The Whispering of Ice Cubes: New and Selected Pieces - by Rupert Wondolowski.
Shattered Wig Press, 425 E. 31st St., Baltimore, MD 21218 - www.normals.com/wig.html - Probably $10.00
Somehow this computer didn’t auto-save and I lost all of these reviews when I pushed the wrong button. Like looking up from the subway of the imagination and just hopping off at the wrong stop and it is Niagara Falls. All this wonderful verb salad solid stream of worderous reviews lost in the blink of an eye as I screamed NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooo. But then again here is an eye – a fly’s eye on the cover of Rupert Wondolowski’s book. I think yes! I think I wrote that he does see things a bit other than the normal (The name of his bookstore is Normals ((part-owner))((How normal is that?)) and he does! Does not see normal. What is a good thing like hotdogs! Wondolowski’s vision is of a poetry ripe and rip with humor and the twists and turns of Niagara Falls lip staple-gun gum language juxtapositions! Sorta surreal – for sure – but also reviling the flexibility and excellent ability of words and worbs as a medium to create a reality, somewhere. And how the real can be alliterated meaning altered with words. Words are what Rupert W. manipull-alters and all ears. It is in it this adventure! He is a grand collagest of the real pasting this and that (even in his own bookstore (he part owner of Normals in Baltimore – go there) where he works at) – the real wonderful wondering about poking and caressing books. So the real disappears and re-appears variously and stories are there by related, as in told. It is a more than a real experience involved here. One holds the word world in suspension after reading the R.W.’s presentation of it! And I guess, well, yes, we are aliens and estranged form our language and the real and we have wings and club each other with kielbasa. Seems natural to me. Why not a poetics of worbs that turns the world on its ear! Or Eye! Or Wig (He is the editor of The Shattered Wig Review.) And with the skill of a cutter and paster (or pastor of the word or Rupert Wordwondolowski makes a world word with humor and insight into the lonesomeness of tasty word art – you open the book and out poops and pops the monster of language – you see its tyranny and how ridiculous the medium of words are. How can they create any reality at all? Shaping and shapeshifter – it is Rupert Wondolowski in-charge of the words. I wrote in the lost review that he is a magician. He is. Watch him pull a rabbit out of his seven.
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Vellum. Volume 2. Number 1. - Editors Joshua Auerbach and Eleni Zisimatos Auerbach
P.O. Box 48003 Montreal Quebec H2V 4S8 Canada. vallummag@sympatico.ca or www.vallummag.com
I lost this review too in the pressed the wrong button hasty moment. But I wanted to write that this is a full service magazine – it got poems – it got reviews – it got essay. Got it all sassy! Enough and when I came to find myself reading it page by page (a thing I don’t do with magazines much anymore) I found I liked it. This is not your small press poetry magazine but poetry is big enough for several places of poetry. What a drag if everyplace were New York! But this is Montreal and I was way pleased to be reading Nicole Brossard – who is one of the north’s best. … I mean the world’s best for sure. But let me get on with reading and I came across this poem called CUNT by Joanne Merriam and I had to stop and read it once, twice and three times (wouldn’t you) and let me write here Merriam’s last line: “See how moonlight’s sharp music breaks all your windows.” I have glass all over my office. I have glass everywhere in the parlor, on the couch. And there are birds. And fish. And there is glass all over everything. That’s what reading Vellum is and the sound.
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What Language - by J. P. Dancing Bear.
Slipstream Press, P.O. Box 2071, Niagara Falls, New York, 14301. $7.00 (only)
J. P. Dancing Bear is reading this day or yesterday up at Niagara County Community College and I am here writing this after reading his book and I wish I were up there listening to him carve the words with sharp mind blade that moves through the pumpkin and leaves a few fingers on the kitchen floor. What language? NO! What Language! That is the first clue to this superior poet and his magnificent poetic ability. Awesome! His uses let me quote him “ruthless language.” I like that and he does not back away form the brittle and brute life yet he is a strong poet who knows how tender words themselves are and how they can be miss-used so he doesn’t. Hence each word like hen’s teeth is pore-cisely placed palaces a palace of his in word work and – well – in the midst of the poem the words fly like slipping on black ice and the ghosts are speaking all around. Hear’umm.
