The Otherstream 19 Years Ago

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2012

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

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Having nothing else to use this installment of my column for, I decided to return to my first few columns together a little literary history. They, I thought, would give readers a good idea of what was going on in the literary otherstream.  Well, as you will, see, I got carried away, barely covering more than my first column.  No problem: I’ll just make this a multiple-installment return to the past.

I think too few such returns are taken by writers.  This is especially unfortunate when it comes to the otherstream, which by definition is only lightly reported on where more than a few readers ever go to until it’s become part of the mainstream–if reported on, at all.  Posterity will be unhappy about that.  Or so I have to convince myself to keep on keeping on.

I’m not sure when the otherstream started, by the way.  I do know that I invented the term for it sometime in the eighties, shortly after I entered it around 1985.  I meant by it not the opposite of the mainstream, but the opposite of what I call the “knownstream,” for poetry (and art-in-general) pretty much wholly unknown to academics–and the mainstream media, which takes its cues entirely from universities, particularly the prestigious ones like Harvard and Yale—which tend to be the most backward.  It consists, then & now, primarily of visual and sound poetry, but also of mathematical poetry and various kinds of minimalist poetry—and, most recently, of cyber poetry and other poetries I myself don’t know as well as I ought to (but have at least written about).  It includes language poetry to a degree, as well, although language poetry had academic support in 1993 and now has membership in the stultified Academy of American Poets, and substantial representation in the commercial anthologies.

The very first zine my column treated was Meat Epoch #11.  Except for a mathematical poem of mine, its poems were not otherstream, only “difficult.”  But first-rate. (I’ve always emphasized that a poem does not have to be otherstream to be first-rate, regardless of what some say about me.)  As has always been my practice, what I mainly did was point out happy moments in the poems I treated, although I could be negative, too–cheerleading for the otherstream, though, since just about nobody else is.  Hence, I quoted the Wallace-Stevens-like “context (which) rose in the eastern window” from the poem by A. L. Nielson in Meat Epoch, then from the end of the similarly philosophical poem there by Spencer Selby, in which meaning-in-general “gathers in emptiness/ and waits on all things.”  Wordsworth, that–which I mean as a supreme compliment.  (He was once an otherstream poet, as I’m sure anyone reading this will know.)

I also quoted this from one of editor Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s fragmental, evocative pieces which represented “kairos,” or “the favorable moment”: “pray/ dance/ sing/ decide,” a sequence I thought beautifully scored off the more likely “research/ think/ calculate/ decide,” or somesuch).   At that point, I mentioned how Meat Epoch had begun about a year before as a one-man collection of critiques and poetry that St. Thomasino had distributed like a letter to other poets and editors he felt he had things in common with.  As a result, he was now getting his experimental work published elsewhere, and publishing such well-known figures in the otherstream as John M. Bennett, thus neatly demonstrating one highly viable way of getting established as a writer, outside the establishment.  Did it work?  Well, all 4 writers published in this issue of Meat Epoch are still around, but none seems more visible than he was in 1993, so far as I can tell.  I think Spencer Selby’s work has changed the most, becoming less and less verbal—but at times astonishing striking visually.  As it has been for many of us, computer paint software and the Internet have made a big difference in his work, the first chiefly by facilitating the employment of color, the second by facilitating distribution, particularly of works in color.

I’ve not kept up well with A. L. Nielson, who always seemed to me more academic and connected with the language poets than the people I became close to.  As for me, like Selby, I have become much more a full-color visual poet since 1993, without gaining any critical attention outside the otherstream.

Meat Epoch hasn’t been published for many years, but St. Thomasino has kept an active webzine, eratio, going for some time–its specialty, however, is “post-modernist” language poetry, not the kind of adventurous otherstream work Meat Epoch had.  I think that except for aiding in the distribution of his poetry and ideas (and he is predominantly an idea-person), the computer has not been important to him.

Dada Tennis, CWM #1 and O!!Zone, the other three zines I treated in my first column, are gone, too.  So is Bill Paulauskas, editor of Dada Tennis (which was just what it sounds like it’d be).  When looking him up on the Internet so I could say something about him here, I was saddened to learn that he had died in 2006.  We had a fun correspondence that, alas, didn’t last very long, he being into a different kind of otherstream work, for the most part, than I.  But, hey, Wikipedia has an entry on his zine, which Paulauskas kept going until 2005.

In carrying out an Internet search on CWM #1, co-edited by Geof Huth and David Kopaska-Merkal, I discovered you can buy a copy of it at eBay for around $30.  Like many otherstream publications, it was more packaged than published–with a pocket on the inside of its back cover containing two books of matches decorated by Bruce Mitchell and a narrow strip of folded cardboard on which G. Huth had rubber-stamped the word, “watearth”—which seems minor until you notice what its central pun is doing.

I never knew much about Bruce Mitchell, but Geof Huth, a longtime friend, is still active—over-active, I keep warning him—as a blogger, attendee at and/or participant in, poetry readings all over the world, and composer of practically all possible kinds of poems—and non-poems he insists are poems although they have no words in them.  I don’t believe he has yet been written up anywhere “important.”  David Kopaska-Merkel is still highly active as editor/publisher and contributor to Dreams and Nightmares, a major albeit marginal periodical of science fiction and fantasy poetry, which is into its 26th year of publication, but not made him famous.

