Some drastic things have happened to me since my last column: I've become gainfully employed--as a substitute teacher, and at a parttime job late nights. This after nineteen years of freedom.

Well, it's been tough, so much so that I've decided to use a rejected piece here rather than grind out a whole new column. It's an overview of experioddica in the South that I submitted to New Orleans Review, which didn't have room for it. I've previously written here about more than one of the zines in the overview, but I don't think it'll hurt to mention them again.

Using Spencer Selby's exhaustive list of magazines devoted to innovative art and my own files, I was able to find 15 periodicals publishing burstnorm poetry in the South. This is not a huge number, but among the fiveteen are some excellent ones.

One of them is The Experioddicist, which Jake Berry began in May 1993. Crammed onto the two sides of its first issue, a single sheet of 17" by 11.5" of paper folded in half, was just about every kind of burstnorm poetry imaginable. (For you latecomers to my column, "burstnorm poetry" is what I call poetry that significantly breaks with at least one significicant norm of grammar, spelling, rationality, or symbolic decorum--by which I mean traditional poetry's aloofness from non-verbal elements like computer coding, musical notation, drawn images, etc.).

Among the many burstnorm specimens in The Experioddicist is a poem by Matt Wellick with "xenogrammatical," "microherent" lines like "here i am verd/ poresp composit (hunt)" in a column next to a circuit-board-like diagram that suggests the text is many-pathed and electronic. With time, Wellick's poem unmazes into a "haintempl toward mangliskin," or "haint temple toward mangled English's glistening skin," in one of several possible readings.

A more accessible mispelling is Richard Kostelanetz's lewd "an tit he tical." Most of the poems in this and the second issue of The Experioddicist are "idiolinguistic," by which I mean that their focus is variant grammar, syntax, orthography, etc. Later issues, each devoted to a single artist, often break into visual, mathematical, sound, cryptographical and other forms of "pluraesthetic poetry."

Among the contributors to The Experioddicist are Ficus strangulensis and Keith Higginbotham, each of whom is also a southern lit-zine editor. Ficus runs a stapled-in-the-corner zine in Charleston, West Virginia, called Transmog (which is short for "transmogrification"). Its latest issue (#17) contains burstnorm material from close to fifty contributors, among them the Canadian, jwcurry, one of whose works, "Iron Choir," seems to me the pick of the issue. A visual poem, it consists mainly of a seemingly random jumble of letraset letters (and a letraset semi-colon), scrawls, lines, and a small squarish patch cowded with smaller letters. At first glance, the work seems a mildly interesting design. but eventually one notices an m, an A and fusion of a capital J with a small j that suggests a G, an i, and a C. And one begins to feel the potential of the choir-machine's unreleased letters. The balance of mystery and access is nearly perfect.

Spencer Selby has some fine work in this issue, too, including a text about mental concentration that seems taken from some manual on how to become a super-rigidnik. It is overlaid on an almost too-gooey-to-be-true photograph of a little girl blowing a bubble. The result is another telling clash of mechanism and wonder.

Keith Higginbotham edits two specimens of southern experioddica, The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee and Missionary Stew. The latter has become devoted entirely to two-word poems such as Harold Dinkel's "elementary drowning," which is beautifully illustrated by the author in Volume 2, No. 3.; and, in the previous issue, Surllama's "armageddon vertebrae"; John M. Bennett's "Noose Complication"; Ann Erickson's "nuisance food"; and co-editor Tracey R. Combs's "think OFF."

The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee is more ambitious. Its recentest issue (#3) contains poems like Gregory St. thomasino's infra-verbal gem, "The Sirens":"aweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/ and away into," and a really strange computery verbo-visual piece by Higginbotham in which a stack of three stark white submarines is clearly visible, and a scattering of letters that three times spell, "This wyld"--or "This wyrd." A dark snake or something, a few jags of white, and other distortions unsimplify the piece toward high mystery. There's also an interesting infra-verbal poem by John Elsberg called "Washington Lives" that breaks up words (e.g., "Redskins" into "reds KIN s") and mixes in snippets of German that allow such amusements as "him melu berle velpla ying fie ld" ("himmel uber" meaning "sky over"). Many other leading lights of the otherstream are represented in The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee.

Possibly the South's most fetchingly produced otherstream publication is Ken Harris and Jim Leftwich's Juxta, a Virginia magazine whose focus is mainly idiolinguistic poetry, but whose second issue includes some of Spencer Selby's verbo- visual double-exposures and a cryptographical poem by me which I make a point of mentioning because it is accompanied by an author's explanation, something Leftwich hopes to get more Juxta poets to do in the future, and which I think a great idea. Juxta also prints straight criticism like John Noto's "Synthesis: Nova -- the Thermodynamics of Broken Lifestyles Collapsed into Timeless Gene-Pool Mandalas Bifurcate into Smart Grooves (the Ambient Muse-Live!)" Well, maybe not that straight.

Jake Berry is the dominant poet of the second issue of @>Juxta@>, with a rant about "creative transfinity" on page one, many short poems distributed through it, and five full-pages of the second volume of his super-eclectic, verbo-visio-mythomatico yow of an epic, Brambu Drezi, near the end. Another high point is Charles Borkhuis's "BEFORE THOUGHT PASSES" with its "circles of exposure/ circles of disappearance/ the day your breath/ was not your own . . ." No idiolinguistics here, just a beautifully correct amount of sur-intelligence. Similarly lyrical are the poems here by Michael Basinski, notably the ones from his Odalesque, my favorite of which speaks of "Ipening Quince/ perfume scent swelling/ licio ose ender/ loom that coVers/ delicious Quince ush" with almost pornographically sensuality.

As for the other specimens of experioddica in the South, they'll have to wait until part two of this column.