It's good to have Silent But Deadly to rant and babble into again. I hope I can do better in this installment--which is on the tenth issue of Silent But Deadly, incidentally--than I've been doing recently--due, I think, to weariness. The poems up for review aren't very inspiring, though. I can think of just about nothing to say about the following specimen of "Frank's Depression Poetry," for instance:

          200 Years Ago

          200 years ago
          If you were a beautiful Indian with large breasts
          visiting my tepee,
          I would politely nod "Hello"
          and remove a small burlap bag containing crack cocaine
          from beneath a black rug.
          200 years ago
          if you were to smile
          and place crack onto a hollow chicken bone
          I would stare at a bow and arrow
          next to my filthy feet,
          pretending not to notice
          your eyes watering, face changing colors,
          nude body stiff and tense
          struggling to maintain the smoke in your lungs.
          200 years ago
          if you were to hold my hand
          and whisper you're going to reincarnate until
          you invent a telephone
          and shit on the moon.
          I would have believed the crack you inhaled
          shot, stabbed and torched your soul.

          The modern world now has telephones
          and humans have managed to squat on the moon
          leaving a trail of used toilet paper.

          It's strange
          we don't know one another
          and yet
          I sense we shared crack in a tepee
          200 years ago.

It is a technique-free dopey daydream about what would have happened if the you of the poem were a "beautiful Indian with large breasts/ visiting" the narrator's teepee. Who/What the person addressed really is, is nowhere indicated to the slightest degree, but the narrator senses that he "shared crack in a teepee/ 200 years ago" with her. Why does he think that? Who knows. And I'm not at all in sympathy with the stock sarcasm the poem makes against the exploration of the moon.

Becky Bayer's "pile of ants" is a little better, I guess, for it includes two highly visual similes. Those similes are conventional, however, and about a conventional subject, a colony of ants; and the poem does nothing technically interesting.

          Pile of Ants

          Like a mile-long thread
          Strung tight with shining black beads
          That yanks and pulls internal
          From a hundred directions at once
          To coil itself into an
          Impossible knot,

          Or like an orgy
          Of mutated poppy seeds
          That grope and write in rhythm
          From under and under and under
          To glide close and soft and strong
          Into orgasm,

          The ant pile
          Is alive.

"Reflections on the Way to Work," by J. Ferguson, is also a plaintext poem of no technical interest, but it is competent, and mildly appeals to me. I found it a little hard to believe the narrator of the poem could have seen the ballgame reflected in the wheezer of the poem's eyes, however--and I would have preferred that "In his eyes,/" had been dropped, and "On tiny blue fields" changed to "On the tiny blue fields of his eyes," or something similar, to keep the "blue fields" from feeling redundant. I think I'd change "Was played out twice" to "Was being played out twice," too. I thought the final image of the narrator's face moving across the wheezer's windows a nice one.

          Reflections on the Way to Work

          All belly and bloodvessel

          He wheezed about his car.

          His tie, a short string

          His pants, a belted barrel.

          In his eyes,

          A ball game in the park

          Was played out twice

          On tiny blue fields.

          As I passed

          My face

          Moved across his windows.

Harlan Lyman is much more adventurous than the preceding three poets in his "Head of Nags," a speciman of what I call jump-cut poetry, and others call "parataxis":

          To curve into compactness.
          Memories more precious material.
          Gullible as circling awareness.
          In what gurgles distance.
          Veer with stable center leg.
          Into do mine own.
          More as more inexpansive.
          Half-footed steps drag implants.
          In blue as white trance the arms.
          As shear as pounding wind.
          To tend a path away to life.
          In who to is it right.
          Buy emotions that care.
          Shingles shield the shut up.
          I have contracted so I have lacked it.
          Unpack the particular lending.

This text could also be called poetry of the non sequitur. The passages of such poetry have no obvious logical linkage to each other; their abrupt discontinuity, in fact, is their hallmark. In "Head of Nags" each line is self-contained, with no easily-apparent connection with any of the other lines in the poem. Not only that, but the lines are often quite "xenogrammatical" and nutty by themselves. What, for instance, can "In who to is it right." or "Into do my own." mean? For such a poem to work, it must, in my view, eventually suggest some kind of unified mood, as in the poems of John M. Bennett. This one somewhat does, perhaps will do so more in time, for me. Clearly, it concerns someone's sense of incapacity, incompleteness, lack of direction (as with "Half- footed steps drag implants"). The persona is narrowing, has "contracted," his life become "More and more inexpansive." He needs "a path away to life." The idea of "buy(ing) emotions that care" beautifully expresses the narrator's need for emotional involvement coupled with an oppression by commerce/materialism/ technology that makes him consider emotions a buyable commodity of some sort. That several of the lines begin with "in," and one begins with "Shingles," helps unify the mood of the piece in an auditory/verbal fashion. Its sensually strong words, like "gurgles" and "blue," "white," and occasional vivid images, like the one about the "Half-footed steps," keep it colorful enough to stay with even when it starts to seem too hermetic. I like this poem.

I also like the visual poem below by Bay Kelley, though I haven't entirely figured it out. It just looks whizzy and interesting. I'm intrigued by the o in the top portion of the poem, and wonder about its possible relation to "loophole" (which looks wonderfully alien smudged, and spelled as "looph ole"). The pistol is exciting. Was it responsible for the holes? Something colorful has happened, but I'm either too slow, or wasn't supplied with enough pertinent details, to know enough about what it might have been to consider this poem a full success.

That does it for my critiques this time. Now a question for C. Mulrooney, though I thought I wouldn't bother with him anymore, and in any case am sure he won't bother to answer me: what does he mean when he says in his letter of 12 July 1995 that he finds Richard Kostelanetz "anthologized in The Explicator, and a confirmed idiot, Bob Grumman's da." Yes, I know that one of Richard's poems was discussed in an issue of The Explicator, but what's my "da" and was it, or I, in The Explicator? And am I the confirmed idiot or Richard? Speaking of Mulrooney, I found his and Heather Lowe's "finger sandwiches" intriguing, but couldn't make any real sense of it. I rather suspect that the two (or is it just one) are having fun at the expense of us dysfunctional experimental poets, but I think the technique of the poem (not new) has many possibilities.

Kostelanetz's list of dominant-mode poetry-making motives is a high spot of SbutD #9--but, as I've already written him, I think the last, sincere line of the poem too abruptly opposed to what precedes it to work satisfactorily.

I was surprised that so many of the last issue's reviewers failed to recognize the Eel Leonard poem as a JOKE: drivel that isn't drivel because it's the output of the hilariously damaged mind that is the true subject of the poem.

No more to say.