Another Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art

Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2012

the bleed.01
Editors: Mara Patricia Hernandez and John Moore Williams
Volume 1, Issue 1, June 2011. 90pp; Avantexte Press, Oakland CA,
http://www.avantexte.com/thebleed

Webzines featuring visual poetry and related artworks are becoming much more frequent of late. Among the best of them is the bleed, subject of my last two columns, and my subject once again. Fortunately for me, it is available as a regular hardcopy magazine, for I was unable to read it on the Internet–due, I’ve been told, to my still being on dial-up.

In his introduction, Editor Williams describes his discoveries during his first year “in the bleed”: “that the world is much larger, and more full of fearlessly creative souls than (he’d) ever imagined; that bringing the work to light takes much more work than (he’d) expected; that there are days when (he wished he’d) never started this thing in the first place, and, in a secret corner of (his) aorta, that (he had) come to resent doing it; and that another day comes when (he sees) a submission and (realizes) that (his) eyes have been skinned wide open, (his) cranium levered back with a gut-wrenching crack, and how happy the world makes (him).” Which certainly brings me back to my own days as an editor/publisher.

There are all kinds of works in this issue of the bleed, with interesting accompanying commentary by both Williams and each individual artist. First up is Amanda Earl, with a three-piece suite of concrete poetry (i.e., producing a viso-aesthetic effect through the use of typography only). Based on passages of “The Song of Solomon,” it begins with one consisting of a set of three stacks each of which contains the words, “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feeds among the lilies,” in alphabetical order, and three more with the same words except for “am” and “the” in the same order. These latter are perpendicular to, and on top, of the other set. Trust me, the resulting gestalt captures–and renews–all that the original song celebrated. The sequence’s two other poems are equally effective.

Already I have a problem–I’ve only treated one poem out of the many here worth discussion but used up more than a third of my space. I’ll have to be stingy with my words from now on, starting with the visioconceptual non-poetry of Rosaire Appel–wonderfully resonant 3-D blueprints of the shape of poems; Marton Koppany’s finding a way to make his minimalist treatments of (1) the word “or” (its o a white balloon) and (2) a combination of a dash, quotation marks, a wavy line (indicating water) and a comic-strip balloon both very funny and lyrically expansive; Vernon Frazer’s masterful textual collages, one of them with a rectangle inscribed with “the centurion/ of the broken/ codes reaches/ a dark footing,” to wonderfully contradict the geometric rigor of the graphic design it is in (i.e., poetry versus engineering, to the enhancement of both).

Also, some absorbing deformations of a page of print in sudsy water by Michael Justin Hatfield; four gorgeous 3-D constructions with text present or implied of the sort he’s well-known for by Peter Ciccariello; a four-part blur and swirl of words by Andrew Topel; four arresting non-representational images with texts printed on top of them by Berne Reichert, the graphics and texts bouncing off each other into interesting new locales; three inimitable all-word poems by John M. Bennett, the first half of one of which is (approximately, as I can’t duplicate the fonts used here) “elimination of the gnatss a lun/ ching ear fooaam my rabb/ bbit coughs an stre/ ams beneath th/ e gate your f/ lash==olight/ sunk nost/ ril can/ of f/ –=O=–/ rks . . .”

Yes, that last one takes a long while to get an understanding of, but it does eventually unclear into the kind of sensually sensible loud mood/situation the best poems, and almost all of Bennett’s, do, given patience and sufficient mental surrender on the part of the engagent.

To continue, we have “border again border,” by Aysegul Tozeren, which is not in English, so I can’t say much about it except that it looks interesting. After that, five poems by Willem van den Bosch, the first of which is “The Anxious Prince”: “be or not/ to be or/ not to be/ or not to”; four terrific images by Carlyle Baker, one of which I described at my blog as “simultaneously some sort of alchemical diagram, a map of a section of an archaeological dig, a frame from a film of a dream, a ‘careworn and coffee-stained map’ of a lost country (as John Moore Williams described it), maybe even a piece of square currency from some mystical secret nation . . .” Then 2 pages of what seem like found combinations of text and graphics by Sean Burn (I think–the design of the page combines too many disparate items for me to be sure what’s what in it, but “Sean Burn” was the only name among them); some provocative computer-distortions of text by Mike Cannell, and some fascinating microbiologalizations of isolated letters by Nico Vassilakis; also five conceptual poems by Eric Goddard-Scovel that caught my fancy, especially the one called “eleven!”: “!!!11!!!!11!!1111!!!!11!11!!!!!11!”