Guy R. Beining, who had an arresting collage in CWM #1, was one of the two poets featured in the second issue of O!!Zone, and—for me—one of the giants of the current otherstream (as poet, visimagist and visual poet)—so ridiculously unnoticed by the academy.  Harry Burrus has continued to be active as collagist, film-maker, poet and novelist, with a new novel, Time Passes Like Rain, out, but has not yet won a Major Reputation.  I can’t understand how it is that of all the people I’ve written about over the years in my column, none has become widely acclaimed.  Gotta keep on keeping on, anyway.  The Establishment can’t keep us invisible forever!

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Hurricane Charley

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 36, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2004

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Handbook of Literary Terms.
X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia and Mark Bauerlein, Editors.
165 pp; 2004; Pa; Pearson Longman,
www.ablongman.com. $21.20.

 

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It looked like it’d hit further north, and just give us standard tropical storm winds. At the last minute, though, it swerved into Charlotte Harbor and whipped up the Peace River. Port Charlotte, where I live, is the first town on the north bank of the Peace River. Punta Gorda, where I substitute teach, is on the opposite bank. Both got hit pretty hard. Winds near 140 mph at times, the report was.

I came out of it okay, I guess. Twenty minutes or so of more than a little apprehension, with my cat in the bathroom. A quite tall pine and a sprawling huge oak within five or six feet of my house were my main worry. I didn’t hear anything slam into the house, though. Then of the light the eye of the storm let into my living room, particularly dazzling because so many backyard branches that would have been screening it, and two orange trees were gone. More wind followed after a short while, but less than I was expecting.

I lost enough shingles to need a new roof, and most of my lanai (which is what we in Florida call a screened-in back porch). Almost all my trees but the orange trees survived, although my yard was covered with branches, some tree-sized.

My neighborhood was without electricity for around ten days–with temperatures around 90, and the usual Florida humidity. No gas for hot water, and no cable tv. The mail stopped, but only for a couple of days. No phone, either, for me. That was what bothered me the most, for I couldn’t get on the Internet, even after power was restored. I still can’t, after over two weeks as I write this. MCI had a trailer in one of the shopping centers where you could phone or use the Internet free, though, so I was able to let friends and family know I was all right. (Corporate Capitalism has some heart–many other businesses helped out, giving away plywood, tarps, water, ice! The Salvation Army and Red Cross were there from day one with free meals and other help, too. The government also pitched in quickly: I got a sizable check for my uninsured roof from FEMA just a week after I applied for assistance. And mine and all my local friends’ neighbors were terrific, volunteering chain saw services, running errands, just checking to make sure all was okay. . . .)

Needless to day, I got further behind than ever with my writing. Who can write with just a pencil or pen? I really wasn’t in a state to do much Serious Writing, anyway. I’m still not, although I have the use of my computer again. I’m always able to gripe about the American Poetry Establishment, though, and I have to get this column done, so that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of it.

To do that, I s’pose I have to define what I mean by “the American Poetry Establishment.” No easy task, that. There’s the Harvard/New Yorker axis with its Iowa University satellite-turned-equal. This axis, or something like it, does not overtly dictate what kind of poetry is in, what kind out, so much as very influentially take it for granted that no poetry exists except its kind–which ranges from the “experimental poetry” of John Ashbery to the traditional poetry (most of the time) of Richard Wilbur. Or, 90% or more of the reasonably significant poetry currently being composed–but less than 10% of the kinds of significant poetry being composed. Consequently, few college English departments teach anything but knownstream poetry; no reputable publisher publishes anything but knownstream poetry; no anthologist whose product will have a print run of a thousand or more copies includes more than one or two token burstnorm poems in it; no critic in any periodical reaching more than a few hundred readers does more than mention one or two uncertified poets–at most; no prize of any significance goes to anyone seriously trying to advance the possibilities of poetry (unless he’s so old the stasguards in charge no longer feel threatened by what he’s doing, or he represents some victim group).

And reference books like Handbook of Literary Terms, which could easily slip in a few burstnorm terms such as “visual poetry,” “sound poetry,” “mathematical poetry” (if not “mathemaku”), “performance poetry,” “infraverbal poetry,” “computer poetry,” “jump-cut poetry,” “hypertext,” among its definitions of “cowboy poetry,” “clerihew,” “new formalism,” “play review,” “projective verse,” “print culture,” “rap,” don’t. To be fair, I must report that this book has an entry on “minimalism” that quotes a poem by Karl Kempton that my Runaway Spoon Press published–though with nothing in the entry to indicate the editors have any idea what the poem is doing (they suggest it attains “blankness” by being “pared back to near-pure description”).

It also has an entry on “concrete poetry” to make up somewhat for the absence of one on visual poetry. It quotes the same falling leaf poem by E. E. Cummings that the 1974 edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics used in its definition of concrete poetry. But that was one of the examples of visual poetry I used in my Of Manywhere-at-Once, so I shouldn’t complain. Amusingly, Handbook of Literary Terms has a fairly substantial entry on language poetry–one more indication of that poetry’s acadominance (my term for that which the advanced few in academia most admire, and their slower peers have to denigrate, being unable to oppose it with obliviousness, their preferred tactic against superior art). The absorption of language poetry into the axis previously mentioned is clearly under way, and accelerating.

