Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes by Richard Kostelanetz 246 pp; 1993; Pa; a cappella books, 814 N. Franklin St., Chicago IL 60610. $17.
texture, 5 Fall, 1993; 60pp.; 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK 73072. $6.
The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee, #2 Winter, 1994; 36 pp.; 100 Courtland Dr., Columbia SC 29223. $3.50.
Grist On-Line, #3 December, 1993; 96 pp.; Columbus Circle Sta., Box 20805, New York NY 10023. (Grist@phantom.com.) Free, if down-loaded.

Something interesting happened to me as 1993 was ending: I was given an entry in Richard Kostelanetz's Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. According to Kostelanetz (a friend of mine, needless to say), I have "become a major critic of avant-garde American poetry." And--this I really appreciated--he quotes a passage from a piece I wrote for SPR to show why he thinks that, something far too few commentators on the arts do. On the other hand, I was irked with Kostelanetz for not mentioning such important figures as Karl Kempton, Jonathan Brannen and jwcurry in his book--while including people like Ogden Nash and Robert Benchley (who might have pushed known forms to their limits but never went beyond known forms). I recommend Kostelanetz's dictionary, though: it's opinionated but fun, and often educational about the kind of under-regarded art and artists this column is most concerned with.

Another work by Kostelantez, WORDWORKS, also hit the bookstores recently. I mention this mainly to complain about its not yet having been reviewed in either the academic or the popular media, despite its being a landmark collection of Kostelanetz's diversely from-the-otherstream poetry and part of a series that includes collections by such knownstreamers as John Logan, William Stafford, W.D. Snodgrass and Carolyn Kizer. This is a shame, for it is full of wonderful poems. (In my favorite, the letters, "SLE," cross and leave the bottom of a page that the letters, "EEP," cross the top of, going in the opposite direction, upside-down. Simple-seeming, no doubt, but how could anything be more illuminating about the off-the-page world we sleep into, and weightlessly, loftily, magically, dream back from?)

Meanwhile, three zines of special interest to fans of experioddica have recently come out. One, Texture #5, includes a number of fine poems from the language-poetry school, and various hard-to-categorize prose texts. What most interested me, though, because of its rarity in the otherstream, were its critical discussions of figures like Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan and William Burroughs. Stein always having given me trouble, I quickly zeroed in on Julia Spahr's take on her. Alas, I didn't get much from it, for it never demonstrated why Stein should be considered more than a rambling village dumbfounder. Spahr does provide samples of Stein's writing, but tells us little about what they do, other than pun, and repeat material in a way unlike the "domesticated and controlled repetition of traditional forms" such as the rondeau. Stein's variations on "no since" to highlight nonsense's lack of a causal antecedent, a "since," is my kind of fun, but not when kept up for more than fifty words. Sure, as Spahr points out, this gives a reader interpretive room, which is fine, but I philistinely want to know what the difference between it and diffuseness, the defect of being excessively interpretable, is.

Nonetheless, Spahr's essay, and the others in Texture, are well worth reading, particularly editor Susan Smith Nash's "interview" (2 short questions followed by page-length answers) of Gerald Burns. (Whose interesting answer in the December issue of SPR to my editorial on varieties of poetry schools appeared, ironically, just after I'd sent in my last column, in which I popped off about how little reaction the editorial had sparked.)

The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee #2 has no critical articles but makes up for it with a wide selection of visual and electrojunctive poems, and various kinds of collages. I'm pressed for space, so will let the following TITT poem by Jake Berry sum up my reaction: "Exodus/ fermenting/ in alembic/ vernacular// swimmer/ learns to/ fly, as/ clear as I/ know it" Here heavy words about the process of distillation's fusion with swimming-become-flying, and the latter's fusion with an act of explanation that might seem incomplete but which performs rather than states its meaning, capture, for me, what the majority of TITT's contents can do to lift an aesthcipient.

Grist On-Line #3 is the last item on my list of zines to mention this time around. It made an impact on me because it's the first specimen of electronic experioddica I've come across. It includes several first-rate cutting-edge textual poems by poets like Andrew Gettler, Jurado and Jerome Rothenberg (from 1968!). It also has a good variety of articles. One on the use of the Internet as a visual art show gallery by John E. Jacobsen should be right up the alley of my SMR colleague, Edmund X. DeJesus. As should Grist editor John Fowler's ecently- set-up electronic poetry bookstore. Fowler charges a nominal fee to stock books. I don't know how effective the store will be, but my own press's books are now on its "shelves"--because I'm eager to get in on the groundfloor of this kind of thing however small the initial pay-off might be.