1919–2009

It’s been a long time coming, but Jonathan Penton has helped us recoup the Golden Age of Ahadada e-chaps. Maurice Scully’s Five Dances is due up. The wonderful Annie Finch will soon follow.

http://newmysticsreviews.blogspot.com:80/2009/07/review-of-nota-bene-eiswein-by-eileen-r.html

Review of Mark Spitzer, Age of the Demon Tools. Ahadada Books, 2007. 60pp. ISBN 976-0-9808873-1-0.

Kane X. Faucher

Mark Spitzer has been an advocate of a rather esoteric spirituality, having achieved that sublime state of finding his inner catfisherman. Fish, and more particularly those of the bottom feeder variety, have been a mainstay theme in most of Spitzer’s offerings, but to rely solely on this distinction would be limiting and giving short shrift to the cavalcade of other thematic nuances Spitzer spots his work with.
In his newest poetry collection, following his last volume (The Pigs Drink From Infinity), we find Spitzer both at the height of his brazen invective and the depths of humourous self-deprecation. Flurries of neologisms and portmanteaus greet the reader on every page, attaining a kind of special economy of words that truly delight and discomfit. These madcap inventions are essentially eddying shoals that ride the infernal crest of Spitzer’s unapologetic narrative as he fumbles his way through life in Kirksville and beyond. Spitzer is both stoic and comedian, and occasionally a mad wordplay pundit. But it is not just the harlequin moments that resonate in Spitzer’s bizarre tour de force, but as well the dips and deviations into that sonorous poetic voice and the earnest politically astute commentator that seems to believe in a kind of Jeffersonian-style democracy that has yet to truly be made manifest. In this way, he is both ponderous poetic voice and sociopolitical soothsayer, frocked as a kind of post-beat logomancer whose poetic “splatterns” never fail to resonate with the sharpness of their delivery.
With its many “hazeled lakes”, “me-pods”, “lurky leviathans”, and hailed nutmeats, Spitzer bends his phrases over his knee by the logic of more scatometrico, issuing a polemical discharge that is beyond the commonplace flatulence of pundits on either side of that butt-cheek ideological divide.
I had spent time with Spitzer and his wife in their swampy habitat in Toad Suck, Arkansas last autumn. Upon their wasp-banded motorboat along the river with chicken liver bait on the end of a viciously medieval-looking treble hook, and me hardly a fisherman having never before seen gar up close or eaten marinated shark-steak kebob, it was evident that they were living on a cultural isthmus jutting solely from a county run on Baptistry. There were spiders the size of some men’s nightmares in a place that was largely an artistically defunct humidifier, where bars had to be named “supper clubs” where booze is sold only to those who purchase annual memberships. These are the living conditions where Spitzer’s poetry must swell and shoulder forth - on those Ozarkian foothill ascents nearby where, according to some rumours, literary icon Andrei Codrescu is said to have a home secretly ruling the hills like some misplaced Romanian prince. Spitzer, in life and in poetry, has the temperament of a gun-toting Ginsberg, or at the very least a poetically debonair angler. It is something readers of Spitzer have seen alluded to in many of his last offerings such as Chum, Bottom Feeder, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, and Riding the Unit.
The political call-to-action is much more pronounced in this volume, and it is with invective, bile and warning that Spitzer declares that the age of the demon tools is quickly upon us, taking aim at thinly disguised politicos that care more about senseless wars and ignoring environmental degradation. Spitzer’s anchor in his double-barreled poetic critique comes to the fore by arraying the many ugly baubles together of modern woe into a bracelet of catastrophe, and his proof comes on the page where it all seems to return: the increasing levels of fatally toxic levels of chemicals in our rivers and lakes where fish populations dwindle. At heart, Spitzer appears to be an eco-conscious spokesperson, and poetry is his conduit, his forceful critique of attack against indifference in an age where demon tools are becoming sadly de rigueur.

Just got news of the only photograph of Phineas Gage known to exist. There he sits, holding his bar–much as I’d imagined him. He’s a handsome and resolute man going through hell and little by little realizing that the nightmare will only deepen. Here’s the link: http://brightbytes.com/phineasgage/

Two highly adventurous British magazines, highly recommended.

