Catching Up, Again
Small Press Review, Volume 33, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2001
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Bothand, the Warrior. Matrice Kubik. 44 pp.; 2001. Xtant Books, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville VA 22903. $7.
End of the Ceaseless Road. Will Inman.
xtant one, September 2001.
Hunkers. John Crouse.
Koja, vol. 3, Fall 2000.
MOOL3Ghosts. Michael Basinski. 21 pp.; 2001
Score, vol. 16, Fall 2001.
Strange Things Begin To Happen When A Meteor Crashes Into The Arizona Desert.
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Lots of things to review this time around. First--because
there're things by ME in it, but also because it's an issue of a
magazine that's been presenting admirable work for nearly fifteen
years, and because it's notably anthological about a variety of
quite valuable but generally under-esteemed poetry--is Score 16.
Its theme, stated on its cover, is "the largeness the small is
capable of." Editor Crag Hill uses two or three hundred poems of
five lines or less from the huge number of such poems that editor
Crag Hill has been collecting since the mid-eighties to
demonstrate it. Of the many, many poets involved, here are the
names of just the ones on pages 46 and 47: Judith Roche, James
Rossignol, Andrew Russell, Steve Sanfield, Thom Schramm and Hal
Sirowitz. Among the many many poems are full): Ed Conti's "On
and Off," which consists of two large O's, one with a little n
inside it, the other empty; gary barwin and jwcurry's
"snow/falls//taste/buds"; Robert Grenier's "someone than
someone"; Steve Tills's "POEM 189": "The ultimate revenge./ Send
a mirror." The issue also contains several (short) statements
about such poems.
Next is xtant, because it is almost all visio-textual art, half
of it from other countries. Christian Burgaud's richly swirling
op-art pieces, most of them doing intriguing things with the
letter E, using techniques reminiscent of Bill Keith and Karl
Kempton, particularly appealed to me. I also much enjoyed Tim Gaze's conceptually resonant but also visually absorbing series
of pictographic texts with what I'd call "over-scribbles." This
he aptly calls "Old European vs. The Tao." Others contributing
excellent work to the issue include John M. Bennett, John Crouse,
Pete Spence, Malok, Tim Gaze, Ficus strangulensis, Jessica Smith,
and Marcia Arrieta.
Xtant is also putting out chapbooks such as Hunkers, by John
Crouse, and Bothand, The Warrior, by Matrice Kubik. The
former consists of one-page scenes in which "Me" and "You"
exchange one-line sex-centered, langpo utterances (e.g., "Me:
Personal once upons want balls snuggled at doubled loop ripe
breasts. You: Recharge different. Me: Rooms in a motherfucking
crater. You: Freuds cunt. Me: Loom farthling some must be
undercouch cushions worth past."); the latter is similarly free-
association-seeming, but--as you would guess from its title--more
narrational (but with no swords in it, I don't think).
Another periodical that features burstnorm poetry is Koja. Its
visual poetry, such as its art director Igor Satanovsky's
fascinating melds of graphics and quotations from famous poets
(e.g., "Our South," which combines a wacked-out rendering of a
set of extraterristrial Siamese twins with quotations from Ezra
Pound and Edward Lear), is mostly right at the border between
captianed graphics, on the one hand, and illustrated poetry on
the other, but has a good deal of energy. It also has a nice tribute by Satanovsky and editor Mikhail Magazinnik to Richard
Kostelanetz and Konstantin K. Kuzminsky ("2 irritators the hell
out of academics"), who turned sixty last year--and much else of
worth, including an amusing 21-page absurdist play by Vladimir
Sorokin, translated by Magazinnik, Dotoevsky-Trip, which is about
getting a "word-fix" of pure Dostoevsky.
Then there are two new books by the prolific Mike Baskinski,
Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the
Arizona Desert and MOOL3Ghosts. It's hard to characterize the
first, whose text ranges from what look like capsule descriptions
of movies or television stories (e.g., "a washed-up prize fighter
tried to make a comeback and strange things begin to happen when
a meteor crashes in the Arizona desert") to Basinskian
langpo/sound poetry like "ich to OyooloougoOst/ Ollosionoo
OmpororessOo . . ." accompanied by weirdly appropriate drawings
that mostly seem from lost civilizations, earthly and extra-
terrestrial, or from fields like alchemy. It's the kind book one
can sensualize all sorts of voyages out of, and never repeat one,
however many times one returns. The other book is all squares of
text using numerous kinds of typography including Hebrew letters,
hearts, little flowers, to mangle the central text just near
enough to incoherence to achieve the kind of dancing such sudden
whats? as "dclovercloven" become for those in tune with
Basinski's way with words and typo-clutter.
The final item from my box is a book from 1999 by Will Inman, End
of the Ceaseless Road, that I should have mentioned here before
this, and wish I had space to do more with than quote the first
few lines of its author's introduction. But they should be
enough to convey Inman's style and outlook, and confirm the
validity of my belief that he's one of our very best poets, and
still going strong. They also seem to me a fine short apologia
for any life of poetry: "I've done a lot of walking in my life,
and while the longest and latest road has been the Way of Words,
I bring foot-rhythms, syncopations of rush and stop short, hoist
and heel, to the path.
"Every turn of the way, like every new line, lets me know what is
known in me that I didn't know was there. No resolution comes
except in the bliss or dismay of new discovery, proof that in
every variation, central unity manifests."
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