Column 111 — May/June 2012
The Otherstream 19 Years Ago
Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2012
Poeticks.com, Webmaster: Bob Grumman http://www.poeticks.com/bob-grummans-small-press-review-columns/june-1993
Having nothing else to use this installment of my column for, I decided to return to my first few columns together a little literary history. They, I thought, would give readers a good idea of what was going on in the literary otherstream. Well, as you will, see, I got carried away, barely covering more than my first column. No problem: I’ll just make this a multiple-installment return to the past.
I think too few such returns are taken by writers. This is especially unfortunate when it comes to the otherstream, which by definition is only lightly reported on where more than a few readers ever go to until it’s become part of the mainstream–if reported on, at all. Posterity will be unhappy about that. Or so I have to convince myself to keep on keeping on.
I’m not sure when the otherstream started, by the way. I do know that I invented the term for it sometime in the eighties, shortly after I entered it around 1985. I meant by it not the opposite of the mainstream, but the opposite of what I call the “knownstream,” for poetry (and art-in-general) pretty much wholly unknown to academics–and the mainstream media, which takes its cues entirely from universities, particularly the prestigious ones like Harvard and Yale—which tend to be the most backward. It consists, then & now, primarily of visual and sound poetry, but also of mathematical poetry and various kinds of minimalist poetry—and, most recently, of cyber poetry and other poetries I myself don’t know as well as I ought to (but have at least written about). It includes language poetry to a degree, as well, although language poetry had academic support in 1993 and now has membership in the stultified Academy of American Poets, and substantial representation in the commercial anthologies.
The very first zine my column treated was Meat Epoch #11. Except for a mathematical poem of mine, its poems were not otherstream, only “difficult.” But first-rate. (I’ve always emphasized that a poem does not have to be otherstream to be first-rate, regardless of what some say about me.) As has always been my practice, what I mainly did was point out happy moments in the poems I treated, although I could be negative, too–cheerleading for the otherstream, though, since just about nobody else is. Hence, I quoted the Wallace-Stevens-like “context (which) rose in the eastern window” from the poem by A. L. Nielson in Meat Epoch, then from the end of the similarly philosophical poem there by Spencer Selby, in which meaning-in-general “gathers in emptiness/ and waits on all things.” Wordsworth, that–which I mean as a supreme compliment. (He was once an otherstream poet, as I’m sure anyone reading this will know.)
I also quoted this from one of editor Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s fragmental, evocative pieces which represented “kairos,” or “the favorable moment”: “pray/ dance/ sing/ decide,” a sequence I thought beautifully scored off the more likely “research/ think/ calculate/ decide,” or somesuch). At that point, I mentioned how Meat Epoch had begun about a year before as a one-man collection of critiques and poetry that St. Thomasino had distributed like a letter to other poets and editors he felt he had things in common with. As a result, he was now getting his experimental work published elsewhere, and publishing such well-known figures in the otherstream as John M. Bennett, thus neatly demonstrating one highly viable way of getting established as a writer, outside the establishment. Did it work? Well, all 4 writers published in this issue of Meat Epoch are still around, but none seems more visible than he was in 1993, so far as I can tell. I think Spencer Selby’s work has changed the most, becoming less and less verbal—but at times astonishing striking visually. As it has been for many of us, computer paint software and the Internet have made a big difference in his work, the first chiefly by facilitating the employment of color, the second by facilitating distribution, particularly of works in color.
I’ve not kept up well with A. L. Nielson, who always seemed to me more academic and connected with the language poets than the people I became close to. As for me, like Selby, I have become much more a full-color visual poet since 1993, without gaining any critical attention outside the otherstream.
Meat Epoch hasn’t been published for many years, but St. Thomasino has kept an active webzine, eratio, going for some time–its specialty, however, is “post-modernist” language poetry, not the kind of adventurous otherstream work Meat Epoch had. I think that except for aiding in the distribution of his poetry and ideas (and he is predominantly an idea-person), the computer has not been important to him.
Dada Tennis, CWM #1 and O!!Zone, the other three zines I treated in my first column, are gone, too. So is Bill Paulauskas, editor of Dada Tennis (which was just what it sounds like it’d be). When looking him up on the Internet so I could say something about him here, I was saddened to learn that he had died in 2006. We had a fun correspondence that, alas, didn’t last very long, he being into a different kind of otherstream work, for the most part, than I. But, hey, Wikipedia has an entry on his zine, which Paulauskas kept going until 2005.
In carrying out an Internet search on CWM #1, co-edited by Geof Huth and David Kopaska-Merkal, I discovered you can buy a copy of it at eBay for around $30. Like many otherstream publications, it was more packaged than published–with a pocket on the inside of its back cover containing two books of matches decorated by Bruce Mitchell and a narrow strip of folded cardboard on which G. Huth had rubber-stamped the word, “watearth”—which seems minor until you notice what its central pun is doing.
I never knew much about Bruce Mitchell, but Geof Huth, a longtime friend, is still active—over-active, I keep warning him—as a blogger, attendee at and/or participant in, poetry readings all over the world, and composer of practically all possible kinds of poems—and non-poems he insists are poems although they have no words in them. I don’t believe he has yet been written up anywhere “important.” David Kopaska-Merkel is still highly active as editor/publisher and contributor to Dreams and Nightmares, a major albeit marginal periodical of science fiction and fantasy poetry, which is into its 26th year of publication, but not made him famous.
Guy R. Beining, who had an arresting collage in CWM #1, was one of the two poets featured in the second issue of O!!Zone, and—for me—one of the giants of the current otherstream (as poet, visimagist and visual poet)—so ridiculously unnoticed by the academy. Harry Burrus has continued to be active as collagist, film-maker, poet and novelist, with a new novel, Time Passes Like Rain, out, but has not yet won a Major Reputation. I can’t understand how it is that of all the people I’ve written about over the years in my column, none has become widely acclaimed. Gotta keep on keeping on, anyway. The Establishment can’t keep us invisible forever!
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