Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
taproot_6.0b
From au462@cleveland.Freenet.EduMon Aug 21 11:08:57 1995
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 10:36:34 -0500
From: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
To: au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu
Subject: TRee #6b--chaps
-----------------------------------------------------------------
TTTTTTTT AA PPPP RRRR OOOO OOOO TTTTTTT
T A A P P R R O O O O T
T AAAAAA PPPP RRRR O O O O T
T A A P R R O O O O T
T A A P R R OOOO OOOO T
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Issue #6.0, section b: chaps 2/95
-----------------------------------------------------------------
TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground,
and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years,
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we
began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications, primarily language-oriented. This posting
is the second section of our 6th full electronic issue, containing
most of the short CHAP reviews; the second section contains most
of the magazine reviews. We provide this information in the hope
that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs.
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:
au462@cleveland.freenet.edu
Requests for e-mail subscriptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting--
(a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve).
The archive site for back issues is the Electronic Poetry Center
at SUNY Buffalo: gopher to: <wings.buffalo.edu/11/internet/
library/e-journals/ub/rift>. Our thanks to Loss Glazier et al
for maintaining this resource.
The paper version of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review
material--in issue #6: survey of recent anthologies and local
poetry newsletters, features on work by Richard Kostelanetz,
Michael McClure, Bern Porter, Harvey Pecar/Joyce Brabner, and
excerpts from _Chain_, _Synaesthetic_, and _The Al Ackerman
Omnibus_. Plus more. TapRoot Reviews intends to survey the
boundaries of "literature", and provide access to work that
stretches those boundaries. It is available from:
Burning Press,
PO Box 585,
Lakewood OH 44107--
$2.50 pp.
Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright
1995 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit
educational corporation. Permission granted to reproduce
this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that THE CONTENTS ARE NOT EDITED OR ALTERED IN ANY WAY, and provided that THIS INTRODUCTORY NOTICE IS INCLUDED. Burning Press is supported, in
part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council.
Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each
review: Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry,
Luigi-Bob Drake, R.R. Lee Etzwiler, Bob Grumman, Susan
Smith Nash, Oberc, Andrew Russ, Gregory Vincent St.
Thomasino, Mark Weber, Thomas Willoch, and Karl Young.
Additional contributors are welcome: drop an e-note or send SASE.
*** Many thanx to all of our contributors. ***
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPS:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
THE STANDARD ARTIST STAMP CATALOGUE--PMTTTD Corporation, 4067
Letitia Ave. S., Seattle WA, 98118-1137. 150pp.+, $25.00. When
I was a neurotic little bastard I used to collect stamps, but
this stamp book of mail art stamps is a thousand times more
organized than I ever was. These stamps are the creation of
artists, and although they imitate the formats of legitimate post
office stamps, they are focused on computer generated acts of
existential ism, collages, photo sets of contributing artists,
bootlegged images of pornography, pen and ink bursts of madness
and insanity, letter-bomb threats, and a thousand warring egos
all trying to out-create each other while sticking to a format
that looks deceptively sane on the surface. If you found weird
stamps on your letters during the 80s, chances are you've seen
some of this work before--if you haven't, and you're curious
about that "stamp thang" you heard about a few years back, this
is a most comprehensive collection.--o
Dr. Al Ackerman: THE BLASTER AL ACKERMAN OMNIBUS--Feh! Press, 147
Second Ave. #603, New York NY, 10003. 288 pp., $12.95. Al
Ackerman is a kind of Dave-Barry-gone-wrong, prevented by his
innate creativity from being satisfied with "family fare." So
BLASTER, his first full-length collection, will probably not
become a best-seller. On the other hand, it will still be read a
million years from now when writers like Barry have long been
forgotten. Of course, his readers will all be Vug-Randolphs, the
large sentient beetles that Ackerman claims are the true authors
of the works of John M. Bennett.--bg
Sherman Alexie: FIRST INDIAN ON THE MOON--Hanging Loose Press.
$12.00. A mixture of free verse poems and short prose, this
collection of Sherman Alexie's work reflects his personal
experience as an American Indian raised on a reservation. The
prose pieces work best, if only because the free verse is so
conventional in style as to be indistinguishable from many other
poets' work. In the prose, recounting the stories of his life,
Alexie's anger and pain are captured in brief anecdotal moments
and disturbing memories. One example: "An Indian man drowned
here on my reservation when he passed out and fell face down into
a mud puddle. There is no other way to say this."--tw
Karen Alkala-Gut: RECIPES: LOVE SOUP AND OTHER POEMS--Yaron Golan
Pub., 3 Burla Str., Tel-Aviv, Israel. 64 pp. Karen was raised
in America, and now lives in Israel. Breaking the metaphor of
silence, she tells us of family deaths and life in a war zone,
and of Jewish hearts open to enemies of obligation. Several of
her poems deal with the sickness and death of her father. The
poems "Night Travel" and "The Train" relates a journey into
Germany, juxtaposing Nazi horror and adolescent intrigue. The
long journal-poem "Between Bombardments" portrays the trepidation
and inhumanity of the Gulf War, of living in the shadows of death
and missile attack. Her innocuous honesty and personal
revelation brings us to taste her bitterness of violent
involvement bound with the absurd. "Instead of his leash/ the
dog brings my mask/ to remind me of his walk." This publication
touches a deep pulse and reminds us of those the Gulf War
personally affected.--rrle
Minoa Alloy: NARTHEX--Vortext Editions, PO Box 23194, Seattle WA,
98102. 82 pp., $5.00. The author's intro to this richly infra-
verbal work suggests the reader think of its "revealed words" as
words "retained upon waking from a dream, hermetic definitions"
that you are to "carry... in your pocket, leave... on your
nightstand." A number of silences from many strands of history
inhabit it, as in "arc arch archae// come the silence." And
silencednesses, as when "aria" is crossed out, then followed by
"your vague epithet." Later, "aria" reappears--sharing a page
with "purge" and "cello/ plant threat." A remarkable amount of
inter-and intra-tonality helps one "understand the gone/ trace/
lostre."--bg
Miekal And & Elizabeth Was: THE MISSING TEXT OF THE LOST TOWER--
Xexoxial Editions, Rt. 1 Box 131, LaFarge WI, 54639. 38 pp.
Combination of surrealism and langpo by And, with subtexts by
Was. Nonsense to the logocentric mind, but both the Tower of
Babble and more scientifically-plausible sites of language-origin
form and unform in the haze of the narrative. "During the
archaic there were no physical & mental restraints, no
institutional boundaries around logos & all the slight
expressions of the subtle universe," says the text near the end--
"And the brass rings" as Liz's subtext puts it at another point
to describe the lyrical way the work uncenters us larger.--bg
Antler: ANTHEM--Beginner's Mind Press, Kingman Blvd. #6, Des
Moines IA, 50311. 1 pg., SASE. A plaintext poem by a Vietnam
Veteran stating why he will no longer stand for the National
Anthem or the Star-Spangled Banner. Not just angry, but mellowly
leading to hopeful thoughts about our country's becoming
Ecotopia, whose "flag is the Wilderness/ and (whose) National
Anthem is the wind." One of a number of worthwhile broadsides
occasionally being but out by this quiet new press.--bg
Amari Baraka: FUNK LORE--Open Magazine New Series, PO Box 2726,
Westfield NJ, 07091. $1.00. One of Baraka's excellent musicwise
and spiritual poems. Originally read at The Cooler in NYC during
Reggie Workman's "Word & Music" performances (Workman used to
play with Coltrane, among many others). Baraka discovers the
blues, their origin in our selves. "In tribes of 12/ bars/ like
the stripes/ of slavery/ on/ our flag/ of skin". Music returned
to it's source body. A strong dose where you need it.--jb
Dennis Barone: THE MASQUE RESUMED--Standing Stones Press, 7
Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 15 pp. If not apocalyptic, at
least aware of the linguistic ruptures and impossibilities of
representations. This collection of poems is stunning--perhaps
the influence of contemporary French poetry is somewhat more
veiled here than in Barone's other works, which imparts a
breathless urgency. Perhaps some of the most subtle innovative
poetry being produced today.
Guy Beining: STOMA--Aegina Press, 59 Oak Lane, Spring Valley,
Huntington WV, 25704. 57 pp., $9.00. For years Beining has been
composing a sequence of "Stoma." This collection contains
numbers 1701 through 1743 (formidably inter-echoing). A stoma is
a minute opening or pore in a surface, and also, in medicine, a
"mouth." Beining's Stoma, then, are often simultaneously sensual
mouths, and haiku-small openings through the quotidian, generally
urban, surface of existence into lyricisms like light frightened
into "CLOUD swells" or "the language of snow" whose grammar
"buntings correct twig to twig."--bg
John M. Bennett: JUST FEET--Texture Chapbook Series No. 13, 3760
Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 24 pp., $6.00. One out of
any two poetry magazines is going to feature John M. Bennett.
The guy is a poem writer, relentless. A river. A roaring sea of
poems smashing against us humble reader beach eyes and ears. A
hurricane rain of cat, dog, giraffe words. John Machine Bennett.
And the books everywhere also by the flock and herd. So we have
this one: JUST FEET. This is one of Bennett's best. Herein
also, two essays on JMB's poetry, one by Jake Berry and one by
Bob Grumman (two writers that have some clear insight into
innovative poetics). Well, this is a way to go. That's good
because writers like Bennett of the boiling underground don't
receive enough critical comment. We forget what the poet's
poetry is all about. Essays good to get new readers. And for
the thick reader that has to be struck in the head with a washing
machine or cement ostrich, these essays do it. An innovative
idea for a book also to get writers reading each other and then
writing and that writing going into the book. More. Collages
which match the power of the poems by Brekka Hervey, Susan Smith
Nash, and Kelly Vincent.--mb
Aloma Bloom & Jessie Gretzinger: STEPS TO FREEDOM--c/o Taggerzine
Specials, PO Box 632952, San Diego CA, 92163. 12 pp., $1.00(?).
