Score, after publishing a dozen issues in the eighties and early nineties, and becoming one of this country's two leading magazines of visio-textual art (Kaldron being the other), went dormant for several years--and was even declared dead by its editors. But last year one of the latter, Crag Hill, decided to revive it, in editorial partnership with visual poet Spencer Selby. The result is every bit as good as the previous issues of the magazine, featuring work by long-time leaders in the field like Dick Higgins and Arrigo Lora-Totino, but also material from new-comers like Patrick Mullins and Adam Gamble.

To give some notion of what Score--and contemporary visio- textual art at its best--is like, I've chosen to two representative specimens to concentrate on. The first of these, "fluxion modulus 9," a visual poem by Guy R. Beining, uses random rhyming (of "obsidian" with "meridian" and--somewhat-- "rubidium"). This seems purposeless, even with the unifying word "lapidary" (in caps) positioned between "obsidian" and "rubidium" (both also in caps), since "lapidary" has to do with, among other things, engraving on stone--like obsidian. Also positioned between those two words, with two-piece clumps of "LAPIDARY" distributed to its four corners, is a large rectangle. Part of the collage within this is an architectural rendition of an open doorway with a door-sized rectangle tilted out of it on which something that looks to be a Wright Brothers Era biplane is depicted. Behind these two images is a lot of micro-speckly xerox-grey that suggests granite. Quite a bit below them a person in what may be a jester's outfit is smiling, the word "POP" just over his hat.

The biplane and doorway immediately give the rhymes and "LAPIDARY" high lyrical purpose as a title for a diagram of the idea of flight. "Obsidian" is what The Creative Imagination carves that idea into or through, crossing a Rubicon--somewhat but not entirely arbitrarily derived from "RUBIDIUM"--in the process. Playfulness is part of this, or so the smiling figure suggests, and it is a high point, or so one lesser meaning of the word, "meridian," suggests.

I should add that there is also a set of "ow-phrases" in the piece: "eye shadow," "bay window," "over shadow" and "black widow." It refers back to similar sets in others of Beining's "Fluxion moduli"--such as #5, also in Score," which has "whitlow," "shallow," "airflow" and "hueglow." The four words or phrases of each set are distributed among the four compartments of a cross. The poetry-sequence within a poetry sequence Beining thus brings about I tentatively take to be expressing a "quadchotomy" of North, East, South, West, the same way that the collage of "fluxion modulus 9" expresses the dichotomy of closure/opening. There is, needless to say, much more to the moduli that I lack space to discuss here.

Beining, by the way, has a great new book out, Carved Erosion. It's full of sur-haiku like "blueness of birds bones/ within/ an asian red nightmare" that are often enhanced with visual elements, and the wrenching of lines out of standard orientations. In the past year Beining has also had an issue of The Experioddicist devoted to his work, #14, which is well worth sending for.

The second of the specimens from Score I'm treating here is Irving Weiss's "From Here to There." This seems at first doodling, then coalesces as a compendium of lines--with wiring, or a system of nerve-ducts, or a river and its tributaries thickly down the center of the page. The latter finally announces the higher meaning of the work as a consideration of Nature versus Symbol, or some similar dichotomy, for the--let's call it a river-system--cuts off a number of abstract lines approaching it from the left. The topmost of these is straight, the next depicts sine waves. The third looks like a brain- machine's output. A micro-scribble and some kind of nameless fissure follow, with a line that tries to spell "line" but stutteringly achieves only "lllliiinnnnee" at the very bottom of the stack. This latter runs into a tributary of the central river, coming out on the other side properly spelled, in longhand. Sharing the other side with it are a single line rectilinearly plotting an "L" from whose leg an "I" rises which is also the far-left vertical of an "N" whose far-right vertical is also the vertical of an "E." The latter's highest horizontal is drawn but nothing else, the rectilinearly-moving line only able to go forward, apparently. Lower on this RIGHT side of the page is a typed list in upper-case, of the four letters of "LINE," starting with "LNEI." What Weiss has achieved, then, is a demonstration of how much universe lines are responsible for, in a subtle lyric concerning--did I say, "Nature versus Symbol?" It is that, but also, deeper, emotion versus reason.

Oops, I see I've just about run out of space. And once again I've failed to get to CORTEXt. I wanted to discuss a first-rate annual that's devoted to America's first visual poet, E. E. Cummings, and a great visio-textual anthology from South America, too--as well as shamelessly plug Al Ackerman yet again (because of the kickbacks he's been sending me). It looks like I'll need a part two to handle these duties.