I'd proposed a little earlier that it might be welcome if listmembers said a
little about books that seem to have been lost in the shuffle in the last
few years--i.e. under- or unreviewed, or underrated. No bites, so far--fair
enough. But I thought I'd toss in another candidate--the 1998 Wild Honey
chapbook _20/20 Vision_ by Pete Smith. He's a transplanted Englishman now
living in Canada out west, his collection of _Grosseteste Reviews_ having
survived the trip; he's now hooked up with the KSW writers & has returned to
writing after a break. I think _20/20 Vision_ was his first major endeavour
after his return, & it may strike a chord in anyone who's a fan of either
Tony Lopez or Stephen Rodefer's _Four Lectures_. A gift for the epigram:
"Outside a suburban brothel, mangled, rusted, one of Larkin's cycle clips.";
"_A Book of Martyrs_ is not a How / To Book; is not a How Not To Book.";
"Money has no class"; "A National Day of Morning"; "The Midlands didn't
invent the End of the World / but perfected it"; "the ratings always favour
Barabbas"; "Cracked, the future will take care of the irony and dust." Or
lines like this:
The name of that microbe that lives on a host in the sea,
comes out at night to feed and hides itself in its own light
emitted at the exact wavelength as moonlight slicing water:
that name for my pseudonym, please.
Or one entire section (of 20 lines, per the title):
SEE THROUGH.
Another Night of the Living Idiot: Ritalin elasticated its Mick
Jagger lips in a high camp version of _Not Fade Away_,
extended by the evening caffeine balls-up. The wiring overload
kicked in in the supine position and tripped the rumination machine.
Daniel the Seer was so called not because of what he saw
but what he saw through. The statue's gold standard falling
to lead; the fire that doesn't burn you if you lick back when it licks
you. If it wasn't Daniel I saw with the Stones at the Locarno Ballroom,
Coventry, 1963, who was that singing _I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be
chug achugachug chug chug_? Knowledge shall increase but still
won't keep up with ignorance: personal computers will refuse
to acknowledge your first name: the borders between city and country
will be patrolled by red-jacketed foxes. I, me, saw all these things
and was instructed to seal them up in a book to be published
in an edition of 150, under the imprint _Past Oral Histories: Six
Six Six_. The mark of a good beast is its ability to devour you while
maintaining eye contact and making you think it's worshipping
you. At the end of the thousand years it will be opened and read
and declared _Quite quite but John of Patmos has the staying power_.
Cities of gold; seas of glass; glitter that lasts, lasts.
I'll toss in one more example: an untitled poem of his that first appeared
in _The Gig_ 1; I don't know if it's been reprinted elsewhere.
Convergence divided: auralities conquered by triple-tongued notes
of held forte. The crescendo avoided its own logical: da capo
circled the wagons in a custer of reinventiveness until wheels rolled
slowly back to the drawing board, the mind's eye, the cave wall
in a blink, in a blink. Body cavities quiver at the in/trusion,
the foreigner stepping into a mucous-paved brink, which should read breech
and it works best if the thing's fully cocked. One man's
Mapplethorpe's another's fist-fuck to say nothing of taste which hardly
comes
into it although a fin-de-siecle-peri-apocalyptic-post-aesthetic
might embrace the leper's shed member in an ecstatic kiss,
a performance-person might feign shock here in an attempt to foreground
an audience. Deafening. If you think time's warped you should
have seen the woofer wipe out at max vol. Scandal's pleasure's
nothing more than stiletto's swish-card: everything that rises
must, just as the reading public demands a plain style twainly.
all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
[log in to unmask]
THE GIG magazine: http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865
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