These are playful poems with playful illustrations, and strangely
enough remind me of James Thurber. There's social commentary,
tons of catholic metaphorical nonsense, relationships fucking up
in a strangely stated gentle way, aging and wisdom, and
insightful spiritual Zen-like poems that make you think. On the
other hand, Zen does no more than love to change the world. Hope
is like Heaven, something to believe in until you drop dead.--o
E. B. Bortz: VOICES OF A WANDERER--Out There Pub., PO Box 796,
Mars PA, 16046. 62 pp., $7.00. An obsessive purity of line and
form dominates Bortz's collection of poetry and short stories
(the longest of which is about a jaunt into Thailand). The motif
here is that of the outsider wandering to various world
locations: Singapore, Seoul, Germany, Israel & Montreal, as well
as several locations in the USA. The verse is minimalist and
melancholy, reminding me of a wanderer infected by a solitary
search for something. What is not mentioned. Like a monastic
voyeur handing out meticulous images which transcend meaning, the
wanderer has almost completely painted himself out of the
picture, covering the naked heat of emotion with a refracted
mirror of scenes which results in a cool touch. Maybe the author
says it best when he ends a short prose-poem with "To suppress
the Innerself is to abdicate the living."--rrle
Jonathan Brannen: NOTHING DOING NEVER AGAIN--Score, 812 SW
Cityview, Pullman WA, 99163. 27pp. +envelope, $6.00. Loose-leaf
cardstock in an envelope, each of the 22 panels of this sequence
consists of typed repetitions of one of the letters of the title
arranged to form a non-representational composition. As the
sequence evolves, its range of grays and blacks and sudden
occurrences of negative space, and its jolts and whispers of
forms in harmony or opposition with each other, slowly turn the
nothing that Brannen seems at first to be doing into a permanent
everything. If only Brannen did his thing on canvas or the
equivalent instead of on pages, he might be getting the acclaim
he deserves, for no museumed user of texts in visual art that I
know is even a tenth as masterfully not doing nothing.--bg
Andre Breton: EARTHLIGHT--Sun & Moon Press, 6026 Wilshire
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. $12.95. Best known as the
spokesman and founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton also wrote
poems that are like delicate, exotic jewels. EARTHLIGHT is a
selection of his work from seven collections first published in
French. For my money, his prose poems are Breton's most
interesting work. "Wearing a hooded beige cape, he frolics on
the satin poster where two paradise feathers replace his spurs,"
begins one poem. And it ends: "Just once can't the expression
for life trigger one of the aurora borealises they'll use to make
the table cloth of the Last Judgment?" Beautiful work. Like
dreams should be.--tw
Kimberly J. Bright: MAENAD--Fell Swoop, 3003 Ponce De Leon St.,
New Orleans LA, 70119. 11 pp., $3. A self-described
"carnivorous poet," Kimberly affords us an amusing look into her
world; a world of Prozac, cosmo girls, tattoos, post-coital
remarks (my favorite: "do you always have so many orgasms?"),
turning men into suicides, turning men into "sobbing little
boys," barbiturate-induced sleep, and similarly interesting
perspectives. "We can make it/ look like an accident." She
strikes immediate and deep chords with her sparse and direct
voice. "I want to/ make your bones into woodwind instruments/
for an all-serial killer orchestra." Her rage and refusal is
delicately balanced with sexual and personal torments. Both
enjoyable and provocative.--rrle
Adam Brodsky: FILM AT 11:00--PO Box 43700, Cleveland OH, 44143.
32 pp., $5.00. One of the more unusual chaps I've read in a
while; paginated in reverse, each page containing an abstract
gray and white frame surrounding a single question: "If a bomb
exploded is it still a bomb?" or a short poem: "I am./ You are./
He, she, it is./ Why aren't they?" A totally gray centerfold, a
couple of longer poems, and a bright insert--somehow it seems to
work for me, with the reverse pagination acting as a countdown.
The commitment here is to contemplation, to diversity, to
originality, and to the absurd.--rrle
John Byrum: FORK SHIFT--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., Mentor
OH, 44060. $4.00. A book of graphically super-imposed texts, in
which the bold "foreground" words could be commentaries on, or
distillations of, the fainter "background" texts; for example the
words "writhing nowhere intentions" appears large and bolder over
a passage that begins "if follows clean glass place inclination
dust designation ever..." There are some variations on this
format, for example several pages in which the bold and faint
texts are graphically equal, or there is no bold text at all,
etc.
It seems to me that there are at least two ways of
approaching these enigmatic and non-discursive works: one would
be to "read" them as visual mandalas, in which the meditative
gaze moves back and forth, in and out in a never conclusive
movement of recombining and reordering of the words; a way of
reading that is process-oriented and not directed toward "getting
the point." The other approach is to consider these works as
artistic representations of knowledge (or "reality") as it is
increasingly manifest in the "information" age: that is, these
works are a metaphor for knowing as a multi-layered process, and
not as a static body of facts and structures.
The book is cleanly and simply presented, and includes a
note of "sources," which are all dictionaries. Highly
recommended.--jmb
Robert Caldwell, Eric Dietz: THE FOUR FOOD GROUPS--Anaconda
Press, PO Box 146640, Chicago IL, 60614. 12 postcards, $4.00.
Andy Lowry, the person behind the wild adventures of Anaconda
Press, bursts out of her latest explosive frenzy with a dozen
postcards by Robert Caldwell and Eric Dietz. The focus is on the
four food groups: alcohol, sugar, fat and caffeine. The cards
scream slogan feasted rants, and the combination of stark
graphics from minds polluted by years of abuse of the four food
groups attacked leave one with a strange inner fear that you
might be next. Pictures of Klansman eating lard, killers on
three day vodka binges, child molesters, and coffee addicts
litter the turf, and are only a sampling of the illustrations and
the edge they rip across. These postcards carry a dark humor,
and a viciousness nastiness, that have to be seen to be
appreciated.--o
Clint Catalyst: CARESSES SOFT AS SANDPAPER--Papershred
Productions, 4104 24th Street #254, San Francisco CA, 94110.
48 pp., $4.00(?). For a poetry chap with mixed illustrations
from a dozen plus illustrators , and poems that capture the wild
long strokes of heated lubricated love making, this is a fine
introduction into a poet who's on a road filled with either self
pitying whoa is me bitterness, or extreme insight into the human
condition. I don't know, man, maybe I've always been a cynical
asshole expecting the worse, but I thought that these poems
needed to go a step further. Perhaps castrations and
mutilations, or self destructive rituals, would have over-ridden
the youthful angst. Perhaps a more in perspective point of view
is what I look for when the world starts to get that looking bad
kind of misery blues.--o
Cydney Chadwick: NOUN DESCENDING A FIRE ESCAPE--Laughing Horse
Broadsides, PO Box 2328, Norman, OK, 73070-2328. 1 pp., $1.00.
"Noun Descending a Fire Escape" explores the perversity of gender
role-constructed bondage, as a woman becomes disenchanted with
her snoring lover, "especially after you discover a whole wad of
money stashed away in his shoe box." A tableau-vivant that
reminds one of French new-wave cinema, Godard's Breathless or
Louis Malle's more recent incest-insinuations in Damage.--ssn
Ana Christy: REAL JUNKIES DON'T EAT PIE--Alpha Beat Press, 31a
Waterloo St., New Hope PA, 18938. 66 pp., $10.00. Ana's
admiration of her beloved Beat roots is unabashed--road poems
stretching frm Greenwich Village to Haight St., western haiku ala
Kerouak's Mexico City Blues, Bebop & drug references... even the
book itself imitates the package of a City Lights Pocketbook.
Her opening poem is titled "My Notebook," and that seems an apt
description for much of the work--picturesque details and clean
colloquial language. But unlike the best Beat writing, this too
often fails to soar--careful observation and recording, but
without the passionate insight or resounding echoes of the
originals. Not bad work, but falling short of what you'd expect
from the self-proclaimed "poet of the counterculture and queen of
the underground."--lbd
Glenn G. Coats: THE BIG ZANY--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty Rd.,
East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $2.00. A set of nature-rural
poems based on a Canadian myth surrounding a man known as "Zany."
"The hull/ of his boat/ was like/ his face:/ brown, lined/
weathered." Using precise evocative descriptions we are guided
through an imaginary Zany's world of "hawks/ and herons," rivers
and small lakes, pickerel and walleye, birch and hemlock. Here
nature takes on a haunted, surreal specter, "There are no
footsteps,/ only water slipping/over rocks" and Zany is the
specter, never appearing except in shadows of the mind.--rrle
Edmund Conti: HIC HAIKU HOC--The Poet Tree, 82-34 138th St., #6F,
Kew Gardens NY, 11435. 23 pp., $3.75. Some amusing parodies of
traditional haiku (for instance: "Okay, all you frogs/ Everybody
out of the pool/ And form three lines."), and other pieces of
light verse, many of them quite infraverbally adventurous, like
"Open Every Day Except Sunday":
openopenopenopenopenopenope
In short, my kinda stuff.--bg
Barbara Cramer: A CHILD OF DREAMS--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty
Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $2.00. Barbara Cramer is a
Colorado poet with an eye for the rigorous moment, and a voice of
self-conscious narrative. She narrates in varied lines her inner
feelings mingled with a patient considerate life. Christian
elation regionally based and honest. Often starry-eyed, and
sometimes expansive: "People will adore me./ fear me,/ worship
me,/ for I am sacred" she states describing her mystical
personification as lightening.--rrle
Simon Cutts: FOR MARIE BOURGET--Tel-Let, 1818 Phillips Pl.,
Charleston IL. 9 pp., $3.00. Three very stiff white pages that
seem blank until you realize that a line has been indented on
each page as though typed by a typewriter with no ribbon. The
lines say, "the only texts/ I ever write/ were the titles," which
is droll, and it's probably wrong of me to give the whole book
away like this, but I haven't, because what counts here is not so
much what the text says, but what it is and feels like in such a
context. This work is not a poem, or just a poem... it is a
Book!--bg
Tony D'Arpino: PATANJALI'S TOES--Found Street, 2260 S. Ferdinand
Ave., Monteray Park CA, 91754. $2.00?. Two clearly expressed
poems presented on a small folded broadside, both of which deal
with a sense of mythic presence emerging:
The sex scene in the center of the
book lifts off the page like a child's tattoo.
