The first issue of Silent But Deadly was published sometime in 1993 when the editor, Kevin Kelly aka Surllama aka Stuart Longfellow was a sprat of 20 or 21. His first editorial thanks me for giving him the idea for the magazine (Kevin, who has lived from time to time, and now lives, in Port Charlotte where I do) being the one otherstream poet I've actually had a day-to-day relationship with). Hence, I can't be said to be too neutral about its value. The magazine was set up to be a sort of printed workshop. One issue was to circulate poems for critique, the next readers' critiques. Few but actual participants got issues. The first went to only 11 people, pre-picked by Kevin--basically people whose poems he'd decided to send around for discussion, and poets he personally knew: Me, Huck Finch, Lou Hertz, Ficus strangulensis, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Li Min Hua, Jim DeWitt, Kevin's father, Feh! A Journal of Odious Poetry, and Paul Weinman. Poems critiqued: "It Remains a Mystery," by Patrick McKinnon; "Yaw-Touches to the Trigger," by Jim DeWitt; and "Cranial Pain," by John M. Bennett.

It was basically thrown-together, with a comic editorial and a comic letter to Bob Grumman by the editor, and a few comments and responses from people Kevin had tried to get to participate in the project. Interesting short visceral response by Huck Finch to the Bennett poem; good short responses to all three poems by Bennett, and a ditsy but sometimes abruptly insightful riff on the poems by editor Stuart (concerned almost entirely with content as opposed to technique); I wrote LOTS more than anyone else, some of it pretty brilliant:

"'It Remains a Mystery,' by Patrick McKinnon, is a specimen of what I have taken to calling 'jump-cut' poetry, from the movie- making process of abruptly jumping from one scene to a second that has no quickly-apparent relation to the first. This keeps an aesthcipient on his toes as well as inserts suspense-building obstacles to a narrative's finding its conclusion. More important, it can produce implicit metaphors (in the same manner that the best collages do). In the case of McKinnon's poem, the spasmic back- and-forth between 9-year-old Jimmy's violent encounter with a tractor and his mother's violent disposal of her wife-beating husband makes the two events metaphors for each other--and with David's archetypally definitive underdog triumph that the poem alludes to toward its end. Here's the poem:

                   how jimmy feenan ever got
                   that tractor started 
                   but me and linsay pratt 
                   are witness to that he did
                   terrorized rabbits ate jimmys
                   eyes and their screams came                   
                   out of his mouth too
                   like just before being decapitated
                   by an owl at half moon
                   the tractor moving unreined
                   because jimmy was only
                   nine years old swimming
                   in placenta and elbowing
                   his moms bladder and rib cage
                   kind of shrugged
                   its huge dragon yellow
                   shoulders and feeling
                   the same freedom jimmy
                   and lindsay and me had been
                   feeling headed across
                   the treeless expanse of progress 
                   bounding jimmy playfully
                   rough as a gentle but clumsy
                   giant along the way
                   me and lindsay tripping alongside          
                   this new kind of pony ride
                   yelling into the heavy
                   tractor roar jump jimmy
                   jump you stupid idiot
                   but jimmy still half boy
                   clung to the seat side
                   the way his mother coddled
                   a butcher knife one night
                   waiting for old man feenan
                   to take the last swing
                   he'd ever take at any feenan
                   in his life jump
                   you stupid idiot
                   that tractor completely
                   out of control veins bursting
                   as the creek soon to be aqueduct
                   sucked it toward her
                   with the sweet promise of sleep
                   and sleep and sleep
                   until jimmy finally all rabbit 
                   lunged limbs chaotic as
                   each of the 27 deep gashes
                   that butcher knife tore
                   thru old man feenans chest
                   till all that was left
                   of his heart was ground
                   beef and tomato paste landed
                   on a tree stump
                   for a gash of his own
                   just as the tractor fell
                   goliath mighty in a mangling
                   of water dirt and bone
                   me and lindasy raping
                   the silence with god
                   jimmy that was great
                   god that was great

"Surrealistic touches (by which I mean the juxtapositioning of incongruous images) figure nicely in the poem, first by making it seem insane, as all the wildest excitements are, second by--again--giving birth to implicit metaphors. Thus, the passage, 'terrorized rabbits ate jimmys/ eyes and their scream came/ out of his mouth too,' is an insane jumble of what happened but probably almost exactly descriptive of how it seemed to the narrator and 'lindsay pratt' (whose being named in full neatly adds to the authentic feel of the report). No doubt rabbits were present, and stared with terror at jimmy, 'devouring' his eyes; and they and he screamed the same scream--out of the same small vulnerability.

