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Close that Cellar Door! - Audio Poetics by Dan Sicoli and Joe Malvestuto
$10.00 includes postage. Contact: Dan Sicoli at: PO Box 2071, Niagara Falls, NY 14301.

     Since I recently fell down the cellar stairs, bruised fingers, hip and a broken rib (musta be how like Adam feel in the garden after his rib incident), I can relate to the title of this CD: CLOSE THE CELLAR DOOR! by Dan Sicoli – who has poetry ringing out of a lonesome beer bottle in the deepest of cold, damp city night pisst offtism soul watching with some form of disbelief at the circus of life in its dumb shit spit splendor boring honker an affront to the real which is poetry intoxicated smile and voice of ruble of boxcars, and by Joe Malvestuto – who smiles with poetry as ants enter the Christ-like hurts of his heart. A most wonderful weave of music and poetry – not the with Jazz crap but woven without the poetry fearing the music or the music on knees to the poem. Like it is two poets who have this street poem music in them with the other instrument music also and it is all as part of the art. I wish there were more CDs like this one. If so poetry and music mixed would not be such dried scrock. So do this one in the tradition of Locklin, The Buk, the wandering madness men and women in downtown American cities, the howling of the toe in a toaster, an agony butterfly in the beak of blackbird President. Poetry is song, King Song, climbing up the Eiffel tower.

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Ragged EDGE Magsheets No. 4. Jimmy Abbey Stays for the Drum Circler - by Gerald Locklin.
$3.00 each, post free (US copies go Air Mail). Contact: Appliance Books, 43 Transmere Grove, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP1 6DU, UK. www.raggededge.btinernet.co.uk Poet of spewing street voices K. M. Dersley runs this project projectile.

     OK, so in this series besides Locklin’s Jimmy Abbey Stays for the Drum Circle is: A Tale of the British Beatniks by K. M. Dersley; Bopper by Jim Burns; Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? by A. D. Winans; and it continues on so you know that here you are gunna score, so get out the pencil and moist up the tip and pull out the near empty wallet (but the good thing only $3.00 A POP! What aint half bad!) And write for all these and others and you wanna know K. M. Dersley anyway – if yo er in The LAND of ENGs and wanna send your poetry other than to your neighbor across the hall (who can’t read anyway) so just do this thing for crying out loud! But let’s tear open this bag of chips by Gerald Locklin. A fast tight short story it are featuring Locklin’s lusty Jimmy Abbey and is Locklin at his ironic and joy packed, humoristic horny best with twist of splendid ending the way fiction should be in these complicated times of unreadable egghead prose. Not Locklin who is writing prose for the Home Depot guy balding in plumbing telling me how to fix my toilet by saying, “You know what I mean – the thingy?” Here in Locklin prose the body is mind! Here in Locklin’s short story the imagination fires up the balls! Maybe blue balls! Read the story - $3.00 bucks! Less than a gallon of gas in Bush’s America.

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Asemic Magazine. No. 3. - Tim Gaze, editor.
P.O. Box 1011, Kent Town, SA 5071, Australia. You gotta write to Tim for the price or send some dollars – I understand he is outta work so he needs support. Ya can’t expect something for nothing. See – being a poet means you be broke and broke – down-under or up-under – don’t matter. Maybe send a lettuce!

     Now… why a magazine? – ? “Paper has more presence than electronic media” that’s a quote from Tim Gaze – I mean you gotta like this poet – him being Australia’s and world’s inonavigator and flashlight light into the darkness. Visual poets and poets or all stripes gotta wish there were more Gazes. And you see Asemic is the best new brand new nude thing coming in visual poetry in twenty years! Let me quote, “The world “asemic” means having no semantic content.” That means it is not writing but writing that demands improvisation to translate. This means there is no arrogance of learned poet. This means sound improvisation is always a possibility – all works sing! This means pagan – pre meaning. Ah! What joy. All favorites of visual poetry work within this one like Ross Priddle, Jim Leftwich, Jack Berry, Ficus! And more endless. And I was happy to find a Brion Gysin work in the mag also. He was once colleague of William Burroughs. And when I saw it, I said, why yes, Gysin was into this in the 1960s. Now it is asemic and Tim Gaze on his non semantic eastern dragon bakes the cake of this brand new writing form. A fat issue. You need it. You gotta get with it. Remember that small press ushered in visual poetry 40 years ago. Time to reinvigorate this genre again you of small press, you who are gods and goddesses and humble slices of peach pie and black coffee poem.