I had a number of disagreements with definitions in Handbook of Literary Terms. For instance, I consider “doggerel” to be rhymed unmetrical poetry rather than poetry that superior people consider bad, the uselessly subjective definition the handbook has. But most of its definitions are sound. I really don’t have that much against it. It’s competent, and intended only for “undergraduates getting their first taste of serious literary study,” according to its introduction, so one can’t expect it to be too advanced. Still, I wish books like it would present a larger, truer idea of what’s going on in American poetry at present.

The Size of Poems

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 5/6 May/June 2002

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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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Finally: the promised column on Tundra–sorta. “Sorta” because I’m going to use Tundra mainly as an excuse to get into my taxonomy of poems on the basis of their length, something to which I’ve given more than a little thought over the years. Tundra is a good excuse for this exercise because it is devoted to what its editor, Michael D. Welch, describes as short poems, and defines as poems of fourteen lines or less, though he seems more interested in poems significantly shorter than that–in haiku, in fact. Indeed, his magazine is named after one of the best known minimalist haiku of all-time, Cor van den Heuvel’s, “tundra,” which is but that word in length (and thus, in Geof Huth’s terminology, a “pwoermd”). Actually, of course, it is quite a bit larger than that since it won’t work unless printed in normal-sized type, and placed in the middle of an otherwise empty page.

I myself define a short poem as any poem that will fit comfortably on a single normal-sized page–so should not be more than twenty normal lines in length. I break more pronouncedly with Welch in distinguishing that category from one for smaller poems, which I call “kernular,” from “kernel” and “capsular”–and adding a subset of that which I call, “microkernular poetry.” Kernular poems are poems less than twenty (or so) syllables in length, becoming microkernular poems when they have shrunk to a single word or less. Short poems are all poems longer than kernular poems but less than twenty-one normal lines in length. The sonnet is the type-model for the latter, and seems a natural size, as many before me have noticed: it perfectly holds a thought, counter-thought and conclusion, or the equivalent of the three. The quatrain, as a holder of a single full-sized thought, seems a good type-model for shorter short poems. A haiku seems the obvious choice as the type-model for kernular poems, for it is generally a kind of incomplete thought–the sensual expression all thoughts are marrowed with, sans commentary.

The couplet would be another choice, but a distant second for me because, at its best as lyrical poetry, it would be a fat haiku; at its most traditional, it would just be a lean but full thought, and a type-model for a class of poetry should do what distinguishes a poem from prose: maximize its aesthcipient’s fundaceptual (sensual), rather than his reducticeptual (conceptual), experience of its subject (if you’ll excuse the terms from another of my taxonomies, which covers kinds of human awarenesses).

As for micro-kernular poems, I suspect many of them are larger than kernular poems because, like “tundra”–and Aram Saroyan’s pwoermd, “lighght”–they require whole pages to themselves to achieve full efectiveness. My own “SpringPoem No. 3,719,242″ requires twelve pages for the single word, “spring!” Other microkernular poems are really multiple words pretending to be one word–such as Jonathan Brannen’s “nocean.” However actually long or short various micro-kernular poems are, however, they deserve a category of their own–as the purest possible lyric poems, not being large enough, verbally, to be explicitly reducticeptual (except in the unavoidable but trivial way all words, being concepts, are), so going directly to their auditors’ viscera.

It seems to me that the kernular poem may just be the archetypal lyric poem, for it seems to me that all longer poems are either kernular poems with set-ups, amplifications and ornamentation (none of which I disdain) or secondary texts studded with kernular poems– as Poe had it. Of course, such longer poems, at their best, permit their kernular poems to play off each other, and unite to some higher effect–but so might, say, a collection of haiku.

Haiku. Tundra has an interesting discussion in letters from 1973-74 between Robert Bly and Cor van den Heuvel on the value of this form. It is amazingly under-rated, for something out of the knownstream, no doubt because it is so easy to write mediocre specimens of it. Bly demonstrates the other principal reason: incomprehension in the face of the simply-verbalized pure imagery that is the haiku’s main strength. He wants some kind of heightening of language, or surrealization of imagery as in his (mis)translation of a haiku by Basho as “Storm on Mount Asama/ Wind blowing/ out of the stones.”

This kind of surrealization, incidentally, is shown nicely in another part of Tundra in which Charles Rossiter insightfully if briefly reviews Bly’s Morning Poems, 1998. In it Rossiter quotes this line from Bly’s “All These Stories”: “In some stories a wolf pursues us until we/ Turn into swallows, and agree to live in longing.” It isn’t true of most haiku, however. In general, they present straight imagery, which has trouble carrying the “ah” that Bly believes a poet should put into each of his poems; but they can: for instance, in van den Heuvel’s contribution to this issue of Tundra: “city street/ the darkness inside/ the snow-covered cars.” This haiku’s fore-burden is simply a call to attend to the way snow increases the darkness inside cars on a city street. But much more is connoted: all the absence in some city, or place of substantial human presence; stoppage; silence; the conquering of a human domain by nature; what winter is.

