From au462@cleveland.Freenet.EduMon Aug 21 11:08:57 1995 Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 10:36:34 -0500 From: Robert Drake To: au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Subject: TRee #6b--chaps ----------------------------------------------------------------- TTTTTTTT AA PPPP RRRR OOOO OOOO TTTTTTT T A A P P R R O O O O T T AAAAAA PPPP RRRR O O O O T T A A P R R O O O O T T A A P R R OOOO OOOO T ----------------------------------------------------------------- Issue #6.0, section b: chaps 2/95 ----------------------------------------------------------------- TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground, and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years, we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio- verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro- Press" publications, primarily language-oriented. This posting is the second section of our 6th full electronic issue, containing most of the short CHAP reviews; the second section contains most of the magazine reviews. We provide this information in the hope that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs. Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at: au462@cleveland.freenet.edu Requests for e-mail subscriptions should be sent to the same address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting-- (a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve). The archive site for back issues is the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo: gopher to: . Our thanks to Loss Glazier et al for maintaining this resource. The paper version of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review material--in issue #6: survey of recent anthologies and local poetry newsletters, features on work by Richard Kostelanetz, Michael McClure, Bern Porter, Harvey Pecar/Joyce Brabner, and excerpts from _Chain_, _Synaesthetic_, and _The Al Ackerman Omnibus_. Plus more. TapRoot Reviews intends to survey the boundaries of "literature", and provide access to work that stretches those boundaries. It is available from: Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107-- $2.50 pp. Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright 1995 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit educational corporation. Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that THE CONTENTS ARE NOT EDITED OR ALTERED IN ANY WAY, and provided that THIS INTRODUCTORY NOTICE IS INCLUDED. Burning Press is supported, in part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council. Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each review: Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Luigi-Bob Drake, R.R. Lee Etzwiler, Bob Grumman, Susan Smith Nash, Oberc, Andrew Russ, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Mark Weber, Thomas Willoch, and Karl Young. Additional contributors are welcome: drop an e-note or send SASE. *** Many thanx to all of our contributors. *** ----------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- THE STANDARD ARTIST STAMP CATALOGUE--PMTTTD Corporation, 4067 Letitia Ave. S., Seattle WA, 98118-1137. 150pp.+, $25.00. When I was a neurotic little bastard I used to collect stamps, but this stamp book of mail art stamps is a thousand times more organized than I ever was. These stamps are the creation of artists, and although they imitate the formats of legitimate post office stamps, they are focused on computer generated acts of existentialism, collages, photo sets of contributing artists, bootlegged images of pornography, pen and ink bursts of madness and insanity, letter-bomb threats, and a thousand warring egos all trying to out-create each other while sticking to a format that looks deceptively sane on the surface. If you found weird stamps on your letters during the 80s, chances are you've seen some of this work before--if you haven't, and you're curious about that "stamp thang" you heard about a few years back, this is a most comprehensive collection.--o Dr. Al Ackerman: THE BLASTER AL ACKERMAN OMNIBUS--Feh! Press, 147 Second Ave. #603, New York NY, 10003. 288 pp., $12.95. Al Ackerman is a kind of Dave-Barry-gone-wrong, prevented by his innate creativity from being satisfied with "family fare." So BLASTER, his first full-length collection, will probably not become a best-seller. On the other hand, it will still be read a million years from now when writers like Barry have long been forgotten. Of course, his readers will all be Vug-Randolphs, the large sentient beetles that Ackerman claims are the true authors of the works of John M. Bennett.--bg Sherman Alexie: FIRST INDIAN ON THE MOON--Hanging Loose Press. $12.00. A mixture of free verse poems and short prose, this collection of Sherman Alexie's work reflects his personal experience as an American Indian raised on a reservation. The prose pieces work best, if only because the free verse is so conventional in style as to be indistinguishable from many other poets' work. In the prose, recounting the stories of his life, Alexie's anger and pain are captured in brief anecdotal moments and disturbing memories. One example: "An Indian man drowned here on my reservation when he passed out and fell face down into a mud puddle. There is no other way to say this."--tw Karen Alkala-Gut: RECIPES: LOVE SOUP AND OTHER POEMS--Yaron Golan Pub., 3 Burla Str., Tel-Aviv, Israel. 64 pp. Karen was raised in America, and now lives in Israel. Breaking the metaphor of silence, she tells us of family deaths and life in a war zone, and of Jewish hearts open to enemies of obligation. Several of her poems deal with the sickness and death of her father. The poems "Night Travel" and "The Train" relates a journey into Germany, juxtaposing Nazi horror and adolescent intrigue. The long journal-poem "Between Bombardments" portrays the trepidation and inhumanity of the Gulf War, of living in the shadows of death and missile attack. Her innocuous honesty and personal revelation brings us to taste her bitterness of violent involvement bound with the absurd. "Instead of his leash/ the dog brings my mask/ to remind me of his walk." This publication touches a deep pulse and reminds us of those the Gulf War personally affected.--rrle Minoa Alloy: NARTHEX--Vortext Editions, PO Box 23194, Seattle WA, 98102. 82 pp., $5.00. The author's intro to this richly infra- verbal work suggests the reader think of its "revealed words" as words "retained upon waking from a dream, hermetic definitions" that you are to "carry... in your pocket, leave... on your nightstand." A number of silences from many strands of history inhabit it, as in "arc arch archae// come the silence." And silencednesses, as when "aria" is crossed out, then followed by "your vague epithet." Later, "aria" reappears--sharing a page with "purge" and "cello/ plant threat." A remarkable amount of inter-and intra-tonality helps one "understand the gone/ trace/ lostre."--bg Miekal And & Elizabeth Was: THE MISSING TEXT OF THE LOST TOWER-- Xexoxial Editions, Rt. 1 Box 131, LaFarge WI, 54639. 38 pp. Combination of surrealism and langpo by And, with subtexts by Was. Nonsense to the logocentric mind, but both the Tower of Babble and more scientifically-plausible sites of language-origin form and unform in the haze of the narrative. "During the archaic there were no physical & mental restraints, no institutional boundaries around logos & all the slight expressions of the subtle universe," says the text near the end-- "And the brass rings" as Liz's subtext puts it at another point to describe the lyrical way the work uncenters us larger.--bg Antler: ANTHEM--Beginner's Mind Press, Kingman Blvd. #6, Des Moines IA, 50311. 1 pg., SASE. A plaintext poem by a Vietnam Veteran stating why he will no longer stand for the National Anthem or the Star-Spangled Banner. Not just angry, but mellowly leading to hopeful thoughts about our country's becoming Ecotopia, whose "flag is the Wilderness/ and (whose) National Anthem is the wind." One of a number of worthwhile broadsides occasionally being but out by this quiet new press.--bg Amari Baraka: FUNK LORE--Open Magazine New Series, PO Box 2726, Westfield NJ, 07091. $1.00. One of Baraka's excellent musicwise and spiritual poems. Originally read at The Cooler in NYC during Reggie Workman's "Word & Music" performances (Workman used to play with Coltrane, among many others). Baraka discovers the blues, their origin in our selves. "In tribes of 12/ bars/ like the stripes/ of slavery/ on/ our flag/ of skin". Music returned to it's source body. A strong dose where you need it.--jb Dennis Barone: THE MASQUE RESUMED--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 15 pp. If not apocalyptic, at least aware of the linguistic ruptures and impossibilities of representations. This collection of poems is stunning--perhaps the influence of contemporary French poetry is somewhat more veiled here than in Barone's other works, which imparts a breathless urgency. Perhaps some of the most subtle innovative poetry being produced today. Guy Beining: STOMA--Aegina Press, 59 Oak Lane, Spring Valley, Huntington WV, 25704. 57 pp., $9.00. For years Beining has been composing a sequence of "Stoma." This collection contains numbers 1701 through 1743 (formidably inter-echoing). A stoma is a minute opening or pore in a surface, and also, in medicine, a "mouth." Beining's Stoma, then, are often simultaneously sensual mouths, and haiku-small openings through the quotidian, generally urban, surface of existence into lyricisms like light frightened into "CLOUD swells" or "the language of snow" whose grammar "buntings correct twig to twig."--bg John M. Bennett: JUST FEET--Texture Chapbook Series No. 13, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 24 pp., $6.00. One out of any two poetry magazines is going to feature John M. Bennett. The guy is a poem writer, relentless. A river. A roaring sea of poems smashing against us humble reader beach eyes and ears. A hurricane rain of cat, dog, giraffe words. John Machine Bennett. And the books everywhere also by the flock and herd. So we have this one: JUST FEET. This is one of Bennett's best. Herein also, two essays on JMB's poetry, one by Jake Berry and one by Bob Grumman (two writers that have some clear insight into innovative poetics). Well, this is a way to go. That's good because writers like Bennett of the boiling underground don't receive enough critical comment. We forget what the poet's poetry is all about. Essays good to get new readers. And for the thick reader that has to be struck in the head with a washing machine or cement ostrich, these essays do it. An innovative idea for a book also to get writers reading each other and then writing and that writing going into the book. More. Collages which match the power of the poems by Brekka Hervey, Susan Smith Nash, and Kelly Vincent.