Implexures - by Karen MacCormack.
2003. 75 pages. Chax Press, 101 W. Sixth St., no.6, Tucson, Arizona 85701. Write for price (probably around $12.00) or West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield, S7 1HN - in the UK. Write for price.
A Bibliography of the Published Work of Douglas Blazek 1961-2001 - by James DenBoer.
$15.95. 180 pages. Glass Eye Books (in association with Blue Thunder Books), 221 Pine Street, Number 4B1, Florence, MA 01062.
Admissible Evidence (Random Sightings) - by d a levy and Kent Taylor.
Kirpin Press. Editor A. Horvath. P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, WA 98668-2943. 100 made. Write for price and availability.
Naked Knuckle. Issue one. 2003. - Editor: Greg Edwards. (Jeff Edwards and Alex Anguzza helping out)
211 Rowland Avenue, Modesto, CA 95354. A single issue is $3.00 (postage paid) and a subscription is three issues at $8.00 (postage paid). Zine appears 2 or 3 times a year and the price -Hello out there!!- this is cheap! Hey, they lookin for poems and readers! Hey, if you're selling pencils on the street corner for a quarter each you only gotta sell 12 to get this N.K. premier issue! Come-on, cough it up.
Letters – Poems 1953-1956 - by Robert Duncan.
Edited and With an Afterward by Robert J. Bertholf. $16.50. Flood Editions, P.O. Box 3865 Chicago, Illinois 60654-0865. http://www.floodeditions.com
A book - by Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova
...which might be titled ABC, or could be called that, Anabasis Xtant. C/o Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707. 2003. Isbn 1-930259-32-8 Price could be between $8 and $12.00. Write for price.
Optimism and Skepticism - by Mark Weber.
• Retirement Blues & Other Jazz Poems - by Gerald Locklin.
2003. Zerx Press, 725 Van Buren Place SE, Albuquerque, NM 87108. $10.00. Worth it all.
Hanging Loose 83. - Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217. Subscription is 3 issues for $17.50.
Implexures - by Karen MacCormack.
2003. 75 pages. Chax Press, 101 W. Sixth St., no.6, Tucson, Arizona 85701. Write for price (probably around $12.00) or West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield, S7 1HN - in the UK. Write for price.
The word implement is close to the word implexures (if you were alphabetizing all the words ever). One is or I am an implement of time and implicated by it (time). So when one reads this poetry there is an activation of imagination that expands the actual words and their saying to engage the imagination of the reader and the reader (me) falls into and through this portal into all time and memory. A complete soak as into a swimming pool! As beings we spend a good bit of time in memory, conscious or not (of it), and I can’t find in my memory any poetry, other than this poetry, that so opened this particular door for me – flung open. The avatar of memory hovers about Karen MacCormack, haunting and performing and informing her poetry. All of her memory is the material for her poetry - oh Jack Kerouac, memory babe, would be so jealous! Wide open ended poem of parts, part history of memory and a family and life memories perhaps there and untapped or barely visible and one wondering poet about the impetus to react a certain way in time, so MacCormack moves about this thickness of memory with some ease and which is a measure of her tremendous artistic assets. “Places move on,” she writes in one of the works and that sticks in my mind as I drive these streets in this my hometown (Buffalo) which mind as well be India or China because I am no longer on them as I once was and I am left with memory. How do we remember with words and slow that memory down so that the memory might be clothed in words? Karen MacCormack, for this humble being, presents a form, poetry.
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A Bibliography of the Published Work of Douglas Blazek 1961-2001 - by James DenBoer.
$15.95. 180 pages. Glass Eye Books (in association with Blue Thunder Books), 221 Pine Street, Number 4B1, Florence, MA 01062.
