I'm going to start with my own poem, "Poem's California Career," because for some reason I feel more at home in it than I do in the others up for critique:

            For hours
            a telephone's unlocatable ringing
            kept the beach and the parasols
            flapping through
            the eyesight the ocean
            had been for so long
            struggling to become.

Note: a few weeks before I put this essay online an anthology of material from Lost & Found Times came out that contained a version of this poem; in it, the eyesight belonged to some cats who had left it behind--as I recall . . . I like this version much better; what is interesting, though, is that the previous version is now the official version, having been published in a formal anthology.) In any case, the poem is part of a sequence now numbering a few dozen that is concerned with a persona I've named "Poem." He/it acts more or less simultaneously as a human and a thing--and is derived mainly from Yeats's Crazy Jane and Hughes's "Crow," particularly the latter, who is simultaneously human and bird--and elemental mythic essence. All this is irrelevant, though, because this poem has nothing to do, really, with Poem. I put him in the title because the poem's scene is similar to others he's been part of, and because I wanted to be able to publish this poem in my chap, Of Poem, which consists only of poems featuring Poem.

In the poem proper, the words "California," "beach," "parasols" and " "ocean" set the scene, with the "telephone's unlocatable ringing" providing its surrealistic tone of indistinct frustration. It's quiet but the flapping that's going on suggests a wind of sorts. The poem's key word, of course, is "eyesight." It's intended to speak not just of sight or vision but of consciousness: the ocean is struggling not just to see but to become fully alive. Since the beach and parasols are located in this consciousness the ocean's struggling to become, the ocean is clearly trying to rise and become one with the sky. All of which is crazy but, I hope, gives a sense of the ocean's tumbling ashore over and over, driven by some inner, transcendent urge.

"Poem's California Career" came to me as images, with the idea of eyesight-as-a-place occurring to me because I (like a lot of other poets) do a lot with the concept of consciousness's or some emotion's being a place. I threw in the unlocatability of the phone's ringing after thinking of and liking the idea of an unanswered ringing phone. Logically, the phone, not its ringing, ought to be what's unlocatable but I like the slight wrongness of the way I have it. Otherwise, the poem is constructed to sound nice and evoke a California beach.

          Diction Counts

          She counted them easily
          seventeen snails to let loose.
          Every single one of those slimey
          those slick-shelled beasts
          were placed on my heavy chest
          my sweat- drenched skin.
          To crawl in their mucous manner.
          I watched her bend to do it.
          I watched her breasts roll outward.
          I accepted those molluscular
          crustaceons . . . looked for the stockmarket
          reports in their electronic march.
          My mother appeared
          she wore a bikini again . . . genuflected
          recited a 3rd grade spelling test.

Paul Weinman's "Diction Counts" is, like my poem, surrealistic, or dream-veined. It seems located at the beach, too. Because I am a haiku man, my first thought about the 17 snails was that they're syllables--this prompted by the title, which has to do with diction and counting. The girl in the poem could be reciting a haiku that the persona finds acceptable mainly because of his sexual interest in her, it would seem, since he is more intent on the girl's bending than on her recitation (which consists of putting the snails on his chest). I'm not sure why the persona looks "for stockmarket reports in (the crustaceans') electronic march," or why their march is "electronic." Maybe he is not really concerned with the snails (or possible poem) but idly musing far afield. Or maybe he finds the poem mechanical, abstract. His mind certainly drifts away, the girl reminding him of his mother, whom he sees as sexually provocative (or so the bikini suggests to me)--and absurd. It's hard to say much about a poem like this. It put me in the dream it's about, and the locale seemed vivid. The sexual thrill of the breasts worked well for me because of the contrast of the snails with them. I guess it's a case of a scene's working, or coming richly to life, or not in poems like this, and all I can say is that I think it does here.

The Kensward Elmslie piece is prose, in my view, since it seems to lack lineation and any other kind of flow-break, flow-breaks (generally but not always line-breaks) being in my poetics what identify a verbal text as a poem. But it's a fun piece, or passage (I think it's from a longer work):

        Lummox flux: gland malfunction. Lummox flux is operative
        phrase, squashed in between "Local Advertising and "Bon-
        anza Bound." Lummox flux key issue gone infra-red. Felt
        beeps intensify, doggedly shrill, as if alarm system were
        struggling to burst its shackles, ability to warn widens, but
        no experience so doesn't. Bashes psyches with rainbow
        show, tempting spectrum co- ordinated to appeal to brain-
        waves of worrier haves and no- worrier have-nots alike,
        plus variant numbed ones and the over-exiteds. Goes blank
        when near enough to touch, fades out when hands reach
        out. Ethos bathos. Feel it's their fault. Swell up into balloon
        fingers of clown ape, fingers with hairy sores and fecal
        smudges riffling through the invisible bank-notes to much
        applause.

