There have so far been twelve issues of Silent But Deadly, one of them not yet finished. To avoid reviewing anything new and thus taking a chance of straining my brain, I've been rerunning my responses to the poems up for review in each of this magazine's issues. Here's my seventh. Just five to go!

C. Mulrooney's "Bob Grumman Teaching his Grandmother to Suck Eggs" isn't among the official "Poems on Review" for this issue but I felt morally obligated to respond to it since my name is in its title.

I think the poem works pretty well as a metaphor equating my literary criticism to the output of an obviously unhinged and simple-minded but unflappable word-processor. In any case, it gave me a laugh. It did little, on the other hand, to cure me of my insanity; only philosophically responsible arguments against my positions could do that. Speaking of which, I was delighted that John Denson has reversed himself about my mathematical poetry sequence and now believes it sucks more than the poem by John M. Bennett's that was up for review in the same issue.

I should add that I was intrigued by Mulrooney's Wm. the Butler Yeats poem (which I'd seen before). It's by far the best poem of his that I've come across. I take it as a picture of a kite made out of Yeats by a math-based or very abstract critic. It is full of canceled g's and about to soar (the g's representing gravity); but Yeats is only a mundane butler, so the kite will not soar far--only a foolish critic could have thought it would. Fragments of Yeats float under the kite. If Mulrooney knew what he was doing, he could have made a good poem out of this, but he's just trying to show how dumb visual poetry is without knowing anything about it.

One last observation before going to work on the poems on review: I thought the four "kernular poems," as I call the smallest-sized poems, that Pete Lee shared with us in his self-critique a lot of fun, particularly the disemvoweled "nvntfl."

Of the four poems officially up for discussion, I liked Albert Huffstickler's "Appropriate Response" least. First off, it doesn't do anything as poetry. Second, while it's too bad that its protagonist caught AIDS and gave it to his wife, I don't find comparing him to Orestes and Oedipus, and screaming about his plight all that appropriate: lots of people get prematurely canceled, which is sad-- but it's also life. If "a heightened response" IS appropriate, the poem must tell us more about the protagonist to indicate why.

         Appropriate Response

         There's something fiercely
         Old Testament about it:
         He wasn't a bad person but
         he fooled around on her
         one time, caught AIDS,
         gave it to her and now
         they're shut away together, dying.
         Old Testament? No,
         it's Orestes pursued by the
         Furies or it's Oedipus fleeing
         his fate only to find himself
         led to the very spot where
         his destiny waited and,
         in his agony, tearing the
         very eyes from his skull.
         Such a scenario demands
         a heightened response. It's
         not enough to weep or curse.
         You want to make sweeping
         gestures, cry "Horror! Horror!"
         grope your way blindly off-stage,
         one arm across your face, the
         other extended before you,
         hand clawing empty air
         as you exit screaming.

Alan Catlin's 14-liner suggests a haphazardly-rhyming sonnet with its final line chopped off, but otherwise I can't find much in it. It might be a parody of what its author takes to be purposely obscure computer-generated nonsense verse, or it might be an ambitious experimental poem--in code. Whatever it is, it's beyond me.

Sheila Murphy's "They Didn't Cook" is an eloquent description of over-fastidious, deeply repressed people who go through life but don't use it--that is, they use it spotlessly, which they can only do by not touching it. Their existence blurs by, unpunctuated, and--in particular--un-played, unswung-at. What makes the poem, of course, is not its message, but the splash and variety of its images, like the "uncreviced possibility" that a carefully made bed is, which is implicitly compared with the creviced and otherwise unkempt reality that the best beds, and lives, can be.

