Column045 — July/August 2000
More Voyages into Cyberspace
Small Press Review, Volume 32, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2000
Absurdistische Liga. SiteMaster: Rainer Gobchert.
clear-cut: anthology. SiteMaster: Nico Vassilakis.
Comprepoetica. SiteMaster: Bob Grumman.
Light and Dust. SiteMaster: Karl Young.
Qazingulaza. SiteMaster: Miekal And.
The Sackner Archive. Sitemaster: Marvin Sackner.
Small Press Review. SiteMaster: Len Fulton.
Trudy Mercer’s Eclectic Editions. Sitemaster: Trudy Mercer.
VisPo-Langu(Im)age. SiteMaster: Jim Andrews.
I hadn’t toured the Internet for a couple of months, so I decided to assign myself a column on it as an excuse to do so. It was fun. My best stop was at the Small Press Review site. It’s only a one-page ad for SPR, but it mentions me as a “notable,” the only place on earth that does that! I also visited the Schirmer Books site where I’m an unmentioned notable–as contributor to Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, which it published as the millennium began, and which, I’ve now decided, is the best thing Gale, its parent organization, has ever published.
Not that anyone would be able to guess that from what is at the site. Its two blurbs are fine, but its sample of entry subjects is the pits. It includes just about nothing one could not find more than sufficient information about in any standard encyclopedia. The mainest virtue of Kostelanetz’s tome, of course, is its coverage of subjects no other reference so much as mentions–like many of the people and poetries I write about here. But you can’t expect a corporation to think any reader would want to find out about anything uncertified by either the academy or the marketplace.
I have to admit that I went to the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive site, which consists mostly of a catalogue of the archive’s holdings, almost entirely to find out how many entries the catalogue has for my work (17) among its 32,000 entries (with occasional illustrations) for items like, well, the Sackner collection’s original Tom Phillips paintings. 30,000 other items in the Sackner collection await cataloguing. Since only 3000 new entries were made last year, and since the Sackners probably acquire or are sent a dozen new things a day, it doesn’t look like the catalogue will ever be complete. But even incomplete, it’s a huge resource for any serious student of visual poetry and related arts.
I bring in the mudlark site even though it’s not what you’d call experioddical because a section of it is devoted to Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet, which consists of over twelve dozen breezeful brief pieces of evocature by Runaway Spoon Press Poet Diane Wald. “Cyclist in the Fields” is representative: “It would be easy for us to ignore him, to skirt the cornfields around him, to fly over him as the geese do, to act as if he were silly as lint. Yet there he is freely, as a book does.” Almost every one of Wald’s texts gets a brain-lifting shaft of hunh? like the last four words of this one.
There is other good work, in large servings, at the site from such as Andrew Schelling, Henry Gould and Sheila E. Murphy.
Trudy Mercer’s Eclectic Editions (a model of elegant web-design, I might point out) is another site I visited. It is primarily a resource for feminists (with interesting material on feminist theory, feminist sci-fi and such authors as Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child and Zora Neale Hurston) but more for me is its list of links to sites like clear-cut anthology, a fine anthology of (mostly orthotextual) works by Seattle poets; Qazingulaza, the site of a “hypermedia/permaculture rural community called Dreamtime Village” which includes among its many eclectic pieces of “crossmedia beliefware,” a fascinating animated verbo- visual “interwriting” by Maria Damon and Miekal And called “Literature Nation”; Absurdistische Liga, which is interesting chiefly for its links to ABSHURTLING COUGH: a cyberzine that claims to be of visual poetry but, as far as I can tell, only has mixtures of words and graphics–but they’re easy-to-like; VisPo-Langu(Im)age, Jim Andrews’s collection of essays about webart, and poetry, mostly conventional, but some of it visual, and some of it possibly entirely new in technique, such as the clever pop-up poems about which all I can say here is that they do pop up; and my own Comprepoetica, which has long been in a state of torpor, I have to admit–but here’s something terrific about it: if you e.mail me from any posting-box there, your message will reach me anonymously, so you can tell me what you really think of this column with no fear of reprisals, such as my seeing that you never get another NEA grant; seriously, I’d love it if someone would post me about this column pro or con; I never get any feedback except thanks from people about whose work I’ve said nice things).
Another stop I made was at Rain Taxi’s website. Here are first-rate reviews not in its print version, but which give the flavor of those that are. It specializes in mainer-stream poetry than I do, most of the time, but seems pretty wide-ranging. At the time of this writing it had a particularly readable review by Mark Terrill of a new four-hundred page collection of Bukowski poems, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire, that sounds like something any Bukowski fan should be interested in.
Then there’s Syberia Nova Kultura, a full-color Russian website in English and Russian that has all kinds of fine visio-textual art from all over the world including 9 images by Ruggero Maggi that I couldn’t figure out but liked; five lovely pastel collages by Harry Burrus that combine ancient Egypt and other classicismry jolted together with a today that seems out of the NY Daily News; and an illumage by Mike Dyar featuring drawings of frog, cow, grasshopper, flower, etc. that seem random but somehow capture the wonderfully serene mood that Nature at its homeliest can mend us into. In short, Syberia Nova Kultura is a site worth spending a day at.
A site worth spending a week at is Light & Dust, which I’ve plugged here before but which deserves continual plugging. A recent Mike Basinski contribution to it is, by itself, practically worth buying a computer and a hook-up to the Internet for: it’s called “The Coming of the Circles,” and consists of big crossword grids with all kinds of words, near-words, and non-words scribbled into them, in color, with circles of varied sizes and hues invading them–and sometimes squeezing text out of the squares it was occupying. The mishmash breaks into gibberish and poetry about equally–and sometimes simultaneously! Something else at light & dust worth getting on the Internet for is the survey of work by David Cole just begun, which includes a series of “Envelope Poems,” which prove Cole (who, I regret to announce, recently died of a respiratory illness) to have been one of our country’s master colorists–as do his two collaborations here with Marilyn Rosenberg, in which each artist (impossibly) improves the other! How is it that the bigCity critics have missed his work? Or hers? But I’m always asking questions like that. It’s easy enough to answer: the bigCity critics are idiots.