It’s not every day that somebody hands you a set of eleven books bound in string that you can then fit into the side pocket of a suit jacket. But that is what CA Conrad handed me the other night at the Public Library, and how I then brought the collection home. These are, as you might have gathered already, instances of micropublishing, the latest suite of work from Baltimore’s Furniture Press.
It is probably generous to describe these as books, even chapbooks. For want of a $40 saddle-stitch stapler, each collection is a series of between three and six unbound half-sheets of paper that form little book-thingees 5½” high, 4¼” across. All have the name of the author on the cover, but not all also have titles & only some of those actually show up on the cover. On the back, we can see that each is part of a numbered series, entitled “{PO25¢EM}” – numbers 21 through 31, to be exact.
This is, as you might gather (and you would not be wrong), a decidedly quirky publishing project. But it is solid as poetry, from start to finish. Included in this cluster are:
· Alicia Askenase
· CA Conrad
· Tom Devaney
· Brett Evans
· Greg Fuchs
· Hassen
· Ish Klein
· Chris McCreary
· Jenn McCreary
· Ethel Rackin
· Frank Sherlock
With the exception of Fuchs, who escaped to trendy Brooklyn awhile back, the rest are Philadelphia area poets, a good cross section of the local literary scene, ranging from Askenase, a co-founder of 6ix and former curator of the reading series at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden, to Frank Sherlock, impresario of the current series at La Tazza.
None, so far as I can tell, wrote anything “special” for this format, but all have work that fits well here. The approaches are quite various. For instance, Askenase’s project, Suspect, is a serial poem exploring the language surrounding our current wars in Afghanistan & Iraq:
there really were
no
civilians dying
to think
we cared deeply about them
in the painting
Tom Devaney & CA Conrad both have short books of poems. I take Evans’ Bacon Assegai as a long poem, tho possibly it is a series. Its language has the thick materiality I associate with late Zukofsky, circa 80 Flowers or “A”-22 & -23, viz:
Plover pywipes
breeding season catch-flower
t’ fèass mony jeers
pleasure to more
pleasure. She sent her two sis
ters upstairs to pull down
my wisdome teeth. I came loose
rather by art
than by strength.
In wlapping there is as
the laundress stacking shirts
again green shutters.
not to woo the Chinese woo
is to stop fun
interruptions, pinching
punc
tuitions hup netting off
ballad light – bog o’ stars
& inclined to kick to move
That’s simply great to read aloud, as I’ve done more than once.
As with Evans, who I believe is the only here I’ve not met, I find myself responding most strongly to people with whose writing I’ve not connected before. The uninominal Hassen is a case in point. Only a couple of her poems even stretch out to two lines, but they utilize the call-and-response play that is possible with their titles as well as can be done:
true or false
i like the idea of an accomplished fact
*
crap shoot
handwriting in mirror rather than face
*
atomic
life is hard; fuck me
*
consolation
my comic book expression of horror
There is, as should be visible from just these three poets, a considerable diversity here, evidence I would argue that there is, finally, no such thing as a Philadelphia style, tho there are tendencies one might note, such as an openness to wit, a sense of what is being done elsewhere, an avoidance of the pretentious. Between Ethel Rackin’s post-New American narrative & Frank Sherlock’s boxed two-liners –
There’s a dream teardrop flooding the street
Butt ugly native seeks sexy alien to come together & drown
one can find the whole of the post-avant tradition (save, I suppose, those versions that for reasons of software can’t be contained, really, on the page). At the same time, it’s an excellent anthology of what poetry in Philadelphia means, here on the cusp of 2005.
For more info, or to obtain copies, write furniture_press@graffiti.net.
