Last & Lost Poems by Delmore Schwartz. I have to disagree with Robert Phillips who lauds this work in his introduction. Almost none of this writing shows the compression, the intelligence, the drama of his earlier work. What “broke” Schwartz? His illness? The various medications he was on when he wrote?

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. I’m genuinely enjoying this book. It’s sent me back to Augustine’s Confessions and has put Thomas Kinsella’s The Tain on my Amazon wish list for next ordering.

The Catalpa Bow; A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, by Carmen Blacker. This is a classic in the field and is just as important as Ghosts and the Japanese.

New British Poetry, edited by Patterson and Simic. Thin pickings.

Haiku; Anthologie de poem court japonaise, Atlan and Bianau.

From the Country of Eight Islands; Sato and Watson.

The Poem Behind The Poem; Translating Asian Poetry edited by Frank Stewart. Most of this is impressionistic stuff: we’re told about the translator’s spiritual condition while translating, how they must “prepare” for translation in some mysterious fashion, etc. etc. So far the best essay is J.P. Seaton’s “Once More, on the Empty Mountain,” because he really addresses the difference between Romance languages and Chinese and Japanese writing systems: parataxis, and he discusses how this comes into play in attempting to transfer the meaning (not to mention the form) of a poem from one completely different mode of thinking into another. William I. Elliott also gets high marks. The absolute worst essay is W.S. Merwin’s; the most puzzling is Arthur Sze’s in which he reveals his process of translation using Robert H. Mathew’s Chinese-English Dictionary, as if this is the key to a deep understanding of a language he doesn’t know. Anyway, as I said, I’m still reading and will no doubt re-read Sze and Merwin to try to understand if I’m missing something, or if the something I feel I’m missing is not there in the first place.

Since I have a few minutes of breathing space here, I thought I’d stop to say thanks to some special institutions that have have helped us get the word out about the Witness.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore.

The Maryland Historical Society.

Special Collections, The University of Maryland Library, College Park.

The Historical Society of Carroll County, Maryland.

The Carroll County, Maryland Human Relations Commission.

Carroll Citizens for Racial Equality.

The Carroll County, Maryland, Public Library System.

The Baltimore Sun.

The Westminster, Maryland Advocate.

The Westminster, Maryland Eagle.

Carroll County, Maryland Cable TV–Channels 3, 18, 19, 21.

Meikai (Bright Sea) University, Shin-Urayasu, Japan.

This is our promise to continue to provide the Witness at no cost to anyone who desires this information. Just click the icon on the front page, click the appropriate prompt on the second page and the book is yours. We have had well over 4,000 downloads since putting the Witness on-line last December.

I spent the day yesterday working on visual poetry and I’ve developed a new definition for what I’m doing: “Ants on a string style” visual poetry drawings. Words follow the contours of the drawn, painted,or engraved line in this style of visual poetry and may be seen as inhabiting the same line in a positive “upside” or negative “downside” manner. The words may be read linearly forwards or backwards, or in an alternating manner from positive to negative, etc. Examples of this style may be seen at Ubu-web, and at the Vortice Argentina website under my name.

My mail box continues to bring me gifts. Jared Pearce’s A Map to Twenty-Six Dimensions was an unexpected surprise. With its beautiful sunflower cover and poems that, as the author explains, are snapshots of the same “scenes of a life” taken from different positions–different perspectives–and in an abstrusely metaphysical leap of reasoning based on String theory, different dimensions–the poet offers a map-like spread of impressive writing. I’d like to include one such offering below:

Love

The inside curve lips around–a membrane
totally impervious to spoken language and
roaring on its own,

And the way gravity washes
itself on one’s skin purls
or crashes the whole tube:

The interplay
from trough to crest is one graceful motion
while the point we hold lies

Perfectly still, embraced
in one long dream of the cosmos
swimming into life;
An event so liberating
because though it feels like everything
swells and expires, we haven’t really moved

That we can tell.
We’ve surfaced and seen
the world, finally standing in
one place–every buoy,
every tress, every rafter.

My apologies to Jared: this blogging system doesn’t allow me to include the delicate enjambments of his fine poem–but I couldn’t resist including it.

Contact Jared Pearce for copies at jcpearceATbsu.edu, or write to him at 301 N. Reserve St./Muncie, IN. 47303.

Willard Bohn presents the whole range of visual poetry from the Futurists to Concrete and Lettrist poets. He speculates on the origins of vispo (advertising art of the 19th c., Mallarme, and especially Chinese ideograms) and leaves us with possible vispoetries of the future in the form of the Holopoems of Eduardo Kac and the melding of arts taking place on the world wide web. In between these poles Bohn gives us sensitive readings of Apollinaire, Severini, and the remarkable Mexican poet (and pioneer of Western Haiku) Jose Juan Tablada. The Campos brothers, Emmet Williams, Dick Higgens, and a host of well-known writers are discussed, but it is the lesser-knowns and the samplings of work from rare publications that fascinate me most. Names like Vicenc Sole de Sojo, and the Catalan vispoet J.V. Foix and his dazzling work are totally new to me. Bohn includes close to the text translations of each poem as he explains it, so English readers can follow along without trouble. Visual poetry is a vital current in both the art and literature of the 20th century. Bohn gives thought-provoking definitions of the permutations of this compelling fusion of genres. In short, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Get it from the University of Delaware Press.