According to my notes, I sent the first six of the following micro-reviews, from sometime in 1995, to Luigi-Bob Drake for Taproot Reviews and he didn't have room in the issue they were for to use them. Hence, as far as I know, they've never been published. Since I still haven't gotten around to reviewing anything new for this series, here they are--plus a few other reviews, to fill out the column.

Poetic Briefs (No. 16, June/July 1994), 31 Parkwood St., #3, Albany NY 12208. 16 pp., $10/6 issues. A forum on feminist poetics whose first piece starts by quoting Rachel Blau DuPlessis's, "A poetics gives permission to continue." Since for me a poetics is entirely outside "permission," a poetics being no more (or less) to the poems that are its subject than poetry is to the weathers and landscapes that are its subject, the epigraph put me into my rejection mode, and I stayed there to the end of the issue. My main impression: the subject of the issue is much more the poetics of being a verbally-creative female than my masculinely-linear notion of what a poetics is, but I learned from, and enjoyed the varied outlooks presented.

Shit Diary (#11, May 1994), Anatomy Floaters, USF #3182, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa FL 33620-3182. 16 pp., $1. A back-and-forth between Surllama and me (Bob Grumman) about my visual poetry taxonomy. Should help anyone interested in such esoterica. Better, it includes some nice samples of visual poems and related artworks from world literature.

John M. Bennett & Serge Segay: Flaccid--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH 43214. 16 pp., $2. "Made in Zaumland." Remarkably fruitful clash of two masters burstnorm poetry from opposite parts of the globe, Segay being from Russia. To each panel Bennett contributes words, scrawligraphy, rubberstamped decorative edges, Segay "texts" in charactery part hieroglyphic, part cryptographic (some of it resembling Morse code), part electronic coding, part cave drawing. The sequence as a whole is clearly "designed," with all the contrasts and rephrasings of music and other varieties of the architecturally-expressive present. Jokey but technically-exciting and rich, too.

O!!Zone : (#13, September 1994), 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX 77057. 56 pp., $4. Texts and illumagery from all over, including New Zealand, Australia, France and Thailand. Great collage on the cover by Glenn Russell of a bicyclist Muybridging through a human brain as though through a hologram. Mostly what I've taken to calling plaintext poetry but also some burstnorm material such as Michael Basinski's "Shell Nodosus," which begins, "except for its more slender spire and less/ pronounced nodulos sculpture their fingers/ twist into claws . . ."

Zyzzyva (Vol. X, No. 3, Fall 1994), 41 Sutter St., Suite 1400, San Francisco CA 94104. 160 pp., $9. A very slick smallpress (as opposed to micro-press) magazine (as opposed to zine) with a 15-person board of directors and lots of ads and grants. But I forgive it because (1) Editor Howard Junker says, "One of my greatest pleasures as 'editor' of a 'literary' magazine is the chance to spend so much time curating," and (2) this issue features four selections from Karl Kempton's Om Suite which, although (gorgeous) visual poems, take the "intra-structural" use of the language as far as any purely language poems I'm familiar with. (Note from February 1999: "intra-structural" seems to be a fore-runner of my term, "infra-verbal," by which I mean anything in a poem that makes aesthetically-expressive use of letters, number, punctuation marks and other verbal elements smaller than words).

Bill Keith and Pierre Garnier: Viva Africa!--Writers Forum, 89a Petherton Rd., London N5 2QT. 64 pp., $10. A "ssssssssssonic" snake formed of the letters of its name that slithers through a field of s's, and other visual poems by Bill Keith mixed with conceptual illumages by Pierre Garnier that often restate nearby poems of Keith's, and always continue the book's celebration of Africa as Eden/ heart/hearth/art-source (often with drawings of the map of Africa). This book expresses all the whir & magic of verbo- visual creativity at its best. A must for all who appreciate pluraesthetic art.

CompoundEye--(#12, June 1996), 52 Park St., #3, Somerville MA 02143. 12 pp., $7/6 issues. 100-Word Reviews of collections of and books about langpo and related poetries, 22 of them. They are not what you'd call very critically incisive, with hardly a half dozen samples of their poets' work. But it's nice to hear from Gerald Burns about Ralph Maud's extremely thorough study of Charles Olson's reading, and from Editor Ange Mlinko about a 1963 Black Sparrow book by Jackson MacLow called 22 Light Poems. And get various other writers' impressions of people like William Bronk, Ron Silliman, Hannah Weiner and several other lesser known figures.

Transmog (#20, June 1996), Ficus strangulensis, Rt 6 Box 138, Charleston WV 25311. 27 pp., cost: SASE. Overwhelming onslaught of otherstream visual, textual and verbo-visual matter from 72 contributors. To get some small idea of its range, one need just turn to page seven's "AhaeTtullaFfa/ ssscrolatAAA" from Michael Basinski's "A" versus "My shirts have changed places./ I wonder why they don't disturb my pants," from Anthony Herles's "The Skeletons." Or, on page 21, Sparrow's "Today I crossed the street/ to see a dog bark" versus a collage by J. Lehmus in one half of which a photograph of an ornate tombstone mismarries a cut-out fragment of text, "ot the corn/ led and in b/ a hidden/ sleep/ seen it? h/ one light."