--mb Aloma Bloom & Jessie Gretzinger: STEPS TO FREEDOM--c/o Taggerzine Specials, PO Box 632952, San Diego CA, 92163. 12 pp., $1.00(?). These are playful poems with playful illustrations, and strangely enough remind me of James Thurber. There's social commentary, tons of catholic metaphorical nonsense, relationships fucking up in a strangely stated gentle way, aging and wisdom, and insightful spiritual Zen-like poems that make you think. On the other hand, Zen does no more than love to change the world. Hope is like Heaven, something to believe in until you drop dead.--o E. B. Bortz: VOICES OF A WANDERER--Out There Pub., PO Box 796, Mars PA, 16046. 62 pp., $7.00. An obsessive purity of line and form dominates Bortz's collection of poetry and short stories (the longest of which is about a jaunt into Thailand). The motif here is that of the outsider wandering to various world locations: Singapore, Seoul, Germany, Israel & Montreal, as well as several locations in the USA. The verse is minimalist and melancholy, reminding me of a wanderer infected by a solitary search for something. What is not mentioned. Like a monastic voyeur handing out meticulous images which transcend meaning, the wanderer has almost completely painted himself out of the picture, covering the naked heat of emotion with a refracted mirror of scenes which results in a cool touch. Maybe the author says it best when he ends a short prose-poem with "To suppress the Innerself is to abdicate the living."--rrle Jonathan Brannen: NOTHING DOING NEVER AGAIN--Score, 812 SW Cityview, Pullman WA, 99163. 27pp. +envelope, $6.00. Loose-leaf cardstock in an envelope, each of the 22 panels of this sequence consists of typed repetitions of one of the letters of the title arranged to form a non-representational composition. As the sequence evolves, its range of grays and blacks and sudden occurrences of negative space, and its jolts and whispers of forms in harmony or opposition with each other, slowly turn the nothing that Brannen seems at first to be doing into a permanent everything. If only Brannen did his thing on canvas or the equivalent instead of on pages, he might be getting the acclaim he deserves, for no museumed user of texts in visual art that I know is even a tenth as masterfully not doing nothing.--bg Andre Breton: EARTHLIGHT--Sun & Moon Press, 6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. $12.95. Best known as the spokesman and founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton also wrote poems that are like delicate, exotic jewels. EARTHLIGHT is a selection of his work from seven collections first published in French. For my money, his prose poems are Breton's most interesting work. "Wearing a hooded beige cape, he frolics on the satin poster where two paradise feathers replace his spurs," begins one poem. And it ends: "Just once can't the expression for life trigger one of the aurora borealises they'll use to make the table cloth of the Last Judgment?" Beautiful work. Like dreams should be.--tw Kimberly J. Bright: MAENAD--Fell Swoop, 3003 Ponce De Leon St., New Orleans LA, 70119. 11 pp., $3. A self-described "carnivorous poet," Kimberly affords us an amusing look into her world; a world of Prozac, cosmo girls, tattoos, post-coital remarks (my favorite: "do you always have so many orgasms?"), turning men into suicides, turning men into "sobbing little boys," barbiturate-induced sleep, and similarly interesting perspectives. "We can make it/ look like an accident." She strikes immediate and deep chords with her sparse and direct voice. "I want to/ make your bones into woodwind instruments/ for an all-serial killer orchestra." Her rage and refusal is delicately balanced with sexual and personal torments. Both enjoyable and provocative.--rrle Adam Brodsky: FILM AT 11:00--PO Box 43700, Cleveland OH, 44143. 32 pp., $5.00. One of the more unusual chaps I've read in a while; paginated in reverse, each page containing an abstract gray and white frame surrounding a single question: "If a bomb exploded is it still a bomb?" or a short poem: "I am./ You are./ He, she, it is./ Why aren't they?" A totally gray centerfold, a couple of longer poems, and a bright insert--somehow it seems to work for me, with the reverse pagination acting as a countdown. The commitment here is to contemplation, to diversity, to originality, and to the absurd.--rrle John Byrum: FORK SHIFT--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., Mentor OH, 44060. $4.00. A book of graphically super-imposed texts, in which the bold "foreground" words could be commentaries on, or distillations of, the fainter "background" texts; for example the words "writhing nowhere intentions" appears large and bolder over a passage that begins "if follows clean glass place inclination dust designation ever..." There are some variations on this format, for example several pages in which the bold and faint texts are graphically equal, or there is no bold text at all, etc. It seems to me that there are at least two ways of approaching these enigmatic and non-discursive works: one would be to "read" them as visual mandalas, in which the meditative gaze moves back and forth, in and out in a never conclusive movement of recombining and reordering of the words; a way of reading that is process-oriented and not directed toward "getting the point." The other approach is to consider these works as artistic representations of knowledge (or "reality") as it is increasingly manifest in the "information" age: that is, these works are a metaphor for knowing as a multi-layered process, and not as a static body of facts and structures. The book is cleanly and simply presented, and includes a note of "sources," which are all dictionaries. Highly recommended.--jmb Robert Caldwell, Eric Dietz: THE FOUR FOOD GROUPS--Anaconda Press, PO Box 146640, Chicago IL, 60614. 12 postcards, $4.00. Andy Lowry, the person behind the wild adventures of Anaconda Press, bursts out of her latest explosive frenzy with a dozen postcards by Robert Caldwell and Eric Dietz. The focus is on the four food groups: alcohol, sugar, fat and caffeine. The cards scream slogan feasted rants, and the combination of stark graphics from minds polluted by years of abuse of the four food groups attacked leave one with a strange inner fear that you might be next. Pictures of Klansman eating lard, killers on three day vodka binges, child molesters, and coffee addicts litter the turf, and are only a sampling of the illustrations and the edge they rip across. These postcards carry a dark humor, and a viciousness nastiness, that have to be seen to be appreciated.--o Clint Catalyst: CARESSES SOFT AS SANDPAPER--Papershred Productions, 4104 24th Street #254, San Francisco CA, 94110. 48 pp., $4.00(?). For a poetry chap with mixed illustrations from a dozen plus illustrators , and poems that capture the wild long strokes of heated lubricated love making, this is a fine introduction into a poet who's on a road filled with either self pitying whoa is me bitterness, or extreme insight into the human condition. I don't know, man, maybe I've always been a cynical asshole expecting the worse, but I thought that these poems needed to go a step further. Perhaps castrations and mutilations, or self destructive rituals, would have over-ridden the youthful angst. Perhaps a more in perspective point of view is what I look for when the world starts to get that looking bad kind of misery blues.--o Cydney Chadwick: NOUN DESCENDING A FIRE ESCAPE--Laughing Horse Broadsides, PO Box 2328, Norman, OK, 73070-2328. 1 pp., $1.00. "Noun Descending a Fire Escape" explores the perversity of gender role-constructed bondage, as a woman becomes disenchanted with her snoring lover, "especially after you discover a whole wad of money stashed away in his shoe box." A tableau-vivant that reminds one of French new-wave cinema, Godard's Breathless or Louis Malle's more recent incest-insinuations in Damage.--ssn Ana Christy: REAL JUNKIES DON'T EAT PIE--Alpha Beat Press, 31a Waterloo St., New Hope PA, 18938. 66 pp., $10.00. Ana's admiration of her beloved Beat roots is unabashed--road poems stretching frm Greenwich Village to Haight St., western haiku ala Kerouak's Mexico City Blues, Bebop & drug references... even the book itself imitates the package of a City Lights Pocketbook. Her opening poem is titled "My Notebook," and that seems an apt description for much of the work--picturesque details and clean colloquial language. But unlike the best Beat writing, this too often fails to soar--careful observation and recording, but without the passionate insight or resounding echoes of the originals. Not bad work, but falling short of what you'd expect from the self-proclaimed "poet of the counterculture and queen of the underground."--lbd Glenn G. Coats: THE BIG ZANY--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $2.00. A set of nature-rural poems based on a Canadian myth surrounding a man known as "Zany." "The hull/ of his boat/ was like/ his face:/ brown, lined/ weathered." Using precise evocative descriptions we are guided through an imaginary Zany's world of "hawks/ and herons," rivers and small lakes, pickerel and walleye, birch and hemlock. Here nature takes on a haunted, surreal specter, "There are no footsteps,/ only water slipping/over rocks" and Zany is the specter, never appearing except in shadows of the mind.--rrle Edmund Conti: HIC HAIKU HOC--The Poet Tree, 82-34 138th St., #6F, Kew Gardens NY, 11435. 23 pp., $3.75. Some amusing parodies of traditional haiku (for instance: "Okay, all you frogs/ Everybody out of the pool/ And form three lines."), and other pieces of light verse, many of them quite infraverbally adventurous, like "Open Every Day Except Sunday": openopenopenopenopenopenope In short, my kinda stuff.--bg Barbara Cramer: A CHILD OF DREAMS--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $2.00. Barbara Cramer is a Colorado poet with an eye for the rigorous moment, and a voice of self-conscious narrative. She narrates in varied lines her inner feelings mingled with a patient considerate life. Christian elation regionally based and honest. Often starry-eyed, and sometimes expansive: "People will adore me./ fear me,/ worship me,/ for I am sacred" she states describing her mystical personification as lightening.