The cataloger’s
task of making a gift backlog discoverable continues—though with this caveat:
I’ve called this further selection “glean” over “cull,” as the latter suggested
some decision of deaccession…
That’s never so
for this collection of 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone
poetry, where every unique instance is kept in an exhaustive attempt to illustrate
a “library of record” within the collecting parameters.
By way of these
items, I continue to practice what’s called “catalogers’ judgment,” weighing
the needs of the piece alongside descriptive standards, paired here with brief
appreciations—as each gift described presents an invitation to future
researchers.
042
Powers / John
Perlman.
Mamaroneck, N.Y. :
Kachina Press, ©1982.
From “‘The Millet’”:
Trying the Shih Ching
by a lake
lathered by wind
[…]
imagining
a branch
as centerpole
Shih Ching (Book of Songs) in the Library of
Congress index of uniform titles presents as Shijing, to tie together works of translation and homage
thematically. Not only does the passage formalize the influence of the Shijing, but also recognizes the
asynchronous idiom of Lorine Niedecker, found in the allusive inventory of this
poem of hers: “a book / of old Chinese poems // and binoculars / to probe the
river / trees.”
043
Transient / Jeff
Vande Zande.
Greensboro, North
Carolina : March Street Press, 2001.
Jeff Vande Zande has found a way to speak to the “local
habitation” of Michigan through roadways that crisscross the peninsulas, simultaneously
ancient and modern, as in “Night Travel”:
The long shores of
Michigan’s
peninsulas shape
the inland living:
no crow routes, no
easy bridges.
North of Saginaw,
after dusk,
the absence of
semis and salesmen
abandons travelers
to roll
out of darkness
into darkness,
mining for more
road
on the promise of
their headlights.
where travelers follow unlit roads, path-making as
they go—following shoreline the way no crow flies, at least, not visibly, by
night lights.
044
Smithereens
seasonal sampler. Vol. 1, no. 1.
Bolinas, Calif. :
Smithereens Press, 1982.
Charlie Ross,
editor; Mary Lu Banta, managing editor; Joanne Kyger, contributing editor.
Was it Hoffman who said
(with Allen and Ulrich, in their landmark study) that most little magazines
“fail” before issue two?—of that analysis, this is a most fabulous example! No
known no. 2 ever arrived, but it needn’t have: because the first time around
was such an anthology of a certain slice of happening. Here’s a list of
contributors:
Mary Lu Banta,
Bill Berkson, Chris Breyer, Reed Bye, Janet Cannon, Tom Clark, N. Cole, David
Cope, Barry Cox, Brad Erickson, Dick Gallup, Jim Garmhausen, Merrill Gilfilan,
Robert Grenier, Donald Guravich, Bobbie Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Alastair
Johnston, Steve Klingaman, D. Kolokithas, Joanne Kyger, Diana Middleton
McQuaid, Kathlene McGill, Duncan McNaughton, Sara Menefee, Dotty Le Mieux,
Arthur Okamura, Simone Okamura, Michael Palmer, Louis Patler, Ken Petrelli,
Simon Pettet, Tom Raworth, Tasha Robbins, Bob Rosenthal, Charlie Ross, Joe
Safdie, Al Sgambati, David Levi Strauss, John Thorpe, Anne Waldman, J.M. Werle,
and Michael Wolfe.
045
Postcards from
Coney Island / Tina Posner.
Brooklyn, NY :
Black Canal Press, [1996]
Here are poems placed in and around New York City, and
in and around memory; these notional spaces overlap in work (sometimes prose,
sometimes not) where images are strikingly set in a belying talkiness often
labelled “speech.” Though there’s little excess, as “talk” might imply—take
this opening from “Elopement to Maine,” which works quickly through contrasts to
bring us to the heightened, everyday states of relationships, saving time for
an occasional/pastoral, with muse—
By day the numb
blue breaks into
mountains of fir
and the odd cloud.
By night, we
navigate under
innumerable seeds
buried in the sky
with only our wine
for warmth.