Finally, there is an essay, “On a Letter Sufficient for Visual Poetry,” subtitled, “A Report, with a Fantasia,” by Iain Macdonald Matheson–12-pages including a page of afterthoughts and two pages of footnotes, one of them citing a poem of mine at Mad Hatters Review, so you know the thing is of the highest seriousness. My immediate off-the-top-of-my-head impression of this after only dipping into it here and there was that it was “brilliantly (and valuably) philosophically irresponsible.” I was “pretty sure I was understanding it, but didn’t think its author cared too much whether or not he was understood. The French School.” Derrida and the other relativistic French writers on literature of his time are, for me, entertainers, not verosophers (my term for serious seekers of the truth). Not that I consider entertainment of less value than truth. And it can sometimes annoy a reader into valid insights–just as the search for truth can sometimes entertain. Of course, said writers considered it an absolute truth that truth did not exist. But don’t let me get going on that. Bottom line: I extemefully approve the appearance of essays like this one as part of collections of poetry of any kind, but particularly of oddball poetry. I think visual poetry’s greatest problem is lack of them.
.

Register Domain Names

Another Summer Vacation

Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2001

The Atlantic Center for the Arts
1414 Art Center Avenue
New Smyrna Beach FL 32168
The Atlantic Center for the Arts

My opinion that the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, does more to advance the arts in this country than any other institution should probably be taken with at least a few grains of salt since it is the only arts-related institution in the country that has ever done anything for me, personally. I think that few will believe I was wrong to publicize it here when they’ve finished this column, however.

According to a book about the center, The First Decade, it was dreamed up and founded in 1977 by Doris Leeper, a distinguished visimagist (i.e., painter/sculptor, in my special lingo), its purpose being to give “talented artists at mid-career the opportunity to work with outstanding Master Artists . . . (in) a uniquely open workshop atmosphere unencumbered by preconceived boundaries or expectations.”

So, starting in 1982 with poet James Dickey, sculptor Duane Hanson and composer David Del Tredici, two or three “Master Artists” have conducted residency programs at the center every two or three months–with up to ten “associate artists” (the artists considered to be in mid-career) working with each master artist (and getting free room and board). Many well-known poets have done stints as master artists at the center such as Dickey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Philip Whalen, John Ashbery, Amy Clampitt, Robert Creeley and Jonathan Williams.

So far as I know, Williams was the only otherstream poet invited to the center as a master artist until my master artist, Richard Kostelanetz (and even Kostelanetz, however still under-recognized by the powers-that-be in the surface of American Culture, has had an immense number of books published, many of them by establishment publishers, and has gotten previous grants). It would be pleasant if there were some organization in this country that identified rather than merely re-identified (or, in the case of most of them, misidentified) master artists. But, the ACA must be commended for bringing in the likes of Kostelanetz.

The scuttlebutt is that Edward Albee, second master artist at the center, and now chairman of its national council, was instrumental in allowing Richard to scoot in. Be that as it may, Albee seems to be equaling James Michener in helping out other artists, the center being only one of many enterprises with that aim that he’s a consequential part of. So, if he weren’t already on my list of Important Cultural Figures for his incontestably major accomplishments as a playwright, he’d be on it for his nurturing of the arts.

For the most part, Kostelanetz, understandably, chose friends in visual poetry as his associates: me, Kathy Ernst, Scott Helmes and John M. Bennett; the younger associates–Josh Carr, Pat Greene, Fred Young, Hesse McGraw and Michael Peters were mostly people recommended to him by friends. In short, it was the standard who you know game. We had to fill out application forms, though. Still, Richard did pick one or two associates from among submitters he didn’t know, and Kerry James Marshall did likewise, I’m fairly certain. (He’s the excellent painter who was the only other master artist present during my stay (a composer having disappointingly dropped out for some reason). So it’s worth writing the center or going to its website, to find out how to apply for either a residency or an associateship.

Physically, the center consists of interestingly blend-with-nature buildings emerging out of dense palmettoey Florida vegetation, planked walkways of the kind associated with beaches connecting them. It includes a library (with computers and Internet-access), field house (which was the Kostelanetz group’s work room), painters’ studio, sculptors’ studio, theatre, dance studio, recording studio, computer room, administration building and dining hall, plus clumps of very nice motel-like rooms for associates, and three cottages for master artists.

