But now another one has: New Orleans Review, which is put out by New Orleans's Loyola University. Most of its summer issue consists of solid but not technically venturesome journal-entry poems (like one by Ken Fontenot that begins, "Another day as a security guard," then considers the "tiny dynamite noises" made by the bubbles in a can of Coke). It also contains a few similarly straight-forward short stories. Right in the middle of the magazine, however, is a 42-page section devoted by guest- editor William Lavender to "Experimental Writing in the South." Quite an inner city of language poetry, text&graphic derangements, and even mathematical poems (yes, mine) this is to the suburbs the rest of the issue is.

Three pages from the second volume of Jake Berry's epic Brambu Drezi start things off (after overviews on experimental writing in the South by Lavender and Hank Lazer). I've been studying Berry's work for a number of years now but still can't say much more about it than that it intelligently mixes just about all the techniques of burstnorm poetry I'm familiar with. The result seems a sprawl of notes, equations, diagrams, drawings by some 14th-century alchemist suddenly finding himself in this century.

Or: "sacs of messiah/ fused into raw metal code," as one of Berry's passages here has it.

Next to the third of Berry's pages is a two-part poem by A. diMichele. diMichele, like his friend and colleague, Berry, and their primary progenitor, Charles Olson, treats the page as a field. Thus, he doesn't let his words take care of all his expressive intentions as a prose-writer would, or merely cut his lines off at strategic points to add silences and emphases to what he is saying as competent conventional poets do; he slabs, stacks and interrupts his text to gain not only in silence and intensification, but to suggest, oddly, both fragmentation (through scatteredness) and structural solidity (through the separation of texts into columns).

A related virtue of this kind of technique is that the poet can connect two seemingly unrelated ideas or images by representing them in similarly positioned words. For instance, diMichele shows us "black             loam" at one point in his text, then quite a bit later, "funk             barn"--as well as other pairs with large spaces between them. To someone gazing on rather than merely reading the poem, this provides a sense of the parallel between undifferentiated black that perhaps grows into fertile loam and a negative mood that somehow leads to the different kind of fertility a barn represents. Does potted             dharma," another of diMichele's pairs, work another parallel with the other two? Seems to me it does--although I admit that all this is highly subjective. I do contend, however, that this kind of poetry makes worthwhile, plausible connections between ideas or images that are impossible for songmode or plaintext poetry (the two conventional poetries).

Something of this is suggested by the opening of diMichele's poem: "innate approximation of inadequate ample "parallels" thesaur-dream:" with his words arranged in three columns a word's-length of space, approximately, apart. "thesaur-dream" by itself is enough to prove diMichele a poet even without all else he's doing here.

For additional evidence of this, I recommend his recent poem, "Something for Creeley." It consists of 16 words in thick blue letters about a half-inch high that block out a resonant homage to Creeley, and to what not language, but the existence of language, says, something that is central for Creeley and so many others in language poetry.

Another burstnorm field poet with a piece in New Orleans Review is Hank Lazer. His text seems slightly more restrained than Berry's and diMichele's but it contains like jewels: for instance, the passage, "because of the diminishing capacity for subjectivity to assert meaningful autonomy/ lyric          lark          lurk," which is followed by other plays on words (like "lord          lured           lurid") that deepen far beyond their initial delightfulness.

Jim Leftwich, represented here by four poems, should be grouped with the previous three, though he makes more use of the page-as- field elsewhere. His poems here are Very Telegraphic: e.g., "theme truth shit imp tantalize nocturnal time booth poetr." Opposites combusted into each other are common to the work of the poets of this school: the full expanse of life, no restrictions on subject-matter. Intentional misspellings such as "poetr" are also frequent in their work.

It should be evident by now that New Orleans Review has provided us with a brief compendium of the most current burstnorm poetry, though concentrated in what I call Idiolinguistic Poetry* (which is close to what others, and often I myself, call language poetry). Besides the work of the poets mentioned, there is excellent stuff by Joy Lahey, Skip Fox, Ken Harris, Tom Whitworth, Lisa Samuels, David Thomas Roberts, Claudia Grinnell, Lindsay Hill, Camille Martin, David Hoefer, Paul Naylor, Susan Facknitz and Lew Thomas. If only I had another ten or twenty pages to discuss it! Or the work of just one of any of the above.