Reaching Isle Au
Haut (secretly hope),
we head, deep in
the interior,
toward Long Pond,
to bathe in
mocha shade and
gold shavings.
Watching from the
bank, you split us
in two: subject
and object. You shoot,
but the image
flatters over the wound,
an idolater’s
conjuring […]
046
Other people / Ian
Heames.
New York, N.Y. :
New York Stock, 2013.
Working by way of, these poems take French forms as
“source text”—Baudelaire, Villon, du Bellay. Source here is often just a point
of departure, though some poems linger closer in vocabulary, as with this from
du Bellay’s “Sonnets from L’Olive augmentée”:
Now that Night her
starry chariot plies,
Are you not weary
(my desire) of following,
Already night has
gathered in her train
River-god who
receives in your humid flow,
Not Dryads running
lightly through the trees (trans. A.S.
Kline, ©2009)
become, in Heames’s spare flourish—
Night
is my guide now, whose chariot is sleep
rivers,
fountains, desert places
the
elements are emptied of your pain
wood
nymphs, demigods, water nymphs, animals
all
different kinds
Each of three sequences focuses on one of these French
poets (a subsequent edition of Other
People appearing from the author’s own Face Press in 2014). Consider
especially the lasting influence of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal—splendidly, in Heames’s
rendering, Bad Flowers—from the modernist
lyricists (Millay) through the New York School (O’Hara), signifying long into our
own moment by way of image, mood, or intimation. Example: this ending to the
poem “You’re Barely Sonic” (of “Le Cygne”?)—
sky to be used
which ship it
slips down they stand
beautiful
it is but is
you’re barely
sonic
you go into exile
to land
047
Begin, Buffalo! / by Cyn Mat [Cynthia Ruffin-Mathews] ;
preface by Selena Ball ; illustrations by William Yancy Cooper.
Buffalo, New York
: Cyn Mat Publications, [revised edition] 1984. I saw the license plate CYN MAT about a week ago,
driving down by the Erie Basin Marina… Is that the poet?! I wondered. Cyn Mat
is the pseudonym for teacher Cynthia Ruffin-Mathews, states a bio note, “given
to her by Celes Tisdale to distinguish her from other area authors named
Cynthia.” These poems address Blackness, Reaganomics, urban thruways,
integration, parallels to Native American struggles, differing approaches to
revolution, and a critique of capitalism—all in one slim chapbook! A sample, from
the poem “Silent Cries”:
Silent
cries
of pains unheard
through
false fantasies
of false hope
through
pillagers’ lies
and murderers’ weapons
of
sin’s shameful sorrow.
Deaths totaling
Bells tolling
Mothers woe-ing
Country’s showing
ignorance in its
worst form.
As icon, this self-publication is an invaluable manifestation
of a post-Black Arts network local to Buffalo—the connection to professor and
workshop facilitator Celes Tisdale; a prefatory poem by Selena Ball (presumably
Cynthia Selena Ball-Williams, author of the poetry collection Womaning (Williamsville, N.Y.:
Serendipity Arts Unlimited, 1978)); illustrations by writer, painter, and
muralist William Yancy Cooper; and graphic design made at the Langston Hughes
Institute (formerly on High Street).
048
excerpts from
Camera Obscura / Erica Lewis.
San Francisco, CA:
Etherdome, 2009.
From Etherdome—that great publishing venture that
culminated in As if It Fell from the Sun
(An EtherDome Anthology: Ten Years of Women’s Writing), compiled by series
editors Colleen Lookingbill and Elizabeth Robinson (San Franciso, 2012)—this chapbook jointedly alternates between blocks
of justified text and Mallarmesque spacing. The poems are meditative, enacting the
difference described between image and reality; how “time and the constant
mutability of everything is actually the underlying story of all the stories we
write,” as phrased at opening. Add to this the visual text: images by Mark
Stephen Finein, often with the poet’s text floatingly overlapping. Lewis’s
mediations (collected as a full-length volume in 2010, published by BlazeVOX) also
enact a poetry-criticism that reminds me of Juliana Spahr’s imperative in Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism: a
poetry able to comment upon itself as a poetics: “that you do not identify with
the image allows for its manipulation…” [erica lewis].
