Small Press Review, Volume 35, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2003

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Modern Haiku, Volume 34.1, Winter-Spring 2003.
Lee Gurga, Editor
100 pp; Pa;
Box 68, Lincoln IL 62656.
www.modernhaiku.org
1-yr. sub. (3 copies) $21.

Sack Drone Gothic
Al Ackerman
16 pp; 2003; Pa;
Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $6.

Writing To Be Seen: Book and Related Arts by Visual Poets
K.S. Ernst and Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Curators
20 pp; 2003; Pa;
Kathy Ernst, 13 Yard Avenue, Farmington NJ 07727. $12.50.

First off, let me apologize for not getting my column for the January/February issue of Small Press Review in on time. I somehow got it into my head I had an extra month to do it in that I didn't have. My column should be in every issue from now on, however: I've instructed Len to just re-publish one of my old columns sdrawkcab if I'm ever late again.

Okay, now to the catalogue for the "Second Wave" exhibit my recent columns have been about.. I had hoped to spend the rest of the year praising it, but new Important Announcements I have to get to have intervened. Hence, I must finish my review of it with just few randomly-chosen samples from those of its pages I didn't cover before: (1) a quotation from Richard Kostelanetz's One Night Stood: "I didn't// Again, later"; (2) a poem from Larry Tomoyasu's Between: "in tornado weather the sheets stay out/ to field, curse sudden against the/ electrified smell of the sky." and (3) a poem by Mikhail Magazinnik from the first issue of the magazine, Koja: "March bride the groom/ Kill bugs the spray/ Bell toll the wed/ Sky land the grey." The rest of the catalogue's contents are at the same level as these (whatever you think that level is), trust me.

My Important Announcements will also reduce my return to the symposium in the title of my series to this single paragraph. Its subject: Saturday, 27 September 2002, the day of the presentations. They were given simultaneously in two different rooms, so I missed the following: a talk by Robert H. Jackson about William S. Burroughs' Influence on Recent Writing; Bill Austin's "Against Formalism: Experiments with Internality," which Dave Baratier described to the Poetics List on the Internet as a "poetic tribute to (the) Avant-Garde (which) deconstructed major paradoxes of its eternally vanishing identity, and its relation to form and desire"; one of Michael Basinski's amazing performances "smoothly mining all visual, semantic and sound associations from the dense texture of his quite funny visuals, made with/from the most "democratic" materials like regular markers and cereal boxes," according to Baratier; Geoffrey Gatza's, "Tantalum: The Congo War Interpreted Through Consumer Acuity," which mixed corpo-speak, langpo and visual poetry; a John M. Bennett reading; a Jesse Glass reading which included sound pieces influenced by the Japanese white noise scene; Michael Peters's "Wholesale Form: An Attack on the Corporate Form" which Igor Satanovsky described on the Internet as "a sonic assault and atmosphere of serious nervous restlessness and paranoia, moving on to dissect means of corporate invasive mental domination"; a talk by Columbus small press editor, Jennifer Bosveld, on "Poetry as Extreme Sport: Difficulties on the Road to Invention"; and readings by Peter Ganick and Joel Lipman that I was unable to find out much about except that they went well. More next issue.

There. Now, finally, my Important Announcements. My first is "Whether you are out of work or suck/ Gush/ On, gush on, you loofa belt. E.g. the air." Which is to say that Al Ackerman got loose again, this time in the pages of a thing called Sack Drone Gothic, which is a "'Heroic' Hack . . . drawn from various John M. Bennett poems." And very funny while farthingaling any receptive mind hostier for burstnorm poetry by being in a weird rich way poetry its own self. (Note: a farthingale, which I was writing about just now in something for another literary magazine, is a young shoot of a tree that was used to make skirts jut out at the hip in Elizabethan times.) An even more important announcement is that Kathy Ernst's Press Me Close has recently published a catalogue of the exhibit she and Marilyn Rosenberg curated at The Center for Book Arts in New York last fall. It has a picture of ME on the front (in full color!), so well worth the asking price. The catalogue has excellent color reproductions of most of the works in the show, two to five (usually three) from each of the following: Guy R. Beining, David Cole, Kathy Ernst, William L. Fox, Me, Scott Helmes, Crag Hill, Bill Keith, Karl Kempton, Joel Lipman, Marilyn Rosenberg, Carol Stetser and Karl Young. I was on the cover as co-editor of Writing To Be Seen, the anthology of visiotextual art the show was promoting. My final announcement is that the winter/spring issue of Modern Haiku has two fascinating full-color haiku-collages in it by Chris Gordon. It also contains an excellent long essay on the influence of haiku on the French between 1850 and 1930 or so. In other words, it appears that the new editor of Modern Haiku, Lee Gurga, is keeping Modern Haiku as superior to just about every other poetry periodical going as it was under the editorship of Robert Spiess (whose death in March of last year I regret taking so long to mention, for he was quietly a pviotal figure in American Poetry for a good many years).