Shattered

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2002

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american poetry (free and how)
Igor Satanovsky. 60 pp; 2001; Pa;
Koja Press, Box 140083, Brooklyn NY
11214 (and kojapress.com). $10.

Shattered Wig Review, issue # 2, Spring 2001.
Edited by Rupert Wondolowski. 68 pp;
Shattered Wig Press, 425 E. 31st St., Baltimore
MD 21218 (and normals.com/wig.html). $5 ppd.

Teen Cardinal. Mitchell W. Feldstein.
78 pp; 2001; Pa; Shattered Wig Press,
425 E. 31st St., Baltimore MD 21218
(and normals.com/wig.html). $8 ppd.

Tundra, issue # 2, September 2001.
Edited by Michael Dylan Welch. 128 pp;
Michael D. Welch, Box 4014, Foster City
CA 94404 (and [email protected]). $9.

 

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Those of you who have risen to the “Akron-yellow level” of penis marmelading will well understand why I must pass on the “word” concerning the latest issue of Shattered Wig Review before covering the book and magazine I said I would (if “synka umpha- polkishly”) at the end of my previous column. For one thing, there is a delicious sociological diagram on the front depicting the rape by human spacemen of one of a moon-like alien planet’s multi-tenacled citizens. For another, its helpful editor, some guy calling himself Rupert, described a deliciously moving conversation he had with some Mormons. He told them, among other things, “how that politician from Louisiana who wrote ‘You Are My Sunshine’ used to say that yodeling was a form of time travel.”

The zine features humor, too, such as Nick Jones’s “Traveling”: “The pattern on the/ Seattle Airport carpet reminds/ me of some bacon,” which I have quoted in full. Of course, its theological “plain talk” is, as always, the zine’s strong point, as in Al Ackerman’s survey of John M. Bennett’s sermons (the famed “under the tank bobbin” ones, in fact). These include one called, “Sounds Reasonable,” that I especially like, for some reason: “A man came home early from work one afternoon and found his wife in the living room with a naked man. ‘Dear, this is Bob G., whose oil wallets giggle with inflation with impaction kinda sodden cleaver,’ she explained.” Later Willie Smith starts a story, “Jesus needed a pack of smokes.” In short, although disparate, sickle-cell anemia is no excuse. There are a lot of wacked out great drawings, too, some worked into comic strips by A. Goldfarb (3 times) and Mary Knot and Beppi, a writer/illustrator team.

Okay, now for the book, Igor Satanovsky’s american poetry (free and how), that I promised to discuss. A piece called, “histology of the projectivist’s cortex,” sets it going. It consists of a diagram of a human cerebral cortex’s layers of “Black Mountain,” “Projective” and “Objective” cells; one of the Projective cells is shown gaining stimulation from “beat” and “foreign” nerve fibers, which it passes on to “deep image nuclei.”

Next comes a dictated prose text, its shortest paragraph saying, “paragraph i want to quote transcend unquote limitations of language given to me as a complete alien body to accept comma to strip on comma to explore,” to wryly bring to mind images of accepting and stripping on commas, among other things.

What to say about “4 pieces on the nature of redness” except that I laughed at passages like “honeymoon with a fat lady’s gonna last/ until she starts to sing/ but he liked his new girlfriend.” Later, in the second section of the two-part book, which is called, “how,” Satanovsky concentrates on “recuts,” or the mangling of appropriated material into strange, usually comical but also often weirdly lyrical combinations.

Interwoven throughout the volume are illustrations, most of them in two frames, generally with parts of photographically “real” images seen through very disturbed lenses. Among them is a wonderful series of bizarrely paired quotations from well-known poets. Ezra Pound (“Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace”) and Edward Lear (“And they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws/ and a lovely monkey with lollipop paws!”) are one such pair. The other pairs are Keats and Dante, Pound and Lear, MacLeish and Cummings, Bishop and Robert Lowell, Eliot and Ashbery, and Louis Simpson and Mina Loy.

Another highlight are the poems Satanovsky has created by deleting something like 99% of such canonical texts as Book I of Paradise Lost. Related to these are a group of Shakespeare’s sonnets that carry on from d. a. levy’s obliterated texts and later ones by John Stickney and others by scribbling out text. Consequently, the first sonnet becomes, “creatures we bear memory: with self Making lies. Sweet, cruel Art tenders the ‘else’ To the ‘and’.” A sense of humor still, but much else.

This is true, as well, of Mitchell W. Feldstein’s Teen Cardinal, a book of poems that arrived with Shattered Wig Review that seems worth a few words here. Feldstein’s poems are less wide-ranging in technique and expressive modalities than Satanovsky’s. In fact, they are straight-out specimens of contra-genteel near-prose. But the words are just about always appropriate, the vision strong and accurate. Feldstein’s “In thine eyes you are a beauty” is characteristic of much of his collection, for it consists mostly of very short lines, some of them just a word or two . . . wide, mostly unpunctuated, with caps used mainly for the names of patients on some psychiatric ward, or the like, to sarcastically inflate their stature. Most of Feldstein’s poems are either sardonic Bukowski-influenced character studies of the down-and-out like this “In thine eyes,” or gnomic meditations (for me, at any rate) like “love rules the day (for chris toll),” which I will quote in full:

if reality
functions
as
willful
beings
coagulate
with
rhyme
winning
the day
then
this all
becomes meaningless.

What happiness bubbles out of these pages is scant, and grey, but oddly warming, as in this wind-up of “something sings”: “coffee sweetened white/ to help smooth out another day/ make sweltering somewhat enjoyable/ by speeding/ up the night turning/ dusk to dawn before our very eyes.” I particularly applaud the deftness of Feldstein’s vivification of so everyday an item as coffee with extra cream and sugar, and re-perception of night as something small but hugely active. He and Satanovsky are two poets I hope to hear a lot more from.

And that brings me to the end of another column–without the review of Tundra promised in my last column. That’s because it got me into my taxonomaniacal zone to such an extent that I wrote a whole column about the size of poems. Read it here, in two months!

http://www.wordforword.info/vol13/gvst.htm

Notes on Bob Grumman’s Mathemaku and on Mathematical Poetry Generally (*) with additional commentary by John Randall, Associate Professor of Math at Rutgers University “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.” –Herakleitos, 21, trans. by Guy Davenport “Discourse is like a river.” –Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino “If to the moment I should say: Abide, you are so fair.” –Goethe. Faust.   The point I wish to make is two-fold: It is (1) that the mathematical symbols employed by the poet are not merely typographically convenient; that is to say, they are not ornamental, they are not adventitious –and so cannot be dispensed with if the poem is to be the poem that the poet intends it to be. And (2) that the poet is doing what poets have always set out to do; namely, to give permanence to the transitory, to make permanent the transitory, or fleeting, poetic intuition. But that this poet presents us with a most signature strategy toward that end. The first particular to note about the mathemaku (and about mathematical poetry, generally), is that it is not about mathematics per se. This point is fast set forth, along with some terse historical account as to mathematical poetry’s possibleantecedents, by Bob Grumman in his essay, “Of Segreceptuality and Mathematical Poetry.” (1) There Grumman writes, “Of course, mathematics has for a long time occasionally gotten into poetry, but until this century only as subject, not as actual component. In other words, there had been poems about mathematics (by some of the 17th Century metaphysical poets, for example), but no poems that were mathematics.” (2) Furthermore, it is important to note that the mathemaku is not heuristic, there is no logic of discovery going on–save for what the reader “discovers” on his own as he reads or scans the poem. (This process of reading, or discovery, this processing of information, I call–according to the program, logoclastics– redding [generally, redding is the putting into order ].) Inasmuch as the poetic intuition is presented to us in this mathematical language, this nonlinguistic symbolic system!, themathemaku is after the fact; the poetic intuition has already been formed (it has already been articulated), and what we are presented with is a transliteration –the result, the object, of a giving over of one language, or of one order of language (theto express in words ), for another (the to express in mathematical symbols, a mathematical nomenclature–and thismathematical nomenclature has not been cynically appropriated, it is not a mere associative reinforcement, but rather is it the embodiment of the poem–it is the vessel through which the poem is conveyed, it is its concrete expression). The transliteration is, from a language into a notation; from words, into a nonlinguistic system of signs representative of words. In the mathemaku we are presented with nothing of the pre-history of the poetic intuition, we have nothing of its adventure, of its struggle into being and which, I would contend, can only be portrayed in words, and not in a form–the mathemaku form–that is as such twice removed. For in the redding of the mathemaku, we are redding from mathematical symbols backinto words, we are interpreting, denoting, these / each mathematical symbols into groups of words, and then articulating these discrete, that’s not to say unconnected, groups together into one at last paradepictive paragraph. (But this pre-history of the poetic intuition, it is not present in the haiku either. . .). For finally it is by way of words that the poetic intuition, the poetry, is grasped by the understanding of the reader; again, we are reading from a mathematical nomenclature, back into the colloquial language of poetry, or a paraphrase of that poetry, which nonetheless involves us again with an ambiguous and inexact, if not indeterminate, language; (3) what we are presented with, is the poetic intuition concretized; it is the poetic intuition given definite form, and for all time; it is the poetic intuition preserved, presented as a permanent and unchanging truth, now and forever (or else so long as the symbols of mathematics continue to indicate what they indicate, and are not changed or modified in what they signify, in their denotation, e.g., so long as the mathematician’s k [or c, C, or K] stands for a mathematician’s constant). (What is the relationship between the mathematician’s constant and the constant of colloquial language? In Grumman’s usage, does the meaning not fluctuate between the one and the other? In the redding, are we not taking the one for the other?) Grumman has so composed his poem that there is, on the one hand, little room for ambiguity (so far as these mathematical symbols stand alone as mathematical symbols), but then on the other hand, while I would not say this ambiguity is to instance the instability of meaning, we might take it to be the ambiguousness of poetic language generally. (We must bear in mind that the word ambiguous means having several possible meanings or interpretations. ) If we look at what are his strictly mathematical symbols–as distinct from what are musical notations (these appoggiaturas or grace notes ), and then the one astronomical symbol standing for the sun –beginning with the symbol , sigma, which of course stands for sum, or,the summation of, and has a sense similar to that of the symbol  (the mark that looks like the letter s, an s which stands for summation), which stands for integral, and indicating that the expression following it is to be integrated, and then the symbol k, which as we noted stands for constant, and then of course the symbol +, which is the plus sign, the sign of in-addition-to, and also the sign for positive, we can see that his “mathematical expression” is the transliteration of a thought, an idea-about. This idea–and, ideas are, properly speaking, or so I would contend, always about something –is the poetic intuition–and, a poetic intuition is always an epitome. I want to say immediately, that what is going on in the mathemaku is not a quantification, a measurement, of emotion (something that has been tried by the psychologists and shown to be, at last, unreliable). The implications of this giving over of one language, or order, for another are far greater than any scientific or systematic quantification of the emotions (which in the final analysis is more to do with and about neuronic transmissions and changes in pulse rate and breathing, more to do with the autonomic and central nervous systems, than with what we would term, if poetically, and according to common sense, an emotion ). We have to ask, why has it become necessary for the poet to change over to mathematical symbols, to the nomenclature of mathematics, in order to achieve this permanence and immutability, has he not available to express in words in order to achieve this aim, this aim that is it not the end of all poetry to make permanent the transitory? Indeed, Grumman allows of such a question in his essay. “If the point of the poem,” he asks, “could be conveyed in words, why complicate things with mathematics?” He answers that, appreciating an artwork from more than one major part of the brain at once is more pleasurable than appreciating it segreceptually, i.e., rather than in one perceptual or conceptual area of the brain at a time; and, but what is of more interest to us here in these notes, that the mathematics not only speaks to the ultimate oneness of all forms of human creativity, but that it illustrates the gradations of speech that the poem is about, and serves to maximize their –the gradations of speech, that is– concreteness. We must point out, that nowhere in his brief essay does Grumman provide the architecture to support his insight that the brain does function in this way, and we are reminded of Pound’s logopoeia, but be that as it may, he does have a fertile metaphor, and his point is not lost. (And we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the now vast literature that exists on the subject of the brain and its functions, specificallycognition, much of which makes up the very architecture pertinent to Grumman’s point. But still, even if we take him on his word, even if we can accept, however provisionally, that a poem in mathematical notation speaks to the ultimate oneness of all forms of human creativity (and what is so special about the nomenclature of mathematics that it can do this; is it because its indices are constant; is it because mathematics is a universal language; or, what’s more intriguing still, has the poet found in the mathematiucal nomenclature a new voice of “negative capability”; has he found that our problematics are the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” of a language whose stability of meaning is obliterate?), it is a glaring leap to leave unaddressed the question whether, apart from the visual cortex–the information processing system at which awareness makes its most passive grasp at an object and template recognition occurs–the brain does in fact use a different area to know at mathematical symbols than it does to translate those symbols into words–isn’t it all but a matter of memory, and context and expectations? This question goes to the heart of the matter, and informs that of the general aesthetic appreciation of the artwork. It is often the case in the writings of Mr. Grumman, that he takes for granted our knowledge of the fields not only of modern and classical literature, but of psychology and philosophy as well. A consequence of this is that his writings must be elaborated on by other writers.) We ought as well to say, that nor does he mention anything at all to do with the making permanent of the transitory, which is the reading / interpretation driving these notes. Does the mathemaku resist my reading? From the perspective of logoclastics, we might answer that, because words have been shown to undergo modifications, qualifications and limitations, if not outright changes, to their meanings. Indeed, some words become archaic, because their usage has become rare; and some words become obsolete, because they have been replaced by other words, or phrases, which better serve their purpose of indication. A simple formula to follow, in understanding these modifications to words, would be, that since every use of a term in a new context gives it a new meaning, there are as many meanings as there are contexts. So far as this goes, this is pretty sound policy, and we need only pick up an unannotated edition of Shakespeare to gain a first hand experience of archaisms and obsolete words, that is of the time it takes to track down their modern equivalents. (4) But this is really only one side of the situation, it has now entered abruptly upon the poet that he is living in what may arguably be described as a post-logocentric climate. The poet learns that his discourse (that poetic intuition, that poetic insight, to-be-conveyed to his reader, or else, to be immortalized, and but of course the structure of language whose aim it is to carry this out), the poet learns that his discourse, once held to be centered in his words, and kept safe by the stability of the meaning of those words, has been cut adrift, has all but poof evaporated, is ob-literate, strictly expunged from the letter; he learns that his discourse has no center, as such, but that it has innumerable centers . . . innumerable configurations . . . as great as is the future times to come, so great in number are the contexts and expectations he must preface! This is not but a matter of his future readers finding their modern equivalents, nor is it a matter of their understanding his poem according to the meanings of the words at the time during which he composed it (that is, moreover, their taking into account of the poet’s social, historical and psychological contexts, a matter of syntax and context); it is . . . a matter of his contemporariesunderstanding the poem to be the poem that he intends it to be. It is not too great a reach to compare this situation, this state of affairs, to when in ancient and mediaeval times almost all scholars believed that the Earth was situated, really affixed, to the center of the universe; that the Earth was truly motionless, in a state of absolute rest; and all motion could then be measured relative to such a point–being the Earth–at absolute rest, and we would then have an absolute motion upon which all observers could agree. Any observed motion that was not equivalent to the absolute motion, was the result of the absolute motion of the observer. And then, in the year 1543, there appeared De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri IV by Nicolas Copernicus, in which was put forward a heliocentric theory of the universe; and then in 1781, Immanuel Kant published the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, which included the famous passages on the transcendental deduction of the categories, and in which he (in the preface to the second edition, 1787) compares his answer to the question, How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?(that answer is, of course, to do with what he termed, “transcendental idealism” ) to the Copernican revolution in astronomy; and now, today, we are undergoing the incidental effects, the fallout, perhaps, of a third “Copernican revolution,” an intellectual revolution that is still shaking ground, and that will continue to shake ground, and beyond the reams of literature and literary criticism, to architecture, and to music, and even to mathematics. (Whereas with Copernicus, man had lost his privileged position in the universe, today we are bearing witness as signification loses its privileged position in discourse.) The poet John M. Bennett has been kind enough to consider my assertions here, and he remarks that this transliteration may be, if not an out-and-out making permanent of the transitory, than at least an attempt at “slowing down.” And one might construe this “slowing down” to refer to the process (a slowing down of this process) by which things once thought permanent are revealed to be in fact not permanent at all but transitory. In this sense, then, this slowing down would be a sort of mechanical metaphor, pointing to the overall significance of the mathemaku. On the other hand, one might just as well construe this “slowing down” to refer to the “discovery” process of the reader; a slowing down of the reading so as to allow the reader the occasion or opportunity for re-consideration. In both cases, however, what is being slowed down is indeed the reader’s activity, his redding. But since it is what the reader brings to the text (by way of his very own contexts and expectations) that determines, ultimately, the meaning of the text, this strategy would seem ineffective, ineffective to make permanent the transitory (unless we were willing to happy ourselves with a metaphor, which in the long run may be all– ought it to be all? –we can to a reasonable degree expect from a poem . . . ). To what end or purpose, then, this “slowing down”? In either case, this slowing down is with reference to time . It is a deliberate manipulation of the time, not in the sense of metre, but of the time of the reading process, in the sense of to slow down the reading . Perhaps we can say that this manipulation of time is in itself a metaphor for. . . . Let us consider this quote from Paul Valéry: “The symbol is to some extent a time machine. It is an inconceivable shortening of the duration of mental operations, to the point where one might almost define the world of mind as the world in which one can use symbols.” (5) Perhaps we can say that this slowing down, this manipulation of time, in a mechanical sense, is a metaphor for the operations of the mind when to do with symbols, and however obtuse, however imprecise it may be, the poet, by composing his poem so as to admit of this slowing down, is by way of this slowing down creating a metaphor, and by way of this metaphor making reference to the operations of the mind when to do with symbols. Is this Grumman’s answer to segreceptuality . . . ? Is this another note in the philosophy we know of as of-manywhere-at-once…? What better instance of such, than of the symbol. . . . But then again, why not, this “slowing down,” to be a strategy for inducing in the reader, the experience of to-defer…? Still, granting all that, would it not be nonetheless as artificial, as man-made, a contrivance as the illusion of permanence or stability of meaning that has been shown to attend our discourse for the last two thousand years…? It is my assertion, that this transliteration, while although it may be a “slowing down” in some or other specific sense–it is my assertion that this transliteration, this giving over of one language or order for another, is the poet’s attempt, but as though he can do none other, to give permanence to the transitory, and that given the awareness of the mostwise arbitrary, and ever changing meanings of words, he has turned to mathematical symbols, to a mathematical nomenclature, as a source of reliable and dependable meanings, as an ever-increasing set of eternal, immutable truths, for to achieve this / his end. (But are mathematical symbols indeed “dependable”? At this point, certain questions are raised, and no less than to the immutability, to the infallibility or permanence of mathematics and its symbols; the articulation of these questions, and their discussion, is, happily, beyond the scope of these notes; I have, above, at least hinted at one such controversy, that ultimately we are turned back to words if we are to grasp at the poetry contained in the mathemaku, for the mathemaku is in ways a container, a hermetically sealed chamber or vault–the poem is given to a mode of existence, being the mathematical syntax or sentence or formula or proposition–in name if not in fact, in word if not in object, keeping safe its contents but as though to foreclose or exclude successive horizons of expectations, keeping safe its contents from the encroachments of new contexts, new meanings, nay, a revolution in how things are thought. . . . And yet on the other hand, it may increase us to consider that, the poet has not stood still and accepted his fate, or at least that fate that has at last caught up with letters; the poet has moved on, in his attempt to give permanence to the transitory; in this case he has moved on to mathematical symbols, to the nomenclature of the mathematician; and this may very well mean that the will to give permanence to the transitory ( Moment, abide! ), like faith in the transcendent, and like the poetic insight itself, is something that can only be lost, but that it cannot be erased. . . . Commentary by John Randall, Associate Professor of Math at Rutgers University The symbols of mathematics are by no means permanent. Probably the most enduring are the “Arabic” numerals, which have been around for about 1000 years. Everything else is much more recent. Literal symbols for unknowns were introduced by the Italian algebraist Vieta (1540-1603), who still used aequare to denote equality. (6) Our modern sign for equality was introduced by Robert Recorde, the English Royal Physician, in 1557. (7) Signs such as  (for summation) and  (for integration) were introduced much later, moreover, their meaning has changed. The meaning of infinite sums was not sorted out until the 19th century. Misunderstandings of the nature of convergence caused luminaries such as Cauchy to misstep. Our modern usage of the integral sign (for Riemann-Stieljes integration) dates to the early 20th century. While integration of simple functions would have been written in a similar way by the 18th-century mathematicians, their notation of function (as a particular kind of relation given by a formula) is far less general than ours. While mathematicians have been agreed on the meaning of the positive integers for several hundred years, even the negative integers were regarded as mere artifice until more recently. A precise definition of the real numbers was given little more than 100 years ago by Dedekind. Notation is even more transient: Newton’s mathematical work is now readable only by specialists, not by mathematicians. To assume that through mathematical and musical ideas and notation one can transcend time seems to ignore history. Both depend on their culture and time, just as language does. The transcendent intent of the mathemaku is perhaps better construed as allegory rather than actuality. The inclusion of flawed technical notations assumed to be unfamiliar to the reader is at best mysticism and at worst mere appropriation. A Note on Randall, by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino In regard to the use of aequare (which is Latin for to make equal ) to denote equality, and in keeping with the context ofletters, my instincts turn me to Shakespeare, who wrote in his Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” And with an invocation to Gertrude Stein, from her poem, Sacred Emily : A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. The point is this: Whether I am writing the word “constant,” or the symbol, the notation, “k,” my responsibility, to the poem, is to make accessible to my reader (that is, to make my reader open to the influence of) the idea of unchangeableness or without vary . If I am writing in the traditional haiku idiom, I might use the word “constant,” and if I am writing in the mathemaku idiom, I might use the symbol “k.” In both equations, the idea of unchangeableness is stable ( stable, that is–and pardon, please, if I am in effect treating an abstraction as though it were substantially existing, if I am, that is, reifying–to the extent whereas this thing I call a rose will smell just as sweet regardless of whether I call it “rose” or “rosa,” or “rhodon”), but to the degree that its sense is turned by my use of it in the poetic context–the idea of unchangeableness in and of itself is an abstraction, there must be an unchangeableness with regard to something. The changes we are concerned with here are not the changes to name, but to meanings, indeed to what the names are pointing to. In other words, the sign may change, indeed the mark may change from a word to a symbol, but what matters to us most is (1) its link by social convention to (2) what it stands for. (Robert Recorde’s use of the twin lines as a mnemonic–i.e., assisting the memory–shorthand for equals stuck, and continues to stay, because it works better than writing the wordaequare. Here, the authoritarianism, or, power, or, mental force, is sheer practicality!) And if you’ll grant me that the mathemaku is a work of logoclastics , then to consider its success–with regard to its transcendent intent, but then as a work of art on the whole, if you will–in terms of allegory (Edward Gorey?), rather than in terms of actuality, only, methinks, increases it by lending to it a certain concept of . . . but irony is a word I am no longer taken with, today I can think only in terms of whimsicality. Even wistful, characterized by pensive longing. . . . Ah, that is the dominant seventh! Notes: (*) A version of this article first appeared in Meat Epoch #20, March 1997. (1)Central Park, (Spring number, 1994). (2) In his poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” Shakespeare makes reference to number and mathematics as being useless to in any positive sense describe or measure the high chaste love that did hold between the birds. And it is important to bear in mind, and no less in the context of Grumman, that the Phoenix is the symbol of love and the Turtle Dove of constancy. Grumman’s use of mathematics is most always to the positive sense. He writes, “I’m no authority on the subject but my impression is that the first true mathematical poem occurred in Louis Zukofsky’s A, which was published in 1969. Whatever the truth of the matter, that was myintroduction to the form, . . .” It is interesting that Grumman does not cite Paul Valéry (if not for an actual occurrence of the mathematical poem, then perhaps as a precursor, or at least for moral support) who had a strong attraction to mathematics. Valéry wrote in his Notebooks that he wanted “to amuse myself by translating everything into mathematics.” (See the commentary by John Randall, especially his valuable suggestion that the mathemaku be read as allegory.) (3) And while one can argue that all works are to good extent “indeterminate,” and that some works are deliberately explorations of indeterminacy, as most works of logoclastics are, I say–and rest these notes upon this–that that is not the case with the mathemaku. Rather, much to the contrary. . . . The mathemaku is not a deliberate exploration of indeterminacy, but is a strategy after permanence of meaning. (I wonder at the optimism of this strategy, as I consider all works of logoclastics at basis a response to the dystopic. In this case, the poet’s foreclosure is with regard to change; his promise for his poem is not so much a stasis or still life or time-capsule effect; rather, a utopia. No matter that this utopia is hypothetical. The range of the works of logoclastics is vast, and includes the whole of Language writing, and includes not only those works that are deliberately explorations of indeterminacy, in themselves and in the redding, but all works that present us with a break or dislocation of discourse, all works that in effect induce a collaboration in the creation of meaning, all works that induce a narrativity in the reader. For starters, all works that begin in the consciousness that ours is a post-logocentric climate, all works that begin in the consciousness that discouse is no longer centered in words but occurs in the text’s being redd– these are works of logoclastics! ) (4) For a wonderful elaboration of this “problem,” and on the art of reading generally, see Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” collected in Labyrinths (5) Quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years , p., 242. (6) That is to say, Vieta actually wrote the word aequare to indicate that the terms separated are equal where we would use the symbol of the two parallel lines, =, to indicate such. Vieta did not have at his ready the modern equals sign; it was not invented yet or else he was unaware of its coming into use! (7) Note how the symbol (the mark ) resembles its meaning! Recorde wrote, in his textbook of algebra entitled The Whetstone of Witte, “I will set as I do often in work use, a pair of parallels, of twin lines of one length, thus: =, because no two things can be more equal.”

