Poetry USA, Spring/Summer '93. Edited by Jack Foley. 4/yr; 56 pp; 2569 Maxwell Avenue, Oakland CA 94123. $10/year, $4 sample.

 

About a year ago a guest editorial of mine appeared in Small Press
Review.  It concerned the number of different "schools" of poetry now
extant in America, most of them ignored by the commercial and academic
establishments, and themselves ignoring (if not inimical to) all rival
schools. I started a list of them and invited others to add to it.  My
hope was to inspire someone eventually to publish an anthology of poetry
that contained specimens of all the varieties of poetry currently
being composed in this country--but I would have been content merely
to have triggered a little discussion.
  
So far, someone from New Zealand has written to say my list should
include found poetry (he's right), and two other people have offered moral
support.  That's about it.  Dana Gioia, on the other hand, got so many
responses to the Atlantic article he wrote a year or two ago on the
state of American poetry that he can't even begin to reply to them,
or so he claims.  Since Gioia's appreciation of poetry stops at around
1900, and even his academic knowledge of it is only up to 1960, I con-
clude from the opposite receptions given our articles (even taking into
consideration the relatively large circulation of the Atlantic) that
the poetry community in America has almost no interest in poetry, or
even mere discussion of poetry, that uses techniques not common by the
fifties or earlier.

More recently, I sounded out the editors of Writer's Digest on an
article I wanted to write on otherstream poetry zines as a break-in
market for poets not writing formal poetry or conventional free-verse
(this latter representing "non-traditional" poetry for Writer's Digest).
I told them I thought my piece would augment the "otherwise excellent
article on poetry markets" that'd been in their magazine a few months
before.  (Yeah, I have my moments of hypocrisy, too.)  That they turned
me down didn't bother me.  But I was annoyed by their claim that the
kinds of non-traditional poetry I thought they'd neglected "actually . . .
were considered" in their article.  Of course, no one expects the
people in charge of Writer's Digest to know anything about poetry,
or any other form of writing, but it'd be nice if they were a little
less smugly certain of their omniscience.

Despite these two grave setbacks for the cause of Otherstream Poetry,
however, all is not lost, for there is, I am happy to report, an
American magazine reaching more than a few dozen readers that is
covering just about the ENTIRE poetry spectrum: Poetry USA.  The
latest issue, which is devoted to "the experimental issue," contains
not only infra-verbal, visual, and mathematical poetry (though no found
poetry) but knownstream free-verse, rhymed verse and all kinds of other
mixtures and who-knows-whats.  There are fine illustrations and collages
scattered through it, too, and a group of excerpts from a taped dinner
conversation Robert Duncan had with Norman and Virginia Goldstein in 1970. 
Duncan's remarks are all decidedly New Age and off-the-wall but often
nonetheless insightful and invigorating, not so much about poetry as
about being a poet.

Rounding out the issue are a number of pertinent quotations on poetics
from people like Whitman, Stein, Olson and Gioia (!) and letters-
to-the-editor that include a report from Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
about his efforts to smuggle an issue of his unconventional art zine
into the recent Whitney Museum Biennial, which was supposed to be devoted
to "alternative" art but, although it included magazines, for some reason
ignored . . . experioddica.

Among the too-numerous-to-mention-them-all high points of the issue is
Michael Basinski's 4-part "Odalisque" series.  In each frame of this
a ring of words and near-words surrounds a giant O.  The near-word at
the top of "Odalisque No. 1" nicely emonstrates what an infra-verbal
technique can accomplish.  The near-word is "rammar," the infra-verbal
technique simple defacement, the result a sudden "disconcealment" of a
secret (and, to me, strangely enchanting) symmetry, which rattles the
reader into full engagement with "grammar," "ram," "mar," and "mirror"--
as sounds AND signs, by themselves AND intermingled.

In "Odalisqu No. 4," Basinski circles his O with twenty words containing
a v--or V.  What makes this interesting is that many of these words
wouldn't normally have a v in them--"vords," for instance.  This would
undoubtledly seem a silly game to Gioia, Writer's Digest, and those
who read them, but for me it was (yes) thrilling to experience a "down"
sharpened to "dovn," a "water" turned Germanic and fatherly as "vater,"
and such unmodified words as "wives" and "aggressive" as suddenly alien
objects, speared into.  Or, best of all, to find between "wildevness"
and "festival," and opposite "wives," the wonderfully expanded "luVst."

Basinski also contributes a version of "The Tell-Tale Heart" that lists
all of Poe's words in alphabetical order.  This, for me, yields nothing
less than the subconscious mind of the story, eerily achieving a narrative
interest in its own right as it blends or clashes with what Poe wrote--
as in the following passage: "shriek shriek shrieked shrieked shutters
silence silence simple since since single single singylarity sleep
slept slept slight slight slipped..." or "how how however human" followed
by 120 instances of "I."

I was also impressed by the issue's many excerpts from Jake Berry's
visio-mathematico meta-scientific master-poem, "Brambu Drezi"--and
the excellent introduction to it that Jack Foley, the editor-in-chief
of Poetry USA, provides.  Strong long poems by Ivan Arguelles and
Michael McClure are in the issue, as well.  How sad that slickzines like
the Atlantic and Writer's Digest will no doubt continue forever to
ignore publications like Poetry USA.