review of
Mark Young, editor OTOLITHS issue fifty-six, part one
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 28, 2020

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1319642-oto

I don't really follow literary/poetry journals, online or hard-copy, so I have no idea how many there are these days, how many exist only online, how many exist only in hard-copy, how many in both forms. This is an example of the latter. It appears online 1st & then is available, somewhat expensively IMO, as POD hard-copy. B/c of this lack of knowledge on my part, I don't know how OTOLITHS compares to other such publications: is it more conservative? more adventurous? I tend to think more eclectic insofar as the types of work presented range from discursive to visual poetic. There doesn't seem to be much Flarf or Conceptual Poetry or Concrete Poetry but I'm sure the editor, Mark Young, wd be open to them. The cover, by Young, is static in printed form but is a simple animation in its online form.

At any rate, I'm a contributor & I like it enough to choose to be so b/c it does present variety & I like much of the work by fellow contributors, I'm very glad OTOLITHS exists & that it's made it to issue 56. That, in itself, strikes me as extraordinary, staying power in small periodicals is somewhat rare. The issues that I have are printed out in 2 volumes: a black & white volume that's cheaper for purchasers & then a color volume that's particularly stimulating to look at but definitely not cheap. I contributed to the color volume of this but bought copies of both so that my aRCHIVE wd be more complete. I draw the line at the expense of buying all issues.

Thinking about OTOLITHS stimulates me to revisit other such publications that I've contributed to. W/ this in mind I list them here w/ the yr(s) I published w/ them. Perhaps some other old hands will enjoy being reminded of the titles.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978)
Hard Crabs (1979, 1980)
RAWZ (1979)
DOC(K)S (1981)
End Paper (1982)
A HUNDRED POSTERS (1983?)
Lost and Found Times (1985)
Phosphorusflourish (1987)
Shattered Wig Review (1988)
(S)CRAP (1988)
ottotole (1989)
Painted Bride Quarterly (1992)
Encylopaedia Destructica - Bumba (2007)
Zswound (2009)
Rampike (2010, 2012, 2014)
The OPEN SPACE magazine (2011, 2014)
Tip of the Knife (2012)
Sibila (2012)
And/Or (2014)

All in all, OTOLITHS compares quite nicely to the company it keeps here. Publications like RAWZ, End Paper, Phosphorusflourish, (S)CRAP, & Encylopaedia Destructica - Bumba had artist's bks touches that I particularly enjoy. DOC(K)S, ottotole, & The OPEN SPACE magazine came out in more of a bk form, as does OTOLITHS. I'm obsessed w/ bks so that's good too.

The black & white volume, the volume reviewed here, tends to have more typewritten poetry since the visual poetry is usually in color — but it's not completely w/o the VP. In fact, visually it's close to stunning.

I read thru the whole thing as I always do w/ everything I read & everything I, therefore, review. The only exception is when something's in a language other than English. The pieces I choose to quote from aren't presented as 'the best', they're just things that caught my attn for one reason or another. E.G.: Grace Coughlin's "The Problem is They Grow Up" has a reviewer note connected to it saying "stupid behavior".

"When he was twelve, he'd catch fireflies in a jar, tinfoil on top, and every time it would surprise him when they didn't glow for him the way they did in the open air. He'd Shake the jar. He'd Smack the glass. He'd Rattle the metal lid. His mom would say 'That's enough now, set them free,' but for him it wasn't enough. Before the bulbs blew out—suffocated, I would guess, from a lack of air and sky—they'd flicker just a little one last time. And, for him, that was enough. He hasn't been twelve for thirteen years." - p 12

This is one of many bks I've been reading concurrently over a long time. This yr, 2020, has been a difficult one for me & I haven't been enjoying things as much as I might have previously. As such, this was probably read over a period of 8 or more mnths. My reviewer note for this next poem excerpt suggests comparing E. E. Cummings. That wd've been connected to my having reviewed the Richard Kostelanetz edited E. E. Cummings' AnOther E. E. Cummings way back in March 10-17, 2020 ("E.E.: Cum": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1265916-e-e ) so I probably read this poem shortly after writing that review.

"Len g thy sir RRow too OOlls
Regr owth t OO OO lls sto-sto ny
For a theo logy of s worth tor ts
Ggg oner wort HY lllo ttos" - Hugh Tribbey, p 14

& what about Kristian Radford returning to Japan?