The furnace in the yogi: a description and
dossier of seasons.
--jmb
Marilyn Dammann: EPHEMERAL EARTHWORKS--PO Box 115, Baraga MI,
49908. 48 pp., $10.00. Twenty-four well printed photos of
outdoor sculptures, most made of bark and driftwood. Pieces
constructed by gravity and placement in snow without artificial
fasteners. Pieces work with light and snow: the moving shadows
of the wood are as important as the wood itself. Hence, time
figures into the work in two ways: transience, and time marked by
movement of shadows. Sound a bit like Stonehenge? It should:
much of Dammann's work takes ancient lyths as points of
departure, and she has made stone cairns on the shores of Upper
Michigan and along the coast of Ireland. Unlike grandiose
earthwork sculptors, Dammann avoids violation of nature, works
according to seasons, and makes sure her work leaves nothing
behind that might not be there already. Several sculptures are
nothing but marks in snow--as ephemeral as art can get. But we
have these haunting photos, which Dammann rightly calls "visual
poems."--ky
Gary David: A LOG OF DEADWOOD--North Atlantic Books, PO Box
12327, Berkeley CA, 94701. 139 pp., $9.95. Poetry of
historicity--the result is somewhat tame because of its self-
consciously academic nature, but interesting nonetheless. Maybe
it's the cowboy in it all. Deadwood refers to the Dakota gold
mining rough-n-ready times, in fact, the book purports to be a
"Postmodern Epic of the South Dakota Gold Rush." David owes much
to Edward Dorn, whose Gunslinger echoes throughout these pages.
David's work reminds me of another poet, Bill Sherman, whose
surreal meditations upon Old Mesilla bring out the gothic & the
grotesque lurking in every ghost town.--ssn
Corrine DeWinter: WISHCRAFT--Arrow Pub., PO Box, East Long Meadow
MA, 01028. 32 pp., $2.00. This is Ms. DeWinter's second
chapbook, and it is crosshatched with eroticism and death,
affection and obsessed lust, magic and myth. She wrenches her
images through a screen of incantation, "I have danced far and
wide and moved no heart." A floating desperation prevails,
wistful yet persistent, "Come out into the light and sing/ Your
superstitions, come out..." The background is eerie, haunting,
ancient primal needs of tortured goddesses, solemn searchers and
shadowy oracles.--rrle
Larry Eigner: A COUNT OF SOME THINGS--Score, 812 SW Cityview,
Pullman WA, 99163. 8 pp., $4.00. Four short poems in the
inimitable high innocence of Eigner, but here with almost
sardonic musings on numbers, particularly the number of people
over-populating the world at present--with the "yugoslav newborn
designated (July '87) our billionth contemporary" making two
appearances.--bg
Urhacy Faustino and Leila Miccolis, eds.: SACIEDADE DOS POETAS
VIVOS (Vol 5, 1994)--Blocos, Caixa Postal 25029, 20552-970
Rio/RJ, BRASIL. 112 pp. [No price listed, but $10 in
international postal coupons should do the trick.] Brazil has
had a particularly active visual poetry scene since the mid-
fifties, when the Noigandres group started its multifaceted
projects. Noigandres poets did good work then, and continue to
do so now. But the group has also kept succeeding generations
from emerging in print in Brazil and from being seen in other
countries. The present collection may be the fullest
representation of post-Noigandres visual poetry available. If
you don't read Portuguese, don't worry: most of the poems work
with icons, phrases in English, and brief Portuguese texts that
can be read by Anglophones. Perhaps 15% require knowledge of
Portuguese. The energy, inventiveness, and variety of these
poets comes through forcefully in this anthology. In the next
decade, some of the poets in this volume will find an
international audience.--ky
Valerie Fox: AMNESIA, OR, IDEAS FOR MOVIES--Texture Press, 3760
Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 35 pp., $4.00. In the title-
piece of this collection of 12 poems and other texts, two banal
movie-ideas are turned representative of the vacuity of mass
Culture by the suggested title following them, "I really like
that building how tall and thin it is." The rest of the
collection provides similar slants off popular inanity (e.g., one
poem asks if a reincarnation of Emma Goldman would, among other
things, "shower in Baltimore/ buy flowers for herself/ or wait
for someone to give her/ what she deserved"--or "have another cup
of coffee.") The book includes "critical accompaniments" by
Stephen Ratcliffe, Thomas Lowe Taylor and Susan Smith Nash, too--
the first of them a very indirect one since it's most about
Twelfth Night and never mentions Fox's work.--bg
William A. Fox: GEOGRAPH--Rainshadow Editions, The Black Rock
Press, University Library 322, University of Nevada, Reno NV,
89557. 60 pp., $10.00. A collection of diagrammatically
constructed poems, visually and conceptually arranged in ways for
which the Fibonacci series (a mathematical progression referred
to more than once in the book) is a metaphor. Most of the poems
are in series, each section repeating and rearranging elements of
the previous one, giving the poems a sense of being closed and
open-ended at the same time, an effect which is strikingly
beautiful:
block to stack a
a block noather to
nother a a mesa
box and nother a
Elegantly produced in a square perfectbound format on good
paper.--jmb
Fox continues to refine the minimalist approach of much of
his earlier work. Words isolated by context and by placement on
the page often work as modular units that can be transposed in a
singular semantic structure or one that changes by slow
accretions. In some instances, paired columns that are set up to
be read vertically and horizontally add a sense of a third
dimension to the work, reminiscent of the volume implied by
polyphonic music. Fox's earlier experiments with visual poetry
are here refined into simple, thin lines, sometimes implying
verse lines left unstated or diagrams surrounding modular texts.
Most interestingly, these wispy, schematic lines bring out
rhythmic possibilities in the solitary words that would otherwise
be difficult to hear. If the minimalism of Ian Hamilton Finlay
and Robert Lax appeals to you, you'll probably like this
book.--ky
Christopher Franke: =5--William Busta Gallery, 2021 Murry Hill,
Cleveland OH, 44106. 29 pp., $1.00. A delightful tiny
(2.75x2.25") book of poems and visual poems, containing much
humor and wordplay (both visual and aural). The "price" is from
the back of the book, which includes the phrase "Dime X A Dime".
My favorite piece here:
Franke did find time to write a
poem about not having enough
time. He calls it "Dash."
"On my stove are four burners.
When I need more than four burn-
ers, something isn't cooking," the
poem reads in part.
--jmb
Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston: CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN
FOREST--Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Ave, Staten Island NY,
10314. 80 pp., $8.95. Boston and Frazier are longtime Science
Fiction poets whose work combines a surrealist sensibility with a
hard technological edge. Their CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN
FOREST invokes a jungle gone botanically mad: "It is a Sphinx
that lifts the world upon its back and grows./ Its veins are road
maps that lead nowhere,/ its breath a cypher,/ its inscrutable
eyes spin mandalas that drift and blue/ shift in toward
Armageddon." Eerie and evocative, these poems effectively
explore a terrain most poets don't even realize exists.--tw
Peter Ganick: IT OR S/HE--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines,
Morris MN, 56267. 16 pp., $4.00. Fourteen blocks of prose in
the most radically altered-syntax zone of language writing. Its
first two sentences, for instance, are: "You and I are what They
coil from Us at a sample of Those that inept lick. tells Them
that usage it imperils so You can Them." The title tells it all:
this is a book hyper-emphasizing described but referentless
pronouns. The result is a tantalizingly odd secondary world,
full of a sense of being generated by rather that generating. It
is experiments like this sequence that are keeping Language
writing one of the central modes of verbal art.--bg
Peter Ganick: UNTITLED SELFKNOWLEDGE--Tight Press, PO Box 1591,
Guerneville CA, 95446. 16 pp., $4.00. The title seems to refer
to a fascinating quality of these poems: they are written in a
kind of blank, impersonal style (there are no pronouns, for
example) that yet contain an expanding sense of self, a self
immersed and growing in the effluvia of consciousness and the
inevitable forms consciousness takes:
tactics rose near floundering
mallets and fingers
the joiners
first
crises thought so tentative
servant roses above
the blue
well
As in the above, the language flows through passages of
elliptical, "depersonalized" syntax to phrases of a perhaps
deceptive discursive clarity: seen in the context of the poems as
a whole, such phrases become as protean in meaning and inference
as anything here. A slippery and engaging book of great beauty
and resonance.--jmb
Sarya Elizabeth Gratner, ed.: EARTHWORDS (anthology)--Write For
Life, 4773 Harmony Lane, Orcutt CA, 93455-4513. 103 pp., $10.00.
