But somehow Kenneth Patchen is one of its poets, so maybe whoever writes about him will give a line or two to visual poetry. Or there will be something on it in the entry for E.E. Cummings-- though probably not in the entries for three of his poems that will also be included since they will not be his visually innovative ones, just the easy-to-like anthology pieces like "i sing of olaf glad and big." Oops, I almost forgot--editorial advisor John Hollander has an entry (as do two of his works) and he's done shaped poems that, technically, have to be considered visual poems, I guess, though their shapes are only decorative, as far as I can see. I'm sure they'll get a line or two of coverage.

Meanwhile, the second edition of Richard Kostelanetz's A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes is out. I don't yet have a copy, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't mention at least fifty American poets that the Hudson "encyclopedia" doesn't, and no more than a handful that it does. A related piece of news is that Crag Hill and I are processing material for two volumes of a multi-volumed anthology of visual poetry and related art (Writing To Be Seen: an anthology of later 20th-century visio-textual art). We hope to do five or more volumes covering ten to twelve poets each. I can almost guarantee that no one in them will be discussed in a book like EAP for at least another thirty years.

Okay, enough of my sputtering. It's time to go on to something more interesting, such as the following poem, which is from F. J. Seligson's Vietnam Diary, a series of lyrical (albeit mutedly socio-politically bitter) haiku about a father and daughter holiday excursion (it would appear) through Vietnam:

Other recent good news from my part of the woords, as Mike Basinski or Geof Huth--or both--would say, is the recent publication of various artworks, profiles, interviews and features from twenty years of Judith Hoffberg's decidedly non- EAPian journal of museum art, mail art, book art (in particular), and even visual poetry (including a particularly informative ten-page interview of British visual poet Paula Claire), among much else. In a very attractive glossy cover. A must-have for anyone with a genuine interest in the arts.

Then, speaking of Mike Basinski, there is the third issue of his (14-year-old) daughter Natalie's zine, Basinski, that would get my vote for best zine of the last year of the twentieth century if only for its labeling itself a "Zine of the Arths." It's got quite a variety of interesting stuff starting with a dopey-in-the-best-sense mix of graphics and nutto prose narrative by Jeff Filipski. Its graffiti-like but not amateurish cartoon melange covers a third of its text, making it inpenetrable to standard rationality, but it has swamp cabbage, a lion and cold beer in it.

Next are four pages by NBB (Nancy Burr) of highly sophisticated scribbles into the deepest secrets of pre-language's struggle to become language, both in history and in any contemporary individual's mind. A fifth page of NBB's is a xerox of cut-out single short lines of text about "you" with thread carefully, then black lengths of paper wildly, woven through them, and a handlike outline emerging up from them, grabbing for what could be flung scarves. I could well steal from this, which is my highest compliment for any artwork.

A poem by Ed Kelleher follows that uses a kind of textual version of Philip Glass's minimalistly repetitive technique that makes a dumb-starting poem about whether "Ed" is "still there in the ground" become a very undumb-feeling lament by its end. And three imitations of Hopkins by Kelleher that--well, one of their lines is "Their mystery must have missed me, Miss." But they have a way of deepening if you give them a chance to.

I'm running out of room, so of the other good things in Basinski, I'll only be able to get to Mary Begley's very absorbing visual poems (that remind me a bit of Mike Miskowski's stuff, mainly because, like his, they come out of a computer with that kind of squarish jitter such work has--and which can be very effective, exploited the way Mary exploits it here to suggest a kind of background mechanicalness to unregiment out of, or try to, or to somehow marry (as in her "bunches of love"). Okay, I'll admit here that I may not know what I'm talking about--but I'll stand by my main point, which is that Mary's pieces have and exploit computer-awkwardnesses successfully.

And with that yet another installment of my column endeth.