I mention all this as a community service tip to anyone considering publish-on-demand that most of the companies offering it are rip-offs, although the verdict ain't entirely in on the one I'm trying to get to print the anthology. Another I'm in touch with charges nothing to hold your novel, or whatever, on its hard drive, thus making it available to anyone who wants to buy a copy. But it will charge you $12 a copy, plus postage. If someone else buys it for the too-high retail price of $16 plus postage, you get a buck or two royalty. Too high to expect to sell any copies unless you have something so terrific you could have gotten a regular publisher to publish it. But a retailer can get it for $9.60 plus shipping, so if you have a friend who owns a bookstore, as I do, you can get it for that still-damned- high price. The only excuse for using the service, it seems to me, is if you want to use the printed copies as samples. The one good thing about this form of publication is that you retain all rights to your book, so if you can later get a real publisher to take it over, you are allowed to do so. So what I'll probably do with my novel is buy ten or twenty copies of it to shop around.

Originally, I wanted to finish a book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy this summer but got bogged down in a chapter refuting the anti-Shakespeare people whose every argument I felt duty-bound to discuss. There were so many of them, I finally flipped out. Couldn't stand to write no more (though I will eventually return to it, by gawd). To keep my summer from being a complete bust, I decided to write the novel, a sorta James Bond thing with a virtual reality machine central to it, that's nothing but tv-tested action cliches but (my downfall) has a main character with my interests. Today I hit the halfway point. I no longer comprehend my plot so I'm going to have my main character talk about mathematical poetry till I figure it out. I estimate I have about a 40% chance of finishing the thing. Then I'll see if I can save it with superhuman revision.

My sixteen minutes ended five minutes ago, but I'll keep going. I can't let my faithful readers down--and I do have some works to discuss--seriously. One is a book by Joel Chace called Uncertain Relations that consists of a series of poems involving the poet's reflections on his 75-year-old mother, now suffering occasional, possibly stroke-related delusions, interwoven with the poet's memories of an outdoor college chemistry class's notations in colored chalk on a patio's stone slabs that he'd wandered past soon after his mother had had to be institutionalized--with seemingly meaningless facts and statistics from a friend's emails to him jumbled occasionally into the mix. Result: a carnival of science-gone-aesthetic bizarrely playing spring to the winter the poet's mother is succumbing to, and which is spilling into her son--in a larger winter of a universe gone shimmeringly and overlappingly micro- and macro-Heisenbergian. But not without shafts of sardonic humor.

Then there's Blackbird, which is either a (spiral-bound) magazine or the second in a series of anthologies, but a good read--make that, scan--whichever it is. It's all kinds of collages, visual poems, textual poems, illumages and who-knows-whats about blackbirds by art-makers from Russia, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, the USA, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Argentina and Brazil including Theo Breuer of Germany whose politics aren't mine (he thinks gas chambers and electric chairs equally representative of the century just past though one was used for innocent Jews, the other for convicted murderers) but makes up for it with a translation of, and commentary on, a first-rate poem of Paul Celan: "SUSCEPTIVE/ was the one-/ winged hanging blackbird,/ over the firewall, behind/ Paris, high up there/ in the/ poem," to whose Paris/poem alliteration he refers as the "one thing (that) is probably better in the English version" and which he (correctly, when I thought about it) characterizes as "PERFECT."

As for Score #15 and The End Review #2, I'll just say that the former is fuller than ever of A-1 visio-textual matter, and that the other, whose editor, Scott Keeney, has a droll/reflective updating of Stevens's 13 Blackbirds in Blackbird, is on par (i.e., well worth buying) with the previous issue of the magazine, which I reviewed here a year or two ago.