What's new as far as I'm concerned is something I've dubbed "Burstnorm Poetry" because of its refusal to be restricted by any norm of grammar, spelling or symbolic decorum (by which I mean traditional poetry's reluctance to incorporate non-verbal elements like computer coding, musical notation, drawn images, etc.). Some of the numerous strands of burstnorm poetry, principally "xenogrammatical poetry" (my name for certain kinds of "language poetry"), have been around since the fifties, or can be traced back further to Joyce, Stein and the Dadaists. Indeed, isolated precursors for ALL of its strands can be found in previous decades--or centuries--which only means that nothing is entirely new. Nonetheless, I claim that burstnorm poetry is a new art movement, because (1) as literary history goes, forty-years-old is not necessarily old; (2) a movement's newness does not depend on the novelty of its product but on how long the movement has attracted a significant number of participants; and (3) many strands of burst-norm poetry have, in fact, been significantly practiced by no more than one or two scattered poets for as long as a decade--e.g., infra-verbal poetry (or poetry whose letters, punctuation marks and other elements below the level of words are expressively important), mathematical poetry (or poetry that literally carries out mathematical processes), sound poetry (or poetry whose extra-verbal sound is central) . . . Certainly burstnorm poetry is doing more new things technically than its two rivals, plaintext poetry (standard free verse) and songmode poetry (traditional formal verse), neither of which does ANYTHING new technically.

In the final analysis, however, the newness of a given poetry is of minor importance; what it does and whether or not what it does is of aesthetic value is all that truly matters. Strong evidence that what burstnorm poetry does is of aesthetic value is provided by two recently-begun magazines, Synaesthetic and Croton Bug.

Alex Cigale, the editor of Synaethestic, hopes among other things to "counter-act the self-absorbed poetic persona that has come to dominate post-war poetry in the public mind--the beat, confessional, language, and performance poetries that have gained prominence in each successive decade from the 50's through the 90's." Hence, he showcased found poetry as a kind of anti-self public poetry in the first issue of Synaesthetic. The focus of its second issue, the one up for review here, is "The Intersection of Science & Art."

The prize work of this second issue is a set of four full-color illumages (i.e., visual artworks) by Kevin Clarke in which representations of dna coding--or, once, something that looks like an eeg print-out--are superimposed on photographs to produce what Clarke calls "genetic portraits." In one of these, Clarke portrays Jeff Koons, the parodistic painter, with lines of a's, g's, c's and t's on top of a mostly brown negative photographic print of an old-fashioned slot machine, its wrong colors making the result seem not a mere snapshot of Koons's conscious mind but an x-ray of his soul! And the super-abstract scientific dna coding conflicts richly with the tackily-decorated, nostalgic slot machine further to bring Clarke's conception of Koons to life.

Work of another master of the verbo-visual double-exposure, Spencer Selby, is also here. In one of his pieces what look to be wood-cuts from a medieval guide to alchemy are overlaid by a large-type text skewedly about mind, freedom and similar philosophical matters, the whole seeming to me both satire and celebration of the quest for truth. On the page next door is a collage by Guy Beining that depicts science as scribble, lunacy, artwork, game, and exalted mystery to really get viscerally into what it is.

Elsewhere Laurel Speer contributes an evocative text about 20th- century mathematician Kurt Godel's eating habits that undersimmers with questions of body versus spirit, and there is much else of value in this beautifully-produced publication (which even boasts a table of contents with pix of the contributors!) I hope it can keep going.

Croton Bug is also a well-produced publication with a table of contents (though no pix of contributors) and a wide range of front-line burstnorm material. Among its choicest items are a meta-mathematical poem about "sentient geographies" by Jake Berry, a compound idiolinguistic poem called "'v-effect'" by Peter Inman (that is as formidable as my name for it would suggest, with lines like "drench. krip. neural. teal. than. he. can. think. elbow. about."), and an ingenious-but-moving verbo- visual tribute to the non-representational painter Ellsworth Kelly by John Byrum. I regret that I lack space to say more about this excellent new magazine.