Sudden Turnings - by Robert K. Johnson.
2001. 71 pages. $12.00. Impatiens Press, 50 North Street, Westford, MA, 01886-1279. http://impatiens.com/.
The Louisiana Review. Vol. 3. - Summer/Fall 2001.
224 pages. Editor: Maura
Gage. The Louisiana Review, Division of Liberal Arts, Louisiana State
University at Eunice, P.O. Box 1129, Eunice, LA. 70535. $13.00 an issue
(includes postage).
The readership flock of The-Hold knows and reads Lyn Lifshin, A. D. Winans
and Gerald Locklin. Duane Locke's been around for thirty years or more.
Herschel Silverman knows Donald Lev. Of course, Antler knows Jeff Poniewaz.
I know, via the snail mail, that T. Kilgore Splake lives way up in Northern
Michigan and I know that I went to college with Jerry McGuire, but he might
not remember. Mark Hartenbach is from East Liverpool, Ohio. We all know
cait collins. Obviously this is a community of writers, more than 100, here
represented in this issue of The Louisiana Review. More than that, this
issue brings together a form of American poetry that's been neglected, in
general, by the academy, big publishing houses and the white wine, soft
cheese, uptown Manhattan pink poodles and the downtown gently soiled
Manhattan and spilling over into Brooklyn pink poodles and the network of
poodle washing McDonald-salon poetry Disney too many everywhere all over
the U.S of A. The reality for most of the poets in this issue of LR is
second shift. Here in one finds an anthology of sub-canonical poets who are
populace and popular beneath the high brow. It's legitimacy as a form of
poetry stems from its tradition, now decades old, which began in magazines
like Hearse, The Outsider and Marvin Malone's The Wormwood Review, and it's
major pantheon of inspiration includes Charles Bukowski. The vitality and
extent of this community and its tenacious vibrancy stems from a frank
exchange of reality, which is sometimes mournful, base, corrupt and stupid,
and yet includes an acknowledgement via form to Modernism. Its experiment
is that poetry is not totally a cerebral ideology but a common daily event,
like coffee, bills and Republican lies. Maura Gage, her co-editors and
editorial staff at The Louisiana Review obviously understands this. Gage
has done a most marvelous job mapping this diverse, truly sprawling and
representative constellation of poets. She has assembled a unique document
of a world academically unrecognized but vibrant and diverse as any rain
forest. More than a discoverer or an explorer, Maura Gage is a caretaker
and a literary historian who has here made a document and poetic primer for
a type of poetry that enhances the comfort zone of American poetry and
expands our literary myopia.
Unarmed - adventurous poetry journal.
No. 21. Early December 2001. No editor listed. No price listed - FREE - on front cover. Send poems, money in some amount, or stamps, the anger of spring and the like to: Unarmed, 1405 Fairmont, St. Paul, MN. 55105.
Now 21 issues old, Unarmed has become one of my favorite magazines. It is one of the few I read cover to cover. I get comfortable with the poems because they're published without the author's name attached on each page after each poem. Thank god the ego has not overwhelmed every magazine. Adventurous, yes it is an adventurous magazine with poems in this issue by bill bissett, Peggy Lefler, enemy of the people, Michael Mann, anon and the wild team of Scott Helms and John M. Bennett. So, yes, there is plenty of visual work and enough regular type poems and them poems stretch the guts. As the poet writes, "Did rats, as they met death by poison,// approach
reason in a mirror image?" Now adventure means in my mind an exhilarating
voyage into the an unknown other. It is a first date kinda thing - not
knowing what is gunna happen. If I am not mistaken, Isabelle gave Columbus
copies of Unarmed. And some copies were buried with Magellan and Armstrong
left copies on the moon. And it comes from Minnesota also, a state that
surrounds St. Paul etc., which must be having a literary renaissance. And
Unarmed is part of this uprising.
Landing On My Feet - by Cheryl A. Townsend.
Kirpan Press, PO Box 2943 Vancouver, WA. 98668-2943. No price. 25 pages. Most fabulous! But write to editor A. Horvath. He has a long and growing list of great poetry books by Other Universe Poets in stock and he is republishing long out-of-print d. a. levy books. He commands the factory spring of the poets! Among the Gods, he sits.
The dominant theme of much of Cheryl Townsend's published poetry is her unabashed enjoyment of sex. Radical because she was among, if not the first, woman poet to totally allow her sexuality to dominate her literary canvas. This form of feminism is yet to be fully appreciated or embraced. However, certainly Cheryl Townsend will be heralded and exonerated for her pioneering work when the narrow libidinal USA of Poetry is better understood. Pleasantly, in the mean time, we have this new book, Landing On My Feet. The poems within this collection reveal a maturing Townsend, who is exploring the emotional terrain of love and finding among other things sorrow and the sometimes-bitter residue of life experience. With age the onslaught of memory is difficult to contain and it plays full in the emotional life portrayed in Townsend's poetry. Memory is within this
collection a lingering cologne. The raw vigor of Townsend pure sex poetry
has found a partner in the form of the older person's life (an lie)
experience. The result of this conjugal joining is fuller and richer poetry
spiced with a sensual amount of sugar but also consumed with more than just
a single grain of salt.
Sudden Turnings - by Robert K. Johnson.
2001. 71 pages. $12.00. Impatiens
Press, 50 North Street, Westford, MA, 01886-1279. http://impatiens.com/.
Master poet Robert K. Johnson finds the poem in tiny, randomly occurring, seemingly common and meaningless moments of everyday life and in those moments poetry is vital, sensual and everywhere alive. He writes in his poem In Any Piece of Music, "it is always/a sequence// shorter/ than ten notes// that hold my breath/still as sunlight." His lines are short and tight and governed by tried and tested life rhymes, like specific brush
strokes he creates insight and refreshing, intense images. Some of the
highest praise I image that can be granted to the art of poetry is the word
YES. YES, I see and I understand. A moment that was otherwise passed and
forgotten is preserved, pressed within the mind and savored endlessly. I
find this word YES throughout Sudden Turnings and I am sure anyone who
opens themselves to Robert K. Johnson's poems will be intimately touched.
For me, particularly, there is the poem, Sixteen? Eighteen? Years
Afterwards.
So excited am I by this poem that I imaged that if I write it here it may be mine! Of course, it is not. But I offer this to you, this Robert K. Johnson poem in the sincere hope that you will burst open. The beginning lines of his poem Sixteen? Eighteen? Years Afterwards reads:
you/emerging/from the rush/of waves and surf// flare in/my memory/like
flower/petals.
Michael Basinski
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