Some time back, I had a day in which my mailbox was filled almost entirely with poetry & other work from Boston. This past week, I had a parallel event happen, only this time from Milwaukee.

 

The reality was that I got two packages, both filled with riches. The first was from Bob Harrison, sending along “Counter Daemons,” the first section of a new long poem, WYSIWYG. I’ve been a fan of Harrison, both as poet & editor, for quite some time now, so this is the first installment of what I take to be a great gift to us all. My first quick read-thru tells me it’s full of energy, wit & pizzazz. Harrison is one of those essential “glue” people who give poetry communities literal substance, not unlike Gil Ott in Philadelphia, or Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy in San Francisco. Or Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung, also from Milwaukee. Karl Young, tho he doesn’t get out much, isn’t so far away, or at least wasn’t last time I was there. With such people & an institution like Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee is considerably more well endowed vis-à-vis contemporary poetry than, say, Chicago, which only has the University thereof, Northwestern, the heavily funded but always underachieving Poetry & the Art Institute. Poor Chicago, just 90 miles from all those riches.

 

The other package, the first issue of a journal called Gam – the reference is not slang for a lady’s leg, but rather a “social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising ground” – is an all-Milwaukee affair, edited (the whaling reference is a dead give-away) by Stacy Szymaszek, herself the literary program manager of Woodland Pattern. Most of its poets, other than Harrison – you can find some of “Counter Daemons” here – and Szymaszek, are either new to me, with the notable exception of Steve Nelson-Raney, whom I think of first of all as a great saxophone player. (Indeed, much of this is being written to the literal tune of Nelson-Raney’s Summer 1994 CD.)

 

Gam’s poetry is not unlike Szymaszek’s own: well-crafted, mostly spare, alive to the ear. Given the presence of Nelson-Raney, Harrison & david baptiste chirot, the issue comes across as a whole as less experimental, say, than one might expect. In part, this may be an illusion – Harrison’s excerpt from “Counter Daemons” can be read as referring to computer processes (among much else) & may derive from an unidentified process – still, it’s impossible to imagine

 

a rose petal follows
the scarring inside

 

being derived from any process other than the human imagination & heart. Conversely, chirot’s “TO ABSORB DARKNESS UNTIL ALL THAT REMAINS IS LIGHT” – I guess he saves his caps for poem titles – looks experimental until one realizes that what the sections in caps are kin to a chorus, not exactly the newest thing in poetry (& executed very much in the same spirit as chirot demonstrates here by that old hound of convention, T.S. Eliot, once upon a time).

 

Readers of this blog will know that nothing quite makes me feel more optimistic than reading first rate work from poets whose writing is new to me. John Tyson & Drew Kunz both fit that description. And I could teach a class on Nelson-Raney’s “Badges”:

 

Ice stars some
early badges of beauty
affixed to glass
storm door’s
insert tiny singers
in cold morning
silence

 

First we would discuss the career of the i, around which this poem is built, then the narrative line found in the o – its first three appearances are so soft one barely notices them, yet it dominates the latter half of the poem. That’s an overstatement, really – rather, the o is so strong in the fourth & sixth lines precisely to set up the i in the final three lines – the three phonemes it represents in the fifth line each echo one more time in the poem’s last lines. Then we would talk about the double b sounds in the second line, the role of s throughout, followed finally by the poem’s last line (noting along the way that every phoneme in the first word Ice shows up here as well). It’s a simple enough text at one level, but its formal resonances just go on & on. What a gift a good ear is.

 

Indeed, Nelson-Raney’s ear, along with that of Tyson, Harrison, Kunz &, in “Seblon after Querelle,” Szymaszek, has the effect of rendering Robert J. Baumann’s

 

quackery,
cane,
not able.
the walk of cobble:
crack
quick
heart beat.
nimble.

 

or

dark,
lark:

bird in,
December out.
bone.
alone.

 

far too clumsy & unsubtle for my liking. In another setting, I might not have felt that way, but whether it’s the Milwaukee scene or Szymaszek’s editing, the role of the ear is central to Gam. It’s absence as a dynamic element of the writing is noticeable in Jennifer Montgomery’s work for somewhat the same reason – that absence underscores the sentimentality at the heart of her narratives, surreal & otherwise. And I’m not at all sure that a poet who invokes Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (whose last name she misspells) wants to be viewed as a sentimentalist.

 

Gam therefore is a mixed bag, but its high points are so terrific that I would encourage everyone to get it. Although, be warned, the issue I received notes a publication run of just 100, not nearly enough for this quality of writing. My one other kvetch is the clips with which this first issue is bound. Staples would work much better. Gam is available, if at all, from 142 E. Concordia, Milwaukee, WI 53212.