--rrle Simon Cutts: FOR MARIE BOURGET--Tel-Let, 1818 Phillips Pl., Charleston IL. 9 pp., $3.00. Three very stiff white pages that seem blank until you realize that a line has been indented on each page as though typed by a typewriter with no ribbon. The lines say, "the only texts/ I ever write/ were the titles," which is droll, and it's probably wrong of me to give the whole book away like this, but I haven't, because what counts here is not so much what the text says, but what it is and feels like in such a context. This work is not a poem, or just a poem... it is a Book!--bg Tony D'Arpino: PATANJALI'S TOES--Found Street, 2260 S. Ferdinand Ave., Monteray Park CA, 91754. $2.00?. Two clearly expressed poems presented on a small folded broadside, both of which deal with a sense of mythic presence emerging: The sex scene in the center of the book lifts off the page like a child's tattoo. The furnace in the yogi: a description and dossier of seasons. --jmb Marilyn Dammann: EPHEMERAL EARTHWORKS--PO Box 115, Baraga MI, 49908. 48 pp., $10.00. Twenty-four well printed photos of outdoor sculptures, most made of bark and driftwood. Pieces constructed by gravity and placement in snow without artificial fasteners. Pieces work with light and snow: the moving shadows of the wood are as important as the wood itself. Hence, time figures into the work in two ways: transience, and time marked by movement of shadows. Sound a bit like Stonehenge? It should: much of Dammann's work takes ancient lyths as points of departure, and she has made stone cairns on the shores of Upper Michigan and along the coast of Ireland. Unlike grandiose earthwork sculptors, Dammann avoids violation of nature, works according to seasons, and makes sure her work leaves nothing behind that might not be there already. Several sculptures are nothing but marks in snow--as ephemeral as art can get. But we have these haunting photos, which Dammann rightly calls "visual poems."--ky Gary David: A LOG OF DEADWOOD--North Atlantic Books, PO Box 12327, Berkeley CA, 94701. 139 pp., $9.95. Poetry of historicity--the result is somewhat tame because of its self- consciously academic nature, but interesting nonetheless. Maybe it's the cowboy in it all. Deadwood refers to the Dakota gold mining rough-n-ready times, in fact, the book purports to be a "Postmodern Epic of the South Dakota Gold Rush." David owes much to Edward Dorn, whose Gunslinger echoes throughout these pages. David's work reminds me of another poet, Bill Sherman, whose surreal meditations upon Old Mesilla bring out the gothic & the grotesque lurking in every ghost town.--ssn Corrine DeWinter: WISHCRAFT--Arrow Pub., PO Box, East Long Meadow MA, 01028. 32 pp., $2.00. This is Ms. DeWinter's second chapbook, and it is crosshatched with eroticism and death, affection and obsessed lust, magic and myth. She wrenches her images through a screen of incantation, "I have danced far and wide and moved no heart." A floating desperation prevails, wistful yet persistent, "Come out into the light and sing/ Your superstitions, come out..." The background is eerie, haunting, ancient primal needs of tortured goddesses, solemn searchers and shadowy oracles.--rrle Larry Eigner: A COUNT OF SOME THINGS--Score, 812 SW Cityview, Pullman WA, 99163. 8 pp., $4.00. Four short poems in the inimitable high innocence of Eigner, but here with almost sardonic musings on numbers, particularly the number of people over-populating the world at present--with the "yugoslav newborn designated (July '87) our billionth contemporary" making two appearances.--bg Urhacy Faustino and Leila Miccolis, eds.: SACIEDADE DOS POETAS VIVOS (Vol 5, 1994)--Blocos, Caixa Postal 25029, 20552-970 Rio/RJ, BRASIL. 112 pp. [No price listed, but $10 in international postal coupons should do the trick.] Brazil has had a particularly active visual poetry scene since the mid- fifties, when the Noigandres group started its multifaceted projects. Noigandres poets did good work then, and continue to do so now. But the group has also kept succeeding generations from emerging in print in Brazil and from being seen in other countries. The present collection may be the fullest representation of post-Noigandres visual poetry available. If you don't read Portuguese, don't worry: most of the poems work with icons, phrases in English, and brief Portuguese texts that can be read by Anglophones. Perhaps 15% require knowledge of Portuguese. The energy, inventiveness, and variety of these poets comes through forcefully in this anthology. In the next decade, some of the poets in this volume will find an international audience.--ky Valerie Fox: AMNESIA, OR, IDEAS FOR MOVIES--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 35 pp., $4.00. In the title- piece of this collection of 12 poems and other texts, two banal movie-ideas are turned representative of the vacuity of mass Culture by the suggested title following them, "I really like that building how tall and thin it is." The rest of the collection provides similar slants off popular inanity (e.g., one poem asks if a reincarnation of Emma Goldman would, among other things, "shower in Baltimore/ buy flowers for herself/ or wait for someone to give her/ what she deserved"--or "have another cup of coffee.") The book includes "critical accompaniments" by Stephen Ratcliffe, Thomas Lowe Taylor and Susan Smith Nash, too-- the first of them a very indirect one since it's most about Twelfth Night and never mentions Fox's work.--bg William A. Fox: GEOGRAPH--Rainshadow Editions, The Black Rock Press, University Library 322, University of Nevada, Reno NV, 89557. 60 pp., $10.00. A collection of diagrammatically constructed poems, visually and conceptually arranged in ways for which the Fibonacci series (a mathematical progression referred to more than once in the book) is a metaphor. Most of the poems are in series, each section repeating and rearranging elements of the previous one, giving the poems a sense of being closed and open-ended at the same time, an effect which is strikingly beautiful: block to stack a a block noather to nother a a mesa box and nother a Elegantly produced in a square perfectbound format on good paper.--jmb Fox continues to refine the minimalist approach of much of his earlier work. Words isolated by context and by placement on the page often work as modular units that can be transposed in a singular semantic structure or one that changes by slow accretions. In some instances, paired columns that are set up to be read vertically and horizontally add a sense of a third dimension to the work, reminiscent of the volume implied by polyphonic music. Fox's earlier experiments with visual poetry are here refined into simple, thin lines, sometimes implying verse lines left unstated or diagrams surrounding modular texts. Most interestingly, these wispy, schematic lines bring out rhythmic possibilities in the solitary words that would otherwise be difficult to hear. If the minimalism of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Robert Lax appeals to you, you'll probably like this book.--ky Christopher Franke: =5--William Busta Gallery, 2021 Murry Hill, Cleveland OH, 44106. 29 pp., $1.00. A delightful tiny (2.75x2.25") book of poems and visual poems, containing much humor and wordplay (both visual and aural). The "price" is from the back of the book, which includes the phrase "Dime X A Dime". My favorite piece here: Franke did find time to write a poem about not having enough time. He calls it "Dash." "On my stove are four burners. When I need more than four burn- ers, something isn't cooking," the poem reads in part. --jmb Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston: CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST--Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Ave, Staten Island NY, 10314. 80 pp., $8.95. Boston and Frazier are longtime Science Fiction poets whose work combines a surrealist sensibility with a hard technological edge. Their CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST invokes a jungle gone botanically mad: "It is a Sphinx that lifts the world upon its back and grows./ Its veins are road maps that lead nowhere,/ its breath a cypher,/ its inscrutable eyes spin mandalas that drift and blue/ shift in toward Armageddon." Eerie and evocative, these poems effectively explore a terrain most poets don't even realize exists.--tw Peter Ganick: IT OR S/HE--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 16 pp., $4.00. Fourteen blocks of prose in the most radically altered-syntax zone of language writing. Its first two sentences, for instance, are: "You and I are what They coil from Us at a sample of Those that inept lick. tells Them that usage it imperils so You can Them." The title tells it all: this is a book hyper-emphasizing described but referentless pronouns. The result is a tantalizingly odd secondary world, full of a sense of being generated by rather that generating. It is experiments like this sequence that are keeping Language writing one of the central modes of verbal art.--bg Peter Ganick: UNTITLED SELFKNOWLEDGE--Tight Press, PO Box 1591, Guerneville CA, 95446. 16 pp., $4.00. The title seems to refer to a fascinating quality of these poems: they are written in a kind of blank, impersonal style (there are no pronouns, for example) that yet contain an expanding sense of self, a self immersed and growing in the effluvia of consciousness and the inevitable forms consciousness takes: tactics rose near floundering mallets and fingers the joiners first crises thought so tentative servant roses above the blue well As in the above, the language flows through passages of elliptical, "depersonalized" syntax to phrases of a perhaps deceptive discursive clarity: seen in the context of the poems as a whole, such phrases become as protean in meaning and inference as anything here. A slippery and engaging book of great beauty and resonance.--jmb Sarya Elizabeth Gratner, ed.: EARTHWORDS (anthology)--Write For Life, 4773 Harmony Lane, Orcutt CA, 93455-4513. 