Small Press Review, Volume 34, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2002

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The Chair on the Way to the Fire.
Martin Koenig. 30 pp; 2001; Pa;
Popular Reality, Box 73, Schenectady NY 12301. $5.

I Taught My Dog To Shoot A Gun.
Al Ackerman. 103 pp; 2001; Pa;
Popular Reality, Box 73, Schenectady NY 12301. $8.

I got semi-excited when I saw page one of the September/October issue of American Book Review: it announced a special focus section on "codework," or "the computer stirring into the text, and the text stirring the computer," as Focus Editor Alan Sondheim put it in his introductory piece. At last, thought I, a not-entirely-invisible publication is covering a school of poetry I myself haven't yet come to grips with! The first discussion in the section that I read, which was by Talan Memmott, disappointed me, though. Memmott presented a good brief over-view, I guess--with links to people doing valuable work in the field, notably Ted Warnell. But he failed to suggest that anyone was doing anything very new. Sure, some people, like Brian Lennon, are making formal poetic devices of e.mail devices, like headers, to good effect, and I much like the faster-than- page-turning clicked steps of some of Warnell's pieces, but such innovations seem minor to me (as innovations). Nor does Memmott succeed in making a case for poets like the talented Mez's finding "new uses of textual symbols" that result in a new "form of conductivity." He seems unaware of that such pre-computer infraverbal poets as E.E. Cummings were using punctuation marks expressively, and achieving coinages constructed like Mez's "e-rrelevant" and "distinct[ure]ion" (both of which I much like) years ago.

Memmott and the other contributors to the focus section, McKenzie Wark, Beatrice Beaugien, Belinda Barnet and Florian Cramer, are well worth reading, particularly for the poems and excerpts of poems they use to illustrate their discussions. I haven't space here to treat them a hundredth as fully as they, and "codework," deserve. I do believe they are closing in on something of high value; I just am not yet convinced that it is in any important way yet new. Kudos, anyway, to American Book Review for clearing the way for the discussion of a kind of literature it will take the mainstream at least another ten years to get to (and another ten to do so penetratingly).

Now for another plug for Popular Reality, putting out books again after the revival of the zine of that name a couple of years ago. Its latest two titles, The Chair on the Way to the Fire and I Taught My Dog To Shoot A Gun, are terrific. The first of these consists almost entirely of purposely crude-seeming line drawings sans details (e.g., faces with no eyes, hairlines, eyebrows, mouths except in profile, etc.) and their banal, completely pertinent but somehow disconnected captians. One of the drawings shows a cigarette-smoking deer with a man's body behind a diner counter; it is labeled, "Would you be a deer and work nights at a greasy spoon?" Another, perhaps my favorite, shows some kind of bird in profile speaking to a creature that's nothing but a head-sized shape with spikes, like the Statue of Liberty's crown in outline, from behind, and two lines angling away from the shape to suggest a cape. A few horizontal lines cross in front of the peculiar couple. The highest has a few jags in it to suggest leaves or sunrays; two others make partial boxes or curve one way or another to suggest who knows what. The captian: "Sometimes these things work themselves out." Many of Koenig's pieces, like the latter, somehow resonate with archetypal feelings of dislocation, and are thus--for me--poetic; they are also very funny about taking any part of life seriously, in the tradition of Glen Baxter, B. Kliban and Gary Larson.

As for the Ackerman title, it does nothing to disabuse me of my opinion that Ackerman is the funniest writer I know of in this country. Certainly he is as good at portraying total nuts' incredibly creative (and logical) schemes to wrest beauty and meaning out of life than anyone who has ever written--though Flannery O'Connor at her best comes close to him. He is a master of funny drawing, too: as a depiction of one of his gap-toothed loons, de-focused into at least two faces, and in ravishingly-vivid color is on the cover, and several of Ackerman's drawings in the books interior demonstrate. The stories--well, here's a brief taste: "And I (a girl named Suzy) think that's exactly where fortune turned around for me, opening its arms and welcoming me to a whole new vision and ball game. By the end of the week, once I had put Blind Ka and the garage firmly behind me, I met a wonderful new man, who was part-owner of a used bookstore and knew how to have fun and be sociable and could even play a musical instrument (the snare drum), but who, so far as I could tell, never felt compelled to cover his face with anything more exotic than his own boxershorts, which came hand-picked from the Goodwill," and this found ad from Popular Mechanix, 1951: "OH BOY .. . mom says there's going to be a TELEVISION set in our NEW REFRIGERATOR!"

Drat. I wanted to talk about Tundra, an excellent newish magazine of and about short poems, and american poetry (free and how), Igor Satanovsky's excellent new collection of very funny textual who-knows-whats and weirdly emotion-stirring mergings of lines from famous poems and graphics from who-knows-where, but I've run out of room. You'll have to wait till next issue to find out more, I'm afraid.