• Free Thought Volume II, Issue 1, 2000.
Gary Aposhian, editor (and lots
of supporting editorial staff). Free Thought Publications, P.O. Box 238671,
Encinitas, CA 92023. Subscription: $10.00 for four issues. Email:
aposhiangary@hotmail.com
• Before It's Light by Lyn Lifshin.
1999. 239 pages. Black Sparrow Press, 24
Tenth Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. The usual Black Sparrow price (not bad
and worth it always).
• Rain River by Yusuke Keida
Editions Pphoo, Pradip Choudhuri, 73 Regent
Estate, Calcutta, 700 092 India. 2000. 68pp.
$10.00 US funds.
• Baker Street Irregular No. 4 / Minotaur No. 35
Baker Street Irregular,
4026 Midvale Avenue, Oakland, California, 94602. $5.00 an issue.
•
http://www.lucidmoonpoetry.com
• Heeltap No. 7. Issn 1091-9449. 2000.
$5.00 c/o Richard D. Houff, 604
Hawthorne Avenue East, St. Paul, MN 55116-2012. Direct all correspondence,
donations and submissions to him.
• The Band Only a Mother Could Love by The Bubbadinos.
Zerx 021 - CD. Mark
Weber, 725 Van Buren Place SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108.
-or- zerxpress@aol.com
• Free Thought Volume II, Issue 1, 2000.
Gary Aposhian, editor (and lots
of supporting editorial staff). Free Thought Publications, P.O. Box 238671,
Encinitas, CA 92023. Subscription: $10.00 for four issues. Email:
aposhiangary@hotmail.com
This particular issue is titled: Resurrection issue including a
retrospective of Charles Bukowski, interviews, short stories, photography
and artwork all a tribute to Hank's eightieth birthday. And a great tribute
it is. Happy Birthday Charles B. This issue for sure is a must for all of us
who honor the name Bukowski. I can only imagine that someplace an amusing,
confident, contented smile would be cracked by King Charles the Buk. I hope
he tips a beer. Most interesting to me, I learned from the material within.
And spread out about the issue are poems by Bukowski that saw first
appearance in Marvin Malone's monument of a literary magazine, the fantastic
Wormwood Review. Malone was a life-long publisher of Bukowski's work, among many, many others. Within this Free Thought issue are interviews with John Martin, Gerald Locklin, Michael Montfort and articles and short stories by
friends, like John Thomas, and a very interesting piece by William Parkard,
editor of The New York Quarterly. The issue also features a very long
interview with Linda Bukowski and a piece called The First Time I Read
Bukowski by Free Thought editor Gary Aposhian. And there are Bukowski
drawings and a re-publication of 20 tanks from Kasseldown and lots of
photographs not before published. A dream, a dream for sure for Charles
Bukowski fans, readers, scholars, and fans and friends. For Sure.
• Before It's Light by Lyn Lifshin.
1999. 239 pages. Black Sparrow Press, 24
Tenth Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. The usual Black Sparrow price (not bad
and worth it always).
Of course, like many, or all, I am acquainted with Lyn Lifshin's poems and
read them, over the years, at various times, in small magazines and as small
groupings in chapbooks. I knew her as a madonna and a madwoman and a
seductress, and also as a poet who would drift, nostalgically, into her
past. The poems appeared real, that is the images in the poems represented,
so I thought, a real time, a real place, and a real past that could be
called Lyn Lifshin's. On one level, of course, this is true. However,
reading 200 plus pages of Lady Lyn's poems, and that means about 200 new
poems, does transport one. Where one locates after engaging these poems is
in a familiar landscape, which is, nevertheless, unreal. Everyone's past is
always fabricated. Lifshin's past is infused and laced with emotions that
make magic the objects, including the feelings, of Lyn Lifshin created
places and people, places and people of her imagination. In her opening
poem, But Instead Has Gone Underground, she writes, "who I am is already/
camouflaged behind/ velvet and leather." So it is them throughout, each
step, in each poem, all these places of poetry are swaddled by her,
Lifshin's imagination that has made mythic the common (community) place of
everybody's everyday. Reading these poems one dances with their seduction
and falls into their witchery comfort.
• Rain River by Yusuke Keida
Editions Pphoo, Pradip Choudhuri, 73 Regent
Estate, Calcutta, 700 092 India. 2000. 68pp.
$10.00 US funds.
"I'm a cross-legged goof/ because I write poetry," pens Japanese poet
Yusuke Keida in his first widely available, in English, book of poems. It is
a selection of work harvested from 20 years of writing. It is a book, in one
sense, of love poems, homage and tributes to other poets that allowed Keide
to breathe/bathe full, wet, naked life, in the midst of the hard cold rain
of existence beyond poetry. His masters are Kerouac and Ginsberg and he has
supported them, and a generation or two of Beats that follow them, via his
Blue Beat Jacket press and magazine. Keida also translated Kerouac's poetry
into Japanese. Yes, Rain River, it is a lovely book published by Pradip
Choudhuri, India's Beat Generation proponent and promoter, and has that
delightful, oriental peace, a peace so needed, so sought after by Kerouac,
Ginsberg, poets in general, and maybe you to, good reader. Check it out.