103 pp., $10.00. An exquisitely hand-crafted book-object with a front-cover reproduction of a full-color representational painting by Shirley Wallace whose sunlight, leaf-shadows and window-reflections epitomize the mostly quite conventional but often lyrically- substantial poems within. I was especially taken with Camina Tripodi's daringly simple "Because Of Your Heart," which consists of just four lines: its title repeated three times followed by "Everything."--bg Richard F. Hayes Sr.: THAT'S LIFE--American Living Press, PO Box 901, Allston MA, 02134. 40 pp., $3.00. The poet is an ex-fire chief, and a WWII veteran. His poems are tantalizing personal glimpses of a full life, a life of double-edged humor and pathos. His work is clean and clever, graceful and dramatic, one man's thoughtful account of life, no more, no less. I found this set somewhat academic in that it never tries to break out of its placid mold. Like poetry of another era. The excitement when it comes is in the paradox hidden under the simplicity. ÒYes, she did swing by her/ teeth from the rope attached to a tree limb, but only momentarily..." The simplicity in this case is not boring, but relaxing and charming.--rrle Bernard Hewit: TACIT TENDRILS--Wild Strawberry Press, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $2.00. Obscure twists in voice and mood within these poems. For example, when he talks about returning home after the war, "he needed silence and space/ in order to once more paradoxically/ join the human race." Metrically moody and forced. Included in this chap is what he calls a "Gothic Play." Eight pages and five characters to be exact. It shows the irony of human behaviors, and interactions, but it is hardly Gothic, though it is playful. Poetry sometimes portentous & rhetorical, sometimes rhyming, always shadowed by implication.--rrle Dick Higgins: POEMS PLAIN AND FANCY--Station Hill, Barrytown NY, 12507. Selected shorter poems 1957-1985 that document a career of experimental poetry by one of its foremost exponents. Many many many many different approaches to writing here, mostly under the imposition of various structures (and strictures), including chance, repetition, sound translation, and his own snowflake form. While not every example will impact the reader deeply, there are quite a few genuinely moving works here, and even the poems that don't work emotionally show the reader new forms to look into for the reader's own writing. I think anyone involved or interested in experimental poetry should at least thumb through this book once to get an idea of the many things Higgins has been up to.--ar Jack Hirschman: THE XIBALBA ARCANE--Azul Editions, 2032 Belmont Rd., NW, Suite 301, Washington DC, 20009. 62 pp., $10.95. Drawing on the Mayan books of prophecies, the Chilam Balam, Hirschman reprises much of the lyric density of his earlier poems based in Surrealism and Judaic tradition, and expands it into the revolutionary commitment of his more recent work. Here everything goes back to roots, including revolutions: dialectics that turn in circles according to the oldest calendars of the western world and appear in the Zappatista Revolt of contemporary Chiapas. Like any book of prophecies, this one reaches into the past and the future to understand what is happening now. In Hirsch's view this is a time for anger and hence for redress; a time for hope since it is a time for action.--ky Tom House: I MUST BE AN ALIEN--Penny Dreadful Press, 6680 Charlotte Ave., H-6, Nashville TN, 37209. 16 pp., $1.00. Poetry caught somewhere in the lost triangle between surreal, beat, and jazz. Exaggerated line breaks and mounting cadences produce rousing images of tent revivals, pornography, horny little sisters, cannibalism, and drinking at the local union hall. This chapbook is a fun-house mirror which twists images to frightening degrees. Interesting and vivid.--rrle Geof Huth: TO A SMALL STREAM OF WATER (OR DITCH)--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 15 pp. A meditation on consciousness and its consequences--Huth plunges into the depths of a rage for order that positions death at the very edges of the neat, prosodic alignments of meaning that language grapples with. Huth's work is a wonderful exploration of how a writer expresses self-reflexivity in words, particularly in the intriguing "Arrange," "At," and "Zipper," in which a child's struggle with a zipper parallels the nature of language pushed into new configurations.--ssn David Ignatow: GLEANINGS: UNCOLLECTED POETRY OF THE FIFTIES-- Grist, Columbus Circle Station, PO Box 20805, New York NY, 10032- 1496. $25.00. Book on computer disk, available in Windows and Mac format--in either version, the book is not in plain ascii format. It comes with a viewer that facilitates movement through the book, the placement of bookmarks, etc. Format is modeled on that of a printed book, with sturdy, legible type, and "pages"-- units framed as pages in a book would be. Perhaps it's appropriate that this harbinger of book forms of the future should be a retrospective of work by a senior poet. In his preface to this collection, Ignatow says that these poems "were not given their final version in time for publication in POEMS: 1934-1969." Some still seem unfinished, but this collection does includes some of Ignatow's best work of the time. Perhaps it was wise of him to let them cook longer. Generally, these are poems typical of Ignatow during the '50s and any fan of his should appreciate them. The urban industrial milieu, with its drabness, repression, anger, fits of bravado and long stretches of quiet desperation, may have changed in many of its outward details but a lot of the essentials remain as relevant today as they were in the '50s--perhaps, eerily, more so now than 10 or 20 years ago.--ky Michael Kriesel: ASSHOLE MANIFESTO--Full Moon Press, 727 Lincoln #1, Antigo WI, 54409. 4 pp., $1.00(?). This is a short chap that feels like a takeoff on Ginsberg's HOWL. Not exactly an original idea, and the anger becomes more obnoxious than a threat, but it still works in part. This is actually an excerpt of a longer poem (oh no!), and I don't know, with UFO abductions, AIDS, dildos, MTV, and the philosophy that life is shit stated over and over again, this becomes rather tedious fast. The few lines that work aren't enough to save this excerpt, much less a longer piece.--o Jack Lamb, editor: SPEAKING OF CHANGE--PO Box 4290, Carlsbad CA, 92018. 69 pp., $4.00. An anthology of racially-conscious prose & poetry of Color. Originally a spoken word performance of persuasive face-to-face discourse. Here we have racial and cultural disintegration: "the Taiwanese is in me I just don't know how to bring it out," Leng Loh explains her lack of traditional language. We hear a southern child's wonder "The year my mother birthed me/ they shot Jack/ and as a child, I accepted the guilt of that." Infinity decays in the face of these disturbing voices, voices of people devastated by gilded white ideals: keening holocaustical voices weary from pain and deceit "this is my culture. i experience it differently from you. it is not a joking matter to me." Read this, learn from this.--rrle Dan Landrum: SIDE-LONG GLANCE--c/o Taggerzine Specials, PO Box 632952, San Diego CA, 92163. 8 pp., $1.00(?). This collection captures a poem, "Impersonals," that comes so damn close to the truth I want to know what Landrum was drinking when he wrote it. It's a cross-reference guide to misfits looking for love, while running through a list of things that'll alienate the most empathetic savior on a street corner. These poems click with understanding, and although this chap is short, it carries more wisdom than anything anyone who claimed God was talking through his lips ever had to say.--o Hank Lazer: INTER(IR)RUPTIONS--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., Mentor OH, 44060. $4.00. The first chapter in a long work-in- progress, 10 x 10, INTER(IR)RUPTIONS is fundamentally a poem, or series of poems, of parallel intelligences drawn from a variety of sources including Emerson's journals, The New York Times, Seventeen, a work on neuroscience, etc., and Lazer's own powerful, sometimes even ludic, imagination. It is how this imagination creatively juxtaposes and allows the texts and graphics to locate poetically with one another that gives the work shape in the mind as well as on the page. We sense initially the similarity of this collision of voices with our daily lives. Despite whatever course we may choose to focus on as if it were the subject of our concentration, in reality we are living through and working with a multitude of media and intelligences that in essence provide the primary substance of that focus. We are then living many lives occupying several domains at the same time in a single space. Lazer articulates this reality with a music that not only reminds us of these anxious circumstances but finds the music in it--a kind of flux that neither annihilates the individual persona nor panders to it. This is a realistic poetry for an age where information media, and this also reflects on the function of the book itself and print media generally, is the actual "landscape" of our passage. INTER(IR)RUPTIONS then is a mapping process, but not of the actual, but a means of responding to the actual. This is the dance of "events" entered with a metasentience of the nature of the music. Almost apocalyptic in its effect, the knowledge of nature extended into the abstract thus rendering the abstract as natural. Still, this is only one possible overview, and the beauty of the Lazer's poetry should be witnessed line by line for the deeper secrets it yields. High craft in combination with vast imagination. The opening movement of a important work.--jb Richard L. Levesque: FETAL GRACELAND--Wudge Press, 2227 Woodglen Dr., Indianapolis IN, 46260. 32 pp., $3.00. With poems titled "Orga(z)m," "Prison Stabbing Blues," and "Punk Rock Cunt," we expect an ominous point of view, but Levesque goes beyond simple sinister: here are the killing grounds filled with monstrous images of zombies, two-dollar booze, guns, serial killers, death and bizarre sex. "Can you hear the killer/ inside me--?" Amid the bleak images is a stinging force, something that reads like an incantation--"moans, forest molds, salt/ and cider; pagan folds."--or sometimes like a syncopated beatstomp: "knee drop baby worships this,/ this Cadillac lump without a soul." Sociopathic poetry of fractured hopes and unique times. I'm thinking about cutting and pasting this chap into my family album.