I don't know how else Peter Ganick started the millennium at his Potes & Poets Press, but one thing he did was publish a glossy- paperbacked 591-pager by Jim Leftwich called Doubt. On the basis of this alone, he can retire his press for at least the decade (but just yesterday I read a review of another similarly large book that he's published, this one by Ivan Arguelles). Doubt is a midlife masterwich by one of our finest wordjunctors minus only his high flair for visio-textification (often most chargedly apparent in the collaborations he's done with John M. Bennett). Which is to say that Doubt is all conventional words.

It begins, introductorily, "Constructs him against long views among differences to say that aside from the poetry of nature a ritual poem relies on voice to divulge every aspect of admitted proof," which (once you've reread it slowly enough) reasonably well states what Leftwich is doing, in part, in this book, and demonstrates the kind of (slightly) slant syntax he most uses in it. However, his prose--or, more exactly, his evocature (which is what I call prose that sounds and acts like poetry but isn't)--relies mainly on the (extreme) jump-cut, or sudden, limitedly rational change of subject: e.g., "The eye of a potato. Quechua, who the Spanish could call plunderer. Knotted cords of different thickness and colors."

No space to say more about Doubt than that (1) I haven't read all of it yet but it looks like one of those books that you can dip in and out of for a lifetime, enlargeningly; (2) much of it is paragraphless, but many oasises containing separated aphorism-like statements, or near-statements are provided; (3) high points include the discrete line, "Leaves light sounds in breath," which can mean that leaves ignite sounds in breath, which is wacko but, for me: whew! (4) Leftwich also has a discrete line, "The useless hindrance of expressivity," to which I retort: (a) "the wonderful aethetic usefulness of hindrance," and (b) "I dunno why so many language and post-language poets deride expressiveness but use words which can't not be expressive since they are symbols invented for that purpose" (which is to say that this line of Leftwich's pushed one of my pop-off buttons); and (5) the last two numbered pages of Doubt are otherwise blank, but its last page is completely blank, none of which, I'm sure, is an accident.

The most recent new zine of untraditional prose and poetry I've seen came out almost a year ago, as I write this. I meant to mention it sooner, but--well, the way I operate, it's lucky I mention anything. The zine in question is called verdure. It's (unofficially) a SUNY, Buffalo, publication by and mostly for students and former students at that university. Its editors say that it "is not intended as a 'showcase' for local poetry, but is rather a forum ('place') in which to arrive as some understanding of the practice-s of poetics. That is, it is a sort of "poetics of poetics," a phrase used by Charles Bernstein when asked at a seminar he was running to define poetics; he claimed, in the words of Alexander and Russo, that "a poetics remains inarticulable because it is a provisional instance." He went on to say that it nevertheless might be located through a "poetics of poetics."

In other words, if I follow, we're back to the romantic notion that poetry is just too livingly tenuous and unique for generalizations about it to be made, which--of course--is nonsense. No reason analyzing how we analyze poetry can't be interesting and fruitful, though. I'm not sure that's what takes place in this publication, but there are informative lit history pieces here, such as an account of women-edited small presses and journals by Russo; an interview of Loss Glazier about his "visual-kinetic" works and the use of the Internet; an interview with Joanne Kyger; a review of a visio-textual art exhibit curated by Johanna Drucker; a list of "recently received" chaps and zines and the like--and scattered poems in the langpo vein. My basic impression (in spite of the stated aim): young folks talking about poetry, with enjoyment--and some perceptiveness. Carry on!

To finish off my column for this issue, I'm going to turn now to Bogg even though it's not as otherstream as most of the stuff I review here--nothing like Leftwich's eruptions here--and even though it gets its mentions elsewhere, but because (1) it's a very nicely-produced magazine of good prose and poetry, and (2) it allows me to quote one of its poems, which I got a laugh out of, Wayne Hogan's "You Can't Say That On T.V.":