POETICKS

I’ve lost any enthusiasm I had for this project, but I’m continuing it, anyway–today with just excerpts from my diary, some of them repeating stuff I already have somewhere in this manuscript.  Sorry.  But who’s reading?

8:30 P.M.  Thursday  30 January 1992

The mail was moderately interesting for a change: letters from Arnold Falleder and Jonathan Brannen, and forms to fill out for that international Who’s Who company that David Thomas Roberts recommended me for, and for this year’s write-up on my press in Poet’s Market.

10 P.M.  Saturday  1 February 1992

I had what seemed good ideas concerning my sonnet, especially just after retiring for a nap this afternoon.  Geof had said last night that he thought I was a maniac for continuing so persistently with the sonnet, but that it was a form of greatness.  He also said he preferred one of the versions of the poem three or four before my “final” one better than the final one, which was what got me thinking about how to improve it again.  I got awakened from my nap by a call from C. L. Champion, of all people.  We talked for about two hours.  He seems quite bright but is only around Surllama’s age.  He was quite taken with Of Manywhere-at-Once, which was encouraging.  After talking with him, and Geof, who called a second time because he needed the title of David’s book, I had another idea or two.  For a while I was very happy with the new version of the sonnet but now I think only two changes good ones, and they’re both minor.  I’ll probably try to think of yet more changes.

10 February 1992.  I need some kind of success soon–I seem (as I’ve been thinking every once in a while for several months now) that I’ve become addicted to favorable attention, and start having withdrawel symptoms if I don’t get some kind of applause or the equivalent, however small, every week or so–like the acceptance of a poem, or a compliment about one of my essays from a colleague.

8 P.M.  Tuesday  18 February 1992

I heard back from Laurel Spence.  Nice letter but she didn’t seem much interested in Of Manywhere-at-Once, saying that it wasn’t the kind of book she looks for for review.  She sent me a copy of one of her poetry collections–not bad, though more quotidian in subject matter and thought than I consider the best poetry to be.  Self-expression much more than exploration of the language, or a quest for higher meanings.  I’ve always considered her too set in her ways to be open to the full world of poetry, and her response is further evidence of the validity of my impression.

9 P.M.  Thursday  20 February 1992

I got an encouraging postcard from Dana Gioia.  He said he didn’t have time to start up a correspondence but that if I sent him some of my reviews and poems he would look them over and send me comments on them, when time permitted.  This evening I got together a packet of things.  Unfortunately I don’t have many textual poems to send him–he specified that I send him material in print.  (Mediocrities always need a previous mediocrity to verify any writer’s worth before being able to devote serious attention to the writer.)  If he’s got any kind of ear and/or brain, he should like my criticism, though.

9 P.M.  Saturday  22 February 1992

A box of new products from Geof, without a cover letter.  The latest issue of Alabama Dogshoe Moustache I particularly liked, for it had a wonderful couplingual poem by George Swede, which I quote in full, “graveyarduskilldeer.”  Geof also sent me a list of the words he’s found relating to verbo-visual art.  This is the skeleton of his historical dictionary of verbo-visual art.  I have a few problems with it, the main one being that he includes a lot of terminology that doesn’t have anything to do with verbo-visual art, such as my own term, “alphaconceptual poetry.”  He also wants to use “An” with “historical” in the title, and I hate this exception to the rule that “an” goes only before words beginning with vowels.  Some of the entries seem weakly defined, but that’s no doubt because this is just a rough draft.  I approve of the effort and hope I can help but it looks like it’ll require an incredibly large amount of work.

11 P.M.  Monday  24 February 1992

A Letter from Len Fulton.  He has decided he can’t run as it is because it is a review of a book I published.  But he made up for that by inviting me to review a collection of d. a. levy stuff–and he suggested I revise my Kempton piece so it was a discussion of a kind of poetry which used Kempton’s pieces as examples.  Of course, that’s how I saw the piece to begin with, but I made some changes that I hope will make it acceptable to him–and accepted his invitation to review the levy book.  I also spent an hour and a half at the library helping Bernice Weiss set up the Tuesday Writers’ Group display that Bernice got Nancy, the librarian, to let us do.

9 P.M.  Tuesday  25 February 1992

Metropophobobia, an otherstream store I’m sending 3 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once and some other items on consignment.

