The Dew Neal - by Douglas Manson.
Slack Buddha Press, 50 Garrison Avenue, Somerville, MA 02144. $5.00 or buy 6 copies of Manson’s The Dew Neal for $20.00 or get other titles from the La Perruque series of which The Dew Neal is number 10.
E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d. - Maria Damon and mIEKAL aND.
2004. 24 pages. Xeroxial Editions, 10375 Cty Hway A, LaFarge WI 54639 $4.00 includes postage.
http://www.xexoxial.org - perspicacity@xexoxial.org
• Notes to Cleveland - Correspondence from Jim Lowell to Tom Kryss.
[1979-2003] 2004. 26 pages. $12.00 includes shipping. All proceeds go to Tessa Lowell.
Kirpin Press. PO Box 2943,Vancouver, WA 98668-2943 – make checks payable to A. Horvath.
• Notes to Cleveland - Selected Correspondence from Jim Lowell to Kent Taylor.
[1970-2003] 2004. 70 pages $17.00 includes postage. All proceeds from this book go to Tessa Lowell. Kirpin Press. PO Box 2943,Vancouver, WA 98668-2943 – make checks payable to A. Horvath.
• Until the Last Light Goes Out - by Alan Horvath.
2004. 20 pages $12.00 includes postage. Kirpin Press. PO Box 2943,Vancouver, WA 98668-2943 – make checks payable to A. Horvath.
The Dark Months of May - by Tom Pickard.
68 pages. $12.95. Flood Editions, P.O. Box 3865, Chicago, Illinois, 60654-0865 www.floodeditions.com www.floodeditions.com
Few poets, I think, can appeal to more than one of the many poetry camps that exist in our poetry nation. Fewer, I think can appeal directly to the aesthetics of small press poetry, demanding candid encounter with social ills, social class and with its demand that poetry not reside solely in academia and the academic avant garde whose superstars include Robert Creeley and the late Allen Ginsberg. However, Tom Pickard seems to do this. Any reader has to read in awe because Pickard writes a most working class accessible yet most decidedly measured and artful poetry. He can read in a bar to a bunch of miners just off shift or to a classroom full of eggheads and come out with free drinks from both crowds. By the way, he is not Tom Pickard who is the Tom Pickard who is the deputy head of the FBI. This Tom Pickard lives on the boarder between England and Scotland. He dropped out of school at 16, held any number of jobs, attracted the attention the British poet Basil Bunting who liked his anti-(stuffy)-poetic establishment point of view and created a poetry from the cadences of the British workin people. Author of 10 substantial books of poems, the latest is his The Dark Months of May (which is blurbed by Annie Lenox) and the poems within chronicle the end of a marriage. Let me give some examples, from the poem: Denial is a River in Egypt:
god I’m easy, a pushover
for anyone with wine, a spliff,
a condom in her bag
I say no thanks and
half a bottle later
we’re on the nest
and from his poem The Dark Months of May:
agitated
I spin a glass
until it
hits my ring
I wont take if off
until you do
A collection of the pain of losing love poems this collection pokes the deep crevices of open hurt in each person whose hand has fallen out of another’s. I can’t recall when I last wrote highly recommended, so let’s go: highly recommended. Add terrific.
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Post 9/11: The Way I Be - by Herschel Silverman.
I2004. 52 pages. Butcher Shop Press, 529 Beach 132nd St. Rockaway Beach, NY 11694. Check for price at: butchershoppress@hotmail.com
Herschel Silverman writes on the first page of this book, “In the wake of 9/11 this is an attempt to capture the chaos.” and, “The meaning is in the method and in the doing.” I must rush write and say that this Herschel Silverman silver bullet is in the pistol of The Lone Ranger poem is upper super successful becauSings (yes SINGS) a meshSING of his two first page statements. Silverman at his peak poetry is a beat Beat rhythmic urban machine New Jersey ensemble that word notes along and swoops your ear up in its terrific traffic of words that gets you go from title to end Ding ding dong. SAMPLE :::::SEE::::HEAR::::
half-notes on Verso St.
