Then they'd find out about people like William Howe, whose tailspin press is now two titles into burstnorm (i.e., experimental) poetry. One of these is Howe's own Tripflea, a fascinating 2-spined bookwork whose pages interleave from opposite sides and are strewn with texts rarely larger than a word or phrase. Infra-verbal suggestiveness is a key here, as in the line, "dick shun airy dreeeeeeem z" that occurs on one page, and the "lept er" which starts the book among such phrases as, "may king/ the// Fabrick," to speak, for me, of butterflies and spring, and the lombs they spangle out of.

The other book from tailspin, Michael Basinski's SleVep, is likewise not really a book but a bookwork, for its main structural elements, transparent celluloid pages that make its text seem vividly, concretely stratified, are nearly as expressively important as that text. A square of white posterboard is provided that can be slid under each stratum to capture its scattery, semi-sequential content, which includes the wonderful "O/ cl ear wooRds." Just the idea of woods as "woo roads" makes me sigh, but there's so much more in the passage. That much of the book's other material is appropriated from medical books, anthropological research papers, and the like, gives Basinski's often-erotic lyricism all kinds of registers (besides the palpable nothingness of the book's pages) to emerge, delicately, out of. I don't think I'm going out on a limb in considering the Establishment particularly remiss in continuing to ignore Basinski.

Several other first-rate poets (e.g., John Byrum and Richard Kostelanetz) who are unknown to (or ignored by) mainstream critics and editors have work in Vattacharjo Chandan's Sanskrit/English PrakalpanA LiteraturE, which I mention though my copy is dated 1993 because it demonstrates how international a lot of the stuff I write about has become.

I'm as late in discussing the Autumn, 1993, issue of Visible Language. Visible Language, though usually super-specializedly academic without much interest in aesthetics, is nonetheless almost always valuable for those composing or studying visual poetry. This issue, which is titled, "Visual Poetry, An International Anthology," however, is not too dry, at all. Edited by leading American visual poet/critic Harry Polkinhorn, it is divided into sections of visual poetry (and commentary) from Brazil, Cuba (the weakest), Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Uruguay and the US. Among my favorite poems are "Le Pli - No 1" and "Le Pli - No 2," by Ana Hatherly of Portugal, which do interesting things with machine-printed texts that "degenerate" at the margins into handwriting; a study in non-euclidean geometry by Crag Hill in which the word, "parallel," dissolves into and out of all sorts of parallels and non-parallels with repetitions of itself; and a weird landscape called "The Order of Things" that Polkinhorn has made out of texts seen from behind, or wrongside-up, or both. The multiple orders these texts achieve make a mockery of Polkinhorn's title--unless they prove it by the final order they somehow achieve in a flesh beyond textual logic.

The final specimen of burstnorm poetry I want to mention is A. DiMichele's bookwork-of-several-covers-and-different-sized-pages, ampersand (said): MANIFESTO. Its largest set of pages consists of sundry enlarged or reduced or xerographically slurred re-utterances of the words: "is this it. diversion the/ vorticist teacup?/ sugar is information/ sleep is the secret of the/ ancients./ and linear./ it's all been said./ now to wake up/ and unsay it," and the bizarre but somehow related collage that accompanies them. Choice, is all I have space to say about this.