book reviews w/basinski

book reviews with michael basinski

Isotopes - by Dan Zimmerman.
2001. 16 pages. Frame Publications. Contact publisher for price and postage etc.
frame@cottawge.clara.co.uk

A tremendously fun book, with amazement on each page and humor also - follows the drifting imagination and it is startling how it shifts and that shifting pops the mind into yes, I see. Chance generated from 4x4 wordsquares and run through an anagram generator and then downsized to these neat 14 line poems this poetry engages the tech.stuff of this mod. world. Most contemporary high-tech poetry runs like this: poet thinks of an idea and puts it on the web. Web proves the poet's idea not poetry (mainly because the poet doesn't do any poetry anyway). But Hear: Here then in ISOTOPES, Zimmerman, smart read deep, Gnostic poet imagines and writes, engages the writing with some form of tech, here anagram generator, and then reengages with imagination, his poet imagination, engages the raw material and produces poetry. This is the way to deal with poetry with tech. Ah. Zimmerman shows us the path through all the websites, emails, hypertext dull forest of unpoetic silliness. He makes poetry. Look for the light. He lives in New Jersey!

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Maybe Tomorrow - by Shane Jones.
$3.00. 25 pages. MuscleHead Press Chapbooks. BoneWorld Publishing, John and Nancy Berbirch, 3700 County Route 24, Russell, New York 13684

A nice chunk of collection by one our youngest and best. Shane Jones is one of those rare poets for whom poetry is living. Frightening how close to the fallen and sparking electric lines of heart and soul he comes. Melding in fact. This book divided into three sections: Moister or less clothes, the sweetness of love - smell and puddles of robins, bunny slippers; and the crumbling toast of a burned out love smothered with rancid butter and hard cream cheese… and horrible fact that memory does something to old romances - makes you remember only the crickets, the ice cream, the wonder of Niagara Falls etc. See what fools we all are. But we see through these windows and Shane Jones keeps them open.

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Boston: A Long Poem - by Hugh Fox.
Ibbetson Street Press, 25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143. Write for Price or
Send $10.00 to Doug Holder at Ibbetson.

Hugh Fox master being and form of Lord in Small Press circles has with vast energy and deep knowledge knows all of the small press world more than any other and better than all those teachers of poetry out there in the fancy soft cheese world of poetry. But poetry knows Fox. Fox is the fashion in witch one protects oneself from the unchained dog, the way of doing of other peaks of authors. He knows so perfectly knows and that poetic is here displayed in this poem of Boston that brings together in one spot all that living and poetry are when merged. All places one place all information one information a mesh and a meld and merging and coming together and implosion of diversity - words-art-gods - and the like all like into one spots. Here Fox is the intersection of all roads, which then makes him poet and allows him, with clarity and ease, to make the poem, weaves it out of all the waves coming ashore.

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Switch - by Tim Gaze.2002. Anabasis/Xtant.
Unconscious at Cape Paterson - by Tim Gaze & Cornelis Vleeskens. 2002.
Anabasis/Xtant.
Xtant is Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707.
Anabasis is Thomas Lowe Taylor, Oysterville, Washington 98641-0216. Write to these folks about prices and other good great books. www.anabasispress.com

Visual works. I am sure that these are examples of imaginative deep writing, they being other symbols and lines merged into new forms or developing alphabets - now we have a name for these works - Asemic writing. That is the word: Hear it: ASEMIC. But for me the delight of these books, written in Asemic, is the reading of this work - because the new writing in these new worlds/works with other alphabets demands a form of reading that translates into sound each glyph or string, poem- therefore new sounds must be made and the expansive experience is then IT. Wonderful to touch down on this terrific planet of other writing. These authors stretch it and brake it and broke it and IS now someplace else … in the other… place of creativity. Obviously the air is there breathable, beautiful. Let's go. Paint your wagon, and come along.

