable because Shakespeare had said in his first dedication that he would not compose a second poem if Southampton did not like the first, and here we have a second poem from him.

Whatever the “warrant” was, though, Shakespeare got it, and it had to be delivered to him. One would think Southampton himself personally gave it to him, but even if not—as  anti-Stratfordians argue—someone had to give Shakespeare—as a writer—the warrant in person. In other words, either Southampton recognized Shakespeare in person as a writer or his go-between did.

(3)    Francis Meres’s Testimony

Meres (1598): “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.”

How would Meres know about the sonnets among Shakespeare’s private friends without being a private friend himself—or by knowing a private friend who was thus a go-between personally recognizing Shakespeare as a poet the way the deliverer of the warrant in (b) was?

(4) Sir George Buc’s Testimony (which I found out about from Alan Nelson)

The Folger Shakespeare Library copy of George a Greene contains an annotation in the hand of George Buc (1560-1622), who was Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622:

Written by ………… a minister, who ac[ted] the pin{n}ers part in it himself. Teste W. Shakespea[re] Ergo, George Buc knew Shakespeare personally, which makes the following Stationers Register entry of Nov. 26, 1607 almost-certainly  personal literary evidence from Shake- speare’s lifetime that he was a writer: “26 Novembris. Nathanial Butter John Busby. Entred for their Copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Thwardens A booke called. Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Banksyde vjd.”

(5) Thomas Heywood’s Testimony

The following, by Thomas Heywood is from “Epistle to the printer after An Apology for Actors” (1612): “Here likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that worke, by taking the two Epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a lesse volume, vnder the name of another, which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him; and hee to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name: but as I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage, vnder whom he hath publisht them, so the Author I know much offended with M. *Jaggard* that (altogether vnknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”

The work Heywood is referring to is Jaggard’s 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of poems, the title page of which said it was by William Shakespeare, but which contained poems known or thought to be by others, including the two poems by Heywood that
Heywood gives the titles of, which were in Heywood’s Troia Britannica (1609).

Because the anti-Stratfordians have had trouble reading it (Diana Price, for instance, claims on pages 130 and 131 of her book that the passage’s “wording is dense, filled with troublesome pronouns” and therefore can’t count as evidence for Shakespeare), let me repeat it,
accompanied by my paraphrase (in caps).

Here likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in

I FEEL I MUST TELL YOU HOW I WAS HARMED IN

that work, by taking the two Epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to

THAT VOLUME BY THE INCLUSION IN IT OF TWO OF MY POEMS (WHICH I NAME)

Paris, and printing them in a less volume, under the name of another,

AND PRINTING THEM IN A LESS SIGNIFICANT VOLUME ATTRIBUTED TO SOMEONE ELSE

which may put the world in opinion I might steal them from him; and he

AN ACT WHICH MAY MAKE IT LOOK TO EVERYONE LIKE I STOLE THE POEMS FROM THAT OTHER PERSON AND HE

to do himself right, hath since published them in his own name: but as

TO INDICATE THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER HAS SINCE PRINTED THEM AS HIS, BUT SINCE

I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage, under whom he

I AM COMPELLED TO ADMIT THAT MY POEMS ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE GIVEN SOME SORT OF REWARD, BACKED, OR THE LIKE, BY THAT OTHER PERSON, WHOSE NAME JAGGARD

(Note: “patronage” to modern ears, is a bit dense as a figure of speech, and the “he” that refers to Jaggard is sloppily used, but not so sloppily as to prevent any reasonable person from figuring out its referent, or for any other reading of the passage to work)

hath published them, so the Author I know much offended with M.

HAS PUBLISHED THEM UNDER. THE WRITER WHOSE NAME WAS SO USED HAS, I KNOW, BECOME VERY ANNOYED AS A RESULT WITH MR.

Jaggard (that altogether un known to him) presumed to make so bold

JAGGARD (WHO WITHOUT THE WRITER’S KNOWLEDGE) AUDACIOUSLY MADE FREE

with his name. These, and the like dishonesties I know you to be clear

WITH THE NAME OF THAT WRITER. I’M SURE YOU COULD NOT BE GUILTY OF SUCH KINDS OF UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR

of; and I could wish but to be the happy Author of so worthy a work as

AND IT WOULD PLEASE ME IF ONLY I WERE THE FORTUNATE WRITER OF A WORK GOOD ENOUGH TO

I could willingly commit to your care and workmanship.

TURN OVER TO YOU (THE PRINTER THIS TEXT IS ADDRESSED TO).

