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 Pagan Supper - by Dan Sicoli.
Pudding House Publications, 60 North Main Street, Johnson, Ohio 43031
www.puddinghouse.com - 32 pages. $8.95.
Several Steps from the Rope - by Guy Beining.
34 leaves of collage. 2002. Xtant Anabasis.
1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $8.43.
Staceal 1 - by Jim Leftwich.
2002. Unpaged but there has got to be a hundred. Avantacular Press.
1813 Belmar Drive A5, Fort Collins, CO. 80526. $11.23
Skew - by Andrew Topel and company.
2002. 20 pages. Xtant Anabasis.
1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $6.15
Puzzles - by Andrew Topel.
2002. 7 leaves of topel puzzel. Avantacular Press.
1813 Belmar Drive A5, Fort Collins, CO. 80526. $2.09
Estrella's Prophecies 2 - by David Baratier.
2002. prophesies 23-43. Xtant Anabasis.
1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $5.67
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Pagan Supper - by Dan Sicoli.
Pudding House Publications, 60 North Main Street, Johnson, Ohio 43031
www.puddinghouse.com - 32 pages. $8.95.
This is a fine selection by one of our best, and I am glad that it now exists and can be in your hand. This book, this Pagan Supper to which you sit, is that type of book of poetry the defines a progression in poetry, as did, for example, Bukowski's first book, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, as did for example, Howl. Sicoli has been all about the small press for the past two decades. He knows the world, and he is from and is that world also. But now, in this post Bukowski small press, underground world, his literary instinct points us and leads out from under the giant shadow of King Charles the Buk. The poetry of the people has to march on. Sicoli is leading the charge. Keeping the all important cadence of the speaking voice, its inflections and grammatical patterns, Sicoli finds the fissures in images of strings of words to draw out and make visible a poetry that smarts and stings and was there (here) all along. His is a poetry of careful craft that does not loose sight of its origins in the daily. He follows a poetic philosophy that dictates that poetry is within the context of anyone and everyone. His audience is you. The poems are not melodramatic and not romantic or illusive. The poems render an American reality. As this confusing world roars past, Sicoli's poems make one ponder our strange existence in the midst of this tremendously dreamlike state that veils our eyes with ice-cream and spit shinned suburban ghettos. Frank, candid and disturbing for its depiction of the ambivalent reality in which we live our existential and fanatic lives, Sicoli's poetry makes one stop to finger the bruised apple from the tree of knowledge. The city is his literary landscape and his populace is composed of immigrants and bums and whores and working people. It is their imagination that is so ripely exhibited in Sicoli's poetry. It is a point-of-view clouded by immigrant Catholicism and hangovers and a world in which Dan Sicoli dreams of being the poet Jesus, "i dreamed i was Jesus /slowly nodding out in a booth/ at an all-night dinner/ when a waitress nudged my shoulder/ i awoke/ grunted/ and forgave no one."
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Several Steps from the Rope - by Guy Beining.
34 leaves of collage. 2002. Xtant Anabasis.
1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $8.43.
Ways of reading words within the context of a poem that is a collage is an area of literary exploration now engaged. This book is composed of
34 collages. They are poemollages, poemcollages, pomollages, colloems, which are a merger of visuality and word to make a word art or a poem of visualities. They are, as I have written now numerous times ? they are OPEMS, a poem which is visual and verbal and breaks many, oh so many dull rules of verse. Beining explores sex and death, it seems to me, with bits of words, fragments of dream speak pushing, pulsating against and juxtapositioning themselves in the midst of the clipped and pasted pure viz-images. His words make these collages speaking pictures. Perhaps meshing, sliding as in sexual, Beining, within the context of his works, his opems, asks poetic questions for the reader to ponder, read and then answer. Do words bring death? Are words a sexual manifestation? Reading Beining's collages opens OPEMS the possible. Rejoice.
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Staceal 1 - by Jim Leftwich.
2002. Unpaged but there has got to be a hundred. Avantacular Press.
1813 Belmar Drive A5, Fort Collins, CO. 80526. $11.23
(Let me must write that this visual work, poems are in the broad general a poetry that demands eyes and ears working as if these senses were wed and web and that somehow there is this sexuality/textuality that you must come to.) You see you must read as an improvisation. So you must write improvisation. Here Leftwich follows the designs of the speaking imagination that does not speak with dictionary words. Staceal is a neologism. Neologisms rejuice! Leftwich's work is a reading vertical rather than narrative or even elliptical progression. As one enters the OPEM, that is a work without boundaries, sort of the way your ship travels in the universe, so then the imagination enters the contexts and the reading is a finding and discovery, slipping the hand that is the mind undercover to come upon. The upon is where you are at as a poet. Not where the French would like you to be. Not where the academy or the non-academy would wish you to be. But where the poetic source? THE GREAT PO! Is. Yore Is, is the place Leftwich's Opems arrive.
