One of the questions asked us was what a bad zine was. Ashley felt there was no such thing, and I tend to agree inasmuch as any zine is an act of creative communication and thus praiseworthy. On the other hand, there are surely zines that are more worth reading than others. Heath suggested that the best zines are those invested with the most genuine passion. I would have added that I think a zinester's failure to ask what his zine will do that no other zine is already doing more than anything makes for inferior zines, but the 34-hour bus ride from Florida to Chicago I was coming off of made it hard for me to think very fast at the time, so I didn't.

I was up for a small grant from Poets & Writers to attend the conference, by the way. It didn't come through, which obliges me to make a few negative comments on the 25th anniversary issue of that organization's magazine, which recently appeared. Except for two or three token representatives of minorities, the people invited to honor the anniversary with texts were all estabniks. Perhaps the most egregiously pre-1950 of them was Dana Gioia, whose list of his 25 favorite modern love poems included "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"--and nothing by anyone who hasn't been published in The New Yorker or somewhere comparable. Anthologist David Lehman chipped in with an attack on the New York Times Magazine article on the American poetry scene that I attacked here two columns ago; Lehman condemned the article for being too flippant; I for ignoring whole schools of first-rate current poetry, like Lehman's anthologies.

Meanwhile, Karl Wenclas was circulating a rant in his zine, the New Philistine, that characterized the UPC as a "ridiculous geek show" consisting of "underground corporate wannabes seeking respectability" and "rather-piggy corporate-flunkies." And he described the UPC panelists as "very above-ground" (which must account for the surprisingly high amount of my last paycheck for writing, $20, which I got last November). Wenclas's principal complaint concerned the help the conference got from a professor (Ted Anton) in getting a University to let its grounds be used for it. He was also put off that the rich poseurs in attendance, like "Mr. Silicon-brain Chip" Rowe, publisher of Chip's Closet Cleaner and, alas, a Playboy editor, use computers rather than manual typewriters, like Wenclas. In short, no one in poetry is too small to seem a Gioia to someone like Wenclas--or, no doubt, to feel a Wenclas to someone like, say, Danielle Steele, as Gioia probably does.

As for "corporate" ambitions, they weren't a factor for most UPC participants. We just want to get our ideas and art out without starving. While we do crave more notice, it's much more because feedback can help us improve than because the notice could lead to fame, power and money. Which reminds me that in one of the two panels I was a spectator at, which was devoted to copyright law, the question of whether you should allow a magazine like Harper's to quote you came up. One zine-publisher said she didn't care who quoted her since all she cared about was communicating. I couldn't think of a proper reply to that till later, as usual. It is that if you let slickzines quote you, you help them, which means that you facilitate the dissemination of crap, which you should be against. So you must think long and hard whether the good done by what they want to quote of yours will make up for the harm done by the crap it accompanies--if you can convince yourself that their selection of something of yours isn't proof that it's crap, too.

At the other panel I attended, Mike Basinski was persuasive on the value of the direct, visceral, impolite plaintext poetry of poets like Paul Weinman and Cheryl Townsend that dominates most literary zines, but is scorned by the academic and commercial presses. I disagreed with his calling such poetry "zine poetry," however--since zines are also, as he later agreed, the sole venue for the much different, high-brow kinds of burstnorm poetry that are generally my subject here. So I suggest dividing "zine poetry" into "streetlevel" and "otherstream" poetry. I prefer "streetlevel," or some such, to "street" because the latter suggests poetry by street people only and there are many working stiffs, housewives and the like also writing such material.

Before signing off, I'd like to plug the Zap-level cartoons of Dave Kocher, whom I met at the conference; Tim W. Brown's zine, @>tomorrow magazine@>, which includes one of Lyn Lifshin's streetlevel Marilyn poems (which I consider among her best work), and an appealing cluster of Richard Kostelanetz's one-sentence short stories; and the latest issue of U-Direct, which is edited by Batya Goldman, the main organizer of the conference, and has, since just last year, become a leading source of articles on, and reviews of, zines.