I'm not the Bukowski School's biggest fan, so I probably did make some mildly negative comment to Surllama about Robert Howington's poetry (that Surllama relayed to Howington according to a comment of Surllama's in this issue of Silent But Deadly). Anyway, I found it interesting that Howington responded by lashing out at me, albeit comically, rather than doing what I think he should have: asking me why it was that I didn't like his poetry. I would now ask him why he doesn't like my stuff--except that he should be indicating that elsewhere in this issue. I loved his calling me "too smart," and agree that I probably DO over- indulge in "analytical mumbo gumbo," but there's no other way to go for those of us with a philosophical as well as a visceral interest in poetry. The more ways you can know poetry, and life, the better.

Now to this issue's selection of poems, starting with "evening," which is by Gabriel Monteleone Neruda, as he calls himself:

             Child of our world's midnight,
             i could see the floor strewn
             with a cruel blood, and, beyond windows
             those icicles groped the trees
             in solemn gesture

             On this bitter human floor, a mother
             hugged a child close to a patient dug.
             Was it miraculous wonder
             the child was unaware it was a sad year?
             Icicles were swooning
             as the air thawed

             The child understood that every answer
             must be carved upon the lips,
             as it drew

             Child of an earthly midnight,
             you may never understand
             when the mind is wrought intimately
             by a god you do not know
             and must not find.
             Gods who prowl the inner cosmos
             are subtle, and beyond reproach.

Strong poem but I keep seeing those damned over-sized Keene- child-eyes staring out of it at me. "Cruel blood" seems a little excessive, and the blood's being "strewn" feels wrong to me. The image of answers' being carved on lips didn't make sense to me--I can't picture it, so would rather have some other verb: "burned into the lips?" "stabbed through the lips?" I dunno. The wind-up also bothered me. Either I didn't get it or it means that God or the gods are indifferent to Suffering, a trite observation. Moreover, whatever the end means, it turns the piece into a message-poem, which diminishes it as the surrealistic mood-piece I think it is best as.

Bennett's poem might be his nuttiest one yet but, yow, if it has any defects, its "It's's" makes up for them!

"A Red Spot," by Tom "Tearaway" Schulte, is pretty good sensationalism but none of its images is far enough off the beaten track to zap me--and buildings-as-hydras don't go well with buildings-as-vultures. I also feel that the spread of blood should mean more than it seems to here. The poem gives us dread by itself rather than dread and, say, its political cause, or its psychopathological cause (in its beholder or instigator). I feel both muddled and pretentious here, but find it hard to drop the subject because, as a poetry publisher, I seem to be getting a lot of submissions like "A Red Spot" (though not as well-written), and I've been trying for quite a while to figure out why I have reservations about them. I guess it reduces to my belief that people-centered situations with a horror-component are more interesting (and explorable) than horror-centered situations with a people-component. Macbeth is superior to Titus Andronicus.

Sometimes Schulte over-writes, I might add. For instance: "in an epileptic, dangerous fashion" is superfluous. This next comment is extremely minor, but who knows, maybe it'll be useful: I didn't like the use of "This" at the beginning of the poem. It seems like a conversational "this," as in "this guy comes up to me," so doesn't fit the decorum of the poem, which isn't conversational, but reportorial.

             A Red Spot

             This city is sticking
             antennaed tenement heads
             of its hydra body
             above the seething asphalt morass
             that threatens to overtake it

             The dirty, sickly, little bulbs sit
             awed in front of the staring windows
             eyeing rusting carcasses
             bulking up their shadows
             with open trunks and gaping maws
             they crowd in closer
             on the unmoving iron hulks<

             Screaming
             lurid and alien lights
             cast glaring and snguine
             on the strange, slow dance
             its a truck with a red cross

             seeming lost and frenzied
             in an epileptic, dangerous fashion
             it cauterwauls into a telephone pole

             Thick blood comes in a
             neverending stream
             from the vehicles innards
             a dazed pilot of the wreck
             stumbles out and falls
             in the goo

             the light summer mist
             meets the rising, hot steam
             everything seems slick and red

             Ghouls come out of the night
             in a crude arc
             they cluster together
             at the edge of the light
             pointing and gawking
             mouths open wide, hungry

             somebody tried to push
             the big red spot
             toward a drain
             clogged with damp newspaper
             and leaves
             but it keeps growing

             it just mixes
             with run off rain and city sweat and grime
             and keeps growing
             and I can just feel it everywhere.

Now at last to my own poems, which I'm eager to analyze. (I'm not with those who believe their poems come from some mystical abode whose name is too sacred to utter.) I call them "mathemaku," combining "mathematics" with "haiku," and try to shape them at least slightly like conventional haiku. I expect a number of baffled responses. A little surly contempt won't surprise me, either. I hope, however, that those who consider the poems worthless will say why. (One person who skimmed a booklet of my mathemaku told a friend of mine the booklet had been a waste of paper: in other words, that he couldn't get anything out of it made in universally valueless.

The poems are difficult, not because all that brilliant or complex, but because full understanding of them requires some background in mathematics. Thus, at best they will be a minority taste. I hope at least some people will like them, though.

I use math for several reasons: yes, to be different; but also to set up a scientific/abstract ambience to use against/with the sensual/ intuition-based tone that the poems' being part-haiku should convey; and to compress, compress, compress, since some mathematical symbols can take the place of a load of words. (See Central Park no. 23 for a longer apologia of mine on behalf of mathematical poetry.)

