The
Dead Zone Trilogy
by Todd Moore.
St. Vitus Press. 2005. 38 pages. For more information on
this book, price, etc. contact: Theron Moore at st.vitusfan@aol.com
Those readers who have encountered and engaged Todd
Moore's poetry are familiar with his focused literary obsession with
John Dillinger and how Dillinger has become, for Moore, an allegorical
icon. With this book, The Dead Zone Trilogy, Todd Moore continues to
explore and mine/mind this rich, legendary and complex American
outlaw/gangster and symbol. In the three long poems within this
book, Moore pushes beyond the candid sexuality and violence and outlaw
behavior of Dillinger. Within the poems time itself is manipulated.
Moore interferes with time. The poems, particularly the center poem in
the collection, occurs, if that is the correct term, within the seconds
when Dillinger realizes he has been trapped in the Chicago alley,
betrayed by the lady in red and is being shot and is shot dead. It is
of course frightening as the various thoughts flash in Dillinger's mind
as imagined by Moore. But it is more than an imagination that Moore
has. He has merged with Dillinger and they are of one imagination.
Moore is able to weave in poetry John Dillinger's fleeting images. It
is a collage of particular seconds, memories and bits of language.
Moore, all along, throughout his career, has been a good citizen of the
small press. He continues to be that. But beyond this allegiance he is
innovative in his pursuit. He is not only imagining the thought of his
poetic familiar and character but bringing into small press poetry
techniques infrequently utilized namely time manipulation and collage.
Small press poetry needs this form of infusion. Moore does it and still
retains his allegiance to the genuine.
O Outbreak
by Kevin Thurston. In the alphabetical listing of the Serial
Pamphleteer Editions, this is letter J. Furniture Press. Baltimore, MD.
Check website for price and other publications.
furniture_press@graffiti.net
Perhaps this is Kevin Thurston's first book. As
such, it points to a career that will challenge the shape of writing.
It smashes words at the level of THE word. It invades and mutates
writing. This is a slim, beautifully printed, fun and intellectually
impressive book that depicts the invasion of the vowel O into our
words, for example: O onto oor words, foo example: O onto oor woods,
foo oxomplo: O OOOctra. Therefore, the writing is fun, humorous and
playful as well as, so to speak, deadly serious about altering
language. Be thirsty for Thurston. Watch for his name up in the
Dolights.
Mineshaft. Number 15, April 2005.
Everett Rand & Gioia Palmieri, editors. 611 Bon Air Avenue, Durham,
NC 27704. Issn 1531-138X. One year subscription is $17.50. Cover
price for this issue: $5.00.
The front cover of this issue features a drawing by
R. Crumb and the back cover a reproduction of a circa 1940s or 1950s
newspaper advertisement for burlesque, complete with picture of Donna
Kaye, who was the headline stripper. There is a reprint of an interview
with Charles Bukowski by Ace Backwords within. And also inside more
Crumb and more Burlesque and a piece by Andre Codresque. And of course
more. For a 48 page magazine, word for word, line by line, drawing by
drawing, item by item, with a focused purpose, I'd be hard to find a
match for Mineshaft. I was remembered, after reading Bruce Simon's Los
Angeles Burlesque article, in Mineshaft, the burlesque advertisements
of my own childhood and how my fantasies were fueled and molded by
these 1950s burlesque ads. In the newspapers! Yes, in the everyday
newspapers. Oh the right-wing has stifled and drowned our sexuality. I
mean there was kinda porn in the newspaper! I remember the headliners:
Honey Bee and Busty Russell. Busty measured 50 inches around the bust!
This became a measure of greatness in my circle of friends: 50 inches!
50 inches! Our dreams were measured by 50 inches. Well, that's just a
personal reaction to Mineshaft - the best little magazine in the candy
section of your local supermarket book store where the proprietor is so
old that you can buy quarts of beer and drink it out by the railroad
tracks with Mineshaft in hand dreaming of Ginger Jones. It's the work
of the little magazine to remove the reader from the daily to the realm
of the extraordinary, the mind and imagination, and Mineshaft does it
with each page. Totally engrossing and appealing. Get it. Keep it up on
the shelf. Oh! Wait! No hide it! Mineshaft is a magazine that your
friends will steal.
[U T O ?] Blausteinsee
by Luc Fierens and Reed Altemus. PostFluxpost/Tonerworks. Luc Fierens,
Post Fluxpost Galdenberg 18, B-1982 Weerde, Belgium. Reed Altemus,
Tonerworks, P.O. Box 52 Portland, ME 04112-0052. No price. Write.