049
Longitude of
longing : and other poems / Patricia Michael Morimando.
[Place of
publication not identified] : Patricia Michael Morimando, [2004]
The self-published often presents as guide to poems thinking
through the daily concerns of social, political, relational, and economic
occurrence. Here I’ll attempt to faithfully recreate the concrete-ness of
Patricia Michael Morimando’s “Words”:
c
r
y
s
t
a
l
stars
quiver
in remorse
while CEOs suck
up lichen, leaving
landscapes lurid, forlorn
loons lament to cement-colored
moon — this abysmal cosmos
composed of allegorical phantoms
permeating
credulity encrusted
minds numbed by infinitesimal
numbers
products of an
incubating species stuck
in a chrysalis
of
ignorance beyond
star - tossed
chasm
050
The Broadside
annual 1973 : introducing new Black poets / editor Jill Witherspoon Boyer.
Detroit :
Broadside Press, 1973.
Can enough ever be said about the publishing phenomenon
Broadside Press? Founded by poet and librarian Dudley Randall, this is the
second volume of a chapbook serial that lasted two years (1972-1972); in her
introduction, editor Jill Witherspoon Boyer says: “We believe that Black
readers are actively seeking new directions in literature. We are just as
convinced that there are unknown Black poets who can creatively translate and
transform the space around them, if encouraged and given the opportunity to do
so.” The press and the editor have provided this space, and “all of the poems
presented here are as exciting as they are different,” with work by C.S. Berry, Sandra Cox, Walter Cox, Stella Crews, Dennis Wilson Folly,
Darnell Hawkins, Jacelyn Lewis, Elouise Loftin, Frank Lamont Phillips, Mbembe
(Milton Smith), and Richard W. Thomas.
051
Bright seeds :
poems / by Kathryn T.S. Bass.
Georgetown, Ky. :
Finishing Line Press, ©2005.
Finishing Line is a small press whose publishing
poetics has made space for hundreds of voices; most printed from 2002 forward,
often in limited print runs. This chapbook is #39 in their New Women’s Voices
Series. With every poem title beginning “Garden of,” the author works her way
through Demons, Architects, Insomniacs, Storms, Algebra, Convalescence, and
more. I like this kind of parameter, and Bass’s images are as specific as they
are encompassing. From “Garden of Landscapes”:
what a
day
distant
curtain
dropped
every
within
a far
metonymy
[…]
horseman
saluting
or
trying to see
052
Catullus : blues
from ancient Rome / translated by Ryan Gallagher ; photography by Derek Fenner.
Boulder, CO :
Bootstrap Productions, [1999] Catullus always makes modernism seem a Roman invention.
(Greek, even.) Ryan Gallagher translates the ancient into an idiom of the now,
bacchanal and bawdy as ever. What works about the pairing with Derek Fenner’s
photography is the resemblance of the latter to Fellini’s Satyricon, where miniature figurines walk before, toward, and lean
against monumental props of glowing kinetic aura.
053
World’d too much :
the selected poetry of Russell Atkins / edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E.
McDonough.
Cleveland, Ohio : Cleveland
State University Poetry Center, [2019]
A book like this is essentially what a poetry archive
is for: per Janice A. Lowe’s foreword, the editors “have combed countless
anthologies, journals and storage spaces and have unearthed rarely seen examples
of Atkins’s writing.” This work clearly exceeds the dimensions of the archive,
as Lowe traces through conversations and associations; but the attempt to
collect exhaustively finds purpose when accessed as a “forever file” of
publications and manuscripts. Caveat: if
the poet’s papers have been saved, and stored safely… I was gratefully
introduced to poet, composer, theorist, and editor Russell Atkins through a
talk given by Tyrone Williams, around the time Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series
published Russell Atkins: On the Life and
Work of an American Master (a volume coedited by Prufer with Michael
Dumanis). From Atkins’s “Lakefront, Cleveland”:
so
thunders sea
it
gathers strength
summoned ascends
huged up
then
softs!
curls
up about rocks
upcurls
about thick
about
bold curls up
about it
then dangerous’d
soft!