I spent the best part of my ACA time in the field house or at a computer (Kostelanetz supervising me and the rest of his charges beautifully, via encouragement only). While in the field house, I worked on poems. I spent my time at computers learning Photo Shop from Ernst (with lots of help from other associates) and applying what I learned to turning out new visio-mathematical poems, and–later–finding out how to make computer videos from Young, which enabled me to make a crude short on what I’m trying to do in my long division poems.

This I presented at a show&tell thing at the end of our stay that was open to the public (in conjunction with an exhibit of our work). An unprolific poet generally lucky to do three new poems in a year, I got ten new ones done in my three weeks at ACA, three or four of them major (for me), plus three collaborations with Bennett (no one escaped collaborating with him!) that I also deem important, and parts of some quite intriguing group efforts.

I spent a lot of near-best time gabbing with and viewing the work of fellow artists, including those in the very talented, if not as wacked-out as we, Marshall group. The food was super-good, too, though not fancy. And we even had a field trip; it was to the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive in Miami, which had lots of terrific visual poems and related matter not there when I last was. The only negative of my stay was that no bigtime arts patron took a gander at my work and decided, on the spot, to become my Prince Ludwig II. But, hey, visibility is starting to seem more and more not totally impossible for us visual poets! So, watch out, world!

You kids showed such good creative use of the idea of making mathematical poems, that I thought I would show you another kind of arithmetic you can use to make a poem: long division.  The above is an example.  To understand it all you have to do is treat it as a long division example that uses words (or pictures) instead of numbers.  That means it is telling us that if you divide “BIG” by “little,” your answer will be the sun–with a remainder of “Hi!”  It has a remainder because the sun times “little” doesn’t quite equal “BIG,” it equals a “smile” (or so I say!)  A smile, the poem says, needs to have “Hi!” added to it to equal “BIG.”  Okay, it doesn’t really make sense the way proper arithmetic does, but my hope is that it will give those who see it a happy feeling of a smile as something little that has been multiplied by the sun, and with a friendly greeting added to it become BIG. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my long division poem as much as I’ve enjoyed your addition poems, and that some of you will go on to make more mathematical poems.

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By the way, if you think you may be interested in the nutty way I think about long division, click HERE.
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Staples.com Coupon

Comprepoetica BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY of Contemporary American Poetry

This file was begun 12 October 1997.  Some of its entries, condensed and perhaps otherwise modified, will eventually appear in the Comprepoetica Dictionary of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetics & Poets.  Both those entries used in the dictionary and those not will be kept here for the life of this site.

Note: some of the entries here consist of the raw materials of biographies only; due to the sitemaster’s not getting around to finishing them.  For this he begs the reader’s indulgence.  He would very much appreciate being informed of any mistakes any entry contains.

Index of Biographical Entries

Charles Alexander
Chris Alexander
Kit Austin

Maura Alia Bramkamp
Michael Basinski
David Beaudouin
Thomas Bell
Ken Brandon
Janet Buck
Bill Burmeister
Harry Burrus

Brandon Carpenter
Joel Chace
Blaise Cirelli

Dark Poet
Catherine Daly
Michel Delville
Debra Di Blasi
Thomas Downing
Joseph Duemer
Patrick F. Durgin
Patrick Thomas Durgin

James Eggeling

Eliza Jane Farley
Annie Finch
Chris Flink
Sely Friday

Tim Gilbert
David Gitin
Henry Gould
Bob Grumman

Crag Hill
Michael Helsem
Jan D. Hodge
Jenny Houston
Louise Huebner

Jo
Pierre Joris

Scott Keeney
Michael Kelleher
Karen Kelley
David Kopaska-Merkel
Richard Kostelanetz

Ralph La Charity (bio missing)
Pete Landers
Geoffrey Lavelle
Billy Little
Brent Long

Bill Marsh
Courtney Maxwell
Errol Miller
Sheila E. Murphy

desiree niteowl

Mark Ostrowski
Danielle Oviatt

Clemente Padin
Mark Peters
W.T. Pfefferle
Mark Prejsnar

dan raphael
Rochelle Ratner
Johnathon Reinier
Rebecca Reynolds
Harland Ristau
trace s. ruggles
Laura Ryder

Joe Safdie
Brian A. Salchert
Tony Seldin
David Shohan
Alan Sondheim
Douglas Spangle
Harvey Stanbrough
Hugh Steinberg
David Stone

Aviva Vogel

Irving Weiss
Bobbie West
Laura E. Wright

Daniel Zimmerman

Biographies on the above can be found in separate files, each for poets and critics whose names begin with a given letter of the alphabet.