"Lummox flux" is great: a rhyme (to my ear) and all kinds of other repenations (as I call repeated sounds of any kind--but I'm looking for a better term--reliterants just occurred to me). It also sounds . . . lummoxy. "gland malfunction" carries on the sense and sounds. I soon get a sense of inhabiting some kind of very strange persona, sort of like one of John M. Bennett's but mechanical rather than visceral. Whatever this persona is, it's trying to make sense of whatever the "lummox flux" is--imbecility out-of-control? Or maybe there's no persona, maybe the passage is a simple report on some commericalization between "Local Advertising" or supermarket advertising and the like, and ads for the stock market or other forms of gambling, as indicated by "Bonanza Bound." Lummox flux would have to do with the simple changes that manufacturers make to their products to get lummoxes to junk old stuff and buy new stuff that's for all practical purposes the same as the old stuff.

The piece is clearly an amusing jibe at idiots: "worrier haves and no-worrier have-nots alike, plus variant numbed ones and the over- exiteds," the latter whom I first thought to be "over-ExCITeds" but now see to be that, and out of their minds--which they've exited to too great a degree. And whatever is being advertized is clearly insubstantial, illusory--but the consumers believe that the fact that it fades when they try to touch it is their fault; their failure to connect with it makes them feel like lummoxes. Maybe the whole text is about fools in pursuit of Mall-Heaven. I like its spurts of imagery and elegant contempt but it doesn't come together for me. I doesn't make me want to read more of Elmslie: it's too hermetic for me-- and maybe too negative for me as it's all anti-lyrical. But there's definitely something intriguing there.

The Higginbotham poem above is from a book my own press published, so I have to like it, right? Well, I do. Higginbotham calls poems like these "clipoems," which seems a good term for them. The poem's opening image, "cologne bingo," seems wryly effective to me for some reason. Ah, perhaps we have here a metonymy-- "cologne" representing a bunch of perfumed men playing bingo. With the background idea of different colognes drifting through the air, hoping their numbers will come up.

"between cheap/ blue" puts the bingo game in some unopulent church hall, or outside in a scraggly park. The quotes around three spaces adds to the atmosphere of emptiness. But the quotation marks are also ditto marks, which indicate that "cheap" is to be repeated (but that the recorder of the scene doesn't consider it important enough to spell out a second time). The nearness of "branches" makes the two instances of "cheap" into two instances of "cheep"--which fits in with the summer that is next introduced. So far a sort of fill-in puzzle that feels southern to me, though it needn't be, and melancholy/nostalgic.

"my wrists against its/ millenia" is the toughest part to crack for me. "Its" would be referring to "summer," which would suggest that the summer is approaching or even experiencing its millannia. Its loneliness has lengthened its seeming age to thousands of years. The observer is leaning against the outside of the surface of the summer's age, mournfully looking in, his hands probably fisted against his cheeks, which would allow his wrists to support his lean against the summer's millennia.

Note the hand-written extra-hominess and simple-yow largeness of "BINGO," and the downslope of all the words, particularly "millennia." The fractured scene is hard to be sure of, my interpretation being only the best I'm able to come up with, but the poem's mood is surely negative. It is lyrically negative, however-- and triumphantly mastered through conversion to art by its observer, the clipoet.

        Dawn
        his first reaction to this old slut- minded goat was his
        old mother. She was standing crudely over a big washtub
        scrubbing cigarettes. His old father was breaking into
        so many pieces--the ramparts were changing color so fast
        everything went black. The tombs were cold and damp,
        and he was afraid the whole time, that is,
        until he came back above ground
        and the sun hit him in the nose like a baseball.
        At that point, when he emerged from the tunnels of catacombs
        and was standing tall in the peaceful dawn
        were rabbits were playing
        and nature was so strong--that you couldn't
        budge the stalk of a dandelion with a twin-engine baseball bat,
        or Mother Balls would jump down out of the sky yelling rape
        and gut you with a lamb'stail.
        It was so easy to fuck beautiful women
        that he forgot all about it and went about his business,
        of which he had none.

