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http://home.earthlink.net/~gbpress Ian riffin. Green Bean Press, P.O. Box 237, NY, NY 10013. Send support - use any form possible This is Ian Griffin candy. Poets and prose with throbbing robin eggs laid by armadillos and dishes screaming in the air from the boss's flabbing, sweating lips, tore panty-hose again - twice this week, standing still and being hit by a truck - it is your fault, here in America - this isn't. This isn't a guy who can fly off to Brazil for a strawberry milkshake to sooth his hurt mind. No. Here are poets who butter your toast with shit and butterflies. Oh the night notes are lonely and strange things. How these insects ignored by the museums sing. We are fortunate that the Bush II's DDT didn't kill them, kill us all. I am sitting here smoking a cigarette with Mike Kriesel, Winans, Crocker, the group. And joe r. and Mark Terrill and Nathan Graziano - it is his kitchen. I don't play cards. I sit and smoke and look out the window at the pleasant dark night. I hear the Gods, the bugs. Gontarek comes in with Sal Salasin. "Where the hell's Griffin?" someone asks. No one answers. I think he is out back making books, I think, but remain silent. My smoke drifts out the window. There are plenty of insects. I hear them. They make me happy. These insects are free and they refuse.
Oh course, this issue of Mineshaft in hand, and I see that R. Crumb did the cover. There is more Crumb inside. He has good company: Mike Kriesel, A. D. Winans, - hey weren't these guys in the Green Bean book? Yeah but Jorin Osroska, Rob Meadow and Irving Stettner weren't. And do you have a problem with that? You think I care? You think I care what I think? Or anyone? I think this is a good magazine. I talk a lot to msyelf, and I never answer politely. There are photographs and drawings as well as poems and fiction in this issue. All of this is top of the line, top shelf. This is orange frosting on sponge cake. And beer married to smoked fish. It's morning and there is a beer in the fridge and it is night and THEY leave you alone and there is lots of beer and THE THING is on television again. I am selling records in Peru and people there love music. I am treated good. The people give me sneakers. "You write good poems," they say. They say, "Want some hamburgers?" No one is mad at me. Life is good and so is this magazine. Let's say you start with Tramp the Road by Catherine Aldington. "No, Catherine, I do not know the way towards death. I do not know and I am looking straight into the cellar." I ponder again, after your poem, I ponder. Should I look for the lost socks of my life? Poetry makes you do such wonderful things. Well, if you don't want to write to Mineshaft you can get issues at: Troubadour Books, City Lights, Powell's, Harvard Book Store, Grolier's, Tattered Cover, Water Row, Bull's Head, Collected Works, The Regulator Bookshop, Gotham and Downtown Books and News.
It is very good, it is so good to take the focus away from form mundane, overin and doubleflated, masturbated, philosophical melodramatic mud, vapid poems, with their deep meanings and seething purpose and posing and place it on the fact that words can be toys. Ah toys - such were the joys…. But not Are! Rosemarie Waldrop allows us to re-enter that delightful Popsicle palace and place with her Ernst Jandl project. Playfulness unleashed can be poetry! Fun can be poetry and humor poetry. Talk about making poetry some larger and wider and poetry that can have a popular appeal and a wider and a real reading audience!!! Let's start with this project. Thank the Gods
that there is still room in the ponderous realm of poems that poems can be funny. All of this and more happens in this most inspiring collection of translations of German poet Ernst Jandl. Like this poem translated by Rosemarie Waldrop:
Well, the first one I pour out of the envelope was one without a word title so this organic stuff in black and white must be the title. The art work and text is copyrighted by D.E.C. Robbins - so DEC must be the author. Good work DEC. Sample: Let me rest in your pain-littered dreams/ that feed evolution/ on the edge of mankind. This is an eight page one poem book and a good one it is. Well, the second one out of the envelope is a smaller publication but longer. This second smaller publication seems to be called: Excerpts from ON FORMS by this person named Logosphagus. The art work: spiked organic beasty! The poetry sample: Standard deviations:/ [in taxonomy/large moose heads/medium moose heads/small moose heads]/ A fine slash of poems - too bad the entire project not in print. I love it. A good bit of pondering about the ridiculous lives we lead in the age of - what ever age this is. Well, nothing else came in the pack. But if I get to San Diego…I am gunna stay in The Fort.
Michael Basinski
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