That out of the way, I have two new anthologies to discuss. The first especially pleases me, for many of its contributors, and its editor, are of the latest generation in visio-textual art--people in their twenties and early thirties--though there is a wide, wide range of artists represented in it (including me). And it looks like derek beaulieu, its editor, is well on his way to becoming the jwcurry of his generation of Canadians. Not only is his selection first-rate, but it looks like he put a lot of thought, aesthetically-sensitive thought, into the packaging of each of the items in it (for instance, pairing my mathematical poem with a similarly-shaped one by Karl Kempton). What follows are some notes about a few randomly-selected pieces from the anthology to give you an idea of what it's like.

Problem Pictures, by Spencer Selby. Frame 1: "refuse/// to see," in crisp, large lettering, formal & clear, over/under an indeterminant background that looks like a detail, hugely blown up, from a conventional representational photograph. Frame 2: here the textual layer is cut off at the sides, the graphic layer enlarged beyond the ability of its printed dots to blend to become just-decipherable as possible trees filling the far edge of a possible field with a certain, albeit very roughly represented, woman in it, between the textual matter, a second kind of woods . . . Frame 3: another enlarged reproduced photograph over/under "Ludicrous pro-/ portion between immense possiblity,/ and the result." An explanation, to a degree, of the frame to the left, with the woman in it. Frame 4: the text here is, "below the/ burden of/ our choice"; the graphic, two men shown from the rear who seem to be moving forward through what may be high grass; it is distortedly over-expanded like Selby's other graphics and, also like them, in vigorous tension with the crisp print of the textual layer over or under it. So, two on foot, into, or out of, or through, textuality, toward some "immense possibility"; and we have jump-cut textcollagic poetry, developing sudden by-images of some force as it depicts, at the same time that it draws us into, an archetypally tangled search for meaning.

Steve McCaffery has contributed two wrynesses, one of them a cartoon of the left half of an H which is thinking, "form," while its separated right half thinks, "content." This happens, as the title tells us, at the specific time of 4:46 PM 8/11/77. McCaffery's other piece shows what looks like a not-too- interesting design of squares and short, wide rectangles, the latter mostly to the right, the former mostly to the left and growing larger as they descend. The words, "see," and "sea" cross the page in fairly large type. Toward the bottom is a third word, "seize." To its right the lowermost and largest of the squares encloses the lowermost of the rectangles. With reflection one should SEE the puzzle turn lyrical-deep as vision assimilates--as well as contains like a sea--the sea . . . at the same time that "seize" does something verbally comparable.

Jennifer Books's piece here consists of fragments of letters that move in and out of identifiability. The main draw here (for me) is the use of color, for Books delicately forms her partial-letters via cross-hatching in various colors, sometimes using one color for a letter's vertical lines, and another for its horizontal lines. The result is not only pretty, but (literally) vibratory. And we have what seems to me a textual illumage (although I can make out, I think, the word, "MAP") in which a merely arresting non-representational design is kept marvelously from dissolution--is held at its center--by just-enough-textuality . . . or a sense of some language which underlies all things drawing chaos toward meaning.

Another exciting, however simple-seeming, use of color occurs with three texts excerpted from Johanna Drucker's The Public Life of Language that Jill Hartman of Semi-Precious Press in Calgary has printed on three different-colored transparencies. The use of color hints at what printing on colored transparencies, and reading various combinations of the texts, one on top of another, against the light, might do for poetry--which Drucker's near-prose isn't. But I did enjoy the following punwork amongst its jump-cut condescensions toward mass-taste and mass-thought: "brought straight into the CAPITAL from the outlying districts/ FRESH AS/ PAINT/ nation state/ the brain aches/ looking in its/ pockets for/ change."

There is much much more in this collection, enough for one of the commercial or university culture magazines to devote five to ten thousand words to reviewing, if there were a commercial or university culture magazine with any genuine interest in what's going on it poetry using techniques that weren't in wide use fifty or more years ago.

The latest O!!Zone anthology of what its editor calls "visual poetry" is au currant, too, but I have space only to say it's a fine collection, some of it textual and graphic, some of it graphic only, but little of it both verbal and visual enough to qualify as visual poetry.

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And now the report from two days after I wrote the above--isn't the suspense killing you? It is, happily, that my PSA level is down, so it looks like I may get through this year without croaking, or having anything major done to me medically. And mine column shalt continue. Urp.