054
An inherited ocean
/ by Morten Søndergaard.
Chicago, Illinois
: Beard of Bees Press, 2005.
Operating as translational sampler, this collection
draws together shorter poems and excerpts from longer sequences found in two
books from the Danish by translator John Irons. I almost took Søndergaard’s
imagery purely as surrealism, perhaps obscuring another lineage to the Sartrean
disorientation of the everyday—
[…]
a rose
dipped in liquid
nitrogen
pulverized
at my shoulder blade,
to change position
just
before sleeping and to regret,
to feel
an inherited ocean
sluice
over one’s brain with salt […]
055
Amelia Etlinger :
an American original : visual poems from 1972 to 1983.
[Milan] : Osart
Gallery ; Treviso : Galleria arte contemporanea l’Elefante, [2019]
Ellen Marie Helinka, in the introductory essay to this
exhibition catalog of Etlinger’s visual poems, cites Marta Werner’s recovery of
Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems as possible antecedent. The comparison is
striking, especially given that Etlinger likely never knew of Dickinson’s
earlier practice. Etlinger belonged to a circle of mail artists and visual
poets exchanging handcrafted pieces across international borders, where the
sending of the piece—its materiality as “post”—is of essence to the work
itself. This is a poet who worked in threads, papers, petals; and these
fifty-plus photographs of Etlinger’s startling missives remain only partially open
to the viewer… thoughtfully bound in a gatefold cover with string tie as packaging, still awaiting
re-opening.
056
SHOSH NE NS /
Matthew Cooperman.
Buffalo, NY :
Plantable Chapbooks, [about 2019]
An exploration of materiality has a certain lineage in
Buffalo—from Ferrum Wheel to Hostile
Books. In this volume, from Plantable Chapbooks, we encounter “hand-made cover
paper from Porridge Paper embedded with wildflower seeds,” the back cover
bearing visual instructions on How to Plant a Chapbook. Cooperman’s poems—sampled
from Ed Dorn’s Shoshoneans—fit this sensibility,
featuring erasure procedures that textually “go to seed” and reconfigure as new
flora. [Also consider that the Undercurrent edition of Richard Brautigan’s 1968
Please Plant This Book (in Cooperation
with New Student Review) was issued
from Buffalo.]
057
Rhythm &
colour : Hélène Vanel, Loïs Hutton & Margaret Morris / Richard
M. Emerson.
Edinburgh : Golden
Hare, 2018.
Dance seems the most difficult of the arts to write
of; even its gestures are not easily, if systematically, recorded; entire
languages have been invented to attempt this! As a lasting vestige of
modernism, the interconnected history of modern dance to other arts might
remain hidden from us—at least, that’s the feeling from this richly researched,
densely illustrated tome, tracing the biographies of three figures moving
between artistic communities in Britain and France. Social, critical, archival—take
this historicizing analysis of a review found within:
Maryse Dubois’
review is interesting for what it does not say but strongly implies. For the
first time the audience is characterised as predominantly homosexual. Previous
references to “young women with firm serious expressions” and “serious women
peering through the transpiration with gloomy intentness” may have been coded
but were certainly ambivalent. Dubois’ observation is more amused than
judgmental, as is her reference to esoteric and hermetic views […]
058
After the mountain
: the A.M. Klein reboot project / compiled and edited by Jason Camlot.
Montréal : Synapse
Press, 2011.
Among the many forms of memorial and recovery is the
tribute volume (e.g.: Homage to Frank
O'Hara, edited by Bill Berkson & Joe LeSueur (Bolinas: Big Sky, 1978)).
This oblong volume, printed as a companion to Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein (Montréal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2011), brings together more than two dozen contemporary
poets, remixing and -fashioning Klein’s poem “The Mountain.” A posthumous
festschrift of sorts, the tributes work like an exercise with WCW’s plums: the
results are varied and playful; most winning of all, each demonstrates the
continued relevance of Klein’s poetry.