On Three Shakespeare-Related Poems By John Davies

We have three poems called epigrams, by John Davies of Hereford, that people debating who wrote the works of Shakespeare cannot avoid discussing. The most important of them is the following, which was published in 1610:

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.

Needless to say, the views of Gulielmus-Affirmers and Rejectors about the meaning of this poem are decidedly incompatible. What is perhaps their worst clash begins even before the body of the poem. It concerns just what Davies meant by “Terence.”

Oxfordian Charlton Ogburn has trouble with this because Terence wrote comedies, and Shakespeare was a great tragedian. Well, the probability, as Irvin Matus theorizes, is that Davies was merely complimenting Shakespeare for his gift for verbal clarity and elegance, Terence having been most esteemed by the Elizabethans for such a gift. According to Matus, Terence “was in the curriculum of Westminster School, one of the great schools of the day, ‘for the better learning (of) the pure Roman style.’” Almost every contemporary writer commenting on Shakespeare’s style praised its mellifluousness or the like. And most of what Shakespeare wrote was clear, particularly when contrasted to the style it replaced, Lyly’s euphuism, which was very ornate and affected-seeming.

Carrying on for Ogburn, Diana Price suggests that Davies described Shakespeare as a Terence because Terence was a front man for aristocrats, as none other than famed literary historian Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) held. He thought that only aristocrats could have been refined enough to write elegantly.  Terence was an African slave.  (However, as John W. Kennedy said about this at HLAS when a Gulielmus-Rejector repeated Montaigne’s opinion, “In Roman times, being a slave had virtually no bearing on literacy. Teachers were slaves.”) The English scholar, Roger Ascham (1515-1568) is also brought up in support of the Terence-as-Front view, for his posthumous The Scholemaster (1570) asserts without evidence that Terence’s name was on some works he did not write.

Price argues her case further by pointing out the hyphen Davies used in Shakespeare’s name, which “Anti-Stratfordians theorize . . . signifies a pseudonym, and in this instance the sobriquet, ‘our English Terence,’ reinforces this theory.” That’s because Terence in his time was “accused of taking credit for the plays of aristocratic authors Scipio and Laelius.” Fascinating lapse of logic this: “Shake-speare” equals “Terence,” according to Davies; “Terence” equals his front-man, Shaksper and “Shake-speare” equals Oxford, according to Price. Which leads to Shaksper equals Oxford.

There are many reasons to believe Davies considered Terence a genuine author, not anyone’s front, in his title. Where in the poem does Davies suggest that Terence was, as Terence may have been, indebted to Scipio and Laelius, or that Shakespeare was any kind of front? Since we see no references to any of these stories about Terence, the only reasonable conclusion is that Davies was speaking of Shakespeare as “our Terence” because Shakespeare was one of the great writers of English comedies just as Terence was one of the great writers of Latin comedies.

Terry Ross has more to say in response to Price’s take on Terence. He states that except for a few explicit references to Laelius or Scipio, Terence, in Shakespeare’s time, was always referred to as a genuine author.  “His name was not proverbial for a ‘front.’” Ross draws attention to the front matter to the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida which describes that play as deserving of serious discussion “as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus.” Clearly, whoever wrote this was calling Terence a superior writer of comedy, like Plautus, as well as using the Roman to compliment Shakespeare as a writer.

Another allusion to Terence occurs in a poem of 1614 that brings up Shakespeare by Thomas Freeman:

….Who loves chaste life, there’s Lucrece for a teacher;
Who list read lust, there’s Venus and Adonis,
True model of a most lascivious lecher.
Besides, in plays thy wit winds like Meander,
Whence needy new composers borrow more
Than Terence doth from Plautus or Meander….

Freeman is clearly saying “new composers” borrow more from Shakespeare than Terence did from Plautus or Meander. In other words, Terence, for Freeman, is indeed a borrower, but still a playwright, and Shakespeare not a borrower, but one borrowed from.

There’s also Meres, who lists “the best poets for comedy … among the Latines” as “Plautus, Terence, Naevius, Sext. Turpilius, Licinus Imbrex, and Virgilius Romanus”; Shakespeare is listed as one of “the best for Comedy among us.” Meres as clearly as Freeman speaks of Terence as a genuine (superior) playwright. Ross, drawing on Don Cameron Allen’s Francis Meres’s Treatise “Poetrie”: A Critical Edition, adds that “Textor, an important Meres source for his list of the best Latin poets, does not even mention the Scipio/Laelius rumors in his capsule bio of the playwright, although Textor does mention Terence’s having been a slave and his having been born in Africa.

In his First Folio eulogy to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson compares him to “tart Aristophanes, / Neat Terence, witty Plautus ….” all of whom he plainly considered playwrights of note.  Add to these George Puttenham (1529-1590), who said, “There were also Poets that wrote onely for the stage, I means playes and interludes, to recreate the people with matters of disporte, and to that intent did set forth in shewes & pageants, accompanied with speach the common  behauiours and maner of life of priuate persons, and such as were the meaner sort of men, and they were called Comicall Poets, of whom among the Greekes Menander and Aristophanes were most excellent, with the Latines Terence and Plautus.”

All this is not enough to satisfy the Guliemus-Rejectors. They claim that any educated person of Shakespeare’s time who read the Davies poem would be aware of Ascham’s or Montaigne’s opinion of Terence, and would have as likely thought of him as a front as they would have thought him a genuine (important) playwright. Ross points out, however, that even in the few cases when some Elizabethan writer discusses the Scipio/Laelius rumors, they do not consider him essentially as a front. “Sidney in his Apology said, ‘Laelius, called the Romane Socrates [was] himselfe a Poet; so as part of Heautontimo- roumenon in Terence, was supposed to bee made by him’ — note the qualifying ‘was supposed’ and the limited scope of Laelius’s possible contribution to Terence’s work. Sidney’s other references to Terence speak of him as the author of the works attributed to him.”

Ascham does say that “some Comedies” with Terence’s name on them were written “by worthy Scipio, and wise Laelius, and namely Heauton: and Adelphi.” But he leaves four of Terence’s comedies to him. Elsewhere in Ascham’s The Scholemaster, Terence shows up as a genuine writer of the works credited to him, never as a front of some sort. As for Montaigne, he explicitly states that he thought Scipio and Laelius wrote the comedies of Terence in one of his essays, but whenever he elsewhere refers to those comedies, he treats them as by Terence. That is, he writes of Terence not as a front but as an author.