"One last parallel the poem quietly draws is between nature and man, with nature (consisting of a 'treeless expanse of progress' and a "creek soon to be aqueduct) as one more loser to its smaller foe. Thus is the over-all triumph depicted given a sinister twist-- in support of the poem's title. All victories are finally problematic."

I next discussed the following poem by Jim DeWitt, "YAW-TOUCHES TO THAT TRIGGER":

                  you know I'm de

                  ad-set against horseplay

                  but I will care

                  ess her shoulder bones till s

                  he whinnies, and squ

                  eeze her waist till she swishes
                
                  her tail...but I'd rat

                  her rub where the

                  rib bone co                   

                  nnects to the hip bone

                  and sure as some cowboy sorce

                  rer said, snakes'll

                  slither out of her jock

                  ey shorts and qui

                  ckly the cons

                  trictor will become by favorite
                     

"This adds a little element of puzzle-solving to the poem, and prevents the reader from zipping through it too quickly. Much more important, it makes the reader's mental process act as a metaphor for the physical process being described--for, that is, the hands' the narrator is fantasizing over the woman's body first in one direction, and for one apparent aim, then abruptly oppositely. Deviousness. Also total coverage of said body. The reader's mind's movements as it watches the narrator carry out his program (in his imagination) parallel the narrator's physical ones, so the reader enjoys them in two parts of his mind not usually working together, which I take to be the principal purpose of poetry.

"Occasionally DeWitt's intra-syllabic line-breaks have an addi- tional effect that is extremely valuable: they suggest extra words that can contrast or expand the words actually printed. For instance, when 'care' becomes 'caress' to suggest tenderness, or when 'rat' and 'her' combine to the innocuous 'rather' after having pointed up one appropriate characterization of the narrator (as superficial, inconsiderate womanizer). Note, too, the nice onomatopoeia of the s's that begin and end the fifth line, and fore-shadow the snakes to come--but also say more about the caressing being discussed.

"The snakes that come out 'of her jock/ ey shorts' are a touch hard for me to take, though, because they too strongly suggest penises, which don't fit the text--for me, at least. The vagina as the constrictor that will become the narrator's favorite works fine for me, but what part of the female body can we connect the snakes to? Pubic hair seems strained.

"Of course, all this is happening in the narrator's imagination, so we can simply assume that he's a bit fucked-up. I guess I just want him to be fucked-up more the way I am, so would want the snakes coming out of the man's shorts, not hers."

I reached my peak on a poem by John M. Bennett, "CRANIAL PAIN":

     'S headache-thumbnail right through's eye rushes 
     (hunches like a blowing nose through's kleenex) tatters    
     leaving's facement throbbing like's "big picture"
     throttles him, trying to breathe through a gagging 
     pills (like's pineal layer trembles and's legs-round's-
     neck's drawn up, tight in a limpid caterwauling limped
     against the skullwall (where's longed hand presses
     sight through's tooth-hung jaw).  Where in's bed's
     spate o' fart(ing's part of's final squeezy vision (like
     the state's dumb thinking in a swarm's sunk, er, parsing
     steam in a misty cloud like (burnt (glass (or a crowd
     with the skin learnt off.  Ah's stiff in's gain... 

"The situation is advanced surrealistically with the sounds rather than the meanings of words often suggesting further words, the strain of trying to reduce everything to words keeping ration- ality from dominance. The result, in my latest terminology, is a compound electrojunctive poem--electrojunctive because it sizzles most tellingly due to the meeting of incongruous images; compound because its junctures result from both surrealistic mismatching and the overthrow of accepted syntax.

"What's in it for a reader? A masterful evocation of an aching head? Yes, that, but more important, a maximal evocation of physical suffering which works a carthesis like tragedy is said to do in drama. But most important for me is the poem's meta- phorical brilliance: just the idea of a headache narrowed to a thumbnail--that blasts out through an eye from behind like a nose blasting through a snot-shredded kleenex--puts me outside the horror of the headache (at the same time that I'm inside it) and into the countering joy of the verbo- visual aptness of the description. Art compensates for, cleans away, or "understands," the pain of the reality that is its subject.

"And what about the idea of 'a crowd/ with the skin learnt off?!!' Yow! 'learnt' rhymes into arbitrary being from 'burnt'--but then finds an aptness, as a metaphor for 'abraded,' that only the greatest poetry achieves, and involves us simultaneously in the idealized unphysical search for truth, and the inexorable physical grinding off of the surfaces of things--or has the crowd learned its own body down to subdermal sensitivities? And where does the state come into all this, stupid in an acrid burnt- glass), misty swarm . . ? Are we witnessing its headache? And demise? The headache is iron-sure; all else is the scatter of madly contradictory but right images and ideas off that ultimately unifying central, aching fact. In short: another major lyric by Bennett."

Nine issues of Silent But Deadly have appeared since the first. My adventures in it will be continued.