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T A A P P R R O O O O T
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T A A P R R O O O O T
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Issue #3.0, section b 9/93
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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 3rd full electronic issue, containing
all of the short CHAPBOOK reviews; the first section contains all of
the Tzine 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 subsctiptions 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).
I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues.
A cummulative, searchable, and x-referenced HyperCard version is
under development--e-mail for status & availablility information.
Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review
material--in this issue, reviews & articles by John Byrum, Dick
Higgins, geof huth, Mike Basinski, Tom Willoch--as well as a variety
of poetry prose & grafix. It is available from: Burning Press,
PO Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107--$2.50 pp. Both the print &
electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright 1993 by Burning
Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit educational
corporation. Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR
NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, 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, Tom Becket, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Jeff Conant,
Daniel Davidson, Luigi-Bob Drake, R. Lee Etzwiler, Bob Grumman, Susan
Smith Nash, Charlotte Pressler, Larry Smith, John Stickney, Thomas
Willoch, & Ron Zack.
- ** Many thanx to all contributors. ***
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CHAPBOOKS:
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Etel Adnan: OF CITIES & WOMEN (LETTERS TO FAWWAZ)--Post-Apollo
Press, 35 Marie St., Sausalito CA, 94965. 114 pp., $11.00.
Fiction in the form of an epistolary novel that converges with
women's studies. A woman, Etel, writes letters to deal with the
agonies of loss and life during wartime. In it, the problems of
Arab women (and all women) are probed gently, fairly, but with
unflinching honesty. Adnan refuses to endorse reactionary stances
of tit-for-tat hate discourse. She remains level-headed and
articulate. In attempting to explain the motives behind war and
the overwhelming destruction of Beirut, Adnan makes insightful
observations on the relation of culture and gender roles.--ssn
Dennis Barone: WAVES OF ICE, WAVES OF RUMOR--Zasterle Press, Apdo
167 La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, SPAIN. 34 pp., $8.00. A
response/call to Desnos, Prvert, and the Great French
Song heart of the mind and eye, a sculptural lozenge of words
after Arp quiet as the silence after a rock fall resting
isn't inattentive, but creates a slope a flask to continue
with after everything has preceded.--daniel davidson
Michael Basinski: CNYTTAN--Meow Press, 334 Bryant #7, Buffalo NY,
14222. 16 pp. Purely textual, and literary, multi-interpretable
collages concerned with Artemis, snakes, something "good against
meancholik," modern zoology, fairy tale transformations, and other
items too numerous to mention--all of them, for me, flowing
implicitly or explicitly towards various kinds of re-births.
Along the way this masterful infra-verbal poem:
WIT
WAT
ICH
TCH
HER
which beautifully expresses a becoming so gradually full as to
be tactile.--bg
Batworth: BETTER COMING UP--Shattered Wig, 523 E. 38th St.,
Baltimore, MD, 21218. 28 pp., $2.00. Batworth knows how to
confuse, rip apart, reassemble, and leave the adrenaline still
running in your system even though the accident is a long time
over. You get the crashing metal of cars, with words like: "God
is lice-infested," "The sun does in fact/ shine out of his
asshole," and conclusions that scream: "Swinging like a fine
hearse/ squeeling like a flock of reeds." I don't know, maybe I
got some kind of disorder, but this high speed energetic swinging word-
play catches me off guard, and makes me want to hear more so
I can re-establish my equilibrium. When he screams "Soups for
creeps, soups for creeps..." in "Information Feeds On Me" I want
to sit down, stand up, touch my toes, count to ten, then pick up
this chap again. There is the schizophrenic wordplay, combined
with quick jerks to reality, and I want to stop that crazy fucker
on the street and say, yeah, I understand, but you got to make
more sense! You got to make more sense! These are either the words
of a madman, or a person so gone that the occasional glimpse into
reality is quickly lost and they don't even realize they were on
the right road for once. When Batworth tells me: "Everybody in
the real world was in what/ I would call a weird mood. People
trued/ patty-cake with feet. Others walked side/ ways for fun.
Still others thought ord-/inary life was tv but they didn't know/
how to live it. Some wrote books in what/ they thought was their
free time, but we/ know better than that." I get scared. He
knows more than I do about the things that scare me. He knows
something that I don't, and I don't feel comfortable letting a
madman have the advantage.--oberc
Guy Beining: 100 HAIKU SELECTED FROM A DECADE--O!!Zone, 1266
Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057. 24 pp., $6.50. Just the
full-color cover glossy of a Beining collage of astronaut, bird,
Ancient Greece and who knows what else makes this thin volume
worth its price; but the haiku, seldom at all eccentric, are very
fine, too. Examples: "A butcher senses/ the wisdom/ of bones";
and "Silence of window/ in chatter of/ snowfall".--bg
Gina Bergamino: ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE HE'S IN MY--The New Press,
53-35 Hollis Court Blvd., Flushing, NY, 11365. 24 pp., $3.00.
Gina is a poet's poet, and she crafts her poems not around the
survival instincts of poverty stricken writers, but rather around
the poetry itself. She is a crafts-person, and these poems
capture insightful touches that caress the words instead of
smashing them into your face. In "5 a.m. dream" we get lines
like: "the man/ with fat hands/ is breaking through/ the kitchen
door/ & I squoosh/ his fingers/ squeeze them/ dig my nails/ into
his" combined with: "my father calls/ a family meeting/he's
unhappy/ that I want/ to be a writer". She rips thoughts out of
the air, tosses them against other disjointed feelings, and leaves
one disturbed with the kind of nightmares only a lover can wake
you from. At the same time there is an innocence and observation
that captures those "little things" in a brand new light. In
"Unemployment Dream": "You're in the Sunvet mall/ with your
brother trying/ to decide on strange flavors/ of icecream..."
while "your father is buying lumber/ inside Rickles. Sweating,
he/ pushes dolly...", then: "when he sees you he is happy/ and his
eyes well up./ You want to give him/ ham & beans."--oberc
Lynne Beyer: THE FUTURE COMES--Pinched Nerves Press, 1610 Ave. P.
#6B, Brooklyn NY, 11229. 8 pp., $1.00? Five poems by a woman who
is described to the fore as "currently looking forward." Lots of
very intelligently dopey fun with words, as in "Stoop'" which ends
with "the action of activity,/ beast or burden, stoop to concur,
it becomes you." Lyrical at points, too, as in the description of
"yellow flowers,/ capable of full expansion,/ (that) absorbed the
sadness, their/ real origin," from "Krishnamurti's Journal."--bg
David Bromige: TINY COURTS IN A WORLD WITHOUT SCALE--Brick Books,
Box 38, Station B, London Ontario, CANADA, N6A 4V3. 60 pp.,
$9.95. These are poems of address and comment in the tradition of
Jonathan Williams, Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn.
