Fattening Frogs For Snakes: Delta Sound Suite - by John Sinclair.
225 pages. Cloth bound - $25.00 - paperback edition also available for $15. Surregional Press, 906 Pauline St., New Orleans, LA 70117. mesechabe@hotmail.com or dforment@suno.edu
A poet is a rare thing and Ah! Here we have some poems by a poet – one John Sinclair. He has a history and a history in music MC5 – Detroit – the 1960s, White Panthers, and what he writes about is the history of the blues! It’s a natural. But he is just not a white guy writing about the blues. He is more it than I thought could be. As a poet he can be. The book is introduced by Amiri Baraka, which is about as good as an intro and sanction as one can get when dealing with Black music. The book has many discographies of the many blue participants – the old gang – Robert Johnson, Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters and the like. And plenty of references and it is a book that all blues lover must have! Sinclair makes the history of these blues artists into a poetic history – not an easy thing to do! I mean – making history into poetry can come out crap but not here, Sinclair – with magic and the devil and passion he makes poetry, emphatic and sensitive, an imagination a blue wonder. The poems short burst lines knitted to a clear note that lingers deep into the humid night.
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Chunk - by Sandra Guerreiro.
32 pages. 2003. $6.00. House Press, Buffalo, New York: – contact smguerreiro@iol.pt
or order book at: Sandra Guerreiro, 139 Elmwood Avenue, Apartment 2, Buffalo, New York, 14201.
The faith I have in poetry to open the portals of the imagination to allow one to love again and with a permission to love continuously was here resurrected reading Sandra Guerreiro’s significant new book of poetry. This is not a poetry of narrative adventure or a poetry of place in the real. It is a capturing of the elusive Eros of words, those brief moments in strings of words that flirt by like tiny fish in clear streams. A teasing to read deeper! And she comprehends the role of fingers in writing and love and the spaces within a poem where poetry resides. Each unnamed poem in this sequence invites the sensual return to our mundane lives. Love and poetry invigorate me and here this magnificent and ruling emotion fully involves me as reader (I become a person in the poem) and engages me and then I transformed into the water of Sandra Guerreiro’s poem magic and I felt I too was poetry.
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Raining All Over - by Rebecca Morrison.
Lumox Press, PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733. Little Red Book No. 44.
Series edited by Raindog lumoxraindog@earthink.net - $5.00
First one has to like little books that are red. Everytime I touch one I am again in the Wobbly frame of mind. Songs for the people, poems for the people. And that is the little press. For those who do not know The Wobbly’s Little Red Song Book - better check it out and learn the history of descent and popular art in this country before Bush declares war on it and destroys that history looking for Poetry of Mass Destruction (PMD). HA! But like the Wobbly’s Rebecca Morrison takes a song, a song that I know and you know: I am The Walrus (one of Lennon’s best) and alters it for pointed political purpose. Lennon would have been proud. She alters I am the Walrus into ODE TO EXXON and her version is about the destruction of the natural world. Let me quote,
Exxon Texans smoking cigars don’t you think the seagull screams at you? Scree scree scree!
See how they fly like birds in the sky, see how they die.
I’m crying.
Money grubbing fishmongers climbing up the Exxon ladder.
Etc. It dosen’t leave my head. A chilly work, and this one should be anthologized everywhere and published again and again in magazines everywhere, on billboards. If you are an editor write to her. Find here, write to here and ask to reprint this work. Now, that is not to say that she doesn’t score elsewhere in this little red book. She does just that and and and. This poet is one clever poet and the poems are dense and lush with words but not losing ever the nature of small press - directness and simplicity. That is direct poetic action. She isn’t innocent but a wrier that isn’t chained to an ideology. She’s her own writer, which is what all is. In the end that is it. And not forgetting the people’s creed. This poet can pull and stretch the poetics of small press this way and that and it shows, reads. Read how fluid and flexible this form of poetry can be when handled in the hands of someone with brain and heart and passion and concern. And it is only five bucks and you get a lot of poems – like forty pages of good poems for a five that’s like 12 cents for a page and she writes a poetry that it is something you need. NEED.
