Catholic Kin - by Kemp D. Gregory.
2003. 150 pages. $14.95, iUniverse, Inc. 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512. www.iuniverse.com
St. Vitus’s Dance, Volume 1, Number 3. 2003. - Theron Moore (editor)
9251 Eagle Ranch Road, NW, Apt. 2111, Albuquerque, NM 87114. $4.50 an issue.
and if the xray hadn’t said differently i’d swear i was empty - by Theodore Knapsack.
32 pages. 2003. $5.00 fingerprintpress, P.O. Box 5473 Deptford, NJ 08096.
Tilt - by Elizabeth Burns.
275 pages. $22.00 Sourcebooks Inc., PO Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410. http://www.sourcebooks.com
Tilt is a novel and as such is about a child with autism and the stress of that autism on a family, which results in the husband/father’s mental breakdown and the wife/mother’s likewise mental collapse. A well-written narrative, and a balanced form, makes it a real book. My warning is that it is sad story but in that sadness it is so real. More so for me because I know the people, who are the characters, as real people. Elizabeth Burns is a poet and the story unfolds at the hand of a poet, in my thoughts, via reflection and by succinct definition, capturing instances in words of intense emotive states. Often Burns’s prose depicting her emotional states defines emotional circumstance that at times I have felt. In these instances her full strength as an artist flutters above the relentless problems of life. Real writers fear this not and find ways to do just that. Burns does. I like it. She is frightfully accurate. Her young daughter’s toes wiggling under the bathroom door in a moment of utter despair and the resulting motherly pleasures and joy defines totally the emotional fluctuations of human heart. I wrote above that I know these people as people but in this novel they are characters in a work of art and remain as such throughout the entire book. This gave me distance to digest their life troubles and to fully share, without personal sympathy, the trials they encountered, and the encounters are many. The book is subtitled: every family spins on its own axis. Surely, it does. And so do works of art – this art’s sharp needle spins upon your heart.
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Asemia - by Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich and Louise Tourney and Joe Maneri and Abdourahamane Diarra.
2003. 96 pages. Anabasis. Xtant, 1512Mountianside Ct. Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707. Write for price.
A form or branch of verbo-visual poetry, Asemic writing is an original progression within this genre. Thank the Gods (and Pixies) some poets are getting beyond the 1960s and into something other than simulations of Finlay or Cobbing, although, thank the Gods if these had a proto-generator it might be Cobbing. But, nevertheless, Asemia strikes out boldly into a form of writing that locates itself in primitive emotive states, pre-aural, pre-intellectual, when the sound of emotions took forms like these. Carefully rendered glyphs of proto or other writing the works ask the reader to fully engage them via what senses might be strongest in their particular reading field. They are not puzzles. Not riddles waiting to be solved but works that form a state of being that might be or should be the imaginative state. Like keyholes into the substructure of the spiritual life of letters and words enter and enjoy. Maneri writes a sequence of 24 spirit poems – sort of a form of spiritually dictated or guided automatic poetry! Poet as medium – I like it. Not seen this! And Diarra is from Mali – my first read of a vis-poet from that continent. We speak to each other with a poetry form from the other! Wow again. Wow.
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Catholic Kin - by Kemp D. Gregory.
2003. 150 pages. $14.95, iUniverse, Inc. 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512. www.iuniverse.com
The Catholic in catholic Kin is a small c. Welcome to the poetic world of Kemp Gregory. Not often that I read the word God in so many poems these days. God as in the God upstairs, but this God is here in these poems. But not that all powerful nasty moral son-of a… gun God. The God that you talk to when you get a flat tire in a snow storm. Oh God! So I think maybe it is this friendly, buddy to pal, conversation with God that allows Kemp Gregory’s poems to be so talking free and the easy cadences bounce from stanza to stanza over a wide horizon of incidents, emotions and circumstances. I imagine William Carlos Williams poem mind operating much the same at Kemp Gregory’s. The poems popping up all the time and the damned necessity to write them down. Now don’t think that this work is anything like a religious sermon and none of that moralizing crap or the pain of sin or anything like that. Nope. The poems are filled with delight in life and family and are sometimes silly and ironic and sarcastic and just plain funny. Humor here in fact abounds. Now, 150 pages of poetry has gotta have some humor in them or else – I mean – why read so many poems. Here are some titles: A Bit Groggy, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Returns from the Grave to Complete His last Fucking Timesheet; Clark Kent in the Parking lot of the Pilgrim Laundry; and Feeding My Poem to a Yankee Copier. See! These poems have that easy flowing I am in the midst of my humdrum life observations with stuff happening to me while stuck in traffic poems of the men and women of this weird America we are in. They are then real people poems, small press works that rattle along to keep us sane in the office, on the job, in the laundry mat and on deep into the walk around day. And Kemp- I also read Turok, Son of Stone comic books! You become his friend in these poems. And let me quote:
As you steadily continue
to age, it becomes more
tempting to feel
sure you’ve stepped
in every pile of shit
there is.
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St. Vitus’s Dance, Volume 1, Number 3. 2003. - Theron Moore (editor)
9251 Eagle Ranch Road, NW, Apt. 2111, Albuquerque, NM 87114. $4.50 an issue.
There are some magazines that act as ports of call where poets can fist-fight, drink, whore about a little, loose all their money and swap stories, gather information, read, exchange and head out to the sea of poetry, harpoon, gun, pen cock or cunt in steaming hand and off to hide out, commit suicide or write. The welcome mat is laid out here in this St. Vitus’s Dance and I suggest any lonely, hungover or lost poet of the butcher shop or department store of living idiot people stop by for a few. Stop in weary hunted poets to take a piss, cool the dogs, rest the writing mind, forget about the prairie of humanity blowing like sand and dust about the planet and delve into poetry. Barkeep: Theron Moore (Seems he doesn’t mind noting he is Todd Moore’s son – so here it is written.). There is a long interview in here with poet and publisher Mark Weber – a much deserved thing for sure and needed (done by Todd Moore). And some intro essays and talk and conversation and poems by Alex Glidzen and I was happy to read some works by Shane Jones. Now, Shane Jones is a very interesting young poet who has the line and cadence of so much essence of small press that when old guys like me are dead he will be king. Everyone should publish Jones. And well, it is all here and towards the back is: The List of One Hundred Outlaw Poets. I wonder if you are on it? Guess you will have to buy the magazine. And if you are not on it – how will you get on it? Start by reading St. Vitus’s Dance. And if you are on it and not dead and even if you are dead – well… you will have to work to stay on it by reading St. Vitus’s Dance `cause you do hear the footsteps of the young – don’t you?
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and if the xray hadn’t said differently i’d swear i was empty - by Theodore Knapsack.
32 pages. 2003. $5.00 fingerprintpress, P.O. Box 5473 Deptford, NJ 08096.
Cait Collins published this book what does not mean in my mind that I can not read it and write about in her ezine. Right, Pal, or what? Anyway, I have read Knapsack before and he is a poet full of the youthful fire of poet who somehow got his fingers caught in the lawn mower while his feet are in the washing machine and he is writing with his dick and boiling wood glue has exploded in the library. He is mashing it up here. Time and words. With big chunks as of poetry stuck to the walls. Pull it off. Hot and smoldering. Thick and chunky and raw with delight. Gunna be a collector’s item cause he won’t stop – you can’t stop this type of cyclone force. Just sacrifice a bull and get out of the way.
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Michael Basinski
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