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Skew - by Andrew Topel and company.
2002. 20 pages. Xtant Anabasis.
1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $6.15
Here Topel in this his center poem in this book of skewed that is expanding juxtapositioning of words so worbs occur and OPEMS appear oput of the text so that the text in Topel's word imagination is an organ organic orgasm cosmosssgasm, gasm GASM thing. This organic is all about the improvisational reading, engage, engagement so you are to be web to the poem - OPEM! To the poetry you wed. Here in this, the central work in this book, perhaps it might be called PLODE, the dictionary definition of a word explodes through the double pages. It is the big bang of the poetic imagination. And out of it spreads the text of the book, the other opems of the text, a text that crosses also the boundary of the book and does well up and spill thought the pages erupting the imagination into all other texts. Let it be the imagination's raw power gushing forth. And froth. Thoth.
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Puzzles - by Andrew Topel.
2002. 7 leaves of topel puzzel. Avantacular Press.
1813 Belmar Drive A5, Fort Collins, CO. 80526. $2.09
So while we are reading some Topel, let's read some more Topel. Topel explodes so your mind, as they write, gets blown?apart and the mind gets blown so that witch, which is underneath and in back off - that is in back of the mind is the imagination is now there as in HERE. As in hear it happen. Variously the puzzles - cross-words and fragments. Get it! Cross Word puzzel or cross out word puzzel. As the puzzel appears that is falls apart, is blow apart the imagination of the great puzzel maker of creativity steps forward like some alien and or god and the ordered reality of the world, pox upon it - the dictionary and meaning, now expands. Expand. The elastic waist band has smashed all their instruments and the gods have come marching into the city of the mundane. Topel on a puzzel horse. And the poet populace tossing bits of jig-saw puzzel towards the moon so all the pieces make a lovely rain from which there is no umbrella, so drink.
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Estrella's Prophecies 2 - by David Baratier.
2002. prophesies 23-43. Xtant Anabasis.
1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797. $5.67
The form of these prophecies are fortune-telling prophecies printed on cards that one would get for a quarter - maybe two quarters - at some Coney Island type board-walk penny-arcade thing where Estrella would be within a glass box peering into your future. Drop in a coin - get out a fortune. What a place for poetry. Poetry is of course prophecy. Baratier reminds us of this from his Delphi imagination. Exactly and wonderful. It is Baratier's imagination that generates these fortunes and we that are the fortunes of poetry and we are fortunate to get the poems that are twists of language and puns and endless playfulness of language and that darkness between humor that is life in America also. So they are not without a string. And they lead one into a magical and marvelous laberynthian of the might be possible, which is fortune anyway as one finds one's way into the poetic future. But not in anyway hostile to the ordinary because of course a fortune has to exist and you must find it, under a stump, in a pyramid or in this instance, in this book of poems, where in is a fortune of poetry.
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Michael Basinski
Assistant Curator
Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo. His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including: Proliferation, Terrible Work, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Boxkite, The Mill Hunk Herald, Yellow Silk, The Village Voice, Object, Oblek, Score, Generator, Juxta, Poetic Briefs, Another Chicago Magazine, Sure: A Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, Kiosk, Earth's Daughters, Atticus Review, Mallife, Taproot, Transmog, B-City, House Organ, First Intensity, Mirage No.4/Period(ical), Lower Limit Speech, Texture, R/IFT, Chain, Antenym, Bullhead, Poetry New York, First Offence, and many others.
For more than twenty years he has performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with his intermedia performance ensemble: The Ebma, which has released two Lps: SEA and Enjambment.
His books include: Idyll (Juxta Press, 1996), Heebee-jeebies (Meow Press, 1996), SleVep (Tailspin Press, 1995), Vessels (Texture Press, 1993), Cnyttan (Meow Press, 1993), Mooon Bok (Leave Books, 1992)and Red Rain Too (1992)and Flight to the Moon (1993) from Run Away Spoon Press.
• basinski @ mp3.com •
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Poetry/Rare Books Collection
420 Capen Hall
SUNY at Buffalo
Bflo. New York 14260
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