The State of North American Vizpo, Part Two

Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2009

      Poetry, Volume 193, Issue 2, November 2008
      Edited by Christian Wiman
      100 pp; 444 N. Michigan Ave., Ste.1850,
      Chicago IL 60611. $5.50 ppd./copy.

      po–X-cetera
      Webmaster: Bob Grumman
      http://comprepoetica.com/newblog/blog01758.html

Because too few poetry critics really tie into a poem they’re discussing, and just about none that treat visual poems, I’ve decided to interrupt my overview of what’s going on in the precincts of current visio-textual art to zero in on one of the pieces in the Poetry gallery I wrote about in my last column, Scott Helmes’s “haiku #62″ (which is on view at my blog, URL above). It’s a great piece, for one thing, as good as any current visio-textual art I’ve seen. But it should also allow me to say a few things about the non-verbal aesthetic value of text in visual art that I don’t believe anyone else has.

At first, I thought “haiku #62″ entirely non-verbal–“asemic,” as those making averbal textual designs call it. It has a few words and word-fragments, but they didn’t seem to mean much, aesthetically. It was a portrait of a standard American haiku, because its title said it was, it consisted of three “lines” like such a haiku, and because it had text, if not significant words. Moreover (and this is something else I overlooked at first), its text is entirely oriented as literature–all its letters, that is, are standing straight up.

Now, however, I see that its employment of pure text plus non-representational design as the 5/7 of a traditional haiku makes a word in its third “line,” “place” aesthetically important for naming where it is as both strongly a visimagery place (“visimagery” is my newest coinage for “visual art”), but also a textual place (with linguistic potential). The “sq ft of” in the 5/7 portion suggests (lyrically and amusingly) that measurement, definition, something not haphazard, is required to make the color and shape of the third line create a place. So I now classify it as (barely) a visual wordwork.

To go on, it is superb even if taken as purely visual. Fonts, letter-sizes, colors repeating and varying and contrasting all over it–with a haiku delicacy and serenity; its three main shapes suggesting fragments of autumn, things afloat or in flight, and the momentariness that haiku so much represent, but also clearly out of the bright brittle of High Commerce.

The text, as pure text, does more–and here is where, I hope, I get meaningfully into the question of what attributes of non-verbal text can carry out useful functions in visual art. So far, I’ve found five such attributes: (1) it’s recognizable; (2) it’s tonally significant; (3) it’s auditory; (4) its elements have direction; (5) it is symbolic.

(1) That text is recognizable, or familiar, is particularly advantageous in a nonrepresentational work of visual art by acting against disorientation or alienation, giving an engagent spots to rest his eyes in–and landmarks to use (cartoceptually) in traversing the piece. Text will make what it’s in to some degree comfortingly resemble a printed page, too–the way the circular forms I like to put in my non-representational visual artworks suggest moons or suns to give what they’re in the look of landscapes. This seems unarguably true of “Haiku 62.”

(2) That text can make a significant tonal contribution to a visual artwork. Cursive results in a tone much different than print does, and various fonts can express many different tones. In the Helmes piece, it provides a sharp Madison Ave. contrast to its over-all haiku ambience. Tonality is important, but I can’t see how it can ever be central.

(3) That text consists of elements that for the most part can be pronounced, or partially pronounced (and which most people will automatically sub-vocally pronounce, however slightly) will add an auditory dimension to the artworks it’s in. In some cases this can be exploited to major effect. The auditory effect of “Haiku 62’s” text seems to me minimal–which is one reason I find it very close to the borblur between poetry and visimagery. On the other hand, the escape it seems to be making from language into more ethereal realms is not minor. . . .

(4) Closely related to (1) is text’s having direction–letters face right (for the English-speaking), thus acting as unobtrusive arrows. Hence, text can be used to guide an engagent’s exploration of what it’s in more dependably than anything else other than actual arrows (if that’s what the piece’s creator wants). Its having direction also gives a piece a tone of going somewhere, of having purpose, and motion toward a goal. At the very least, it gives a piece a greater feel of location than the piece would otherwise have–or, another expressive element for its maker to work with–as I feel Scott Helmes did to excellent effect in his piece, albeit very possibly unconsciously.

