Mad Poet Symposium, Part Two


Small Press Review, Volume 34, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2002
An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
80 pp; 2002; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

An American Avant Garde: First Wave: An Exhibit
Featuring the William S. Burroughs Collection
and Work by Other Avant-Garde Artists
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
48 pp; 2001; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

My previous column sketchily described the events of day one of the two-day symposium put on by Ohio State as part of its An American Avant Garde: Second Wave exhibit. Before going on to day two, I've decided to spend some space on the catalogue for the exhibit, for the more I go through it, the more I feel it provides one of the best summaries of where our most technically adventurous poets have been during the past twenty or so years. It's a gorgeously-produced glossy-paged book whose cover features a spicily wacked-out, menuey collage by Ficus strangulensis of cut-out big short texts (e.g., "$2.19," "Boneless," "Free") on scrambled pages of a small-print Bible.

Just past the title and copyright pages is wonderful visual poem from Jim Leftwich's unfinished Croker Norge (1995): smearings or cut-outs or fragments of plants, I couldn't tell which, but green and brown were the main colors except for the off-white background. In one diagonally-opposed pair of corners charred paper. A little yellow and blue. The whole highly suggestive of nature--leaves, bark, water. But with a precise rectangle outlined in black in the upper left containing at the top, "known as n e a r b y." If that was the extent of its text, I'd call the work an illumage (i.e., work of visual art); the phrase would be its title, no more, although a title up there with Klee's for poetic charge. But the text next says something about "in homonyms of the/ corporal" and two phrases too muddied with paint for me to read on the right, while lower down on the other side of the rectangle one can make out "nect;/ spond/ death is not/ final/ Spicer/ says of/ tempo- /rality and/ spatiality" and more obscured words that make it a powerful poem about death and other things that the graphics more than merely illustrate.

The linearity of the rectangle and a zigzag drawing in black inside it plus the varied typography of the text give the work an intellectuality-to-basic-nature range that I think represents the work in the exhibit about as effectively as anything could. That Leftwich's poem consists of items from more than one expressive modality, some of them fragments or cut-ups, and all of them requiring visceral understanding to make sense of as a whole, connects it, too, to a main underlying theme of the exhibit, and its catalogue: the importance of collage, cut-ups and other disjunctive devices in the work of William S. Burroughs, whose literary effects are archived at Ohio State and who was the central subject of an exhibit at the same library the year before, and in the work of related innovators of his generation such as Brion Gysin.

Leftwich's literary effects are also archived at the library along with such other contemporaries as Scott MacLeod, John M. Bennett, Thomas L. Taylor and William T. Vollman. Sheila Murphy's published works are archived there, too, but not--I don't believe--her other literary effects, at least, to any extent. A bunch of my press's books are there, one of them my own Of Manywhere-at-Once, which made it into the exhibit. A letter of mine, which was among Leftwich's literary effects, is also on exhibit. It's from 1994, not yet ten-years-old. Both it and my memoir are discussed in the catalogue. In the letter, I discuss my "Cryptographiku for Jim L5ftwich," which is one of many minimalist poems reproduced in the catalogue, to make it, for my money, a leading anthology of such poetry (because of the many minimalist poems in it, not because mine is in it, though that definitely helps!):

 


a full wish of a moon

lingering without effect

in the 23 8 5 1 0 0
One result of my discussion of this poem with Jim, who was not able to figure it out, was its revision to:


full wish of a moon

lingering without effect

in the  w i n 20 5 18  14 9 6 4 0
which should be much easier to understand (and is a perfect 5/7/5 haiku, too boot). Don't read the rest of this paragraph if you want to solve it without help! If you want help, the "5" in the title should provide a lot. The "Cryptographiku" there is another big clue. Then there is "win." (Final hint: think about the many meanings of zero.)

Strange to think something I scribbled to a personal friend without thinking that much about it is in a glass case in a large Important Building to be looked at by the general public. On the other hand, I've always had a streak of megalomania, so probably wrote it, as I write most of my letters, at least partially to that public.

On the same page of the catalogue as the entries for me, are three for Peter Ganick which reveal two amusingly different sides of Ganick's work. One is a 1997 manuscript for a book called Flavor. About the poems in this collection, including the following, Ganick says in a letter to Don Hilla of 3300 Press, "I don't think I could write any more poems like these":


manly from the start

over a beer and water

news as text is for concentration upon

the aspects regurgitated by his students
An excerpt shown in another entry for Ganick indicates his more customary sort of poetry:



as th reason for was only language old

nova lesson the slaphappy innocence

tingle th crisis of fringe appearance
John M. Bennett says regarding the longer poem this latter excerpt is from, "here is what goes on inside the mantra, which is present in the poem's rhythm and flow, in its grounded drone or continuo." A nice virtue of the catalogue is its frequent inclusion of pertinent remarks like Bennett's, and one in the same entry by Sheila Murphy, about the poems it features.

Ooops. I see I've about used up a column's worth of words already. Looks like I'll be talking about this catalogue for a while.

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