During the same panel, I got slightly irritated at one point with the ebullient and (nearly always) entertainingly informative and insightful Douglas Messerli, for coming out against critics' attempts to put poets in schools, one of the things I think most needs to be done to allow for intelligent discussion, or even mere visiblization, of all the people effectively craft-extendingly active in poetry today--so long as the placement of poets is done rationally, which--of course--rarely happens.

Highly-visible language poet/critic Charles Bernstein finished off the conference with a mixture of poems and prose, the latter mainly directed against "National Poetry Month" and all it represents--the sort of amusing but rather shallow patter that everyone present would be bound to agree with (unless a few enemies of "alternative poetry" had infiltrated us). Later, at a bar, I shoved up to him and Michael Franco and introduced myself.

We batted his well-known antagonist, my pal Richard Kostelanetz, around a bit. Then Bernstein segued into the Grumman/Perloff affair. He censured me for having attacked people instead of just the contents of Perloff's course on visual poetry; he never attacked people, he said . . . except, he agreed when I called it to his attention, mainstreamers. I bring all this up for the obvious reason that I had no reply at the time but do (I think) now. (The biggest reason I had no reply at the time was that I was mostly on a scouting mission and wasn't prepared to argue much about anything.) My reply: ignoring entire schools of poetry from a position of influence, as I claim he and his allies do, is far worse than attacking them since, of course, attacking people will render them visible, which is all most of us otherstreamers really want. I'd love to be attacked in a major way by him or Perloff.

Which brings me to The Next Word, "an interdisciplinary exhibition of visual art, artists' books, graphic design, and visual poetry," curated by verbo-visual arts specialist Johanna Drucker, a major ally of Bernstein's. It has sometimes seemed to me that Drucker is out to disappear 90% of the best practitioners in verbo-visual art by neglecting to mention them or mentioning them slightingly in her university-published books, and leaving them out of, or dimly-lit, in the shows she curates. Certainly she doesn't do much for them. More likely, however, she's just lazy, knowledgeless and undiscriminating--or, to be nicer, over- extended and lacking time for thoroughness. Not that she ignores everyone whose work in the field I admire in this show. In fact, it includes specimens of Geof Huth's leaflet-art; two collections of visual poetry put out by my outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press: Jake Berry's Brambu Drezi: Book One and Irving Weiss's Visual Voices; and a folder of material by Scott Helmes and others. The jury's out, however, as to whether she genuinely wanted these items in her show or put them in only to please Marvin Sackner, who supplied her with them--and much else--for she barely mentions them, and reproduces none of them, in the essay she wrote for the show's catalogue.

Typical of the superficiality of Drucker's essay is her treatment of Brambu Drezi: for her, it is "obsessive typewriter poetry." But if she had glanced at more than a page or two of it, she would have seen how much more than that it is, for its texts are copiously fused with graphic matter--all kinds of scribbles/maps/sketches/etc.--(as opposed to illustrated by graphic matter, the way most of the other books in her show are). It is also full of mathematical notations, astronomical symbols, medieval alchemistry, prehistoric glyphs, voodooism, and who knows what else. Similarly, Drucker says nothing about the content of Huth's work, and covers Weiss and Helmes with the single statement that "The range of possibilities demonstrated in collections like Irving Weiss's Visual Voices: The Poem as a Print Object (1994) or Seven Poets (1994), edited by Scott Helmes with work by Julian Blaine and Phillip Gallo, among others, shows the fascination which poets invest in the visual, physical form of their work."

She's better a few times, but not by much, as when she comments on the way Clifton Meader's book of uncut pages (i.e., pairs of pages whose outside edges are left joined) with one text on the outside of them, and Biblical texts within, suggests that the Bible is at the core of Western Lit. No mention that Karl Young, for one, was using that technique twenty or more years ago, however.

If you want to find out more about the field, her bibliography won't help much, though it dutifully mentions the two tired old standard anthologies of concrete poetry, Solt's and Williams's, and one good, if short, book on bookworks, Buzz Spector's The Bookmaker's Desire. In short, Drucker's essay is close to worthless as anything more than a list of mostly minor works of contemporary verbo-visual art.