The long and the short of it is that there is little reason to suspect from the title alone that Davies is not complimenting Shakespeare as a fine dramatist. There is strong support for this in the body of the poem. Davies, with no hint whatever of irony, says there that Shakespeare was an actor who could have been a companion of the king had he not been an actor. He also says Shakespeare has a “reigning wit” and sows honesty. Nowhere does he say anything against his poem’s subject. It would therefore be ridiculously against sane poetic decorum for his title to disparage him.

But, argue some Gulielmus-Rejectors, what about the two poems in Davies’s book after his poem to Shakespeare that are, respectively, to “No-body” and to “Some-body.”  Shouldn’t they make one suspicious?  Not me. Evidently, Davies wanted to flatter two friends who were shy, so what? Actually, the sequence of poems the poem and the ones to “No-body” and “Some-body” are part of supports the proposition that Davies was complimenting Shakespeare. Here on the titles of the poems in it, in order:

155. To my worthily-disposed friend, Mr. Sam. Daniell.

156. To my well-accomplishÆd friend Mr. Ben Johnson.

157. To my much esteemed Mr. Inego Jones, our English Zeuxis and Vitruvius.

158. To my worthy kinde friend Mr. Isacke Simonds.

159. To our English Terence Mr. Will: Shake-speare.

160. To his most constant, though most unknowne friend; No-body.

161. To my neere-deere wel-knowne friend; Some-body.

162. To my much-regarded and approved good friend Thomas Marbery, Esq.

163. To my right deere friend approved for such, John Panton Esquire [followed by others to his dear pupil, his beloved friend, etc.]

According to Pat Dooley, Diana Price’s husband, we’re supposed to notice how different from the others Davies’s poem to Shakespeare is. “When Davies is personally acquainted with someone it is very obvious. It would appear that he does not have such a relationship with Shakespeare. We then have the odd choice of playwright. Terence was believed to be a front for aristocratic playwrights and other Elizabethan writers said as much.”

Right. So let’s go through the list again, this time with their titles as Dooley would take them to be (and shortened):

155. To my friend Daniell, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

156. To my friend Johnson, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

157. To my friend Jones, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

158. To my friend Simonds, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

159. To my non-friend, Shake-speare, derision and scorn.

160. To my friend No-body, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

161. To my friend Some-body, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

162. To my friend Marbery, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

163. To my friend Panton, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

Hmmmm.

I’ve already given the gist of my interpretation of the poem, itself, but will now present my detailed reading.  I find no concealed meanings in it. Davies, for me, Davies considers Shakespeare a superior dramatist, as Terence was. He reports that Shakespeare had played some “Kingly parts in sport.” To “play a part” is, of course, what actors do. He did this “in sport,” as Davies writes his poem “in sport,” which surely indicates that he played the “Kingly parts” as an artist—that is, his playing the parts in sport emphasizes his actions as those of an actor. Strongly supporting this is another of Davies’s epigrams. It is to the actor Robert Armin who acted in Shakespeare’s company, and is believed to have played the fools in Shakespeare’s plays after 1599. In it Davies says of Armin that he “in sport . . . wisely play(s) the fool.” Elsewhere in that poem Davies makes it unambiguous that he considers Armin an actor.

According to Davies, some persons said that if “good Will” had not been an actor, he could have been a companion to a King. This seems a simple compliment like telling a lawyer that if he hadn’t gone into law, he might have become a baseball star. As “a companion for a King,” he would have been a king himself for lower types. That stands by iteself, but I suspect Davies is here suggesting that “the meaner sort,” or persons Davies looks down on, do not now think much of Will but would, being status-conscious boobs, if he were a king’s companion.

Some make fun of the notion, railing at it, but Shakespeare is above trivial insults. In the words of the clumsy couplet with which Davies ends his poem, he describes Will as sowing honesty, which then also meant “honour.” This, those who railed reaped, to increase their own stock of honour/honesty. To me it looks like “which they do keep” is in the poem to finish off the line and provide a rhyme for “reap.” I’d read the final line to mean, simply, “thus they increase the stock of honesty they have on hand.”

Gulielmus-Rejectors don’t consider the poem so straight-forward. Ogburn accepts that Davies was testifying that Shakespeare, the writer, acted (an important admission most Gulielmus-Rejectors would be uncomfortable with). He goes further, though, and finds evidence that Davies also testified that Shakespeare was a nobleman. How? Why, only a noble could be “a companion for a king,” the word, “companion” deriving from the Latin word, “comes,” which (approximately) means “count.” What can one say against such strained reasoning?

Diana Price paraphrases this poem as follows:

“To our own Battillus (by which she means a front although copious research has shown that the Romans considered the actual Battillus simply a poor poet who stole from other poets, not a front), Master Will: Shake-speare

“Scuttlebutt has it, my good man Will (which I, just for fun, put in verse), that had you not behaved arrogantly, as though you were the king of the troupe, you would still be a member of the King’s Men, and a king among those lowly actors and shareholders. Some of the King’s Men criticize you, as they believe you crossed them. But you don’t get abusive. You keep your condescending sense of humor. And you have inspired the King’s Men to value honesty, because now they take more care to hold on to their “Stock” of playbooks (“which they do keep”). They do not want them sold out from under them by someone dishonest like you. So now they will guard their assets (“increase their stock”), and it will be more difficult for you to get your hands on them, since you are no longer a partner in the operation.

I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide who has a better grip on the poem, Price or I.

Price, incidentally, also finds a few Shakespearean scholars unable to follow the poem to support her characterization of it as “cryptic.” But it is quite straight-forward for such a poem from such a time. I won’t say I’ve got it exactly, but I do think I’ve gotten it as close as one can get any such poem from that far back. I am certain I’ve shown that the poem is not cryptic (although anyone can force mystery into it, or any poem, if sufficiently driven to by a need to ambiguate it–and find some Shakespearean scholar to agree with one).

Regardless of how she interprets the poem, Price is sure it presents no “contemporaneous personal literary evidence” (a term she refuses explicitly to define) for him. I do not concur. It is true that Davies does not explicitly say anywhere in the poem that he personally knew Shakespeare. In support of this, she notes that he used the editiorial “our” in referring to him. On top of that, he starts his poem not by telling us his opinion of Shakespeare but what “some” said about him.

Yet, John Chamberlain write in a letter of Spenser, “our principal poet,” as having died without indicating that he had personally known him, and his testimony satisfies Price as personal evidence that Spenser was a writer. The reasoning seems to be that if one testifies that an alleged writer is a person in some way other than as a writer, it makes the testimony personal. Chamberlain does mention a few details about a person named Spenser beside the fact that he died, but I claim Davies tells us at least as much that is personal about Shakespeare– as well as suggests he knew him personally.

Before I turn to what Davies said in his “English Terence” poem to indicate that, I feel it would be useful to examine two poems by Davies that were published before it that most Shakespearean scholars, if not most Gulielmus-Rejectors, agree are about William Shakespeare the author. The first is from his Microcosmos (1603):

Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,
As ye are Men, that pass time not abus’d:
And some I love for painting, poesie W.S. R.B.
And say fell fortune cannot be excus’d,
That hath for better uses you refused:
Wit, Courage, good shape, good partes and all goode,
As long as all these goods are no worse us’d,
And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloode
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.

This has two marginal notes besides the one with the initials: “Simonides saith, that painting is a dumb Poesy, & Poesy a speaking painting” and “Roscius was said for his excellency in his quality, to be only worthy to come on the stage, and for his honesty to be more worthy then to come thereon (‘then’ being almost certainly a form of ‘than’).”

These lines seem clearly to speak of the “Players” Richard Burbage (R.B.) and William Shakespeare (W.S), as—respectively—a painter and a poet, Thomas Middleton having written that Burbage was “excellent both player and painter” and Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, among other documents, confirming that someone with the initials, W.S., was a poet. Note that Davies speaks of personal traits of R.B. and W.S.: they are “generous . . . in mind and mood.” How would he know that if he weren’t personally acquainted with these men? Okay, someone could have told him, but is it really likely that he would have written the two poems quoted so far, and a third, about an actor he seems to know a lot about, and describes as a poet, like himself, without ever making his personal acquaintance? Even granting that he did not know Burbage or Shakespeare, surely he bestows as  much personhood on them by describing them each as actors who were gifted in a second art, and possessing the personal trait of generosity, as Chamberlain bestows on Spenser when he described his place and time of death, his vocation as a poet and he came “lately out of Ireland.”

Davies’s other poem to Shakespeare–or to W.S.–is the following, from his The Civil Warres of Death and Fortune (1605):

Some followed her by acting all mens parts Stage Players
These on a Stage she rais’d (in scorne) to fall:
And made them Mirrors, by their acting Arts,
Wherin men saw their faults, though ne’r so small:
Yet soome she guerdond not, to their desarts; W.S. R.B.
But, othersome, were but ill-actioned all:
Who while they acted ill, ill staid behinde,
(By custome of their maners) in their minde.

Again, the poet indicates a knowledge of W.S. and R.B. as men by referring to how the two acted off the stage; that is, he claims that when they acted the roles of evil characters (“acted ill”), their minds remained uncontaminated “By custome of their maners,” or due to the propriety of their real-life manners. He is also aware that the two have not be rewarded to the extent he thinks they should have been, which indicate that, at the very least, he thinks of them as real persons who can be slighted, just as he thinks of them as real persons who have a vocation as stage players.

Davies’s later-published poem combines with these in granting Shakespeare personhood (and indicating that her probably knew him personally). Here it is, again:

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.

Yes, Davies addresses Shakespeare as “our,” not “my,” “English Terence.” The reason for that should be obvious to anyone: to claim another is a great writer in the eyes of everyone is a somewhat larger compliment that to claim he is a great writer in one’s own eyes, alone, and Davies wanted to compliment Shakespeare. And why should he intrude himself into this single great compliment by saying, “My Friend, The English Terence, Mr. Will: Shake-speare?” I’ve already discussed the reference to Terence and why that is certainly a compliment. Moreover, the poem’s centering a group on nine poems, all the others of which are to friends of Davies’s, strongly suggests that this one was to a friend of his, too.

We aren’t finished with the title of the poem, though, for–look: it makes “Shake-speare” a gentleman! Do pseudonyms get coats of arms, or do actual persons?

It is also true that Davies starts the main text of his poem with a reference to what certain others say about Shakespeare. But this is not “impersonal,” just a report as to what the person, Shakespeare, is having said about him. Moreover, Davies indicates they say about him, which makes it his own view, too. That is, he is directly reporting that he believes that if Shakespeare had not been an actor (with a mention of some of the kinds of roles he played), he’d be a big man in some court. Poetic hyperbole, but not hugely, since commoners could and did sometimes rise to positions of political power in those times. So both “some” and Davies are testifying that Shakespeare was an actor who might have been “more,” two data that seem to establish him as a genuine person the way Chamberlain established Spenser as one.

Stronger evidence is in those three lines, too: Davies’s use of the intimate second person singular–“thou. This is not something he did in the other poems in this set, but does twice more in this poem. Surely, it is relevant that he also addressed Shakespeare as “good Will,” using a nickname–in other words, addressing him as a familiar acquaintance who was a good person. Later, Davies reveals his knowledge that Shakespeare does not rail, and has honesty, or honor, which he sows. He could be speaking here only of his writing, but taken in context with everything else we know he said about Shakespeare, that seems less likely than that he was speaking of him as a person.

(An interesting side-point is that Shakespeare is presented as alive through Davies’s use of the present tense in describing him in this poem. As if the fact that this “Shake-speare” was an actor, and not a companion of kings or the equivalent, weren’t enough to distinguish him from Oxford, this suggests Shakespeare was alive in 1610 or 1611, when the poem was published. That’s six or seven years after Oxford died. The poem, of course, was written before 1610, but had to have been written after 1603, when Shakespeare began acting “King’s roles”–as a member of the King’s Men.)

I can’t claim that the three epigrams by Davies that I’ve discussed are certain personal evidence for Shakespeare, but they surely seem as strong personal evidence for him as Chamberlain’s for Spenser, or the law books John Marston’s father left him in his will that Price counts as evidence that he was an author. The evidence of Meres, and of Heywood when he wrote of personal knowledge that Shakespeare, long after Oxford was dead, was upset that his name was falsely attached to some of Heywood’s poems, which I consider equally personal (and contemporaneous), are corroboration. Assuming we ignore posthumous evidence, the way Price does. It is not likely that Diana Price will ever agree to that, however.

Charles Alexander

Poet, Book Artist, Critic, Publisher

Alexander was born in Honolulu, grew up mostly in Norman, Oklahoma, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has lived in Tucson for most of the last 14 years, including at present, with his wife Cynthia Miller, one of the premier visual artists of the American Southwest.  His e.mail address is [email protected].

Charles Alexander’s  books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press, Tucson, 1990) and arc of light / dark matter (Segue Books, New York, 1992).

Two chapbooks are forthcoming in winter 1998: Four Ninety Eight to Seven from Meow Press (Buffalo, New York) and Pushing Water from Standing Stones Press (Morris, Minnesota).

Alexander has also published reviews and critical essays on contemporary literature and culture. He is the founder and director of Chax Press, which was begun in Tucson, Arizona in 1984; Chax moved to Minneapolis from 1993 through 1996, and returned to Tucson in the summer of 1996. Chax is a publisher of handmade letterpress books and trade literary editions, both of which explore innovative writing and its conjunction with book forms. Through Chax Press, from 1986 to the present Alexander has organized literary readings, talks, workshops and presentations by artists. From 1993 through 1995 Alexander was executive director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the nation’s most comprehensive center for the arts of the book, both in terms of programs and artists’ studio facilities. As its director, Alexander completed the production of the visual/literary artists’ book, Winter Book in 1995 with visual artist Tom Rose.

In addition he has directed educational programs and a variety of
artists’ residencies, creative productions, and other works. He was the
organizer and director of the 1994 symposium, Art and Language: Re-Reading the Boundless Book, one of the foundational symposiums in the recent history of the book arts. From this symposium, he edited the formative collection of essays, Talking The Boundless Book: Art, Language, and the Book Arts (Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis, 1996).

Alexander has given poetry readings, lectures, and workshops throughout the country at colleges, universities, art centers, and other locations, including at the University of Alabama, the University of Arizona, theState University of New York at Buffalo, Painted Bride Arts Center in Philadelphia, Small Press Traffic in San Francisco,  Canessa Gallery in  San Francisco, the University of Washington, Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Scottsdale Center for the Arts, and many more. Alexander has also performed poetry in galleries and art centers, has collaborated with musicians and dancers, and in general brings to poetry a broad sense of artistic and collaborative possibility.

Poet Robert Creeley writes that Alexander’s work “hears a complex literacy of literalizing words. By means of a fencing of statements, sense is found rather than determined. The real is as thought.” And, concerning his 1992book, arc of light/dark matter, the poet and critic Ron Silliman writes, “Now Charles Alexander pushes the envelope of what is possible in writing
ven further, to the ends of the universe. And beyond. . . This is the most
sensuous, intelligent, rewarding writing I’ve read in ages.”

Christopher W. Alexander

Poet/Critic/Publisher

Alexander’s regular address is PO Box 522402, Salt Lake City, UT 84102; e.mail will reach him at [email protected].
Born 25 March 1970, in Akron, OH, he is espoused (unofficially) to Linda V. Russo and is the father of one child.

He works as a computer tech teacher.  He has a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a master’s from Boston University.  Besides composing poetry, he writes cultural criticism and acts as a press collective co-ordinatoror editor.  He likes both classical and hardcore music (composers: Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg,  Shostakovich, Ives, Cage; bands/musicians: The Minutemen, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus), film (Derek Jarman’s TheGarden; The Last of England), politics (Intifada, IRA, American domestic; foreign affairs), hiking, bicycling, painting; sculpture (Picasso, Diego Rivera, F. Kahlo, Duchamp).

