Review
Matthew Wong: Transmissions From a More Perfect Cosmos – Review
Greg Masters
Precision is no longer necessary – nor aspired to – in the works of Matthew Wong. In his first museum retrospective in the U.S., fabrications of a parallel universe mirror our reality but offer an alternative representat...
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Review
THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX by Richard Modiano – REVIEW
Marc Olmsted
THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX
By Richard Modiano
Punk Hostage Press
$20.00
(Available on Amazon)
How can I review a book that reviews itself so elegantly in Richard Modiano’s own preface and Pam Ward’s introduction? Then there are remarks by Viggo Mortenson and Ronne Blakely. The list goes on. THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX is, unsurprisingly, a very good, even great book. It is also Richard’s first, at age 71. Not even a prior chapbook of his own, ladies and gentlemen.
What took him so long?
The answer may be found first in his recent 10 years as Executive Director of Beyond Baroque, the Venice Beach, California literary center equivalent of NYC’s Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Like any true Platonic philosopher-king, he did not ask for it, let alone want it. Like the Roman Empire’s Marcus Aurelius, he ran BB with wisdom, dignity and humbleness. Alec Guinness played Marcus Aurelius in Anthony Ma...
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Review
The Menace of the Minotaur – a review of David Harrison Horton’s MAZE POEMS
John Greiner
MAZE POEMS
David Harrison Horton
Arteidolia Press
Daedalus, with his genius, was barely able to escape from the labyrinth of his own creation which was built to contain the Minotaur. Theseus, with the aid of Ariadne and her ball of twine was able to defeat the Minotaur and free the Athenians from the Cretian sacrifice of their young men and women in the labyrinth. David Harrison Horton, in his most recent book MAZE POEMS, has made use of Daedalus’s labyrinth, Theseus’s cleverness and Ariadne's practical skill to take on the Minotaur of language.
Language has taken on monstrous proportions in our modern era being used to propagate misinformation in the political realm. In contemporary culture language has too often taken on the lumbering weight of a didacticism that longs for fulfillment in the advent of a social realist hierarchy in a Year Zero horror utopia. Mr. Horton in MAZE POEMS has achieved the admirable end ...
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Review
HIGH WHITE NOTES—The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism—Review
Marc Olmsted
HIGH WHITE NOTES
The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism
By David S. Wills
Beatdom Books
$17.99
High White Notes takes a phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was of prime importance to Hunter S. Thompson (or any serious writer) - being in the zone while creating. It is of course important to all artists to be in that zone, and thus David Wills uses Thompson’s writing exclusively (rather than a more conventional biography) to get to the man and his self-created myth, one far more invented than I previously realized.
Most of us enthusiastic about Thompson agree that Hell’s Angels, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 are his “high white notes” - and anyone attempting to follow and understand him can see that there is a deterioration in his work from that point - relatively slow enough to entice us back momentarily (I used to regularly pick up the San Francisco Examiner ju...
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Review
Rigor of Semblance: Louise Hamlin at the Hood Museum of Art — Review
Greg Masters
In the early 1980s, when I first became acquainted with her work, Louise Hamlin lived in Manhattan and painted scenes of her urban environment: a stretch of upper Broadway on a rainy night that accented reflections from the ...
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Review
Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite – Review
Greg Masters
JACKET WEATHER
Mike DeCapite
Soft Skull Press, New York City, 2021, 258 pages, $16.95
Senses attuned walking through the city: the crispness of the sounds, the grittiness of the incongruous assembly of buildings and storefronts, the light effects, the pedestrians mired in their moment, even the smells; plugged into the cacophony for the solo passage through the grid, each element contributing to a choral totality that in Mike DeCapite's hand streams forth like clear whitewater, without decoration, without a superfluous syllable.
In fact, a strong, residual effect of this novel comes from what is not present. Not to give away too much, but the narrative is on its own track, so far away from mainstream formula. The delight of not being absorbed into what most art douses us with every day results in a therapeutic wash. How can a book be so full of love without irony or conflict? He does it.
While there is story-telling going...
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Review
TAXI NIGHT — Poetry by Cliff Fyman — Review
Marc Olmsted
TAXI NIGHT
Poetry by Cliff Fyman
Long News Books
$15.00
I connected with Cliff Fyman some years after his association with Naropa University (then Institute) and its 1977 Summer Writing Program - a heyday-hosting of teachers like William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I met him through then-fellow student writers Peter Marti and Vincent Zangrillo.
Although late in the book, there is this poetic statement from Fyman, and it sums up his view:
I see every object alive
and luminous
and at the same time I
see the decay and death
inherent in it’s very shining.
Cliff Fyman is essentially influenced by William Carlos Williams and his school of Objectvism, something Allen Ginsberg returned full circle to in his teaching at Naropa. Cliff learned to sit in the Buddhist style of “calm abiding,” shamatha. Add to that - he is also a vegetarian as we...
