POETICKS

Meat Epoch, #11 Spring, 1993; 2pp.; 3055 Decatur  Avenue, Apt. 2D, Bronx NY 10467.  Price: SASE.     DADA TENNIS, #3 Spring, 1993; 16pp.; Box 10,  Woodhaven NY 11421.  $2.     CWM, #1 Summer 1992; 32pp.; 1300 Kicker Rd.,  Tuscaloosa AL 35404.  $3.     O!!Zone, #2 February 1993; 16 pp.; 1266 Fountain View  Dr., Houston TX 77057.  $2.52.

Six years or so ago, I coined the word, "experioddica," as a name  for the "experimental," "odd" "periodicals" of the arts that I  was then writing about for Factsheet Five.  This term has not yet  made it into TIME, but it has been used in print by more than  three people besides myself (usually misspelled), so I've decided  to keep it going as my title here.     In the future I hope to concentrate on just one or two specimens  of experioddica in each column.  In this, my very first, however,  I have decided to range more widely, and cursorily, to try to  rough out the field as a whole.  I will thus be discussing four  magazines: Meat Epoch #11, Dada Tennis #3, O!!Zone #2 and CWM #1.     Of these, Meat Epoch #11 is perhaps the least impressive on the  surface for it is just a xeroxed broadside containing five poems  and an illustration.  Two of the poems are philosophical.  One of  them, which is by A. L. Nielson, begins with a Wallace Stevens-  like "context (which) rose in the eastern window;" the other,  which is by Spencer Selby, ends with meaning-in-general, which  "gathers in emptiness/ and waits on all things."  Two of the  others, which are by editor Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, are  fragmental and evocative (one of them representing "kairos," or  "the favorable moment," as--in part--the sequence "pray/ dance/  sing/ decide," to score neatly off the more likely "research/  think/ calculate/ decide," or somesuch).  The fifth is one of my  own mathematical oddities.     What is most noteworthy about Meat Epoch, however, is that it  began about a year ago as a one-man collection of critiques and  poetry that St. Thomasino distributed like a letter to other  poets and editors he felt he had things in common with.  As a  result, he is now getting his experimental work published  elsewhere, and publishing such well-known figures in the  otherstream as John M. Bennett.  Meat Epoch thus neatly  demonstrates one highly viable way of getting established as a  writer, outside the establishment.     Dada Tennis #3, though just 8 stapled-together sheets of paper,  is fancier than Meat Epoch, for it is full of fascinating &  sophisticated computer-generated graphics, and even contains a  work in color in which C. L. Champion has played games with the  letters of the word "breast."  DDT contains many other exploratory,  even insane, poems, such as one by editor Bill Paulauskas that  bounces from "God's angry balloon" to "A peacock/ dipped in black/  oil/ and beaten with a porkchop" to "tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp/  tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp."  Paulausakas, by the way, runs some  sort of computer bulletin board from which he got a portion of DDT's  contents.  Lunatics with modems should be sure to write him about it.     CWM #1 is the most elegant specimen of the four zines, for it has  a stiff cover and is saddle-stitched.  On its front is a gorgeous  water smudgery in pink, violet and blue by Carlyle Baker and  inside its back cover is a pocket containing two books of matches  decorated by Bruce Mitchell and a narrow strip of folded cardboard  within which G. Huth has rubber-stamped the word, "watearth"--which  seems minor until you notice what its central pun is doing.  Most of  the poems within are only mildly adventurous technically but almost  all of them have a lift to them; take, for example, "Lethe," which is  by Herb Kauderer:                    kneel at the banks by the ford and peer                 into the soft wrinkled brown-green blanket                 watch it undulate in random patterns calling                 in a voice that soaks up sound                 birdcall & leaf                 flame & wood                 absorbed & reformed                 into a gently urging lullaby                 calling you to sleep     An arresting collage by Guy R. Beining, a scrap of fiction, and  some reviews complete CWM's wares.    Beining is one of the two poets featured in the second issue of  O!!Zone, a saddle-stitched paper-covered zine that calls itself  "a literary pamphlet."  His poems are quite disjunctional, as  "1544" demonstrates: "in hatch of abbot/ all manicured/ parlor  talk knocks apart/ blossoms & the only pig at market."  But at  least one of them at one point ripples into traditional lyricism  with "solvent edge of moon on/ blush of lake/ green veins of may  in/ chalk of birch."  The poems of O!!Zone's second poet, Ken  Brandon, are more straight-forward, but full of amiable breezes  like a description of a mission whose "quiet is of/ swallow  gargles and/ twittering women resound/ ding like bells from a/  stone room to the left/ of jesus christ and the/ gladiolus."     There.  I hope that's enough to suggest what's out there in the  world of . . . experioddica.  Visit it soon!

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