Among the books closest to him are The Brothers Karamazov and Berger’s A Painter of OurTime; he is also high on the play, Woyzeck. He describes his religious outlook as buddhist/none, marxist.  He enjoys following pro basketball, but only Chicago games & only occasionally. He practiced Tae Kwon Do for 10 yrs.,  now lifts weights, jogs, goes on extended hikes, bicycles, cross-country skis, and occasionally goes snowshoeing.
About his background in science and philosophy he says, spent 2 yrs. of my undergrad studying genetics, got bored; moved over to american lit. “I do read a good deal of philosophy,” he says, “particularly Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, Derrida, the polit. philosophy of the Frankfurt School critics (esp. Adorno), Foucault, M. Bakhtin; V. Volosinov, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, etc.— focus on political & language phi.

About his life-in-general, Alexander says, “complicated, but good overall. L.& I are relatively poor, but happy together, nominative press collective is taking off a bit, my poetic work is good if difficult.”

He had work in n/formation 1: spring 1997 and is currently viewable on the web at http://choengmon.lib.utah.edu/~calexand/nonce.  His book, Dusky Winders (nominative press collective, 1996) has been reviewed in Taproot Reviews.  The contemporary poets important to him are Robert Creeley, Donald Revell, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Tina Darraugh, Peter Inman, Ron Silliman, Alan Halsey, Susan Howe, Peter Gizzi, David Bromige, Bruce Andrews and Susan Gevirtz.  His favorites from the past are Zukofsky, Oppen, Williams, Stein, Spicer, Duncan and Apollinaire.

Critis he deems important are Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, M. Perloff,
David James, Walter Benjamin, Michael Davidson, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Steve Evans. In describing his tastes in poetry, Alexander says, “I respond most favorably to innovative form, but not as pure utterance.” He is “interested in a poetics that reflects a commitment to leftist politics of some variety — not necessarily overtly (expository) but that raises questions of the epistemological variety.
not interested in a liberatory politics of the signifier; or pure music any more than in naively content-driven verse.”

As a critic, he aims for a reading of particular works in the context of their material conditions, poetry as a reflection /or criticism of its culture of origin.  He tends to think of poetry in terms of “a Bourdieulian field of poetic production, in which participants take positions that have meaning in relation to the field as a whole. we seem to suffer from a polarization @ this point — or rather not so much a polarization, which violates the spatial metaphor, but an antagonism —wherein some sectors of the field dominate in
terms of monetary capital, recognition (by mass-market media organs) by virtue of the accessibility of their work (in terms of a middle-class view of art — largely affirmative or comprehensible in terms of that class; pretensions to universality, e.g., conforming to common sense, etc.). This is light verse, even @ its most critical, because the criticism it lodges is always given in terms of the dominant, so partially serves a recuperative function; positioned elsewhere in the field, variably antagonistic but united by their lack of /or distain for monetary capital are various innovative poetries.”

He goes on to say that “if one is concerned with the politicization of poetry, it’s important to realize the value of other kinds of work, even if one still priviledges one mode. My chief interest is less in the antagonism between poetry communities than in possible critical-rhetorical strategies characterized by the whole of poetry as a genre, both innovative;
dominant — despite the fact that, clearly, my tastes run to the former. He recommends the following for entries in the Comprepoetica Dictionary: Electronic Poetry Center (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc), n/formation
(http://choengmon.lib.utah.edu/~calexand/nonce/), UbuWeb, Fluxus Online, Poet’s House (NYC), Misc. Proj. (Atlanta zine), Talisman (N.J. journal), Situation (D.C. zine), Impercipient Lecture Series (Providence, R.I. journal), Mirage/Period(ical) (S.F. zine), Mass. Ave. (Boston zine), lyric (S.F. zine) and Antenym (S.F. zine).

Click <a href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem2.html”>here</a> to read naldecon series, a sample of his work.

Click <a ref=”http://www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/compoems/poem3.html”>here</a> to read Joel Kuszai’s Globigerina Ooze, Alexander’s choice of another contemporary poet’s work he likes.

Kit Austin

Poet

Austin’s street address is 814 N. Dodge Street, Iowa City IA   52245; her e.mail address is caroline-austin@uiowa; and her phone number (319) 337-6124.

She has had work published in 100 Words and River King Poetry
Supplement.

Among the contemporary poets important to Austin are James Merrill, Frank Bidart, Gary Soto and Cynthia Macdonald; among those of the past she considers important are Whitman, Dickinson, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Eliot, Rilke, Cendrars, Yeats, Hardy.  Edmund Wilson is the one critic she names as important to her.

She welcomes any feedback about her poetry.  For a sample of it, click <a href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem36.html”>here</a>.

For Matthea F. Harvey&#8217;s Frederick Courteney Selous’s “Letters To His Love,” a favorite poem of Austin’s by someone else, click <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe1493/poem37.html”>here</a>.

Maura Alia Bramkamp (BRAM camp)

Poet

(street address)  266 Elmwood Ave #307
(city&#038;state)  Buffalo, NY 14222
(e.mail address)  [email protected]</p>
(affiliations/organizations)

National Writers Union, member

Italian American Writers Union, member
The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Lifetime Subscriber

(publication credits)
<i>The Buffalo News</i> (essays)
Amazon.com Editorial Review: <i>Welcome To My Planet: Where English is Sometimes
Spoken</i>, by Shannon Olson
<i>ARTVOICE</i> (Buffalo, NY)

Buffalo Spree (Buffalo, NY)
<i>The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal</i> (San Francisco)
<i>Switched-On-Gutenberg</i> (Internet Seattle-based)
<i>Exhibition</i> (Bainbridge Island, WA)
<i>The Woodstock Times</i> (Woodstock,NY)

<i>synapse</i> (Seattle, WA)
<i>convolvulus</i>
<i>Half Tones to Jubilee</i> (Pensacola, FL)
Signals (Olympia, WA)
tight (Guerneville, CA)
Spillway (WA)

The Healing Woman (CA)
The Wise Woman (CA)
105 Magazine (New Paltz, NY)
POETALK (CA)
<i>cups: a cafe journal</i> (San Francisco, CA)
<i>Arts Journal</i>poems &#038; interview (Poulsbo, WA)

<i>Coffee House Quarterly</i> (CO)
<i>Higher Source</i> (Bainbridge Island, WA)
And others&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;

(list of works)

CHAPBOOK
<i>Resculpting</i> (Paper Boat Press,1995)

ANTHOLOGIES
<i>This Far Together</i> (Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, 1995)
<i>Go Gently</i> (The Healing Woman, 1995)
<i>Bay Area Poets Coalition 1995 Anthology</i>
<i>Husky Voices</i> (Univ of WA, MFA Anthology, 1998)

(where written up)</p>
<i>Women&#8217;s Work</i> (Seattle,WA, 1995)
<i>Arts Journal</i> (Poulsbo, WA, 1996)
<i>The Healing Woman</i> (1996)
<i>Small Press Review</i> (Pick of the Month &#038; Review, 1996)

<i>synapse</i> (review, 1996)
<i>The Kitsap Herald</i> (1995)

(contemporary poets important to Bramkamp)
Charles Simic, Jana Harris, Billy Collins, Lynda Hull (deceased),
Seamus Heaney, Lynn Emmanuel, Carolyn Kizer,
Mark Doty, Raymond Carver, Nikki Finney,
Jane Kenyon, Ai, Gillian Conoley, Patti Smith

Larry Levis (deceased), Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche,
Yusef Komunyakaa, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Nancy Willard,
Richard Hugo, Theodore Roethke, Carol Ann Duffy,
Marlene Nourbese Philip &#038; many others

(poets of yesteryear important to respondent)
Colette, Muriel Rukeyser, Paul Celan,
Rilke, Rimbaud, Edward Lear, Sylvia Plath,
Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop,

Samuel Beckett, Eugene O&#8217;Neil, W.H. Auden, Frank O&#8217;Hara
And many more&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.

(critics important to respondent)

Eavan Boland, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich&#8230;
otherwise, not particularly interested in criticism. I think going through an MFA program
ruined it for me.

(tastes in poetry)  I&#8217;m most drawn to narrative, lyrical, and prose poetry. Yet, I
read widely and try to sample styles outside my usual references.

(impression of contemporary poetry)  Ever-changing. Expanding, shouting, fighting
amongst our many selves, loud, soft, chilling,consoling, alienating &#038; inviting.

(zines, etc., that ought to be listed in the dictionary)
<i>Switched-On-Gutenberg</i> (Internet)
<i>The Cortland Review</i> (Internet)
<i>SketchRadio.com</i> (Internet)

<i>Small Press Review &#038; Small Magazine Review</i> (Dust Books)
<i>The Directory of Poetry Publishers</i> (Dust Books)
<i>Directory of Literary Magazines</i> (CLMP)
.

<b>Michael Basinski, Poet</b>

Basinski lives at 30 Colonial Avenue, Lancaster NY 14086; his
e.mail address is [email protected]; his phone number 716 645-2917

He was born 19 November 1979 in Lisbon.  He is 6 feet tall and weighs 165 pounds.  His
eyes and hair are brown, his ethnic background Polish.  He got his Ph.D. at SUNY,
Buffalo.  His occupation, says he, is working, his vocations, etc.  His characterizes himself
a pagan in both religion and politics.  He claims not to enjoy anything in the arts besides
poetry, or have any interest in sports.  He enjoys nothing in science or philosophy, either.
In answer to the <i>Comprepoetica</i> survey question that asks a respondent to name
the first poem that comes to his mind right then, he said, None.

Basinski has published in many periodicals including <i>First Offense, First Intensity,
Angle, Torque(Toronto), Kiosk, Essex Street, Washington Review, Chain, Boxkite,
Leopold Bloom, Taproot, Generator, Arras, Explosive Magazine, RIF/T, Yellow Silk,
Benzine, Sure, Another Chicago Magazine, Lyric&#038;, Mirage no.4(Period)ical, Lower
Limit Speech, Juxta, Wooden Head Review, Synaesthetic, Small Press Review</i>, and
other WEB and Email magazines.

His books include: <i>[Un-Nome]</i>, The Runaway Spoon Press;  <i>Idyll</i>, Juxta
Press; <i>Heebee-jeebies</i>, Meow Press; and many others.  He has been written up in
<i>Texture, Small Press Review, Taproot Reviews, Exile, Poetic Briefs</i>, etc.

He says that the poets of yesteryear important to him are Those before the coming of
circles.  His tastes in poetry?  Glitches and witches.  His impression of contemporary
poetry? Angels and beasts.

<b>David Beaudouin, Poet</b>

Beaudouin resides with his wife, family and Dawgs at 2840 St. Paul St., Baltimore, MD
21218.  His e.mail address is [email protected], his phone number is 410-467-0600.  He
was born 3 February 1951 in Baltimore.

Beaudouin got his degree in 1975 from Johns Hopkins.  His religion is Quakerism, his
main political belief, Keep right except to pass.

His credits include the following chapbooks:
<i>Catenae,
American Night,
Human Nature</i> and <i>
Gig</i>.  He was last published on the Net in <i>Enterzone</i>.

Contemporary poets of importance to him are
Bernard Welt,
Terry Winch,
Kendra Kopelke,
Kim Carlin,
Jenmny Keith,
Ron Padgett and
Anselm Hollo.  Earlier poets of importance to him are

Frank O&#8217;Hara,
Charles Olson,
Joe Cardarelli, and
Elliott Coleman.

About contemporary poetry, he says, Well, it&#8217;s a mess, but I&#8217;m not
cleaning it up this time.

He enjoys going to the movies<i>any</i> movies.  He sums up his background in
philosophy and science with the following single sentence: When I was 10, I invented the
Buddha in my bedroom.

About his life, he says, Well, it seems to be moving along.
.
.
.

<b>Thomas Bell, Poet</b>

Bell lives at 2518 Wellington Pl., Murfreesboro, TN 37128.  His telephone number is
(615)
904-2374; his e.mail addresses are [email protected] and [email protected].
Born 18 February 1943 in Milwaukee, he is married and has two children.  He is right-
handed; about this he says, I write right and draw left.  poetry depends on where
i&#8217;m coming from.  i right write and draw to an inside straight.

He describes his religious denomination as democrat.  His occupation is

psychologist, for which he got the necessary degrees from the University of Wisconsin –
Milwaukee, Marquette, and the Wisconsin School of Professional Psychology.  He is also
an
editor and librarian.  He&#8217;s had work published on
paper and on the Internet.

One contemporary poet who is especially important to him is Allen Davies, and he
considers William Carlos
Williams the most important poet of the past for him.  He names no critics he favors
but throws his support to those who are experimental experiential.

Click<a href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem24.html”> here</a> to
read The Flowers, one of Bell&#8217;s poems.

Visit <A HREF=”http://www.public.usit.net/trbell”>Bell&#8217;s HomeSite</a> for
more of his poems.

<b>Ken Brandon, Poet</b>

Ken Brandona painter as well as a poet (actually, both combined, much of the time)was
born 10 February 1934 in Seattle, Washington.  He now lives with his wife, Maru Bruno
Flores, in Mexico.  His mailing address is La Danza 6, San Miguel de Allende, GTO.
37700 Mexico; his phone number is (Mexico)(415)-2-7098. A graduate of the University
of Washington in Seattle, he has three children: Ansel, Mateo and Dylan.

According to the <i>Comprepoetica</i> survey form he filled out,
Brandon makes his living under dim eyes passes the trail market.  His religion is Zenjoko,
his political affiliation good.  As for the poets who have influenced him,</p>

<pre>

the other poets
I throw in the fire
to get hot
</pre>
His hobbies are confidential.  In answer to the survey question about what techniques and
subject matter are of value to him in poetry, he says, Technique is self without trying for
any subject matter.  Regarding contemporary poetry, he says, As I think of it, it defines
itself automatically.

Brandon is a publisher who has put out 19 issues of the zine, <i>Iz Knot</i>, as of 1997.
His work has not been much written up.  My own stuff grips my interest, he says in
response to the query on the survey about what books he reads, or movies he goes to, and
so forth.  He describes his background in philosophy and science as normal.  As for the
sports he watches or participates in, information about that, he says, is confidential.

On life-in-general, Brandon says:</p>
<pre>

finding his path less taken
misled the dead gardner
for a while
</pre>
To view an untitled sample poem by Brandon, click <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem31.html”>here</a>.   </p>
<b>Janet Buck</b>

Buck teaches writing and literature at the college level. Her poetry, humor, and
essays have appeared in <i>The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Melic Review, Sapphire
Magazine, The Recursive Angel, Southern Ocean Review, Lynx: Poetry from Bath,
Apples &#038; Oranges, Oranges &#038; Apples, The Rose &#038; Thorn, San
Francisco Salvo,
Poetry Super Highway, Poetik License, Mind Fire, Astrophysicist’s Tango

Partner
Speaks, Perihelion, Oracle, Poetry Motel, Feminista!, Calliope, The Beaded
Strand,
New Thought Journal, Medicinal Purposes, 2River View, Kimera, Free Cuisinart,
In
Motion, Athens City Times, Conspire, Idling, remark, BeeHive, Gravity,
AfterNoon, A
Writer’s Choice, Niederngasse, Shades of December, Maelstrom, The Oracular
Tree,

Red Booth Review, Poetry Heaven, Tintern Abbey, Arkham, hoursbecomedays, The
Artful Mind, Oatmeal &#038; Poetry, Black Rose Blooming, Apollo Online, Masquerade,
Pigs &#8216;n Poets, Savoy, The Poet&#8217;s Edge, Allegory, GreenCross, Online
Writer,
Poetry
Cafe, Oblique, Locust Magazine, The Poetry Kit, Pyrowords, Vortex, Ceteris
Paribus,
The Suisun Valley Review, Illya&#8217;s Honey, Fires of Autumn, Orbital Revolution,

A
Little Poetry, Dead Letters, King Log, Peshekee Review, The Green Tricycle,
Pogonip,
Chimeric, Poetry Repair Shop, 3:00 AM Magazine, Wired Art from Wired Hearts</i>,
and
hundreds of print journals and e-zines world-wide.  A print collection of
Janet’s poetry
entitled <i>Calamity’s Quilt</i> is soon to be published by Newton’s Baby Press.