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Tablets – 1 through Tablets – 4 - by Peter Ganick and Tarsals
1 through Tarsals – 2 by Peter Ganick. 2004. Available at $5.00 each or $25 for the set from Peter Ganick, 181 Edgemont Avenue, W. Hartford, Ct. 06110.

     For decades Peter Ganick was one of principle entrepreneurs of the new poetry of the 1980s and 1990s. Via his magazine ABACUS and his press: Potes and Poets, he published and he promoted a generation of innovative, perplexing and challenging writing, seemingly without prejudice with one exception being that the writing had to be challenging, bright and new. He was part of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E surge but his interest in provocative, conscious altering poetry was not limited to its publication. Ganick himself is a poet, a word I do not write without deep consideration. He has authored more than 50 books of poetry and continues to this day to actively write and publish. These six books are now added to his substantial bibliography. The tablet sequence takes its name from, seemingly, the way in which the poetry was written, which is to write in a tablet and each work, like a poetic diary entry, is composed and dated at a sitting. Sometimes there is more than one poem written at a sitting – such is the nature of creativity – meaning sometimes there is more in the tank one day than the next. The Tarsals sequence is like Tablets in compostional facets. This poetry is the work of poetry mind moving about the words and indicates the shifting and pondering, reflective and insightful mind of the poet Ganick engaged in poetry. Less opaque than some of his earlier works, this poetry falls into a comfortable rhythm of thought. Insight after insight, this poetry feels like Ganick’s best work. Free to engage poetry for poetry’s worth his poetry in these compositions are meditative moments, flashes of smart imaginative word light or lighting hitting the brain or fire flies blinking with lucid word precise imagination. Can’t put it down while reading and constantly looking up and joining with the poet in contemplations released by a mature control of language as art. The pome, the poem, the passing moments in poetry here recorded.

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• Prose Elements (1969-2003) - by Thomas Lowe Taylor.
2004. Isbn 1-930259-38-7 Anabasis. Xtant Books. For other information and price write: Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct. Charlottesville, VA 22903.

     Thomas Lowe Taylor is a multi-dimensional artist. He is poet, prosesist, photographersist and all around literary experimentalist who has been pushing against the limits for thirty years. Pushing against the hard rock is hard work and a hard place in which one poet finds himself. There is no support from the greater literary world for the hard at work intrepid artist like Thomas Lowe Taylor. When I first heard his name I heard Thomas Lowe Taylor was geology prof. or a geography teacher. Geo this or geo that and maybe I don’t remember very right. But one senses him working with and at, seeking elements of for and a poetry in these prose works all about one poet’s poetics. Elements, elementals here now are called Prose Elements. If I could find one poet, among many, who Thomas Lowe Taylor might find an anchor it seems to be that poet would be Charles Olson and then it fits perfect about the elements and hard places, like continents bumping into each other. So this book is a collection of very complex but thoroughly exciting working out of poetic notions, prose writing essay statements and poetic thinkings. Like Olson and Pound, it is collage in its wide bridging informational impact. A life of reading and writing and poetic consideration and experimentations has gone into these essays and prose sections and it is a wonderful experience to read one mind alive in poetry. In his afterworld he writes that this is trance writing. Of course it is because in, so to speak, trance is where the metaphors and literary leaps occur. They occur here most wonderfully. But also in structure these are creative, trance like essays, and extend and develop Olson’s projects to the point where these are Thomas Lowe Taylor’s projects. Good creative and informative poetic essays about poetry are in short supply. If you thirst, wanna get tranced, here is some elixir.

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• Bodh[i] Circu[it]s / Alg[a]e[bra] D[ra[in]] - by Derek White.
Calamari Press 350 W. 57th St Apt 3H, New York, New York 10019 derek@calamaripress.com

     Bodh[i] Circu[it]s / Alg[a]e[bra] D[ra[in]] continues work that Derek White has done in his previous books: 23 Text Tiles and Mining in the Black Hills both 2003 from Calamari Press. This is expansive visual poetry and as that something needed. Guilty, visual poets are sometimes of repeating themselves via style and form and medium but you won’t find any of that in Derek White. He is the most expansive visual poet I’ve read in some time. Each page in fact is a new field of work, a new form, form of forms, and he has not abandoned the word but has each time found it fresh and new again and is able to ornament it in balance with visuals, various forms, lines images, color, type, print, hands, photocopy, and conglomeration, a constellation cooperation of mediums germinates and generates into a splendidly babbling work. And with babble I mean only a compliment because babble is the multi-sound/dimensions one hears, as sweet delight, when engaging White’s diverse fields of work. Finally, a two eyes poet! One eye visual and one readable – one focused imagination. See also his magazine SleepingFish www.sleepingfish.net Fish and net – I like it!

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