This passage is as clear as anything written back then (and no anti-Stratfordian at HLAS has shown where my paraphrase gets it wrong). To say it is too ambiguous to count as a personal reference to Shakespeare is ridiculous, if not insane. Heywood in effect names him, for only Shakespeare’s name is on The *Passionate Pilgrim*; he calls him an author, and reveals personal information about him. That he knew him personally is corroborated by a later poem Heywood wrote in which he said that Shakespeare was not haughty, and known to all as just “Will.”  Even if you decide Heywood did not personally know Will, he had to have gotten his information about him from someone who did know him personally and that he was upset with Jaggard’s misuse of his name.

(C) Literary Evidence That Is Probably Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

(1) Greene’s Testimony

The author of Greenes Groatsworth of Witte (1592), whether Robert Greene, as I believe, or Henry Chettle, as others do, states that William Shakespeare, the actor, was a playwright (since he is said to conceitedly believe that one of his lines makes him as good a composer of blank verse as Christopher Marlowe and two other playwriting associates of Greene’s).  (See my essay on the Groatsworth for details.) That Greene (or whoever it was who was calling himself Greene) not only knows of this actor and that he was writing plays (or parts of plays), but pronounces him conceited, and a jack-of-all trades with some certainty strongly suggests that Greene personally knew him—as does Greene’s centrality in the London writing trade, just about everyone in which he seemed to know. But Shakespeare is only identified by his acting vocation, authorship of a line from Henry VI, Part 3 (said to be his in the First Folio and not attributed to anyone else anywhere else), and the nonce term, “Shake-scene,” to refer to Shakespeare, not explicitly. Hence, I put it in this category rather than into B.

(2) Henry Chettle’s Testimony

I contend that in his preface to Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), Henry Chettle identifies Shakespeare as a playwright he has met in person and found to be a swell guy. He doesn’t give this playwright’s name, but in speaking of him, he is clearly speaking of the Crow of Greenes
Groatsworth of Wit
(i.e., Shakespeare), for he is apologizing for offensive statements in the Groatsworth that could only have been directed at the Crow, the only one insulted therein who was an actor, or—for that matter—had both an art and a vocation.

(3) John Davies’s Testimony

In 1603, John Davies of Hereford writes of his love of actors, including a W.S. (coupled with an R.B.) whom Davies also loved for poetry and who, except for anti-Stratfordians, is almost certainly Shakespeare.  Two years later he also refers positively to actors, particularly “R.B.
and W.S.,” in a poem. I mention this to indicate the probability that he actually knew W.S. and R.B. personally, because of his fondness for actors in general, and them in particular.

In 1610, a more explicit poem by Davies about Shakespeare was published:

To Our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake-speare

Some say (good Will). which I, in sport, do sing,
Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King;
And been a King among the meaner sort.
Some others rail; but, rail as they think fit,
Thou hast no railing, but, a reigning Wit:
And honesty thou sowst, which they do reap;
So, to increase their stock which they do keep.

To start with, Davies describes Shakespeare as a dramatist, as Terence was. In the body of the poem, he speaks of Shakespeare’s reigning wit, and reveals his knowledge of comments about Shakespeare. This, for me, is suggestion enough that Davies knew Shakespeare, but the fact that the poem is one in a sequence of poems Davies wrote about various of his friends, all of them complimentary, though one or two are teasingly mocking, as well, makes it probably, for me, that Davies personally knew Shakespeare.

(4) the impresa

A 1613 record (“Item, 31 Martii 1613 to Mr. Shakespeare in gold about my Lord’s impresa xlivs. To Richard Burbage for painting and making it, in gold xlivs.”) is further evidence that a William Shakespeare was an actor, albeit only weakly circumstantial since the “Shakspeare” here not only is not identified as an actor but may have been some other Shakespeare, such as John Shakespeare, the royal bitmaker Charlotte Stopes turned up in her researches. But Burbage and Shakespeare were associated together too many times for it to be likely that here Burbage was for the first and apparently only time associated with some other Shakespeare than Will, and that the other Shakespeare was constructing some kind of clever/arty picture/motto
combination of just the kind that Shakespeare the writer imaged so often in his plays and that Burbage would have had the talent to paint.

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

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

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

(5) The Testimony of the Title-Pages

Throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime title-pages of published plays attributed those plays to him. They are obviously literary evidence that he wrote them. I consider them probably personal because it doesn’t seem possible to me that none of the many publishers who published his plays and testified that he wrote them by placing his name on their title-pages knew him personally. Diana Price, in fact, is sure that nearly all of them did—except as a play-broker, rather than as a playwright. Nonetheless, if they knew him personally, their testimony on the title-pages of the books they published must be considered personal literary evidence. This must hold, also, for the title-pages of published plays they put his name or initials on that scholars are close to unanimous in considering not to have been Shakespeare’s work: if a
publisher personally knew Shakespeare, and publically stated that he was the author of a particular book, then his testimony is personal literary evidence that that was the case (however easily counter evidence might outweigh it). Interestingly, since no known published
play of the times had the name of a non-writer on its title-page, even Shakespeare’s name on the thtile-page of a play he did not write is strong evidence that he was a writer.