For a sample of her poetry, A Writer&#8217;s Prayer, click <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem49.html”>here</a>.
<b>Bill Burmeister (BER my stir), Poet</b>

Burmeister resides with his wife, Diana, at 8018 Lakepointe Drive, Plantation, Fla 33322.
His
e.mail address is [email protected].  A Florida native of Armenian
(mother) and German (dad) descent, he was born 22 March 1961, in St. Petersburg.  He
works as an Electronics Engineer, having gotten his bachelor&#8217;s and
master&#8217;s in that field at the University of Central Florida.  His hobbies include
reading folklore, following baseball, listening to jazz/blues music, raising plants, amateur
astronomy, good wine and cigars, and collecting stamps.

He has several works in progress (as of late October 1997): poem/play (1 yr); first
chapbook of poems; translations of a play by the (deceased) Ecuadorian poet Gonzalo
Escudero and poems from Jorge Guillen&#8217;s <i>Cantico</i>.

Among the contemporary poets important to Burmeister are
John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, A. Child, Clark Coolidge, Henry Gould, Lyn Hejinian,
Simic, J. Tate, Revell, Paz, Yau, L.Scalapino, B.Hillman, S.Howe, D.Ignatow, M.Strand,
M.McClure, B.Guest, R.Bly . . .
Earlier poets important to him include  Homer, Dante A., Milton, Shakespeare, Blake,
Wordsworth, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Loy, Williams (WCW), Pound, Breton,
Char, Zukofsky, Oppenheim.Celan, Loy, Joyce, T.Roethke, Carroll, Jorge Guillen, Lorca,
Neruda, Gonzalo Escudero, Spicer, Duncan, Patchen, Antonio Machado, Dickinson,
Wallace Stevens, Unamuno, Gustavo Adolpho Bequer, Beckett, D.Thomas, Muriel
Rukuyser, Rilke, J.Taggart . . .

Among critics, he particularly values the work of Blanchot, Bernstein, Perloff, Sartre,
Bachelard and Paz.

About his tastes in poetry he says, I have a fairly open, generous approach to poetry,
especially in what comes to me from the past. For poetry in the present, I look for the
writing as thinking, metaphysical, meditative, stream of consciousness, chance, new
surrealism, playfulness with language, nonsense, energetic lively language, reinvented
language, and so on. I look for innovation, but not necessarily formal innovation. What I
like most, I get from the avante-garde, but contentment with the avante-garde is an
impossibility by definition.  The avante-garde is not the beginning and the end of a
particular kind of poetry, but rather only the beginning, and maybe not the best possible at
that since a new dialogue has been begun with all of literature and history, the past as well
as a future.

As for criticism, he says, I don&#8217;t consider myself a critic as such, although
naturally, I recognize the importance of maintaining a critical ability since this has been
and will continue to be an essential part of literature.  For me, taste, appeal, enjoyment,
and enthusiasm must be considered at the personal level as much as any aesthetic, but can
never be
forced upon another as aesthetic. I tend to believe that poetry
is a lot like religion in that a kind of faith is necessary to
hold the poem together.  It seems to me that the poem is a delicate, but patient entity that
outlives time-sensitive criticism (such as identity politics and other socio-political agendas
in the guise of criticism).  Good critical writing is that which goes before or after good
writing: it informs, enlightens, and expands readership rather than merely decodes and
justifies.

Outside his field, Burmeister enjoys reading novels by James (<i>The Wings of a
Dove</i>), Faulkner (<i>The Sound and the Fury</i>)  Kafka (<i>The Trial</i>)  Gunter
Grass (<i>Cat and Mouse, Tin Drum</i>), Thomas Mann (<i>The Magic Mountain</i>),
the science fiction of G.Bear, Simak, Asimov, and D.Brin (before he choked), and Plays
by Beckett (<i>Waiting for Godot, Krapp&#8217;s last tape</i>), Gonzalo Escudero
(<i>Parallelogram</i>), the short word plays of Gertrude Stein, and the plays of
Sheakespeare.  He collects books of black &#038; white photography (Weston, Man Ray,
Irina Ionesco) and films (Wells, The Marx Brothers, D.Lynch and more).  He is also
building a collection of original paintings by Latin American painters such as the
contemporary Ecuadorian Arauz.  He listens to John Cage, experimental jazz (A.Braxton
and others) and acid jazz, and classical music.

About his interests in science and philosophy, he says, i tend (right now anyway) to be
partial toward the Spanish philo. Jose Ortega y Gassett, J.P.Sartre, Kierkegaard, Derrida,
&#038; Kant.
For philosophy of science, I have tended toward Einstein, Newton, Asimov, and Faraday.
Burmeister was educated in hard sciences up through elementary modern physics (theory
of quantuum electrodynamics, statistical mechanics, etc.), in mathematics
up through essential calculus, linear operator theory, diffential equations and boundary
value problems (applied).

In answer to the <i>Comprepoetica</i> survey question about the present world situation,
he says, I&#8217;m wondering for how long we can survive this ludicrous zero-sum game
known as the &#8216;Global economy.&#8217;

For a sample of Bill Burmeister&#8217;s poetry (with a brief commentary on it by
Burmeister), click <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/soho/cafe/1493/poem11.html”>here</a>.

<b>Harry Burrus, Poet/Publisher</b>

Burrus lives with his wife, Megan, at 1266 Fountain View, Houston, Texas 77057-2204.
His telephone number is (713) 784-2802; his e.mail address, [email protected]

He was born in Denver, reared in St. Louis.  Moved to Houston in June 1977.  He is six
feet one and weighs 175 pounds.  His parents

were university professors.  His father was the first Pro Football player with a PHD.  He
himself holds advanced degrees in Film, Dramatic Arts, and Poetryand is active as a
collagist, photographer, screenwriter and filmmaker as well as a poet and the publisher of
<i>O!!Zone</i>, which he describes as a
modest literary-art zine.

His poetry books include:  <i>I Do Not Sleep With Strangers, Confessions of a Tennis
Pro;
Bouquet; A Game of Rules; Without Feathers; For Deposit Only; the Jaguar
Porfolio</i>; and <i>Cartouche</i>.  He has also co-edited with Peter Gravis of Black Tie
Press,

<i>American Poetry Confronts the 1990&#8217;s</i>.

Burrus&#8217;s poetry, photographs, and collages have appeared in various publications
and
exhibitions in the US and abroad.

Says Burrus about making a living, I gain dinero via photography, scripts, workshops, and
various other artistic
pursuits (and years ago as a tennis pro).

About religion and politics/nationalism (and money), he finds that most people
cannot discuss without harboring ill-feeling and/or distrust for those who
possess views different from their own.  Hence, I tend not to engage in these
areas unless it is with those capable of out of body experiences.

He has difficulty specifically determining what poets and critics and other influences have
been important to him.  The aggregation is subtle and ongoing.  Travel, for sure, is a
primary player.  On the goat path and with the
aroma of donkey dung filling the surrounding air, I witness and pick up
juxtaposition, impact, resonance, and cultural unravelings.  On these

excursions I shoot a lot of film, make journal entries, and ambient sound
recordings and always use the material.  I never know how or when or in what
form the work will appear, but it eventually does pop up somewhere, either in
poems, art of some kind like a collage, or, perhaps, a story emerges.

I am drawn to openness, curiosity, and a willingness to take chances.  I like
strong personalities.  I favor high energy and experimentation.  The seduction
has been more from artists and filmmakers, rather than poets, although a few
poets have landed a stroke or two.  A few personalities that quickly come to

mind are: Ernst, Magritte, Man Ray, Buñuel, Resnais, Cartier-Bresson,
Schwitters, Godard, Bergman, Newton, Rausenberg, Matta, Isidore Ducasse,
Pessoa, Prevert, Bowles, Wenders, and Gysin.

I tend to appreciate those engaged in multiple activities and skilled in
different pursuits.  Peter Beard and Bruce Chatwin come to mind.  Journeymen.
I enjoy Henry Miller’s writing about watercolors more than his novels.  I
enjoy the independence of his watercolors.

I make extractions from movements (Dada, Surrealism, The Beats, etc.), pulling

on the dynamism or a particular tack  something I notice that I might employ
in my work.  I may utilize or value aspects of the thinking that goes into a
work more than the work itself.  Burroughs’ and Kerouac’s and Lawrence’s
ideas, for example.  I also value their dedication.

Previously I read a lot of poetry and poetry publications, but I became
disenchanted with the likes of APR and Poetry  too much sameness.  Even

newcomers and alternative journals, which broke away from the writing school
content and were, at first, exciting and fresh, even they slowly lost their
zest and started wearing that familiar uniform.  There is, however, still
energy in various zines and micro-presses, so, choice is out there.  One must
forage for the interesting  which is the same with people.

My engagement with international visual poets, mail artists, and photographers
provides visual stimulation, plus insights into other cultures.  Myriad

personalities have opened to me and my exchange with them I eagerly maintain.
I find correspondence or working on a collage or making a photograph more
intriguing than being a spectator of some sporting event.

Burrus cites three critics who write well about their topics:  Walter Pater, John Simon, and
Marvin Bell.

The last full collection of poetry Burrus has read (as of 15 November 1997 was
Bukowski&#8217;s <i>Betting on the Muse</i>; last

non-poetry book: <i>Breaking the Maya Code</i>, by Michael Coe.

Click <a href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem18.html”>here</a> to see
Blue Mirror, a poem from Burrus&#8217;s <i>A Game of Rules</i>

(name of respondent)  Brandon
(pronunciation of respondent&#8217;s name)  Carpenter
(street address)  4616 S. Rusk
(city&#038;state)  Amarillo, Tx 79110

(e.mail address)  [email protected]
(phone number)  N/A
(po-type)  Poet/Critic
(affiliations/organizations)

Denver Word Affiliate
Vocal Velocity Records

(publication credits)

Poetry Cafe
Anvil
Poetry Shelter
Pauper.com
Sharptongue

(list of works)

A flame of the heart in the hands of Dread
Discombobulate the Dissemated

Muddy&#8217;s Cafe: Out of the Mud
Sharptongue

(contemporary poets important to respondent)  Ben Ohmart
(poets of yesteryear important to respondent)
Baudlelaire
Rimbaud
Ginsberg

Kerouac

(tastes in poetry)

Avant-Garde
Beat

(description of criticism)  Pick out the truth of the piece, show the path to find these truths
and uplift the reader, author, editor and other critics.
(zines, etc., that ought to be listed in the dictionary)

Realpoetic

(sample of respondent&#8217;s poetry)  members.tripod.com/Carpenter_B</p>
<hr />
</body>
</html>
.

<b>Joel Chace, Poet</b>

(pronunciation of respondent&#8217;s name)  Chase
(street address)  300 E. Seminary St.

(city&#038;state)  Mercersburg, PA  17236
(e.mail address)  [email protected]
(phone number)  717-328-3824

(affiliations/organizations)

Poetry EditorAntietam Review and 5_Trope electronic
magazine.

(publication credits)

My poems have appeared or are forthcoming  in print journals and
magazines such as the following:  <i>The Seneca Review, The Connecticut
Poetry Review, Spinning Jenny, Poetry Motel,  No Exit,  Pembroke
Magazine, Crazy Horse, Kudos</i> (England), and <i>Porto-Franco</i> (Romania).  I

have also published work in Electronic Magazines such as the following:
<i>Ninth St. Labs, Recursive Angel, Highbeams, Switched-on-Gutenberg,
Kudzu, Pif, The Morpo Review, Snakeskin, Slumgullion, PotePoetZine,</i>
and <i>The Experioddicist</i>.

(list of works)

Northwoods Press, in 1984, published my collection of poems entitled
<i>The Harp Beyond the Wall</i>.  Persephone Press, in 1992, published my

second book, <i>Red Ghost</i>, which won the first Persephone Press Book Award
and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in that same year.  Big Easy
Press, in 1995, brought out a collection entitled <i>Court of Ass-Sizes</i>.
In June, 1997, came a full-length collection, <i>Twentieth Century
Deaths</i>, from Singular Speech Press.  <i>The Melancholy of Yorick</i>

(Birch Brook Press) and <i>maggnummappuss</i> (nominated for a 1998 Pushcart Prize)
appeared in 1998, and a  bi-lingual edition of my poems is being prepared in Romania.

(where written up)

<i>Slumgullion, Pif, Mind Fire, A Writer&#8217;s Choice, Next,
No Exit, Grab-a-Nickel, Small Press Review</i>.

(contemporary poets important to respondent)

Jake Berry, W.D. Snodgrass, Adrienne Rich,
Jack Foley, Robert Creeley.

(poets of yesteryear important to respondent)

Jack Spicer, Thomas McGrath, Muriel Rukeyser,
Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman.

(critics important to respondent)

Jack Foley, Muriel Rukeyser,
Marjorie Perloff.

For two samples of Chace&#8217;s poetry, click <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem48.html”>here</a>.  He&#8217;d
appreciate any feedback on it that you&#8217;d care to e.mail him.

<b>Blaise Cirelli, Poet</b>
Cirelli was born 1 January 1952 in Philadelphia.  He describes himself as having a
Buddhist leaning and being Leftist Apolitical.  His publication credits include
<i>Agniezewska&#8217;s Diary, VIA, Zaum, Blind Donkey </i>and<i> Talus and
Scree</i>, and his
etry&#8217;s been written up in the San Louis Obispo Local  newspaper.  Contemporary
poets he admires include Michael Palmer,

Lyn Hejinian, Mei Mei Bruseenbugge (spelling?), Robert Hass, Ron Padgett and Robert
Pinsky.  He also admires the work of Ezra Pound,
Homer,
William Carlos Williams,
Loraine Niedecker,
Frank O&#8217;Hara,
Shelley,
Browning and
Tennyson.
Critics important to him are

Charles Altieri,
Helen Vendler,
Marjorie Perloff and
Forest Gander.

As a reader of poetry, he enjoys Experimental, Meditative Lyric poetryand <i>not</i>
Nature (Because how can you not like nature? I&#8217;d rather be in nature than read
about it).  His impression of the current scene is that There seem to be a lot of

diocre poets getting published.

Among his favorite books are: <i>The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment
<i>and</i> The
Sorrows of Young Werther</i>.  He lists two favorite movies: <i>Black Robe</i> and
<i>Il Postino</i>.  The sculpture of Henry Moore is important to him.  About philosophy
he says, I wish I could understand Wittgenstein.  On life-in-general: Some peop

are born with failure, others have it thrust upon them.  His
Favorite name for a cat: Spot (if it has spots); Favorite food: organic turnips.

For a sample of Cirelli&#8217;s poetry click <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem4.html”>here</a>.

<b>Dark Poet, Poet</b>

Dark Poet&#8217;s address is 555 this isn&#8217;t real, Punta Gorda FL 33982. His
e.mail address is [email protected], his phone
number,(941) 555-9992.

(affiliations/organizations)  NA
(publication credits)  NA
(list of works)  NA
(where written up)  Conspiracy boards all over
(contemporary poets important to respondent)  na
(poets of yesteryear important to respondent)  Poe
(critics important to respondent)  na
(tastes in poetry)  na</p>

You can find a sample of Dark Poet&#8217;s work by clicking <a
href=”http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1493/poem45.html”>here</a>.  His attitude
toward getting feedback on it: Sure.  It&#8217;s a rough draft.

<b>Catherine Daly (DAY lee), Poet</b>

Daly lives at 533 South Alandele Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90036.
Her e.mail address is [email protected], and is affiliated with
UCLA Extension and various listservs.

So far (late 1998), Daly has gotten about 80 poems into print  but has not yet had a book
published.  She has the following
manuscripts sitting around her house, however: <i>Engine No. 9, Locket, Manners in the
Colony, Dark Night</i>, and <i>The Green Hotel</i>.

The work of Barbara Guest and some of that of Barbara Hillman
has been important to her, and she likes the work of Todd Baron, Spencer Selby, Karen
Volkman, Ann Lauterbach (her favorite poetry teacher), Janet Holmes, Jeanne Marie
Beaumontthe last three of
whom have been especially supportive of her efforts.