         They Didn't Cook

         They didn't cook they liked their kitchens
         Spotless but were lazy so the spoons
         Retained their shine the shelflife
         Of the spices tested rules there was no chance
         That they would rustle up some chili or presume
         To offer pate to the guest who climed onto
         Their metaphoric sofa often

         They didn't go to bed they liked crisp
         Sheets intact the way a prelude to smart sex
         Within a movie showed bed linen taut
         As sailors' uniforms
         Even if they liked play
         Coupling would not happen
         They admired the made bed often they did not
         Make it remained uncreviced possibility
         Cream blue tauper a sort of window

         They never lived they worked at what they did not feel
         And they lamented all the sunsets lost the freen fees
         Never paid the days untasted they neglected to redeem
         Themselves from hurting severally they counted themselves
         Missing they imagined small containers they might own
         Of life they gradually evolved into
         A shelter from the truth no empty
         All the scrolls with ritual uncite they admired those
         Living elemental moments lifted into share drafts
         Of eternity each instant each slow pitch
         Soft finger melded into cognizance

"Tara Correia, You Have a Phone Call, Line 4," by Kurt Eisenlohr, is another strong poem--because of diction like the description of the eyes that "frog open" and the comic "Test subject #nothing." Its evocation of a (prison?) hospital, probably a nuthouse, from the point of view of its medically-interfered-with inmates-as- frogs/insects/ fetuses who are submerged in who knows exactly what kind of altered reality comes across vividly. Exactly what was going on when #nothing shrieked about his lost hands and feet escaped me, though, and who are the disemboweled apes?

         Tara Correia, You Have a Phone Call, Line 4

         Disembodied voice falling sexless from a sealing sky
         Fishboys stickball the wetdream, beds going up
         in masturbatory flame--a Catholic hell
         Blue light of television
         Shadows ghosting the longwall:

         A ward full of eyes frog open as Test Subject
         nothing shrieks a cut- throat, informing the doctors
         that his hands and feet have disappeared:

         Raucous applause from the research pool
         Champagne corks rocket the sterile air
         Interns writing nurses on tile:

         A 1000 Whitecoats rush in to clap the backs
         of disemboweled apes--
              Wait till we off his dick! Now that
              will be something to write home about!

         Sunday morning in stir
         Nurses moving up the porcelain hall
         Clack of heel, click of tongue

         Women in white dropped strange from the sky
         wielding needles and diamond-sharp smiles:

         We swallow the pills and rub our legs together
         in insect time:

         Images suck over the undersea faces

         Voice over

         Flicker of blue.

A Postscript: after I wrote the above, it occurred to me that I wanted to lay into Heather Lowe for her Hollywood Condescension toward Richard Kostelanetz's stack of one-word fissional poems (and fissional poetry as a whole, which--however unnoticed by knownstreamers--is slowly becoming a leading kind of infra-verbal poetry). Nothing against Heather (and I didn't realize she lives in Malibu when I wrote the above), but I have a lot against Hollywood Condescension, which I define as belittlement of an artwork by finding something minor in it that, on the surface, has "already been done." Thus a Hollywood type (living in NY) belittled a play of mine about a man who changes into a chicken by pointing out that Kafka had already used the transformation idea-- stupid because so had Shakespeare, Ovid and zillions of others; because I used my transformation much differently than Kafka had; and because there was much more to my play than a man's changing into a chicken.

Similarly, when Heather shrugs off Kostelanetz's poems because she "remembers Vladimir Nabokov saying what's the ASS in PASSION and the JEST in MAJESTY," she assumes that Nabokov exhausted the possibilities of this kind of wordplay (which I call disconcealment), which is absurd. For one thing, Nabokov tells us about his disconcealment whereas Kostelanetz -shows us his, to make it as superior to Nabokov's as a metaphor is to a simile. Secondly, Kostelanetz presents his fissional creations as one-word poems rather than burying them in prose paragraphs, to further make them art rather than conversation. Finally, Kostelanetz makes every letter of a word he operates on in poems like "TheRapist" count, instead of just three, which puts what he does leagues beyond what Nabokov does in sophistication. Conclusion: Ms. Lowe is guilty of Hollywood Condescension and should be more careful in the future.