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Review
List Full: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness – Review
Jim Feast
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Review
The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel – Review
Sparrow
The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel
by Marc Jampole
Poets write novels invertedly; the language comes first, then the plot ‒ if there even is a plot. In his Acknowledgments, Marc Jampole mentions a number of poems that have been transformed into prose in The Brothers Silver. My favorite poet-novels are by Beat luminary-turned-Zen Buddhist monk Philip Whalen: Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head and You Didn’t Even Try. Both are gentle, sad, inconclusive portraits of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. The writing is deceptively simple, but there is a poet’s languor; a sense of the narrator watching patiently, from a great distance. Jampole writes tempestuously, with rising and flipping wordplay:
Desire to play Oberon in the school play claws at me. This hunger doesn’t rest, to say out loud in front of everyone, “At a fair vestal thronèd by the west….” To a mirror twin, I exclaim my lines for hours. Audition day I ...
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Review
(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn) – Poems by Jim Feast — REVIEW
Thaddeus Rutkowski
(a strange awakening of light that takes the place of dawn)
poems by Jim Feast
Autonomedia
$16.29
The subtitle for Jim Feast’s latest poetry collection, “Poems for Lady Bunny: Chicago, 1972–1975,” clues us in to the time and place for these basically metrical, mostly long poems. As Feast explains in his introduction, Lady Bunny was a painter who served as his “muse, mentor and she-devil’s advocate.” This book, then, works as a tribute to and elegy for this artist, who died in 1977. Many of the poems are dated in the early to mid-1970s, when Feast was a young man. The book has an attractive cover painting by R. Brown Lethem.
In the book’s first poem, “For the Painter, Lady Bunny,” Feast describes one of Bunny’s “compositions” and by doing so sets out his aesthetic purpose:
The room draws near to the red beads
of rain on the window. The sun settles
like a rose covered over in snow. Now ...
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Review
Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems – Review
John Pietaro
Edward D. Wood, Jr., Selected Poems, Unexpurgated Edition
Black Scat Books, 2020
Yes, it really is that Ed Wood. Recalled in cult movie circles as the bizarro planet’s Orson Welles, Wood was writer-director-producer ...
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Review
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates – Poems by Rich Ferguson – Review
Kathleen Reichelt
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates
Poems by Rich Ferguson
Moon Tide Press
In his newest book of poetry Rich Ferguson promises a puzzle. Or according to the poet, collaborations “with clouds creating poems continuously changing shape & meaning, depending how you look at them”. Rich doesn’t disappoint. Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, published by Moon Tide Press and released in January 2021, delivers this and more.
Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, poems by Rich Ferguson
In the eight section book, Rich Ferguson begins his lunar journey with relationships that end. When Rich addresses the tear from his mother who handed me over to the brass-knuckled moon in “A Worry Bead, a Blessing” and the amnesiac moon, a lunatic laundromat robbing me of my quarters in “When Her Blood-Red Kiss Stains My Breath”, he isn’t mixing his metaphors. The theme of moon repeats throughout this book, carefully...
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Review
IN THE REBEL CAFE: Interviews with Ed Sanders – Review
Marc Olmsted
IN THE REBEL CAFE
Interviews with Ed Sanders
edited by Jennie Skerl
Clemson University Press
$120.00
Jennie Skerl has put together a magnificent intro/crash course to Ed Sanders, "second generation" Beat. Sanders, to many of us, needs no introduction, but he is not the household name that many of the "first generation" are.
Further complexity involving appreciation of Sanders is how many angles one can know him from. Many are more aware of his band The Fugs. Perhaps one read The Family in one of its revisions, Sanders' journalistic exploration of Charles Manson, (and among the absolute best of the true crime genre). Finally, one may know him poetically, and in particular, through his "investigative poetics" - journalistic, historical, data-collecting poetics, a refinement and extension of the political "list" poetry of Allen Ginsberg such as "CIA Dope Calypso," which arguably has its own musical influence from Th...
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Review
Words Doing as They Want to Do and Have to Do by Eve Fowler – Review
John Pietaro
Eve Fowler, Words Doing as They Want to Do and Have to Do
(Radical Documents, 2020)
Speakers: Litia Perta, Rachelle Sawatsky, Celeste Dupoy-Spencer, Bobby Jablonski, Kate Hall, Dylan Mira and Jess Arndt. Recorded by Sam S...
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Review
Broadway for Paul by Vincent Katz – Review
Greg Masters
Broadway for Paul
by Vincent Katz
Knopf
$27
Often matter-of-fact in tone, stripped of rococo embellishment or flowery pretense, these poem-objects by poet, art writer and translator Vincent Katz stand as testimony to keen observance and thoughtful assessment. The voice is conversational, as if the poet and reader were seated at an outdoor café sharing a pot of good coffee sheltered for the moment from the rush of activity and liberated from destination.
I felt charged tuning into the, at times, seemingly spontaneous improvisation, the poet boldly applying pen to paper as his thought stream issues forth, one observance noted down which then spawns a reflection, the thought allowed to move where it may as quick as a sax solo; for instance, catching the delight in a woman smiling at a baby on the subway. The observations are coralled into form, the passion of the personal journalism contained in the poems' elegant structure.
T...
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