Criticism in the Otherstream
Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 3, March 1995
Silent But Deadly, No. 6, January 1995; 28 pp.; USF #30444, 4202
Fowler Ave. Tampa FL 33620. SASE.
Poetic Briefs, No. 18, December 1994; 16 pp.; UB Foundation, 31
Parkwood St. #3, Albany NY 12208. $10/5 issues.
Good literary criticism is as important to the health of our
literature as good literature, but there are even less outlets
for it. If any commercial or academic periodicals exist that
carry anything more than superficial reviews of best-sellers,
staid appreciations of long-certified classics, or diatribes
whose only engagement with art is political, I'm unaware of them.
In my tiny branch of the cultural world things are better, thanks
to such publications as the ones I'll be discussing here (and, of
course, to the one printing this!)
The most wide-ranging of them is Taproot Reviews, a
professionally produced tabloid edited by Luigi-Bob Drake that is
now in its third year. The bulk of it consists of brief reviews
(mostly of poetry) in two alphabetized sections, one devoted to
zines, the other to chapbooks. In the summer issue each of these
had something like 150 reviews by people in the field like
Charlotte Pressler, Oberc, Susan Smith Nash--and me. Since some
of its material is recirculated in Factsheet Five, TRR might best be described as an enlarged version of F5's "Arts and Letters" section--but deepened as well as enlarged since TRR also includes a number of longer pieces that go beyond simple reviewing. Thus, the summer issue has a full page by Fabio Doctorovich on Paralengua, an Argentinean "post-typographic poetry" movement Doctorovich is active in; a critique of Ivan Arguelles's Hapax Legomenon by Jake Berry; a discussion by Kristin Prevallet of translations from the French; a survey of Russian Transfuturists by Drake, accompanied by an interview of Transfuturist Serge Segay by Craig Wilson; and several other articles of equal substance.
Although TRR's main focus is on what I call the Otherstream,
Drake does not scant zines dealing in plaintext poetry and other
non-experimental art. Indeed, he is committed to encouraging
poetry (and art) of all stripes. So if you're the editor of any
kind of art-periodical, send him a copy of it for review!
Similarly, if you're looking to publish your own work, you should
be able to find appropriate publications to send that work to in
TRR.
A more intensely critical zine than TRR is Silent But Deadly, which Robert Peters saw and praised last year in SMR, and now contributes to himself (as do, needless to say, I). With each issue of SbutD, editor Kevin Kelly (aka Surllama), distributes four or five poems from among those that participants have sent him, or--sometimes--from his reading. Anyone interested, including C. Mulrooney, can then critique these, Kelly printing the critiques in the next issue. SbutD also includes miscellaneous illustrations, letters and poems, such as one in #5 by Mulrooney called, "Bob Grumman Teaching His Grandmother To Suck Eggs." It consists of blocks of repeated lines about the operation of a Smith-Corona word-processor such as:
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Bold Print - Highlight words for emphasis. Bold Print - Highlight words for emphasis. Bold Print - Highlight words for emphasis.
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In the same issue John B. Denson prays for Mulrooney, though
definitely not because of Mulrooney's disrespect toward me! The
zine, in short, is a lot of fun, and a great place to get close
readings of one's poems from all kinds of other poets.
Poetic Briefs (pun intended) is, like Silent But Deadly, much concerned with the particulars of poetry--though it rarely focuses on single poems the way SbutD does. Issue 18 starts with a poessay by Stephen Ratcliffe intended to exemplify and simultaneously discuss writing that appropriates rather than
formally quotes or refers to previously existing texts, in this
case passages from Mallarme, and from a poem by Ratcliffe
himself. The resulting language-poetry richness and mystery
aptly introduces the rest of the issue, which is devoted to
appreciations of the poetry of Clark Coolidge. The first of
these, by Stephen-Paul Martin, is my favorite, for it goes into
my kind of verbal subtleties, showing how the title of Coolidge's The Maintains, for example, is both about the way the article, the, "unobtrusively maintains conceptual order in various forms of verbal communication," and the way language acts as a "maintain" of the "zones of consciousness and apperception that poetry makes possible." Cynthia Kimball says wonderful things about Coolidge, too, in a poem consisting of lines from Coleridge's "Xanadu" that alternate with lines from Coolidge, while Coleridge's name is shown dissolving into Coolidge's--to provide a near-exact parallel to the way in which Coleridge's tone and imagery marry into Coolidge's with surprising smoothness. Suchwise does Poetic Briefs provide consistently intelligent and often lyrical insights into what's going on in the best current language poetry. I can't imagine any serious lover of poetry's not being able to learn something of importance from it, or its allies, Taproot Reviews and Silent But Deadly.
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