11:30 P.M.  Wednesday  26 February 1992

I worked fairly hard most of the day, but the main result was my deciding I was all screwed up about what alphaconceptuality was, and that the version of the Kempton piece that I wrote for Fulton this morning to replace the one I sent him Monday needed itself to be replaced, which I just finished doing.

10 P.M.  Thursday  27 February 1992

My response to the Core Questionnaire on Visual Poetry (nothing, alas, profound, and it tired me).  Next day a letter to Geof on the changes in my poetics terminology.  New term: “Portmanteaual Poetry.”  Plus work on my next Factsheet Five column, which I will base on my Sontag piece.

2 March: the mail was pretty good: a note from Jack Moskovitz and–surprisingly–a genial card from Dana Gioia, who said my package had arrived and he’denjoyed its contents.  He also sent me, separately, a review he’d done in 1977 of a collection of haiku, and an ad for an anthology of literary essays he had a piece in.  I ordered a copy of the latter and expect to write the author of the haiku book as Gioia suggested.  I also wrote a short letter back to Gioia.

I spent the afternoon of 4 March at a meeting of the arts and humanities council.  It was interesting but not very helpful.  I wanted to try to get something done about making my press eligible for grants but no real opening for a disucssion about it presented itself.  Too many people were there with competing concerns–concerns, moreover, that the majority of the other people shared, as they wouldn’t’ve my problems getting RASP eligible for grants.  I went to the meeting with the beginning of a headache.  I had planned to gulp down some aspirins before leaving but forgot to.  I was pretty shot on my return and still feel mildly crappy despite having taken two aspirns at 5 followed by two alka-selzers with aspirin in them at around 6:30.  In short, not a good day at all.

5 March I spent some time thinking about a proposal I hope to send the arts and humanities council about an improved artists’ and artworks’ registry.  It’s something that should appeal to them, and get me better involved with them.

11 March 1992.  I just finished a final revision of my response to the Core Questionnaire on Visual Poetry.  My answers were pretty pedestrian but sound enough, I suppose.  Next day a letter from CL Champion with a silly/amusing parody of my Sonnet–and a revision thereof!

14 March: a copy of the latest issue of the newsletter John Byrum edits, with the second excerpt from my book in it.  It was reassuring to see that the series of excerpts is indeed continuing.

16 March: a letter from D. T. Roberts that was very favorable about Of Manywhere-at-Once.

10:30 P.M.  Thursday  19 March 1992

The big event of the day was the coining of a new term, “textual figuration,” to replace “textual vizlation.”  “Figuration” is a standard English word meaning “act or instance of representing a shape or figure,” so it’s close enough to meaning visual art to use it for that, it seems to me.  A person practicing it would be a “figurateur,” I’ve decided.  The relevant adjective would be, “figurational,” to distinguish it from “figurative,” which has a conflicting literary meaning.

26 March 1992.  2 filled-out data sheets for the arts-in-eduation artists’ registry, one more or less properly filled-out, the other scantily filled out in protest of the kind of information asked for; my computerized arts-registry proposal; and a brief cover-letter to Jean Martensen, the Arts & Humanities Council executive director.

10:30 P.M.  Saturday  28 March 1992

A note from Len Fulton that he was using my infra-verbal poetry piece in the April issue.

10 P.M.  Friday  17 April 1992

Then the incoming mail arrived and included 3 pleasant items: 2 copies of the latest issue of the

Small Press Review with my guest editorial in it.

19 April 1992: a decision I made and might actually stick to: to drop out of the arts and council, and not get involved in any new organizations such as the local writers’ group I was going to try to get to a meeting of; also the writers’ conference I was going to try to get a fellowship to.  I’ve got to concentrate on getting the  RASPbooks done, keeping from falling too far behind with my correspondence, continuing to get material into print here and there, and–most of all–getting my next book done.  I mustn’t spread myself too thin.

8:30 P.M.  Friday  1 May 1992

Todd bought 16 books, including my Of Manywhere-at-Once.  He seemed nice.  Apparently he’s a recovered, or recovering, druggie.  Does photography and seems from the pictures he showed me to have a good eye.  He goes in for road kills, though, which aren’t my favorite subject matter.  He did a series of one corpse that recorded its “life” over a period of several days.  It had some quite interesting moments.

