This double issue, and the next, is devoted to "The Experimental," which is here treated with the respect and intelligence usually given mainstream work. Editor Jack Foley opens with "Towards A Preface To My Book, Gershwin," which serves extremely well as an introduction of the type of work that follows. Next, a "Quotations/Testimonies" section includes the voices of everyone from Walter J. Ong to Walt Whitman to Jack Spicer to Gertrude Stein to Plato, and lead us into a trip though the looking glass of human consciousness as origami where vocal-verbal-visual wormholes drive from one quadrant to another as quick as the space between syllables. To single out individual works would do a disservice to the whole. And this issue reads as a whole--a single work written by poets from all places and times converged here to demonstrate the beauty that lies in the outer reaches. I should mention that a transcript of dinner conversation between Robert Duncan and friends demonstrates his extraordinary imagination and leaps of logic in his enthusiasm for virtually any subject. As such, he represents that element of the experimental that perhaps gives it life--enthusiasm for everything--to live, to create without limitation. This issue is saturated with that enthusiasm. 56 large tabloid pages in two sections, dirt cheap for a document that explores the neuro-chemical-spiritual fringe.--Jake Berry
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #4,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1995.