Bourbon and Coke - by Robert L. Penick. Chance Magazine Press (I think), (I think is not part of the Press name), 3929 South Fifth Street, Louisville, KY 40214. $7.00 (I think) (I think that $7.00 should get the poet a few Bourbon and Cokes).
Light Fields - by Michael Kriesel. He lives at: HI 6550 State Hwy 52,
Aniwa, Wisconsin 54408. (Strange address but write him.) Light Fields a publication of: Chance Magazine Press, 3929 South Fifth Street, Louisville, KY 40214. No price given for the 20 pages of poems but must be between 5 and 10 bucks. (My guess that the few bucks includes postage).
Bogg - No. 70. Editor: John Elsberg, 422 N. Cleveland St. Arlington, VA.22201. Subscription is $12.00 for three issues.
The Face of Chet Baker - by Gerald Locklin and then flip the book and you have E Minor 6 by Mark Weber. Zerx Press, 725 Van Buren Place SE,
Albuquerque, NM 87108. About 8 or 10 bucks and worth every worn face on a Lincoln penny. I think both Weber and Locklin have beards like the great Linc did have.
White Light - The Lost Vision of Montana by Tom Eagle. 203 pages. Probably ten or 12 bucks. Published by Anabasis, Oysterville, WA. 98641-0216. anabasis@willapabay.org
Bourbon and Coke - by Robert L. Penick. Chance Magazine Press (I think), (I think is not part of the Press name), 3929 South Fifth Street, Louisville, KY 40214. $7.00 (I think) (I think that $7.00 should get the poet a few Bourbon and Cokes). Bourbon and Coke is a bourbon and coke double bar bourbon with no ice to water down that bar back bourbon. Dedicated to Henry Chinaski seems to be a better indication as to what the poems is gunna be than any long winded fart introduction. So be it. And probably better than any long winded fart filled review. But who can stop from farting? The poems in this book are about drinking and friends who drink and things one sees when drinking heavily. Skip's bar is the place to be. Drinkers live in worlds close by but not in the world of the huge sea of non-drinkers. I am sorry for them, them non-drinkers. I was stuck in a gas station during a snowstorm a few nights ago with about 30 people and announced that I would buy beer at 11PM, so we could at least have fun. No one responded. A few people then had coffee. A few people bought some crackers and a few waited in line to pee. A lot of people stood quietly watching the snow. They watched and watched. And watched the snowfall. Henry Chinaski was not among them. Robert Penick was
not among them. Shortly later I left the gas station to make my way in the snow. I farted loudly in the cold and wind and dark. It felt good to be alone and away. This then is my mark of approval for Penick and his poems.
Light Fields- by Michael Kriesel. He lives at: HI 6550 State Hwy 52,
Aniwa, Wisconsin 54408. (Strange address but write him.) Light Fields a publication of: Chance Magazine Press, 3929 South Fifth Street, Louisville, KY 40214. No price given for the 20 pages of poems but must be between 5 and 10 bucks. (My guess that the few bucks includes postage).
Words that if I write a review I will use: solitary, father's belt, 10 years in the Navy. Sad. Love. Broken. Women would love to be loved by this guy. Haunted. Shadows. Moon. Field. Romantic. Someone who happened to be under the ass of life without an umbrella. Nature. Dragon fly. Firefly. Ripe. Rip. He writes, "drowning/ me/ in mercury." More Moons. Agony. Black. Black tree from which hangs the suicide bodies of Cain and Christ. Sorrow. Romance of remembering. Wishing. AH sweet bitterness and fierce thirst for all things lost and love. Slipping into darkness. Melancholy. Could be short poems for tombstones. Captures a cup of sane sadness enough to quench the fiery Hellhole of life.
Bogg - No. 70. Editor: John Elsberg, 422 N. Cleveland St. Arlington, VA.22201. Subscription is $12.00 for three issues.