Well, what is the title? Probably in the world
of words it will simply end up as: Blausteinsee. So be it. But that's
too bad because this is more, so much more than a title. What is
spectacular in this slim, co-authored text, is that it is not of the
world of words but of the realm of poetry that is a combine of words
and images and sound and all forms of meta-writing. It springs full
flesh form from the meta-poetic, that far reaching trajectory in poetry
that is pushing for excellence in experimentation. This book is by two
poets who relish in changeling and challanguageing the status quo. Oh,
well yes, they relish on the hot-dog of the academic stiff meat poetry.
Well, not meat at all, because there are no meat dogs in school -
only cereal filed sausage skins. Relish the relish the relish. So here
we have a dynamic duo of poetry pushing limits with rubber stamps and
collage techniques borrowed from painting. It is bold. It is
provocative and it, like a spray can spewing graffiti, is reinventing
the media and medium of poetry. Check into this hotel if you want a
front row seat for the upcoming poetry parade.
Billy Last Crow
by J. P. Dancing Bear. 2004. 90 pages. Turning Point, P.O. Box 541106,
Cincinnati, Ohio 45254-1106. www.turingpointbooks.com
The book forms, via episodic poetic moments of
particular significance in the life/spiritual journey of one Billy Last
Crow: A Native American. He suffers the indignation of being an
original American and by that fact being outside of America. He is an
other, an out of the law of the land and culture character. Throughout
the poetry there is the self of this -other- seeking his self in a
world that will not allow him (you) to be a full partner in it. Perhaps
this is the real metaphor for living in America - the experience of
always being outside of its vapid practice. But, nevertheless, somehow
there are these wishes to be part of it, its all powerful, its seeming
ability to envelop and contain everything - everything but you (the
outsider self). Philosophical cultural stuff - Yeah? Yeah! It's here
and not punching you in the face with its smartness. It just an IS
thing. Here. However, as with all terrific poetry, the poetry also
operates to allow Billy Last Crow to find himself in himself. It is,
this book of poetry, many journies in one. It is an attractive book and
the poems are highly refined. They are the craft. I am attracted to a
poem called Billy Ghost Crow, where Billy, in the end, enters the
Ghost, spiritual, world. He, I'd suggest, becomes the poet and,
therefore, we learn the place of the poet in our culture, America, art,
the Native and the outsider, and , all of this in milieu of century 21.
First Touch
by Glenn W. Cooper. 28 pages. $5.00. Plus $2.00 for shipping.
Bottle of Smoke Press, Bill R. Roberts, Editor, 9002 Wilson Drive
Dover, Delaware, 19904 or www.bospress.net or contact the poet at:
glenncooper@austarnet.com.au (but if you do: ask for poems and publish
them!)
Glenn Cooper notes in one of his poems that his
great talent is getting off the bus at the right stop. That is a great
event! It is not the struggle of getting on but the tiny pleasure of
being conscience at a point of departure. To follow ones destiny and
enjoy it, yes, that is a talent. He lets his daughter dig in her nose
because she likes to dig in her nose and he is a proponent of human
pleasure. It is the small pressure the magic of the everyday event that
is celebrated in Glenn Cooper's poems. Each one is a little pleasure
about the poet living in the middle of himself living life. The lines
are easy flowing, flowing cadence, poems without complication, with
humor and surprise, with the ironies that present themselves in any day
of living. Living is speaking, speaking poetry. Each day for the poet
is poetry. A thing to remember recalled over ad over by reading Glenn
Cooper.
Days of Endless Nights
by Kent Taylor. 2005. Alan Horvath, Kirpin Press, P. O. Box 2943
Vancouver, WA 98668-2943. Write for price. Only 60 made. Do it
now.
Kent Taylor. Poet. Originally from Cleveland, and
that band of poets pulling the loose yarn from the tweed coats and pale
sweaters of the academic elites until those sweaters and tweeds
unraveled and left poetry naked and howling happy and wet and dripping
in the warm streets of poetic Cleveland joy 1960s, levy, Renegade and
Black Rabbit poetry challenging the cops; the cops they were afraid.
Well. Wow. This is poetry we needed then and bleed now for give us this
poetry again. Oh Poet. And that is Kent Taylor, his tap-root of
poems runs into that stream. Here, he is - still - still at it. Forty
year later! Yeah. Here he is in these hand full of poems that still
pull and they finding that space between people and senses and day and
night, that seam where poetic clarity occurs, the sight happens, where
the person, Kent Taylor, becomes the poet Kent Taylor walking that
tender line poetic mind working picking up the shards of poetry and
reflecting with intensity into what are for the poet - particular
instances, moments, seconds, instances, in which there is poetry
plucked and brought to the day surface for us all, all of us on it we
feast.
