I didn't, so took a while for me to adjust to Sprout's severing ties with my press. Eventually, I wrote to a few regular printing companies friends in poetry had recommended to me. I heard back from none, probably because I wanted to print only a hundred copies. I also used the Internet to find other publish-on-demand companies but turned up none but vanity presses. The best of these, Trafford, charges a $500 set-up fee (or more, if you want frills like a listing in their on-line catalogue). It then allows you to buy copies of your paperback for around $7 a copy (for a 200-pager)--for a year. To be able to continue to buy copies of your book after the first year, you need to pay them $84 a year thereafter. I found this last charge inexplicable.

Desperate, I tried to use one such enterprise for volume one of our anthology, anyway--until they demanded a substantial amount of extra money because of the many graphics the volume would use. Finally, two of the contributors to volume one suggested we form a collective and ask contributors to contribute part of the cost of publishing it offset. The others agreed, and one of our contributors, Karl Young, will now be publishing it under his light & dust imprint. I'm going to have to steal $2000 from one of my credit cards, at ungodly interest, to cover what the contributors can't, but we're hoping to sell enough copies to cover most of what I and the others have put in. Meanwhile, volume two is on the back burner of a stove on the farside of the moon. I'm determined to get that out, too, but probably won't be able to for at least a year.

Which brings us, believe it or not, to the catalogue of an Australian visual poetry exhibition. How? Well, five of the six people featured in the show are contributors to the first volume of our anthology, Kathy Ernst, Scott Helmes, Karl Kempton, Marilyn R. Rosenberg and Carol Stetser. The sixth is me. And the catalogue seems to me almost as good a summary of what's been going on in visual poetry in America over the past thirty years as our first volume. At any rate, it presents an excellently compact, quick overview. Two of its six reproductions are in color, too (just one of the anthology's is).

As soon as I saw it, I wanted to review it, even though it's only six pages long. That's because of Kathy Ernst's cover image. It consists of the sentence, "I feel so nice, like thousands of tiny boats," printed twenty-two times right to left and twenty-two times sideways and perpendicular to (and crossing) the right-to- left lines. Most of the lines are in shades of blue, but five are in red. The result is one of Ernst's "quilts." So what do we have? A silly, banal-seeming but absolutely just-right expression of contentment: quilt-warmth, childhood delight (from the tiny boats), harbored security (since many boats are unlikely except in harbors), sea-gentleness (from the colors, and the rhythm of the printing), energetic cheerfulness (from the colors) and, finally, fun, due to the overprinted text's needing to be figured out.

The other pieces are equally charged, however different--and mine isn't the only one with math in it! Carol Stetser's piece combines some algebraic equations with cave paintings and other matter to speak with her usual eloquence of, among much else, humanity's quest for Meaning. Marilyn Rosenberg's piece, all calligraphy as a form of music, is more about the quest for meaningful communication (as I see it), for it rises from wind- blown blotchiness through controlled empty lettering (i.e., outlined lettering) to substantial but still averbal script. There is much more to it I haven't space to consider here. Karl Kempton's contribution is one of his invocations of Vishnu that uses repetitions of one of Vishnu's 108 names to form a gorgeously deep well out of the blank page to speak, among other things, of meaning's rise from nothingness, and Scott Helmes pulls off a wonderfully swirly red and blue and black commotion about "No."

On a little broadside separate from the catalogue, curator Pete Spence has put a negative of Kempton's piece on top of a negative of (part of) Stetser's, and added three doo-dads of his own; the result is a stunning study of the primitive versus final sophistication, and much else. Aside from that, it brought home the advantage visual poetry has over conventional textual poetry for aesthetic appropriation of this sort, which I deem perhaps the best possible way to critique/extend/counter/reverse, and otherwise improvise on, an artwork.