Irony is marked form the start as operative exchange value:
"'Irony' i read/ but is said 'Money'."
What I especially value in Bromige's work is his ability to transform
the materials of everyday life into stunning reverse-image admonitions,
as in--
The referents' lair
for george Bowering
Carter was talking to the shah
about a country which had blossomed forth
under enlightened leadership
About then i found what i was looking for
The weather and the sports report
Attention to the details of how language gets figured is
everywhere evident. "Nothing happens that is not the mind/to us,
this side of Ouch."--tb
Lee Ann Brown: CRUSH--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., Buffalo NY,
14222. 20 pp., $2.00.
Crush is a way of knowing]
It is the only way of knowing
It is a good way of knowing.
It *is* a good way of knowing. This book is a fine and finished
dissertation on a lovely theme--the crush, love's exciting sweet
moment: "Wilderness in domesticity." Just so sexy discrete simple
sentences and questions posed in the neutered affirmative carry
the reader over 13 sections of a poem "with tenderness and
dancing." Enticing, brave, and familiar in its language--"She is
direct with a rhythm"--CRUSH is a gift.--jc
Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin: ON THE PUMICE OF MORONS--The
Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Great Barrington MA, 01230. 20 pp.,
$5.00. "A Rock Crystal, A Roach, A Tree of Heaven/ Hosiery to
spectroheliographs long since departed..." Continuing Fagin
and Coolidge's collaborative work this poem maps out a
personified landscape of habitat making up an inhabited
interconnectedness, the personalities of Taxis and Soho
breaking in like fetishes for a worn-down system keep your
shirt off your back if it bites you take this with you when
you go shopping.--dd
Tina Darragh: ADV. FANS--THE 1968 SERIES--Leave Books, 357 Ashland
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. 12 pp., $4.00. An Academic LANGUAGE-
type exercise introduced by brief texts on child abuse and
language. The body of the book consists of eight visually
manipulated entries from the Oxford English Dictionary, with
footnotes.--jmb
Daniel Davidson: PRODUCT--e.g. press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. Paul
MN, 55105. 44 pp., $6.00. PRODUCT is a prose format poem based
on notes taken at various shopping-centers and malls. It is a
work intricately concerned with the ways in which advertising and
marketing create an object-centered push-pull nexus of desire.
"Development centers on the table, the item that you see. You
come here to be what you want." The particular brilliance of the
book is in the manner in which it both critiques our possessions
and shows how we are possessed. "HAVE, A WAY of life." This is a
good book to read in conjunction with Harryette Mullen's
S*PeRM**K*T [see review in this issue], or anything by that French
theorist Jean Blowdryer. I recommend it.--tb
Kevin Davies: PAUSE BUTTON--Tsunami Editions, 1727 William St.,
Vancouver BC CANADA, V5L 2R5. 78 pp., $15.00. Hyper knowledge
from the cutting wit of INFORMATION herds of sentences and
fragments of the urban coast if you are what you read, then
you wrote this text what if you live here in another place so
that the view from there is here? chew on this: only you can
arm the homeless.--dd
Michael Estabrook: STRIPPED & SHIVERING--BGS Press, 1240 William
St., Racine WI, 53402. 20 pp., $3.00? These are a series of
poetic sketches (with drawings by Dan Nielsen) of various
characters Estabrook has been thrust against. When he talks about
"Joe Sold," we get a heavy drinking womanizer who's still going
strong at 70. "John" is "irascible/ rude/ married/ nearing 40
yet/ he got the most/ beautiful/ woman in/ the building". "A
Friend" admits that she is in AA, and is surprised when no one
seems to be shocked at the news. There is even a short poem about
"Patti", the author's wife, setting her angry frustrated
unemployed eyes on Estabrook after finding no good jobs in the
newspaper ads. These are fine thumbnail sketches that capture
people in short glimpses of reality. The saddest thing in this
collection was when I got to the end, and wanted to read more.
--oberc
A. C. Evans: CHIMERA OBSCURA--Phlebas Press, 2 The Stables, High
Park, Oxenholme, Cumbria, ENGLAND, LA9 7RE. $7.00. "Dark
hyacinth crystals/ flutter behind my eyes" A. C. Evans reports in
one poem from his new collection. This visionary quality is
manifest throughout CHIMERA OBSCURA, which is divided into three
parts: the first deals with the contemporary world of urban
England; the second with personal transformation and initiation;
the third with what Evans calls "The White Earth," a kind of
spiritual void or hereafter of light and emptiness. In poem after
poem, Evans merges the literary, the esoteric and a tad of science
fiction into a sensory apparatus for picking up hidden messages
from other worlds--worlds which may only be inside of us.--tw
Huck Finch: EASTER PROUDNESS--Hairy Labs, 5629 Granada Dr. #271,
Sarasota FL, 34231. 16 pp., SASE. A tiny chapbook of prose that
begins: "Manure the planet with a finger-smudge of swarming crusty
foxes", and boils through defecation, bad sex, and the like with
surrealistic verve and unshutteringly bold imagery.--bg
Edward Foster: THE SPACE BETWEEN HER BED AND CLOCK--Norton Coker
Press, PO Box 64053, San Francisco CA, 94164. 44 pp., $5.95. A
collection of short poems and poetic essays, bringing the personal
and the literary into conjunction in a deliberate and effective
way. Beginning with an essay, "Poetry Has Nothing To Do With
Politics" (the thesis being, I think, that poetry "precedes
intention, choice, and dialogue"), the book moves into poems set
in Turkey, Egypt, and Paris, transcriptions from the Spanish of
Lorca and the Armenian of Zahrad, sustained references to Rimbaud
and Mallarme, and the poetic territory set forth explicitly by
Duncan and Spicer. The poems unabashedly take part in history,
ringing with voices, but not neglecting the personal or the
present tense.--jc
Peter Ganick: CODE ZERO--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr.,
Norman OK, 73072. 21 pp., $4.00. Taking part in the tactics of
Language poetry, where words "mean" in all directions, like
ballbearings ricocheting in empty rooms (& what room is ever
"empty"?). CODE ZERO is a collection of short lyric poems--
"baffled by whom"--where the author's presence retreats behind
fragments of sentences adding up to nothing, and something. From
"Decision to Action":
reveals a motion as subjectless
improves a communications tenfold
honed in at a reason nearly active
CODE ZERO is discrete and funny, elusive as music on holiday.--jc
Michael Gottlieb: NEW YORK--The Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Great