(5) Most obviously, text adds a symbolic layer to a work of visual art it’s in. Freshness, since visual art is generally . . . visual. Vivid contrast, as well: something wholly abstract next to (and/or containing) something wholly sensual (color). More than that (according to my theory of psychology, at any rate), an egagent will not (really) see the text, he will read it, or try to. So the piece with have a sort of “underscore” of symbols. It will be much weaker in an asemic piece than in something with significant verbal content, but it will still be present, and the engagent will still experience it in two different parts of his brain, his visual and his conceptual awarenesses. If he does this both at once, he will get into Manywhere-at-Once, as I called it years ago, naming it the most important destination of poetry.

A Little on Cyber-Lit, then Cycho-Lit

Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2002

American Book Review.
Volume 22, Number 4,
September/October 2001; 32 pp;
The Unit for Contemporary Literature,
Illinois State University, Campus Box 4241,
Normal IL 61790-4241. $4.

The Chair on the Way to the Fire.
Martin Koenig. 30 pp; 2001; Pa;
Popular Reality, Box 73, Schenectady NY 12301. $5.

I Taught My Dog To Shoot A Gun.
Al Ackerman. 103 pp; 2001; Pa;
Popular Reality, Box 73, Schenectady NY 12301. $8.

I got semi-excited when I saw page one of the September/October issue of American Book Review: it announced a special focus section on “codework,” or “the computer stirring into the text, and the text stirring the computer,” as Focus Editor Alan Sondheim put it in his introductory piece. At last, thought I, a not-entirely-invisible publication is covering a school of poetry I myself haven’t yet come to grips with! The first discussion in the section that I read, which was by Talan Memmott, disappointed me, though. Memmott presented a good brief over-view, I guess–with links to people doing valuable work in the field, notably Ted Warnell. But he failed to suggest that anyone was doing anything very new. Sure, some people, like Brian Lennon, are making formal poetic devices of e.mail devices, like headers, to good effect, and I much like the faster-than- page-turning clicked steps of some of Warnell’s pieces, but such innovations seem minor to me (as innovations). Nor does Memmott succeed in making a case for poets like the talented Mez’s finding “new uses of textual symbols” that result in a new “form of conductivity.” He seems unaware of that such pre-computer infraverbal poets as E.E. Cummings were using punctuation marks expressively, and achieving coinages constructed like Mez’s “e-rrelevant” and “distinct[ure]ion” (both of which I much like) years ago.

Memmott and the other contributors to the focus section, McKenzie Wark, Beatrice Beaugien, Belinda Barnet and Florian Cramer, are well worth reading, particularly for the poems and excerpts of poems they use to illustrate their discussions. I haven’t space here to treat them a hundredth as fully as they, and “codework,” deserve. I do believe they are closing in on something of high value; I just am not yet convinced that it is in any important way yet new. Kudos, anyway, to American Book Review for clearing the way for the discussion of a kind of literature it will take the mainstream at least another ten years to get to (and another ten to do so penetratingly).

Now for another plug for Popular Reality, putting out books again after the revival of the zine of that name a couple of years ago. Its latest two titles, The Chair on the Way to the Fire and I Taught My Dog To Shoot A Gun, are terrific. The first of these consists almost entirely of purposely crude-seeming line drawings sans details (e.g., faces with no eyes, hairlines, eyebrows, mouths except in profile, etc.) and their banal, completely pertinent but somehow disconnected captions. One of the drawings shows a cigarette-smoking deer with a man’s body behind a diner counter; it is labeled, “Would you be a deer and work nights at a greasy spoon?” Another, perhaps my favorite, shows some kind of bird in profile speaking to a creature that’s nothing but a head-sized shape with spikes, like the Statue of Liberty’s crown in outline, from behind, and two lines angling away from the shape to suggest a cape. A few horizontal lines cross in front of the peculiar couple. The highest has a few jags in it to suggest leaves or sunrays; two others make partial boxes or curve one way or another to suggest who knows what. The caption: “Sometimes these things work themselves out.” Many of Koenig’s pieces, like the latter, somehow resonate with archetypal feelings of dislocation, and are thus–for me–poetic; they are also very funny about taking any part of life seriously, in the tradition of Glen Baxter, B. Kliban and Gary Larson.