Some of you might not know the name Blazek that is Douglas Blazek. It is a name hailing form the Chicago of industrial America, working class. Way back at the dawn of small press as we know it – 1964 or so, Blazek published one of the most influential magazines of that mimeo era and it was titled: OLE. And he published Lyn Lifshin’s first book and Charles Bukowski’s first book of prose. No bad. Fitting that he should have this bibliography – I mean not because he once published Bukowski but because he remained a poet, a poet true to the force of poetry and, therefore, a force himself. A bibliography is in imagination a form of map and monument, and yes, it is a list of book, broadsides, anthology and magazine publications and in Blazek’s case, books he published and magazines he edited. This bibliography compiled by James DenBper, friend of Blazek, book dealer, and champion of small press, is in the end a form of labor of love. Labor it is. It is pedantic and lives in detail, tiny ones, in dates and number of copies. I learned from it. Blazek published Ole magazine, a magazine I’ve read albeit it was published more than 35 years ago, and I often wondered if I was wrong when I thought that Ole no. 8 was published before Ole no. 7. This notion was confirmed fact in this bibliography. A strange little detail but this is what makes this bibliography an important document. And beyond that, Blazek, being a mimeo rebel, had a network of small press magazines that made his network a community of like minded, passionate and committed writers. Tracking his publications elucidates this network. Those who know Blazek and his work know that he shuns his early, more meat poet, poetry. DenBoer's introduction casts needed light upon Blazek’s purposeful evolution, an evolution that is still ongoing. Blazek won’t give up his perceptions. He needs to wrap words about them, tighter and tiger tighter as he grows and those words then give shape of his imagination. The small press and the mimeo revolution forms a constellation of American poetry composed of ethical poets existing along side the more conservative and academic avant-garde poets. Shamefully, the literary powers of this nation saw fit to consolidate their literary careers in part by excluding other traditions. As time has progressed and upon reflection the mimeo movement of the 1960s and the small press networks of the 1970s form a solid historical core from which ethical authors have since developed. Historical scholarship has begun to respond to the champions of popular and populace poetry from the second half of the 20th century. This bibliography of an ever evolving, changing poet, who first found acceptance in mimeo, formed the core poetics of underground poetry, mastered, matured and evolved and who holds, still in heart-mind, the notion of dangerous poetry, a poetry that challenges cloistered perception - well, this bibliography is an achievement that marks a crucial period where acknowledgement of genuine American people poets can and will receive a much deserved due.
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Admissible Evidence (Random Sightings) - by d a levy and Kent Taylor.
Kirpin Press. Editor A. Horvath. P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, WA 98668-2943. 100 thin.
This is a wonderful historical document and should act as prototype for any such publication. It is a poetry reading given in Cleveland, Ohio in 1967 by d. a. levy and Kent Taylor. The book includes a CD of that reading and the poems in the book are the poems read at that reading and in the order in which they were presented. Levy has entered the mythic. He is the epitome, the essence and the definition of the rebel poet going contrary to law and the repressive order of society and allowing his poetic voice to sing loud. You can read about levy and you can read levy’s poems. Here, you can hear levy read the works. The poems are juxtaposed fragments of mind and silences and they sound with youthful and romantic truth (and he knows it himself and comments about such in his own poetry). Yet he is political, political because he calls it: THE POWER, out on the rug. No he does not sit home in his parent’s paid for apartment and mumble among friends that yes – it is a horrible war in Iraq or Vietnam or Johnson this, Bush W. that, and closes the eyes. Oh Sigh. Levy was out there with his poetry-speaking tough against it: THE POWER. He wore his ethics like a flag. I like em. I like the poems. You feel the portal to the soul. But when you listen to levy you hear the young man voice, quiet and measured in truth poetry moral speaking, almost squeaking in its tiny-ness in the immense problem of repression in the world. The poems are not pornographic, dirty or even violent. The easy speaking Cleveland cadence allows one to hear the simple yet direct poetry of that era when being morally just and standing up, speaking up - when in your own voice speeching really meant speaking. AH, it is a marvelous thing we have here. And following levy is Kent Taylor again with the measured slow and clear Cleveland speaking young man voice. The immediacy of his poetry is not a roar but in the clear simplicity that Kent Taylor relates the mood of his daily writing ritual thought. Unabashedly clear and simple knife that slices the bread, butters it. He titles many of his works the day they were written, trusting his perception. And like levy it is a young man voice. Not rallying the masses for peace or revolution but speaking the direct nakedness of the heart and soul that so defined and marked that era. An era when audiences didn’t sleep in the back row or dream of Chinese food afterwards. Nope. It was believe! That poetry of the direct phone line brought together one person and then another and there was frank conversation and from that came definition and freedom. Walt Whitman said poets need good audiences. Today’s audiences are a sad and sour sack of chewed up pencils without erasers. Poets are more gymnasts than human is. Faith, ah, want faith in poetry? Listen to a few young guys. Young people poems ina church basement in Cleveland in 1967. The Draft outside, cops, crushing filth with the river pollution burning, burning. Kent Taylor and d a levy. One tiger and one tiger. Tyger tyger burning bright.