(D) Literary Evidence Slightly More Likely Than Not To Be Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

(1) The Testimony of John Weever

Here is John Weever’s sonnet on Shakespeare, which appeared in his Epigrammes (1599):

Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue
I swore Apollo got them, and none other,
Their rosy-tainted features clothed in tissue,
Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother.
Rose-cheekt Adonis with his amber tresses,
Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her,
Chaste Lucretia virgine-like her dresses,
Proud lust-stung Tarquine seeking still to prove her:
Romea-Richard; more, whose names I know not,
Their sugred tongues, and power attractive beauty
Say they are Saints, although that Sts they show not
For thousands vows to them subjective dutie:
They burn in love thy childre Shakespear het the
Go, wo thy Muse more Nymphish brood beget them.

According to E.A.J. Honigmann, “Weever made (this poem) a ‘Shakespearian’ sonnet; of around 160 epigrams in his collection, most of them between four and twenty lines in length, one, and only one, is fourteen lines long and rhymes abab, cdcd, efef, gg. This can only mean one thing – that Weaver had seen some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and wished to signal to others in the know that he had enjoyed this privilege.” That would make him one of the friends Shakespeare circulated his sonnets among. Pure speculation, yes, but possibly correct.

(2) The Testimony of Antony Scoloker

In his preface to “Diaphantus; or, the Passions of Love” (1604), Antony Scoloker writes: “(an epistle to the reader) should be like the Never-too-well read Arcadia, where the Prose and verce (Matters and Words) are like his Mistresses eyes, one still excelling another and without Corivall: or to come home to the vulgars Element, like Friendly Shakespeare’s Tragedies, where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.”

If Scoloker was referring to Shakespeare’s personality, his use of the adjective “friendly” to describe him would indicate that he personally knew him (or that someone else who personally knew him had told Skoloker he was friendly); but since Scoloker here could be referring to Shakespeare’s “friendly” style as a writer, I don’t feel I can assume that he knew Shakespeare the man. (There are two conflicting questions for me: why insert an adjective about a man’s disposition in a paragraph otherwise entirely about writing; and why use the adjective in front of Shakespeare’s name rather than in front of “tragedies” if it is supposed to describe the latter?)

(3) The Testimony of John Webster

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

( Let me pause here to ask why Price counts Webster’s verse as CPLE for both Heywood and himself. On its face it suppports the claim that Webster knew Heywood and thought Heywood was the author of “Apology for Actors.” But how does it persuade us that Webster was himself an author? If Shakespeare’s dedications to V&A and RoL don’t count, Webster’s name at the bottom of a printed verse is no  evidence of his authorship. There is no indication that Webster’s rough draft manuscript for the verse survives, nor does Heywood’s bio show any reciprocal record of esteem for Webster. This is not the only case where a commendatory verse gets counted twice in the CPLE data. I have to say it sounds like stuffing the ballot box.)

Now, to continue:

John Webster, 1612 (“To the reader” prefacing The White Devil):

Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance; for mine own part I have ever truly cheris’d my good opinion of other men’s worthy labors: especially of that full and height’ned style of Master Chapman; the labor’d and understanding works of Master Jonson; the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher; and lastly, without wrong last to be named, the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, M. Dekker, and M. Heywood; wishing that what I write may be read by their light; protesting that, in the strength of mine own judgment, I know them so worthy that, though I rest silent in my own work, yet to most of theirs I dare, without flattery, fix that of Martial: non norunt, haec monumenta mori [“these monuments know not how to die”].

On the surface, Webster’s praise is impersonal–the kind that is appropriate when “there was no personal relationship,” as Price’s husband put it in an HLAS discussion. Webster praises everyone’s “worthy labors”; the “style” of Chapman; the “works” of Jonson; the “composures” of Beaumont and Fletcher; the “industry” of the last three. I mention it here, however, because of its reference to Webster’s “beloved friend” Heywood, without a single adjective to indicate he was a friend of Webster’s. In other words, Price’s policy of counting only testimony that is explicitly personal as personal evidence is improper. So, by including Shakespeare in the company of a certain friend of his, Webster may, ever so slightly, be indicating that
Shakespeare, too, was his friend.