She considers the usual suspects among the poets of yesteryear
important to her, and she admires the criticism of Susan Howe.

About poetry she says, I expect a great deal of thought and feeling to be behind a poem,
and I tend to like poems which reflect ideas.  Because I studied religion and philosophy
and math, I am particularly sensitive to the misuse of many ideas commonly placed into
these categories.

She likes her poetic narration true, not fictional.

A critic as well as a poet, Daly prefers to express critically what (she feels) the poet
attempts vs. succeeds at doing.  For example, she says, Wallace Stevens mentioned that it
was really what he attempted that pleased him about his work, but that he never achieved
anything near that in his poetry.  For a sample
of her criticism, her first book review, an impression of contemporary poetry, can be
found in <i>American Letters &#038; Commentary</i>, 10th Anniversary issue.

She thinks the American Contemporary Poetry &#8217;scene&#8217; is very much like
the alternative music scene of the 80s, and perhaps what the truly alternative music scene
still is: an incredibly generous but fragmented variety of subgenres waiting for someone
like Kurt Cobain to come along and steal all of the riffs and jam them together on a
national stage.

See Daly&#8217;s web site for links to poems of hers that have been published online:

http://members.aol.com/cadaly.</p>

<b>Michel Delville (del VIL), Critic</b>

(pronunciation of respondent&#8217;s name)  [delvil]
Delville lives at Alllée du Beau Vivier 38, 4102 Seraing, Belgium.  His e.mail address is
[email protected]; his phone number is ++ 32 4 3374386.

He has two books coming out in 1998: <i>The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and
the Law of Genre</i> (Gainesville FL: UP of Florida), and <i>J. G. Ballard</i>
(Plymouth: Northcote House).

He considers the following contemporary poets of importance:
Henri Michaux, Ron Silliman, Vasko Popa,
Miroslav Holub, Francis Ponge, Madeline Gins,
Paul Nougé, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Pierre Alferi,

John Cage, Peter Redgrove and Rosmarie Waldrop.

As for poets of the past, he lists Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire,
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Milton and Dante as
the heavyweights for him.

He notes four critics as being important to him: Marjorie Perloff, Roland Barthes, Frank
Lentricchia and Gérard Genette.

<b>Debra Di Blasi, Poet</b>

(pronunciation of Di Blasi&#8217;s name)  dee BLAH-see
Di Blasi&#8217;s mailing address is 5932 Charlotte St., Kansas City, MO 64110, her
e.mail address is [email protected].

(affiliations/organizations)</p>
Missouri Arts Council  Literature Panelist

PEN Center USA West  Member
The Authors Guild, Inc.  Member
The Academy of American Poets  Associate Member
The Writers Place  Member
National League of American Pen Women, Westport, MO Branch

Member  Chair, Short Story Committee</p>
publication credits

BOOKS:
* <i>Drought &#038; Say What You Like</i>, novella, New Directions Books: New
York, NY.  March 1997   winner Thorpe Menn Book Award
* <i>Prayers of an Accidental Nature</i>, short story collection,  Coffee House Press:
Minneapolis, MN.  May 1999.

* Gass Pain, hypertext essay (Dalkey Archive Press/The Center for Book Culture,
www.centerforthebook.org)
*many published short fiction, articles, essays, reviews

list of works

FICTION
* <i>What the Body Requires</i> (formerly titled <i>Reprise: Reprisal</i>), novel (See
AWARDS)

* <i>The Fourth Book</i>, short story collection, in progress</p>
SHORT STORIES
*Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung To The Accompaniment Of Piano.  <i>The Iowa
Review</i>.  December 2000  (See  RADIO / AUDIO and PERFORMANCE /
INSTALLATION / THEATRE)
* Blue, Recollection, and Exiles.  <i>The Prague Review</i>.  Winter 2000

*Snapshots: A Geneology.  Show + Tell anthology of Kansas City writers and artists,
Potpourri Publications: Kansas City, MO.  June 2000
*The Buck.  Potpourri  literary journal.  Fall 1996
*Blind.  New Letters literary journal.  Spring 1996
*Drowning Hard. Cottonwood literary journal. 1995  anthologized in Moondance e-zine.
1997

*I Am Telling You Lies. Sou&#8217;wester literary journal.  1995
*Chairman of the Board.  TIWA (Themes Interpreted by Writers and Artists) literary and
visual arts magazine.  1993  (See RADIO / AUDIO)
*An Interview With My Husband.  New Delta Review. 1991  anthologized in Lovers:
Writings By Women, The Crossing Press. 1992. (See AWARDS)
*Delbert.  <i>AENE literary journal</i>.  1991

*The Season&#8217;s Condition.  Colorado-North Review literary journal.  1990  (See
FILM and RADIO / AUDIO)
*Where All Things Converge. Transfer literary journal.  1989</p>
NONFICTION
*<i>The Way Men Kiss</i>,  memoir, in progress

<i>Gass Pain</i>, hypertext,  The Center for Book Culture casebook on William H.
Gass&#8217;s The Tunnel, H.L. Hix, editor.  November 2000
(www.centerforbookculture.org)</p>
Essays
Millennium Garden: Paintings by Jim Sajovic.  Published in art catalog.  September 1999.
Out of the Garden, Into the Cave.  1997  (See AWARDS)
What Three Cheers Everywhere Provide.  Anthologized in Exposures: Essays By Missouri
Women,  Woods Colt Press: Kansas City, MO,  March 1997 (See AWARDS)</p>

Articles (for SOMA arts magazine: San Francisco, CA)
We&#8217;ve Got Joe Montana.  1994
I Am Writing To You From the Middle Of Nowhere. 1990
James Rosenquist:  Seeing/Not Seeing.  1990
Diamanda Galas:  Honesty Inside A Clenched Fist.  1989

Rising From the Ash Heap of Performance Art, Rinde Eckert Takes Off.  1988
Otto Hitzberger:  Cutting Away.  1987
Miró.  1987
Jonathan Barbieri:  Missiles Across the Border.  1987</p>
Art Reviews (for <i>The New Art Examiner</i>: Chicago, IL)

Jane Ashbury.  1985.
Marilyn Propp.  1984,</p>
SCREENPLAYS / FILM
Screenplays Produced</p>
<i>Drought</i>,  16mm, 28 min.  1998 (premiere)  1993 (written)
Based on the novella of the same title by Debra Di Blasi.

Produced by Breathing Furniture Films/Lisa Moncure &#038; Michael Leen,
Screenplay by Debra Di Blasi, Lisa Moncure, Michael Leen,  Directed by Lisa Moncure,
Photography by Michael Leen,  Sound Design by Jim McKee/Earwax Productions,
Starring Jessika Cardinahl &#038; Jack Conley,  Production esign by Megan Ricks
&#038; John Matheson,  Editing by Jennifer Jean Cacavas,  Radio Program Music by
Allen Davis.</p>
SCREENINGS:
o       National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC,  November 2000
o       Ragtag Cinema:  Columbia, MO.  June 2000
o       Universe Elle, as part of the 53rd Cannes International Film Festival:  Cannes,
France.  May 2000

* Broadcast rights purchased by Independent Film Channel.  Premiere broadcast
November 23, 1999
* Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee:  Kansas City, MO.  April 1999 (see AWARDS)
o       Göteborg Sweden Film Festival:  Göteborg, Sweden.  Feb.  1999
o       Festival Internacional de Cine de Bilbao Spain:  Bilbao, Spain.   November 1998
o       Sao Paulo Mostra Internacional de Cinama:  Sao Paulo, Brazil.  October 1998
o       Figueira da Foz International Festival of Cinema:  Lisbon Portugal.  September 1998
(See AWARDS)
o       Webster University Film Series:  St. Louis, MO.  September 1999.
o       Sarajevo International Film Festival:  Sarajevo, Bosnia.  August 1998
o       Recontres Cinemágraphiques Franco-American D&#8217;Avignon, France:
Avignon, France. June 1998 (See AWARDS)

o       Charlotte Film Festival:  Charlotte, NC.  June 1998
o       Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival:  Toronto, Canada.  June 1998 (See
AWARDS)
o       New York/Avignon Film Festival:  New York, NY.  April-May 1998
o       New York Women&#8217;s Film Festival:  New York, NY.  April 1998
o       Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival:  Taos, NM.  April 1998 (See AWARDS)
o       American Film Institute Film Festival:  Los Angeles, CA. World premiere: October
1997 </p>
<i>The Season&#8217;s Condition</i> —  Super 8, 10 min.

Based on the short story of the same title by Debra Di Blasi.
Produced and directed by Lisa Moncure,  photography by Michael Leen.  </p>
SCREENINGS:
o       Toronto Film Festival:  Toronto, Canada.  1998
o       American Film Institute Film Festival:  Los Angeles, CA.  1995
o       Bay Area Film &#038; Video Poetry Festival:  San Francisco, CA.  1994

o       Culture Under Fire Film Festival:  Kansas City, MO.  1994</p>
Screenplays in Pre-Production
<i>My Father’s Farm</i>,  original short documentary in pre-production, based on the
essay Out of the Garden, Into the Cave by Debra Di Blasi.  Produced/written/directed by
Debra Di Blasi.
<i>Intruder</i>,  short screenplay in pre-production  screenplay by Debra Di Blasi.
Producer/director Edward Stencel.</p>
Screenplays Unproduced
The Hunger Winter, original feature in progress  co-written with historian Hal Wert

The Shortest Route Home,  original short screenplay
The Walking Wounded,  original feature-length screenplay (See AWARDS)
The Significance of Dreams, original short screenplay
Taming Wild Geese —  unproduced  original feature-length screenplay
Staring Into The Sun —  unproduced  original feature-length screenplay </p>
RADIO / AUDIO</p>
<i>Czechoslovakian Rhapsody</i>,  radio adaptation from the short story of the same
title.  Produced by Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (YLE):  Helsinki, Finland.
Broadcast premiere October 1998

Kansas City Fiction Writers: Vol. 1 — short stories (The Season&#8217;s Condition and
Chairman of the Board) recorded for double CD set, limited edition  featuring Kansas City
fiction writers.  Art Radio:  Kansas City, MO.  Release date December 1998
Dreamless Dream,  radio adaptation from the short stories Blind, Stones, and  Our
Perversions.  Produced by Finnish Broadcasting Corporation:  Helsinki, Finland.
Broadcast premiere October 1998

An Interview With My Husband —  chamber theatre adaptation from the short story of
the same title by Debra Di Blasi.  Produced and adapted by Stephen Booser,  directed by
Art Suskin,  stage management by Nancy Madsen,  premiere at The Writers Place, Kansas
City, MO,  October 1997
Drought — radio adaptation of the novella of the same title by Debra Di Blasi,  produced
and adapted by YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Corporation), Helsinki, Finland o  broadcast
premiere May 1998</p>
PERFORMANCE / EXHIBITIONS / THEATRE</p>
Unbroken View,  multimedia installation  collaboration with visual artist Sharyn O’Mara
assisted by sound designer Chris Willits.  Premiere exhibition:  Edwin A. Ulrich Museum:
Wichita, KS.   November 2000-January 2001.  Traveling to Juniata Landscape Museum:
Juniata, Pennsylvania.  September 2001.
Czechoslovakian Rhapsody,  multimedia performance based on the short story of the same
title by Debra Di Blasi.  Written/directed/produced/performed by Debra Di Blasi.
Premiere Ragtag Cinema, June 2000
An Interview With My Husband —  chamber theatre adaptation from the short story of
the same title by Debra Di Blasi.  Produced and adapted by Stephen Booser,  directed by
Art Suskin,  stage management by Nancy Madsen,  premiere at The Writers Place, Kansas
City, MO,  October 1997</p>
(where written up)</p>
<i>The New York Times Book Review
*Publishers Weekly

*Book Forum
*ForeWord
*In Print
*The Kansas City Star</i>
many, many others</p>
contemporary poets important to Di Blasi</p>
Louise Gluck
Larry Levis (deceased)
Billy Collins

H.L. Hix
Galway Kinnell
Mark Strand
Marilyn Hacker
many, many others
poets of yesteryear important to Di Blasi
Sylvia Plath
T.S. Eliot
W.B. Yeats

many, many others
critics important to Di Blasi: Not particularly interested in criticism
tastes in poetry: As a fiction writer, I am most fond of narrative poetry, although I enjoy
anything brilliant that contains aural lyricism.  Content is important only in that it helps
illuminate a &#8216;truth&#8217; I already know or confronts me with one I have not yet
discovered.
impression of contemporary poetry: Wonderful.  The range of styles and voices is a
pleasure.
zines, etc., that ought to be listed in the dictionary:  Virtually every serious literary journal
that publishes poetry deserves to be on this list.

 

---

 

My Scientific American Blog

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2013

---

M@h*(pOet)?ica
Blog-Master: Bob Grumman

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/27/mhpoetica-music-and-autobiography/

---

To celebrate the full year of entries to my Scientific American guest blog that I completed early this past June, and feeling by then that I could get away with it, I devoted my next entry to my own works. No doubt I’m a gross narcissist, but I did feel self-conscious about such blatant self-aggrandizement. But I have several rationalizations for it. One is that no one else will aggrandize me and I deserve to be, at least a little!
Seriousfully, I have several less self-centered rationalizations. Indeed, I’d go so far as to call them “reasons!”

 1. If an analyst of an art practices the art himself, what works would he be more qualified to discuss than his own–and use to illustrate his over-all view of the art?

 2. Consider, also, what other works than his own could more effectively reveal his strengths (and, perhaps more important, his shortcomings)–and the strengths and weaknesses of the kind of art he is discussing.

 3. Discussion of his own works leads readily to discussions of himself. Not that I consider myself the proper center of writings like this, but I do strongly believe in making oneself a part of almost any writing—because I myself like finding out about a writer as a person as well as about whatever subject he’s writing about. And a sort of self-interview interwoven through possibly dry text may help keep a reader reading. True, it might also turn off a reader impatient with what he considers irrelevancies. But, hey, I’m not sure I want anyone like that reading my stuff!

4. Feeling free to digress agrees with me—although I suppose that isn’t a very serious reason.

5. Nor, I suppose, is my belief that it makes me feel more honest to yak about myself and why I’m doing what I’m doing as I go along—even when I lie!

I was going to begin my entry with a brief autobiography about how I became a mathematical poet. When it became too long, I dropped it–but I have room for it here, and posterity will want to know! My parents are central to it, for they supplied me with math-genes, both of them having been gifted in math although my mother made no special use of it and my father used it only for a few years as an engineer with Sikorski until being let go because he lacked a college degree.

They passed their mathematical genes on to Bill, Jr., the older of my two older brothers, who became a successful civil engineer (and, at 84, still does work as a consultant) and to me. My other brother, Sherman, was good at math, too, but not what you’d call “gifted.” My sister (gotta be complete!) was better at other things, but not a math whiz.

I was certainly no mathematical prodigy, just automatically strongly attracted to it (and, therefore, better than most at it). My brother Bill helped by introducing me at the age of nine or so (before my school was teaching it) to . . . long division. Because of baseball.

Like many boys, I was a baseball statistics nut, so it came about that one day when the males in my family were living and dying with our baseball team, the New York Giants, I wondered aloud about what batting averages were, which led to Bill’s introducing me to long division, and decimals. For more than a week after that, I spent a lot of time figuring out my favorite players’ averages, right after each time at bat. I never went on to doing anything of interest in math, as a mathematician, although I unofficially minored in it when I finally went to college in my thirties.

But I feel my experience with batting averages awakened what I now think of as a visceral sensitivity to mathematics. I would love to learn if real mathematicians believe they have the same sensitivity. I mean the feeling that numbers are nearly as much things-in-themselves as sounds or colors. In any case, my first long division poem seemed to me to be doing something no other aesthetic object did. So I have specialized in long division as a poet for the past twenty years. Six of them are in the blog entry I’m writing about here.

