The Art of Practice. Edited by Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick 384 pp; 1994; Pa; Potes & Poets Press, 181 Edgemont Ave., Elmwood CT 06110-1005. 384 pp., $18.

In January 1984 the first issue of Abacus appeared. Its ten stapled-in-the-corner pages were devoted to P. Inman's "Backbite," a pioneering specimen of, among other things, infra- verbal poetry (which is, I've decided, a subclass of language- centered poetry). Its first poem begins: "never mind that decide (crump/ quant.) iodine lotion wasn't what he meant,/ the wider dims the end to a beer."

With the full-scale microherence a few lines later of: "serie incents./ jority. eyh, thide," we're in some who-knows-what of innocents/incense (in one-cent increments?) in which, hey, eyes are involved, and something thighed. . . . Trust me, with time and the whole sequence at hand, one can learn a habitat from it.

Since "Backbite" appeared, Peter Ganick's Potes & Poets Press has regularly brought out additional cutting-edge issues of Abacus. The 79th, one of the most recent, consists of a language-centered poetry sequence by Bruce Andrews called "Blue Horizon." It is outwardly more conventional-seeming than "Backbite," but with lines like "Jig Time Ace Talk to the Rabbit" and "Rosecote levelers bye-no-bye decorously," it's no snap to read.

But scattered through its first poem are such phrases as "Sherwood Frost," "Bumblebee Biolage Juleightee," "Tomahawk cedar star-of- the-veld" and "First Grade Pirate's Bounty Reder," and these I was soon able to weave into woodland child-adventury-- and, in the poem's last words, "Validity's wintergold encased in its concretion."

For like reasons I was taken with the narrowing of Andrews's second poem to: "Moments/ Flash/ Hasty/ Line/ Mine/ Fire/ Instant/ Moment," the idea of a "line mine" especially capturing me. And so my excursion through the sequence went, and so I expect my future excursions through it to go, for it is everywhere alive.

The other issue of Abacus features "Cornered Stones" and "Split Infinitives," two collections of texts by Rosemarie Waldrop that I consider neither language-centered nor poetry. They aren't language-centered because they are more concerned with events and ideas than with syntax, grammar and spelling, which I consider the main focus of language-centered literature. They aren't poetry (for me) because they consist not of lines but of sentences, or--to put it another way--where their lines start or stop never adds anything to the expressive value of the texts those lines comprise.

Central to Waldrop's practice is what Charles Wright has called "the jump-cut" after the cinematic technique of jumping abruptly from one subject to another not obviously related to the first, as in this passage from "Pleasure Principle":