Barrington MA, 01230. 93 pp., $10.00. "This is not your city./
You mean the Queen really is in the pay of the Tri-Lateral
Commission?" Made of two long poems, "The Great Pavement" and
"The Ulterior Parkways" fragments of a long bus ride through
the inside of an executive suite memoria producing an uneasy
acculturation canisters of metastasis never forgetting any
conversation slips of advertising slogans scraped from the
asphalt diary.--dd
Dennison W. Griffith & George Myers Jr.: JUMP HOPE--Cumberland,
7652 Sawmill Rd., Suite 194, Dublin OH, 43017. 38 pp., $10.00.
A slickly produced collaboration between painter Griffith and
journalist/writer Myers. Griffith's paintings, mostly faces with
occasional words, are reproduced in full color, and according to a
brief note, inspired Myers to "get at the story behind them".
That story is presented in the form of a woman's diary, which
touches on her daily life, her family, making art, and broader
issues such as gender roles and racism. The text does not attempt
to "explain" the paintings, nor vice-versa, but both retain an
intriguing ambiguity in themselves and in relation to each other.
An elegant collaboration--jmb
Jefferson Hansen: GODS TO THE ELBOWS--Leave Books, 357 Ashland
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. 10 pp. Repetition and incantation on
"mitigate" and "unmitigate" create a screen of sound in the heart
of this chapbook. Visual arrangements tempt the reader to read
out of sequence, and to form and re-form the text. Disjunctive
syntax suggests language's potential to transmute and transform.
--ssn
Martin A. Hibbert: CONCENTRATED GROUND--Stride Publications, 11
Sylvan Rd., Exeter, Devon, ENGLAND, EX4 6EW. #7. Combining
elements of anthropology, ritual, film, folklore, cut-up and
surrealism, Hibbert's poems are uniquely his own both in style and
concerns. He doesn't so much communicate with the reader as
create a linguistic-psychological structure into which the reader
is invited. In this space, a symbolic merging of time and person
takes place, although the poet and reader are "Miles apart/ in our
musty caves/ raising our private shadows." At a time when too
many poets speak only of small, personal matters, Hibbert produces
expansive, challenging poems.--tw
Jeffrey Hillard: RIVER DWELLERS--Cincinnati Writers' Project, Box
29920, Cincinnati, OH, 45229. 66 pp., $6.95. Subtitled "Poems on
the Settling of the Ohio River;" this set of thirteen poems takes
us back in time, before urban sprawl and industrial necessity
filled to crushing the Ohio Valley. Presented in chronological
order, from 1751 to 1862, and thick with lore and legend--there is
a richness of detail in these historically-centered free verse
poems. Of Marietta in 1788, Hilliard says: "The air has grown
rife with coal-fire aroma,/ roasting buffalo, venison, a pike five
feet long,/ enough of dinner to include the whole town."--rle
Susan Howe: THE NONCONFORMIST'S MEMORIAL--New Directions, 80 8th
Ave., New York NY, 10011. 192 pp., 19.95. "20.15 Jesus saith
unto her, Woman,/ why weepest thou? whom seekest/ thou?" Two
sections, "Turning" and "Conversion", reads meta-history and
micro-associations in a production of folds and followings
Melville never had a closer reader falling under the pages
echoes the entire impossibility of finality these cracks
create a present between histories.--dd
Albert Huffstickler: THE SMELL OF THINGS--Press of Circumstance,
312 E. 43rd St. #103, Austin TX, 78751. 14 pp., $3.00. The very
prolific Huffsticker has brought together this small collection of
poems on the theme of smells. He peels the skin off reality,
revealing something naked and elemental to each of us. These
poems reach inside the reader to fondle suppressed feelings,
relics of our prehistoric days, remnants of our animalistic
tendencies. For example, in "Beginning" he uses memories to point
out that "...bad odors/ are learned. She just smelled personal
when I drew/ my finger out. There's more. I learned her/ one item
at a time while she watched me..."
The book is full of olfactory wisdom: in "Retrieval," he writes
"...I think/ you could die from lack of/ smell..."; in "Lie
Detector," Huffstickler points out that "Truth has/ its own odor."
There is an entire poem about the smell of shit, and another that
mourns the smell covered up by air fresheners and deodorants. In
that poem, "Cover and Concealment: Anxiety in the New Age," the
speaker predicts a time when everyone will smell the same:
And when that day comes,
everyone will be so hungry for variety
That it will generate a whole new business:
bootleg smells, obtainable only
at your friendly Neighborhood Nose Dive.
The core of the philosophy expressed in these poems is stated
in a piece called "The Smell of Love:"
The eye is easily deluded.
Ears even more so.
Taste can be disguised.
Touch sometimes lies.
But the nose seeks truth always
and abides with it.
--ronald zack
Albert Huffstickler: TWILIGHT ON TRINITY--Lilliput Review, 207 S.
Millviale Ave., #3, Pittsburgh, PA, 15224. 8 pp., $1.00. One
long poem in a tiny booklet that captures the narrator's voice
speaking across the miles to and about his long-lost love--while
outside, it rains on Trinity Street, "that borderland between/ the
affluent and the/ fallen." Nice and moody and ending as "the
named and the nameless/ walk side by side/ in the slow fall."
Modest production of a personal poem with a subdued emotional
tone.--tw
Ge(of) Huth: O--dbqp press, 317 Princetown Rd., Schenectady NY,
12306,. SASE. G. Huth and I have long been friends & admirers.
Nonetheless, this... object befuddles me. It consists of a yarn-
bound booklet/envelope/? of light-green paper whose corners are
folded and secured in four different ways (e.g., one with a paper
clip). On the outside is printed a large "O" whose hole is
tilted. Fascinating, but... --bg
Geof Huth: ANALPHABET--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH,
44107. 28 pp., $10.00. A coffee-table-size handbound paperback
with thick light-brown pages and the handsomest of typography; a
fitting showcase for 26 charmingly elegant treatments of the
letters of the alphabet, one at a time in sequence, by G. Huth.