(4) The Testimony of Leonard Digges

In 1613 Leonard Digges compared the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of “our Will Shakespeare,” which is a pretty friendly way to refer to Shakespeare—and Digges was not only a close neighbor of Shakespeare’s in both Aldermarston and in London, his father-in-law was remembered by Shakespeare in his will, and served as one of the two overseers of that will. But Digges could have meant “England’s” by “our.” I’m also not sure that “Will” wasn’t the name everyone knew Shakespeare by, not just his friends. Given a choice between calling this piece of evidence personal or impersonal, I’d call it personal. Fortunately, with a sane way of arranging such items in a continuum, I don’t have to do that here.

(E) Literary Evidence Equally Likely to Be Personal or Not Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime

This category would include just about all the literary evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime that is not explicitly personal nor consigned to the preceding categories. I don’t believe there is any known piece of evidence for Shakespeare that can confidently be described as certainly or even probably impersonal. Edward Alleyn, for instance, referred to Shakespeare as a poet; was the reference personal? I, for one, would suspect it probably was since it seems unlikely two such important figures in the London theatre world of the time would not have met, but we lack sufficient data to say one way or the other. The same seems true for all the other evidence for Shakespeare. So this category is the last on my nine that I will concern myself with here. And I won’t bother to list the pieces of evidence that would go into it, for I have covered most of them in the main body of my book, Shakespeare and the Rigidniks.

2 Responses to “Personal Literary Evidence for Shakespeare”

  1. william S. says:

    Hi Bob,

    I’ve never seen or heard of your book sh and the rigidniks and will lovingly peruse and promote its contents. I’m off for a google of it and then I’ll post it.

    My favourite evidence for Sh is from Sir Richard Baker who mentions those that were writers and actors too. Unfortunately it shows up 30 years after his death so inadmissible for the conspiracists.

    FUnny as Baker is a direct contemporary and frequented the London playhouses when he studied there.

    cheers,
    Will

  2. Bob Grumman says:

    Thanks for the comment, Will. You should know, though, that my Shakespeare and the Rigidniks is a hard copy that I must mail to you if you want a copy. E.mail a request to [email protected] and I’ll send you a copy. Free, but will need postage from you if you’re overseas.

    all best, Bob

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton « POETICKS

Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

I wasn’t sure what to put in this entry, I’m so blah.  Fortunately I remembered I  had just gotten a package of poems from Karl Kempton, reflections, among which were many worthy of re-publication here, such as this:

mindless x ( ) = less mind

The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:

old pond

frog

splash

!

Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that.  Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.

 * * *

Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M.  Tough day.  A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40.  I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago.  Then marketing followed by the delivery of ”The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present.  After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore.  I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much.  But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore.  Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty.  Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.

.

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Column082 — July/August 2007 « POETICKS

Column082 — July/August 2007



Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Seven

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 7-8, July-August 2007




      Cosmoetica.
      Webmaster: Dan Schneider.
      http://www.cosmoetica.com.

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

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

      Tomi Shaw’s Blog.
      http://tomirae.blogspot.com.

 


One of the first blogs I came across that mentioned me when I was trying to round up links to my works on the Internet was Tomi Shaw’s. My name cropped up in her interview of someone named Jason Sanford. In conjunction with (gah) the Philistine poetry website of Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica. Sanford was actually praising the moron: ” . . . Dan educated himself about poetry by reading and studying everything he could on the subject. From his website Cosmoetica.com, he now publishes poetry and literary critiques that drive the literary establishment crazy. Basically, Dan takes a no-holds- barred, analytical approach to critiquing writing. If he likes your work, he says exactly why it is good. If he hates it, he lays out why in immense, excruciating detail. His site has literally recorded tens of millions of visitors since it debuted in early 2001. If you Google for information on poets like Bob Grumman or Thylias Moss, his critiques pop up. Dan and his website were even mentioned in the New York Times Book Review last year in the essay ‘The Widening Web of Digital Lit.’”

I fired off a comment, naturally. It got no response, naturally. As I keep saying, Internetters seem to just want to make assertions, then go their way; they don’t want to discuss anything (with anyone, not just me), which keeps the Internet from being as valuable as it could be. I said, “I agree with (Jason Sanford) that webmeisters and bloggers like Dan Schneider, who have a passion for some kind of poetry, and energetically promote their points of view, are the future of poetry, but there are a huge number of them superior to Schneider. I do applaud the way he takes on poetry he doesn’t like, such as mine, at some length. But he doesn’t really do much analysis, preferring assertions, and if any of his victims responds to his crap, he ignores him–except occasionally to lie about how he has “denuded” him. Evidence of all this is at my po-X- cetera blog. But, hey, thanks for mentioning my name!”