A list from my diary of my main micro-triumphs for the 1991:

(1) 4 different presses (all “micro-presses”) solicited me for material to make books of and I sent stuff they found acceptable to all four.  One is to be a book of just four poems, the second a book of seven poems, and the third a book of perhaps a dozen poems.  The fourth (Haw!) is  (probably–the main editor accepted it but it still needs the okay of some panel under him) to be a printing of Barbaric Bart Meets Batperson and her Indian Companion, Taco.  Sent Werebird to Sarasota, too.  (It was turned done, needless to say.  The play was accepted, then printed with the pages out of order.)

(2) Factsheet Five, the only magazine I’ve been doing a regular column for changed hands, and the new editor kept only two of the old columnists, out of ten or so: me and another guy.  A minor triumph, for sure, but reassuring (until somebody else took over and dropped me).

(3) I’ve been sent forms to fill out by two Who’s Who publishers, one the standard people here in the US, the other some people in England who do an International Who’s Who.  The U.S. Who’s Who is called Who’s Who in the South and Southwest and seems to be the Who’s Who one level below that company’s Who’s Who in America.  I got pegged for the international one through a friend who’s gotten into it; I have no idea where the other company got my name.  I’m only being considered for both but, still, any kind of recognition is encouraging.  (I got into both.)

(4) Just yesterday I got a letter from a new acquaintance who wants to do an article on me for a magazine he writes for.  If it comes off, and I’m sure it will, it will be the first article on me.

(5) I had some pieces in an international visual poetry show in San Luis Obispo that then went on tour.  One of its stops was in New York State, where my brother Bill went to see it, reporting that due to lack of space only ten of the seventy or so artists in the show had work  displayed–and I was one of them!  I also had things in shows elsewhere in the U.S., and in Italy, Ireland and Australia.

(6) Two of my visual poems were reprinted in a German anthology of American visual poetry.

(7) A slick magazine called Art Papers had a survey of mail art in which I was mentioned.

(8) A quarterly poetry magazine is publishing excerpts from my Of Manywhere-at-Once–and describing me as “a nationally-known poet, critic and publisher.”

(9) A poem I co-authored is to be translated into a foreign language (Italian).  (Ha, I had forgotten about that.  Iti did get translated, so I’ve now been translated into at least two foreign languages, Italian and Hungarian.  I’m pretty sure something of mine was translated into German, too–probably the words of a visual poem in one of the German publications I had work in.

10.  52 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once, 2nd ed., got into print.  The printer did an excellent job as far as I could tell.  Of course, I found defects, but they were my fault, not the printer’s.  I was quite satisfied with the book, overall.

Pretty weak.  The horror of it is that I’ve done little better since.

During the fall of 1991 I finished getting the revised edition of Of Manywhere-at-Once

I participated in my first local poetry reading on  Saturday  26 October 1991.  It took place at the Sea Grape art gallery in Punta Gorda.  My writers’ group friend, Ken Reynaud,  picked me up about 1:30 and got me there ten minutes before the reading began.  (A bicycle, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, by then was my only mode of transportation, other than my legs by themselves.)  The reading went quite well.  I would guess that about thirty people attended parts of it and 15 to 20 were still there when I did my presentation, around 4.  There were two featured readers.  The first was a 78-year-old lady who had just begun writing poems a year ago, but had written over three hundred.  She was amusing, and some of her poems were quite funny.  They were pure doggerel, though, and the seriousest ones were horrible-bad sentimental and uninspired.

At about 2:45 the main poet came on, a guy in his thirties, I would guess, Michael Haymans, who has since become a good friend of mine.  He was an excellent speaker, helped a good deal by having memorized most of his poems.  Free verse celebrations of Florida wildlife constituted perhaps half his poems, and they were pretty good, although not technically adventurous.  He threw in a few preachy b.s. poems and a couple of comic poems.  I talked to him later and learned that he’s part of a local band, which explains his effective manner as a reader.  (As does his being a lawyer, something else I soon learned about him.)  He’s part of the monthly “literary salon” that’s started up recently in the county, and that I heard about from Linda Salisbury, another local writer who does a humorous column for one of the papers whom I met (I believe) at one of my writers’ group meetings.  I hope to get involved in it somehow.  It meets evenings, though, so it might be difficult.  We had a break for cookies and apple cider after Mike’s stint, which lasted about an hour.  Five people presented material after the break.  The first was Claire Smith, whom I’d met at the Tuesday Writers’ Club once or twice.  She did some competent  light verse.  She was followed by the local Save-the-Trees radical, Louise Ratterman (I think that’s her name), who read just one poem–about a flower.  She read well enough vocally, but hunched up as she read, and didn’t glance up from her poem till the end.  She also wore a pink dress and thick glasses that made her look like a fifth-grader from the 50′s, reciting for a class assignment.