Bottle No. 3. 2005.
Edited by Bill Roberts. Bottle of Smoke Press, 9002 Wilson Drive,
Dover, Delaware 19904 $25.00. Signed edition by all living
authors: $150.00. Check it out at: www.bospress.net
To define: 20 broadsides laid into card covers,
letter pressed. Among the contributors: Charles Bukowski, Gerald
Locklin, Jeffrey Weinberg, S. A. Griffin, Nathan Graziano, Ed Galing
and more. Need I say more about the poems? Let me quote David Barker's
poem from this collection: "Keeping my yap/ shut is something/ I've
never regretted." And there is a picture of d a levy on cover!
That's an introduction, the best, as it should be. This could
almost be like receiving an outlaw wanted poster package. Well it is.
If'in I was a backwoods country sheriff poet controlling the poem with
my intellect and forgetting the streets twenty blocks and two suburban
rings away. You get it. And forgetting that there is a night, at night
and night in each of us, these poems don't do it. Well, I guess it
would piss off that poet sitting in thee high white glistering Pulitzer
towers, pulling on his trouser snake. And it does. And also these sorts
of publications, Bottle of Smoke - Bill Roberts (he being the chief of
this band of language robbers) - this type of publication pays homage
in a fine way to a type of poetry that has often been neglected by fine
printing. He did it. This do it. A gem of ruby tomato filled with
vodka, mind considered and presented poetry like the best bourbon you
got. The majestic aesthetic of small press has here risen to take
a pride in itself and it should and take a swipe here at the ironed
short-sleeve shirt poem also.
As Unavoidable as History
by Adrian Manning. $5.00. Hemispherical Press, C/o Justin.Barrett, 274
Ramona Avenue, Salt Lake City, UT 84115-2115.
www.hemisphericalpress.com And if you wanna write the poet:
Adrian Manning, 2 Noel Street, Leicester, LE3 ODS, England. GO ahead
and do it. You should write to someone in England once in your life.
Maybe he is a form of Poe poet, me thinks reading
these poems, deep stewing and brewing steeped in poems as a form of
sadness, intense, tight, a tight fist of words and opening palms, a
stark pleading begging poems palms opening saying I have no weapons but
words that open like wounds. Melancholic and brooding, the poems stand
witness to the sadness that is part of everyone, the door to door, day
to day forgotten sadness that otherwise, except in poems like these,
left on the page from behind the black curtains, would be neglected.
Manning finds them. Seeks them. The memories are all about bubbling up
here. Artefacts, the poet calls them in his poem, Artefacts. They
are as, the poet says, "unwilling to be buried/ or forgotten/ by
time." Adrian Manning, he who remembers with the mind of the
poet, learns and he teaches with noir light of the poem.
Nutria Bounce
by Joel Dailey. 2005. Open 24 Hours, Brooklyn. For this one contact the
press at: acoldgobot@hotmail.com And you can contact the poet
via: Fell Snoop, the All Bohemian Revue, 3003 Ponce De Leon
Street, New Orleans, LA 70119
Wow! This book is dedicated to Babette Deutsch! Do
you know her? She poet, critic, teacher and not enough remembered. Do
your digging and do it. These are poems full of the marvelous and
terrific juxtapositionings of bits of language. This is not to write
that they are somehow burdened by language theory or attempts at being
obtuse, arrogant or opaque. Quiet the reverse is operating here in this
poetry. The poems are fun and light and capture the language
playfulness so needed in the somber and serious world of poetry. They
are compelling and draw you into each and into the next. Fun to read
poetry. Imagine that. Let me just randomly give you a hand full of
these peanuts or m&ms or pretzels or whatever is your treat: OK:
Here goes some of Joel Dailey: "I forgot to underline the symbolic
portions so the/ Reader'll get it Maybe a brace of
asterisks wing/ By (I knew a woman who moved to NYC to become an/
Asterisk*) Ah the poetics of Everyday command me/ To move the
frying pan six inches west?" Joel Daily isn't afraid to let the
images and ideas and language of mass society populate his poems. The
poems as forms feel essentially verbal and are rich in satire and irony
and humor. A madly riotous poetic venture and a must for those who love
new poetry but not the seriousness and self importance of too much
cutting edge poetry. Ah, how much pleasure to find a smart and
exuberant book of poems willing to be read and ripe with its own
pleasure and with no fear in sharing the hilarity that is everywhere in
the medium we use to communicate.
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