Keida's address, if you interested in Japanese Beats and Kerouac, is: Blue
Jacket Press, 1-5-54 Sugue-cho, Sanjo-shi, Niiagata, Japan.
• Baker Street Irregular No. 4 / Minotaur No. 35
Baker Street Irregular,
4026 Midvale Avenue, Oakland, California, 94602. $5.00 an issue.
There are five poets from San Francisco in this issue. There are four
poets from Oakland in this issue. In this issue there is one poet from Long
Beech, California named Tricia Cherin. Her poem is on page 13. And at this
point the reality leaves and the magic of poetry, that is finding it,
locating its meaning beyond the self of stuff, finding the genius in each
event/object takes off and this is and this point is Cherin's gift - the
flight of word in art and on the page next to her art is an equally good
poem by Alan Catlin, who summons via title Harry Crosby from across oceans
and time form even the Paris of the 1920s which he fled via a bullet. Ah-
the gift of poetry. And Chased Out Beyond the Trees a selection of older
poems by Mark Weber has to be a stop in the read through this issue. Mark is
one of our best and these poems are from the period when his tank was full
of the booze life: wearing a dead man's shirt/staring up an old river/
sometimes, the trees/ grow over the view.
• http://www.lucidmoonpoetry.com
This URL is Ralph Hasselmann's new publishing realm. After 40 print issues
of Lucid Moon, a billion sheets of paper, exhausting several photocopy
machines, etc. and braking the backs of many a mail carrier (luggin around
the great Moon issues), it the LIT IT OF LUCID MOON: - the Zine -
metamorphosed into this site - which is growing, expanding, hanging and
mostly - well - yeah - it is growing - that is what Ralph does the best - that
is combine it all and get it all out there - and not worry about this and
that and well what about this poem - I mean - his gut is a trusted thing -
like ice cream moon and howling dog tongues want it. So, MainMan! Ralph,
has it together - plenty poems, him got reviews, interviews, broadside
series, link to the Alpha BEATS! Tapes and joy, yes, such are the joys
cause we are all girls and boys. No invisible worms allowed, no police on
yaks, no pool closing the second week in September, no none of that, Stuff,
what makes you mad. Here !!! Everything is Holy. Baseball is Holy. The
Organ of Man is Holy. Click on it - willya! Jeez Loueez. Click. Fool Click.
Cluck-cluck-cluck. Click click click.
• Heeltap No. 7. Issn 1091-9449. 2000.
$5.00 c/o Richard D. Houff, 604
Hawthorne Avenue East, St. Paul, MN 55116-2012. Direct all correspondence,
donations and submissions to him.
Heeltap is a Pariah Press Publication. This particular issue begins with a
big chunk of poem work by Lyn Lifshin - 7 poems in fact (this is issue 7). I
guess I was wrong - 5 poems. I am a ritter not an a math-geek. And then
followed by four poems by Todd Fox. Later on there are poems by Gerald
Locklin, Robert Peters, Holy Day (Isn't she from Florida?), Peter Magliocco
(Isn't he from Nashville?), Albert Huffsticker (Isn't he from Texas)? Well,
you see - this is really a congress of poets - this is a UN meeting or an,
you know an Olympic Village of sorts, or a jug volcanoing with the exotic.
Ok - so we have here a magazine that consistently presents American work.
Poems for dishwashers, cab drivers, - all the workin people - not the rich
kids back from France whose Ma and Pa paid for the first 10 issues of the
glossy pornographic Nork York City rag that features only other rich kids
back from France - no and not and nope. Here some bus driver, and lunch room
worker with hair net on head, the slave at Starbucks, the slaves of Nike,
the postal worker (not the office postal workers - the slaves luggin the bag
around), the guy that grinds up your hamburger, the retarded woman that cuts
you a half pound of baloney. Wake up would you! Treat this editor: Richard
Houff. With a letter with some stamps or send him a huge chunk of kilbasa.
Here is a short poem by Paula Villegas:
I love men with blue caps
They keep their heads on so well
• The Band Only a Mother Could Love by The Bubbadinos.
Zerx 021 - CD. Mark
Weber, 725 Van Buren Place SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108.
-or- zerxpress@aol.com
For the past several years Mark Weber, poet of western Oki California
arrests and wine and people guitar hub-cap backporch cigarette trembling
songster house painter (who are also publisher of countless tremendous books
from Zrex Press - and best poet of New Mexico) has been spending tidal waves
of energy on music and as a result - this is one holy result: The Band Only
a Mother Could Love, which is a 25 track CD of wonderfully spun both
traditional and other musics and songs by Weber and they does Clementine,
Yankee Doodle, Amazing Grace, You Are My Sunshine, and etc. like if sand and
glass and blood were the mucus sent in rivers by the Gods. It is easy to
say you have to hear it but you have to hear it. And once you hear it you
say, I gotta hear it again. And again. It grows and grows the great
mountains and deserts and desserts of Alballquerkey, New MeixiGO!!
Michael Basinski
©2000 the-hold.com
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