Near the top of the list of links an Internet search of my name will bring up is Schneider’s alleged “denudement” of me, which is annoying. All he did, by the way, was reveal his complete inability to understand what I was doing in a rough draft of one of my mathemaku at my blog, treating the rough draft as a completed work. He’s basically an estabnik, but proudly allying himself with the poetry establishment of the fifties, rather than with the present one–yet courageously pooh-poohing T. S. Eliot to prove his non- comformity. His poetry, as I show at my blog, is unadventurous and semi-competent at best in technique, and dead-standard in outlook, diction and imagery–except where it improves to incoherence.

For a change of pace, and to show what an excellent bookstore the Internet can be, here’s a sonnet from 44 Sonnets, a paperback by Mike Snider that he’s hawking at his blog (for just $3), and I deem well worth buying, unless you hate formal poetry. The sonnet’s called “Homework”:

      My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
      How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
      Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
      To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,
      How even flaws in this numerical romance
      Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
      Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
      That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.
      Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
      Than nudge her at her homework while I try
      To master patterns made so long before
      My birth that stars since then have left the sky?
      I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
      Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.

Here is what I say about this at my blog: “The remarks I lost (when my blog crashed) were penetrating, I’m sure, but I remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics (i.e., standard contemporary mainstream American poems)–but employing rhymes (note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal sensitively with common human situations and end in effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal music that meter and rhyme can provide.

“One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these, is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation. That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor) equating writing verse with astronomy (and the ones equating either with doing homework, or learning in general). And with poems for the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional, but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.” Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character studies, too. (Note: I’m pretty sure Schneider would agree with me on this one, but even Philistines can be right about some poems.)”

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Column086 — March/April 2008 « POETICKS

Column086 — March/April 2008



Simplexity

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2008




      Simplex 17.
      Edited by derek beaulieu
      2007, 18 sheets; House Press,
      #2, 733 2nd Avenue Northwest,
      Calgary, Alberta, Canada t2n 0e4. np.
 


Early in December 2005, derek beaulieu sent out an invitation to various artists, including me, to participate “in a collaborative / constraint-based concrete poetry portfolio.” Each artist opting in would get a Letraset sheet from beaulieu with instructions to make a work using part or the whole of it and nothing else–on a standard sheet of typing paper. I, to my regret, was too lazy to accept the invitation–something that happens too often with me. Seventeen artists did, though, including Nicole Burisch, Frances Kruk, Jonathan Ball, Christian Bok and Pete Spence. Dan Waber, too, luckily for me–because his piece was a tribute to 15 concrete poets that included me, so he was kind enough to send me a copy of the portfolio. This latter consisted of 17 8..5″ by 11″ sheets of heavy stock in the pocket of a standard stationary store folder–with an eighteenth sheet containing beaulieu’s preface and a list of the contributors.

As is so often the case with the anthologies of otherstream poetry I see, this one would serve excellently as a short survey course in its subject, which is not only concrete poetry but the poetry I call “infraverbal” (because of the poetic importance of what it does inside words). A piece by Bruce Andrews, for instance, is full of infraverbally fragmented words–“E     LA/LA        ting,” for one (a multi-meaninged representation of Los Angeles, among other things). But he scatters his fragments into a visiopoetic design, with a good deal of shattered, disoriented letters metaphoring creation/destruction, death/rebirth– emanating, to my eye, from the one more or less linearly printed word in the piece, “COLUMN,” albeit without its C, and upright rather than horizontal, so his poem is as much a concrete one as infraverbal.

Geoffrey Hlibchuk’s piece is primarily infraverbal. At first, I thought it perhaps the weakest piece in the collection. It consists of a somewhat crude depiction of a sine wave fashioned of what look like two capital U’s, one upside-down, and a horizontal line, up in the top right; the apparent title of the piece, “Sine Curve,” in the bottom left; and a few letters flipped above “Sine Curve”–with a tiny star just above them. These letter, I eventually realized, spelled “univerSe.” Each of them is a different distance exactly above the same letter in the phrase, “Since Curve,” below them–in classic adherence to a long- practiced concrete poetry convention. Ergo, “sine curve” turns out to be an anagram for “universe”–with a C left over. Zing. Something as fundamental as a sine curve from which cometh something fundamental in a much more huge way. With a C–for the speed of light and/or “sea/see,” and no doubt other things that make that plausibly connect to the poem’s foreburden (roughly: “sine curve underlies universe”), so qualify as legitimate undermeanings.

Every once in a while, I come upon an artwork that really bothers me. That’s because I like it, but–even after more than a few minutes with it–can’t figure out why. Such is the case with John M. Bennett’s contribution to Simplex 17, a frame around a mess of letters and letter-fragments. It is clearly visual. It also has a few words, the central one being, “TURD,” which shouldn’t surprise those familiar with Dr. Johnee’s work, continuuming from the basest of the base to the loftiest of the lofty zones of human experience, however subtlely, as it so often does.

