Ganick: ". . . daring neologisms, dangling parentheses and quotation-marks, strange vizpo transductions of renaissance texts with ancient woodcuts, and his finely tuned blocks of poetry/prose." Murphy: ". . . transromantic moments via repetition, fractal shifts, and concentrated stutterance . . . allowing very physical renditions of affection that distill the hearing space from mid-stream frequencies singing fluids of the body to full flower." Nettlebeck: ". . . the true word warrior in a field of the intermediate and scared." Bennett (who isn't entirely in the dark about it all, some of my instruction having taken hold): "(My) body is what is in organic contact with all that is and my writing is an attempt to know that all; to create it. Thus the reversal, concentric, and inside-out structures of these poems, the multiple simultaneous 'meanings'."

The first five lines of my blurb took off from one of Bennett's poems, with many of his words kept in, but I'm no longer sure which poem. It was a serious prank, as, I believe, are many of Bennett's poems--i.e., Bennett's work is not without a sense of humor about the world and itself. Its aim was twofold: to describe my attempt to fashion a blurb and to list some of what I've found, or think I've found, in Bennett, to wit: (1) punnery like "weighs off" for "way off" course (versus the opposite of "off course," "of course"); (2) the lyric in combat with the anti-lyric ("garden spasm"); (3) Murphy's "fractal shifts" as from "blub" to "unblurbable" to "unblurs" to "bulb," which also plays off of (4) Bennett's cyclicity, the early "blub" becoming the later "bulb," and off of (5) his occasional coarse slanginess at expressing primal humanness (e.g., "blubbing")--which returns us to (2), the anti-lyrical "blub" become the flower-or-light-related "bulb"; (6) a lot more I'd better not get into because I still owe some words to the two Richard Kostelanetz books, and the magazine, Koja, that I promised last installment to discuss here. One last clue, though: "Jackson" is Jackson Pollock and Jackson, Michigan, where I and Bennett and Ackerman met each other in person for the first time. Oh, and kudos to Pantograph which, with Mailer Leaves Ham and titles by people like Ivan Arguelles, Susan Smith Nash and Jack Foley, all deserving to be on any sane list of this century's leading poets, has pretty clearly become the leading otherstream publisher in this country.

Now to Kostelanetz. His Three-Element Stories consists of three-word (or equivalent) stories, their elements scattered across the page in resonantly reader-editable disarray, among them the lyrical "abroad/ afar/ anon . . ." and the doubly minimalist, "A/ J/ R"; his other book, for which I have no publisher or price, so didn't list at the top, is called Tran(i/s)mations, with its "i" super-imposed on its first "s." It works the word-game in which a word is changed into other words, a letter at a time. One such sequence goes through over thirty such changes to get amusingly from "zoo" to "men" (but, oops, has at least one typo, and at least one duplicated word).

Koja has on its cover a wonderful sur-fractal nude male by Igor Satanovsky that is also suggestive of reaching fingers. Inside, a droll visual poem by Irving Weiss, "The Trojan Horse," in which a giant A is depicted with all kinds of tiny lower-case letters partly sticking out of it, appropriately introduces the magazine's contents. Also within are "Playboy Dream for 1995/January-December/," a list of women's measurements in various-sized letters by Mike Magazinnik that looks like a model's hour-glass figure; and an absurdist short story, "The First Newton Law," by Alex Galper, which ends after its hero, a high school physics teacher, has made an unruly boy recite Newton's laws to the class while the teacher sodomizes him. We leave the teacher contentedly musing on how unforgettable he has made Newton's first law to the class: "A good teacher could really make a difference. He really liked his job." Koja is an uneven mix but wide-ranging, and definitely up-and-coming.