Even better than this haiku, in my view, is a haiku van den Heuvel uses against Bly’s condescension in their exchange of letters, John Wills’s: “boulders/ just beneath the boat/ it’s dawn.” van den Heauvel praises the way this poem celebrates light without mentioning it. It does other things, but I hold it a superior haiku for containing a juxtaphor, by which I mean one image placed next to another in such a way as to make the first seem a metaphor for that other, as in this case the boulders act as a metaphor, as they come into visibility, for the dawn rising into the sky; similarly the boat seems edging over a kind of darkness (the boulders) into a day just as the sun is. Perhaps this is a bit strained, but something of what I describe seems near-certainly there, and raises the haiku a notch for me–without relegating more straight-forward haiku like van den Heuvel’s to any realm of non- or sub-poetry.

I might insert that I don’t agree with the purists among writers of, and commentators on, haiku that haiku should avoid metaphor; the best have the kind of implicit metaphor this one does–for example, Basho’s “on a withered branch/ a crow settles;/ autumn nightfall.” It is true, though, that a metaphorless (slightly prolonged) haiku, like William Carlos Williams’s “red wheelbarrow” can do things poetically that no metaphored poem can: absolute truth, freshly observed can equal truth told slant, though in a different way. As also in this untitled almost-kernular poem from Tundra by John McClintock:

what to do with the cats?
what can be done with them?
I keep thinking
my mother is dying
what to do with her cats?

Conclusion: there are at least three valid ways to bring off an effective kernular poem, and the only losers are those not able to appreciate them all.

A Vacation Trip to Boston, Part Two

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Numbers 11/12, November/December 1998

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House Organ, Number 24, Fall 1998;
edited by Kenneth Anthony Warren. 18pp;
1250 Belle Avenue, Lakewood OH 44107.
price: whatever donation one thinks proper.

 

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Scene: a panel at “The First Boston Alternative Poetry Conference,” 17-19 July 1998. It was my turn. I was nervous– for a moment too weak in the knees, I feared, to get up. This is normal for me when I appear onstage before more than two people, but I was also flustered and feeling horrendousfully disorganized from just having gotten back from a nearby Kinko’s where, at the last minute, I’d had to get transparencies done of the poems I was going to discuss. I had not brought display copies with me, for hand-outs containing the poems were going to be printed for the audience. But MB had thought AK was going to do this, and vice versa, so it didn’t get done. And the opaque projector I’d been assured would be available could only project transparencies! Aaargh. Nonetheless, I somehow survived–with the help of moderator Mike Basinski’s highly flattering intro, and a very supportive audience that put up with my stumbly beginning. Once I got going (along the way chastising Bill Howe for laughing Very Inappropriately at my more detailedly hyper- intellectual explanations), I was almost adequate!

Howe, the oaf, laughed most at a list of reasons I gave as to why Mathematical Poetry Is Very Good Stuff, I have no idea why. Here are some of my reasons (improved, I ought to point out, since I threw them together a few days before the presentation): such poems’ math quickly gets rid of any Philistines who might happen on them, so they don’t have time to get so disgusted with the brain-bendingness of the poems to bother one later with irate letters to the NY Times; their math gives the poems freshness of expression, always a plus for Enlightened Readers; math, the ultimate tool of concision, makes the poems they’re used in . . . concise–another cardinal virtue of poetry; math can give poetry an axiom-like feel of certainty to use against the uncertainty of existence it is generally about; likewise, math can render poetry more abstract-seeming than words ever could, thus giving it a texture with which to oppose, or highlight, the concreteness of the imagery it will generally also contain; and math can give poetry a tone of logic to use against or with the flow of intuition that will nearly always underlie it at its best; finally, mathematicality in poetry gives its auditor a chance at the thrill of Solution, and a reminder of how much fun solving arithmetic was for at least some of us back in elementary school, and still can be.

I’ve spent a long paragraph on this topic not only to pontificate about and push the value of my kind of poetry, but as an example of the sort of serious self-justification that’s behind much of the otherstream poetry that I write about in this column, whether its practitioners verbalize it or not. My main hope, though, is that my readers will immediately write Bill Howe to bawl him out for daring to laugh at what I said. The oaf. Or did I already say that?

Mary Burger followed my presentation. She showed and discussed a number of visual poems by divers people like John Byrum and others I didn’t know. Some of it was quite good stuff that made me feel better about the future of the form. Darren Wershler- Henry, next on the bill, performed an entertaining translation of bp Nichols’s “Translating Translating Apollinaire” into Klingon– and recited a nice textual poem (with puns), but presented no visual poems, which disappointed me. I never got a chance to talk with Darren, by the way, though he did introduce himself amiably to me before our panel. I mentioned the column I wrote here a while back that wasn’t too positive about his work, but he hadn’t seen it, so I didn’t get a chance to smooth the waters, if they needed to be smoothed.

After Darren came Christian Bok with a fascinating song/grunt/groan/wail I, for one, had trouble believing came out of a human body. He followed that with a textual poem. Ellay Phillips and Wendy Kramer then, in a two-voiced polyphony, read/improvised-off-of the sides of several quite splendidly three-dimensionally-collaged cartons they’d fashioned, sometimes striking ore, sometimes not, but always blazoning the potential of such collaborative efforts.

Bill Howe finished our panel off with a charmingly, at least partially improvised poem/chat that, bless him, mentioned “Bob’s punctuation marks” among the things he wanted to read, other than words; then–after spending some time inking a bowling ball he’d carved all kinds of letters and who-knows-what into–he rolled it over a long strip of paper a few dozen times, then read a poem out of the results. Great idea that didn’t work 100% but was still A-1.