The first thing you gotta know is that if you subscribe to three issues you will get them. Bogg has been around since 1968, which is 32 years, and is probably older then most of the readers of this review and not as old as those who remember that Leon Harvard Owlswald shot Priestadent McKinnedy 37 years ago. And Elsberg himself is a fine poet, with a horizon vaster than most - he writes short poems and does visual poems and etc. Who among this crowd can say they will be in the business in 30 years!! Christ!! Elsberg's Bogg is in the tradition of The Wormwood Review and The Outsider. Consistently Elsberg and Bogg brings to wide light a poetry filled with guts and gusto, with feeling and depth, but not sentimental or any academic professor outlook crap. I would venture to say that in the realm of poetry and society Elsberg and his Bogg present, issue by issue, the very best of poetry by people, consistently, and his mark is the mark that all other editors have to try to match. American poetry owes it all the Elsberg. Don't
forget his free for postage Bogg books. Look, if you have gotten to THE HOLD and to this page and this line and you don't have in hand Bogg you should, you gotta. If you are that stupid to think you can get beyond the front door with your poems in your sweaty steaming hand without knowing about Bogg than you cooked greasy goose is stuffed with zebra puke.
The Face of Chet Baker - by Gerald Locklin and then flip the book and you have E Minor 6 by Mark Weber. Zerx Press, 725 Van Buren Place SE,Albuquerque, NM 87108. About 8 or 10 bucks and worth every worn face on a Lincoln penny. I think both Weber and Locklin have beards like the great Linc did have.
Mark Weber's long poem is half this fine book. It is a long meditative piece composed of memories drifting in and out of the fifteen-page poem. This seems a different type of poem for Mark Weber who spends a good deal of his time painting houses and in the recording studio and writing poems with a more up front reportage style. It is wonderful to see Weber then here growing and growing reflective. He is truly one the great writers of long poems. Perhaps he the one and only one who can handle the form with grace and style and still have it sink in deep like a fork in your raw hot dog or slicing the fog. Look, long poems are hard to write and Weber can write them. A master work that must be read. A line in his coda explains it quite well: "When you first awake your dreams are still part true." So it is with this poem. Then flip the book and be treated to a set of poems by master artist Gerald Locklin here relating more of his jazz poems, riffing along various themes and always appreciating music. Music is an important aspect of Locklin's work - more than one would imagine. Locklin is a poet much involved in the idiom of speech. However, if one considers a riff or phrase in music to be speech in a way controlled, well then so does Locklin's cadence become music. The progression of the poems is a precession of and in and with the pleasure of sound. As with all of Gerard Locklin's work, it is so smoothened in the honest as to be ice and your ride is a glide though the poetry.
White Light- The Lost Vision of Montana by Tom Eagle. 203 pages. Probably ten or 12 bucks. Published by Anabasis, Oysterville, WA. 98641-0216. anabasis@willapabay.org
Only the best of prose is poetry. Tom Eagle does write it. What a most wonderfully, flowering, foutaining imagination. Let me quote, "It was that sort of career, the first compression, devolving the hot erotic surrealistic line down into the word, into the concrete, into scatter-screens through which the emissions were, like psychic orgasms, planted flat iconic mutations of sequence without the grace of rhythm, synaptic firings from the cerebral cortex, they were that, those 1968 scatter poems a few got printed here and there, as if anybody noticed, he thought, horny for greatness, …." And on and on for more than 200 worthwhile glorious greatness pages of Eagle onward. This is the best prose that is poetry - poetry that is a measure of all parts of a creative life with human condition rhythm. And this is it. Enough picnic basket and poetry language and adventure for the hungriest campers, enough Eros of all the arrows in bows, enough of life being unzipped… - a thoroughly worthwhile read. Gems all throughout everywhere like a bit of captured speech on page 141, "Something to do, really, a good hobby, poetry, but why not get a job!"
Michael Basinski
©2000 the-hold.com
•
grafitti messageboard • BACK
email |
the hold
• disclaimer •
© 1998-2002 the-hold.com /archives -all rights reserved
[ TOP ]
|