"returning to the country of my birth
for the first time in over a decade
was meant to be triumphant

I got sick within 48 hours
and spent most of the week
trying to stay in my room" - p 20

& then there's Steve Dalachinsky & Jim Leftwich: I run across their names fairly often, I think we're 'friends' on some social media or another — but such friendships are too ill-established for me to really know them. That's a shame.

"where power begets power & the powerful
are full of powder where prowess is prevalent
& acht(o)ung(e)ing is the norm where the
powerful wear egrets to war there is valet
parking west of the pro shop & the black widow
spiders are full of corn their wings hung
on the storm like facts" - p 27

I love pronunication vagaries:

"ough ough ough ough ough ough
bough love
cough love
dough love
enough love
furlough love
rough love
trough love
ough ough ough ough ough ough" - still Dalachinsky & Leftwich, p 37

Notice "trough love" instead of the more obvious follow-up to "rough love": tough love.

Then there's Leftwich on his own:

"Evaporating hair

fiSh FiVe EntrOpic
GeNeTic giViNg gAs
MaSHed uP potatoes
TreMbLing, toRNado" - p 38

I spot no 'rhyme or reason', no NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), no acrostics or mesostics, not even strictly tOGGLE cASE. Methinks he's playing — but maybe there's more going on here than meets my mind. It wdn't be the 1st time I've missed something.

All of this can be read online in more correctly laid-out & complete versions:

https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2020/01/issue-fifty-six-southern-summer-2020.ht...

Why not carefully read it all there? There's some sort of community at work, at play, might as well get to know us, maybe you'll join us.

Kirk Marshall:

"The Hermanos Luchador dedicated their days to the ardent defence of their inviolable mistress, a chemical grade of pure-strength crack cocaine which, when first pursued, renewed a person's faith in his calling and, when finally tasted, verified for him the compulsion to serve with unquestioning loyalty. The twins harboured no sluggardly confusion as to the rationale upon which their nation's war was founded; by retaining a monopoly on the manufacture and dissemination of their capital's most lucrative export, they ensured that Sonora's civic industry — nay, Mexico's supremacy as a bastion for trade — would continue to thrive." - pp 43-44

"To solicit her favour and capitalize on her affection meant demonstrating that with cocaine as your advocate and confidante, you could amass power, inspire fear and suffering, broker lucrative transactions, convert your familiarity with the pathology of addiction into expertise. Cocaine would not abide being exploited; it was she alone who administered the exploitation of others." - p 44

Well sd.

Sometimes, poetry bks can be a little too precious for me.

"William Allegrezza
Stone & Type, Cedar
Lavender Ink
ISBN: 978-1-944884-67-3
86 pages
$17.95"

The above bk is reviewed. No comment is made about the price & the mere 86 pp. I have a new bk coming out on Entity Press called But Not Limited Too (Smattering 1) that's full color, 152 pp, $15.00. Perhaps the printer of Stone & Type, Cedar does an exceptionally good job. Still, really?, 18 bucks? I wdn't buy it.

Then there's the work by people I've been observing for decades, in this case John M. Bennett (in collaboration w/ Stacey Allam), someone I consider a friend although we've never met.

"Shirt Lens

Speak the shirt
blinded by the wicks
in a thought bubble
and the buttons falling
from clouds
chips clinking
in your blurry glasses
fanning out the nosebuds
hear the passing air" - p 86

It doesn't make me cry the way Dickens's Bleak House does (& I wdn't want it to). It's more like Variations w/o a Theme, a Lens instead of a Theme.

Or what about Márton Koppány's

"my post-full-stop period





. ." - p 93

I thought that was funny, not LOL funny, but funny.

Then there's Jurgen O. Olbrich, another name I've seen around so much I feel like we're friends even tho I don't think we've ever corresponded & I'm sure we've never met. His 4 pp from 94-97 might be called concrete. The 1st page says:

"Here is
always
every-
where." w/ the 1st "Here" & the "here" of "where" in grey. Here here. The text is justified too. I like it, it's elegant.

Or what about Jim McCrary's fill-in-the-implied-blank piece entitled "Untitled"?:

"Covered by noun objects in st
She was he was the best at everything
And never forgot to endure them fr" - p 101

I think much poetry cd be called fill-in-the-implied-blank pieces but McCrary makes it more explicit. How much poetry invokes, evokes, refers to, implies, teases, etc?

