Meat Epoch, #11 Spring, 1993; 2pp.; 3055 Decatur
Avenue, Apt. 2D, Bronx NY 10467.  Price: SASE. 

DADA TENNIS, #3 Spring, 1993; 16pp.; Box 10,
Woodhaven NY 11421.  $2. 

CWM, #1 Summer 1992; 32pp.; 1300 Kicker Rd.,
Tuscaloosa AL 35404.  $3. 

O!!Zone, #2 February 1993; 16 pp.; 1266 Fountain View
Dr., Houston TX 77057.  $2.52. 



Six years or so ago, I coined the word, "experioddica," as a name 
for the "experimental," "odd" "periodicals" of the arts that I 
was then writing about for Factsheet Five.  This term has not yet 
made it into TIME, but it has been used in print by more than 
three people besides myself (usually misspelled), so I've decided 
to keep it going as my title here. 

In the future I hope to concentrate on just one or two specimens 
of experioddica in each column.  In this, my very first, however, 
I have decided to range more widely, and cursorily, to try to 
rough out the field as a whole.  I will thus be discussing four 
magazines: Meat Epoch #11, Dada Tennis #3, O!!Zone #2 and CWM #1. 

Of these, Meat Epoch #11 is perhaps the least impressive on the 
surface for it is just a xeroxed broadside containing five poems 
and an illustration.  Two of the poems are philosophical.  One of 
them, which is by A. L. Nielson, begins with a Wallace Stevens-
like "context (which) rose in the eastern window;" the other, 
which is by Spencer Selby, ends with meaning-in-general, which 
"gathers in emptiness/ and waits on all things."  Two of the 
others, which are by editor Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, are 
fragmental and evocative (one of them representing "kairos," or 
"the favorable moment," as--in part--the sequence "pray/ dance/ 
sing/ decide," to score neatly off the more likely "research/ 
think/ calculate/ decide," or somesuch).  The fifth is one of my 
own mathematical oddities. 


What is most noteworthy about Meat Epoch, however, is that it 
began about a year ago as a one-man collection of critiques and 
poetry that St. Thomasino distributed like a letter to other 
poets and editors he felt he had things in common with.  As a 
result, he is now getting his experimental work published 
elsewhere, and publishing such well-known figures in the 
otherstream as John M. Bennett.  Meat Epoch thus neatly 
demonstrates one highly viable way of getting established as a 
writer, outside the establishment. 

Dada Tennis #3, though just 8 stapled-together sheets of paper, 
is fancier than Meat Epoch, for it is full of fascinating & 
sophisticated computer-generated graphics, and even contains a 
work in color in which C. L. Champion has played games with the 
letters of the word "breast."  DDT contains many other exploratory,
even insane, poems, such as one by editor Bill Paulauskas that
bounces from "God's angry balloon" to "A peacock/ dipped in black/
oil/ and beaten with a porkchop" to "tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp/
tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp."  Paulausakas, by the way, runs some
sort of computer bulletin board from which he got a portion of DDT's
contents.  Lunatics with modems should be sure to write him about it. 

CWM #1 is the most elegant specimen of the four zines, for it has 
a stiff cover and is saddle-stitched.  On its front is a gorgeous 
water smudgery in pink, violet and blue by Carlyle Baker and 
inside its back cover is a pocket containing two books of matches 
decorated by Bruce Mitchell and a narrow strip of folded cardboard
within which G. Huth has rubber-stamped the word, "watearth"--which
seems minor until you notice what its central pun is doing.  Most of
the poems within are only mildly adventurous technically but almost
all of them have a lift to them; take, for example, "Lethe," which is
by Herb Kauderer: 

               kneel at the banks by the ford and peer 
               into the soft wrinkled brown-green blanket 
               watch it undulate in random patterns calling 
               in a voice that soaks up sound 
               birdcall & leaf 
               flame & wood 
               absorbed & reformed 
               into a gently urging lullaby 
               calling you to sleep 

An arresting collage by Guy R. Beining, a scrap of fiction, and
some reviews complete CWM's wares.

Beining is one of the two poets featured in the second issue of 
O!!Zone, a saddle-stitched paper-covered zine that calls itself 
"a literary pamphlet."  His poems are quite disjunctional, as 
"1544" demonstrates: "in hatch of abbot/ all manicured/ parlor 
talk knocks apart/ blossoms & the only pig at market."  But at 
least one of them at one point ripples into traditional lyricism 
with "solvent edge of moon on/ blush of lake/ green veins of may 
in/ chalk of birch."  The poems of O!!Zone's second poet, Ken 
Brandon, are more straight-forward, but full of amiable breezes 
like a description of a mission whose "quiet is of/ swallow 
gargles and/ twittering women resound/ ding like bells from a/ 
stone room to the left/ of jesus christ and the/ gladiolus." 

There.  I hope that's enough to suggest what's out there in the 
world of . . . experioddica.  Visit it soon!