The only other significant words immediately evident are what the frame is made of. Strings of o’s, u’s or n’s, s’s, r’s and e’s, they can be said to spell “ours,” “no,” “on,” soon,” “noon,” “none,” and “one,” the letter u doubling as n–or vice versa. So, does the text, “soon (at) noon) no one, none, ours,” or some similar combination of those words, with or without “on,” contribute enough to the piece’s central meaning to make it (by my standards) a poem? You got me. Needless to say, there is much more going on in the work than I’m able to discuss here that could well makes things much clearer.

Representing the down&dirty strand of concrete poetry in the anthology is “Emplacement and Drift,” by Jason Christie. A work of many overlapping texts, it is a problem piece for me for the same reasons Bennett’s is. It has words, but its words are hard to make anything coherent out of. The piece is similar to Bennett’s, too, in seeming to be (linguiconceptually) a depiction of language in disintegration or formation–or, more exactly, emplaced but adrift. The cursive prettiness of one of the work’s phrases spells, “Velvet Touch Lettering,” to provide a sardonic commentary on what’s going on. But a little slash of black from all the typographical noise jangle around it alters the c to a t. It thus becomes, almost, “truth.” Ergo, is some kind of touch/truth our subject?

Dan Waber’s contribution is a veritable survey course of concrete poetry within a survey course in concrete poetry, as it’s title makes clear: “probable lineage (for Eugen Gomringer, bpNichol, Geof Huth, Karl Kempton, Aram Saroyan, endwar, Nico Vassilakis, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, derek beaulieu, Clemente Padin, Roy Arenella, Irving Weiss, Karl Young, Marton Koppany, and Bob Grumman).” A historical survey of the field. From his letraset sheet, Dan has used nothing (aside from a few arithmetical symbols and two punctuation marks) but o’s and h’s–and parts of the latter, primarily u’s and n’s but also some y’s and and ingenious r broken off an n–that was broken off an h–to trace the field. He begins with Gomringer’s “Silence” (here represented by three layers of five o’s with the middle one missing), and touches on well-known pieces of all the other concretists in his title–“om” for karl kempton, for example, with the same word except with an m with an extra leg in it for Aram Saroyan, for example. It ends at the bottom of the page with a line like the one from simple arithmetic problems (which is how I got into it) with an exclamation point under it, to stand for the poet whose lineage is represented, Dan Waber himself.

As usual, I want to keep writing about this fine experiment beaulieu has pulled off, but haven’t room to. So, here I end.

 

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Column051 — July/August 2001 « POETICKS

Column051 — July/August 2001



Hodgepodge 2001



Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2001




Axle, issue 76, November 2000.
Edited by Tony Figallo. 4 pp;
Paper Virus Press, Box 4180,
Richmond East, Victoria Australia 3121. $10.

Fuck!, Volume 4, Numbers 1 and 3,
January and March 2001. Edited by Lee Thorn
6 pp, each; Lee Thorn, Box 85571,
Tucson AZ 85754. $4/3 issues.

O!!Zone 2001, Winter 2001.
Edited by Harry Burrus. 64 pp;
O!!Zone, 1266 Fountain View,
Houston TX 77057-2204 or
[email protected]. $20.

100, by Charles Doria. 228 pp;
2000; Pa; Charles Doria,
[email protected]. $7.50, ppd.

Popular Reality, Volume 436, Number 7,
January 2001. Edited by Suzy Crowbar Poe.
12 pp; Popular Reality, 116 Shepard,
Lansing MI 48912. $1 (payable to Susan Poe).

The Secret Life of Words.
Edited by Betsy Franco and Maria Damon.
142 pp; 2000; Pa; Teaching Resource Center,
Box 82777, San Diego CA 92138. $18.95.

——————————————————————————–

Today is the second day of spring, and I’ve decided to spring clean my files of matter to review. Hence, the hit&miss hodgepodge to follow.

First item in the alphabetical order I’ve decided to follow, is Axle, a monthly newsletter for an Australian group devoted to “concrete, visual, action, photo and sound poetries,” because it contains a nice (altered) excerpt from a Runway Spoon Press Book. That’s my outfit, in case you don’t know, and I can’t resist any opportunity to plug my authors. The book excerpted from is Commentaries (II) (available for $5 from me at bobgrumman@nut-n- but.net), the author David Miller. The part excerpted is a set of variations on a line, “waking: a figure of stars seen through a glass wall,” that Miller shows fully awake in a larger text otherwise asleep in different degrees of obscuring line-outs.