The first of my poems in the entry, though, is not a long division poem, or even mathematical. In keeping with the entry’s theme, which is the importance of music in my work, it’s an ancient visual haiku from my first collection of poems, poemns, which I paid to have printed in 1966. Here it is in full: “strains of Franck and/ radio is to sky as/ flowerstem is to earth”–with the last line upside-down to make it visual!

A little later my “Seaside Long Division” appears. Its quotient, “Musick,” is the only thing in it overtly connecting it to music–but part of the reason for its dividend, “yesterday,” was the Beatles’ song of that name. Here’s the beginning of my relatively long discussion of the poem (slightly revised), to give you an idea of the commentary in the entry (which I’m Very Proud of): “It is one of my woozier efforts—intentionally, I claim, for wooze is mainly what it’s about. I almost want to leave it at that. But, like Pound, I’m an inveterate village explainer, so have to go on to tell you that the “commocean” (which is part of the product of “musick” times the divisor, “distant sail”) underlying a large part of the poem is wooze, and the word, “dreams” (“dreams of marauders” being the poem’s remainder), is almost a synonym for “wooze.” And look at how the coloring woozes out an opening into whatever it is that the poem is about. I would ask, too, is any of the arts closer to pure wooze than music? Finally, right at the center of the piece is ‘yesterday’: or where the present dissolves into wooze.”

The word. “music,” is more or less defined by the next of my poems. A G-clef sign connects two others to music, and a whole staff makes the connection in the remaining two.

Before leaving, I want to quote a footnote I had in the entry which I consider Very Important: “Because there’s always someone at a poetry reading who is annoyed with poets who try to explain their works on the grounds that a poem that needs to be explained is no good, I thought I’d defend the practice—at least for poems that are difficult because unconventional the way mathexpressive poems are. The simple reason explanation is in order, and should in some cases be required of the poet, is that it is only fair. Why? Because conventional poems come pre-explained! That is to say, schools begin teaching conventional poems—simple rhymes, for instance—as soon as children begin formal education, and continue to do so throughout college, even to students not majoring in English. And PBS programs on poetry, large-circulation magazines and commercial presses publishing poetry as well as poetry critics with readerships of more than a hundred help them by re-explaining them. Conventional poems don’t need their creators’ explanations of them, unconventional poems do.”

 

AN OVERVIEW OF THE AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY

For the first 150 years or so following the death of William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in 1616, it seems to have been taken for granted that he was the author of the works credited to him. Certainly no record from those years has ever been found to indicate otherwise. Then, in 1769, a book by the actor David Garrick’s friend Henry Lawrence called Life and Adventures of Common Sense appeared. An allegory, this work follows an Elizabethan character named Common Sense on his travels through England with his friends Wit, Genius and Humour. Along the way they run into a country rogue who steals various magical tools from them that enable him to write a series of brilliant plays. The rogue’s name, needless to say, is Shakespeare. His victims decide to remain silent about his thefts in order not to rob his country of “its greatest ornament.”

17 years later another book appeared that was slightly relevant to the authorship question: The Story of the Learned Pig. Its not-too-trustworthy hero, the pig of its title, claimed to have had many previous lives. In one of them he did odd jobs for Shakespeare’s company such as holding horses, and writing Shakespeare’s best plays for him.

Neither of these books is a serious attack on Stratfordian beliefs. The first is merely a playful description of Shakespeare as having had common sense, wit, genius and humor. The second attempts to deflate bardolatry more than anything else—in the few of its pages that have anything to do with Shakespeare. But to those who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was responsible for The Oeuvre they indicate that even two centuries ago there was suspicion concerning its authorship.

A more plausible indicator of such suspicion was the Stratford-based research around the time of the publication of The Story of the Learned Pig said to have been carried out by James Wilmot, a friend of both Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. What he learned convinced Wilmot that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays—or so he told James Corton Cowell (according to Cowell) years later when the latter was gathering material for a talk on Shakespeare’s life he was to give to the Ipswich Philosophic Society. Wilmot never let anyone see the records of his research, and had all his papers burned upon his death. But he told Cowell that Francis Bacon was the true author of The Oeuvre. That the Stratfordian could not have written it was proven, for him, by the inability of the Stratford townsfolk Wilmot interviewed (a century-and-a-half after Shakespeare’s death) to tell him a single thing about the poet.

But I am not being fair to Wilmot. That he was unable to find any Shakespearean manuscripts in Stratford, or books from the library of Shakespeare, also contributed to his stand. And there was the problem of the knowledge revealed in the plays (regarding, for instance, the circulation of the blood), which seemed to him beyond the Stratford man’s reach. Moreover, Wilmot discovered a host of fascinating local legends and folk tales in Stratford that went back to Shakespeare’s day, like one about pancakes falling out of the sky. None of these legends and tales showed up in Shakespeare’s plays, as one might have expected (according to Wilmot). In short, Wilmot’s findings were not completely worthless, but–except for Cowell–he had no disciples, and Cowell didn’t even have one disciple, for he swore the Ipswich Philosophic Society to silence before revealing what he’d found out from Wilmot (in 1805). That silence wasn’t broken until around 1930, when the texts of the two talks Cowell gave about Wilmot’s research were discovered by a Baconian–which proved to many an anti-Stratfordian how mortally fearful our ancestors were of revealing . . . The Truth.

Or so the story goes.  Unfortunately for the anti-Stratfordians, though, later research spoiled things.   Paul Altrocchi and Daniel Wright (both Oxfordians, but scholars as well–which is possible!) found no records of an “Ipswich Philosophical Society.  They also discovered several instances of anachronistic vocabulary in the Wilmot papers to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt  that the whole affair was a hoax. 

Ergo, it was actually 51 years after The Story of Learned Pig before anyone else had anything anti-Stratfordian to say in print.  It was only someone fictitious, though, a character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel, Venetia, who claimed that Shakespeare was just an adaptor of other men’s work: “a botcher up of old plays.” But that, of course, is not saying he wasn’t responsible for The Oeuvre, just that he wasn’t as original as he might have been—according to this one fictional character.

Eleven years later, Joseph C. Hart, New York lawyer, writer, colonel, yachtsman, speculated in a memoir that late in the seventeenth century, the author of the Shakespearean plays having been forgotten, the actor Betterton and the writer Rowe found a bunch of anonymous plays and decided to say they were by Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself, according to Hart, “grew up in ignorance and viciousness and became a common poacher. And the latter title, in literary matters, he carried to his grave.” Shakespeare was, in short, a fraud. But he did contribute to the plays—by adding the lewd bits.

Along the way, Hart quoted someone unnamed of his own era who spoke of the “singular and unaccountable mystery . . . attached to Shakespeare’s private life,” and how “almost every document concerning him has either been destroyed or still remains in obscurity.” Meanwhile, in 1852, an anonymous article appeared in an Edinburgh journal whose author was bothered, like so many others, by the wide contrast of Shakespeare’s known life with the life the creator of such exalted masterpieces must have led, and by the lack of letters and manuscripts by Shakespeare, and scarcity of references to him by contemporaries. For instance, if Southampton knew Shakespeare, why had Raleigh, Spenser and Bacon “ignored his acquaintance?” The writer suggested that Shakespeare bought plays from some starving playwright and passed them off as his own. He claimed not to think much of his hypothesis but considered it at least as valid as the idea that Shakespeare himself wrote the plays.

It was at that juncture that Delia Bacon entered the scene (with encouragement from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson). In magazine articles of 1856 and a book the following year, she attributed Shakespeare’s plays to a committee which included Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, and was led by Francis Bacon (who was not, it ought to be stressed, a relation of hers). Her thought was pretty confused but she knew that “the illiterate man who kept the theatre” could never have written the Shakespearean plays. She was committed to a mental institution not long after her book was published.

That same year William Henry Smith’s Bacon and Shakespeare came out. He, too, was disturbed by the lack of manuscripts. He couldn’t understand how Shakespeare could have “allowed” inferior versions of his plays to have been published in his name. He argued that Shakespeare of Stratford was a “poor player” who could never have written the plays, pointing out that he never claimed the plays as his own. For him, a telling clue was that Bacon never referred to Shakespeare in print. Smith also found parallels between apothegms in Bacon’s notebooks and lines in Shakespeare’s plays. It was thus certain to him that Bacon wrote The Oeuvre.

Baconianism seems to have reached its peak in 1892 when Ignatius Donnelly discovered what he (but no sane person since) took to be ciphers in the Shakespearean plays. As decoded by Donnelly, the ciphers revealed Francis Bacon as The True Author. In a Shakespeare-versus-Bacon debate that a leading publication of the time subsequently sponsored, a jury came out 20 for Shakespeare, 2 for composite authorship, 2 for neither of the two, and 1 for Bacon.

The next man credited with The Ouevre had two things going for him: he was a proven genius as a playwright, and he had a motive for concealing his authorship that makes sense. I’m alluding, of course, to Christopher Marlowe. In 1593 he was killed in a tavern brawl, or the equivalent, according to the official documents, and at the time was possibly in mortal trouble with the authorities (as–again, possibly–a loudly out-of-the-closet anti-Christian homosexual and advocate of counterfeiting—or one thought to be). His circumstances would thus have made his pretending to be killed and then going abroad, and continuing his vocation under an assumed name, a wise course of action. He was brought into the controversy in 1895 by a San Francisco attorney, William G. Ziegler, in a book called, It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries. Calvin Hoffman, another American, resuscitated the theory in 1955 with The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare.

At some point or another, William Stanley, Earl of Derby, and other noblemen (and women) have been put forward as the true Shakespeare, but none of them has gotten much backing (in the English-speaking world, at any rate)—except for Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. His discoverer was an English school-teacher named John Thomas Looney who in 1920 announced his theory in a book called “Shakespeare” Identified. In the words of Charlton Ogburn, his main disciple, Looney “did what no one had done before. He approached the quest for the author systematically, and with a completely open mind.” His procedure was to study the plays and poems and make a list of the traits their author must have had (such as membership in the higher aristocracy)—none of which the Stratford man happened to have–and examine the lives of the time’s nobles to find one who did have them. Looney has since been updated and amplified by Ogburn, whose views are now dominant among the anti-Stratfordians.

Hundreds of others have written vigorously anti-Stratfordian articles and books. Ogburn, unsurprisingly, considered this to be evidence of “the extraordinary proportions of the objection to Shakespearean Orthodoxy,” but hundreds of articles and books have been written to disprove Darwin’s theory of natural selection or to prove the existence of ghosts, too, so there seems little reason to take Ogburn’s observation seriously. Ogburn was also impressed by the quality of the people on his side of the question, for they have included (so anti-Stratfordians maintain) Whittier, Whitman, Lord Palmerston, Henry James, Bismarck, Mark Twain, Galsworthy, Freud, Chaplin, and many others.

These famous people contributed no direct evidence to support their view. Nor did they offer original reasons for their candidate or against Shakespeare or ever exhibit any talent for serious historical research. They are thus irrelevant (as are the at least equally large number of big names on the Stratfordian side who contribute nothing to the debate but invective and the party line).

Unfortunately, for a long time, few knowledgeable Shakespeareans deigned to argue seriously with the opponents of Shakespeare, hiding in the premise that to argue with them was to dignify them, which they didn’t deserve. This is the way all estabniks treat the ideas of those seeking to overthrow them. It is not only a disservice to the search for truth, but futile even for status-protection in the long-term. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the inflexibility of most anti-Stratfordians, and the frivolousness of so many of their arguments make it generally unprofitable to spend much time with them. A few valiant Stratfordians have nevertheless gone to the front lines. J. M. Robertson, for example, took all the passages in Shakespeare’s plays that had to do with the law, however faintly, and compared them to similar passages in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. He concluded that the use of legal terminology and ideas was standard for Elizabethan playwrights and rejected the anti-Stratfordian notion that only a lawyer could have written the Shakespearean plays.

Milward Martin attacked the over-all anti-Stratfordian point-of-view with dispatch in his not-yet-answered Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? (to which Ogburn referred but once in his major, very thick pro-Oxford tome—to dispute one trivial point of Martin’s about the meaning of something Francis Beaumont wrote to Jonson about Shakespeare). Since then—due probably to Ogburn’s book, a PBS Frontline “documentary” propagandizing for Oxford, and scattered superficial discussions of the question in mainstream magazines like The Smithsonian and The New Yorker (some years prior to the outburst of the even more superficial, and less responsible articles mentioned in the Preface)—several other Shakespeare-Affirmers have joined Martin against the heretics. Chief among them have been Irvin Matus, who tackled Oxfordianism in his book, Shakespeare, In Fact, the team of Terry Ross and David Kathman, who for many years beginning on 23 April 1996 combatted a wide variety of anti-Stratfordian notions at their Website at http:\www. shakespeareauthorship.com, and Alan Nelson, at his Website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson. As for me, I’ve been arguing in letters with isolated anti-Stratfordians since the middle eighties, even managing to get two letters into their publications. Of late, I’ve been active at an Internet newsgroup called humanities.lit. authors.shakespeare, site of a free-for-all between my side and anti-Stratfordians of various stripes, several of whom I’ll be introducing you to in this book.

So far as I know, no established Shakespearean scholar has ever agreed with the heretics’ position. It would be hard for one to do so, for the hard evidence is about as conclusive as historic evidence can be that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. It begins with the monument put up to him in Stratford’s main church between his death and 1623, when it was referred to in the First Folio, the famous first collection of his plays. The monument’s inscription clearly states that he was a writer, referring to “all that he hath writt.” It also compares him to Virgil for art, and places him on Mount Olympus. No other person of the time who used the name “Shakespeare” is known to have been a writer. It therefore follows that he is by far the most likely person such contemporaries of his as Francis Meres, John Webster and Richard Barnfield meant when they spoke of the poet “Shakespeare,” and that the name, “Shakespeare,” on various published plays was almost certainly his—unless the inscription was fraudulent, for which there is no evidence, or mistaken, which seems absurd considering that the inscription was in the most public (and revered) place in the poet’s hometown where all his friends, relatives and acquaintances could see it.

We also have documentary evidence that makes Shakespeare of Stratford Shakespeare the actor. Two records are central. One is the Stratford man’s will, in which he bequeathed money for memorial rings to three actors, referring to them as his “fellowes.” The other is a document from the Herald’s Office from about 1600 depicting the Stratford Shakespeare family’s coat of arms, and labeled, “Shakespear, ye player.” Another clump of documentary evidence makes Shakespeare the actor Shakespeare the poet. Among the records confirming this are the First Folio, which lists Shakespeare as the leading player in his own works, and two poems by John Davies that indicate the poet acted. Hence, the two clumps together firmly establish the Stratford man as the poet (Stratford Shakespeare = Actor Shakespeare; Actor Shakespeare = Poet Shakespeare; ergo, Stratford Shakespeare = Poet Shakespeare).

There is much other evidence that corroborates this. It includes the testimony of Ben Jonson in the First Folio, in recorded conversations with William Drummond, and in Jonson’s journal, Timber. Even more telling, though often overlooked, is the engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio, which resembles the bust of Shakespeare that is part of his Stratford monument—and is definitely not a likeness of any other known writer of the time. On par with that is a poem to Shakespeare by William Basse, circulating in manuscript before 1623, which had a note attached to it when published in 1633 stating that Shakespeare had died in April of 1616, as the Stratford man was known to have.

All the surviving anecdotal evidence assumes William Shakespeare was a poet/playwright, and one would expect so uncensored a source to at least hint of a great hoax, had there been one. Not only that, but all the other authorship candidates with any kind of backing either died before the dates of records showing Shakespeare still living, or were alive after the dates of records showing Shakespeare no longer living.

Against this, the doubters have only four weapons:

(1) their suspicions of fraud, such as their claim that the monument was actually put up for Shakespeare’s father and decades later changed when Stratford started trying to lure literary tourists to their town, even though Leonard Digges mentions Shakespeare’s “Stratford monument” in his poem for the First Folio;

(2) their ability to find fault with any bit of evidence, such as the comparison of Shakespeare to Virgil, a poet, on his monument (according to them, it ought to have been to Sophocles or some other ancient playwright, not to Virgil, who wrote no plays);

(3) their invulnerable conviction that the commoner from Stratford lacked the education and background to have written the (incredibly erudite) plays he was said to have; and

(4) their certainty that there are authorship-confirming parallels between the events Shakespeare described in his writings and various events in the life of whatever man they’re backing—but not in Shakespeare’s. (That one anti-Stratfordian can find as many such parallels in Lord X’s life as another finds in Lord Y’s life doesn’t seem to faze them.)