Then there's Pat Nolan's "A HISTORY OF HAIKAI Three Dokugin Kasen in memory of Keith Kumasen Abbott" & my thinking: 'Was that the guy who taught at Naropa?" so I looked at the Keith Abbott Wikipedia entry for the Naropa guy & he's listed as still alive & still teaching at Naropa, so NO, it's the Keith Kumasen Abbott who I found things about on SPD: "Keith Kumasen Abbott teaches writing and art at Naropa University." who appears to be, uh, the same Keith Abbott after all & then I found this: "This is a note of appreciation for one of my mentors, Keith Kumasen Abbott, who passed away last week. I met Keith when I worked at Naropa University. He was a faculty member in the Jack Kerouac School of Writing and Poetics where he taught reading and writing." ( https://janineibbotson.com/blog/2019/9/3/appreciation ) & that's from Sept 4, 2019, so I went back to the Wikipedia entry & I cdn't find it so did I read something else & think it was a Wikipedia entry? I must have. I did find this: "Keith Abbott teaches at Naropa University, US" on the European Beat Studies Network website ( https://ebsn.eu/about-ebsn/members/keith-abbott/ ) so I reckon they must be serious about this Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics business.

& what about C. Mehrl Bennett? I particularly enjoyed her "Ask A Cow Poems":

"Oreo trees
Crumble when wet
They are fake
Ask A Cow

Fear
Floats on wood
Under the earth
Ask A Cow" - p 112

Mark DuCharme tells us:

"Don't go away
Develop laughing pneumonia" - p 126

You probably know that there's a type of pneumonia called "walking pneumonia", a pneumonia too mild to be debilitating. I was a research volunteer for a study of it once. As I'm sure you're also aware, all readers bring their own associations to what they read. That's my bring-to.

Jim Melrose:

"—into and onto the low pressure passenger seat not cooled a degree by the departure of Driver "Horse"'s hitchhacker Flaxman and the arrival of Driver "Horse"'s hitchhacker Kevin and again the cab became non-empty space and the universe became once more happy. All passenger seats abhor prolonged emptiness. Ah, truckworld do diddly indeedy abhor all empty passenger seats. So, Kevin, having seamlessly poured into the mold of nothing seeded by Flaxman—began and began and took over actually, the careful listening into the cold dashboard radio provided, which was wakening again from its last periodic cross-country station n out of range release and station n 1 in range acquisition blip-staticky-storm cycle." - pp 127-128

I find that an interesting description of one passenger replacing another in a hack, don't you?

Volodymyr Bilyk contributed a piece called "Melody Poems". Inspired by them I made a movie of me performing them. Here're the YouTube notes for that:

""A reading of Volodymyr Bilyk's "Melody Poems" with abundant mistakes & liberties on an out-of-tune spinet": In 2020 I had 5 of my "Butt Poems" published in "Otoliths" issue, 56 ( https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2019... ). That's available online but I like having a hardcopy of anything I'm published in so I bought a copy of both volumes of this issue. I'm in the process of reading it cover-to-cover with the intention of reviewing it. When I got to Volodymyr Bilyk's "Melody Poems" I thought it would be fun to play the pieces on the piano & to link to a movie of this as a part of the finished review. Since the "Melody Poems" basically just list note names without specifying octave or rhythm, etc, I decided that it would be fun to play them in ways that most people would find 'unmelodic'. This is the result. As you will no doubt notice, I also tweaked it a bit further. I made entirely too many mistakes & took some liberties so the result is probably a bit far off from Bilyk's imagining of the melodies but, hey!, I still went to the trouble of actually approaching the "Melody Poems" as a score." - https://youtu.be/QvG0YeUR7ls

Considering that that movie was uploaded May 11, 2020, that gives you an idea of how long it took for me to get thru this — & this is just the 1st volume!!

The same author provided something of even greater interest to me:

"from The Song of the Great Tits

1
fa', fall.
err.
v -/- | v -/- | v -/- | v -/-
dubitatione_.
nibble.
moan!
no craven,
vale!
too" - p 147

I found hiromi suzuki's work to be "closer to Cummings than to Concrete Poetry" although it has somewhat the appearance of the latter:

"sur)face(
of
silence;
) our (
) p
o (
) O
L (
shiver
y)our(
) face (" - p 162

& then I found Elmedin Kadric's Visual Poetry (not reproducible here) (wch I very much liked) closer to dominoes than, say the sweetener section in the supermarket.

Olchar Lindsann's "ORAcLe" begins w/ a truncated quote from Lautrémont. How can they go wrong?

"~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"is mouth, stuffed with belladonna leaves, let it sli"
–Lautréamont, opening to Canto II of Maldoror

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1319642-oto