"Dawn," by Huck Finch, isn't as good as others I've seen by him. I like "twin-engine baseball bat," and the whirl of it all. I want to know more about "this old slut-minded goat," though. Moreover, some of the surrealisms seem too easy: why, for instance, "a lamb's tail," instead of a doe's tail or a cat's ear? But the poem seems nicely-unified around an experience of coming out of drunkenness and/or sleep and/or a drug trip and is powerfully concrete.

Now for the passage from Ez's Cantos:

        from CANTO XX

        And from the floating bodies, the incense
             blue-pale, purple above them.
        Shelf of the lotophagoi,
        Aerial, cut in the aether.
                                 Reclining,
        With silver spilla,
        The ball as of melted amber, coild, caught up, and turned.
        Lotophagoi of the suave nails, quiet, scornful,

        Voce-profondo:
                "Feared neither death nor pain for this beauty;
        If harm, harm to ourselves."
        And beneath: the clear bones, far down,
        Thousand on thousand.
                "What gain with Odysseus,
        "They that died in the whirlpool
        "Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowingbench,
        "That he should have a great fame
                "And lie by night with the goddess?"
        "Their names are not written in bronze
                "Nor their rowing sticks set with Elpenor's;
        "Nor have they mound by sea- bord.
                "That saw never the olives under Spartha
        "With leaves green and thennot green.
                "The click of light in their brances;
        "That saw not the bronze hall nor the ingle
        "Nor lay there with the queen's waiting maids,
        "Nor had they Circe to couch- mare, Circe Titania,
        "Nor had they meats orf Kalupso
        Or her silk skirts brushing their thighs.
        "Give! What were they given?
                                 Ear-wax.
        Poison and ear-wax.
                        and a salt grave by the bull-field,
        "neson amumona, their heads like sea crows in the foam,
        "Black splotches, sea-weed under lightning;
        "Canned beef of Apollo, ten cans for a boat load."
        Ligur' aoide.
        ...

It seems straight-forward to me, though I needed help on the foreign words from Carroll F. Terrell's A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. "Lotophagoi" is Greek for lotus-eaters (which I didn't need Terrell to figure out, though I'm decidedly monolingual, or less); "spilla" means "pin," or "brooch," in Italian; "voce-profondo" is Italian for "deep-voiced"; "Neson amumona" is Greek for "excellent island"--Pound says in a letter that it is "literally the narrow island bullfield where Apollo's cattle were kept"; and "ligur' aoide" is Greek for "clear, sweet song" (and is repeated from an earlier part of this canto).

As most of us know, The Cantos is an early example, with Eliot's Wasteland, of a jump-cut poem; the text here consists of two one of its fragments. On one its simpler levels, The Cantos parallels the fragmentation of all our lives. Its fragments of different languages contributes to this effect as well as give it a feel of many- worldedness, or cosmopolitanism. A colorful marketplace where all kinds of nationalities congregate.

The Cantos is uneven, and for me this is one of its less inspired sections. The message of the "deep voice" is an almost schmaltzily populistic bit of standard grief for the li'l fella. The lines before that are about Odyseus among the lotus-eaters, which I don't remember too well. In general, however, the lines depict a kind of opium-den scene of narcosis, with bodies floating, "Aerial, cut in the aether," which is a nice touch. A fine vignette but not the most brilliant poetry.

And with that I'm done with this session's poems. Two announcements before I go. I now have a website at http://www.oocities.org/SoHo/Cafe/1492 that I hope all of you with access to the internet will visit. Among the things I'm trying to do there is collect autobiographical data from poets. I have 44 so far, mostly from responses to a survey form I have at the site. I call the site Comprepoetica. Its over-all purpose is to gather data on poetry, poets and poetics that I hope to make a dictionary of. My other announcement is about the special issue of Silent But Deadly that editor Longfellow is going to let me guest-edit. I've received a few critique specimens so far and should have enough to go ahead with. But my personal life is so screwed up at present that I have no idea when I'll be able to distribute a "Critiques On Review" sheet or have the issue. All I can say right now is for you to keep sending in specimens of critiques that you think would be worthwhile critiquing, and that I hope to get going on the project by summer.