I hope an aesthcipient will look through the math of "Mathemaku No. 6a" to find a simple haiku-flavored evocation of boyhood, then consider the math (which is not that advanced). The key to the mathematical meaning of the poem is the formula on the right, which is from high school solid geometry and defines the volume of a sphere. Hence, the terms on the left are here said to equal a sphere whose radius is the quantity, "boyhood." (This suggests that boyhood by itself is two-dimensional--until expanded by some other matter such as what's on the left in the equation.)

Basically, the left consists of the quantity, "dawn," multiplied by the sum of the quantities, "knapsacks," "raft" and "island." Or: the sun is rising and boys with knapsacks are going off on a raft-voyage to an island. Multiplications, the beginning of a day, the beginning of an adventure, the beginning of lives . . . But there's one extra, the portion of "island" that projects from the parenthesis. This I consider my one brilliant effect in the poem. It's supposed visually/conceptually to support Browning's famous idea that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?" by representing the ungraspable, beyond mathematics, dreamed- toward goal that is a part of every fully realized boyhood.

The outside portion of "island" comes back in "Mathemaku No. 6b" to represent the essence of spring, the season of Potential. I won't say more about this poem except to point out that in mathematics, upright lines like those on the left in the equation indicate that the quantity within them has an absolute value--i.e., is positive. So even if "April" or "breathing" has a negative value, the product of the two here must be positive.

In the last poem in the set, the mathematically-contained portion of "island" is meant to suggest things about winter, as does its being raised to the power of the reciprocal (or mathematical opposite) of "Persephone," the goddess of spring. More I will not say, though there is appreciably more (I hope) that could be said.

Sorry, I can't leave without returning to Bennett's "Bare Rocks"-- even though it's obvious he wrote it for one reason only: to destroy my reputation as a critic by confronting me with something even my mumbo gumbo can't reach. There are a few intelligent things I can say about it, however. One is that his second and third strophes are variations on his first--and the "inter-titles" suggest making a ladder (to awareness?) out of a log--with a saw. A log as journal as ladder is there, too.

             BARE ROCKS

             BEND

             Thinking without a thought I spittle chin laid claim
             tumbled in the scarification reflux aspiration lungs
             of fired, clay ran lips the eter chewing, risking
             without a doubt the tripled thin chain trembled,
             wrists, bars, rust stimulation rungs of wire, was...
             stay and, shit, the either drooling, sinking without...

                                                                                          LADDER

             SAW

             Played cumulation, forest seekers words in trees like
             feathered coffins slanting itch of seething hair or
             stitch resumption: bare rock in the clearing whines.
             It's's window resumption, pillowed 'n cried in the
             bleary socks air absorbtion rich feeting banking often,
             weathered and green. His turd leakers rest elation raged

                                                                                                       LOG

             A LOG

             Thinking without a cumulation I spittled the words in trees
             like stumbled in the scarification itch of steaming
             hair or lungs bare rocks in the clearing chewed,
             risking's window consumption. The grinning chain cried
             in's bleary socks' rust stimulation; rich fleeting
             stays 'n shits, his sneakers' best sinking's staged...

                                                                                     A LADDER

Heh heh: the loon misspelled "absorption." Speaking of spelling, the way various words change shape throughout the work--e.g., "feeting" to "fleeting," "tumbled" to "stumbled," "ether" to "either"- -makes even unchanged words shifty: I keep reading "sinking's" as "stinking's," for example. The refusal of the words and phrases quickly to "make sense" causes such near-doubles, if any, to come into much greater prominence than they would if the texts sped into a narrowing narrative. Hence, while I puzzle over "window consumption," for instance, "window's resumption" has time to materialize--as does even the nearby "whine," which allows "wine's consumption," which seems appropriate. A highly interesting property of this kind of disjunctive theme&variation poem, this presentation of images that become double- and triple-exposures, is the way extra exposures issuing from the poem itself rather than, more conventionally, from the aesthcipient's background, though from that, too. That is, connotations and associations are all part of the poem as in all good poems, but some are concretely there, which increases their potency.

My main attempt at a fore-burden takes off from "risking's window consumption" in the third strophe. This I take to mean "consumption by, rather than of, "risking's window," or the opening into experience that risking permits. The consumption could refer to the protagonist, his words, the itch and/or lungs (which suggest tb), the trees or even the "bare rocks," Bennett's grammatical warp making all these and more fruitfully possible. I favor its referring to the trees here. The protagonist, is "thinking without cumulation" or keeping up with his experience rather than trying to define it; and his words are forming viscerally, not cerebrally, in the form of spittle. He deposits words in trees that are (sort of) stumbled onto ground scarred (or scratched bare) by the itch of "steaming hair" (hot because of hectic cerebral activity?). Or the trees are in lungs (close to feeling's center) that "bare rocks" are chewing "in the clearing." Risking has allowed the protagonist access to the trees.

I've taken up enough space, and would need thirty pages or more to do the poem justice, so will just list three others of my discoveries about the poem, then conclude: (1) the change of the "bare rock" of strophe #2 to individuated rocks in the next strophe; (2) the change of strophe #1's "rust stimulation" to "rest elation" in strophe #2 and back to "rust stimulation in the final strophe; and (3) the absence of a mentioned window in the first strophe followed by a "window resumption" in the next strophe that becomes in the last strophe a window consumption." Meanings--prime meanings--will coalesce and glitter to life out of the poem if one immerses himself in it long enough.