As for the Ackerman title, it does nothing to disabuse me of my opinion that Ackerman is the funniest writer I know of in this country. Certainly he is as good at portraying total nuts’ incredibly creative (and logical) schemes to wrest beauty and meaning out of life than anyone who has ever written–though Flannery O’Connor at her best comes close to him. He is a master of funny drawing, too: as a depiction of one of his gap-toothed loons, de-focused into at least two faces, and in ravishingly-vivid color is on the cover, and several of Ackerman’s drawings in the books interior demonstrate. The stories–well, here’s a brief taste: “And I (a girl named Suzy) think that’s exactly where fortune turned around for me, opening its arms and welcoming me to a whole new vision and ball game. By the end of the week, once I had put Blind Ka and the garage firmly behind me, I met a wonderful new man, who was part-owner of a used bookstore and knew how to have fun and be sociable and could even play a musical instrument (the snare drum), but who, so far as I could tell, never felt compelled to cover his face with anything more exotic than his own boxershorts, which came hand-picked from the Goodwill,” and this found ad from Popular Mechanix, 1951: “OH BOY .. . mom says there’s going to be a TELEVISION set in our NEW REFRIGERATOR!”

Drat. I wanted to talk about Tundra, an excellent newish magazine of and about short poems, and american poetry (free and how), Igor Satanovsky’s excellent new collection of very funny textual who-knows-whats and weirdly emotion-stirring mergings of lines from famous poems and graphics from who-knows-where, but I’ve run out of room. You’ll have to wait till next issue to find out more, I’m afraid.

The Ever-Visible RK

35 Years of Visible Writing: a Memoir.
Richard Kostelanetz. 54 pp; 2004; Pa;
Koja Press, Box140083, Brooklyn NY 11214.
http://kojapress.com. $23.

As everyone reading this should know, Richard Kostelanetz has been a leading otherstream poet for a number of decades. His general mode of working as a poet is to find some feature of words that few if any other poets have exploited, and build several thousand poems exploiting it. Well, maybe only a few hundred. Anyway, 35 Years of Visible Writing contains many of the best of them, with a valuable commentary by the author on his practice and philosophy as a poet.

Making the book by itself close to a visual poem is its design by Igor Satanovsky, who provides just the right images of Kostelanetz’s work in just the right places not only to near-perfectly accompany Kostelanetz’s commentary but flow interactively into a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts, to use an expression Kostelantz says in the book is a main aim of his as a poet. Nothing stunningly brilliant, just a lot of things elegantly and sensitively applied. For instance, Satanovsky alternates white on black with conventional black on white pages throughout much of the book. The first exception to the alternation is a . . . minimalist canvas, I’d call it, filled with “69” over and over in black on a white background. The constant op-art reversal of the “6” (or is it the “9?”) is given an extra charge by the sudden white background where black was expected. Elsewhere, a lefthand page contains one of Kostenetz’s “corner poems,” as I guess I’d name them, in which the corners of the page is occupied, respectively, by “WORDS,” “VECTORS,” “VIBRATIONS” and “POEM,” in white, each oriented in a different way (i.e., perpendicularly upward, and the reverse, and horizonatal, and upside-down). On the facing page is a variation of the same poem that consists of the same four words and orientations plus twelve other “inter-resonant” words that form four smaller corner poems. That it switches to black letters on a white page makes it seem like a jump from night into day.

Satanovsky does all kinds of other things with different-sized type, text going up and down or in circles or elsehow, shaped swatches of text, and the like–always enhancing Kostelanetz’s discussion and works, never intruding on them.

Among Kostelanetz’s works are several of the cut-up and reassembled specimens of a photograph of Kostelanetz from his Reincarnations that Satanovsky has deftly scattered through the book to constantly break a face into the otherwise rarifiedly hyper- conceptuality of the book. Reincarnations differs from most of Kostelanetz’s work here (and mostwhere) in being wholly averbal. But it is typical of that work in its sequentiality, its anti-conventionality (though others using the same ploy over the years have cost it some of its original impact), its constructivist minimalism (each frame being made up of 80 rearranged squares), and–at its best–its focused aesthetic wallop.

A page from Kostelanetz’s well-known and popular East Village series of 1970-71 is here, too. Each of these is a little map of some portion of the East Village, but with little squares of hand-written prose description, commentary or simple naming replacing buildings and streets–and placed in such a way (diagonally, for instance) as to make a highly connotative poem of the result rather than just a map.

“Disintegration” is here, too–one of Kostelanetz’s earliest and most-antholgized visual poems, no doubt because, in simply showing the word “disintegration” disintegrating visio-onomatopoeically, it doesn’t take much on the part of a spectator to appreciate it. Many others of the best of Kostelanetz’s word-games are here. There are photographs of his work in holography, too, with more of his discussion concerned with that than with anything else.