One page should give you the flavor: it contains two large W's,
one fashioned conventionally of two intertwined V's, the other of
two contiguous U's. The first is labeled "Double U," the second
"Double V."--bg
Lisa Jarnot: THE FALL OF ORPHEUS--Shuffaloff Books, 415 Norwood
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. This is Lisa Jarnot's first
chapbook, part of Suffaloff's Local Habitation Series (includes
Creeley, John Clarke, etc.). She is a young poet whose promise
has arrived. Her images and juxtapositioning of language merge
the mythical with the common. In epistolary form Lisa intercepts
poetry, reveals a journey marked by signposts recognizable to both
the senses and the spirit. The poems offer a desire seeking,
searching for poetry, which is parallel to her anchored poetic.
There is no conflict, no barrier. Poetry here is simply all the
fact. Her opening: "i'm not in jail anymore,/ i'm on a greyhound
to memphis."--mb
Norman Jope: IN THE ABSENCE OF A SUMMIT--Phlebas Press, 2 The
Stables, High Park, Oxenholme, Cumbria, ENGLAND, LA9 7RE. 64 pp.,
$7.00. Editor of the literary magazine MEMES, Norman Jope creates
brief texts which explore time and identity in a mystical, lyrical
language. In "Preparations for an Exit," a woman claims the night
piece by piece, until "by her quiet courage, the edge invades the
centre... and all things widen." Jope is a poet of the place
where the personal reaches beyond itself to those common terrains,
be they historical or metaphysical, we all share. His language is
a cross between the literary and the folkloric, expressing quiet
truths and observations calmly and with an assured ease.
Ultimately, the question of what remains behind after death, how
much of our words and thoughts continue in time, is at the heart
of these musings; "Something of me shall remain--but I shall not
choose its face."--tw
Andrew Joron: SCIENCE FICTION--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643,
Berkeley CA, 94709. 69 pp., $8.95. The poems in this well-
produced, perfect-bound volume achieve a remarkable synthesis of
visionary clarity and thoughtfulness that moves them far beyond
what is usually described as "speculative" poetry. Using topics
and themes from science and fantastic fiction, Joron creates a
highly visual surrealism made coherent in each poem by a
consistent point of view and/or developing process of
consciousness. His language is clean, allusive, and contains
nothing extraneous. Do not miss it:
Men banished from sleep
wander through the night-market
Qrummage among
Marvelous toys: aphrodisiac
Cures; a thigh-bone
Strung & tuned
To the frequency of a quasar
Little dolls with removeable parts
Packets of hair, & coinages
Of skin
(from "Voiceprints")--jmb
Dimitris Karageourgiou, ed.: GILDZEN AT 50: A CELEBRATION--Toucan
Press, 1129 Morris Rd., Kent OH, 44240. 188 pp., $10.00. A one-
man poetry conglomerate at Kent State University--where he serves
as poet, archivist, editor and critic--Alex Gildzen is here
honored on his fiftieth birthday with a tribute volume containing
a complete bibliography of his writings, of works about him, and
of his many letters. Also included are tributes from a number of
poets and writers, photographs of Gildzen, and examples of some of
his own works. A touching thank you to a man whose enthusiasm for
poetry shines through.--tw
Vampyre Mike Kassel: WILD KINGDOM--Zeitgeist Press, 500 Ygnacio
Valley Rd. Suite 225, Walnut Creek CA, 94596. 26 pp., $3.00. The
wildman is back again, with a new collection that tries to scar
your retinas when you're not looking. He captures the inner-city
madness in WILD KINGDOM, and leaves you sitting there breathless,
recovering from an act of random love that proved to be too
intense. He screams about "Yuppies whose wine cellars are worth
more/ than the gross national product of Africa,/ who can't drive
and talk on the phone at the same time/ and insist on doing both
at 60 miles an hour./ The secretaries who dream of marrying them/
and probably deserve to." He screams about "Bike messengers
burning in a never ending/ adrenalin crazed fit,/ filthy
hummingbirds moving/ fifty times as fast as the world around them/
in a never ending race to/ overtake a shrinking paycheck/ and an
expanding rent bill/ until they spontaneously combust and blow up/
on the hood of your car." And this is just the beginning, the
wildman keeps on going, pushing you further into his reality until
you are so overwhelmed all you can do is sit knowing if you ever
stand up again there's a possibility that you might die. I am
impressed by Kassell's work. He knows his turf, when he gets cut
up he doesn't care who he splatters the blood on--he splatters you
every time you leap into another line, and leaves you showing off
the psychological scars once you've completed another round. This
is what it is all about.--oberc
David C Kopaska-Merkel: A ROUND WHITE HOLE--dbqp press, 317
Princetown Rd., Schenectady NY, 12306. 16 pp., $2.00. Just 13
one-page poems by the editor of DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES with a nice
range of form and content. All not news but history too, like the
following haiku:
deep sky meadow
/the snout of broken dreams/
a moss-ridden brick
Also, an infra-verbal gem called "Phore," that on the surface is
just a list of seven words or phrases with spaces in them where
the syllable "phore" has been removed... but in the full thought
is an amazing deepening out of biology ("chromatophore" and
"spermatophore") to the investigation of anomalies ("phoretean" or
"Fortean," itself anomalous!) and beyond.--bg
T. L. Kryss: STRANGE ATTRACTIONS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr.
SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 28 pp., $5.00? These are soft, gentle
poems that capture nature and hard work in modern parables filled
with insight. The strange thing is these poems captured my
attention in the same way Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did the first
time I opened up a book of their ideas. They are quiet, subtle
observations, and while I often thrive on the masochistic
bombardment of hysteria, there are times I need to take a rest and
really try to understand what all the weirdness is all about.
This is good place to be when I am in that mood, and actually
believe that there are possible solutions to the madness that
surrounds me.--oberc
Anna Leonessa: JOURNAL ENTRIES, ACAPULCO '93--O!!Zone, 1266
Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057. 24 pp., $6.50. A stylish,
26-copy, never-to-be-reprinted collectors edition. Poems and
photographs complementing the relationship described in Laura
RyderUs Exchanging Gifts (reviewed elsewhere in this issue).