--rrle Rafael Zepeda & Gerald Locklin: THE DURANGO P0EMS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 30 pp., $3.00. I like collaborations like this, wars between poets that can only leave ashes and flames and explosions that kill more neighbors than friends. We got drinking, self medication, attempted sexual endeavors, fights that don't want to happen unless someone wants to throw the first punch, ethnic points of view, and a real attempt to capture what it all means on paper, knowing damn well once you sober up you'll probably throw the answer away. Usually you get sparring between poets in these deals, but here you got best friends throwing imaginary punches, both figuring they won the fight, leaving the reader laughing at that cocky walk both writers got when they walk down the street. These are old hands doing it right, and every word does what its supposed to do.--o Liz Magor and Joey Morgan: HOW TO AVOID THE FUTURE TENSE--The Walter Phillips Gallery, Box 1020, Banff AL, CANADA, T0L 0C0. $20 (Canadian), + shipping. Basically a photo book with narrative. But some of the photos are from a different narrative than the text. There are two kinds of pages, one for each narrative. On white pages there are pictures of people camping, in relatively primitive style, in backwoods Canada somewhere. On translucent pages, there are anecdotes from the narrator's stay in France plus small pictures of bits of French architecture and art. Thus we have juxtaposed Old World and New World ways of living in the past. The reader is left to make the final comparisons of the two.--ar Stephen-Paul Martin: CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 15 pp. Two pieces, poetic in their intensity and their attention to the multi- faceted possibilities of language. "Double Bed" is a dramatic monologue recast to accommodate two points of views: Jenny and Freddie. There is an eerie doubling going on: Jenny and Freddie could be aspects of one person, split into painful doppelganger, evil twin status, by the sheer stress of maintaining a pulse rate while all around collapse.--ssn G.Z. Mataisz: END TIME--AK Press, PO Box 40682, San Francisco CA, 94140-0682. 299 pp., $8.00. Solidly-crafted thriller set in the year 2007 and concerned with some missing "riemanim: (a sort of super-plutonium), with lots of anti-war echoes from the sixties. Provocative political discussion and "what if's" raise the book's intellectual value without spoiling it as a good read.--bg Michael McClure: LIGHTING THE CORNERS On Art, Nature, and the Visionary--University of New Mexico College of Arts and Sciences. 338 pp., $19.95. "Our sensoriums are spirit mechanisms that light up the cave around them for the experience," McClure states in the opening interview, "Writing One's Body", of this essential and revealing volume. He has been a traveler through our common space-time, our great mammal voice bard, reminding us, as we create ever more indulgent idols to our techno-arrogance, that we are animals, our mind, our soul is animal soul and to attempt to deny that is a kind of self-imposed schizophrenia. In these essays and interviews we begin to understand the poetics behind the poems, or rather the poetics articulated in prose what the poems allow us to live. And we see McClure as he moves among his peers, pieces on Robert Duncan, Robert Creely, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Gary Snyder, Julian Beck, etc., and come to realize the connections, the obvious influence his work and his life (the two are surely one) have had on the culture. The pieces cover four decades of radical intelligence, as fresh and important today as they have ever been. Through these essays and interviews we get illuminations of the poet building his soul in the world, and revelations within our own sensoriums as to what we are and how we might act from that knowledge. If McClure had never written a poem this book would be indispensable, but because he voiced and scribed so much brilliant poetry this book means more than the textual form can relate. "To walk a hundred yards in total freedom is to live forever in eternity--freedom for an instant is beyond measure and is immortality." This is truth in and as flesh, an invitation impossible to refuse.--jb Steven McDaris: THE MOON GETS LAID--Skinners Irregular Horse, 2107 E. Jarvis St., Milwaukee WI, 53211. $4.00. McDaris was a new name to me a few months ago. His chapbooks have been arriving in the mail and I've been knocked-out by this flat-out great story writer. Real page turners. A new raw talent forming and taking shape. Hope he sticks with his big-hearted vision. His locker room banter of tits & girls. His easy shock of recognition with the feelings absolutely familiar. His tact and sagacity and magic of getting them down on paper in such a way the picture blossoms in your mind like a John Ford movie. Never dull. Always moving. If he were a bebop saxophonist in the '50s he'd be Dexter Gordon, going with the flow. Not the innovator that Bird or Sonny Stitt or Lucky Thompson were. Just good ol' straight-forward Dexter (who incidentally made his most powerful statements in the '70s). This MOON is a real '60s story, with all the pertinent images of that era--weed, free love, & wine high psychedelic philosophy. It strikes me as a man's story--I wonder if women enjoy reading it. MOON is a novella set in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, with an admirable knowledge of flora & fauna & geology & native cooking & Indian history & customs. Seamlessly interwoven. Characters as alive as yesterday.--mw Todd Moore: DANCING W/ BLOOD--Undulating Bedsheet Productions, c/o Mike, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 90025. 16 pp., $1.50. Todd Moore is that uncle your best friend had, that was so worldly and wise and filled with tales of weirdness, you wanted to leave home and see it all for yourself. In this collection you get the hard edged unforgiving poetry that Moore does so well, with poems about a "bar girl coming out for/ a smoke she has a 4 inch/ pipe rolled into her fist" bashing the head of a drunk trying to molest a girl with a 45 automatic, and the first safe sex attack I've ever seen: "when he/ wdn't give her/ the grocery/ money she/ sapped him/ w/a 2 ply/ condom filled/ w/nickels...". There are other great poems done in that tradition Todd has become famous for, capturing revenge with a taste of blood.--o Todd Moore: SHOOTING OUT THE LIGHTS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 40 pp., $4.00. (back-to -back with Mark Weber's SWINDLER'S HARMONICA SIESTA). It's good to see Todd settling into the southwest after all of that vicious gangster writing of the midwest. Fortunately he's as mean as ever, and the poems in this collection capture hookers, sweat and piss soaked beds in ten minute hotels, home made 22s, bets that got more losers than winners, brains scattered across a hundred sidewalks, and rocks smashing through windows without a message you don't want to hear. This is Moore kicking ass. This is the real life without pretense. And hey, just when you thought you were safe from Weber he kicks back with a strong longing for stability in a world that changes its faces so fast you often want it all to sit still so you can know where you are at that moment. Mark also grabs that asshole who fucks with you at a reading and shows the jerk the rules are a lot different than he thought. When I read Weber I feel like I'm drinking with an old friend, we're catching up on the latest news.--o Susan Smith Nash: MY LOVE IS APOCALYPSE AND RHINESTONES--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 24 pp., $4.00. Using Marilyn Monroe as an archetype for women in a media- saturated society, Susan Smith Nash creates a chapbook of poems mingling levels of allusion, cross-pollinating from line to line as worlds collide in jarring verbal effects. "Celebrity goes by the velocity of discover, I waited/ my sense of self scattered by Doppler-shifted/ light palms clapped together, so faint so retreating." The best poem here is the extended "Letters from Marilyn," written in a more conventional verse but with enormous power. The first letter ends with the line: "Let me rip apart the reverse image of my smile." The eighth letter ends with "His mistake broke me, like echoes of mother/ on the face of every abandoned child." Nash concludes with an essay on Monroe's last movie, "The Misfits," in which the actress played an androgynous character, and which Nash sees as a cinematic commentary on gender roles.--tw Susan Smith Nash: T.E. LAWRENCE: A VEIL IN THE SAND--Room Press, 29 Lynton Place, White Plains NY, 10606. 14 pp., $3.00?. A set of five remarkably passionate long poems, which invoke not only distant times, places, and personalities, but a very strong sense of self coming into being, as if the awareness of history (and not just human, but geological as well), were "taken personally" very much indeed. The language is largely accessible yet charged, elliptical, and constantly breaking out ahead of its own structures, running ahead of itself: Serpentine walls fits like saddle, series erect desert grow in weeping torrents, false poetics like abandon or warmth, bent twisted, round, ripping silence cold spokes on rhythmic way you tell tide hitting seawall, Type faster, harder, even--arrange sentiment onto self or message--intelligence on the basic wet & dry season, abundant dazzle mystery Alchemist constructed hero at work Brughel's prelude to chemistry, whipping camels foaming to your Yanbu home, Saudi Arabian grief or rape sprawls human remains over dawn's corona-- It is rare to encounter poetry of such emotional intensity and strong intellectual engagement combined. The closest thing to it I can think of are some of the major works of Romanticism (i.e., the Odes of Keats, or Jose Maria Heedria's Niagra) although comparison is a challenging one, and is an indication of the authentic brilliance of her work here.--jmb Letta Simone-Nefertari Neely: GAWD AND ALLUH HUH SISTAHS--104 Gates Ave., Brooklyn NY, 11238. 28 pp., $?. Starting with a quote from M.O.V.E. leader, Ramona Africa, "Nobody was supposed to survive," Neely goes on to prove that many people have indeed survived. Written in a diced phonic style of free verse, with liberal doses of Black English, a powerful narrative and historical Black images. "my girls are blk shadows lookin for answer hanging/ from a pulpit blown away/ by the klan...