Column066 — May/June 2004
Ramblblurry, Continued
Small Press Review,
Volume 36, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2004
The Compact DuChamp, Amp After Amp.
By Guy R. Beining
2003; 70pp; Pa; Chapultepec Press,
111 East University, Cincinnati, OH 54219. $23 ppd.
Literature Nation.
By Maria Damon & mIEKAL aND.
2003; 85pp; Pa; Potes & Poets Press,
2 Ten Acres Drive, Bedford, MA 01730. $16, $21 ppd.
Sack Drone Gothic.
By Al Ackerman.
2003; 16pp; Pa; Luna Bisonte Prods.,
137 Leland Avenue, Columbus, OH 43214. $6 ppd.
Several Steps From The Rope.
By Guy R. Beining.
2002; 35pp; Pa; Xtant Anabasis,
Box 216, Oysterville, W A 98641-0261. $15 ppd.
the whispering ice cubes.
By Rupert Wondoloski.
2003; 51pp; Pa; Shattered Wig Press,
425 East 31 st Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. $8 ppd.
xtant, Autumn 2004. Edited by Jim Leftwich.
20 pp; 1512 Mountainside Court,
Charlottesville VA 22903-9797. $20 ppd.
I’d better start reviewing right away. Otherwise, I’ll bolt into self analysis, my favorite topic, it would seem. IAMASLUG: Over a week has passed since I wrote the first two sentences of this column. At least I didn’t bolt into self-analysis, except for the SLUG part. In any event, I’m raring to go at the moment, mainly because I have some text to quote from one of the items under review and from something co-author aND wrote about it, so I won’t have to do hardly no work myself. The item is Literature Nation, the quoted mailer is from its “Whether Hotel” section: “[icicle shoreline]” is above the following paragraph (and the work is near-entirely paragraphed, so for me not poetry but…evocature, so not prose, either): “a street called One Way. A street called along. A street called alone. A street called one. A mandate to document. loneliness came to whether hotel. The street called only. The ballad tells of mighty dirt and the Solitude Cafe, but thats not what this story is about.”
I have to confess that I haven’t read all the pages of this long work, and do not yet know it narratively except that it does seem to be, as aND says, “a love poem for the languescapes we inhabit and for the process of writing itself: intimate forms of creative survival in our favorite earthly settings.” It reminds me of much of Clark Coolidge’s work in its flight from verbal logic while retaining a kind of musical coherence by means of repeated matter and variations thereon.
After writing the preceding, it took me a while to find an example of repeated matter, in the quoted passage. Finally, several related ones were superobvious: “document,” “ballad” and “story.” All these go back to the fourth paragraph of the work, where we find, “literature of the disinherited,” and to the next paragraph, where we find, “Scars are the traces of words,” as well as to many other spots where the languescapc is explicitly discussed or pictured or riffed off of. The landscape is seldom absent, either, especially “the mighty dirt” and closely related forests and shores.
Literature Nation is a book worth a book or more of discussion, but it’s time now to give Sack Drone Gothic another plug. I left out important–commercially important– information about it in my last column: to wit, that is it a hack (i.e., a collage of appropriations from others’ work and reworkings thcreof) of poems by John M. Bennett, some of them in collaboration with such other otherstream names as Ficus strangulensis, Stacey Allam, mlEKAL aND and The Lonely One!
If that isn’t enough to induce you to order a copy, here’s another quotation from it: “Palp your dry and heedless writer’s scalp for/ Writer’s flakes – extra wrong spouse/ Extra two had innate ray stark eyes to/ Do what all-white meatball/ Speaka da stork, a man…” I would explicate this if it weren’t that when I explicate Ackerman’s work, The Atlantic Monthly always steals what I say straight from my computer and prints it before Small Press Review does, giving credit to Dana Gioia or someone, to make me look like a plagiarist (and Gioia like he has more than a half-ounce of marmalade for a brain).
“Today I walked and my buttocks felt firm anel good inside my pants.” This is from the whispering ice cubes, which I feel I should also plug although I covered it in my last column. Note the “inside my pants,” which makes this sentence from “a tribute to maryland, brimming with cancer,” so gloriously eternal. How can anyone not order a book with such a sentence in it?
Now to xtant, which is formidable, which is why I left it till now, when I can claim it’s only lack of space that keeps me from being brilliant about it. There are all kinds of things to steal from in it (I’m serious now), if you’re into visual and related poetries by such as Thomas Lowe Taylor, Andy Topel, John M. Bennett (in collaboration with people like Scott Helmes and Taylor) and Tim Gaze, who provides a letter about what he’s doing when he composes “asemically” (a good litcrit coinage not mine). One very simple piece in xtant that bowled me over is a page by Carlos Luis with the words, “Do we have any idea what we’re talking about? Of course not. The next step should be then:” at the top, and some kind of architectural drawing with a lot of numbers of a square structure. A smaller, tilted square is in the middle of the drawing with a cross indicating N, W, S, E in the middle of the smaller square, skewed with respect to both the squares. This made me laugh, but laugh into a wonder about finding our places in confusion, the absurd (but beautiful because an attempt) use of hyperlinearity to do so, and – finally – Making Our Way in the Universe.
Guy R. Beining is also represented in xtant. One of his pieces, “Stoma 1773,” is (except for a few scribbles) solitextual (“words alone”), something he rarely does, anymore. “Stoma 1773″ is language-poetry-nutty, much like the Ackerman passage I quoted, but without anything like “extra wrong spouse” or “Speaka da stork” to signal comedy. It’s about biological evolution featuring (briefly) an african lungfish, geological evolution (featuring diastrophism), and an “old paris coop/ sheltered by honeysuckles,” to summarize. For me, it mellowly expresses a small local quiettude…in a vague shimmer of large old philosophical concerns. A soothing feel of meditation rather than a meditation. What I most liked about it, though, was its use of arrows from words in the poem out to marginal notes in little 3-sided boxes. One of these arrows goes from “shadows” to “knot in cloth.” Something about the connection between the two images seemed miraculously right to me shadows being a sort of knot in light?
Also in xtant is one of Beining’s signature collages of print, handwriting, drawings and photographs. It’s a gem, as are just about all the similar pieces in his Several Steps from the Rope and The Compact DuChamp Amp after Amp, which I hope finally to say a little about in my next column.