Strictly speaking, not out of the scene TRR is mostly about [what
"scene" is that?--ed.], but as a side-product of the magazine
O!!ZONE, worth a mention here, I think.--bg
Gerald Locklin / Mark Weber: OUTTAKES / CEREMONIES ABOARD THE
DRUNKEN BOAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM,
87108. 28 pp., $5.00? I don't think there is a poet worth his
grain of salt that doesn't know about Locklin. In this split-
format chap Locklin captures new turf, talking about the paranoia
he got while driving on the other side of the road on British
soil, catching a French woman breaking into the men's room because
she has to piss and the lines are shorter in that arena, and a
strange attack of anxiety cured by his daughter while his wife
doesn't really give a shit. These are the human touches that make
Locklin more than human, and every time I see or read about a new
collection of his work I want to know what he's been doing,
because he has a way of bringing me right there. Mark Weber, on
the other hand, has a different style of observation, and he
captures things from an angle that is every bit as powerful as
Locklin's, only with a meaner edge. When Weber screams: "do not
go gentle into that Brautigan night/ rage! rage! as if your penis
was on fire/ yelling at God the ultimate liar" I know just as
clearly, as I do when I read Locklin, what is going on in his
head. He has brilliant observations into talk show participants
and the people who manipulate them, KKK members who make
statements that leave one with no choice but to decide they are
fucking blinder than we all thought, and he lets us know, in the
midst of the confusion reality splashes in our faces, that he (and
I) love the comforts of drinking and letting this world just
happen as it is going to anyway. Gerald and Mark are both keen
observers of the world we have been tossed into, and both of them
let you know, point blank, what is going on in their heads. If
you want brutal honesty, words that hit the mark, and people who
know how to say the things that they have seen, this is a good
place to wrap your fingers.--oberc
Gerald Locklin / Mark Weber: THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FATHER /
THE DAYS OF WINE AND REMEGEL--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE,
Albuquerque NM, 87108. 26 pp., $5.00? Locklin captures a world
that many poets have yet to imagine. In this collection we watch
him go back to his hometown for the first time in 25 years for his
oldest son's wedding. Locklin captures the awkwardness of a
history once lived, a first wife and family awkwardness, and that
strange existential sadness you're left with when memories mix
with a changed world that no longer works with the way things once
were. Weber tells tales of desperation: looking for a job you
know you're going to hate, not going to college because school
didn't capture the knowledge he was looking for, and getting fired
again from a job where the boss was the kind of guy who'd
masturbate while making an obscene phone call. These folks know
the real world, but don't buy into the illusions that most people
need for their psychological survival. They drink, they survive,
they write and let you know what they're seeing happen all around
them. We talk about the edge, but they dance on the razor.--oberc
Stephen-Paul Martin: THE GOTHIC TWILIGHT--Asylum Arts, PO Box
6203, Santa Maria, CA, 93456. 92 pp., $8.95. Fiction is often a
series of distorting mirrors in which we see exaggerated versions
of ourselves, and thereby see ourselves in a fresh way. Stephen-
Paul Martin creates fictional mirrors which reveal self and
society. His narrative is minimal; his prose crackles;
progression from one scene to the next is nonlogical; and old
bourgeois bugaboos like consistent characters are courageously
dispensed with. And the funhouse mirrors of his fiction show
amusing, gruesome pictures which seem to be our own faces.--tw
Gustave Morin: INFORMATION: THE COMPLETE DOSSIER; DOG GRUEL CODEX
FILE; & ETC, :CONVERSATION PIECE--Stained Paper Archive, 1796
Byng Rd., Windsor Ontario CANADA, N8W 3C8. 6 pp. @, $1.00/set.
The DOSSIER is an absurdist list of characteristics(?) such as
teeth rot, "Sharpen dull hooks by dulling the hook on that which
is sharp," and "TBA." The CODEX FILE is a set of poems rendered
unreadable through overprinting, which makes Chinese characters of
their letters--and makes a jump after three poems in lower-case
letters to a poem in upper-case suddenly & extremely dramatic.
ETC. is a series of designs comprised of chunks of letters and
numerals in different kinds of typography--an example of what I
call "textual illumagery."--bg
Jack Moskovitz: VERMICELLI VIXEN--Aran Press, 1320 S. Third St.,
Louisville KY, 40208. 68 pp., $5.00. Well-wrought tale about a
sixty-year-old man's lugubrious adventures in the company of a
prostitute after a night at the local bar. In the process he
reels through the post-midnight of his past relationships with
women (and of his current dead-on-its-feet one with his
companion), as well as into quite comic scenes connected with his
having to re-bury one of the customers of his business which is
the selling & re-selling of a single cemetery plot. A literate,
surrealistically-energized and Winesburg-authentic novella.--bg
Harryette Mullen: S*PeRM**K*T--Singing Horse Press, PO Box 40034,
Philadelphia PA, 19106. 48 pp., $6.00. Attention shoppers! I
strongly recommend this book of poems for its acute sociology of
consumer culture and its warm jazzy sense of humour. S*PeRM**K*T
details the supermarket seen in its obscene reductive essence.
"So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant."
Commodities, like they say, are us. After reading S*PeRM**K*T you
will never look at a grocery aisle the same way twice. Ring on
Produce--tb
Claire Needell: NOT A BALANCING ACT--Burning Deck, 71 Elmgrove
Ave., Providence RI, 02906. 60 pp., $8.00. Poetry which requires
a certain amount of philosophical and linguistic foregrounding for
full appreciation. Of primary concern is the naming process: "A
car is a cave and a hotel is a cave... giving a name to an event
is a matter of pure inference." Also, there are wry observations
on the intractability of human behavior--Needell seems to suggest
that since language is flawed, and communication an illusion,
there are limits to the civilizing and taming force of it.--ssn
Kurt Nimmo: TIOGA PASS--Persona Non Grata, 46000 Geddes Rd. # 86,
Canton MI, 48188. 56 pp., $4.95. So far to the left it's right.
Nimmo's pseudo-nihilism and unreserved gonzo stance of delving
into the unique fractures of our society has produced a novella
full of fun, controversial characters, and wild rides splattered
with hidden meaning. The narrator, a cynical alcoholic named
Blake, travels across a terminal American landscape with three
friends from out of his past. If there is a search for meaning it
is lost in the volatile dialogue and anarchical overtones of the
main character. From Detroit to LA and back, Nimmo's Blake
explores our country's socially-strained and decadent wasteland, a
nation of spasms: "It's death. Our Manifest Destiny's death.
It's a primordial fear of nothingness." Drinking constantly and
criticizing everything imaginable, Blake takes on all comers, from
Arabs to vegetarians. In him, Nimmo has combined America's scaly
underbelly into a motif of bright awareness. "We learn absolutely
nothing from history. We believe lies, distrust truth. We hate
genius and celebrate mediocrity. We love our chains. We fear the
unknown and act in accordance. We're doomed, fucked and doomed."