I have more to say about my Boston outing, but–once again–I’ve run out of room. Before I stop, though, I want to plug at least one publication. I’ve chosen the latest issue of House Organ, which is always full of first-rate textual poetry and literary criticism of all sorts. This issue consists of a “chain of responses, memories and connections” Bill Sylvester wrote about a manuscript called Freud and Picasso that his friend Gerald Burns had sent him a few months before Burns died. It especially jumped out at me because it reached me almost exactly the day I was thinking it was about time someone did something to commemorate Burns, who was one of our very best poets. Sylvester’s commentary is not just about Burns, which would be enough, or just about poetry, but (like Burns’s poetry) it splashes through all the workings of the mind, and–finally–of existence. In short, I highly recommend it.

Visit to a Blog

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, January/February 2006

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Scense Reviews. Derek White. http://sleepingfish.net/Scense.htm.

Lyrical Eddies: poems after the music of marilyn crispell.
Jefferson Hansen. 65 pp; 2005; Pa;
Anomaly Press, c/o Lorraine Graham,
1401 North Street NW #601,
Washington, D.C. 20005. $23.

TELLTHISMUCH
Carlos Luis and Wendy Sorin.
20 pp; 2005; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press,
Box 495597, Port Charlotte FL 33949. $20 ppd.

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Talk about laziness and outrageous ethics, this column is going to be mostly a quotation of someone else’s review–and of a book my press published! My rationale is that the review is a first-rate example of how to write an intelligent review (which has nothing to do with whether it’s positive or negative), and that the book reviewed (an entirely meta- commercial one) is one nobody else is likely to review but which mightily deserves to be reviewed. Without further ado, here is the review, Derek White’s “The Combinatories of Advertising,” which I got off the Internet from White’s excellent website:

“I was delighted to receive a new chapbook the other day, a (full-color) collaboration between Carlos Luis & Wendy Sorin entitled TELLTHISMUCH (The Runaway Spoon Press). Being that I have previously collaborated with both of them, I was personally interested to see how their collaboration would turn out, especially as what I admire about both of them is their sense of visual design and physical symbolism, and I was interested to see what sort of fish they would catch when their tackle boxes were combined.

“Immediately we are presented with the question, ‘What happens when ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry? From here, language dissolves to a maze of synaptic association, physically linked and circled, giving the outward appearance of a Tom Phillips piece. But whereas Phillips steals new associations from old texts, Sorin and Luis fabricate their associations, though often from sampled or used materials–iconic pictures, found texts, headlines, symbols and other collagic ephemera–which they bounce off each other like charged pachinko balls in a dreaming brain. Rather than deconstructing, they are constructing, and combining in a wild game of chance.

“The meaning behind the resulting juggernaut is about as apparent as the underlying themes in advertising which they address, in that the jungle of symbolism triggers connections in your brain which you might not ever be aware of. Case in point, (in a piece in which) we are given veritable eye candy with the repeated disclaimer, ‘maltreat, his own eyes.’

“This combination or nodal styling is not new to Sorin (see some of the samples from our collaboration, P.S. At Least We Died Trying), but when combined with luis’ compounding lexicon–half borrowed from ancient hierglyphics and half-borrowed from the depths of ASCII assembly code symbols that don’t normally make the rounds in conventional ‘texts,’ they form something entirely different and compelling.

“I’m not sure what (one) image towards the middle of the chapbook is intended to be, but to me it looks like the exposed guts of a distributor cap, which is solidified by the repeated rearrangement of the letters P-L-U-G; as well as the recurring STAT red warning label, which not only conjures static, or statistic, but STET, the copywriters code for ‘let stand’ (in reference to an omitted or corrected word). The viscerally electric, yet eerily biological, image of a distributor cap is perfect for picturing how the synaptic ‘language’ itself works. The distributor cap in a motor is what makes the connections, shooting current out to the individual spark plugs which in turn fire their respective pistons, bridging the gap from ethereal, and invisible electrical energy, to physical mechanical energy. Not that you need to know this to drive a car.

“These are not things you are subconsciously aware of. So what is TELLTHISMUCH? It is a subversive advertisement for the loco-motion of language itself, the crazed propagation of dissociated ideas into the interstitial fabric of our gray matter to fuse and drip back together into new and novel language formations. And did I mention that it accomplishes this while still being light-hearted and funny?”

What makes this review a good one are (1) the precise description of the book’s contents– and, at Derek’s website, full-color reproductions of three of the works in it; (2) the wide range of connections Derek finds, and plausibly demonstrates the validity of; (3) his willingness to bounce his language into passages like “the sort of fish they would catch when their tackle boxes were combined” and “the loco-motion of language itself, the crazed propagation of dissociated ideas into the interstitial fabric of our gray matter”; and (4) its subject matter. Okay, no doubt I count that last a virtue because in this case the subject matter is something I was involved with. I have a better reason: reviews of value tell us about matter we would not likely find out about if not for them, they don’t tell us about Shakespeare and the current poetry celebrities like Vendler and Bloom’s writings. This is obvious such a review. Now, to cap my laziness, I’m going to finish this column by quoting a poem from Jefferson Hansen’s latest collection, Lyrical Eddies: poems after the music of marilyn crispell. Its title is “Rain”:

  drumming on asphalt             washing helicopter         seeds         into gutter &           sewer            green leaves vacillate    like a gambler's         mind              & we sparrows huddle            in hedges              wait out the rain             to flit again        in clouds of our own making

The Issa sensibility this poem displays is prominent in Hansen’s collection, but his quirky mentality is capable of all kinds of registers, as in this from “How Not To Anaesthetize Desire”: “the duck crossed the road because of a category error/ the goose followed for the hell of it.” Hansen is another ridiculously too-little-known poet I wish I could do more for than these few lines. Try him, sometime.