Next up is Fuck!, whose editor, Lee Thorn, deserves all kinds of kudos for keeping a monthly (!) going for over three years now. The two issues nearest at hand, like all the issues of Thorn’s zine that I’ve seen, are down ‘n’ dirty: three sheets of typing paper stapled in the upper left corner and covered mostly with contra-genteel poetry and drawings. Neatly-typed. Among the specimens of poetry in the March issue is Ryan G. Van Cleave’s, “Y Chromosome,” which is refreshingly pro-male (but laughingly so.) Its third stanza is: “More than a swerve from mere genital utility/ it’s a dynamic curiosity, the driving desire to know./ We don’t mean to be insatiable,/ but we are,” followed by, “.” The poem ends, “We’ve already got one X chromosome./ Who’d be nuts enough/ to trade all this in for another?” Others, including Antler, have some good stuff in the March issue, too, and for my crowd there are four infraverbal gems in it from Mike Basinski, one of which includes the passage, “LARGE/ Nevel’s oranges/ textswitch detect defect,” and if you don’t hum up at the sight of “textswitch” with its blur of witchery/ text-switchery/ sandwichery/ wit-stitchery,” then I suspect infraverbality will never be your thing. The January issue boasts two inimitable visual poems by Joel Lipman (whose work I too rarely see in print), one with the crude slogan “First poetry, later de/ Mockracy,” which is–as just quoted–a kinda silly joke but type-set/mis-set/myth-set/et-set by Lipman yields all kinds of shimmers about firstness, poetry, communication–and later deMockracy/ freedom, et-set. Among the more standard good stuff in that issue is Thorn’s “people are/ SO/ FUCKING/ RUDE// and then, if you don’t like it,/ YOU’RE the asshole.”

The latest issue of O!!Zone is as packed with excellent reproductions of mostly first-rate straight illumages, visual poems (mostly in the form of collages) and illustrated straight poems as ever. The mix of nationalities is particularly appealing, Russia being especially well-represented.

Then there’s Charles Doria’s 100, a collection of short poems which includes, “1/1/00″: “when everything old/ becomes all things new/ we’ll laugh down/ meadows lightly green” but is mostly leftist anger with the USA, as in, “Beirut”: “260 USA dead/ Reagan/ why weren’t you there/ instead” or with what I’d call American Christianity (“evertime I see a christer/ moving the mouth/ this marvelous urge/ to piss it shut”). It’s hard, however, to get too peeved with him, if you don’t agree with him, after his untitled: “the hair on my head is/ just like the hair on my ass/ can you tell if/ I’m talking or farting.”

The latest issue of Popular Reality is as wacked-out as ever, with all kinds of funny stuff crammed into its tabloid-sized pages like the description by Editor Crowbar of her date with John M. Bennett, similarly funny texts and drawings by Al Ackerman, and a reproduction of an authentic old-timey ad for the Smith and Wesson Bicycle Revolver, “the only SAFE Arm For Bicyclists . . . cannot be fired by accident, even in the event of a header.” Also in the issue are discussions of flouridation, electromagnetic radiation and like conspiracies as well as a tragi-comic attack by Jim Goad on Jim Hogshire’s destructive attempts to help Goad in his trial for beating up a nutto woman who had attacked him. It has a nice Musicmaster illumage, too, and I much like the unattributed drawing on the front cover that outlines a man (leaving out his face and like details) who is sitting at a dining table with his fork into something circular on a plate; “It almost tasted like the real thing,” it is captianed. Another dumb-sounding throw-away that really resonates for me.

Last on my list of items to cover in this report is a book for elementary school teachers (grades 3-6), The Secret Life of Words, that uses a charming collection of user-friendly poems to get schoolchildren into the fun of poetry. I mention it mainly, I will admit, because one of MY mathematical poems is in it, but it has some neato stuff by bpNichol, too, such as “Sixteen Lilypads,” which consists of a large square that has been divided into sixteen small squares, each containing some permutation of “frog,” such as “fr?g,” “?rog,” and, finally, “????.” Its inclusion of many other infraverbal and/or visual poems like Nichol’s, and all sorts of other kinds of poetry give it a wider range than any adult anthology I know of–and make it certain to excite the more verbally imaginative children (and teachers) lucky enough to be exposed to it.

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Column061 — July/August 2003 « POETICKS

Column061 — July/August 2003



Mad Poet Symposium, Part Four

 


Small Press Review,
Volume 35, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2003




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.

Modern Haiku, Volume 34.1, Winter-Spring 2003.
Lee Gurga, Editor
100 pp; Pa;
Box 68, Lincoln IL 62656.
www.modernhaiku.org
1-yr. sub. (3 copies) $21.