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Naked Knuckle. Issue one. 2003. - Editor: Greg Edwards. (Jeff Edwards and Alex Anguzza helping out)
211 Rowland Avenue, Modesto, CA 95354. A single issue is $3.00 (postage paid) and a subscription is three issues at $8.00 (postage paid). Zine appears 2 or 3 times a year and the price -Hello out there!!- this is cheap! Hey, they lookin for poems and readers! Hey, if you're selling pencils on the street corner for a quarter each you only gotta sell 12 to get this N.K. premier issue! Come-on, cough it up..
Havin been to Hamtramck a few times and visited a number of bars there and the Polish club, I had to go to Don Winter’s poem, Hamtramck Street Scene, as my first read in this mag and was not disappointed to find that his poem and then like the other poems in this Naked Knuckle stands in the ethical tradition of small press poetry that refuses to flee from the fall of virginity, the sexual metaphors possible by the sensitive arrangement of tomatoes and cucumbers and the sperm spited out of the mouths of whores.
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Letters – Poems 1953-1956 - by Robert Duncan.
Edited and With an Afterward by Robert J. Bertholf. $16.50. Flood Editions, P.O. Box 3865 Chicago, Illinois 60654-0865. http://www.floodeditions.com
Let’s leave the this and that of academics and critic mumbles in the cloistered and protected and predictable classrooms of poetry and come upon this book. I suppose Robert Duncan is a way a ways from the immediacy of small press poetry and I suppose all readers of poetry have heard the name, read the work and made the decision, one way or the other, about literary direction, small press or the other camp(s) of small press. Let’s not pretend that all poetry is not other than small press poetry. All fair. All fair. In this book, a handsome, sensitive, reissue of Duncan’s book originally published in the 1950s (before the Opening of the Field) one locates that kernel, sand, magic that invigorates the mind and heart to poetry, no matter what form the poem might in the end manifest. The matter of love informs this work and if you are inclined to love, ever, at all, or on occasion, this is an ignition. The matter of poetry informs. The muse here is a fact! It is difficult to be unmoved. Facts arrive. Great books of poems remain grand. Shelley is as immediate as the relentless, invigorating snowstorms of Buffalo, New York! With the distance time has allowed, Duncan becomes like Keats and Shelley, Browning and Duncan’s mentor, Pound, a being, a poet moved by the forces of poetry, able to harness and adorn with words that spirit that rules all poems. With this book, this historical record and the poetry it is, Robert Duncan enters The Poetry Hall of Fame and honored we are, those all of use who labor each day with words, that such poetry exists to inspire and quench various thirsts and that editors and publishers recognize just that and provide a map to this nourishment.
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A book - by Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova
...which might be titled ABC, or could be called that, Anabasis Xtant. C/o Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707. 2003. Isbn 1-930259-32-8 Price could be between $8 and $12.00. Write for price.