// ...let us all say ache." Letta Neely has the yoke of tradition upon her, but she projects a visionary future, a future where we "remember to take Emmit Teal, Atlanta child murders, ghost dancers, Stonewall, and/ apple pie/ all together." She shows us the bold vicious hate within our culture, with all of its isms and phobias (racism, sexism, homophobia), and then she stands up and says what she believes with a passionate voice echoing into a new era. "this/ is/ no/ time to stop breathing/ this is no time to stop/ this is no time." Feminist, lesbian black pride in its most critical, intellectual form--the poem of incidental tragedy and healing growth.--rrle R.L. Nichols: THE POINT IS...--Alpha Beat Press, 31a Waterloo St., New Hope PA, 18938. $6.00. With major honesty, wide open, speaking with the machine shop music tools of poetry, R.L. Nichols sings through this book with some of the cleanest and clearest agony and sexual pleasure notes of word music of any poet canary or spring bird on the planet. Can do and does make amazement with the simple language words into poetry. No dull, camp repetition. A voice of communication. Frank philosophy from the bottom honest side up. Beat, Bukowski, bad, bay, mouth full words dance. And he says, and we should all consider when thinking about poetry: "To realize the beauty of worms?"--mb Eric Nisenson: ASCENSION--JOHN COLTRANE AND HIS QUEST--St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY, 10010. $22.95. For many of us John Coltrane was more than a jazz genius, though that surely would have been enough to merit his acclaim. He moved through all jazz had to offer and all he could invoke from those roots and went further still beyond the limits of his medium, his instrument and possibly even his humanity and carried us along with him (even those of us who discovered him a decade or more after his death). To tell his story as a man or musician would and has produced fine work, there is so much to draw from. But Nisenson has given us a gift of another order, focusing centrally on what drove him to the reaches of such extraordinary passion. Certainly this is a biography, covering virtually all stages of his life including such bucolic details as his love for sweet potato pie (which gave him dental problems) and his humble southern manner or his early drug abuse. But as Nisenson says in the opening pages, Coltrane's "life was based on a series of discoveries". It is these moments of discovery and self- revelation that are the meat of the book and what gives Coltrane's life and work such enormous value for the generations. The music and how it relates to the quest is central, including details of how Trane arrived at his "sheets of sound" or his later development of modes and finally free outside playing. Yet, the descriptions are never difficult and non-musicians and players alike should be able to fully understand every nuance. Also, Nisenson's personal accounts of Coltrane in performance, which often included solos that would last over an hour, add an almost cinematic dimension to the book. After listening to him all these years I found these passages to be a dear treat, able to see through them what I will never be able to see in the flesh. The individual albums are analyzed and appraised as well so that someone who knew little of the work would have a reliable guide of which pieces to seek out first. Nisenson's research should also be commended, full of accounts and information from friends and acquaintances and of course the musicians themselves. I've wanted for years to read what I felt was an adequate account of a man, and the music, for which words must surely fall short, and this is as close as we are ever likely to get. Coltrane has inspired us to commit ourselves whole heart and soul to our callings and is no doubt a primary inspiration for much of what is reviewed in these pages. It is such a delight at last to have a volume that explores and relates the discoveries in the life of the high lord of jazz transcendence. Very highly recommended.--jb Oberc: PORN--A.T.H. Press., c/o T. Bishop, 2177 Stewart Dr., Hatfield PA, 19440. 40 pp., $3.00. The violent and decadent times of a female porno star as she lives and works the fringe of society, from childhood to middle-age. Hypnotic, erotic, violent, just like real life. Paragraphs form a prose-poem style which reads like parables of the obscene. Oberc has fused a singular isolated spirit of seeking with a delicious sexually obsessed darkness. "feminists scream outside the set/ they want to save my ass/ they don't want to pay my bills/ I fuck for a living/ they scream out slogans/ they tell me to save myself/ they talk about freedom while trying to take it all away..." Oberc's self-lacerating personification judges and refuses to judge, condones and condemns society at the same time. This chap is not for everybody, but I enjoyed it.--rrle William Parker: MUSIC IS--Open Magazine New Series, PO Box 2726, Westfield NJ, 07091. $1.00. Introduction to the forthcoming book, MUSIC AND THE SHADOWPEOPLES, MUSIC IS is a spontaneous feeling manifesto, a diatribe of holy inspiration from one who understands the deepest richest impulses of creative sound without the restrictions of manufactured order. "Music is the abysmal rainbow that bridges endless galaxies/ Music passes through the musician, the Muse-Physician knows enough not to interfere/ Music remands bad spirits." We get the sense of the full liberating possibility of music. Music as the rite soul healing. This little book, like Parker's music, is further evidence of his enormous gift for delivering that rite. Much gratitude to the folks at Open for this and all recent materials, they continue to remind us of the power of walking the radical edge.--jb Geza Perneczky: THE MAGAZINE NETWORK-The Trends of Alternative Art in the Light of Their Periodicals-1968-1988--c/o Stephen Perkins, 1816 S. College, Iowa City IA, 52245. 285 pp., $30.00. Mike Gunderloy thought he was onto the big time when he started Factsheet Five, but there were already extensive archives and documenters of the underground, and if you want to see what laid the foundation for Mike's publication, this is the place to start. Perneczky originally published this book in Hungarian, and it had an international focus on mail art and literary publications from the very start. At the same time many of the underground publications that earned decent reputations in the US during the '80s (Nightmares of Reason, Artpolice, Bag of Wire, Bikini Girl, Lost And Found Times, etc.) are captured at their peak, and were probably discovered through Factsheet Five's attempts to catch as mush of that world as possible. Although there is an academic side to this great book, there is also a historical capturing of many of the individuals who were doing it yourself before anyone knew what doing it yourself was all about. They were highly motivated creative types that got involved because they were so driven, because they had to focus their energy in a positive direction, and this book captures that energy and creativity in an international perspective you won't find in your local underground coffee table book. If you can't afford a copy, try to get your Library to borrow it for you. It's definitely a peek into the past that'll stir brain cells you thought were dead.--o Stephen Petroff: THE SECRETS OF THE TOWN OF BOWDOINHAM--Kore Press. 24 pp. Handwritten in legible script with exquisite hand-drawn borders and artwork. I believe it is written about a small rural town in Maine. Deep woods magic, and pain combine to swirl around the reader like a vortex of strange assurances that something weirder is coming up. As narrative prose it has a rich feel: a mentally deficient boy teaches his father the magic of wooden whistles; a cancer patient becomes a ghost; a woman shoplifts plums, a poet's last meal, a witch who lives on Post Road, and the destruction of a litter of halfgrown puppies... these incidents and more are found in these pages.--rrle Sylvia Play: AIRY EL--Poets & Writers, dist. by Da Dead Press, 3226 Raspberry, Erie PA, 16508. $$23.95. This appears to be a major find: 22 lost poems by Plath, edited by Paul Weinman and Ron Androla. These poems were obviously buried by the author, perhaps out of embarrassment at their sexual explicitness (some titles: "Plath, the Hopeless Cunt", "Pigs in Fecus"), but they will go a long way toward clarifying some of the issues that have swirled around her work. The editors are to be congratulated for this latest example of their on-going scholarship and research into the hidden and ignored texts for some of our greatest literary heroes. (I only wish they had kept their noses out of my trash--last year they published a group of poems I had thrown away and forgotten, but they must have found them doubtless soaked in the juices from one of those chicken-package diapers, and published them as EAR CANNIBAL, to my great embarrassment. Oh well, one has to be thick-skinned in this poetry business, and I suppose the interests of history take precedence over the posturings of my fragile ego.--jmb Don't worry about the address or the price because anytime Androla an with Robert Lowell ("Shy girl anemic in back of his poetry class,"), and yeah, more lust ("Did you shed/ Silk socks, capped incisors and a BMW"). Sometimes these psychopaths hit it right on the nose, but other times they're just making references to the authors while being themselves, creating a satire that leaves you trying not to laugh, but knowing your eyeballs might fall out of their sockets if you don't.--oed incisors and a BMW"). Sometimes these psychopaths hit it right on the nose, but other times they're just making references to the authors while being themselves, creating a satire that leaves you trying not to laugh, but knowing your eyeballs might fall out of their sockets if you don't.