The Latest Otherstream Anthology
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Loose Watch: A Lost And Found Times Anthology,
edited by John M. Bennett, Paul Holman
and Bridget Penney. 205 pp.; 1999; Pa;
Invisible Books, B.M. Invisible,
London WC1N 3XX United Kingdom. $20, ppd.
Comprepoetica, Sitemaster: Bob Grumman.
http://www.oocities.org/SoHo/Cafe/1492
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Imagine my chagrin when I found C. Mulrooney, my arch-enemy's,
name in the index of this jenoo-inely profeshun'ly selected and
produced collection of material--mostly poetry, some of it
visual, but also collages, drawings, cartoons, textual illumages
and comic essays--from the first 39 issues of Lost & Found Times (August 1975 to November 1997). I was listed in the index, too, though, so I forgave the editors. A lot of other names were there: around 170, from Al Ackerman to Christina Zawadiwsky. If more than two or three of these have had anything in an anthology published by a commercial or university press, I'd be amazed. If more than two or three of these didn't better deserve to have had something in an anthology published by a commercial or university press than ninety percent of those who have had something in one, I'd be amazed. If more than two or three of these ever has anything in an anthology published by a commercial or university press (before the year 2020, that is), I'll be amazed.
The stars of the anthology are John M. Bennett, and Ackerman
(both under more than one name--unless my zeit-fungus informant
from Pluto has deceived me yet again), Bennett with something
like fifty pieces, and Ackerman with about a third as many, but
making up for it with two- and three-page installments of his
"Ack's Wacks" essays. This is as it should be as Bennett co-
founded Lost & Found Times (with the painter Doug Landies, who suddenly, prematurely died of a heart attack when the magazine was only a few years old), and has always been the main
contributor to it, and Ackerman has, from nearly the beginning,
been its humorist-in-residence. Both, moreover, are leading
figures in our literature.
Among the other contributors, a small, deservingly top-drawer
clump including Jim Leftwich, Sheila E. Murphy, Jake Berry, S.
Gustav Hagglund and Susan Smith Nash are represented by five or
more pieces; a larger scatter by two-to-four; and the rest
(around a hundred) by one apiece.
Loose Watch begins with a reproduction of the first issue of Lost and Found Times, which, according to Bennett, "was a conceptual stunt dreamed up (by him and Landies): a sheet of fake lost and found notices to be slipped under the windshield wipers of cars in the parking lot of Graceland Shopping Center," which was near Bennett's home. It was also distributed postally as mail art. Characteristic of the notices in it are the following: "LOST: I lost my prized goat bladder dress gloves at the Spring Nurses' Dance. If you took them by mistake please return them. No questions asked. 321-1703" and "FOUND: Unmarked carton filled with catheads. Claim immediately! 999-3267."
The rest of the anthology is arranged chronologically. Hence,
it informatively documents the evolution of the otherstream over
the last third of this century. It does this most valuably, I
think, in the case of Bennett. For example, it allows us to
compare the last stanza of an early three-stanza Bennett poem:
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In the basement he filled a box with cockroach poison thought his hair was growing stiff and saw a light spiraling on the furnace; he grabbed his tools, fell on the stairs I'll have to change my plans he thought the hammer speeding toward his face
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with a complete poem from twenty years or so later:
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TEXT
Fort rain, night of howling, rumble in the
TRAVEL
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Note the carry across the years of visceral concern, especially
with physical pain (being hit with a hammer, biting bricks); and
"wrong" line-breaks from the slightly wrong one at "and" to the
very wrong break at "the." A lexicon of relatively commonplace words persists. A different sanity from most people's is obvious in both samples, too, and in practically all of Bennett's work--a sanity based in dream-logic (a dream-logic explicitly in a previous stanza of the poem the first sample is from, which starts, "Later he dreamed a toaster, electric green/ smoke towering out of it, he was/ walking behind the shopping
center . . ." Bennett's poems, I might add, are rarely far from
shopping centers, hoses, sheets . . .
On the other hand, an advance toward what I'd call higher poetry
is evident: more is happening more concentratedly in the later
sample, and Bennett's text has moved from colorful imagery to
colorful metaphors; most craft-extendingly, the lazy punctuation
(no periods) of the early sample has been replaced in the later
by sophisticatedly expressive use of odd punctuation--note, for
instance, the series of initial parenthesis-marks "TEXT" explores
its caverns through down to "choke," the single word of which the
rest of the poem, apparently, is but levels of elaboration . . .
But enough of Bennett--except to say that over the past few
months I've made all my contributions to Silent But Deadly available at my website, Comprepoetica, and they include several analyses of Bennett poems that may be of interest to Bennett scholars, as well as analyses of at least two poems by others that are in Loose Watch.
Among the other often-terrific poems in the latter is one by
Geoffrey Cook that stopped me in my tracks. It consists of the
dark horizontals of a bar code an inch above the faintly-typed
words, "Two Toy Trucks," with another bar code an inch-and-a-half
below that. Why its effect on me? Something about the just-
barely commercially-appropriate type used for "Two Toy Trucks"
all by itself between the long, super-impersonal, super-
efficient, modern market-centeredness of the bar codes spun me
into the escapeful wonder of toy trucks almost become dream-real.
Above the Cook poem is a great poem by John Byrum that begins,
"no a rotate, smudge-pot lotion athwart sunset, scaffolding
mannered" that I would explicate in nothing flat if I hadn't come
to the end of my space.
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