Mr. C. Mulrooney is slowly becoming almost as interesting for me to write about in Silent But Deadly as the discussion-poems. His misunderstood-genius anguish, and general cantankerousness are always fun to react to. And he represents to perfection the Beyond-Mere-Reason Type that's so common in poetry, and so problematical, and therefore fascinating, to me. In SbutD #7 Mulrooney ventures ever-so-slightly out of innuendo to actually state some ideas rather than just spout off. He says that reviewing has to do mainly with "precise analysis," which has to do with "the workings of the language in use, and what the poem SAYS . . . as opposed . . . to one's opinion (or) incomprehension of it. Cock a leg upon a tree if you will, but don't call a Douglas fir a beech, or blame it for your hopping-mad taxonomical strangury." He doesn't mention me here, but-- hypersensitive to references to taxonomy as I am--I take the last bit of his statement personally. In any event, I use taxonomy simply to try to name kinds of poems, and poetic devices, to make discussion easier. Those finding it flawed should point out what is wrong with it rather than just call it "hopping-mad." I might add that while what a poem does is far more important to me than what it says, I try my best as a reviewer to pin down what it says. If I call a fir a beech, tell me why it isn't a beech, don't just tell me I'm a lousy botanist. Furthermore, don't assume that if you created the tree, you must necessarily know what kind of tree it is.

Whatever Mr. Mulrooney's failings, I was pleased that in this past issue he has also finally favored us with genuine attempts to critique--even though he's more concerned with carrying out vendettas, being witty, and proving himself a man of cultural depth than in dealing with the poems at hand. I don't know what he means by implying that I, Bennett, "early Murphy" and others, are "morally unreadable," except that he is, as his poetry demonstrates, more concerned with setting people than words right. I do understand what he means when he describes the same three poets' output as "turgid."

Isn't it interesting how we Silent but Deadly's are dividing into factions, by the way? Witness the alliance of Heat her Low with Mr. Mulrooney--which at first surprised me, then didn't. Why won't she tell me what a graphaid haiku is, by the way? Is she verbally challenged, like Lional Hampton and the others to whom anti-intellectual bullshit such as "if you have to ask what it is, you'll never get it," have been attributed?

I enjoyed Editor Surllama's letter to Catlin. As for our editor's belief that I am wrong to call SButD otherstream, I would like to know how else to describe a publication with John B. Denson on its staff. Aside from that, I consider any publication to be otherstream that at least sometimes contains or significantly deals with (i.e., doesn't just call attention to) material beyond the ken of the establishment, as SbutD does.

Okay, okay, I'll start my critiques. First there's "road myways" by fellow Floridian Abby Susik:

   road
   i want to be a road
   i want to ride the wind of neverend and be a road and bend
   'round life's swerves curves lips and dips
   i want to rid with a glide that will never ever die
   ...sigh...
   high is what i am when my mind probes the land, the sand, the
   ever lasting band, the grandest of the grand
   curling and swirling through life and strife cutting like a
   knife through the deep... to seep in, steep in, leap in the grass
   of the rolling hill waves saves and delays my heart from the
   days when my ways were dead end, deafened, to the beat the drum
   the mum, for some the call to come and be a road
   a destination, an inspiration, a perspiration on the forehead
   of time, a deviation from the normality of rhyme, an ivitation
   to the life of the sublime
   Oh the paths i would follow the miles i would swallow my heights
   would never fall... oh... to flow with the slow and low grow
   of tempo, i know
   roads like veins strain and dreain deeper to the thumping refrain
   all lead and bleed intwined like vines into the core the heart
   the start of it all, yes, both the womb and the tomb of us, the
   nest and the placeof final rest--where life's juices are pressed
   to make only the best of wines--lines wind with blindness closer
   to the mindless days... when the highways are myways and ride
   on for always
   Oh holy road, my feet are meant to meet your gravel so unravel
   unravel road... for i have to let free and set free and get free
   to be a
   road

Abby provides fierce competition for Denson in the rhyme department. She should watch such stock expressions as "never ever die." She flirts with schlock, but the poem is so skippingly artless, I don't think it's a problem. Many locutions are awkward because of the premium put on rhyming, but this also seems no problem to me. My main criticism is that the poem's protagonist desires most of the time to be a road, but then speaks of following paths--roads don't (generally) follow paths, they @*1are@*0 paths. "road myways" is no major poem, but it's good breezy fun, like most of Denson's poems.

