This, of course, was just like writing 50 or more separate letters--except that I didn't have to repeat information: once I'd told Harry, say, about my one-time near-love Susan, I didn't need to repeat the story to everybody else I replied to. (Susan had recently phoned me from San Diego, ten years and two electro- shock treatments [hers, not mine] after we'd last seen each other. When I didn't immediately accept her offer to come share my Florida home, she started a correspondence with a stranger who was serving time and married him a month later though she'd never to that point seen him in person. It didn't turn out well: she panicked on the eve of his first scheduled out-of-jail conjugal visit, and divorced him. "All of a sudden it hit me," said she.

"He's a felon! I can't have him in my house!" She dropped me as a correspondent due to the insufficiency of my celebration of her restored availability, so I don't know if she ever got back with the convict or not.)

The letter was fun to write, and besides the poop on Susan and other bits of personal gossip included responses to poems and drawings various correspondents had sent me, some wacked-out philosophizing about Art and the Unconscious, a defense of one of my mathematical poems, and so on. When I finally finished it, it was something like 8,000 words long.

The response to it was satisfying. It boggled the few people I wasn't all that interested in writing to out of replying, and seemed to entertain the others. A couple of recipients even reviewed it in zines they edited! Perhaps the most flattering result was Ralph LaCharity's reprinting something like three- quarters of it in his zine, W'ORCs. This was quite a surprise to me, though I knew he liked to publish letters in W'ORCs.

LaCharity also responded at length to what I'd said in my letter to him personally, starting Very Perceptively with words about my "evoking of the pith & breadth of Otherstream Praxis." He also favorably mentioned the author's explanations with which I sometimes accompany the crazier poems I get published--as in a recent issue of Juxta, whose editors are trying to encourage such help-for-readers, so many of its poems being decidedly off-putting in their strayngeness.

Then LaCharity ascended to a self-exegesis of his own "Rupan," an essay/letter in an earlier issue of WORC's that I'd spent a few words in my letter on. LaCharity might be as nuts as I am. He certainly pulled out all the stops in describing how his (and my) kind of poetry dons "in its radical outwelling: the Hummed, the Mimed, the Written, the Diagrammed, the Encoded, the Concretized, the Mumbled & the Recorded, the Algorhythmized & the Amplified, the Drumbed & the EverDanced, that which is Accompanied & Collabial & Simultaned, on & on . . ." Much of his inspiration, he pointed out, comes from Jack Foley's prime, priming, reflections on the shallowness of conceiving poetry as something written on a page only. The manner in which LaCharity is achieving his own main goal, "How to Tongue MultiValently" is clear from such lines as "dreamerrily omphalo star-fishery'd y shell-tonic" from "Rupan" itself. It was a Yow of the First Order to have triggered such a brave rant from so valuable a culturateur as he.

I had been meaning to review W'ORCs here even before LaCharity's pr move on my behalf, for it's just the kind of stapled-in-the-corner lit zine that I most enjoy calling attention to. Read, I'm sure, by just about no one in the mainstream media, or in academia, but twenty years or more closer to what's going on in literature today than they are, it's also good breezy fun, full of news about readings past and upcoming, gossip, and poetics. It also reprints all kinds of poems and other artworks from other zines, and as far as I can tell, covers the full range of poetry in English today.

Some of the reprinting is (I'm sure) sardonic, such as the copy of a dominant-mode piece of plaintext verse by James Laughlin from the New Yorker that reflects on "the happy shouts of children/ Romping from room to room," that's in the March issue.

Much better poems are printed in the issue and the other two under review, such as January's excerpts from Jake Berry's Brambu Drezi, Part Two and Jim Leftwich's Khawatir, which LaCharity thinks rhymes with Brambu somehow, and I agree. Think a moment on Berry's "independent attractors/ & their shadow knowledge" on a page with six occurences of the word "idylye" stacked in the lower left corner; the page swarms with chemistry, archaeology, and "Pan, joyously electric, dancing hoof and cunt in paradise." Does Berry mean "shadow-knowledge," or knowledge that is but some greater essence's shadow? Berry's work is intimidatingly noisy, but teems with questions the blood can exult in, like the preceding. Leftwich rhymes with Berry by focusing also on existence's shadow knowledge, and doing so in a world in which "particular means prayer" and one views it with "the eating eye" and other similarly aptly misused senses. Their two poetries are unconfusably their own in form and style, but one in the elations they dance out of. The wonderful thing about W'ORCs is the inclusion with Berry's and Leftwich's poetry letters about it from them, with LaCharity's equally charged feedback. Also in the January issue is a pertinent essay by Jack Foley, "Light, Breath, and the Empty Page." Foley, I suspect, is the clearest critic writing about this stuff; certainly he's clearer than I!

The February W'ORCs has some fine material, too, including an essay by Ron Silliman on "Wild Form" that but wrong-headed, because he claims that "form" is "structure that proves generative and inherent" rather than mere "pattern, exoskeletal reiteration." But the latter, objectively, is what form is; to claim that only "good" scaffolding qualifies as form, as Silliman seems to, is simply to subjectify form for political purposes, something the language poets are too wont to do. Nonetheless, his essay is a great read. There's a fine rant by Ron Androla in the same issue. I wish I had space to discuss it, and the excellent poems (often much more straight-forward than Berry's and Leftwich's) that are also in the issues I've skimmed over for you here. To find out more about them, you'll just have to writer LaCharity.