The book ends with a description of the 2001 installation he collaborated on with HyunYeul Lee, a grad student at MIT, as part of a group exhibition titled ID/Entities. It sounds like something that should have been captured on film. Here is what Kostelanetz writes about it: “I offered autobiographical texts which she incorporated into an extraordinary multimedia installation that was faithful to my esthetic in nearly all respects, ambitious in using several projections, and rich in the use of my verbal materials. Into a setting that resembled a writer’s study with a desk, typewriter, and a wooden chair next to a simulated window on the left side and a fireplace on the right she cast several kinetic projections of my words and only my words.” As critic Barbara Pollock wrote, “. . . words–animated and projected–replace the writer. . . . lines of text dance across (his) desk, jump in and out of (his) inkwell, and rumble across the window in traffic patterns. . . .”

Kostelanetz’s commentary is always informative and fluid. I don’t know why he considers some of his poems visual, though. His strings–poems in which meaningfullyricalinkingots go on for scores or hundreds of words–are purely verbal, as far as I’m concerned, for example. He considers them “visual” simply, I take it, because his removal of spaces is a visual act. But so is writing a letter. He also considers such of his InSerts as “GrasShopper” and “CrumBled” visual because “capitalization is essentially a visual enhancement.” But so is underlining, bold-facing and italicization, so I consider it a textual operation, and would give Kostelanetz’s InSerts my own name for such texts: “infraverbal,” since they depend primarily on textual manipulations going on inside words rather than inside sentences, as is the case in traditional poetry.

I also think some of his poems are better described as prose. I’ve written about that in my blog, beginning with the entry on his “circular poems” that I posted early in January at http://www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog/OldBlogs/Blog00337.html. Whatever they’re called, though, the best of them are among the best and most important we have from the past 35 years, and Kostelanetz more worth arguing with about poetry than just about anyone else around. (But WHY did he have to say at the very end of his book that he favors “black and white as the sole colors indigenous to art, believing that all other hues belong primarily to ‘illustration?’”)

Wilshberia:

Anti-Wilshberian: Anyone who believes no poetry of consequence is composed in Wilshberia.  Incorrectly applied to those expressing opposition to Mono-Wilshberianism.

Mono-Wilshberian: Anyone who believes the poetry of Wilshberia is the only significant kind of contemporary American poetry.

Wilshberian: One who admires some of the poetry of Wilshberia and or, at least sometimes, composes it.  Sometimes incorrectly confused with Mono-Wilshberian (something I’ve done myself).

Maura Alia Bramkamp (BRAM camp)

Poet

(street address)  266 Elmwood Ave #307
(city&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)
The Buffalo News (essays)

Amazon.com Editorial Review: Welcome To My Planet: Where English is Sometimes Spoken, by Shannon Olson

ARTVOICE (Buffalo, NY)

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

synapse (Seattle, WA)
convolvulus
Half Tones to Jubilee (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)
cups: a cafe journal (San Francisco, CA)
Arts Journal poems & interview (Poulsbo, WA)

Coffee House Quarterly (CO)
Higher Source (Bainbridge Island, WA)
And others . . .

(list of works)

CHAPBOOK
Resculpting (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’Neil, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara
And many more . . .

(critics important to respondent)

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

(tastes in poetry)  I am 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, 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)
.

Michael Basinski

Poet

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 <

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.

</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.

Welcome to the first installment of my M@h*(pOet)?ica Blog. I chose its title to give fair warning of the kind of . . . unusual material it will be concerned with, to wit: poetry whose mathematical elements are as important as its verbal elements, as in the following:

It’s from a series of ten equations its author, Scott Helmes, calls “Non-additive Postulations,” which first appeared in Ernest Robson and Jet Wimp’s anthology, Against Infinity (Primary Press, 1979). Later I will attempt to show that it makes sense. Sort of. For now I leave it for those courageous enough to stick with me as something to reflect upon. Suggested topics of reflection: how is it poetry? How is it mathematics? Why should anyone bother with it, regardless of what it is?

