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  Cunt-Ups - by Dodie Bellamy.
Tender Buttons, P.O. Box 13 Cooper Station, NY, NY, 10276. 2001. 65 pages. 11.95
rOlling COMBers - John M. Bennett.
208 pages. 2001. Potes & Poets Press, 2 Ten Acres Drive, Bedford, MA 01730-2019 $14.00.
Notes on Non Existence - the 1st Bifurcation by Ric Carfagna.
A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001. 44 pages. $5.00.
• Notes on Non Existence - Second Segue by Ric Carfagna.
A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001. 48 pages. $5.00.
Bukowski Review. Number One. - Winter 2001-2002.
64 pages. Editors: Joan Jobe Smith and Marilyn Johnson. 1044 East 2nd Street -
No. 8, Long Beech, California, 90802. $11.00.
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Cunt-Ups - by Dodie Bellamy.
Tender Buttons, P.O. Box 13 Cooper Station, NY, NY, 10276. 2001. 65 pages. 11.95
Cunt-ups, as Dodie Bellamy notes, derive from the more male William Burroughs's cut-up technique. Any comparison stops there. Bellamy's texts are sensuous love poems raised from pornography. The most frequent words in her book are cunt and cock and the cunt-ups are extremely erotic yet passionate and lovely. Initially, attracted by the word Cunt-ups, one seeks the naughty and forbidden titillation of pornography. However, within these poems cock and cunt become the Os and Xs of love letters. Bellamy's enhancement of her initial cunt-up opens the erotic fantasy life and dreamlike passion that each lover hides within flowers and candy. Initially the poet introduces her text with a quote form Adrienne Rich's Twenty-one Love Poems. There are twenty-one Cunt-ups. The tradition is clear. Combining the roots of desire, the platonic, wishful thinking, with the words of pop Eros and daydream, Bellamy does, what I thought impossible. She reinvents the love poem.
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rOlling COMBers - John M. Bennett.
208 pages. 2001. Potes & Poets Press, 2 Ten Acres Drive,
Bedford, MA 01730-2019 $14.00.
Here we have a most wonderful and first massive collection of poems by one of poetry's most active agents. Bennett spends more time in the present, presence of the poem, than any other poem writer. For most, the imagination is a selective filter and the act of writing a meditative activity. In Bennett's rule all action comes into the poem instantly. As Zen like, in the moment, as Bennett's writing can be, it is also Action. I suspect nothing is left out and with the most fanatical furry of writing, form becomes the page in which, on which are captured butterflies, insects, moths, fire-hydrants, feet, and peas, eves of tuna, and all that might and can and may and does occupy conversation and daily life. Bennett's relentless thought is wildly extravagant and expressionistic. And the poems also have humor and passion juice. Here is a sense of place of high excitation and agitated imagination and transcendent vibration of the universe people bus energy and socks and but (yes, but). In one poem he writes blender blender. AH, yes. A metaphor. A quiet place in the madness.
An intoxicating experience, this book is top-shelf. And the so-called real world is and shell be never the same again.
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Notes on Non Existence - the 1st Bifurcation by Ric Carfagna.
A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001.
44 pages. $5.00.
• Notes on Non Existence - Second Segue by Ric Carfagna.
A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001.
48 pages. $5.00.
In a recent letter Ric Carfagna defined himself as a radically obscure
poet. Obscurity is a barnacle all poets know as the voice of the gods. But radical also, I found interesting. Ric Carfagna's projects are radical, that is radical as in the roots of poetry and radical also in that they're aggressively other than - well all - of the workshop grandmother's apron and North American gray squirrel poetry that populates the plates of the majority of soft, tender and obviously unexperimental or Somenex poetic ears. A massive rolling of multisylabic word strings seek a form of non-existence IN Ric Carfagna's poems. Non existence as not existing, me
thinks, in the gas stations or classrooms flung across the world. But not in non-existence but IN that place other, that other being place where only exists the Poetic Ace of the heart of meaning. I wanted to find some string that meant nothing but could not and only could find endless meaning. My bookmark flipped about onto floor like some mad seal so I opened my text again - somewhere-anywhere-: "immolation to nether-regions/ linking/ theoreticals/ within world/ where no progression is possible. / to render/ a nascent ontology/ using a door to return to the (internal/ locality." But what I was looking for, which seemed a defining movement (one of many and there are many) anyway that moment being: "events transpired without descriptions." I mean there are many more… "numbered in the satiation of forgetting/ the terminal mass/ miming the discord/ of alternant geometries."
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Bukowski Review. Number One. - Winter 2001-2002.
64 pages. Editors: Joan Jobe Smith and Marilyn Johnson. 1044 East 2nd Street - No. 8, Long Beech, California, 90802. $11.00.
A much needed magazine, Bukowski Review, Number One, is a literary place where discussion on, about, and in homage of Charles Bukowski can take place. And it is a place also to take a swing at Bukowski. This is good. This is good. It is a fantastic effort and an exercise in both love and devotion. The review hails form Bukowski country, LA and south of LA – in fact - Long Beach! The pantheon of Bukowski friends and acquaintances contribute in one form or another to this inaugural issue. There are interviews by Fred Voss of franEye, Ann Menebroker and Linda King. Bukowski advocates will know these names. There is writing by Jay Martin, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Mark Wisniewski and Gerald Locklin. There is a lot here that I don't mention, I am sorry, I can't, space is tight and short. But
here is also an article by Voss called Bukowski & The Wormwood Review and the Bukowski Review is dedicated to Bukowski and also Wormwood Review Editor Marvin Malone. All things are correct and here in place in this Review. Its fact, its existence is what is most important. It is important. Charles Bukowski's place in literature is fixed - with or without this review. However, what Charles Bukowski's poetry meant beyond what he wrote and what he meant to poets and American letters is less clear, less defined. Bukowski Review begins to bring that into focus. The discussion, the argument will continue. The poetry that Bukowski tapped in his poems continues also. And editors and poets, the circle that makes up this issue, are much more than Bukowski fans. They carry it forward in their own work. This is not a fan club. These are artists working in the realm of a legitimate American poetry, a poetry that was heralded and popularized by Bukowski. All hail the Arrival of Bukowski Review. All hail Long Beach. All hail or hale and hail and hale the editors and poets! Long may it rain (The day it rained in LA) and reign.
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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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