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Score. No. 18. 2003. - Editor: Crag Hill
88 pages. Crag Hill, 111 E. Fifth, Moscow, ID 83843. Subscription is $10.00
Score is a visual poetry, experimental, limitless magazine. Dense, rich and varied, unafraid, Score is a commitment to an area of poetry as diverse and radical as to be completely awesome and threatening to the clipped and tired and tied wings of most poetry. Score was started, Crag Hill once told me, to be a place for poetic scores. The fruit is now in season. The aural impact is truly forceful. There are as many new sounds as new sights as new forms in this issue. And what was most surprising was the number of new participants in this adventure. Particularly, I have to mention the section generated by the Atlanta Poets Group, which I find most extraordinary and hence excited because here then is a group of artists who formed a tight knit and progressive unit of poets and exploratory poetics, a conversation of poetries that does not have to occur in certain bars on Manhattan! Oh thank God there is something new in the universe! This is a model, this APG, Atlanta Poets Group, of poetry in this new century. Carry on and check it out. Crag Hill is immortal.
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Greatest Hits: 1995-2003 - by A. D. Winans.
Isbn 1-58998-219-3. Greatest Hits Series No. 197. $8.95. Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane, Columbus, Ohio, 43213. http://www.puddinghouse.com Or write Sir Winans and ask him for poems or send him money so he can fix his heater: PO Box 31249, San Francisco, CA 94131-0249
Let’s first say after 197 in this series, a round of applause and applesauce for Jennifer Bosveld – Queen of Pudding House! Now on to this greatest hits by Winans, who places his soul as a thin wafer of Holy Communion, each day, on the tongue of the poem for people and poetry of the people, so those distressed, will have a poetry, and some poems, like baskets of oranges and lettuce from China Town, like cool designer beer for which you are charged Bud price, for thanks for the coffee and another in which sunshine is the cream, twists words Winans like spaghetti around a fork Communion Winans stands mighty with his picket-sign outside the stuffy too easy life of tweed jackets and turtle necks and mom and dad paying the rent for apartments in Venice, oh Winans, oh stick it in up sideways up their stupid, intellectual asses our poems of working people and broken people our poems our crowns our thorns.
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Poesy XXII. Fall 2003. - C/o Brian Morrisey
Issn # 1541-8162. C/o Brian Morrisey, P.O. Box 7823, Santa Cruz, Ca. 95061. Submissions@poesy.org and check out: www.poesy.org also.
I waiting to get a blood test and they have a retarded woman about 26 in the blood draw chair and she is freaked by the needle and has two or three nurses and kinda blood nurses and officials and a social worker as big as line-backer hovering about her like vultures and I need this before my needle after 12 hours of fasting (even no water) and I see that Morrisey runs 1000 copies of this Poesy mag! 1000 copies he does it for free! 1000, that is 1, xero-zero-sero copies! And it starts off with a great editorial where he talks to my mind about the commune between poet and editor and poetry! He understands and then there are pomes and poems by Linda Lerner and an interview with her – these are her days! And a wonderful anti-war poem by Antler. He knows. Another money war for Republican rich to get a Republican richer and how is it that Americans are so stupid to believe Bush and cause so much dead and death when there are pomes and poems by Dave Church and an interview with Robert K. Johnson in this mag. I mean, wouldn’t you rather be hearing a poem by Edward Obuszenski – it sings of strange humankind’s veil of the self – rather than Bush’s piece of shit excuses for more dead? Well, I would. And I’d read poems by David Chorton and translations by Jack Hirschman and Boston Notes by the Doug! Doug Holder – he be! And they can take all the blood they want and run all their blood texts for this bug and that pencil and that milk thistle in your blood is too high. Tough and too bad. And the hell with Bush – it is poem mags like these that make the heart beat each and every long darned cold day and tanks the Christ and other various gods for the poem what is here preserved and perpetuated by Morrisey – wish he as my President! YOU! Join up. Resist by opening your imagination! – Do it with Now! Start with POESY XXII.
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Buddha on Ice. Peshekee River Poetry No. 6. - Tom Blessing. – editor.