More On My Ssmumbmmmnrre

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2000

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      Doubt, by Jim Leftwich. 591 pp;
      Potes & Poets, 181 Edgemont Avenue,
      Elmwood CT 06110-1005. $18.

      verdure, Number 1, October/November, 1999;
      edited by Christopher W. Alexander and Linda Russo. 36 pp;
      verdure, 19 Hodge Avenue, No. 9, Buffalo NY 14222.
      Free but donations accepted.

      Bogg, No. 70, Summer, 2000;
      edited by John Elsberg. 72 pp;
      John Elsberg, 422 N. Cleveland St.,
      Arlington VA 22201. $4.50.

 

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I don’t know how else Peter Ganick started the millennium at his Potes & Poets Press, but one thing he did was publish a glossy- paperbacked 591-pager by Jim Leftwich called Doubt. On the basis of this alone, he can retire his press for at least the decade (but just yesterday I read a review of another similarly large book that he’s published, this one by Ivan Arguelles). Doubt is a midlife masterwich by one of our finest wordjunctors minus only his high flair for visio-textification (often most chargedly apparent in the collaborations he’s done with John M. Bennett). Which is to say that Doubt is all conventional words.

It begins, introductorily, “Constructs him against long views among differences to say that aside from the poetry of nature a ritual poem relies on voice to divulge every aspect of admitted proof,” which (once you’ve reread it slowly enough) reasonably well states what Leftwich is doing, in part, in this book, and demonstrates the kind of (slightly) slant syntax he most uses in it. However, his prose–or, more exactly, his evocature (which is what I call prose that sounds and acts like poetry but isn’t)–relies mainly on the (extreme) jump-cut, or sudden, limitedly rational change of subject: e.g., “The eye of a potato. Quechua, who the Spanish could call plunderer. Knotted cords of different thickness and colors.”

No space to say more about Doubt than that (1) I haven’t read all of it yet but it looks like one of those books that you can dip in and out of for a lifetime, enlargeningly; (2) much of it is paragraphless, but many oasises containing separated aphorism-like statements, or near-statements are provided; (3) high points include the discrete line, “Leaves light sounds in breath,” which can mean that leaves ignite sounds in breath, which is wacko but, for me: whew! (4) Leftwich also has a discrete line, “The useless hindrance of expressivity,” to which I retort: (a) “the wonderful aethetic usefulness of hindrance,” and (b) “I dunno why so many language and post-language poets deride expressiveness but use words which can’t not be expressive since they are symbols invented for that purpose” (which is to say that this line of Leftwich’s pushed one of my pop-off buttons); and (5) the last two numbered pages of Doubt are otherwise blank, but its last page is completely blank, none of which, I’m sure, is an accident.

The most recent new zine of untraditional prose and poetry I’ve seen came out almost a year ago, as I write this. I meant to mention it sooner, but–well, the way I operate, it’s lucky I mention anything. The zine in question is called verdure. It’s (unofficially) a SUNY, Buffalo, publication by and mostly for students and former students at that university. Its editors say that it “is not intended as a ‘showcase’ for local poetry, but is rather a forum (‘place’) in which to arrive as some understanding of the practice-s of poetics. That is, it is a sort of “poetics of poetics,” a phrase used by Charles Bernstein when asked at a seminar he was running to define poetics; he claimed, in the words of Alexander and Russo, that “a poetics remains inarticulable because it is a provisional instance.” He went on to say that it nevertheless might be located through a “poetics of poetics.”

In other words, if I follow, we’re back to the romantic notion that poetry is just too livingly tenuous and unique for generalizations about it to be made, which–of course–is nonsense. No reason analyzing how we analyze poetry can’t be interesting and fruitful, though. I’m not sure that’s what takes place in this publication, but there are informative lit history pieces here, such as an account of women-edited small presses and journals by Russo; an interview of Loss Glazier about his “visual-kinetic” works and the use of the Internet; an interview with Joanne Kyger; a review of a visio-textual art exhibit curated by Johanna Drucker; a list of “recently received” chaps and zines and the like–and scattered poems in the langpo vein. My basic impression (in spite of the stated aim): young folks talking about poetry, with enjoyment–and some perceptiveness. Carry on!

To finish off my column for this issue, I’m going to turn now to Bogg even though it’s not as otherstream as most of the stuff I review here–nothing like Leftwich’s eruptions here–and even though it gets its mentions elsewhere, but because (1) it’s a very nicely-produced magazine of good prose and poetry, and (2) it allows me to quote one of its poems, which I got a laugh out of, Wayne Hogan’s “You Can’t Say That On T.V.”:

                         Coming this Tuesday only
                         Jesus is Lord at Sheffield’s
                         Catfish House. Strong
                         as an ox and twice as pretty.