beap beap beap bog old faults
plurally discover meanings darling
meaning waht waht could be
zeros like butterfly babble
or new wine acrid acidic so it develops
and I’m colored like wow yah web
a tower of hi-fi tapes
It’s a talking music of being and being out on the street and in between the gush roooosh of cars and horns and words of all of russsssssssssshzz talking is the material of Silverman’s art, which is half hearing and half speaking jazz riffs and half a cup of last night coffee or help empty beer of time. He keeps time and grows tomatoes. I mean this computer here keept wanting to correct his word: WAHT buy making it WHAT. I mean that is how he bends the words to his language and not easy and it is art because the damned darn conventional machine I am on wants its conservative order. Not so for H. Silverman keeper of the subway gate tympani.
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The Dew Neal - by Douglas Manson.
Slack Buddha Press, 50 Garrison Avenue, Somerville, MA 02144. $5.00 or buy 6 copies of Manson’s The Dew Neal for $20.00 or get other titles from the La Perruque series of which The Dew Neal is number 10.
OK – The Dew Neal – get it? Like a reverse of the first letters so you get a New Deal – but for Mason it is a Dew Neal that is taking the daily words slobbered about and full of slips lips and skips and twists and turns generated with mist spellings and misspellings and using them to mold and meld a speaking voice in a complete playground that avoids the surface philosophy of lots of poetry that isn’t this playful tat all. So I read in Douglas Manson’s poetry a way of speaking a poetry that doesn’t rely or lie upon blunt old school gutter tweet. The poetry informs. Wow! He’s stating a view! And making words really be art by making them work in their common behavior of making song and reason. What happens after Williams Carlos Williams writes, at the end Paterson, “The last summersault”? Well then you have Doug Mason and the royal acrobats of word possibility without arrogancing. This is really, as in real, then a class-conscious work. And: Trick or Treat, money or eat, we know your home we smell your words. Words are just the things we poets work at – the making of them. This is another way of reading and the music of this sartsats (isn’t this a great word I just made up! sartsats! – means by Doug Manson’s book and reads it) and jerks like the wordworm at the end of the hoook! And he has in the midst of this a lone, alone line: “Meaning we are devastated.” Meaning as we know meaning and meaning as I mean. And then meaning as we know something devastated. This is a good thing to remember that words are not dumb entities but living lizards to be tainted and trained to the page and in Manson’s poetry they still wag their tales, this way that, up and down, dog and cat.
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E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d. - Maria Damon and mIEKAL aND.
2004. 24 pages. Xeroxial Editions, 10375 Cty Hway A, LaFarge WI 54639 $4.00 includes postage.
http://www.xexoxial.org - perspicacity@xexoxial.org
$4 bucks for visual poetry. Buy it! This two authored visual poem by aND and Damon, I should say has meaning again more than just itself because now that it is October 16th and I look out my Buffalo, New York window – there is snow! What would you expect. So why not a poem of snow focus. Here we go: E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d. What’s new for me and most habitable is that this poem is a narrative visual poem. No longer are we staingnated on the single page by a work. Here poetry moves terrific. So it doesn’t have that dullness of one page visual works tryin to be Moby Dick city hall in Chicago monolith or cute candle slowly melting – isn’t that so sweet. Nope. aND won’t have it and Marie Damon neither. And a real invigoration of what a word in a poem can be and in this it’s like, “co%%le trou%%le” What a two world line! And throughout there is a sensitivity to font and type manipulation that goes beyond the clever and becomes useful in fact a very necessary poetic tool. This line here as I write it with these words and their regimentation are left here for measuring money in the bank or vases full wheat on the way to market. But for the poem – real invention. There is no going back. I mean, I didn’t think any one or anytwo could really write a poem about snow anymore! However, it is these artists and poets and the combine of two in one conversation across the storm that makes it so new. I think that painters can finally learn from the poets. So – I suggest from this humbleness what we embark upon a new century of teaching poets about poetry from poetry. Here’s a primer of Century 21.