--rle
Jena V: AMBLYOPIA--Avenue B, PO Box 542, Bolinas CA, 94924. 42
pp., $8.00. AMBLYOPIA is a serial poem in the form of twenty
meditations working the edges, the inbetween states and metastates
of object relations. Not unlike the vision problem the title is
taken from, perceptual distortions make strange the familiar in
the absence of apparent pathology. What emerges is a kind of
epistemology of alienation on the model of the human eye in which
"Each body represents a separate approach to purpose," and where
reader and writer both are found "Living in the device." This is
an eloquent and moving book of unusual intelligence.--tb
Nicole Panter: MERCURY RETROGRADE--PO Box 862, Venice CA, 90294,.
$6.00. If you saw the punk-rock documentary THE DECLINE OF
WESTERN CIVILIZATION, you saw Nicole Panter trying to manage THE
GERMS. THE GERMS were a popular band that had trouble getting
booked in local clubs because the band members were too fucked up
to play their instruments, and the singer often crawled around on
the floor, forgetting the words to the song he was trying to sing,
and simply mumbled stuporous alcoholic drug-infested guttural
sounds instead. Nicole has come a long way since then. In her
latest book of short stories, MERCURY RETROGRADE, she takes on the
innocence of two teen-aged girls moving to San Francisco. You
catch an honest insight to that innocent ignorance, and learn,
along with the girls, what it is like to grow up in an ugly city.
In another story (the best Nicole has written to date), she
examines the relationship between a young woman in her 30's with
an "older man." The brutal sexuality, manipulations, lies and
dishonesty are captured in a matter-of-fact writing style that
comes too close to the truth for comfort. The exploitive nature
of the man in the story, and the victimization of the woman,
leaves you with that ugly ice-cold alienation you get when a
relationship turns into a sack of shit.--oberc
Stephen Perkins (ed.):SUBSPACE INTERNATIONAL ZINE SHOW CATALOG--
Plagiarist Press, 1816 E. College St., Iowa City IA, 52245. 52
pp., $6.00. SUBSPACE is both an ongoing archive of micropress
zines, and an occasional gallery space that sponsored the
INTERNATIONAL ZINE SHOW last year--this publication is the catalog
from that exhibition. Geographically ranging from Belgium to
Uruguay; subject matter is even more far-flung--but with
particular emphasis on punk, anarchy, mail-artists, and
queerzines. Each entry includes description, address, and a
cover-shot of the zine in question (hundreds of them!); many also
include notes by the individual editors on their perception of
zines & the micropress underground. Some of these publications
may no longer be in business--nevertheless, this is a dense and
meticulous portrait of the scene at a particular moment in our
history, and an invaluable resource--lbd
John Perlman: TEL 28 LET--tel-Let, 1818 Phillips Place, Charlesto
n IL, 61920. 12 pp. A showcase of Perlman's gorgeous,
symmetrical, seamless work. Visual poetry is finely honed here,
and the form suggests the subject--a contemplation of the
relations between word and world. "A Prayer of St. Basil's"
skirts the margins of erasure, and touches on an individual's
horror of nothingness and extermination. If one cannot be
included in the picture, does one cease to exist? "Willis Ave.
Bridge" contains a similar poignancy, and a sense of mourning for
a self that is always on the edge of loss, or (tragically) self-
erasure.--ssn
Dan Raphael: THE BONES BEGIN TO SING--Twenty-Six Books, 6735 SE
78th, Portland OR, 97206. $7.00?. The title of this book of
poems is especially apt for its new more clearly discursive slant,
built on techniques and formal structures Raphael has been
developing for some years now. These are large poems, each one
filling an 8.5 x 11" page or more, dealing passionately but not
simplistically with such large questions as human survival or
"purpose", the evolution of consciousness, and social and cultural
decay or change, all couched in an intensely expressed surrealist
discourse glittering with the "ephemera" of daily life:
RI can see the music in the blood of the guy running down
the alley pushing a shopping cart with a tv inside it,
repeatedly looking over his shoulder at the miniature
cars which like a pack of dogs keep trying to jump & fly
into the low-lying clouds of meat teasing all below with
the threat or treat of carmine rain.S.. (from "Shopping Cart")
These poems, which include so much and range over such broad
territories, remain rigorously focused on particular themes or
qualities of consciousness. This partly explains why their
endings seem so convincing, and, although often formally trailing
off, provide an amazing sense of closure:
Rif only our bodies were aligned
not this inexorable clash into himalaya of unresolved momentum,
rolling over like dogsdogs inhaling each minute like meat,
each om-bark silkily draping the light at the end /
of the moon snaps open.S (from "Divercity")
No brief review can do justice to these important new poems.
Essential reading.--jmb
Werner Reichold: LAYERS OF CONTENT--AHA Books, Box 767, Guala CA,
95445. 128 pp., $9.00. Strong, fresh poems whose stanzas, in
general, approximate haiku. Sensualities both personal (e.g., "we
who have been two/ tongues inside one laughter/ close each other's
lips") and impersonal ("outgrowing angles/ the river swallows/
thistle seeds") that sometimes veer into surrealism, as when a
footprint is described as "sleepless," or the narrator speaks of
his name's "skin."--bg
Sherry Reniker: ATTICUS CHRONICLE--Burning Press, PO Box 585,
Lakewood OH, 44107. 8 pp., $1.00. An ingeniously folded small
booklet of five poems, which are delightfully playful and non-
discursive. Just the thing to tuck in your pocket:
Uniluxurious
late woo chiming misconstrue.
orchard foist blankety bulge
flawed amalgamate obligatory
parley parley parley
--jmb
Laura Ryder: EXCHANGING GIFTS--O!!Zoone, 1266 Fountain View Dr.,
Houston TX, 77057. 78 pp., $12.50. Nice mix of autobiographical
poetry and prose by Laura Ryder, & with photographs (mostly nudes)
that together appealingly evoke a quiet but sexually-charged
(mostly lesbian) Mediterranean summer in the life of a girl coming
of age.--bg
John Shirley: NEW NOIR--Black Ice Books, PO Box 241, Boulder CO,
80306. 190 pp., $7.00. Six crime genre stories from
writer/rock'n'roller John Shirley (who, among other projects,
wrote lyrics for the proto-heavy-metal band Blue Oyster C lt).
Shirley's stories are hallucinatory explorations of borderline
lives; their most extreme actions only just suffice to lay bare
the post-apocalyptic horrors lurking under the thin skin of
pseudo-normality. In other words, any Youth suffering Entrapment
in the Deep Suburbs ought to get off on this stuff. Examples--in
"Jodie and Annie On TV" the title characters, criminal lovers,
calculate their apparently random drive-by shootings with the
needs of TV news producers in mind. Film at 11! In "Sketter
Junkie," El Passo junkieman turns into female mosquito, sucks
blood off luscious female human in downstairs apartment, then
turns into giant female mosquito and fucks said luscious human
with his/her 30-inch proboscis... and dies in the end, of course.