There’s a good one by Bukowski (in memoriam) in this issue, too, and an entertaining visual poem by Jim Kacian that shows the line, “Can one mind hold such a jumble of ideas,” slowly get compressed into a multi-overprinted jumble about six letters wide, whereupon the word, “Sure,” gets similarly compressed. Editor Elsberg is looking for more such pieces, by the way. Anyone doing visual poetry or anything like it should submit something to him.

Experioddica

25 Years Ago

SkyViews, Vol.3, No.4/5, January 1989.
Edited by Phoebe Bosche and James Maloney
92 pp; Box 2473, Seattle WA 98111. $5.

As has often been the case recently, I was having trouble coming up with something to write about in this edition of my column.  Then I got a bunch of magazines and chapbooks from my editors here at Small Press Review.  As I looked through them, trying to find ways of approaching each of them as a reviewer, my mind burbled up into A Higher Subject: not ways into various specific reviews, but (ahem) The Way into any review.  I would treat my readers to Grumman’s Philosophy of Literary Reviewery.  Make that “The Philosophy of Proper Literary Reviewing.”  (Is that worth another “ahem?”  Probably not, but–by Jove–I feel so in the mood for ahemming!)

I quickly realized that I could never write the sort of thing that duty would require of me and expect any of you readers to be able to comprehend it–expect anyone on earth to be able to comprehend it, including even the brilliant readers of this column, I should say.  Still, I thought the idea had traction.  Maybe I could merely write informally about my own career as a literary reviewer.  If I did it in my usual winning manner, it might prove entertaining, and perhaps even help some young chap or chappess yearning to break into the trade, so to speak.  In any case, it ought to get me through another installment of my column.

So I began going through my cartons of ancient small press publications and microzines to try to find the first of my reviews.  I believe it was something I wrote for Score but I’m not sure.  I had sent it to Crag Hill, one of the editors of Score at Karl Kempton’s recommendation.  (Karl was the first visual poet I’d gotten to know, having written him about his visual poetry magazine, Kaldron, which I found out about from (tah dah) one of the Dust Books’ compendiums of small press publishers.)

It doesn’t matter, for the first publication I came across happened to be an issue of SkyViews.  Nostalgia for times long gone got me quickly absorbed in it.  Soon nostalgia was replaced–or augmented–by admiration: the zine might have been published yesterday.  It had some great stuff!  Ergo, instead of gabbing about my own self in this column–or, I suppose I should say, only about my own self–I would review SkyViews.

Note, first of all, that the issue under review is 25-years-old.  It came before the computer revolution got going.  I was a mere lad of 48.  I had a letter-to-the-editor in the issue as well as an essay on the taxonomy of poetry (quite–ahem–a profound one, in fact).  I vaguely recall getting to know a few of the people with work in SkyViews like Trudy Mercer and Mike Miskowski through the mail, and had concluded on the basis of what seemed to be going on in Seattle, where they lived, that that city was the most culturally advanced city in America (except Port Charlotte, Florida).  That people like Marshall Hyrciuk and jwcurry were active in Toronto made me rank that city probably the most culturally advanced place in North America.

I suppose New York and Los Angeles were not at the bottom of my rankings, but certainly were, and still are, on a per capita basis.  New York, of course, isn’t even in the rankings if you count negative effect, since that’s the center of mainstream publishing, and awards-bestowal–unless Cambridge (Harvard) is.

When I searched the Internet for SkyViews, all I could find was something about Phoebe Bosche, its publisher, still active in 2012 as a member of the advisory board of the Cascade Poetry Festival at Seattle University.  From this I learned that SkyViews was a monthly literary publication in the mid 1980s-early 1990s. I think I must have gotten involved with it just before its decline.

Parallel Discourse and Tangential Dreams the issue was called on its cover.  Inside, it was explained that those running it were trying out various new titles but retaining SkyViews, as well, for the sake of continuity. The first three works within were all by Minoy, and seem–except for being monochromatic–doing as much as current “asemic poets” are doing with what I call “textual visimagery” for visual arrangements of letters.  I remember Minoy as an important artist in what became for me, the “Otherstream.”  But I stopped seeing his name well over a decade ago.

A Wikipedia article on Minóy said “Minóy was the pseudonym of the electronic art musician and sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza (October 30, 1951 – March 19, 2010). He was a major figure in the DIY noise music and homemade independent cassette culture scene of the 1980s. He released over 100 compositions.”  So I no doubt stopped seeing his name because I wasn’t much involved in otherstream music (I couldn’t afford a good necessary equipment, and records, tapes and DVDs).

On page 5 of SkyViews nine pages of letters begin, most of them far superior to the tripe from readers to mainstream magazines. One I particularly liked was from Steven Paul Thomas describing the arrogance of famous poet, Ai.  Another was from the late J. Fred Blair, another important name from my past.  Later in the magazine is his very funny (and intelligent) dialogue called, “An Interview with KHOZVACH Through Channeler.”  His excellent poem, “Brother Jack, Brother John,” is in the issue, too–something strongly influenced, I think, by Whitman.

Yikes, I’ve hardly begun my review but already used up my allotment of words.  Gotta quit.  There will be a continuation–or more than one if no one writes in to complain.  Let me just add that among the contributors to the issue are Dan Raphael, Joseph Keppler, “White Boy” Paul Weinman, Kirby Olson, Bill Shivley, Geof Huth and Heather Barr.

Post-Publication Note: I completely forgot that in my last column I said I was going to continue discussing poetics.  No one complained to my editor.
.