--o Richard Schevill: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHEN YOU ARE BERN PORTER and Bern Porter: SOUNDS THAT AROUSE ME: Selected Writings- -Tilbury House, 132 Water Street, Gardiner ME, 04345. $16.95 and $9.95 respectively. Reading these books gave me a picture of and an appreciation for Bern Porter. The books of his I had seen before, small volumes of founds, had not overly impressed me. Porter was a failure in that he did not generate the income to live off his work, but was a great success in anticipating ideas (both artistic and intellectual) that would rise in importance a decade or five later. It's important to know about Bern Porter because he looked towards the future, because he survived so long without compromising his aims, and because of the way he celebrated creativity in all areas of his life. Porter is an inspiring example. On the other hand, the books make it clear there were obstacles--primarily poverty, misdirected social expectations, and governmental mistrust--to getting things done. In spite of all this, Porter did a lot. The moral is, if you can't do it, find another way to do it; if you can't find a way to do it, at least sketch your vision down. Schevill's biography is a chronology of where Porter went and what he did. The book is profusely illustrated with many relevant pictures of Porter, of his artworks, of his found poems, of newspaper clippings, of places he visited, covers and ads for books he published, etc. A number of poems and other writings are included in the text. After cataloging and describing a long list of Porter's achievements, the author devotes the last chapter to giving a detailed appreciation of Porter's found poems and what they stand for. That chapter makes me want to look at some of those books in the major sequence of founds books, and look back at those I'd already gotten (such as the two short books published by the Runaway Spoon Press). SOUNDS THAT AROUSE ME includes all kinds of writing, excepting the visual: finished poems, parts of books, manifestoes, excerpts of interviews, even a couple letters. The writing ranges from the familiar (I had the same basic idea for "Blank Verse" around the same time, and I'm sure there were hundreds if not thousands of other schoolboys that had the same idea as a reaction to being taught Shakespeare in the dry dusty ways high school teachers think up) to the incompletely thought out (such as "Statement"--fixing or replacing the book/text as transmitter of information would require many years of effort-- this piece gives a few concrete proposals that don't seem to be incomplete answers to the very important facts given.) to the moving and complete and significant ("Why Don't You Use the Trail?", "Sciart Manifesto", "Me"). The reminiscences on people like Henry Miller, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Gertrude Stein are quite interesting, too. The biggest shortcoming in this anthology, ultimately, may be the neglect of the found poems, of which we have but one or two examples (if you count the rather arresting "Found Story"). I can also complain that the resetting of "What Henry Miller Said and Why It Is Important" leaves out the all-important white space in the original. But Porter's been at it for longer than most of us have been living, and despite the flaws, these books are important documents of living history.--ar Peter Redgrove: THE LABORATORS--Taxus Press. £6.50. This collection of Peter Redgrove's delicately fashioned verse displays the same concern common to much of his poetry: the female menstrual cycle and its overwhelming importance to human society. Redgrove, a trained chemist, sprinkles his poems with an eclectic mix of scientific and alchemical terms and often writes of a surrealistic or mystical blending of the inner and outer realms. "The scents and the steams, distilled, condense on the mirrors/ In populations of pearly droplets;// Equally the whole forest outside the window/ Shimmers with dew;// Equally her mouth today/ Shimmers with his seed."--tw Jeff Rentsch: THE STORY OF TWO MEN--PO Box 480, Denville NJ, 07834. 24 pp., $2.00(?). This is a collage of text and visuals that may, or may not, be related, and which gestalt into a strange coherency about a son who beat his father with a bat until he couldn't beat him anymore. At first I was hesitant to even deal with this, but after looking at it closely, I was amazed at how powerful it really was, and the way it strangely fit together, like a three dimensional puzzle that doesn't make any sense until it's all assembled. Rentsch is someone to look out for, especially if he's creeping up behind you.--o Marilyn R. Rosenberg: SPALL SPIRULA--101 Lakeview Ave. West, Peekskill NY, 10566. 37 pp., $12.00. Another quietly important visio-verbal work by one of this country's quiet handful of long- time important visual poets. It consists of competently representational pen & inks of the artist's study, rocking chair, scissors, unpacked groceries, etc., mixed with discussions of illumagery using quotations from people like Walter Benjamin, and wherever "9: Potato chips sell eight times as well as pretzels" came from, not to mention non-representational explosions, one with eye-charts and words derived from "fan-" such as "fantasy" and "fancier." My favorite verbal touch is an alphabet that's spelled "ba, dc," etc., up to "ts"--meaning the alphabet ended with TS Eliot?? Every page has several such items. This is definitely a must-get book for anyone interested in pluraesthetic, or even just visual, art.--bg Stuart Ross: RUNTS--Proper Tales Press, Box 789, Station F, Toronto Ontario, Canada, M4Y 2N7. $1.00. A collection of 20 poems, each of 6 lines or less, that have an ironic, playful quality that is most refreshing. Using a pared-down but direct language, they often create a sense of the possibilities that lie behind ordinary surfaces: WHO KNOWS? She sits on the subway eating Zesty Cheese Doritos and reading The Enquirer. Maybe she killed someone today. --jmb C.C. Russell: MORE LIKE FORKS--UBP, c/o Mike, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 90025. 24 pp., $2.00. I like the way Russell turns a line: "You said we used to spoon/ all night,/ wrapped around each other", "I know something about windows/ and saying the right words/ at the wrong times", "They would not call this love/ but warfare", are just a sampling of openings that make you know something is going to come smashing through your window any second. These are poems filled with confused emotions, contrasting love and hate. But there is also, in the midst of the confusion, a strange hope that keeps you going, that makes you want to get it right the next time around.--o Vern Rautsala: LITTLE-KNOWN SPORTS--Univ. of Mass. Press. $20.00 cloth, $9.95 paper. Winner of the annual Juniper Prize in poetry, Vern Rutsala's LITTLE-KNOWN SPORTS is a collection of prose poems divided into three parts. The first part contains poems about photographs, each one describing a particular scene and somehow transforming it into a distinctive and psychologically-resonant slice-of-life. The second part, entitled "Bestiary," contains mythologized explanations of everyday objects, as in "Paper Clip": "We persist in baiting this dull hook with page after page, yet we catch nothing." The final part contains the little-known sports of the book's title, including sleeping, hating, getting into bed, and being hopeless. All in all, a whimsical and unpretentious examination of this odd experience called life.--tw Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: WHO IS BIANCA?--Wet Motorcycle Press, 3055 Decatur Ave. Apt. 2D, Bronx NY, 10467. 6 pp., $1.00?. A torrent of Othello-like obsessions about an apparent rival in love whose name is Bianca. Exactly where we are, or what's happened is unclear, but that is appropriate--as are the florally-archaic poeticisms, and the hints of romantic-novel- schlock, for the poem is (brilliantly) about a person too deranged by jealousy to care about journalistic thoroughness, decorum, or avoiding gush.--bg Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: SIX COMETS ARE COMING; ELEGY FOR CHRISTOPHER SMART; and WHO IS BIANCA?--Wet Motorcycle Press, 3055 Decatur Ave. Apt. 2D, Bronx NY, 10467. 6 pp. @, $1.00@?. These three small booklets form a set, each presenting a different strategy for manipulating texts: the first epigrammatically and/or visually; the second by excising words and letters from words to create a sense of intriguing fragmentariness; and the third by suggesting 17th century poetic diction in an enigmatic dialogic context. Very nice indeed; like little primers of linguistic possibility.--jmb Jack Saunders: OLLA-PODRIDA--Florida's Shame, PO Box 10375, Parker FL, 32404. 4 pp., SASE. Soon, boasts Saunders, he'll have written "100 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood." But he keeps on keepin' on, obsessively re-prosing his defeats at the hands of the literary establishment, now in this series of 4-page pamphlets available to whoever shows an interest. One reviews BLASTER by Al Ackerman, who (now that Bukowski's gone) is the writer to beat for Saunders. Another reports on and satirizes the Florida poetry-grants scene--which leads to a third, which is a quite intelligent discussion of the flaws in most fellowship-distribution procedures. Whether Sisyphus, or the new Kerouac he sees himself as, Saunders is worth reading.--bg Barry Silesky: ONE THING THAT CAN SAVE US--Coffee House Press. $10.95. Filled with talk of lost jobs, unpaid bills, lives distracted by shopping and television, and worries about the state of the world, Barry Silesky's short-short stories paint a bleak picture of Clinton's America. These stories are constructed a sentence at a time, each simple declarative sentence not building on the one before but going in a new direction, adding fresh perspective, new data, until the effect is almost giddy as we hang on tight to the words so we don't fall off. Maybe the words are the one thing that can save us.--tw Jack Skelley: NO BARBIE--Found Street, 2260 S. Ferdinand Ave., Monteray Park CA, 91754. $1.00. Two poems out of the Bukowski school but with weirdly misconnected images like an "Onramp crack beggar" vs. "Nietzsche's hanky holder" vs. "Blue chip stamp collector" in one series of lines, and a post-modernist allusion to Capt. Kirk preceding "Mahler turned all the way up/ to sheer black, with a red rose felt at the tip."--bg Two delightfully quirky poems presented as a small folded broadside where the concept of "Barbie" is presented as a metaphor for a kind of swarming erotic irritant: My doggie Seventh planet of space Mohammed's Ecstasy All the things you aren't Little animal Polio moss in the gutter --jmb Patti Smith: EARLY WORK, 1970-1979--Norton. $18.95. Back when she was a skinny punk, Patti Smith made a name for herself first as a poet and then as a rock star. Then she got married, had kids, moved in among Detroit's Auto Barons, and got middle-aged. EARLY WORK, 1970-1979 takes us back to her rebel days as a haunted visionary poet. Most of these poems read as if they should be shouted from a stage, hysterically and with great emotion. The prosey pieces are rambling and so pure that they didn't need any rewriting at all but just glopped out honest, straight from the heart. If Patti has written any poems about her children, her life in the elite suburbs, or her career as a hypocritical poseur who knew that a media image as a moody rebel could make a fast buck, they aren't included here.