POETICKS

Seven years ago Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation that Lost &  Found Times insulted "the past 3000 years of literature."  A  rather slip-shod writer, Klawans neglected to add that it also  insulted the past 3000 years of visual art, for surely that was  the case.  It still is: among the 300 or so works by 80 poets and  other artists in the latest LAFT (#31) is a set of three crude  drawings.  One is of a man's hoisted, bent leg with what look  like cat-tails hanging from it.  A barely legible scrawl  identifies this as "leg's dripping."  Drawings of a pencil point  captioned, "bare pencil," and a hand gripping a bedpost ("bed's  grip") complete the trio--which is by John M. Bennett, the  magazine's editor, and someone identified only as "Cornpuff."     Elsewhere is a scratchy drawing by Gertrude Granofsky of a round  face with a little pig-snout for a nose, and larger pig-snouts  for eyes.  A third specimen of LAFT-illumagery, a collage by  Malok, seems little more than thrown-together scraps of  supermarket tabloid texts and photographs.  Certainly these are  an insult to traditional art.  But they are much more than petty  mockery.  Both the Bennett/Cornpuff and Granofsky pieces vibrate  out of compelling if strange corners of their creators' minds; as  for Malok's collage, cut-outs from a science text about torque  and electrodes, and a poem that includes a reference to "the  Stars," as "the real popes/laughing fat," give an eerie master-  intelligence to it that is both raucously satirical and--well,  almost oceanically high-serene.  Much of the other illumagery in  LAFT is "stylish," but nearly all of it thumbs its nose at  gentility, and High Art, and explores the same visceral, less-  attended-to aspects of the human condition that the pieces  previously mentioned do.     The same is true of the many difficult-seeming poems in the  issue.  Some of these seem dada for the sake of being dada, and I  sympathize with those who would reject them out of hand.  But I'm  not convinced that any of them is dada only.  What they have that  such poems lack are two or more of the following: (1) flow; (2)  an archetypal hum; (3) a wide range of vocabulary and imagery;  and (4) a low cliche-to-fresh- phraseology ratio.  By "flow" I  mean mostly such old-fashioned qualities as rhythm and  melodiousness; by "archetypal hum" I mean intimations of some  large universal archetype like Spring, Ocean, or the Mating  Instinct.     Take, for instance, the very first poem in LAFT, Michael Dec's,  "Fish Nut."  Its first two lines, "A bicycle in paradise - blue  vinyl boots a fluorescent ceiling/ nails popping out," indicate a  level beyond raw dada.  It at least flirts with archetypality  (due to the reference to paradise), and it flows pleasantly  through b-sounds, l-sounds, c-sounds.  It's without either  cliches or unusually fresh phraseology but its vocabulary and  imagery start vivid and widen as the poem continues--and  eventually makes sense as an evocation of Macbethan futility, its  final two lines being, "The tomorrow and tomorrow/ Think yrself  into a corner."     A later poem by Jake Berry, "American Frame," begins: "You need a  tongue! You need a rang spangler?/ Terse scrolls tighten the  diaphragm into a/ coiled grin."  "Rang spangler" seems fresh to  me, but the poem's freshest phrase occurs when it speaks at its  very end of "a curse with/ a menu."  This alone (I can just see a  tuxedoed curse proffering an elegant menu and inquiring of his  victim which of the many downfalls listed on it he would prefer)  would be enough to keep me coming back to the poem, but it is  high on all the other scales, too (and turns out to be rousingly  negative about our foreign policy-- to each other as well as to  other countries).     Dadaesque poetry is not the only kind of literature in LAFT.  It  also boasts some fine pluraesthetic pieces such as a design by  Luigi-Bob Drake in which repetitions of the word, "HELIX," are  used to represent a strand of DNA; an excerpt from Geof Huth's  deviously simple ABC book, Analphabet; a similarly simple-seeming  treatment of a pig, fly, and rose by David Chikhiadze; several  ever-unsettling illuscriptations by Larry Tomoyasu (one of them  depicting a banana-nosed face that is captioned, "PERSONAL/  PROBATE PETITION"), and many other similarly intriguing pieces.     Not to forget Al Ackerman's regular feature, "Ack's Wacks."  This  issue's installment is called, "More Burgeoning Teat Madness."  It concerns an idle Sunday its typically matter-of-fact  Ackermanian narrator spends at a friend's bookstore.  For a while  he amuses himself playing "the belt game," a preposterously  brutal diversion in which he, the bookstore-owner, and a third  man take turns walloping a fourth man on the romp with a belt.  The latter, who is required to shut his eyes during the game, has  to guess who struck him after each wallop to escape further  punishment.  Having recently had a mental breakdown that prevents  him from saying anything but, "trout- flavored," however, he is  never able to.  At length, the game bores the narrator and he  starts looking through various books.  His insight, triggered by  a line about teats that he comes across in a John O'Hara novel,  has to do with the line's re-use in various literary classics  (like Camus's The Stranger) to pep them up.    Elsewhere, a sketch of a geek by Ackerman further indicates the  LAFT-brand of humor; in it a frowningly serious but glowingly  pleased-with-himself geek is saying into a phone, "Hi-yo,  Silver, and away."  Which seems as good a line for me to say  good-bye on as any.  One last note for un- or seldom-published  writers and illustrators, though: LAFT is exceptionally open to  the work of unknowns.  If you think your work is weird enough,  give it a try!