An exquisitely hand-crafted book-object with a front-cover
reproduction of a full-color representational painting by Shirley
Wallace whose sunlight, leaf-shadows and window-reflections
epitomize the mostly quite conventional but often lyrically-
substantial poems within. I was especially taken with Camina
Tripodi's daringly simple "Because Of Your Heart," which consists
of just four lines: its title repeated three times followed by
"Everything."--bg
Richard F. Hayes Sr.: THAT'S LIFE--American Living Press, PO Box
901, Allston MA, 02134. 40 pp., $3.00. The poet is an ex-fire
chief, and a WWII veteran. His poems are tantalizing personal
glimpses of a full life, a life of double-edged humor and pathos.
His work is clean and clever, graceful and dramatic, one man's
thoughtful account of life, no more, no less. I found this set
somewhat academic in that it never tries to break out of its
placid mold. Like poetry of another era. The excitement when it
comes is in the paradox hidden under the simplicity. ÒYes, she
did swing by her/ teeth from the rope attached to a tree limb,
but only momentarily..." The simplicity in this case is not
boring, but relaxing and charming.--rrle
Bernard Hewit: TACIT TENDRILS--Wild Strawberry Press, 105 Betty
Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $2.00. Obscure twists in
voice and mood within these poems. For example, when he talks
about returning home after the war, "he needed silence and space/
in order to once more paradoxically/ join the human race."
Metrically moody and forced. Included in this chap is what he
calls a "Gothic Play." Eight pages and five characters to be
exact. It shows the irony of human behaviors, and interactions,
but it is hardly Gothic, though it is playful. Poetry sometimes
portentous & rhetorical, sometimes rhyming, always shadowed by
implication.--rrle
Dick Higgins: POEMS PLAIN AND FANCY--Station Hill, Barrytown NY,
12507. Selected shorter poems 1957-1985 that document a career
of experimental poetry by one of its foremost exponents. Many
many many many different approaches to writing here, mostly under
the imposition of various structures (and strictures), including
chance, repetition, sound translation, and his own snowflake
form. While not every example will impact the reader deeply,
there are quite a few genuinely moving works here, and even the
poems that don't work emotionally show the reader new forms to
look into for the reader's own writing. I think anyone involved
or interested in experimental poetry should at least thumb
through this book once to get an idea of the many things Higgins
has been up to.--ar
Jack Hirschman: THE XIBALBA ARCANE--Azul Editions, 2032 Belmont
Rd., NW, Suite 301, Washington DC, 20009. 62 pp., $10.95.
Drawing on the Mayan books of prophecies, the Chilam Balam,
Hirschman reprises much of the lyric density of his earlier poems
based in Surrealism and Judaic tradition, and expands it into the
revolutionary commitment of his more recent work. Here
everything goes back to roots, including revolutions: dialectics
that turn in circles according to the oldest calendars of the
western world and appear in the Zappatista Revolt of contemporary
Chiapas. Like any book of prophecies, this one reaches into the
past and the future to understand what is happening now. In
Hirsch's view this is a time for anger and hence for redress; a
time for hope since it is a time for action.--ky
Tom House: I MUST BE AN ALIEN--Penny Dreadful Press, 6680
Charlotte Ave., H-6, Nashville TN, 37209. 16 pp., $1.00. Poetry
caught somewhere in the lost triangle between surreal, beat, and
jazz. Exaggerated line breaks and mounting cadences produce
rousing images of tent revivals, pornography, horny little
sisters, cannibalism, and drinking at the local union hall. This
chapbook is a fun-house mirror which twists images to frightening
degrees. Interesting and vivid.--rrle
Geof Huth: TO A SMALL STREAM OF WATER (OR DITCH)--Standing Stones
Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 15 pp. A meditation on
consciousness and its consequences--Huth plunges into the depths
of a rage for order that positions death at the very edges of the
neat, prosodic alignments of meaning that language grapples with.
Huth's work is a wonderful exploration of how a writer expresses
self-reflexivity in words, particularly in the intriguing
"Arrange," "At," and "Zipper," in which a child's struggle with a
zipper parallels the nature of language pushed into new
configurations.--ssn
David Ignatow: GLEANINGS: UNCOLLECTED POETRY OF THE FIFTIES--
Grist, Columbus Circle Station, PO Box 20805, New York NY, 10032-
1496. $25.00. Book on computer disk, available in Windows and
Mac format--in either version, the book is not in plain ascii
format. It comes with a viewer that facilitates movement through
the book, the placement of bookmarks, etc. Format is modeled on
that of a printed book, with sturdy, legible type, and "pages"--
units framed as pages in a book would be.
Perhaps it's appropriate that this harbinger of book forms
of the future should be a retrospective of work by a senior poet.
In his preface to this collection, Ignatow says that these poems
"were not given their final version in time for publication in
POEMS: 1934-1969." Some still seem unfinished, but this
collection does includes some of Ignatow's best work of the time.
Perhaps it was wise of him to let them cook longer. Generally,
these are poems typical of Ignatow during the '50s and any fan of
his should appreciate them. The urban industrial milieu, with
its drabness, repression, anger, fits of bravado and long
stretches of quiet desperation, may have changed in many of its
outward details but a lot of the essentials remain as relevant
today as they were in the '50s--perhaps, eerily, more so now than
10 or 20 years ago.--ky
Michael Kriesel: ASSHOLE MANIFESTO--Full Moon Press, 727 Lincoln
#1, Antigo WI, 54409. 4 pp., $1.00(?). This is a short chap
that feels like a takeoff on Ginsberg's HOWL. Not exactly an
original idea, and the anger becomes more obnoxious than a
threat, but it still works in part. This is actually an excerpt
of a longer poem (oh no!), and I don't know, with UFO abductions,
AIDS, dildos, MTV, and the philosophy that life is shit stated
over and over again, this becomes rather tedious fast. The few
lines that work aren't enough to save this excerpt, much less a
longer piece.--o
Jack Lamb, editor: SPEAKING OF CHANGE--PO Box 4290, Carlsbad CA,
92018. 69 pp., $4.00. An anthology of racially-conscious prose
& poetry of Color. Originally a spoken word performance of
persuasive face-to-face discourse. Here we have racial and
cultural disintegration: "the Taiwanese is in me I just don't
know how to bring it out," Leng Loh explains her lack of
traditional language. We hear a southern child's wonder "The
year my mother birthed me/ they shot Jack/ and as a child, I
accepted the guilt of that." Infinity decays in the face of
these disturbing voices, voices of people devastated by gilded
white ideals: keening holocaustical voices weary from pain and
deceit "this is my culture. i experience it differently from
you. it is not a joking matter to me." Read this, learn from
this.--rrle
Dan Landrum: SIDE-LONG GLANCE--c/o Taggerzine Specials, PO Box
632952, San Diego CA, 92163. 8 pp., $1.00(?). This collection
captures a poem, "Impersonals," that comes so damn close to the
truth I want to know what Landrum was drinking when he wrote it.
It's a cross-reference guide to misfits looking for love, while
running through a list of things that'll alienate the most
empathetic savior on a street corner. These poems click with
understanding, and although this chap is short, it carries more
wisdom than anything anyone who claimed God was talking through
his lips ever had to say.--o
Hank Lazer: INTER(IR)RUPTIONS--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd.,
Mentor OH, 44060. $4.00. The first chapter in a long work-in-
progress, 10 x 10, INTER(IR)RUPTIONS is fundamentally a poem, or
series of poems, of parallel intelligences drawn from a variety
of sources including Emerson's journals, The New York Times,
Seventeen, a work on neuroscience, etc., and Lazer's own
powerful, sometimes even ludic, imagination. It is how this
imagination creatively juxtaposes and allows the texts and
graphics to locate poetically with one another that gives the
work shape in the mind as well as on the page. We sense
initially the similarity of this collision of voices with our
daily lives. Despite whatever course we may choose to focus on
as if it were the subject of our concentration, in reality we are
living through and working with a multitude of media and
intelligences that in essence provide the primary substance of
that focus. We are then living many lives occupying several
domains at the same time in a single space. Lazer articulates
this reality with a music that not only reminds us of these
anxious circumstances but finds the music in it--a kind of flux
that neither annihilates the individual persona nor panders to
it. This is a realistic poetry for an age where information
media, and this also reflects on the function of the book itself
and print media generally, is the actual "landscape" of our
passage.
INTER(IR)RUPTIONS then is a mapping process, but not of the
actual, but a means of responding to the actual. This is the
dance of "events" entered with a metasentience of the nature of
the music. Almost apocalyptic in its effect, the knowledge of
nature extended into the abstract thus rendering the abstract as
natural. Still, this is only one possible overview, and the
beauty of the Lazer's poetry should be witnessed line by line for
the deeper secrets it yields. High craft in combination with
vast imagination. The opening movement of a important work.--jb
Richard L. Levesque: FETAL GRACELAND--Wudge Press, 2227 Woodglen
Dr., Indianapolis IN, 46260. 32 pp., $3.00. With poems titled
"Orga(z)m," "Prison Stabbing Blues," and "Punk Rock Cunt," we
expect an ominous point of view, but Levesque goes beyond simple
sinister: here are the killing grounds filled with monstrous
images of zombies, two-dollar booze, guns, serial killers, death
and bizarre sex. "Can you hear the killer/ inside me--?" Amid
the bleak images is a stinging force, something that reads like
an incantation--"moans, forest molds, salt/ and cider; pagan
folds."--or sometimes like a syncopated beat stomp: "knee drop
baby worships this,/ this Cadillac lump without a soul."