--tw Mark Sonnenfeld: MISCELLANY BY MARK--Marymark Press, 45-08 Old Millstone Dr., East Windsor NJ, 08520. 54 pp., $4.00?. There are moments among these cleanly written but fairly conventional poems, of the short-lined "conversational" variety, when a more elusive/allusive and charged poetry seems to be emerging: His lunacy I dared not lock horns with Those boots scuffed And a wide black leather belt was symbolic way back The poems deal with daily life, music, reading, mass culture, and work, and often demonstrate a considerable sensitivity, to their topics, a step beyond the chatty flippancy often found in this kind of writing.--jmb Mark Sonnenfeld: TEN INCH DIAGONAL--Marymark Press, 45-08 Old Millstone Dr., East Windsor NJ, 08520. 24 pp., $2.50. There is an open and playful quality to these poems, many of which are quite free-wheeling in their juxtapositions of vocabulary and syntactical structures. The poet seems to be enjoying himself, but this does not result in a mere facile silliness: the poems often also express a wistfullness and melancholy that, along with the techniques used, remind me of the work of Appolinaire and Huidobro: the lines of stars twitch as pigeon couples flyby the colored flare the republic grocer sweeps the simple of intimacy alone channels the bug sideways A most refreshing collection, nicely illustrated with geometrical and technical diagrams.--jmb Surllama, et al: PENTACOST BOWEL HACK--Anatomy Floaters, USF #3182, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa FL, 33620-3182. 12 pp. Originally a chapbook ms. submitted to Anatomy Floaters. Editor Surllama mixed its texts up and performed a hack on it; later other defilers joined in the fun with separate hacks. The results include a Chinese-quite disintegrated text cum over- scribble by John. Lingner, a renga experiment by John M. Bennett, and a computer-generated "whered salm" by Ficus strangulensis.--bg Curtis Taylor & Nico Vassilakis: SEVEN STEPS OF LOVE--Sub Rosa Press, 6234 Carleton Ave., Seattle WA, 98108. $4.00. Moltenly high-colored Tarot-occult illumages by Taylor on the following seven subjects: "Mouth," "Luck," "Risk," "Give," "Pierce," "Trick," and "Sip." Accompanying them are seven equally energizing Vassilakis poems that move from a mouth that, devouring all, "will taste your skin 'til your thoughts are hinged at the mouth, and what air is here will mix with what air is in you," to the claim that "we are equipped with radar and music." A jangle of textures, ideas and images that pretty much cover the entire range of human existence.--bg A small, accordion-folded booklet consisting of color illustrations backed by texts (7 of each), collectively having the quality of a set of divination cards, the images and texts being intriguingly ambiguous enough to accommodate a wide variety of readings. The first one is "Mouth": Consider a circle, then consider what will fit inside that circle. a mouth has mountains, a mouth has oceans, a mouth has the universe, and all things are ingested easily within in it. there is an obstacle.... --jmb Tentatively, a Convenience: PUZZLE WRITING--Score, 812 SW Cityview, Pullman WA, 99163. 13 pp. (loose sets in an envelope), $3.00. A sequence concerned with identical rectilinear forms that are shaped to be able to interlock, and sometimes they do. Each has a one-word label, "rocket" and "pedicab" being the labels of the two in the opening panel. The background, with one exception, is a pictureless, doubly-exposed jigsaw puzzle. Intriguing events take place but exactly where the narrative is going beats me.--bg Larry Tomoyasu: PHOTOS--Found Street, 2260 S. Ferdinand Ave., Monteray Park CA, 91754. $2.00?. A story dealing with fragments of childhood memories, accompanied by grainy b/w 1950's photos of little boys, in a small booklet produced with Found Press' usual hand-made elegance. The story deals with motels, traveling, lost photos, and has a delightful episode in which "Johnee", perhaps the speaker's brother, is tossing Gideon Bibles out the window of a moving car. The writing is clean, focused, and highly evocative.--jmb Story of an ordinary Joe who had lost a box of photos three years earlier. As he and his friend from boyhood drive cross- country in their search for the photos, stealing Gideon Bibles as they go, the Joe's simple-seeming thoughts and observations click strangely against the photographs of two children that accompany the text. The result is an unexpectedly ed husk adorns the cover--at first glance it could be a drawing of a trendy hairclip, or the logo for an "Invasion of the Insect-Body Snatchers." Trammell's collage, narrative and lyric poetry often brings the self right into the jaws of the locusts, but somehow manages to keep it from being gnawed down to the roots. "Cicada- -the True Bug/ of Apollo, that sings./ warns."--ssnf right into the jaws of the locusts, but somehow manages to keep it from being gnawed down to the roots. "Cicada--the True Bug/ of Apollo, that sings./ warns."--ssn Nick Vaile: HARDCORE MOTHERFUCKER--WTG-Pubs., PO Box 12646, Lexington KY, 40583. 56 pp., Definitely an attention-grabbing title. The first fourteen pages read almost like a journal; a gripping journal of the thoughts of a Hispanic factory worker in Dayton, Ohio, who exists in a vacuum of hate and violence. This is an almost purging rant, a dispelling of evil. "Anger is an injection of adrenaline laced with insanity," he tells us, and then relates to it personally: "I am a grudge holder, now and forever. I cannot forget." Vaile doesn't shy away from rough language, "My ex-mother-in-law is truly a cunt and a whore." There are also several poems about startling places, like the motel where "Deep ThroatÓ was filmed. And more. I can't say this is pretty, but then motherfuckers seldom are. It is real, though. Have you ever been shot at? This chap left me feeling like I had.--rrle Nico Vassilakis: A NAME FOR RADIO--Elbow Press, PO Box 21671, Seattle WA, 98111. 12 pp. Amazingly coy, this tiny little book is a treasure, something one could collect in a miniature bookcase of exquisitely produced examples of the art of the book. Seattle continues to be the hub of visual impact, whether it be grunge or in the fascinating twists and turns that visual poetry hammers into the unconscious. What amazes me is the consistently high quality of it all--Vassilakis is an inspiration.--ssn John Viera: SLOW MOVING PICTURES--Score, 812 SW Cityview, Pullman WA, 99163. 10 pp., $3.00. Drawings, textual illumages and visual poems, all in similarly expressive, scribbly calligraphy. Includes a terrific 10-part impression of a poetry reading called "Minutes of a Poetry Reading at Rocky Point"--it reminded me of Saul Steinberg's visualizations of classical musical compositions without seeming any more derivative than all art is. I was also taken with a florally-cursive rendering of the words "sign" and "song" in such a way that their letters look identical, so the one word shivers provocatively into the other.--bg Fred Voss: STILL IN THE GAME--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine WI, 53402. 24 pp., $3.00. In "Normal" we get tossed into an explosion of misfits, hippies, electric shock orgasms, out of body experiences, and the need to live life instead of disintegrating and hiding from the world. In "I Was Terrified" the opening lines, "He roared his bike to a stop/ on the sidewalk in front of the bay window of my apartment/ and stomped up the stone steps" sets up the situation where some strong willed crazy motherfucker thinks he's doing you a favor when actually you're too scared to get in his way. In "Daredevils" we get another taste of hysteria: "My chair/ could barely hold him as he squirmed/ and told me/ what it was that got him off", where the love of bikes and riding left me wanting to get out there myself. This is pure well written insightful poetry, and although I've had a taste or two of Voss' work before, now I want to get it all.--o Jeanine Wade: NECK DEEP IN LUST (29 Poems of Love and Lust)--PO Box 272, Goodlettsville TN, 37070-0272. $3.00. What can be said is that for sure Jeanine Wade is neck deep, waist deep, head deep and over her head and basking in, bathing in, wallowing in the moist from lust and love. Like 29 Arabian nights (knights)-- EARotic tales (tale). Not the overt straight forward redhot mama tomato stroke and squirt and squirm strain and stain realism but playing with words and with the tools of poetry getting to the same place. A different lush pathway to get to (on) the top of the orgasm mountain. Many paths and sure this is perfumed but never skirts (lifted) the focus which is genuine physical and emotional passion. The body is here and Jeanine Wade (wading in lust) hasn't forgotten that she has a mind, as well as a heart, as ...well, ass.--mb Mary E. Weems (ed.), Susan Kane, Patricia Harusami Leebove, Kristen Ban Tepper: WOMEN'S VOICES--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 44107. 28 pp., $3.00. The heartbeat of women: multi-cultural, multi-voiced, moon goddess proud and strong. This is a collaborative effort emphasizing women's artistic voices in one poetic collection. Chimerical forces and tough- minded introspection combine amid dances of raw experiences: motherhood, art, nurturing addictions, sensual dehumanizations, suburban imprisonment, love "my love like air like food like need." The voices here are all pulled from deep history, genetically extracted: "and when I speak/ I use thunder/ thunder// it is my perfect voice." They rage and demonstrate but never beg meaning. Language and song, primitive and holy, guilt and lust, abuse and abandonment, all combined in these four women's voices, world rhythms bound in Cleveland. Alkaline- Electracharged resurrections of the mighty "I AM."--rrle ----------------------------------------------------------------- End, TapRoot Reviews Electronic Edition (TRee) Issue #6.0, section b: chaps -----------------------------------------------------------------