059
Lines crossed out
/ Jason Camlot ; with art by Betty Goodwin.
Montréal :
Delirium Press, 2005. Part catalog, part poem, (part personal essay,) Camlot
walks the reader through his connection to the work of Canadian visual artist
Betty Goodwin, a connection—and friendship—that sustained him through the era
of his dissertation writing. Such kinships are not always formal, especially
across “disciplines,” preferring the airier spaces of correspondence and more
humid atmospheres of talk. But such connections can be vital, as here, where
subject and form, Camlot’s poems and Goodwin’s artwork, bring that across-ness
to the fore.
060
Missing / Bill Berkson ; collages by PAVE art
students, New Rochelle High School.
San Francisco :
Missing Edition, 2009.
What I find most delightful in this volume is the equal
emphasis on the artist-collaborators. The poem hangs above, only two or three
lines per page, allowing room for the students’ collages, which are pensive and
engaging. There is an aspect of teacherliness, though not at all pedantic;
rather, the kind that shows, invites, collaborates. There are many authors of
this book, gazing in mutual admiration.
061
A pin’s fee / David
Melnick.
[Philadelphia] : H·dn·g
Press, 2019.
Sometimes the poem waits for us, quietly… in an edition
of 100, covers and pages of double-ply folded sheets, “composed […] in 1987.
This is its first print publication.” Each poem within arrives in three
sections, clearly labelled: 1. Fable; 2. Sujet; 3. Morale. [La Fontaine.] They
negotiate lists, charts, cross-outs, fields of space, erasure (seemingly), and
grids. The press-struck letters on the soft, folded pages match the mode of
thought: jaunty as exacting: “Why my vocabulary is so (small) (small) is: guitar, clap, nonetheless.”
062
Onde o lugar = The
where place / Sandra Guerreiro ; translation by Anna Reckin.
Lisboa : Glaciar,
2019.
[cover
illustration by Jeffrey Vincent]
Focusing on “the balance between the poems’
near-abstract expansiveness and the precision of specific detail,” poet Anna
Reckin’s afterword to her translations of Sandra Guerreiro’s poems (from
Portuguese into English) describes a process of collaboration and comparison,
capable of minding how “with very little internal context, the translation
could easily snag on misunderstandings of particular words.” Parallel translations
invite such comparison, even for the reader fluent in only one of facing pages
of text; how
antípodas do
cheiro lâmina
de luas paralelas
ex.planada
planície atracada
em batida de vagas
de pele
in Google’s literal-handedness reads
antipodes of the blade smell
parallel moons
moored plain terrace
in hitting skin waves
instead, in Reckin’s deft handling, becomes
opposite side of scent’s blade
parallel moons
ex.plained plane, docked
at the beat of skin’s waves
063 & 064
& 065
The exchange.
Margaret Elizabeth Mahan. Parts I-III.
Harwich Port, MA :
Combat Paper Press, 2011.
Each of these poems is bound individually: “Cover
paper was made by the author at St. Lawrence University, using military
uniforms donated to the Combat Paper Project by former U.S. Military
personnel.” An earlier publication of Mahan’s poems, under the same title [not
held by this library], was made at Sara Marshall’s print shop, University of
Alabama, with foldout cover paper by Drew Matott, one of the founders of the
Combat Paper Project [BFA in Printmaking, Buffalo State College, 2001]. The
Project’s mission is therapeutic: to run papermaking workshops that allow
veterans to repurpose their old uniforms into paper for journals, chapbooks,
and broadsides on which to write or print their own narratives. These poems by
Mahan are from her experiences working with veterans in such workshops around
the country.
066
The minor arcana /
Dglas N. Røthschld.
[Honolulu,
Hawaii?] : Subpress, ©1997. This must date later than the “CopyWright” year, with references
to 9/11 and commentary further beyond neoliberalism and the [First] Gulf War. The
binding of this copy (a fourth printing) is somehow emblematic of a politics
worn on the poet’s sleeve: the cover is scored to be perfect bound as octavo,
but wraps around in stapled signatures, printed side-by-side. Douglas N.