As far as I’m concerned, what I’ve just said should be enough to convince any rational person that Shakespeare was the poet/playwright he has always been said to have been. Partly because the anti-Stratfordians will complain that I’ve left out their best arguments, but more to show in greater detail their manner of (dysfunctional) reasoning, I will now re-argue my position for the next ten (!) chapters. Even then, I will probably miss many of the other side’s arguments. I do hope to cover all their even slightly sane ones, however.

My extended argument begins with Shakespeare’s name.

Next Chapter here.
.

Another ME Column

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 36, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2004

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Ampersand Squared
Edited by Geop Huth. 2004; 92 pp; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press, 1708 Hayworth Road,
Port Charlotte FL 33952. $10 ppd.

Sack Drone Gothic.
By Al Ackerman. 2003; 14 pp; Pa;
Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $6 ppd.

 

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I tripped again as the year began, mailing in my Small Press Review column for January/February late. Then, I got ridiculously confused, getting it into my head that the late column, or the one I sent right after it, had been lost in the mail. Complicating matters was my having accidentally deleted my only copies of both the columns involved. Before finding out neither of my columns had been lost, I made new columns that repeated material in the previous ones, and had to withdraw them. But I still need to comment on some of the items I mentioned in the unlost columns, because I said so little about them there (and probably indicated I’d say more in the future). I can’t yet because I still have no copy of my second unlost column, so can’t be sure of not repeating myself. This column will thus be a side-column, consisting of three announcements about ME.

First, though, I do want to quote and briefly comment on part of Al Ackerman’s 20-stanza Heroic Hack of various John M. Bennett poems, shared and solo, Sack Drone Gothic, which I covered in at least one of my previous columns. It’s the first line of Stanza 13 of that work, which I’m fairly certain I haven’t yet quoted: “MORE DONG (this the happy jute part).” As ever: a strange combination of the very funny with exits into a kind of lyrical Zen–for those who go clicky-hey over locutions like “drawers and side and ledge” (which is part of the quotation from stanza 18 of Ackerman’s poem, which I did mention in one of the two preceding columns).

Now for the announcements about ME. One is that my outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press just published Ampersand Squared, a collection of pwoermds, which that term’s inventor, anthology editor Geof Huth, incorrectly defines as a one-word poem without a title, believing that a title is part of a poem. There are many fetching pwoermds in his gathering, some of the very best by Huth, himself. Aram Saroyon’s famous “lighght” and famous “eyeye” are here plus specimens from both mainstream and otherstream poets like Emily Romano, Cor van den Heuvel, Jonathan Brannen and Richard Kostelanetz (with a four-page pwoermd!) Needless to say, I have two in it, as well. The book has an excellent introduction by Huth–and a rippingly thorough bibliography that the hypermeticulous Huth fashioned, with some help from me (I pointed out a book I wrote that wasn’t in it but should have been). The asking price for Ampersand Squared is $10 but if you order from me and mention this column, you can have it ppd. for $6. (Note: as of April Fools’ Day 2005 no one has taken me up on this; not that I ever thought this column influential, here–where the offer also applies–or at Small PRess Review. Still . . .)

Incidentally, I had the anthology done by a publish-on-demand firm called Bookmobile, which mIEKAL aND told me about. I highly recommend them. They did an excellent job (from print-ready computer files) for a reasonable price: $630 for printing and shipping 200 copies. And I can now order 25 additional copies from them at any time for less than $3 a copy. The price, I gather, would have been about the same if the book have been eight-and-a-half inches by five-and-a-half inches, instead of the non- standard four-and-a-quarter inches by five-and-a-half inches Ampersand Squared is, for those interested in publishing something of a more standard size than the latter.

Another ME announcement is that Mary Veazey recently very attractively published a collection of 11 of my solitextual (textual only) poems about a persona named “Poem” at her Sticks website. It’s at http://www.stickspress.com/grummanc.html#target.

My last announcement about myself is about my new blog, which can be found at http://www.reocities.com/Comprepoetica/Blog/Bloghome.html. I’ve now made daily posts to it for over 100 days. Since making my previous announcement about it, I’ve added two galleries and an essay section. One of the galleries holds the twelve finished mathemaku I’ve made to date since starting the site. The other is devoted to a sequence of mine, “Long Division of Poetry,” in which I divide various words or phrases such as “words” and “numbers” and “beauty” into “poetry”; the answer is always the same distorted, upside-down version of “words,” the product of it and the divisor always a graphic that’s a full-color variation of an old visual poem of mine called, “Summer Things.” I consider it my most important poem so far.

I highly recommend having a blog. Mine is part of my website, Comprepoetica, which costs me $5 a month at Geocities (but would be free if I didn’t need extra space for my graphic images). It has the value of a diary, which is (mainly) to force one to write something daily, with the advantage that it’s public, which forces one to try to write something with some potential interest to others.

One of these days I’ll do a column on Blogs. There are some excellent ones out there including Geof Huth’s Visualizing Poetics at http://www.dbqp.blogspot.com (this one inspired me to start mine and at times carries on discussions with the latter) and Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard at http://scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score. One that is particularly good in covering burstnorm territories I’m not as up on as I feel I ought to be is language poet Ron Silliman’s Silliman’s Blog at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/. To balance things out a bit, let me also direct you to Mike Snider’s Formal Blog and Sonnetarium at http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501. He is worth reading although he actually admires the tripe published in Poetry.

My Ssmumbmmmnrre

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Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 8/9, September/October 2000

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Blackbird, Number 2, Winter 2000;
edited by David Stone. 134 pp; Merle Publications,
112 W. University Pkway, #1C, Baltimore MD 21210.
$18, ppd., with check made out to David Stone.

The End Review, Number 2, May 2000;
edited by Scott Keeney. 32 pp;
The End Review, 153 Pocono Road #1,
Brookfield CT 06804-2013. price: donation, $3 to $5 suggested.

Score, Number 15, Summer 2000;
edited by Crag Hill and Spencer Selby.
70 pp (printed on one side only); Score Publications,
1111 East 5th Street, Moscow ID 83843. $12, ppd.

Uncertain Relations, by Joel Chace,
with illustrations by Frank C. Eckmair.
56 pp; Birch Brook Press, Box 81, Delhi NY 13753. $14.50.

 

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Hang on, ’cause I’m gonna try to write this column in sixteen minutes. I can’t give it more time on account of I got more important things to do, primariliest a novel I’m writing, but also the anthology of visio-textual art Crag Hill and I are co-editing, Writing To Be Seen, which I just sent off to the printer, 346 pages, but who knows if it’ll come out since the press I sent it to isn’t sure it can handle the graphics it’ll mostly consist of–and I’m not sure Crag and I can handle the cost, if they can publish it. It’s a vanity publish-on-demand press I was suddenly forced to use because Sprout, the good publish-on-demand press I’ve touted in this column, abruptly decided not to offer publish-on-demand services anymore.

I mention all this as a community service tip to anyone considering publish-on-demand that most of the companies offering it are rip-offs, although the verdict ain’t entirely in on the one I’m trying to get to print the anthology. Another I’m in touch with charges nothing to hold your novel, or whatever, on its hard drive, thus making it available to anyone who wants to buy a copy. But it will charge you $12 a copy, plus postage. If someone else buys it for the too-high retail price of $16 plus postage, you get a buck or two royalty. Too high to expect to sell any copies unless you have something so terrific you could have gotten a regular publisher to publish it. But a retailer can get it for $9.60 plus shipping, so if you have a friend who owns a bookstore, as I do, you can get it for that still-damned- high price. The only excuse for using the service, it seems to me, is if you want to use the printed copies as samples. The one good thing about this form of publication is that you retain all rights to your book, so if you can later get a real publisher to take it over, you are allowed to do so. So what I’ll probably do with my novel is buy ten or twenty copies of it to shop around.

Originally, I wanted to finish a book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy this summer but got bogged down in a chapter refuting the anti-Shakespeare people whose every argument I felt duty-bound to discuss. There were so many of them, I finally flipped out. Couldn’t stand to write no more (though I will eventually return to it, by gawd). To keep my summer from being a complete bust, I decided to write the novel, a sorta James Bond thing with a virtual reality machine central to it, that’s nothing but tv-tested action cliches but (my downfall) has a main character with my interests. Today I hit the halfway point. I no longer comprehend my plot so I’m going to have my main character talk about mathematical poetry till I figure it out. I estimate I have about a 40% chance of finishing the thing. Then I’ll see if I can save it with superhuman revision.

My sixteen minutes ended five minutes ago, but I’ll keep going. I can’t let my faithful readers down–and I do have some works to discuss–seriously. One is a book by Joel Chace called Uncertain Relations that consists of a series of poems involving the poet’s reflections on his 75-year-old mother, now suffering occasional, possibly stroke-related delusions, interwoven with the poet’s memories of an outdoor college chemistry class’s notations in colored chalk on a patio’s stone slabs that he’d wandered past soon after his mother had had to be institutionalized–with seemingly meaningless facts and statistics from a friend’s emails to him jumbled occasionally into the mix. Result: a carnival of science-gone-aesthetic bizarrely playing spring to the winter the poet’s mother is succumbing to, and which is spilling into her son–in a larger winter of a universe gone shimmeringly and overlappingly micro- and macro-Heisenbergian. But not without shafts of sardonic humor.

Then there’s Blackbird, which is either a (spiral-bound) magazine or the second in a series of anthologies, but a good read–make that, scan–whichever it is. It’s all kinds of collages, visual poems, textual poems, illumages and who-knows-whats about blackbirds by art-makers from Russia, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, the USA, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Argentina and Brazil including Theo Breuer of Germany whose politics aren’t mine (he thinks gas chambers and electric chairs equally representative of the century just past though one was used for innocent Jews, the other for convicted murderers) but makes up for it with a translation of, and commentary on, a first-rate poem of Paul Celan: “SUSCEPTIVE/ was the one-/ winged hanging blackbird,/ over the firewall, behind/ Paris, high up there/ in the/ poem,” to whose Paris/poem alliteration he refers as the “one thing (that) is probably better in the English version” and which he (correctly, when I thought about it) characterizes as “PERFECT.”

As for Score #15 and The End Review #2, I’ll just say that the former is fuller than ever of A-1 visio-textual matter, and that the other, whose editor, Scott Keeney, has a droll/reflective updating of Stevens’s 13 Blackbirds in Blackbird, is on par (i.e., well worth buying) with the previous issue of the magazine, which I reviewed here a year or two ago.

A Visit to a Webzine

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 3-4, March-April 2007

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      Poets Greatest Hits: Bob Grumman, 1966-2005.
      Bob Grumman. 23p; 2006; Pa;
      Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane,
      Columbus OH 43213. $10 ppd.
      www.puddinghouse.com.

      Sugar Mule #26. M. L. Webster, editor.
      An Anthology of collaborations
      guest editor: Sheila Murphy
      Sugar Mule

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It would seem that the Internet is taking over my literary life. Except for what’s in one recent chapbook, all my poetry for the past few years has appeared on the Internet– principally at my blog, but several other places. I no longer send work to any non- electronic periodicals or publishers. Actually, I no longer submit work anywhere, I just send it, sometimes, to some editor soliciting it–such as Jennifer Bosweld who last year invited me into her press’s series of Greatest Hits, which resulted in the chapbook just mentioned. I’ve drastically cut down on my prose appearances both electronic and in print (except for my blog entries). This is my only column anywhere now. After twenty years of pushing my poetry and criticism at the poetry world hoping for recognition and getting just about none, I’ve given up. This column and my blog satisfy my need to make my my art and ideas known. And I have won recognition from those who count. So there, BigWorld!

Since I brought up Bosweld’s Greatest Hits series, I ought to talk a bit about it. Bosweld started it in 2000 as a parallel to pop singers’ greatest hits CDs. Each contributor is asked to select 12 poems for his volume that he considers to be those “most often requested for reprint or performance.” That was hard for me. I picked the very few anyone ever mentioned anywhere as having read, heard or viewed, plus the two hangable mathemaku that I’ve actually sold (for hunnerts of bucks, each!) And I didn’t forget the haiku that won a best-of-issue prize (of one dollar) from the magazine it was first published in. (“oncoming stepfuls/ of dry-leaf noise and/ a cold sky’s red kite!”) Four of my twelve poems are solitextual (i.e., solely textual) Two are mostly textual. Only one is a pure visual poem. The others are mathemaku.

Okay, now to the main subject of this installment of my column, an issue of a webzine called Sugar Mule that guest-editor Sheila Murphy devoted to solitextual collaborations. I was invited to submit to it but couldn’t any of my few appropriate collaborations (mostly with jw curry aka Wharton Hood), my house being almost as disorganized as my mind. But Geof Huth found a poem he and John M. Bennett had written together, and that I had then slightly revised. Sheila accepted both the Huth/Bennett poem and the Huth/Bennett/Grumman poem. So I was in. Meanwhile, Sheila suggested I collaborate with Geof. He was amenable, so we made a few new poems for the issue, which was fun (and interestingly educational).

The following excerpts should give some idea of the range of the material in the issue, most of it what I’ve taken to calling “neocontemporary” to distinguish it from the “paleocontemporary” poetry dominating the mainstream. The first is from Murphy and K. S. Ernst’s “Words To Start,” which serves as a preface to the issue:

          as though form had lost its felony/
          amid the penmanship
          triggers speech unstained by boundaries with promise
          interior case catching the smallest current of women

My second specimen is from “Who Feed Their Leaves, ” by Mary Rising Higgins and George Kalamaras:

          Asphalt howl sunblinds
          Route 66 brakeride west
          Heartnerve, wordsway mum

          I was busy looking up
          My blame as spilled into sky

          Signature heat swim
          Heartbrain beats in utero
          Closed curve space earth strings

          Protozoan gentle tongue
                                     God, not more geography!

I mustn’t overlook the now-fabled team of John M. Bennett and Jim Leftwich, who are represented by two poems, “Clank” and “Clue.” The first begins, “cusp an door an lift an lot an lump an loot an/ pest an lump an lawn an blast an crush an plot an,” the second, “pork an pot an puke an pencil an clung an clock an/ bone an shawl an joints an flops an blinker an fester an”

Almost as interesting as the poetry are some of the Contributor Bios, which were supplied by the contributors themselves. For instance, among them is Nico Vassilakis’s: “storm tainting sprays of robust loss in mid collapse and blanketed affirmation when you cease to identify with what is absent though a description of portions found denuded remain.” Andrew Topel provides the proper pronunciation of his name in his bio, and tells us that “Andrew” is a noun used “to name what changes shape.” Its etymology? “And (&) from the bowels of other universes, and Rew, proper name and short for renew; a person who is sewn in ink.” “Topel” is a verb with several meanings, one of which is “to form poetry as if from language robed in Swahili.”

My own bio, which I quote for contrast (and Gross Ego-Building), is embarrassingly conventional: “substitute high-school teacher living in Port Charlotte, Florida, whose specialty as a poet is visiomathematical poetry, but who also composes conventional poems (mainly about an alter ego called Poem), infraverbal poems (i.e., poems that happen mostly or entirely inside words) and unmathematical visual poetry. A critic, too, he is notorious for believing visual poems ought to have words, and for his attempt to provide a proper taxonomy for all forms of poetry. He has a website, comprepoetica.com, from which one can go to his poetry/poetics blog, po-X-etera. He’s had some things published.”

Close to forty pairs or trios have poems in the issue–usually two or three. Here are the names of just the last nine groups participating: Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal, John Crouse and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Michelle Greenblatt and Tom Taylor, Susan McMaster and Penn Kemp, David Baratier and Sean Karns, Mackenzie Carignan and Scott Glassman, Frances Presley and Tilla Brading, Maria Damon, mIEKAL aND, and jUStin!katKO, Tom Beckett and Thomas Fink. They and the ones unnamed have done some fascinating things here.