Let’s say this is a book of visual poetry, concrete poetry in the old way. In the new way the authors and publishers haven’t titled the book in the usual way – meaning with recognizable title. This is a very good thing – to rob the rulers of their power concentrated in titles. In single authors, also and of the arrogance of the meaning frozen on the page! With the repetition of images in this poetry the reader is pulled forward at a tempo created by the variation in the images. Therefore, this visual poetry has cadence, and movement! It is a living thing. Not confined to Finlay like sleepy garden but let loose and wild in the world. It has sound in its obviously score like potential. If only we had instruments! Ah! That’s it. One needs a fresh voice and new instruments (vocals or sound making things) to make this thing sing o0ut ound. However, this text already sings in mind and heart imagination. Ah, Mercury! A flight forward here into the visual poetry of the future and allall poetry also. Delight times three.
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Optimism and Skepticism - by Mark Weber.
Retirement Blues & Other Jazz Poems - by Gerald Locklin.
2003. Zerx Press, 725 Van Buren Place SE, Albuquerque, NM 87108. $10.00. Worth it all.
This is one of the Mark Weber/Gerald Locklin flip books and is the 54th in the Zerx series! Wow. Fun. Zerx continuously keeps pumping out the solid stream of musical human cadence works, and we have to thank Mark Weber for that continuously devotedness to Locklin’s Jazz works and to poetry and poetry and music in New Mexico. Salute! Locklin’s work here in features several long works and one imagines that retirement from the teaching load of Toad allows him to generate longer poems in which he explores the endless variation of line and speaking cadence that has fortified small press works for over forty years! So, there is an evolution in Locklin, perhaps, occurring as the lines linger longer and poems find larger canvas. How exciting. Locklin’s work continues to inspire and enlighten, tease and teach, makes you grin, laugh and opens a world of poetry that is tangible, touchable and enjoyable without losing any art or abandoning the power of language. I have to mention that there is a wonderful poem called: Keith Jarrett Meets Charles Bukowski, which stands as a poem for ages. And standing along side it (for me) Mark Weber’s poem: Dry Year, which is a poem of conscience and ethics, eco-mind import, and clear poetic criticalness of mass TV culture and power politics which is killing the natural world. The kind of poem that must continuously be written for all of us to keep in mind the ravages that Bush thinking has upon the natural world (where in is poetry in its raw form). Weber writes: the guys who call all the shots/ are insane with money lust and power/ would our President, if he were a frog/ with burning skin/ even make it to the pond, kerplot/ jump in? (asketh Basho) Here I write thank you Mark. I am with the frogs and the pregnant and women who eat tuna laced with mercury. Recall all: Bush just relaxed the mercury emissions/clean air laws. Now all the young women and their unborn babies can be poisoned by heavy metal. What a great guy: George W. Bush. And Mark Weber stands up and speaks it. I hear. You do – out there – do you hear? Hear or get off this page - you don’t belong here. Poetry is for people with souls. I stand up with Mark Weber. Patriot. Thank you Mark Weber for this poem and all your other poems yeah, yes, also.
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Hanging Loose 83. - Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217. Subscription is 3 issues for $17.50.
83 issues is forever and Hanging Loose remains as a mountain peak in the realm of literary magazines. Run democratically, Hanging Loose continues on towards 100 issues. It is the way a magazine should be – it has a program of writing. This issue is a 125 pages long and if you wish the measure and heart beat of poetry, here in it can be located. This magazine is a prototype of what magazines can be and a should be. It has a cadence and a rhythm. It trusts its notion of the poetry. Go there as an oasis and a model, oh youth and young or new readers of poetry. I’d suggest to you all the works of Mark Pawlak (in this issue and beyond). He weaves politics and poetry into an art more piecing and insightful than any other writer in this America does, and he does it sharp and fast and with the every day news fact and the needle of irony. I could read his poems for days. You could - do. You should. But be prepared to be blinded with the white light bright blinding reality of American life he flings open on the mind. Man, how was it that I do not see. Well, that’s why we need more poets like Mark Pawlak. Page 85 in this issue is where you can begin. But there are all the other poems too! Wow!
Michael Basinski
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