POETICKS

The Latest Otherstream Anthology

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Small Press Review,
Volume 31, Numbers 7/8, July/August 1999

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Loose Watch: A Lost And Found Times Anthology,
edited by John M. Bennett, Paul Holman and Bridget Penney.
205 pp.; 1999; Pa; Invisible Books, B.M. Invisible,
London WC1N 3XX United Kingdom. $20, ppd.

Comprepoetica, Sitemaster: Bob Grumman.
Comprepoetica

 

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Imagine my chagrin when I found the name of C. Mulrooney, my arch-enemy, in the index of this jenoo-inely profeshun’ly selected and produced collection of material–mostly poetry, some of it visual, but also collages, drawings, cartoons, textual illumages and comic essays–from the first 39 issues of Lost & Found Times (August 1975 to November 1997). I was listed in the index, too, though, so I forgave the editors. A lot of other names were there: around 170, from Al Ackerman to Christina Zawadiwsky.

If more than two or three of these have had anything in an anthology published by a commercial or university press, I’d be amazed. If more than two or three of these didn’t better deserve to have had something in an anthology published by a commercial or university press than ninety percent of those who have had something in one, I’d be amazed. If more than two or three of these ever has anything in an anthology published by a commercial or university press (before the year 2020, that is), I’ll be amazed.

The stars of the anthology are John M. Bennett, and Ackerman (both under more than one name–unless my zeit-fungus informant from Pluto has deceived me yet again), Bennett with something like fifty pieces, and Ackerman with about a third as many, but making up for it with two- and three-page installments of his “Ack’s Wacks” essays. This is as it should be as Bennett co- founded Lost & Found Times (with the painter Doug Landies, who suddenly, prematurely died of a heart attack when the magazine was only a few years old), and has always been the main contributor to it, and Ackerman has, from nearly the beginning, been its humorist-in-residence. Both, moreover, are leading figures in our literature.

Among the other contributors, a small, deservingly top-drawer clump including Jim Leftwich, Sheila E. Murphy, Jake Berry, S. Gustav Hagglund and Susan Smith Nash are represented by five or more pieces; a larger scatter by two-to-four; and the rest (around a hundred) by one apiece.

Loose Watch begins with a reproduction of the first issue of Lost and Found Times, which, according to Bennett, “was a conceptual stunt dreamed up (by him and Landies): a sheet of fake lost and found notices to be slipped under the windshield wipers of cars in the parking lot of Graceland Shopping Center,” which was near Bennett’s home. It was also distributed postally as mail art. Characteristic of the notices in it are the following: “LOST: I lost my prized goat bladder dress gloves at the Spring Nurses’ Dance. If you took them by mistake please return them. No questions asked. 321-1703″ and “FOUND: Unmarked carton filled with catheads. Claim immediately! 999-3267.”

The rest of the anthology is arranged chronologically. Hence, it informatively documents the evolution of the otherstream over the last third of this century. It does this most valuably, I think, in the case of Bennett. For example, it allows us to compare the last stanza of an early three-stanza Bennett poem:

In the basement he filled a box with cockroach poison
thought his hair was growing stiff and
saw a light spiraling on the furnace;
he grabbed his tools, fell on the stairs
I’ll have to change my plans he thought
the hammer speeding toward his face

with a complete poem from twenty years or so later:

TEXT

Fort rain, night of howling, rumble in the
typewriter (written streets or spades, you’re
biting bricks the mayor foams, his tassels (I
and hose (regain the entry exit (kind of growling
(light moths mothered ceiling egg invades the
flowered spore of thoughtless, sheets licks
beltless roams, asking clothes for chicken
basket, you (bolus sound retained you (choke

TRAVEL

Note the carry across the years of visceral concern, especially with physical pain (being hit with a hammer, biting bricks); and “wrong” line-breaks from the slightly wrong one at “and” to the very wrong break at “the.” A lexicon of relatively commonplace words persists. A different sanity from most people’s is obvious in both samples, too, and in practically all of Bennett’s work–a sanity based in dream-logic (a dream-logic explicitly in a previous stanza of the poem the first sample is from, which starts, “Later he dreamed a toaster, electric green/ smoke towering out of it, he was/ walking behind the shopping center . . .” Bennett’s poems, I might add, are rarely far from shopping centers, hoses, sheets . . .

On the other hand, an advance toward what I’d call higher poetry is evident: more is happening more concentratedly in the later sample, and Bennett’s text has moved from colorful imagery to colorful metaphors; most craft-extendingly, the lazy punctuation (no periods) of the early sample has been replaced in the later by sophisticatedly expressive use of odd punctuation–note, for instance, the series of initial parenthesis-marks “TEXT” explores its caverns through down to “choke,” the single word of which the rest of the poem, apparently, is but levels of elaboration . . .

But enough of Bennett–except to say that over the past few months I’ve made all my contributions to Silent But Deadly available at my website, Comprepoetica, and they include several analyses of Bennett poems that may be of interest to Bennett scholars, as well as analyses of at least two poems by others that are in Loose Watch.

Among the other often-terrific poems in the latter is one by Geoffrey Cook that stopped me in my tracks. It consists of the dark horizontals of a bar code an inch above the faintly-typed words, “Two Toy Trucks,” with another bar code an inch-and-a-half below that. Why its effect on me? Something about the just- barely commercially-appropriate type used for “Two Toy Trucks” all by itself between the long, super-impersonal, super- efficient, modern market-centeredness of the bar codes spun me into the escapeful wonder of toy trucks almost become dream-real.

Above the Cook poem is a great poem by John Byrum that begins, “no a rotate, smudge-pot lotion athwart sunset, scaffolding mannered” that I would explicate in nothing flat if I hadn’t come to the end of my space.

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