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Find on line poems - by Henry Wilkens.
http://www.bewrite.net/read/poetry.htm#NEW - Write him at hwilkens@bluemail.ch - Awaiting your comments on-line... he is.

Henry is the author of: The Farting Dog, which can be found at the sight above-mentioned. Here is a stiff whiff: This is/ the true story/ of a German/ ballet dancer/ who couldn't/ make it/ in Hollywood/ and ended up/ in a German/ movie/ featuring her/ with a farting dog. And just want to let you know that the moral rights of the author have been asserted. The rights of Harry Wilkens to be identified as the author have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright etc. The poem is about Sylvia Seidel, a young Munich ballet dancer, and now actress, explains Wilkens, who as poet king of mid-Europe and Alps, goes on to say, who got the LUCK to be introduced into Hollywood by Kirk Douglas. Henry Wilkens is a gas! Check out the site… but I mean… go there for Hank's poems! I mean he is in the great line of Henrys: Henry the 8th, Henry Miller, Henry Hemingway, Henry Bukowski, Rames the Henry.

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Postcard Poems - by Del Ray Cross & Cassie Lewis.
2002. Cassie Lewis, 1401 Red Hawk Circle #G302, Fremont, California, 94538.
To order copies, write to casslewis@graffiti.net

"I've got a revolver/ I revolve," this line in the poem Foglifting by Del Ray Cross that sticks in mind and in my admiration chamber. And this poem is part of the sequence by Del Ray Cross in this postcard collection. And the other half of this correspondence is Cassie Lewis, "freedom comes disguised/ as a book of poems." Two burgeoning poets finding their rhythm as writers by the simple demand of riting writing each day to each other a poem, a poem on postcard. This fruit then of this conversation and merging is this book of poems, which reads, classically like an open book to the room in the recesses of the creative mind. The space created by mail, ol' time, like post office, allows the poems the distance of authenticity and this then genuine poetry conveys its intense, hence real, so to speak, emotion, to the humble reader. Each poem arrives in the mailbox of the imagination, and then opened and then read in the heart.

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Young Chet and other recent poems - by Gerald Locklin.
Pudding House Publications Chapbook Series. 2002. $8.95. Pudding House Publications,
60 North Main Street, Johnstown, Ohio, 43031.

The other day I was taking a walk, as has become my custom. You see, I must take weight off, eat vegetables (raw without butter and salt!), and all that bow-wow, woof woof. And I came upon some shards of plastic drinking cup, which I dreamed once held some very cheap draft street picnic beer. And as I looked closer, the shards seemed to become stick figures of people and then ghosts and then they became full fleshed figures, as mush as flattened plastic drinking cups can become full fleshed figures and art. Art was what I was left with as I wandered away. (Lucky I did cause as I gazed upon the flattened shards of plastic I heard a couple guys sitting on a porch say, "Look at that crazy asshole." So as I walked I understood how finding stuff like Yoko Ono did and does, how everything is art as you come upon it and find it and it is the spinning off of whatever one encounters that makes everything art and that we live totally in art if we are artists or get into the rare rhythm of the artist's mind, where, yeah, everything is art. And if you are a poet then everything becomes poetry. Wow I said as I read this new book by Gerald Locklin. Wow this in fact is the highest and bestest poetry there could ever be. Here I have encountered an artist of the greatest caliber. Locklin is artist as everywhere. Damn! I was so happy that the door to my enlightenment came from a plastic beer cup, squished. I think Ger would like that notion. And to those guys on the porch, "kiss my ripe rotten butt."

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michael basinski
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.


Send books and magazines for review to:
Michael Basinski
Poetry/Rare Books Collection
420 Capen Hall
SUNY at Buffalo
Bflo. New York 14260

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Creative Writing Poetry Submissions

and Paper Proposals on Popular Culture Poetry sponsored by michael basinski and maura gage --- Poets for the 2003 Popular Culture Association Conference to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana.....more info


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