La Perruque Editions

Bill Howe and L. A. Phillips are responsible for La Perruque Editions, a series of lo-fi chapbooks from Slack Buddha Press, whose modest but imaginative design (involving layers of coloured card pasted on the covers) puts most perfectbound books to shame. Steven T. Vessels’ ZIP Code Poems is a postcard-sized book in an envelope, each poem a five-line snapshot or observation – “wee poems” as Ian Hamilton Finlay would put it: “not yet daybreak the mountains / invisible from the hilltop dark / mists obscuring the view city lights / hazy / below.” The small format is adhered to again for Geraldine Monk’s She Kept Birds, which is both a birder’s and dialectician’s delight: jangling word-a-line collages of birdnames. The third minibook in the series is Mark Wallace’s Oh Boy, designed to look like a marbled notebook or addressbook. The spare, earnest little lyrics of love and political despair are a bit slight on the page – not bad, but they remind me of how song lyrics on the page fall a bit flat. Keith Tuma’s Topical Ointment is the other odd-size publication in this bunch: a tall book of short squibs, titles rendered in military-stencil lettering. Hit and miss, and then hit again: “Osama rhymes with ‘Yo Mama.’” Now to the regular-size chapbooks: K. Lorraine Graham’s Terminal Humming starts in collage mode, gathering together everything from bashful internet personals to paranoid fantasies for a familiar exercise in détournement . . . but then things start getting stranger and harder to pin down: “The bougainvillea grows and we surround each other like Tolstoy novels.” “Lobulating and pliable, we might experiment with holding (by graveyards, outhouses, sulfur baths that have not been diluted though we swim in rented bathing suits. This is too personal. Shall I keep it?” Ralph Hawkins’ Exact Rubber Bridges is visual poetry drawing on illustrations from vintage textbooks: the roughness and arbitrariness of the cropping give this the feel of something assembled with both scissors and stopwatch at hand. Michael Basinski’s Pomes Popeye Papyrus has a terrific cover with – yep – an image of Popeye printed on a piece of something brown & papyrus-like and glued to the wrappers. The poems read like someone trying to talk about supermarket shopping, Joyce and nursery rhymes with his mouth full. (Is the title a reference to Pomes Penyeach?) Tyrone Williams’ AAB is perhaps the oddest thing in this batch of odd books, containing the title poem (a short three-parter taking off from the AAB structure of blues lyrics), a series of pieces soldering together chunks of academic writing on African-American literature and Derrida, and a brief, sketchy satirical “play” (the quote marks are the author’s) set to random tracks from Cecil Taylor. Daniel Bouchard’s Sound Swarms & Other Poems reminds me of Schuyler, both in the spare delicacy of its prosody (lots of internal sound-linkage: “A haughty grackle on the picnic table / rubs his bill / against green-painted boards, / retches, bloats like a burp, / all ruffled up, and shrieks”) & the way that the poems quietly gather – rather than press – together moments of observation or contemplation. Alan Halsey’s In Addition continues the enigmatic Lives of the Poets project he’s been assembling with Martin Corless-Smith. Its collated babble of unreliable sources recalls The Text of Shelley’s Death; without the detective-story element of the Shelley book the Lives aren’t as compelling, but Halsey’s love of the lore & language & poetry of his subjects comes through strongly. Douglas Manson’s The Dew Neal is a wideranging insomniac monologue strewn with sly typos & bits of Paul Fussell’s book on the Augustan age: funny and serious, disorganized and crafty at the same time, and its offhand wit and fumbling political commentary resolve startlingly into a Medieval dream-vision of our current political life. It’s my favourite book of this crop, but the La Perruque series is consistently interesting as a whole & comes highly recommended. (Individual chapbooks: $5 US; subscriptions: $20 for 6, $32 for 10. Make out cheques to L. A. Phillips or William R. Howe; write: 50 Garrison Ave., Somerville, MA, 02144; howe AT door.net)

Nate Dorward

Published in The Gig 17