I don't know the Magritte painting Bill Kaul's poem apparently is describing. I think I'd appreciate his text more if I did. As it is, I find it mildly interesting surrealistically, I like its sounds, and I get a sort of Isherwood ambience out of it. I'd like a few more details. If I knew why, or approximately why, we should all be in Berlin, for instance, I'd consider it a big plus. I'm all for mood poems, but want the moods to have contexts.

         Yelebeny, Magritte 1930

         Ussur, the keeper of the feathers, hallmarker
         & dervish is at the bistro tonight. The weasel
         man is on the wet shiny curb shouting! the only
         ones who listen are vapors bent on the edges
         like women who need money.
         We loathe Berlin but find it alone will eat
         our unlikely mania porridge. We should all
         still be there.

Simon Perchik's "183" alternately grabs and loses me. It somewhat reminds me of one of John M. Bennett's poems--its oddities seem unforced genuine attempts to capture an experience, so though I have trouble with the poem, I want to stay with it. Clearly, knots and where they carry the speaker are at its center:

         Knots stay put and travelers
         have their favorites, listen for the squeaks
         --I hang my coat and the table

         can't move, tied by a great cloth
         as if it couldn't hear this bread
         shaped like a girl jumping rope
         whose braids are all I remember :the knot

         still trying --it takes a knife
         to creak and keep coming
         --I stare at the window left open

         undo the laces
         and my shoes suddenly warm
         stopped calling for home.

I love the stream of consciousness flow from "tied-down" table to the knots that some remembered girl's braids are to the unknotting of shoes at the end that mean the speaker is home (I take it)--in the kind of knotted serenity that a place to stay would be for a traveler. The knots suggest all sorts of appropriate ideas & feelings. But why the squeaks? And why the change of tense to "stopped" in the last line, when "stop" seems called for. The knife puzzles me, too. Is it a cord-cutter, an enemy of knots? The passage about the bread seemed strained to me at first but on rereading, I find the bread works as a something reminding the speaker of the braided girl so loudly that he thinks the table should be able to hear it. He's not thinking straight, of course, but flowing in weary-wayfarer logic. Thus I find the idea of the table's wanting to move but not being able to because "tied down" by the tablecloth effective, however irrational. Good poem but (I think) I'd prefer it a little clearer.

I wish E. Fleischmann had gotten his itses right but found his trio bouncy fun:

         An Ocean Poem and a Mother Poem and aNother Poem

         a.
         An enormous anemone covers
         the globe,
         its blue-green brain breathing deep into space,
         its zillion tendrils flapping lightly
         We walk through its
         fringe upside-down as it
         seeps through the air
         and to us, its name is love,
         on the land, lay by lay
         we come unexpectedly to the shore.

         b.
         Elastic Fleischmann
         could have been my name.
         Expanding Scorpio Fleischmann the Younger,
         Ena Fruits Gone Human Isotope Reep-a-too Fleischmann the Third.
         It wouldn't have mattered.
         If you stretch it, it'll fray. It won't fray.
         Oh, mama, mama, your
         semi-precious baby is
         stoned again.

         c.
         this object
         that is now
         "being read"

         symbolizes
         the words you
         hear me speak.

         My throat analogs
         your ears,

         my visions,
         your eyes.

         idea is action
         we are people

         (Footnote to the final line of poem "b": Mahalo, Donna Butterworth.)

