Mark Young – Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama – Otoliths

harry k stammer

Mark Young has a new book up on Lulu from Otoliths.

Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama

My first poem in the “geographies” series appeared on my “gamma ways” blog at the beginning of 2009. I feel that the best description of my intent comes from Sam Lohmann who published some in an issue of the journal “Peaches & Bats” that he was editing at the time: “These pieces by Mark Young have a disturbing and comic speed, and seem, as a group, to get at some essential weirdness of the ‘global’ info-capitalist culture we’re all trying to survive and live in.” I began the visual “geographies” just under a couple of years later. At first they tended to be poems on a background, but gradually transformed into digital manipulations of images from places I looked up on the web. As time went on, I refined those locations to Australia & New Zealand, sometimes with a word or two added; but the intent was the same for the visuals as for the poems — the world is something different to what it’s claimed to be. There have been five standalone collections of “geographies” over the years, mainly in chapbook or pdf format, plus a significant tranche in the wide-ranging 600-page collection, “The Codicils,” that came out from Otoliths in 2013. A new collection, “Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama,” that contains a number of visuals &, probably, the final “geographies” poems, is now released.

gravel – Mark Cunningham, Mark Young and harry k stammer

harry k stammer

gravel

Gravel. Might have been called that because it was like walking over it in bare feet to get three grumpy old men to agree on how this book should be put together — identifiers or anonymous; interspersed small offerings or a three-tiered cake; with or without an intro?

Or? Call it that because it’s a word with other, quite divergent, words built in & easily accessed — rave, ave, grave, Ravel — & that’s before discarding the original order.

Or? Each of the pieces, as denoted by the poet’s name, being inserted into the document in a random way, like gravel on a path. The point here is to cross each author’s approach in a way that does or doesn’t affect the how of how the pieces relate to each other. Does this matter in terms of how a reader understands each alone & at the same time how a reader may understand the whole & the poetry within the total work?

Or? What is there to introduce? The Pisan Cantos and Zukofsky’s A made do without introductions, if I recall. Maybe when you’re famous—or post-famous, so that people need to be told how important you are. Were. Is that “you” plural? Or, as with Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, you can have a blurb with more words in it than most of the books included. Then you can get somebody to write an introduction to tell us who the blurb writer, Vito Acconci, is. Was. Who will introduce the introducer?

Or? The only true blurb would be along the lines of: “If you read this book and get irritated as hell & say to yourself, ‘Anybody could do that,’ then you’re got the real spirit of the book.”

Take all of the above, & it’s no wonder they invited me in to compose the introduction. All suggestions will be welcomed. Keep watching this space.

— Kasimir Malevich, February 1915 2025, Red Square

Beware the Bourgeois Doomsday Fantasy – Heath Brougher

harry k stammer

New chapbook out on Amazon from Heath Brougher

Beware the Bourgeois Doomsday Fantasy: Or, The Systemic Persecution of the Individual Or, How I Learned to Never Ask My Landlord to Fix My Air Conditioning

The reflections on the trials and tribulations of someone being harassed in small town America for being and looking different. An indictment of the palpable rise in fascism within the United States. A call to take back our diminished freedom in a world rampant with hatred. A dirge for long lost values such as individuality, compassion and empathy. And where the crocodiles take down the deer just after the water takes them all screaming down the Missouri River struggling to breathe and gasping sounds of drowning animals finally battered by the rapids and finally the truck stop and picked apart by vultures.

Humanity

Interview with George Myers Jr. about his book Worlds End.

harry k stammer

Worlds End.

from Paycock Press

George Myers Jr.’s illustrated Worlds End is a magic carpet ride through history that touches down, finally, on your heart. The genre-bending novel is told episodically through an amateur naturalist’s cabinet of curiousities and characters from centuries past, including Mary Shelley, a beekeeper’s wife, a World War I ambulance driver, and a woman with a prehensile ponytail. Myers explores the fragility of nature and history, blending the real and remembered in a haunting meditation on all that slips away.

Click on art for the link to Amazon.

2 Interviews 11-27

“peut-être le Messie” by Márton Koppány is now out from Otoliths at Lulu.

harry k stammer

 

Márton Koppány notes in his introduction: “Lately I’ve been playing with putting together pieces from distant periods. Some recurring topics are: question marks, clouds, ellipses. They overlap, but ellipses outnumber everything else. Any triad can be considered an ellipsis, and occasionally different (or seemingly different) numbers like 1, 2 and 4 serve the same idea even better, because they are elliptical only elliptically.” His ellipses take many forms — buttons, stones, letters, fish, et al —though I profess my favorite among his ellipses is actually invisible. Perched at the intersection of the dado rail that runs along two of the walls of the room I am writing this in, there is a signed postcard-sized print of a singular piece of vispo, a lounge chair with only one leg but still remaining perfectly upright.  It is called Ellipsis No. 5, & is, coincidentally, the first piece in “peut-être le Messie.” “Perhaps the Messiah” is a wide-ranging title, an ellipsis incorporating the millennia between the canonical gospel of St. Luke & the work of Isidore Isou, a Romanian-born French poet, founder of Lettrisme, author of L’Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie. Márton Koppány’s book is also wide-ranging — perhaps not temporally, but rather attitudinally. I have previously remarked on the “. . . humor, minimalism, satire, genius, art, politics, its multi-faceted et ceteras” of Koppány’s work. This selection of his ellipses evidences every one of those individual characteristics as well as the incredible gestalt when they are combined.

– Mark Young; poet, artist, editor.