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Sleeping With Demons - by A.D. Winans
www.mysteryisland.net/winans
2003. 20 pages. $5.00 + $2.00 postage (Lettered and signed copies available) Bradley Mason Hamlin, publisher. Mystery Island Publications, 384 Windward Way, Sacramento, CA. 95831
Reading, I wonders, always, what is it that lances the soul, tosses the noose about the heart’s neck, makes birds sing in solid winter and why don’t the trees give it up and why tirelessly the water goes about water’s business. And then I reading along and find a poem like one Winans titled Smell of Wolves. Allow me to write some of his lines: And when you look into the/ Mirror and see/ No reflection/ You will smell the/ Smell of wolves/ On your breath. All day long I try to imagine the smell of these wolves, and the sour/sweet? taste of wolf breath? And it permeates the room and the world and you have to lean back and laugh, loud and long, as India crashes into Asia and the sharp peaks of mountains rush up like licking blades to meet God’s neck.
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A Series of SHARP POINTS - by A Horvath.
Kirpin Press, PO Box 2943, Vancouver, WA. 98668-2943. 2003. $10.00 plus $1.00 postage.
When you walk through the poem, at night, there is a quick shadow movement, sadness, irony, sarcasm, loneness, and astonishment at how ridiculous it all is and pondering I guess yes and why and there is lightness also in the lives we lead. Smirk, smile, laugh. Breakfast, for one, alone a little tired, maybe slightly hungover, in a cheap cafeteria in a small working town. Pale gray clouds and the hot sun sopping them up like the last of your eggs. Weaving a landscape of deep emotions, A. Horvath explores the fun house of each soul and with his own flashlight. And you better follow.
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Pegasus Descending (A book of the best bad verse). - Edited by James Camp, X.J. Kennedy and Keith Waldrop.
238 pages. 2003. ANYART: Contemporary Art Center, 71 Elmgrove Avenue, Providence, RI 02906. Available SPD: orders@spdbooks.org
In these times it is best to laugh! And that’s what I did all the way thought Pegasus Descending. How could our best favorite old time poets, like Poe and Emily D. and Browning sound so bad, clunkity clank and with disbelief but with smile and roaring hear all the fun that poetry can grant. A pure delight of reading, I had to go back twice, which is a measure of the wealth of this collection, and laugh some more and more. Poor T. E. Brown, he’s got 7 bad poems in here! A lot of tongue in cheek and consideration when into this book. It is not random, which is further measure of its delight. And it pays homage to The Stuffed Owl (Do you all know that book out there in reading land – check it out). But check this one out first. Humor is all much in absence in our serious world, perhaps too poetically serious. Laugh a bit, smile, laugh a lot and unlike so many other dry anthologies with this ism and that political poetic line to maintain, this one can be read over and over, returned to and it loses nothing and only gains and grows. I wish these editors would tackle the worst of contemporary poetry (but that is very dangerous!) but might be fun. Think about it. This is a door flung open. So, when considering your worst poems, those of your childhood which you hastily first published… who know. Someone’s out there reading away. I think I have to write thank you to these editors. You made the coming of wet fall and chill a bit lighter. This truly has expanded the possible of the poem.
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The New Renaissance. - Louise T. Reynolds – editor.
Spring. No. 35. Vol. XI, No. 3. 3 issues $30.00. The New Renaissance, 26 Heath Road, No. 11, Arlington, MA 02474-3645
Well, Doug Holder is involved here. This is a sign of the very peopleness and concern for the poem that this magazine holds and Marc Widershien is on the advisory board and it is clear that he has the ear of the editors and they listen.
Now if you went out on Halloween dressed as a ghost or a hobbit or which witch or a carrot and went door to door and when you got home you had a bushel basket full of candy, like chocolate and snickers and the like (without razor blades) and there were even a few dimes and quarters in there also – WOW! So this issue (and others of New Renaissance) marvelously edited magazine issue by the bestest of writers and a moment in time captured and telling what is the poem and where a poetry might find harbor in these cold days of war and the dimming of intellect (Bush is turning out the lights slowly). Lighthouse of poets on the rocky shores of dumbness! Shine! Shine out. Be the lighthouse in Alexandra that brighted all the way to Crete! It is here a moment of the smart and bright comes ripping through the sheet of black paper and you poems and poets: Let me name some of the wealth and worth: Joan Colby, Madeline Tiger, Tagore (like he won the Nobel!), Allen C. Fisher, Wendy Barker and on and on. Oh! If this were candy! Oh! The dentist bill!
Michael Basinski
©2003 the-hold.com
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