Rothschild’s poems put into sequence—are sequence of—events echoing
concentrically, from the domestic terrorism of the Oklahoma City Federal
Building Bombing to the oilfields of Iraq and back again, with stops at local New
York City politics and post-World War II “normalcy.” All of these are brought to
bear upon the “little mystery” of worldwide aggression as a means to economic
ends: “So someone asks me what’s going on with EuropeTM
/ & all these right-wing events. & I say they must be // experiencing
an Economic DownturnTM.” [N.B.: A wonderful description of the full
poem, collected in Rothschild’s Theogony (subpress,
2009), can be found on Mark Scroggins’s blog Culture Industry under the entry for Monday, March 15, 2010.]
The little golden
book of lesser New York School poets.
[Place of publication
not identified] : Bibliophasia Reprint Service, [1988?] Great poem gods!—didn’t I just mention [026] that I’d
never seen this, and BAM!—it floats across the cataloging desk… The
frontispiece drawing by Anne Waldman says everything: no, literally: it’s a
signpost pointing the way to Calais, Bolinas, Gloucester, Cooperstown, Tulsa,
St. Mark’s Place, Bustins Island [Maine], Port Jefferson, Iowa City, San
Francisco, Hyanis Port [sic], Angel Hair, and Cut City [Burroughs]. The drawing
provides its own antithesis—we’re “in” New York at the same time we’re “at” all
those locales—a humorously New York School gesture: Where is the New York School? According to this little golden geography,
it centers around the loci soli:
Dick Gallup, Larry
Fagin, Charlie Vermont, Kit Robinson, Tom Veitch, Joe Brainard, Stephen
Rodefer, Joseph Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Lewis Warsh, Maureen Owen, Hilton
Obenzinger, Merrill Gilfillan, Alan Senauke, Harris Schiff, Bernadette Mayer,
Anne Waldman, Jamie MacInnis, Ted Greenwald, Bill Berkson, Alan Bernheimer,
Tony Towle, Simon Schuchat, Michael Brownstein, John Godfrey, Robert Creeley,
Peter Schjeldahl, Tom Clark, Michael-Sean Lazarchuck, Jim Brodey, and Joanne Kyger
(back cover).
Also includes a Further Reading List, and Index of
Titles and First Lines—all in under 50 pages!
068
Hagoromo : a
celestial robe / Yoko Danno.
Kobe : Ikuta
Press, 1984.
Danno is a cofounder of the Ikuta Press, publishing
Anglophone poetry in Japan since 1970—including the serial Anthology. In this retelling of an at-least-8th-century-old
story (also a Noh play), sections are told in scenes, and I’m struck by the
questioning way Danno allows the narrative to move, and hang at remove: “Do I
see all, / do I see through all, do I / see the other side of the mountain, //
or the bottom of the sky?” These shifts offset and hold back an “I do” mirrored
in the story of the celestial maiden trapped on earth. An architecturally
minimalist style is able to support such subtly cantilevered subjectivity, inversing
“I am” for the more encompassing if speculative: “what am I, who dreams, // or
is dreamt?”
069
Culture war III :
ecstasy / Don Byrd.
North American
Ideophonics.
Minneapolis, MN :
Mark Nowak, [1994].
The mail arrives… a folded, stapled newsletter,
postmarked 1994. A discourse on poetics, this polemic’s divided into three
parts: 1) The Sound; 2) Love; 3) The Soul… Byrd asserts that the modernist
soundscape has become dogma, with post-WWII poetry purporting the same Pound-Stein-H.D.-WCW-Eliot
sound system—by grammar and by diction (Olson-Levertov-Duncan-Creeley)—which
Byrd diagnosis as a problematic “philosophic site or generality of desire.”
Complexity has replaced intelligibility is his thesis. Byrd finds an antidote
in Irigaray’s response to J-L Nancy’s question: who comes after the subject? Not to give it all away (I mean, it’s
a dense seven pages!), but who comes after might be without the discursive
concerns of the subject… if indeed we’ve reached full enfranchisement of the
subject, emphasizing Byrd’s concern surrounding the “irregard” for content.
