Small Press Review, Volume 34, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2002

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Shattered Wig Review, issue # 2, Spring 2001.
Edited by Rupert Wondolowski. 68 pp;
Shattered Wig Press, 425 E. 31st St., Baltimore
MD 21218 (and normals.com/wig.html). $5 ppd.

Teen Cardinal. Mitchell W. Feldstein.
78 pp; 2001; Pa; Shattered Wig Press,
425 E. 31st St., Baltimore MD 21218
(and normals.com/wig.html). $8 ppd.

Tundra, issue # 2, September 2001.
Edited by Michael Dylan Welch. 128 pp;
Michael D. Welch, Box 4014, Foster City
CA 94404 (and WelchM@aol.com). $9.

Those of you who have risen to the "Akron-yellow level" of penis marmelading will well understand why I must pass on the "word" concerning the latest issue of Shattered Wig Review before covering the book and magazine I said I would (if "synka umpha- polkishly") at the end of my previous column. For one thing, there is a delicious sociological diagram on the front depicting the rape by human spacemen of one of a moon-like alien planet's multi-tenacled citizens. For another, its helpful editor, some guy calling himself Rupert, described a deliciously moving conversation he had with some Mormons. He told them, among other things, "how that politician from Louisiana who wrote 'You Are My Sunshine' used to say that yodeling was a form of time travel." The zine features humor, too, such as Nick Jones's "Traveling": "The pattern on the/ Seattle Airport carpet reminds/ me of some bacon," which I have quoted in full. Of course, its theological "plain talk" is, as always, the zine's strong point, as in Al Ackerman's survey of John M. Bennett's sermons (the famed "under the tank bobbin" ones, in fact). These include one called, "Sounds Reasonable," that I especially like, for some reason: "A man came home early from work one afternoon and found his wife in the living room with a naked man. 'Dear, this is Bob G., whose oil wallets giggle with inflation with impaction kinda sodden cleaver,' she explained." Later Willie Smith starts a story, "Jesus needed a pack of smokes." In short, although disparate, sickle-cell anemia is no excuse. There are a lot of wacked out great drawings, too, some worked into comic strips by A. Goldfarb (3 times) and Mary Knot and Beppi, a writer/illustrator team.

Okay, now for the book, Igor Satanovsky's american poetry (free and how), that I promised to discuss. A piece called, "histology of the projectivist's cortex," sets it going. It consists of a diagram of a human cerebral cortex's layers of "Black Mountain," "Projective" and "Objective" cells; one of the Projective cells is shown gaining stimulation from "beat" and "foreign" nerve fibers, which it passes on to "deep image nuclei."

Next comes a dictated prose text, its shortest paragraph saying, "paragraph i want to quote transcend unquote limitations of language given to me as a complete alien body to accept comma to strip on comma to explore," to wryly bring to mind images of accepting and stripping on commas, among other things.

What to say about "4 pieces on the nature of redness" except that I laughed at passages like "honeymoon with a fat lady's gonna last/ until she starts to sing/ but he liked his new girlfriend." Later, in the second section of the two-part book, which is called, "how," Satanovsky concentrates on "recuts," or the mangling of appropriated material into strange, usually comical but also often weirdly lyrical combinations.

Interwoven throughout the volume are illustrations, most of them in two frames, generally with parts of photographically "real" images seen through very disturbed lenses. Among them is a wonderful series of bizarrely paired quotations from well-known poets. Ezra Pound ("Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace") and Edward Lear ("And they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws/ and a lovely monkey with lollipop paws!") are one such pair. The other pairs are Keats and Dante, Pound and Lear, MacLeish and Cummings, Bishop and Robert Lowell, Eliot and Ashbery, and Louis Simpson and Mina Loy.

Another highlight are the poems Satanovsky has created by deleting something like 99% of such canonical texts as Book I of Paradise Lost. Related to these are a group of Shakespeare's sonnets that carry on from d. a. levy's obliterated texts and later ones by John Stickney and others by scribbling out text. Consequently, the first sonnet becomes, "creatures we bear memory: with self Making lies. Sweet, cruel Art tenders the 'else' To the 'and'." A sense of humor still, but much else.

This is true, as well, of Mitchell W. Feldstein's Teen Cardinal, a book of poems that arrived with Shattered Wig Review that seems worth a few words here. Feldstein's poems are less wide-ranging in technique and expressive modalities than Satanovsky's. In fact, they are straight-out specimens of contra-genteel near-prose. But the words are just about always appropriate, the vision strong and accurate. Feldstein's "In thine eyes you are a beauty" is characteristic of much of his collection, for it consists mostly of very short lines, some of them just a word or two . . . wide, mostly unpunctuated, with caps used mainly for the names of patients on some psychiatric ward, or the like, to sarcastically inflate their stature. Most of Feldstein's poems are either sardonic Bukowski-influenced character studies of the down-and-out like this "In thine eyes," or gnomic meditations (for me, at any rate) like "love rules the day (for chris toll)," which I will quote in full:

And that brings me to the end of another column--without the review of Tundra promised in my last column. That's because it got me into my taxonomaniacal zone to such an extent that I wrote a whole column about the size of poems. Read it here, in two months!