And in "Just Like Suzie," the hapless middle-class degenerate
Perrick chokes his crack supplier and whore Suzie to death with
his dick while she's fellating him. Then he discovers her jaws
won't unclench... One friend of mine (a rock'n'roller himself and
an experienced fellatee) claims this last scenario is impossible.
I dunno. The writing's believable enough.--charlotte pressler
Eleni Sikelianos: TO SPEAK WHILE DREAMING--Selva Editions, 1701
Bluebell Ave., Boulder CO, 80302. 79 pp., $8.00. "The path i
talk about leads from the other side/ of jailed or crazy or
disable/ who scared me when they grimaced/ thru the chainlink/
there to spread out across & to dream/ while speaking."
This handsomely produced book presents the poet as sibyl--to
speak while dreaming--the words coming through her and settling on
the page still vibrating and with all the motion and music intact.
She writes deftly and sensually of love(s) moving across the
(American) landscape; the poems, with thoroughly modern rhythms,
linebreaks and enjambment, hint towards classical mythology--ripe
with Eros--and lay it over a foundation of the parting lot and the
Indian Reservation. The space she creates evokes a whole
tradition of poets including Anselm Hollo, Philip Whalen, Joanne
Kyger; a series of openform sonnets are in the lineage of Ted
Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Filled with both vision and music,
indebted to but not enslaved by Naropa poetics.--jc
Bucky Sinister: A FRIEND AND A KILLER--PO Box 170664, San
Francisco CA, 94117. 16 p., $3.00. This short chap carries a
vicious edge, and with lines like: "He's got a heart of gold/ and
his enemies have an extra asshole./ He's everything I want in a
friend/ and a killer besides./ He makes me laugh/ and makes others
bleed" you know you're on to something filled with violence and
wisdom gained from way too many gutters. "Living on Methadrine
Time" reminds me of my speed freak days, where time moves too
fast, there are too many things to do, and aging suddenly becomes
something you're incredibly aware of. In "Blood Virgin" we go
hunting with a boy and his father for the first time: "I shot her
once/ and she kicked/ painridden and desperate/ the second shot/
she heard but never felt/ kicked some more/ it was the first time/
for both of us/ the third shot and she lay still/waiting for me".
"The Jesus Virus" caught the desperation of trying to save others
when you're only trying to save yourself. This is a great
collection of poems, capturing a desperate dangerous world where
things go downhill in a hurry.--oberc
Laurel Speer: GRANT DRANK--PO Box 12220, Tucson AZ, 85732. 20
pp., $2.00. This collection of Speer's prose-poems is loaded with
allusions to famous people (Ulysses S. Grant, Flannery O'Conner,
Zero Mostel, Mahler, Picasso, Apollinaire, Hitler...). I'm not
sure I like being taken on a trip around some historically-induced
Disneyland, but overall it works, because the author has created
an aura of significance. There is pain: "...the grief of knowing
he's sold me so cheaply is immense." There is paradox: "It was a
laugh a minute/ it was bad." There is promise in these twenty
poems, as Laurel Speer travels, explores historical incidents,
with a clear voice, from within.--rle
Pete Spiro: 1-800 SUBWAYS--Lazur Press, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow
NY, 11554. 24 pp., $3.00. This is the "Grand Slam" edition,
Spiro having won a 1992 New York Grand Slam competition. Spiro
has power in his urban voice; he activates his characters with
Beat cadences: "...move the poets of another color/ the lip
blisters, the three quarter mister keep your change/ sister
hipster black poets..." He shakes the tree of poetry, he doesn't
dance around it, elusive is not his style. He is bold & blatant,
loud & quick, scary & real. He is "some sort of turbulent, flesh,
sensual, eating, drinking, and/ breeding/ son of Brooklyn." He
gives it to us straight & condemns those who don't--one of his
poems is titled "Poetry; A Broad Historical Review; or, Just Read
the Fucking Poem, Man." Read this one outloud.--rle
Surllama: PHILPHLEXLUDE--Hairy Labs, 5629 Granada Dr. #271,
Sarasota FL, 34231. 8 pp., SASE. Prose about a student returning
home from classes stoned, one way or another. The result is a
cracking dream-collage of current events, household events, math
homework, plain insanity, and so on. At one point, the first-
person protagonist starts swaying--the trees, squirrels,
birdbaths, wheelbarrows, plums, "and even the outhouses over by
the tennis courts" join him--"but wow! they sway so hard, they
fall over."--bg
Thomas Lowe Taylor: JFK: THE ADIRONDACK DIARY--Texture Press, 3760
Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. $4.00. Two sequences of poems
or stanzas, with each text accompanied by collaged images of J. F.
Kennedy and related assassination imagery. The first sequence
could be the voice of JFK speaking from the grave; it is a voice
shorn of connections and identities, yet also the voice in us that
connects all events and places: "Rocks are forming outside. They
are growing into flowers of lava and time." The second sequence
is called "The Chorus"--it includes the voices of Oswald, Ruby,
Sirhan, and others, also speaking from death, circling around the
themes of myth and history. The book concludes with an essay by
Taylor discussing the evolution of American culture and of the
need to put to rest certain obsessive symbols such as JFK, to
release them to the underworld--a process in which the poet must
take part (paradoxically, it would seem) by writing about them. A
highly thought-provoking and evocative book, a meditation on
culture and time.--jmb
Joseph Torra: DOMINO SESSIONS--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave.,
Buffalo NY, 14222. 8 pp., $2.00. No punctuation but a few
question marks among 14 small prose chunks where words collide
like dominoes and, like dominoes laid out acrostically and
accumulating patterns, visions appear from the text, images
accruing from the words whipping past us as we read.