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• Notes to Cleveland - Correspondence from Jim Lowell to Tom Kryss.
[1979-2003] 2004. 26 pages. $12.00 includes shipping. All proceeds go to Tessa Lowell.
Kirpin Press. PO Box 2943,Vancouver, WA 98668-2943 – make checks payable to A. Horvath.
• Notes to Cleveland - Selected Correspondence from Jim Lowell to Kent Taylor.
[1970-2003] 2004. 70 pages $17.00 includes VSPACE. URL proceeds from this book go to Tessa Lowell. Kirpin Press. PO Box 2943,Vancouver, WA 98668-2943 – make checks payable to A. Horvath.
• Until the Last Light Goes Out - by Alan Horvath.
2004. 20 pages $12.00 includes postage. Kirpin Press. PO Box 2943,Vancouver, WA 98668-2943 – make checks payable to A. Horvath.
Kirpin press books are always beautifully designed, illustrated, assembled, and they are limited in number, and are always beautiful, always sensitive and made in the tradition of the best of small press and always publish those heroes and poets and protectors and lovers of poetry. These books are that homage. Two of these books are comprised of letters written by Jim Lowell to his poet friends. Let me tell you, Jim Lowell, himself, and his bookstore, The Asphodel Book Shop, were an outpost in the midst of the formation of the New American poetry. He loved literature and he loved poetry and remained faithful to poetry and poets. He owned and ran the bookstore, the Asphodel Book Store in Cleveland Ohio where in the wild 1960s the d. a. levy community congregated, and he was arrested for selling poetry that the Cleveland cops considered obscene. It was levy’s work and Duncan’s work and the poetry of others. It was that poetry which now is the cannon, academic and outlaw. FYI, Bukowski and west-coasters new him. Eastern poet folk also and in Cleveland, he was a center of small press and new American poetry vitality. He died this year. Recently I read an interview with poet Irving Feldman in which he said that a poet’s audience is really just 8 or 9 friends and that’s it. While Lowell continued to support all progressive poetry, underground, small press, New American, he remained faithful to his 8 or 9 Cleveland friends. And to some of these friends he wrote letters and Kirpan press has now brought forward these two fine collections of letters by Jim Lowell to poets Tom Kress and Kent Taylor. In these collections a reader finds the stuff that cements poetry friendship. There is lots of talk of new books and gossip about visiting poets and travailing and seeing other poets across the decades. It is so good to have this honor to read about the network/community as it was forming and evolving. One can go on and on, and I guess I could. But these letters, let me write, are both literary letters and friendly letters and that is what makes them so attractive. We are not just writers of poems but citizens of poetry in communication. Here, in these two books, is a glimpse of our citizenship. And it carries on. Jim Lowell was married for decades to Tessa and Tessa will benefit from any sales. This is as it should be. A. Horvath, poet, wrote with the Cleveland crowd and was part of this Cleveland group and he now lives in Vancouver Washington where he makes these wonderful Kirpan books. He has just published a new book. Until The Last Light Goes Out is a long, single narrative poem that chronicles a camping trip poet Alan Horvath ventured south of San Francisco. In the adventure he encounters this, that and number of things, pulling this out of that, finding the stuff of life all about him, wandering about the campsite, making friends with a woman and her son from the next site over, momentarily, they join, as people sometimes do bump into each other and there seems to be no reason or rhyme within the encounter, but it happens. It happened. And it occurred without purpose of judgment as part of the great circle rhythms of life. It is average as you and I and those things that you remember, like your grandmother buying you moon shaped cookies at Kowalkowski’s bakery – wait that is in my mind, just an incident there – All of it – I will never forget. Ah, the endless bakeries that make up our lives and our moons, which seems one purpose of this writing, let me write it out: remember, remember it all – so sweet and odd and unexplainable but still. Still there. Still. Narrative it is a poetic activity created via memory, as Horvath writes,
I stare awake the coals
until the tiny embers have gone black
& then leave whatever is left
as a memory,
because that is the fire
that burns the longest
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Michael Basinski
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