Sociopathic poetry of fractured hopes and unique times. I'm
thinking about cutting and pasting this chap into my family
album.--rrle
Rafael Zepeda & Gerald Locklin: THE DURANGO P0EMS--Zerx Press,
5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 30 pp., $3.00.
I like collaborations like this, wars between poets that can only
leave ashes and flames and explosions that kill more neighbors
than friends. We got drinking, self medication, attempted sexual
endeavors, fights that don't want to happen unless someone wants
to throw the first punch, ethnic points of view, and a real
attempt to capture what it all means on paper, knowing damn well
once you sober up you'll probably throw the answer away. Usually
you get sparring between poets in these deals, but here you got
best friends throwing imaginary punches, both figuring they won
the fight, leaving the reader laughing at that cocky walk both
writers got when they walk down the street. These are old hands
doing it right, and every word does what its supposed to do.--o
Liz Magor and Joey Morgan: HOW TO AVOID THE FUTURE TENSE--The
Walter Phillips Gallery, Box 1020, Banff AL, CANADA, T0L 0C0.
$20 (Canadian), + shipping. Basically a photo book with
narrative. But some of the photos are from a different narrative
than the text. There are two kinds of pages, one for each
narrative. On white pages there are pictures of people camping,
in relatively primitive style, in backwoods Canada somewhere. On
translucent pages, there are anecdotes from the narrator's stay
in France plus small pictures of bits of French architecture and
art. Thus we have juxtaposed Old World and New World ways of
living in the past. The reader is left to make the final
comparisons of the two.--ar
Stephen-Paul Martin: CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION--Standing Stones
Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 15 pp. Two pieces,
poetic in their intensity and their attention to the multi-
faceted possibilities of language. "Double Bed" is a dramatic
monologue recast to accommodate two points of views: Jenny and
Freddie. There is an eerie doubling going on: Jenny and Freddie
could be aspects of one person, split into painful doppelganger,
evil twin status, by the sheer stress of maintaining a pulse rate
while all around collapse.--ssn
G.Z. Mataisz: END TIME--AK Press, PO Box 40682, San Francisco CA,
94140-0682. 299 pp., $8.00. Solidly-crafted thriller set in the
year 2007 and concerned with some missing "riemanim: (a sort of
super-plutonium), with lots of anti-war echoes from the sixties.
Provocative political discussion and "what if's" raise the book's
intellectual value without spoiling it as a good read.--bg
Michael McClure: LIGHTING THE CORNERS On Art, Nature, and the
Visionary--University of New Mexico College of Arts and Sciences.
338 pp., $19.95. "Our sensoriums are spirit mechanisms that
light up the cave around them for the experience," McClure states
in the opening interview, "Writing One's Body", of this essential
and revealing volume. He has been a traveler through our common
space-time, our great mammal voice bard, reminding us, as we
create ever more indulgent idols to our techno-arrogance, that we
are animals, our mind, our soul is animal soul and to attempt to
deny that is a kind of self-imposed schizophrenia. In these
essays and interviews we begin to understand the poetics behind
the poems, or rather the poetics articulated in prose what the
poems allow us to live. And we see McClure as he moves among his
peers, pieces on Robert Duncan, Robert Creely, Allen Ginsberg,
Jim Morrison, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Gary Snyder, Julian Beck,
etc., and come to realize the connections, the obvious influence
his work and his life (the two are surely one) have had on the
culture. The pieces cover four decades of radical intelligence,
as fresh and important today as they have ever been. Through
these essays and interviews we get illuminations of the poet
building his soul in the world, and revelations within our own
sensoriums as to what we are and how we might act from that
knowledge. If McClure had never written a poem this book would
be indispensable, but because he voiced and scribed so much
brilliant poetry this book means more than the textual form can
relate. "To walk a hundred yards in total freedom is to live
forever in eternity--freedom for an instant is beyond measure and
is immortality." This is truth in and as flesh, an invitation
impossible to refuse.--jb
Steven McDaris: THE MOON GETS LAID--Skinners Irregular Horse,
2107 E. Jarvis St., Milwaukee WI, 53211. $4.00. McDaris was a
new name to me a few months ago. His chapbooks have been
arriving in the mail and I've been knocked-out by this flat-out
great story writer. Real page turners. A new raw talent forming
and taking shape. Hope he sticks with his big-hearted vision.
His locker room banter of tits & girls. His easy shock of
recognition with the feelings absolutely familiar. His tact and
sagacity and magic of getting them down on paper in such a way
the picture blossoms in your mind like a John Ford movie. Never
dull. Always moving. If he were a bebop saxophonist in the '50s
he'd be Dexter Gordon, going with the flow. Not the innovator
that Bird or Sonny Stitt or Lucky Thompson were. Just good ol'
straight-forward Dexter (who incidentally made his most powerful
statements in the '70s). This MOON is a real '60s story, with
all the pertinent images of that era--weed, free love, & wine
high psychedelic philosophy. It strikes me as a man's story--I
wonder if women enjoy reading it. MOON is a novella set in the
Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, with an admirable knowledge of
flora & fauna & geology & native cooking & Indian history &
customs. Seamlessly interwoven. Characters as alive as
yesterday.--mw
Todd Moore: DANCING W/ BLOOD--Undulating Bedsheet Productions,
c/o Mike, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 90025. 16 pp., $1.50.
Todd Moore is that uncle your best friend had, that was so
worldly and wise and filled with tales of weirdness, you wanted
to leave home and see it all for yourself. In this collection
you get the hard edged unforgiving poetry that Moore does so
well, with poems about a "bar girl coming out for/ a smoke she
has a 4 inch/ pipe rolled into her fist" bashing the head of a
drunk trying to molest a girl with a 45 automatic, and the first
safe sex attack I've ever seen: "when he/ wdn't give her/ the
grocery/ money she/ sapped him/ w/a 2 ply/ condom filled/
w/nickels...". There are other great poems done in that
tradition Todd has become famous for, capturing revenge with a
taste of blood.--o
Todd Moore: SHOOTING OUT THE LIGHTS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration
Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 40 pp., $4.00. (back-to -back
with Mark Weber's SWINDLER'S HARMONICA SIESTA). It's good to see
Todd settling into the southwest after all of that vicious
gangster writing of the midwest. Fortunately he's as mean as
ever, and the poems in this collection capture hookers, sweat and
piss soaked beds in ten minute hotels, home made 22s, bets that
got more losers than winners, brains scattered across a hundred
sidewalks, and rocks smashing through windows without a message
you don't want to hear. This is Moore kicking ass. This is the
real life without pretense.
And hey, just when you thought you were safe from Weber he
kicks back with a strong longing for stability in a world that
changes its faces so fast you often want it all to sit still so
you can know where you are at that moment. Mark also grabs that
asshole who fucks with you at a reading and shows the jerk the
rules are a lot different than he thought. When I read Weber I
feel like I'm drinking with an old friend, we're catching up on
the latest news.--o
Susan Smith Nash: MY LOVE IS APOCALYPSE AND RHINESTONES--Texture
Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 24 pp., $4.00.
Using Marilyn Monroe as an archetype for women in a media-
saturated society, Susan Smith Nash creates a chapbook of poems
mingling levels of allusion, cross-pollinating from line to line
as worlds collide in jarring verbal effects. "Celebrity goes by
the velocity of discover, I waited/ my sense of self scattered by
Doppler-shifted/ light palms clapped together, so faint so
retreating." The best poem here is the extended "Letters from
Marilyn," written in a more conventional verse but with enormous
power. The first letter ends with the line: "Let me rip apart
the reverse image of my smile." The eighth letter ends with "His
mistake broke me, like echoes of mother/ on the face of every
abandoned child." Nash concludes with an essay on Monroe's last
movie, "The Misfits," in which the actress played an androgynous
character, and which Nash sees as a cinematic commentary on
gender roles.--tw
Susan Smith Nash: T.E. LAWRENCE: A VEIL IN THE SAND--Room Press,
29 Lynton Place, White Plains NY, 10606. 14 pp., $3.00?. A set
of five remarkably passionate long poems, which invoke not only
distant times, places, and personalities, but a very strong sense
of self coming into being, as if the awareness of history (and
not just human, but geological as well), were "taken personally"
very much indeed. The language is largely accessible yet
charged, elliptical, and constantly breaking out ahead of its own
structures, running ahead of itself:
Serpentine walls fits like saddle, series erect
desert grow in weeping torrents, false poetics like abandon
or warmth, bent twisted, round, ripping silence
cold spokes on rhythmic way you tell tide hitting seawall,
Type faster, harder, even--arrange sentiment onto self
or message--intelligence on the basic wet & dry
season, abundant dazzle mystery Alchemist constructed
hero at work Brughel's prelude to chemistry, whipping camels
foaming to your Yanbu home, Saudi Arabian
grief or rape sprawls human remains over dawn's corona--
It is rare to encounter poetry of such emotional intensity and
strong intellectual engagement combined. The closest thing to it
I can think of are some of the major works of Romanticism (i.e.,
the Odes of Keats, or Jose Maria Heedria's Niagra) although
comparison is a challenging one, and is an indication of the
authentic brilliance of her work here.--jmb
Letta Simone-Nefertari Neely: GAWD AND ALLUH HUH SISTAHS--104
Gates Ave., Brooklyn NY, 11238. 28 pp., $?. Starting with a
quote from M.O.V.E. leader, Ramona Africa, "Nobody was supposed
to survive," Neely goes on to prove that many people have indeed
survived. Written in a diced phonic style of free verse, with
liberal doses of Black English, a powerful narrative and
historical Black images. "my girls are blk shadows lookin for
answer hanging/ from a pulpit blown away/ by the klan...// ...let
us all say ache." Letta Neely has the yoke of tradition upon
her, but she projects a visionary future, a future where we
"remember to take Emmit Teal, Atlanta child murders, ghost
dancers, Stonewall, and/ apple pie/ all together." She shows us
the bold vicious hate within our culture, with all of its isms
and phobias (racism, sexism, homophobia), and then she stands up
and says what she believes with a passionate voice echoing into a
new era. "this/ is/ no/ time to stop breathing/ this is no time
to stop/ this is no time." Feminist, lesbian black pride in its
most critical, intellectual form--the poem of incidental tragedy
and healing growth.--rrle
R.L. Nichols: THE POINT IS...--Alpha Beat Press, 31a Waterloo
St., New Hope PA, 18938. $6.00. With major honesty, wide open,
speaking with the machine shop music tools of poetry, R.L.