Descriptions, meta-descriptions, narrative and not, of an
apartment building on fire, a flood, a mountain hike, a toxic
cloud, an unpeopled domestic twilight scene: things fairly
familiar rendered in a prose that excites the subject. "Floating
these currents rest seems hardly possible." In its unflagging
momentum this writing points beyond itself--as if each description
is a seed of a bigger picture: "unlinear whisper today tornado
tomorrow in remote altitudes from a stream-pool a goat drinks its
image flows ever toward the sea what effect its glare on global
tides?"--jc
Turman Art Gallery: IS POETRY VISUAL ART?--Indiana State
University, , Terre Haute IN, 47809. 56 pp. A beautifully
packaged catalog for an exhibition devoted to combinations of
visual and verbal art. It contains a few visual poems such as Kay
Rosen's rousingly dramatic "John Wilkes Booth," which consists of
the following, printed in red against a black background:
assass
inin
thethe
ater
Most of the other works reproduced are merely paintings that
include textual material, or texts that are visually heightened
only in the sense that Madison Ave. advertising texts are visually
heightened. But the catalog also includes a number of good essays
on its subject, and would make a worthwhile addition to the
library of anyone seriously interested in visual poetry and
related pursuits.--bg
Nico Vassilakis: ENOCH & ALOE--Last Generation Press, 2965 13th
St., Boulder CO, 80304. 22 pp., $3.50. This single long poem
provides the context for one of the things Vassilakis does best:
move around and through a topic and its multiple circumstantial
associations to create an interpretation of the world as a kind of
multi-layered swarming in which any particular theme or obsession
(here, "man/woman" and language or story/history) seem
increasingly small and of uncertain significance. A beautifully
written work that grows with repeated readings.--jmb
Mark Vinz: LATE NIGHT CALLS--New Rivers Press, 420 N. 5th St,
#910, Minneapolis MN, 55401. $8.95. Mark Vinz's prose poems are
brief, no-frill recountings of his everyday life, neither sordid
enough to be called confessional nor dramatized enough to be pure
fiction. He writes of the "blue stuff" used to clean toilets, the
joys of taking an afternoon nap, and the problem of running out of
gas in front of the state prison. Vinz's prose is direct and
simple, using few metaphors or allusions, and his first-person
narrator speaks in a comfortably ordinary voice. In these texts,
there seems to be no boundary between Vinze's life and art,
between the private man and the public persona.
Imagine that.--tw
Mark Waid: THREATS OF OPPOSITE--Sink Press, PO Box 590095, San
Francisco CA, 94159. 36 pp., $5.00. There is now a(nother)
revival of interest in the long poem, and here is a long poem that
works to resolve "threats of opposite" by playing them out on as
many different levels as possible: psychological,
cultural/historical, sexual, linguistic, and poetic. Waid's
loose, disjointed narrative, apparently random in its associations
("paratactic"), plays off tightly organized formal poetic
techniques--structure questioning itself. The Argument of the
Poem (as Milton might say): WIttgenstein's (& Lacan's) baby is
birthed into the world by doctors and nurses who snip off his
foreskin while initiating him into the culture's language games.
"Uncle" appears almost at once--Uncle Sam, perhaps, but maybe also
the initiatory mother's brother of matriarchal societies. The
narrator observes Uncle's dithering, records his odd jobs,
worries, and search for the "faster route to Medical Emergency."
"She" is there, too--as obliquely observed as Uncle. Finally
Uncle "leaps from the balcony" as She and the narrator unite in a
Nietzschean (if rather muted) "flight out of the sex-
distinguished."--charlotte pressler
Michael E. Waldecki: THE WIND ALWAYS SINGS SOPRANO--310 W. 7th
St., Lorain OH, 44052. 36 pp., $4.50. Never verbose, most often
relentless in his poetry jabs at the world's bulging absurdities,
Michael Waldecki is at his most political in this new book--a
revelation of the misuse of power and the consequent poverty of
the body and spirit created. Waldecki, like his patron saint
Russell Edson, is among the few Absurdists still writing today.
"But these things happen in cycles/ like foreign affairs/ with
passive resisters/ who pelt Iraqi cab drivers/ with stale donuts."
These poems are packed with awareness, often lightly encoded but
most often undeniable in its exaggerated declaration: "The
constipated Global Village/ is at the brink/ of disastrous
relief./ Down wind, you can almost/ smell the plutonium."
Waldecki continues his original poetry into a third decade of
publishing--a court jester with his eyes and heart still open.
--larry smith
Rosmarie Waldrop: LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE--Tender Buttons, 54 East
Manning St. #3, Providence RI, 02906. 81 pp., $7.00. These poems
are intimately voiced investigations of the terrain where
philosophy and poetry meet. I detest paraphrase. Here is a
collage of quotes arranged to suggest some of the book's
argumentative threads:
"... the four points of the compass are equal on the
lawn of the excluded middle where full maturity of
meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by
morsel, off the bone. Something that can be held in
the mouth, deeply like darkness by someone blind or
the empty space I place at the center of each poem
to allow penetration." (pg. 11)
"It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror,
but quite another to get your image out again and
have your errors pass for objectivity." (g. 13)
"Then I realized that the world was the part of my
body I could change by thinking and projected the
ratio of association to sensory cortex onto the
surface of the the globe, inside out as you might
turn a glove." (pg. 77)
"Every thought swelled to the softness of flesh
after a long bath, the lack of definition essential for
happiness, just as not knowing yourself guarantees
a life of long lukewarm days stretching beyond the
shadow of pure reason on the sidewalk." (pg. 47)
"There remains an ultimate gap, as between two people,
that not even a penis can bridge, a point at which
we lose sight of the erections crossing a horizon in
the mind. This is accompanied by a slight giddiness
as when we jump over our shadow..." (pg. 66)
LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE deserves a volume of responses and I
believe at some point it will receive them. It ranks with a
handful of other books (Michael Palmer's SUN, Lyn Hejinian's
THE CELL, Bruce Andrew's I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis' DRAFTS) as among the most important
writing of these last few years. This is one of the books to
take to that fabled desert island. Especially if you enjoy
the sensual vagaries of thought.--tb
Paul Weinman & afungusboy: MY MORNING FEET--afungusboy press,
16 E. Johnson St. #c, Philadelphia PA, 19144. 20 pp., 50".
Paul WeinmanUs poetry has become more surreal and dislocated of
late and combines very well here with afungusboyUs collages. The
images are strong, unforgettable, and humorous in both forms. For
instance, two combs juxtaposed on advertisements, and a lone
extracted molar are boxed apart by crude lines with an old hat on
top of the whole, the letters RmS and RoS hover above and below
the tooth. On the page facing it we read, RThe mirror made
parchesi / as I looked for my baby teeth./ TThe Good Fairy will
shove it up her woowoo.US Joyous and painful simultaneously, MY
MORNING FEET is one of those small otherstream masterpieces that
make that trip to your mailbox worthwhile.--jb
A sequence of eight poems by Weinman each paired with a
collage/graphic illustration by afungusboy. These concise, neat
poems are among Weinman's best, and combine an expressionistic
surrealism with the grit of daily life. They have to do with
sexuality, childhood, and gardening, and are perfectly balanced by
afungusboy's mix of blurred fragments and specific clear images.
--jmb
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