I don't like the anemone's brain's breathing--I think I would have just had "its blue-green breathing deep into space." I don't know what "lay by lay" means here. It makes me think of a sailboat approaching land, but here people already on land are coming "lay by lay" to some shore. A striking image concludes the poem but I'd like it prepared for. In general, I think the poem could be developed more. "b." captures being stoned quite well, it seems to me. Not a deep poem, but enjoyable, and it works well with the more seriously lyrical poem preceding it, and the intellectualized discourse ("c") that follows it, whose ending vividly flashes the pure mechanics of human communication into flesh.

Of the poems up for discussion this time, my favorite is Surllama's "saucervix":

       Magnificent siren filling wearily bled exit
       sneered failure shrunk across infinitely itself
       gesture screaming,
       diagnosing raw house sounds, fissures of fidgeting pageants in
       cosmos tent, antenna glistening, crotches absorbing pulluted plane crash gum-
       chewing yellow sob filthy fat cigarette fingers blistered kissed outskirts. The bone
       pone grammurmur. Two hydrants hopping in spiked heels; self crushed to
       strengthen the edit.

       Rebounding black desire inkling through half-eaten irritation shards of shadow-
       fuckers; blood cowboy triggered by the insect squeezings withheld like plague
       blubbering phone calls bleating electric pissages, fecages, fly-infestages. Boxes of
       rage strained. Mysterious oozing moans like a memorandum. Vulgar mewling
       shirtless prostrate biscuit craving temper tantrum. That hideous rapture of
       biographers sagging hellos to the obsolete watered down shrubbery. Smelly
       suffocation the desert's asphalt midair in its throat,
       husks of of burnt-out lottery whale worm patients in visions of oafish condominium,
       rain forest saleswomen scraping in the thirdhand flesh of chrysler,
       half-tinted soldiers excruciating in orbit of pickled skyscrapers,
       vacant amidst the flotsam of the annihilated rising sun;
       its breathers' womb stuffings public domain.

It's my favorite because it swells into the most adventures of language, and provides the grandest range of imagery. Bennett/Berry/Cummings. There's a risk in piling on the anti- Rapture (i.e., all the oozings, fuckings, fecages, blisters, etc.) the way the romantics piled on prettinesses. For me the best poet at balancing blotch and blaze is still Roethke; Surllama might do well to study him. It also bothers me that there is nothing straight in the poem, its clarity/madness ratio is too skewed in favor of madness for me.

Otherwise and mostly the poem strongly appeals to me. The first strophe sets up an arrestingly tawdry urban sexual-desolation scene. One glimpses details of it but nothing coheres, finally (nor should it since the poem is about confusion). I love the image of the "wearily bled exit"--a way out someone is painfully, damagedly, but only "wearily" making. Then the alarm/temptress filling the exit--blocking it? Or acting as a lure to it? The "failure shrunk across infinitely itself" (which is where I hear Cummings) is beautifully paradoxical, a shrinking into infinity. From the dandily infra-verbal title I suspect the "cosmos tent" of being a vagina, and such events as the "plane crash" and "fidgeting pageants" to be coital. "The bone pond grammurmur" seems wonderfully post- coital to me. It speaks of something profoundly peaceful; pond- absorbent; quietly basic to life as grammar is to language; but foundational, too, as bone is. The crushed self at the end of the strophe makes me think the failure at the beginning has something to do with the dying or obliteration that the sex act is.

But the second strophe doesn't follow from what I've said of the first, unless the sexual act of the first leads to repulsion, to sexual horror. That reading could work, I suppose, but I'm tempermentally opposed to it. I dunno. Lots of parts bewilder me, like what the edit referred to in strophe one is, and in what way the "plague blubbering phone calls" in strophe two can be said to be withheld. But the parallel in color that "Rebounding black desire" makes with "Magnificent siren," (ambulance and police sirens having to do with death and therefore black) exemplifies what is right beyond narrative smoothness in this poem. I don't think I have more than an inkling of what's here, but have enough to know this is a poem worth further enterings.