Nichols sings through this book with some of the cleanest and
clearest agony and sexual pleasure notes of word music of any
poet canary or spring bird on the planet. Can do and does make
amazement with the simple language words into poetry. No dull,
camp repetition. A voice of communication. Frank philosophy
from the bottom honest side up. Beat, Bukowski, bad, bay, mouth
full words dance. And he says, and we should all consider when
thinking about poetry: "To realize the beauty of worms?"--mb
Eric Nisenson: ASCENSION--JOHN COLTRANE AND HIS QUEST--St.
Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY, 10010. $22.95.
For many of us John Coltrane was more than a jazz genius, though
that surely would have been enough to merit his acclaim. He
moved through all jazz had to offer and all he could invoke from
those roots and went further still beyond the limits of his
medium, his instrument and possibly even his humanity and carried
us along with him (even those of us who discovered him a decade
or more after his death). To tell his story as a man or musician
would and has produced fine work, there is so much to draw from.
But Nisenson has given us a gift of another order, focusing
centrally on what drove him to the reaches of such extraordinary
passion. Certainly this is a biography, covering virtually all
stages of his life including such bucolic details as his love for
sweet potato pie (which gave him dental problems) and his humble
southern manner or his early drug abuse. But as Nisenson says in
the opening pages, Coltrane's "life was based on a series of
discoveries". It is these moments of discovery and self-
revelation that are the meat of the book and what gives
Coltrane's life and work such enormous value for the generations.
The music and how it relates to the quest is central, including
details of how Trane arrived at his "sheets of sound" or his
later development of modes and finally free outside playing.
Yet, the descriptions are never difficult and non-musicians and
players alike should be able to fully understand every nuance.
Also, Nisenson's personal accounts of Coltrane in performance,
which often included solos that would last over an hour, add an
almost cinematic dimension to the book. After listening to him
all these years I found these passages to be a dear treat, able
to see through them what I will never be able to see in the
flesh. The individual albums are analyzed and appraised as well
so that someone who knew little of the work would have a reliable
guide of which pieces to seek out first. Nisenson's research
should also be commended, full of accounts and information from
friends and acquaintances and of course the musicians themselves.
I've wanted for years to read what I felt was an adequate account
of a man, and the music, for which words must surely fall short,
and this is as close as we are ever likely to get. Coltrane has
inspired us to commit ourselves whole heart and soul to our
callings and is no doubt a primary inspiration for much of what
is reviewed in these pages. It is such a delight at last to have
a volume that explores and relates the discoveries in the life of
the high lord of jazz transcendence. Very highly
recommended.--jb
Oberc: PORN--A.T.H. Press., c/o T. Bishop, 2177 Stewart Dr.,
Hatfield PA, 19440. 40 pp., $3.00. The violent and decadent
times of a female porno star as she lives and works the fringe of
society, from childhood to middle-age. Hypnotic, erotic,
violent, just like real life. Paragraphs form a prose-poem style
which reads like parables of the obscene. Oberc has fused a
singular isolated spirit of seeking with a delicious sexually
obsessed darkness. "feminists scream outside the set/ they want
to save my ass/ they don't want to pay my bills/ I fuck for a
living/ they scream out slogans/ they tell me to save myself/
they talk about freedom while trying to take it all away..."
Oberc's self-lacerating personification judges and refuses to
judge, condones and condemns society at the same time. This chap
is not for everybody, but I enjoyed it.--rrle
William Parker: MUSIC IS--Open Magazine New Series, PO Box 2726,
Westfield NJ, 07091. $1.00. Introduction to the forthcoming
book, MUSIC AND THE SHADOWPEOPLES, MUSIC IS is a spontaneous
feeling manifesto, a diatribe of holy inspiration from one who
understands the deepest richest impulses of creative sound
without the restrictions of manufactured order. "Music is the
abysmal rainbow that bridges endless galaxies/ Music passes
through the musician, the Muse-Physician knows enough not to
interfere/ Music remands bad spirits." We get the sense of the
full liberating possibility of music. Music as the rite soul
healing. This little book, like Parker's music, is further
evidence of his enormous gift for delivering that rite. Much
gratitude to the folks at Open for this and all recent materials,
they continue to remind us of the power of walking the radical
edge.--jb
Geza Perneczky: THE MAGAZINE NETWORK-The Trends of Alternative
Art in the Light of Their Periodicals-1968-1988--c/o Stephen
Perkins, 1816 S. College, Iowa City IA, 52245. 285 pp., $30.00.
Mike Gunderloy thought he was onto the big time when he started
Factsheet Five, but there were already extensive archives and
documenters of the underground, and if you want to see what laid
the foundation for Mike's publication, this is the place to
start. Perneczky originally published this book in Hungarian,
and it had an international focus on mail art and literary
publications from the very start. At the same time many of the
underground publications that earned decent reputations in the US
during the '80s (Nightmares of Reason, Artpolice, Bag of Wire,
Bikini Girl, Lost And Found Times, etc.) are captured at their
peak, and were probably discovered through Factsheet Five's
attempts to catch as mush of that world as possible. Although
there is an academic side to this great book, there is also a
historical capturing of many of the individuals who were doing it
yourself before anyone knew what doing it yourself was all about.
They were highly motivated creative types that got involved
because they were so driven, because they had to focus their
energy in a positive direction, and this book captures that
energy and creativity in an international perspective you won't
find in your local underground coffee table book. If you can't
afford a copy, try to get your Library to borrow it for you.
It's definitely a peek into the past that'll stir brain cells you
thought were dead.--o
Stephen Petroff: THE SECRETS OF THE TOWN OF BOWDOINHAM--Kore
Press. 24 pp. Handwritten in legible script with exquisite
hand-drawn borders and artwork. I believe it is written about a
small rural town in Maine. Deep woods magic, and pain combine to
swirl around the reader like a vortex of strange assurances that
something weirder is coming up. As narrative prose it has a rich
feel: a mentally deficient boy teaches his father the magic of
wooden whistles; a cancer patient becomes a ghost; a woman
shoplifts plums, a poet's last meal, a witch who lives on Post
Road, and the destruction of a litter of half grown puppies...
these incidents
and more are found in these pages.--rrle
Sylvia Play: AIRY EL--Poets & Writers, dist. by Da Dead Press,
3226 Raspberry, Erie PA, 16508. $$23.95. This appears to be a
major find: 22 lost poems by Plath, edited by Paul Weinman and
Ron Androla. These poems were obviously buried by the author,
perhaps out of embarrassment at their sexual explicitness (some
titles: "Plath, the Hopeless Cunt", "Pigs in Fecus"), but they
will go a long way toward clarifying some of the issues that have
swirled around her work. The editors are to be congratulated for
this latest example of their on-going scholarship and research
into the hidden and ignored texts for some of our greatest
literary heroes. (I only wish they had kept their noses out of
my trash--last year they published a group of poems I had thrown
away and forgotten, but they must have found them doubtless
soaked in the juices from one of those chicken-package diapers,
and published them as EAR CANNIBAL, to my great embarrassment.
Oh well, one has to be thick-skinned in this poetry business, and
I suppose the interests of history take precedence over the
posturings of my fragile ego.--jmb
Don't worry about the address or the price because anytime
Androla an with Robert Lowell ("Shy girl anemic in back of his
poetry class,"), and yeah, more lust ("Did you shed/ Silk socks,
capped incisors and a BMW"). Sometimes these psychopaths hit it
right on the nose, but other times they're just making references
to the authors while being themselves, creating a satire that
leaves you trying not to laugh, but knowing your eyeballs might
fall out of their sockets if you don't.--oed incisors and a
BMW"). Sometimes these psychopaths hit it right on the nose, but
other times they're just making references to the authors while
being themselves, creating a satire that leaves you trying not to
laugh, but knowing your eyeballs might fall out of their sockets
if you don't.--o
Richard Schevill: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHEN YOU ARE BERN
PORTER and Bern Porter: SOUNDS THAT AROUSE ME: Selected Writings-
-Tilbury House, 132 Water Street, Gardiner ME, 04345. $16.95 and
$9.95 respectively. Reading these books gave me a picture of and
an appreciation for Bern Porter. The books of his I had seen
before, small volumes of founds, had not overly impressed me.
Porter was a failure in that he did not generate the income to live off his work, but was a great success in anticipating ideas
(both artistic and intellectual) that would rise in importance a
decade or five later. It's important to know about Bern Porter
because he looked towards the future, because he survived so long
without compromising his aims, and because of the way he
celebrated creativity in all areas of his life. Porter is an
inspiring example. On the other hand, the books make it clear
there were obstacles--primarily poverty, misdirected social
expectations, and governmental mistrust--to getting things done.
In spite of all this, Porter did a lot. The moral is, if you
can't do it, find another way to do it; if you can't find a way
to do it, at least sketch your vision down.