At that point I came on.  I was nervous but got through my first poem (“On the Outskirts of Westport”) without a mishap, and it seemed to go over reasonably well.   I left out a part of my first real line but said the important part of it and got through my second poem, the definition of visual poetry as ampersand cubed pretty well.  I got a laugh when I admitted that some friends had found the definition “not that helpful.”  My “nocturne,” which came next, got the best reception.  It elicited several oooo’s and ahhhs, in fact.  I think I might have over-explained it, but no one seemed to mind.  “The Serpent” got a few chuckles, and my final piece, the haiku about “the raw hues of lights,” did okay, I guess.  I got good applause, and then one of the ladies in charge of the gallery wanted to know what I was doing with my work, whether I was getting it out where people could enjoy it (she seemed to like it quite a bit), so I summarized the American visual poetry scene, as I know it.  Later she made a point of getting my phone number and address in case they had another reading.  I chatted a bit with Claire Smith, then left.  A good experience.

REPRODUCTIONS of the pieces I read or showed here.

The very next day I again was active marketing myself, this time at a fair that began with four guys parachuting into the county auditorium parking lot while the Charlotte High School Band performed.  Once all the parachutists were down, the band marched into the auditorium.  The tables and booths and what not within the auditorium were attractively arranged.   Quite a lot of visimagery on display but none of it even slightly interesting to one of my refined taste, none of it post-impressionism, and hardly any of it even impressionistic.  I met Linda Grotke Salisbury and her husband, with whom I was to share a table.  Nice people.  I left all four of my books plus copies of my seaquence (REPRODUCE) plus a number of my Score Sheets and Score Reviews–and my ampersand piece with them.  I returned at around five.  Linda said she’d sold quite a few of her own books but none of mine.  The author’s presence helped, she said.  I bought a copy of her first book and read a few pieces from it when I got home.  She has a nice breezy, amusing style.  The usual kind of Bombeck et al subjects but well-done and well-packaged.

Around the middle of November, the first excerpt of my book appeared on the front page (and second) of the newsletter John Byrum edited, and my piece on John Bennett’s “The Shirt, the Sheet” was on page three.  Bennett had a review in the issue, too, and Geof’s article on the art strike was reprinted as well.  The highpoint of the issue for me, though, was a reference to me as “a nationally-known poet and critic.”  When I read that to Mother, her response, after a laugh, was, “Not internationally?”  Later, Lee made the same remark when I read the line to the Tuesday Writers’ Club.

Meanwhile, I got a letter from some Who’s Who people saying I had passed some preliminary screening process.  A text about me was included.  I was to correct it and return it.  This I did.  The letter was mainly about an opportunity I was being given to buy a copy of the book for only $120 or something in that range.  I wouldn’t pay $5 for it, even if that guaranteed that I would have an entry in it.  I was annoyed by all this, for the first letter said nothing about a series of screenings, and there was no point in getting corrections to my text until it was certainit would be used.  It’s clearly a scam to get me sufficiently hepped up about being close to getting into the book to order a copy.

Throughout the month I stayed busy printing out (and continuing to revise) the pages of the second volume of Of Manywhere-at-Once.  I noticed quite a few passages that could have been improved but I just didn’t have the time or desire to go through the damned thing yet another time.  At around the middle of the month I had my pages all printed, but had to paste in the illustrations I wanted to use.  Having 100 copies of the book printed would cost around $500, I’d found out.  Plus shipping, which turned out to be a couple of hundred dollars, to my surprise and dismay.

All kinds of little chores had yet to be taken care of, like outlining my pages in blue to make sure the printer got the margins right.  Hence, the month was just about over when I finally was able to package my book and drop it off at the UPS depot.