Tandavapoetry Box 689 Eastpointe, MI 48021. $1.00. Or 3 first class stamps (US) see: Tandavapoetry@yahoo.com
I was laying on the flood no floor and when my left eye crawled open and I see on yellow paper Buddha on Ice! Within poets: Shoshuana Shy, Robert L. Penick, Carol Parris Krauss, Donna Michele Hill, Mark Hartenbach, Alan Catlin, and Sharon Rothenfluch Cooper. I take a deep breath and breathe and inhale this fresh air of the underground poetry all moist with the humanness of garages and eggs sunny-side up and hot coffee in worn cups from Buffalo China! Hey! All those Buffalo China cups you been drinkin hot coffee from for all your life. Guess what. The plant just closed! 300 more people out of work. Lucky we are fighting terrorism. Isn’t cutting the throats of 300 working people and their families, isn’t that a form of terrorism? These aren’t the folks that got big SUV jobs and houses what are as big as churches, no no no. These are people who are the poems in this magazine. I know what side I am on. Bravo my friend poets. I raise my coffee cup and to you too Blessing!
Drunk and Disorderly: Selected Poems (1978-2000) - by Alan Catlin.
Pavement Saw Press, isbn 1-886350-83-3. Price is $14.00. Pavement Saw Press, PO Box 6291, Columbus, Ohio, 43206. David Baratier runs the press.
And if you need poems, write to Catlin at: 143 Furman Street, Schenectady, NY 12304.
This is along awaited, most necessary collection for it presents the full dynamics of Alan Catlin as poet. David Baratier writes a fitting introduction – specifically how he found Catlin’s work in a library as a young man and found relief in Catlin’s vision and understandings of world, life and living and the daily-ness of upstate New York town life. It is a justice. It brings together poems from 26 books by Catlin (some long forgotten and impossible to find) and is over 150 poems long – yes this is nice solid, long needed collection. A life’s work and a life masterwork to write that. Oh yeah, this is a cocktail shaken by Catlin for intoxication for all and for all occasions, any occasion too! Drink hardy. Well that is easy to say. Too easy. Catlin moves from Joyce, which for small press poet, isn’t the everyday. Kerouac, the only other outsider poet, off hand, that finds a launch pad from Joyce. But Catlin do. That part of Joyce that wonders and philosophical Catlin is also as he is in personification Joyce. Interesting, most interesting. This collection presents a poet involved in a life of reading and contemplation of words as art and then this is a manifestation of that practice. This collection does flesh out the bar poet. Flesh deep and rich and read and I am happy to read this book and happy for press and most happy that small press does have such reward. And each word then is measured in Catlin’s work, like a shot and so many mixers. And an olive and a cherry or an onion or a hair curler. And there are always those strange entities, the odd people that inhabit the poetics of small press. And there is passion and humor, on occasion also but most often a sharp insight, the flash of silver in the murky, muddy water of existence in America. Whatever the fix it is a master that progresses with these words, weaving, and the relentless practice of the waves Good.
The Latest News: A Native New Yorker’s Journey to Sept. 11 - Robert K. Johnson.
Selected poems. Ibbetson Street Press. Doug & Dianne Holder, 25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143. ISBN: 0-9724601-3-6. Write for price.
It is a measure and badge and I have taken to adding them. And now to the poems in Latest News, a fine selection by a talent who is aware of madness and the mad and perhaps realizing that we all go there or are near enough to fallllll. Fall In. Fell In. And I think his catching the sight of this entity called MADness shapes the work and gives it, the poems their pleasure and edge – that nose that wins the race for one pony and condemns the rest to the dust bin of tired poem history. It is an adventure to enter the finely tuned engine craft of Johnson’s work. Each work is a custom made motorcycle! Take The Letter, one that resides now as a barbed fishhook in the side of my heart’s eye. THE LETTER. Barely are your eyes open/ when you receive a letter/ you know it is urgent… …. … it takes you / till noon to figure out// its alphabet… … … and you look forward to reading/ more of the letter the next day./ But your eyes stay shut. WOW! Feel that cadence! It is fun to type his lines but then this poem – this letter. These letters in front of your eyes! Read Johnson (and there is an interview with him in issue 22 of Posey – see review above!) See?
Michael Basinski
©2003 the-hold.com
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