Sack Drone Gothic
Al Ackerman
16 pp; 2003; Pa;
Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $6.

Writing To Be Seen: Book and Related Arts by Visual Poets
K.S. Ernst and Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Curators
20 pp; 2003; Pa;
Kathy Ernst, 13 Yard Avenue, Farmington NJ 07727. $12.50.

 


 

First off, let me apologize for not getting my column for the January/February issue of Small Press Review in on time. I somehow got it into my head I had an extra month to do it in that I didn’t have. My column should be in every issue from now on, however: I’ve instructed Len to just re-publish one of my old columns sdrawkcab if I’m ever late again.

Okay, now to the catalogue for the “Second Wave” exhibit my recent columns have been about.. I had hoped to spend the rest of the year praising it, but new Important Announcements I have to get to have intervened. Hence, I must finish my review of it with just few randomly-chosen samples from those of its pages I didn’t cover before: (1) a quotation from Richard Kostelanetz’s One Night Stood: “I didn’t// Again, later”; (2) a poem from Larry Tomoyasu’s Between: “in tornado weather the sheets stay out/ to field, curse sudden against the/ electrified smell of the sky.” and (3) a poem by Mikhail Magazinnik from the first issue of the magazine, Koja: “March bride the groom/ Kill bugs the spray/ Bell toll the wed/ Sky land the grey.” The rest of the catalogue’s contents are at the same level as these (whatever you think that level is), trust me.

My Important Announcements will also reduce my return to the symposium in the title of my series to this single paragraph. Its subject: Saturday, 27 September 2002, the day of the presentations. They were given simultaneously in two different rooms, so I missed the following: a talk by Robert H. Jackson about William S. Burroughs’ Influence on Recent Writing; Bill Austin’s “Against Formalism: Experiments with Internality,” which Dave Baratier described to the Poetics List on the Internet as a “poetic tribute to (the) Avant-Garde (which) deconstructed major paradoxes of its eternally vanishing identity, and its relation to form and desire”; one of Michael Basinski’s amazing performances “smoothly mining all visual, semantic and sound associations from the dense texture of his quite funny visuals, made with/from the most “democratic” materials like regular markers and cereal boxes,” according to Baratier; Geoffrey Gatza’s, “Tantalum: The Congo War Interpreted Through Consumer Acuity,” which mixed corpo-speak, langpo and visual poetry; a John M. Bennett reading; a Jesse Glass reading which included sound pieces influenced by the Japanese white noise scene; Michael Peters’s “Wholesale Form: An Attack on the Corporate Form” which Igor Satanovsky described on the Internet as “a sonic assault and atmosphere of serious nervous restlessness and paranoia, moving on to dissect means of corporate invasive mental domination”; a talk by Columbus small press editor, Jennifer Bosveld, on “Poetry as Extreme Sport: Difficulties on the Road to Invention”; and readings by Peter Ganick and Joel Lipman that I was unable to find out much about except that they went well. More next issue.

There. Now, finally, my Important Announcements. My first is “Whether you are out of work or suck/ Gush/ On, gush on, you loofa belt. E.g. the air.” Which is to say that Al Ackerman got loose again, this time in the pages of a thing called Sack Drone Gothic, which is a “‘Heroic’ Hack . . . drawn from various John M. Bennett poems.” And very funny while farthingaling any receptive mind hostier for burstnorm poetry by being in a weird rich way poetry its own self. (Note: a farthingale, which I was writing about just now in something for another literary magazine, is a young shoot of a tree that was used to make skirts jut out at the hip in Elizabethan times.)

An even more important announcement is that Kathy Ernst’s Press Me Close has recently published a catalogue of the exhibit she and Marilyn Rosenberg curated at The Center for Book Arts in New York last fall. It has a picture of ME on the front (in full color!), so well worth the asking price. The catalogue has excellent color reproductions of most of the works in the show, two to five (usually three) from each of the following: Guy R. Beining, David Cole, Kathy Ernst, William L. Fox, Me, Scott Helmes, Crag Hill, Bill Keith, Karl Kempton, Joel Lipman, Marilyn Rosenberg, Carol Stetser and Karl Young.  I was on the cover as co-editor of Writing To Be Seen, the anthology of visiotextual art the show was promoting.

My final announcement is that the winter/spring issue of Modern Haiku has two fascinating full-color haiku-collages in it by Chris Gordon. It also contains an excellent long essay on the influence of haiku on the French between 1850 and 1930 or so. In other words, it appears that the new editor of Modern Haiku, Lee Gurga, is keeping it as superior to just about every other poetry periodical going as it was under the editorship of Robert Spiess (whose death in March of last year I regret taking so long to mention, for he was quietly a pivotal figure in American Poetry for a good many years).

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