Schevill's biography is a chronology of where Porter went
and what he did. The book is profusely illustrated with many
relevant pictures of Porter, of his artworks, of his found poems,
of newspaper clippings, of places he visited, covers and ads for
books he published, etc. A number of poems and other writings
are included in the text. After cataloging and describing a long
list of Porter's achievements, the author devotes the last
chapter to giving a detailed appreciation of Porter's found poems
and what they stand for. That chapter makes me want to look at
some of those books in the major sequence of founds books, and
look back at those I'd already gotten (such as the two short
books published by the Runaway Spoon Press).
SOUNDS THAT AROUSE ME includes all kinds of writing,
excepting the visual: finished poems, parts of books,
manifestoes, excerpts of interviews, even a couple letters.
The writing ranges from the familiar (I had the same basic idea
for "Blank Verse" around the same time, and I'm sure there were
hundreds if not thousands of other schoolboys that had the same
idea as a reaction to being taught Shakespeare in the dry dusty
ways high school teachers think up) to the incompletely thought
out (such as "Statement"--fixing or replacing the book/text as
transmitter of information would require many years of effort--
this piece gives a few concrete proposals that don't seem to be
incomplete answers to the very important facts given.) to the
moving and complete and significant ("Why Don't You Use the
Trail?", "Sciart Manifesto", "Me"). The reminiscences on people
like Henry Miller, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and
Gertrude Stein are quite interesting, too.
The biggest shortcoming in this anthology, ultimately, may
be the neglect of the found poems, of which we have but one or
two examples (if you count the rather arresting "Found Story").
I can also complain that the resetting of "What Henry Miller Said
and Why It Is Important" leaves out the all-important white space
in the original. But Porter's been at it for longer than most of
us have been living, and despite the flaws, these books are
important documents of living history.--ar
Peter Redgrove: THE LABORATORS--Taxus Press. £6.50. This
collection of Peter Redgrove's delicately fashioned verse
displays the same concern common to much of his poetry: the
female menstrual cycle and its overwhelming importance to human
society. Redgrove, a trained chemist, sprinkles his poems with
an eclectic mix of scientific and alchemical terms and often
writes of a surrealistic or mystical blending of the inner and
outer realms. "The scents and the steams, distilled, condense on
the mirrors/ In populations of pearly droplets;// Equally the
whole forest outside the window/ Shimmers with dew;// Equally her
mouth today/ Shimmers with his seed."--tw
Jeff Rentsch: THE STORY OF TWO MEN--PO Box 480, Denville NJ,
07834. 24 pp., $2.00(?). This is a collage of text and visuals
that may, or may not, be related, and which gestalt into a
strange coherency about a son who beat his father with a bat
until he couldn't beat him anymore. At first I was hesitant to
even deal with this, but after looking at it closely, I was
amazed at how powerful it really was, and the way it strangely
fit together, like a three dimensional puzzle that doesn't make
any sense until it's all assembled. Rentsch is someone to look
out for, especially if he's creeping up behind you.--o
Marilyn R. Rosenberg: SPALL SPIRULA--101 Lakeview Ave. West,
Peekskill NY, 10566. 37 pp., $12.00. Another quietly important
visio-verbal work by one of this country's quiet handful of long-
time important visual poets. It consists of competently
representational pen & inks of the artist's study, rocking chair,
scissors, unpacked groceries, etc., mixed with discussions of
illumagery using quotations from people like Walter Benjamin, and
wherever "9: Potato chips sell eight times as well as pretzels"
came from, not to mention non-representational explosions, one
with eye-charts and words derived from "fan-" such as "fantasy"
and "fancier." My favorite verbal touch is an alphabet that's
spelled "ba, dc," etc., up to "ts"--meaning the alphabet ended
with TS Eliot?? Every page has several such items. This is
definitely a must-get book for anyone interested in
pluraesthetic, or even just visual, art.--bg
Stuart Ross: RUNTS--Proper Tales Press, Box 789, Station F,
Toronto Ontario, Canada, M4Y 2N7. $1.00. A collection of 20
poems, each of 6 lines or less, that have an ironic, playful
quality that is most refreshing. Using a pared-down but direct
language, they often create a sense of the possibilities that lie
behind ordinary surfaces:
WHO KNOWS?
She sits on the subway
eating Zesty Cheese Doritos
and reading The Enquirer.
Maybe she killed someone today.
--jmb
C.C. Russell: MORE LIKE FORKS--UBP, c/o Mike, PO Box 25760, Los
Angeles CA, 90025. 24 pp., $2.00. I like the way Russell turns
a line: "You said we used to spoon/ all night,/ wrapped around
each other", "I know something about windows/ and saying the
right words/ at the wrong times", "They would not call this love/
but warfare", are just a sampling of openings that make you know
something is going to come smashing through your window any
second. These are poems filled with confused emotions,
contrasting love and hate. But there is also, in the midst of the
confusion, a strange hope that keeps you going, that makes you
want to get it right the next time around.--o
Vern Rautsala: LITTLE-KNOWN SPORTS--Univ. of Mass. Press.
$20.00 cloth, $9.95 paper. Winner of the annual Juniper Prize
in poetry, Vern Rutsala's LITTLE-KNOWN SPORTS is a collection of
prose poems divided into three parts. The first part contains
poems about photographs, each one describing a particular scene
and somehow transforming it into a distinctive and
psychologically-resonant slice-of-life. The second part,
entitled "Bestiary," contains mythologized explanations of
everyday objects, as in "Paper Clip": "We persist in baiting this
dull hook with page after page, yet we catch nothing." The final
part contains the little-known sports of the book's title,
including sleeping, hating, getting into bed, and being hopeless.
All in all, a whimsical and unpretentious examination of this odd
experience called life.--tw
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: WHO IS BIANCA?--Wet Motorcycle
Press, 3055 Decatur Ave. Apt. 2D, Bronx NY, 10467. 6 pp.,
$1.00?. A torrent of Othello-like obsessions about an apparent
rival in love whose name is Bianca. Exactly where we are, or
what's happened is unclear, but that is appropriate--as are the
florally-archaic poeticisms, and the hints of romantic-novel-
schlock, for the poem is (brilliantly) about a person too
deranged by jealousy to care about journalistic thoroughness,
decorum, or avoiding gush.--bg
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: SIX COMETS ARE COMING; ELEGY FOR
CHRISTOPHER SMART; and WHO IS BIANCA?--Wet Motorcycle Press, 3055
Decatur Ave. Apt. 2D, Bronx NY, 10467. 6 pp. @, $1.00@?. These
three small booklets form a set, each presenting a different
strategy for manipulating texts: the first epigrammatically
and/or visually; the second by excising words and letters from
words to create a sense of intriguing fragmentariness; and the third by suggesting 17th century poetic diction in an enigmatic
dialogic context. Very nice indeed; like little primers of
linguistic possibility.--jmb
Jack Saunders: OLLA-PODRIDA--Florida's Shame, PO Box 10375,
Parker FL, 32404. 4 pp., SASE. Soon, boasts Saunders, he'll
have written "100 books without selling a word to New York or
Hollywood." But he keeps on keepin' on, obsessively re-prosing
his defeats at the hands of the literary establishment, now in
this series of 4-page pamphlets available to whoever shows an
interest. One reviews BLASTER by Al Ackerman, who (now that
Bukowski's gone) is the writer to beat for Saunders. Another
reports on and satirizes the Florida poetry-grants scene--which
leads to a third, which is a quite intelligent discussion of the
flaws in most fellowship-distribution procedures. Whether
Sisyphus, or the new Kerouac he sees himself as, Saunders is
worth reading.--bg
Barry Silesky: ONE THING THAT CAN SAVE US--Coffee House Press.
$10.95. Filled with talk of lost jobs, unpaid bills, lives
distracted by shopping and television, and worries about the
state of the world, Barry Silesky's short-short stories paint a
bleak picture of Clinton's America. These stories are
constructed a sentence at a time, each simple declarative
sentence not building on the one before but going in a new
direction, adding fresh perspective, new data, until the effect
is almost giddy as we hang on tight to the words so we don't fall
off. Maybe the words are the one thing that can save us.--tw
Jack Skelley: NO BARBIE--Found Street, 2260 S. Ferdinand Ave.,
Monteray Park CA, 91754. $1.00. Two poems out of the Bukowski
school but with weirdly misconnected images like an "Onramp crack
beggar" vs. "Nietzsche's hanky holder" vs. "Blue chip stamp
collector" in one series of lines, and a post-modernist allusion
to Capt. Kirk preceding "Mahler turned all the way up/ to sheer
black, with a red rose felt at the tip."--bg
Two delightfully quirky poems presented as a small folded
broadside where the concept of "Barbie" is presented as a
metaphor for a kind of swarming erotic irritant:
My doggie
Seventh planet of space
Mohammed's Ecstasy
All the things you aren't
Little animal
Polio moss in the gutter
--jmb
Patti Smith: EARLY WORK, 1970-1979--Norton. $18.95. Back when
she was a skinny punk, Patti Smith made a name for herself first
as a poet and then as a rock star. Then she got married, had
kids, moved in among Detroit's Auto Barons, and got middle-aged.