Now for something of mine–since I’m too self-enfatuated to let any chance for self-promotion to get past me without my taking full advantage of it. It’s “The Best Investigations,” an off-shoot of my still-going series of long divisions of “poetry.” I would defend its presence on the grounds that, as an example of the level of my immersion in mathematical poetry as a poet, it should provide a good idea of my qualifications to write about such poetry (or lack thereof). It also should reveal the range of matter such poetry can contain, such as symbols from music, and stolen images from canonical painters like Paul Klee and photographs from the Hubble–to the despair of some in the academy, I fear. (Note how I get back at them in this poem, though!)

My next specimen of the kind of poems my blog will mostly be about is another long division of mine, “Mathemaku No. 4A, Original Version”:

I generally use this, my very first long division poem, in lectures on mathematical poetry as what I hope is an easy-to-follow introduction to it. My friend Betsy Franco was inspired by it to make a bunch of most excellent poems like it for children, with illustrations by Steven Salerno, such as the following:

These are from Betsy’s Mathematickles (Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Then there’s this, by Karl Kempton, the arithmetic of which could not be more simple (look for the arrow near the bottom), but the full poetic complexity of could not be greater:

To finish off my little survey, here are three more I hope will indicate the variety of the poetry this blog will treat. The first is by Charlotte Baldridge, the second by Robert Stodola (both from Against Infinity), and the third by Kaz Maslanka:

Okay, now for a little more about me—about me and mathematical poetry, that is. In elementary school I was early tabbed “gifted,” meaning I was academically one in a hundred. At the time, the population of the United States was only around 150,000,000, so that meant only a million-and-a-half others were as smart (according to the tests) as I. But I did seem quicker to pick up arithmetic than my classmates, and even got enough interested in algebra in junior high to read ahead in my textbook—until other interests intervened. When I got to high school, Sputnik had the country’s leaders worried about our technological lead, so those considered gifted, like I, were bombarded with propaganda about the value of a career in science. Hence, I, and most of my friends, immediately opted for careers in the arts or humanities.

Alarmingly non-conformist, I went further, turning my back on college with the intention of becoming a self-taught Famous Writer, like Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. I never made it. Eventually, paid to go to college by the GI Bill and able to go free in California, where I’d been living long enough to qualify as a Californian, I broke my vow never to go to college. I went full-time to Valley Junior College in the San Fernando Valley for five years, even after I’d used up my GI Bill aid.

I’d always enjoyed math, and had read a few books about it for layman, one of which got me trying to overturn Georg Cantor’s different-sized infinities; it took me several years to finally concede that I couldn’t. (At one point I even wrote Isaac Asimov about it; he wrote a postcard back saying it wasn’t an area of expertise for him, so he could not deal with whatever “refutation” of Cantor I sent him.) I tried to disprove the non-Euclidean geometries, too, taking a long time to allow that I could not. I won’t say anything about my adventures with modern physics—except that I came to be a passionate advocate of the value of all the sciences in spite of what the sputnik hysteria did to me.

Meanwhile, I remained active as a creative writer, getting just about nowhere in all genres. My work was quite conventional except for the haiku I wrote influenced by the typographic techniques of E. E. Cummings. I got nothing published but some conventional haiku that I also wrote. The haiku and Cummings. Those two things were the key to my involvement with mathematical poetry. The haiku because it is the kind of poetry that comes closest to mathematics. I say that because it is supposed to be maximally objective, with a minimum of words, the best of them tending to be almost as condensed and elegant as an effective equation.

As for the poetry of Cummings, its visual elements, as in the famous one from his Tulip and Chimneys (1923), portraying Buffalo Bill,

were the first important step in the evolution of poetry of words only to concrete poetry, which was the first variety of what I call “plurexpressive poetry” for poetry that is significantly aesthetically expressive in more than one expressive modality (or “plurally expressive”), in this case the expressive language of words and the expressive language of graphics. A half century or so later we had many such mixed kinds of poetry, including mathematical poetry . . . and visiomathematical poetry, which employs three expressive modalities, some examples of which I’ve shown here.

Next up, if enough are interested, my examinations of various mathematical poems, including the ones on display here, and my attempts to answer the questions I earlier suggested as topics of reflection. Stay tuned.

Note: all the poems here are reproduced with the permission of their authors, most of them friends of mine, with the exception of the Cummings excerpt which I believe covered by fair use (but am also sure its publishers won’t mind my using for free, if it’s not yet in the public domain as I’ve gotten such permission from them for other poems by Cummings previously, and the three poems from Against Infinity, which I got permission for in an earlier essay of mine from that anthology’s editors, the publisher no long existing, so far as I know.

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