For more information visit www.angelexhaust.com and www.nonism.org, respectively.

Christ, you can dance to this! Bennet intones his “shards” in a surprising tenor–nothing like the Tom Waits I expected–to a B-Boy beat that would do M & M proud. Though Bennet points to Kenneth Patchen as an inspiration, most of what Patchen does in his recorded work has to do with story. Bennet’s “shards” are fragments that sometimes cohere, usually don’t. Perfect for a coffee house where everybody knows all the answers and wants to talk at the top of their lungs. I’d give it a 99–good beat and the words don’t get in the way. The best of Bennet’s work so far.

Take a look. Jesse

I have to admit that Pudding House creeps me out. Not only do I dislike the look and feel of Pudding House publications, but most of what they print–even if it’s from a writer of interest–suffers somehow. I have nothing personal against the editor of Pudding House. I saw her once from a distance at a reading at the University of Ohio and yes–I could imagine that she took great pleasure in all things involving pudding. However, she looked pretty glum that day so I didn’t take the long walk across the room to say hello. Instead, I tried to imagine various incarnations of pudding–Christmas pudding, chocolate pudding from Belgium, pudding and pie, etc.–to evoke a cheerful chain of associations connected with the name, but I could not escape the darkness swimming before my eyes. I think it’s just the name that doesn’t sit right with me (what does gloppy pudding have to do with literature, let alone a house with stone foundations and the like?)–and the studied irony–of calling someone’s scrappily done collection a “Greatest Hits”–like a compilation CD of Tom Jones and the Beegees one picks up from the bargain bin at K-Mart. So when John Bennet’s Firestorm arrived in the post, I immediately recoiled. That is–until my nostrils caught the heavy scent of cigarette smoke like the perfume of a Parisian’s billet doux. Somehow Mr. Bennet’s contaminated, nicotine laden, nostril burning, cancer-defying breath neutralized the saccharine of Pudding House and allowed me to browse what I would normally throw in the corner as so much wasted tree.

There are some good ones in this collection, but page 24 makes the experience worthwhile:

Two Takes On The
Native American Dream

1.
Here’s what the Sioux Nation gave to me: a half-breed grandmother
who taught me to read and write by the age of five, byproducts,
really, of a magic world of dream, song and multi-colored chalk
with which we shaped Saturday mornings while the rest of the
house slept. A Catholic nun temporarily banged the writing and
reading back out of me, but she couldn’t touch the song and color.
So you see where my allegiance lies–I had my war paint on before
I did my Vision Quest.

I’m constantly reminded of where I come from. Of all the tribes
Lewis and Clark encountered on their reconnaissance for conquest,
only the Sioux refused to drop down on their knees. To the
whiskey, a chief called Black Cloud said, “If the white father in
Washington loves us so much, why does he give us things that
make us foolish?” Lewis and Clark said: “You haven’t seen the last
of us.”

The second take is not quite as interesting as the first, though it too has its moments.

Go to www.puddinghouse.com for more information.

Two hundred and eleven pages of appreciations of Jack Micheline, a “street” poet with “street” cred who wrote pedestrian poems and thought about paintings while walking the street and died on a train from San Francisco to somewhere else. Lovers, buddies, fellow street folks and poets and wannabe poets and artists from both coasts tell us we missed something special and that Jack’s poems lived on the breath and in his harmonica and tambourine and dance, all of which ended with a Bart official trying to wake an old sinner up at the end of the line. This volume makes me want to believe them.

The sad thing is that it’s hard to wax romantic about a toothless old man with a pot gut wearing pee-stained underwear who lives on Dinty Moore soup and warm beer in a flop house. The pictures from Jack’s younger days make you nod your head yes, but Jack with his arm around a pretty young thing in an after-hours bar just makes you feel sorry for someone who’s lived well past his legend even though this chorus of printed voices keeps wailing noooooo! nooooo! noooooooo! he lllllliiiiiivvvvvvveeeesssss forevvvveeerrrrr onnnnnnn! like the winter wind off San Francisco bay.

$14.95 from Vagabond & the Smith. Same contact information as the previous book.