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On Becoming A “Noted Writer”   Small Press Review, Volume 29, Number 4, April 1997              Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series,      Volumes 24 and 25, edited by Shelly Andrews.      465 and 505 pp.; 1996; Cl; Gale Research,      835 Penobscot Building, 645 Griswold Street,      Detroit MI 48226-4094. $129, each.  My quest for recognition of any kind has not been a roaring success. I had nothing published until I was in my thirties, and–except in college publications–have never won a literary competition, or gotten any kind of fellowship or grant. I take pride in my present position here at SPR/SMR and in a couple of similar positions elsewhere, but I’ve yet, at age 56, to get my writing to any reasonably large general readership. So it was quite a shock to me when when Shelly Andrews, the editor of the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, asked me for an essay this past spring. A spin-off of the Contemporary Authors series, a respected who’s who that lists thousands of writers, the Autobiography Series covers only three or four hundred authors, among them high-profilers like Poul Anderson, Edward O. Wilson, Irving Wallace, Robert Creeley, Howard Fast–as well as SPR/SMR’s own Robert Peters (and in its advertising literature refers to them as “noted writers”). What was I doing in such fast company?! Particularly since I wasn’t even listed in the parent series! It turns out I’d been recommended to Andrews by my friend, Oakland poet/critic/hyper-etc. Jack Foley. I have no idea how Jack was able to pull it off, but he was also instrumental in getting Jake Berry, Susan Smith Nash, Jim Leftwich, Harry Polkinhorn and John M. Bennett into the series–Jake into Volume 24, me and the others into Volume 25. Also appearing in Volume 24 are Jack himself, his friend Ivan Arguelles, and Charles Bernstein, while Rae Armantrout has a piece in Volume 24. So my making the series was no isolated oddity but part of what might turn out to be a major breakthrough for burstnorm poetry, particularly visual poetry, which all of us but Bernstein, Arguelles and Armantrout have composed. The Autobiography Series has been coming out since 1984. The essays in it (for which authors are paid $1000 apiece) are from 7,000 to 15,000 words in length, and include ten or more personal photographs from their authors’ collections; mine, for example, has one of me as an infant in the arms of my grandfather, another of me with my cat Sally (it now being obligatory, it would seem, for authors to be photographed with at least one cat), and one of me and Bennett and Ackerman (in spite of Ackerman’s offering me thousands in Polish banknotes not to). All the essays in the recentest two volumes that I’ve so far read seem first-rate to me. Those by Arguelles, Armantrout, Polkinhorn, Foley and Berry are vivid and personable. The one by Bernstein, actually an interview, is a little low in narrative thrust, but is a good read, nonetheless. Leftwich’s essay is predominantly a series of aesthetico-philosophical meditations. Bennett’s is perhaps the most revealing about his literary practice of our group’s, but is also interesting about his personal life. Nash’s autobiography is the most personal, most truly autobiographical, not even quoting any of her poems. I’m still not sure whether I like my own piece or not. It was a bear to write. My life seemed sometimes too impoverished, sometimes too rich to deal with (but much more the former). Matters like how much space I should give to childhood, how much to adulthood, or how much to my writing, how much to my personal life, were also a concern. I felt that I particularly needed, because of my obscurity, to discuss in some detail (and quote) my poetry; but because my piece would be for a more or less general if comparatively literate reading public, I didn’t want to get too abstruse. Then there was the problem of just how to describe, or even if I should describe, some of my more embarrassing experiences, such as my arrest for the use of the mails for the conveyance of obscene, defamatory, degenerate articles, matters, things when I was nineteen; and what I should say about the females who have been so vilely cruel to me at various times in my life. My main challenge, though, was figuring out how to organize my material. What I finally did was hit the reader in the very outset with one of my loonier mathematical poems, which I chose also because it had to do with my tree-hutted, code-faring boyhood. After discussing the history of my involvement in mathematical poetry, and what I was trying to achieve with it, with a few easier-to- take specimens of the form, I was able to use my opening poem to get into my middle childhood. After that, and a flash-back to my birth and earliest years, I covered my later boyhood. The rest of my essay was fairly straight-forwardly chronological. I left a lot out–not my arrest, but all the females (there weren’t really many), just about all my struggles as a still- unproduced playwright, practically my entire four years in the Air Force, many names of important friends. . . . My final copy was around 13,000 words in length, and included the full texts of eleven poems. If nothing else, it ought to give a reader a pretty complete idea of what I’m like as a poet. If it’s anywhere near as useful and entertaining as the other essays in this series, I’ll be more than satisfied. For as long as I can remember I’ve thought of my life as a kind of saga. Nothing unique about that, I’m sure. In fact, I believe all of us are wired to be sagaceptual (i.e., to view our lives as sagas), with ourselves as the Grand Heroes thereof (or, in too many cases, as the Grand Victims). Some of us, of course, are more sagaceptual than others–more vigorously and consciously driven to pursue some Consequential Objective, that is. My own personal Consequential Objectives have always been Truth & Beauty, but I’ve had lots of secondary objectives, one of them being Sufficient Recognition. I generally claim that I most want recognition merely to be able to persuade the establishment to take my ideas and artworks seriously enough to give me the feedback I need to perfect them. But I also have to admit that I want recognition for its own sake–simply because it feels good to be considered a hotshot.