EARLY WORK, 1970-1979 takes us back to her rebel days as a
haunted visionary poet. Most of these poems read as if they
should be shouted from a stage, hysterically and with great
emotion. The prosey pieces are rambling and so pure that they
didn't need any rewriting at all but just glopped out honest,
straight from the heart. If Patti has written any poems about
her children, her life in the elite suburbs, or her career as a
hypocritical poseur who knew that a media image as a moody rebel
could make a fast buck, they aren't included here.--tw
Mark Sonnenfeld: MISCELLANY BY MARK--Marymark Press, 45-08 Old
Millstone Dr., East Windsor NJ, 08520. 54 pp., $4.00?. There
are moments among these cleanly written but fairly conventional
poems, of the short-lined "conversational" variety, when a more
elusive/allusive and charged poetry seems to be emerging:
His lunacy
I dared not lock horns
with
Those boots
scuffed And a wide black leather belt
was symbolic
way back
The poems deal with daily life, music, reading, mass culture, and
work, and often demonstrate a considerable sensitivity, to their
topics, a step beyond the chatty flippancy often found in this
kind of writing.--jmb
Mark Sonnenfeld: TEN INCH DIAGONAL--Marymark Press, 45-08 Old
Millstone Dr., East Windsor NJ, 08520. 24 pp., $2.50. There is
an open and playful quality to these poems, many of which are
quite free-wheeling in their juxtapositions of vocabulary and
syntactical structures. The poet seems to be enjoying himself,
but this does not result in a mere facile silliness: the poems
often also express a wistfullness and melancholy that, along with
the techniques used, remind me of the work of Appolinaire and
Huidobro:
the lines
of stars twitch
as pigeon couples flyby
the colored flare
the republic grocer sweeps
the simple of
intimacy alone
channels
the bug sideways
A most refreshing collection, nicely illustrated with geometrical
and technical diagrams.--jmb
Surllama, et al: PENTACOST BOWEL HACK--Anatomy Floaters, USF
#3182, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa FL, 33620-3182. 12 pp.
Originally a chapbook ms. submitted to Anatomy Floaters. Editor
Surllama mixed its texts up and performed a hack on it; later
other defilers joined in the fun with separate hacks. The
results include a Chinese-quite disintegrated text cum over-
scribble by John. Lingner, a renga experiment by John M. Bennett,
and a computer-generated "whered salm" by Ficus
strangulensis.--bg
Curtis Taylor & Nico Vassilakis: SEVEN STEPS OF LOVE--Sub Rosa
Press, 6234 Carleton Ave., Seattle WA, 98108. $4.00. Moltenly
high-colored Tarot-occult illumages by Taylor on the following
seven subjects: "Mouth," "Luck," "Risk," "Give," "Pierce,"
"Trick," and "Sip." Accompanying them are seven equally
energizing Vassilakis poems that move from a mouth that,
devouring all, "will taste your skin 'til your thoughts are
hinged at the mouth, and what air is here will mix with what air
is in you," to the claim that "we are equipped with radar and
music." A jangle of textures, ideas and images that pretty much
cover the entire range of human existence.--bg
A small, accordion-folded booklet consisting of color
illustrations backed by texts (7 of each), collectively having
the quality of a set of divination cards, the images and texts
being intriguingly ambiguous enough to accommodate a wide variety
of readings. The first one is "Mouth":
Consider a circle, then consider
what will fit inside that circle. a
mouth has mountains, a mouth has
oceans, a mouth has the universe,
and all things are ingested easily
within in it. there is an
obstacle....
--jmb
Tentatively, a Convenience: PUZZLE WRITING--Score, 812 SW
Cityview, Pullman WA, 99163. 13 pp. (loose sets in an envelope),
$3.00. A sequence concerned with identical rectilinear forms
that are shaped to be able to interlock, and sometimes they do.
Each has a one-word label, "rocket" and "pedicab" being the
labels of the two in the opening panel. The background, with one
exception, is a pictureless, doubly-exposed jigsaw puzzle.
Intriguing events take place but exactly where the narrative is
going beats me.--bg
Larry Tomoyasu: PHOTOS--Found Street, 2260 S. Ferdinand Ave.,
Monteray Park CA, 91754. $2.00?. A story dealing with fragments
of childhood memories, accompanied by grainy b/w 1950's photos of
little boys, in a small booklet produced with Found Press' usual
hand-made elegance. The story deals with motels, traveling, lost
photos, and has a delightful episode in which "Johnee", perhaps
the speaker's brother, is tossing Gideon Bibles out the window of
a moving car. The writing is clean, focused, and highly
evocative.--jmb
Story of an ordinary Joe who had lost a box of photos three
years earlier. As he and his friend from boyhood drive cross-
country in their search for the photos, stealing Gideon Bibles as
they go, the Joe's simple-seeming thoughts and observations click
strangely against the photographs of two children that accompany
the text. The result is an unexpectedly ed husk adorns the
cover--at first glance it could be a drawing of a trendy
hairclip, or the logo for an "Invasion of the Insect-Body
Snatchers." Trammell's collage, narrative and lyric poetry often
brings the self right into the jaws of the locusts, but somehow
manages to keep it from being gnawed down to the roots. "Cicada-
-the True Bug/ of Apollo, that sings./ warns."--ssnf right into
the jaws of the locusts, but somehow manages to keep it from
being gnawed down to the roots. "Cicada--the True Bug/ of
Apollo, that sings./ warns."--ssn
Nick Vaile: HARDCORE MOTHERFUCKER--WTG-Pubs., PO Box 12646,
Lexington KY, 40583. 56 pp., Definitely an attention-grabbing
title. The first fourteen pages read almost like a journal; a
gripping journal of the thoughts of a Hispanic factory worker in
Dayton, Ohio, who exists in a vacuum of hate and violence. This
is an almost purging rant, a dispelling of evil. "Anger is an
injection of adrenaline laced with insanity," he tells us, and
then relates to it personally: "I am a grudge holder, now and
forever. I cannot forget." Vaile doesn't shy away from rough
language, "My ex-mother-in-law is truly a cunt and a whore."
There are also several poems about startling places, like the
motel where "Deep ThroatÓ was filmed. And more. I can't say
this is pretty, but then motherfuckers seldom are. It is real,
though. Have you ever been shot at? This chap left me feeling
like I had.--rrle
Nico Vassilakis: A NAME FOR RADIO--Elbow Press, PO Box 21671,
Seattle WA, 98111. 12 pp. Amazingly coy, this tiny little book
is a treasure, something one could collect in a miniature
bookcase of exquisitely produced examples of the art of the book.
Seattle continues to be the hub of visual impact, whether it be
grunge or in the fascinating twists and turns that visual poetry
hammers into the unconscious. What amazes me is the consistently
high quality of it all--Vassilakis is an inspiration.--ssn
John Viera: SLOW MOVING PICTURES--Score, 812 SW Cityview, Pullman
WA, 99163. 10 pp., $3.00. Drawings, textual illumages and
visual poems, all in similarly expressive, scribbly calligraphy.
Includes a terrific 10-part impression of a poetry reading called
"Minutes of a Poetry Reading at Rocky Point"--it reminded me of
Saul Steinberg's visualizations of classical musical compositions
without seeming any more derivative than all art is. I was also
taken with a florally-cursive rendering of the words "sign" and
"song" in such a way that their letters look identical, so the
one word shivers provocatively into the other.--bg
Fred Voss: STILL IN THE GAME--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine
WI, 53402. 24 pp., $3.00. In "Normal" we get tossed into an
explosion of misfits, hippies, electric shock orgasms, out of
body experiences, and the need to live life instead of
disintegrating and hiding from the world. In "I Was Terrified"
the opening lines, "He roared his bike to a stop/ on the sidewalk
in front of the bay window of my apartment/ and stomped up the
stone steps" sets up the situation where some strong willed crazy
motherfucker thinks he's doing you a favor when actually you're
too scared to get in his way. In "Daredevils" we get another
taste of hysteria: "My chair/ could barely hold him as he
squirmed/ and told me/ what it was that got him off", where the
love of bikes and riding left me wanting to get out there myself.
This is pure well written insightful poetry, and although I've
had a taste or two of Voss' work before, now I want to get it
all.--o
Jeanine Wade: NECK DEEP IN LUST (29 Poems of Love and Lust)--PO
Box 272, Goodlettsville TN, 37070-0272. $3.00. What can be said
is that for sure Jeanine Wade is neck deep, waist deep, head deep
and over her head and basking in, bathing in, wallowing in the
moist from lust and love. Like 29 Arabian nights (knights)--
EARotic tales (tale). Not the overt straight forward redhot mama
tomato stroke and squirt and squirm strain and stain realism but
playing with words and with the tools of poetry getting to the
same place. A different lush pathway to get to (on) the top of
the orgasm mountain. Many paths and sure this is perfumed but
never skirts (lifted) the focus which is genuine physical and
emotional passion. The body is here and Jeanine Wade (wading in
lust) hasn't forgotten that she has a mind, as well as a heart,
as ...well, ass.--mb
Mary E. Weems (ed.), Susan Kane, Patricia Harusami Leebove,
Kristen Ban Tepper: WOMEN'S VOICES--Burning Press, PO Box 585,
Lakewood OH, 44107. 28 pp., $3.00. The heartbeat of women:
multi-cultural, multi-voiced, moon goddess proud and strong.
This is a collaborative effort emphasizing women's artistic
voices in one poetic collection. Chimerical forces and tough-
minded introspection combine amid dances of raw experiences:
motherhood, art, nurturing addictions, sensual dehumanizations,
suburban imprisonment, love "my love like air like food like
need." The voices here are all pulled from deep history,
genetically extracted: "and when I speak/ I use thunder/
thunder// it is my perfect voice." They rage and demonstrate but
never beg meaning. Language and song, primitive and holy, guilt
and lust, abuse and abandonment, all combined in these four
women's voices, world rhythms bound in Cleveland. Alkaline-
Electra charged resurrections of the mighty "I AM."--rrle
-----------------------------------------------------------------
End, TapRoot Reviews Electronic Edition (TRee)
Issue #6.0, section b: chaps
-----------------------------------------------------------------