070 & 071
Webs of Argiope /
Laynie Browne.
New Haven, Conn. :
Phylum Press, 2004. Scorpyn Odes /
Laynie Browne.
Tucson : Kore
Press, 2015.
Browne’s writing oppugns division between poetry and
prose. This goes for a full inclusivity of the prose poem, too, and even that
catchy category, the “hybrid.” Similarly, division between the realms of fable,
history, philosophy, and the natural world. These two pseudo-metaphoric works—on
spiders and scorpions, respectively—exhibit this, both in the hand-sewn
chapbook from Phylum (“Of wool being rained / the filmy threads / Ballooning
habits / often misrepresented / thus Pliny speaks”) and in the small press,
perfect bound volume of a decade later, juxtaposing multifarious odes with
“Departures” from various forms of constriction:
From this place
not beginning to begin, from beginnings are most difficult, meaning I’ll just
stand here and wait. Departure from the furniture resurrecting a dream in which
beginning is another sort of trap, forsaking tapestry and topiary.
072
Factsheet5 Zine
publishers’ resource guide.
San Francisco, CA
: Factsheet Five [1990s?]
A zine operating as zine index; makes me long for
folded & posted days… (equally, for Selby’s
List). Factsheet Five was a
periodical reviewing periodicals, and this outbranch guided those creating such
small press serials to Distributors, Print Shops, and Retail Outlets. Tied as
these “institutions” were to print, it’d be an interesting (if disheartening)
study to see which of these “guilds” still exists, from Iowa City to Ireland:
Fuck Shit Up Distribution; Marrakech Express; Quimby’s Queer Store (“Cool to
deal with”). Talking Leaves of Buffalo is still here! (and I remember Tower
Books…)
073
from Ark : the
ramparts / Ronald Johnson.
[Place of
publication not identified] : Furnitures, ©1991.
Just side-stapled in white papers, postmarked
Rochester, NY. Often it takes years for a collected volume to come into print,
and these little iterations reveal the zest and zeal of such aggregate. Parts
of Ark appear from Xero Ox Books
between 1980 and 1983, as well as from DBA Editions, New Mexico, in 1980 (12
unnumbered pages). Also 1980, from North Point Press (about 90 pages), with
various bits from KQED, San Francisco (audiocassette, circa 1983), Dutton in
1984 (57 pages), a broadside from Woodland Pattern in 1985, and a volume from Living
Batch Press in 1996 (about 100 pages), culminating in 2014’s 318-page volume
from Flood Editions. This particular one is a 12-page sampler of centered text,
circulated as reminder to future self to collect said volume—“cue: the end of a
thing, / signal for another / as clue unroll ball of thread.”
074
Pages from an
abandoned journal / Edwin Denby ; [cover] photographs by Rudy Burkhardt [sic].
This “edition limited to 200 copies as part of a
Tribute to Edwin Denby held on April 9, 1997 at St. Mark’s Church on the
Bouwerie” was published fourteen years after the death of the poet-dance
critic. What better format than these transcribed pages?—“[e]xcept for these
entries, this untitled journal remained empty.” Typed up and printed on a
single sheet (folded to form a 4-pager), with mylar wrap featuring photos of
Denby by his close collaborator Burckhardt. The pages [words] continuously slip
from underneath the mylar, unable to stop moving beneath their images.
075
Crucified / John
Chinworth.
Boulder, CO :
Harmsweigh Press, 1999.
Take the press name. These poems, by formal experiment
and emotive content, attempt to address the murder of Matthew Shepard, written
in the days and months that followed. In one instance, using a most traditional
device of repetition, turned through pairings of pronouns, different and
identical, the poem embraces a homogenous variability of joy where it declares
and declares and declares “how beautiful we are / in our sexuality.” Thank God.
Edric Mesmer works as a
cataloger for the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, where he
edits the Among the Neighbors pamphlet series on little magazines. Now &
Then, is just out from BlazeVOX (Buffalo, 2020).
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