A FEW WORDS ON ORGANIC FURNITURE CELLAR by Aaron Lowinger

Jessica Smith’s inaugural full-length volume of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar, thoughtfully opens with a “foreword” written by the author which serves as a statement of poetics for the work that follows. In it Ms Smith outlines her notion of “plastic” poetry, her nomenclatural twist on the near mystical poetic objective of infusing language with as much (possible) meaning as (possibly) fits. Questions are raised, influences are openly credited, and the footnotes fly fast and furious. The author’s erudition and meticulous accounting for detail are at the fore of her prose and foreground her poetic method. The craft Ms Smith honed between 2002 and 2004 is nothing if not carefully conceived and drawn out, a draftswoman with her blueprint.

Yet I feel the poetics of Organic Furniture Cellar are more firmly established by the poems themselves on an intuitive readerly level. Allow me to elucidate this with simple description. The dimensions of the book at roughly 7.5 x 9.5 inches provides a rare shape for a book which serves to give the poems a great amount of canvas space on the page. Furthermore, Ms Smith has divided her book into nacheinander-nebeneinander sections: Chronography and Topology, each of which are divided into three smaller sections which form coherent poetic cycles. It’s a relief to see Ms Smith’s ongoing and expert execution of DIY-style bookmaking make such a smooth transition to a perfect-bound, color jacket paperback. The book is immediately unique and the poems invite a new kind of reading altogether.

Ms Smith describes herself as a visual poet which at least means that she continues the Olson/Duncan/Creeley tradition of experimenting with the interaction of form and content in such a way that the poet views the page as a painter would a canvas. The text of the poems are never more important than their structure or nonstructure (and by this I primarily refer to the white space of each poem). In the way that speech receives meaning by relational qualities of information, Ms Smith departs from her influences and contemporaries by maximizing the relational properties of language on paper. The plastic quality of the poems allow the reader to freely enter their sonic and semantic field, a veritable choose-your-own-adventure that allows the poems to be distinct and emotionally aware moments of experience. This motion is beautifully illustrated in Ms Smith’s poem “Card Catalog,” a seemingly found poem that recalls the childlike innocence which resonates throughout the Chronography section which serves as a mapping of time encapsulated by memory. The poetic child magic (“islands named for a prince”) which the poet summons at times, a truly awkward nostalgia, weakens the knees.

The resulting poems are stunning in their freedom and versatility. While their shapes recall and call out nature (constellations, cloud formations, colorations of water and flowers) the Berlin section, “Exile”, modeled loosely after Ulysses accents the ubiquitous lights and signage of the city. There is a joy and absolute newness in Ms Smith’s first book that promises to open up entirely new fields in the landscape of poetry as we know it.

Barrett Gordon

The great sense the good writers gave was that you wanted to be right there with them. Hopefully in an otherworldly land, with someone else's friends, speaking a foreign language, spending other people's money, and driving old cars because it certainly wouldn't be 2006. But now in 2006, there is one poet I want to be right there with, as he's out writing poems off the dead. Imagine being forced to make up something on the spot out of 25 letters you rub off stones from your favorite graveyard. GRAVE RUBBER / 5 FOOLISH REASONS / TO IGNORE PRENEED / ARRANGEMENT You can stay at home and fight it out, maybe re-arrange your whole outlook toward coma splices and revise all your works, just like the dead, they're'll be NO WEEKEND'S GROWING URGE, but when Barrett gets to town there's Calvary Cemetary in Queens for HOUSEPRESS to break laws and write with the dead. ALL THE RA-RA / & HOCUS POCUS / AROIL COME SUN- / DOWN

SPELL’S SPELLING by Luke Daly

Eric U. said once that his image for Spell magazine was that of a word just before being articulated: the process of the word becoming formed, its approach to the barrier between the said/sayable & unsaid/unsayable. And so it’s been with work going in.

Spell wants to be a space in which to articulate, a place to go to get the unsaid said. That’s how the magazine has been using the words “in progress” or “experimental” in its public calls for work. These are not to be taken as cheap uses of those words, but rather as evidence of Eric’s wish to get the poets’ left hands working, as a means to help them get at the thing, the unsayable thing that they all, in the poems, must be after.

So Spell asks us this question, and herein lies its project: how can we get at the unsayable, through what combination, what mechanism (linguistic / visual / spatial / collaged / rubbed / crayoned / stickered / matchbooked / beat-up / cut-up / algorithmic) of “words”?

And the poets are given an opportunity, a place to go to ask questions in their work, to form combinations, and the magazine becomes a room for this forming, where people are going to say their seperate things, or trying to, right hands tied tight to right legs, so it’s not what they decided to say going in that’s getting said, as art is not decision, but what they find gets said, as art is what gets said.

And the magazine itself becomes such an articulation, it develops as its poems do, and this Spell spells more than the last Spell, as we see Eric’s hand is coming up out of it, and now he doesn’t have to try to say Spell anymore, it’s getting said and it’s saying, as it’s got to, itself.

A Review by Michael Slosek

Luke Daly’s poetry is a poetry of place; but not in an easy and tired way. “The Vandalism Questions” continues with many of the themes Luke investigates in “Of a Free Town”, a collaborative book with Barrett Gordon. From these poems I get the sense that for Luke language precedes place, and that the poems are more about the language of place (and the place of language) than they are about representation (of a locality). In this book, the poems are concerned with the writing on the city, the physical (social) spaces that get written on and written over, faded and weathered, reappropriated, stickered, spray-painted, chalked, and reclaimed - consciously by street artists and/or the municipal government, and by everyday citizens. We’re thrust into a linguistic landscape from the start: “Letters of his fading alpha- / bet got written // over. in a / city. freezing // city. downward / town wind // blew the letters / from. in

By writing through this urban landscape, the poems never lose track of their own articulations as they come into being. Luke’s language, and typography, makes us register every syllable used, so that we become aware of the real weight and physicality of this language. His page is ragged, variable margins, lines and words fractured. This requires very slow reading, a sort of reading that takes no part of language for granted. There is also a sense of found language here; but it is uncertain where the origin is. Who is quoted? Why these italics here? Where is this language coming from? These diacritical markers used seemingly at random dislocate the sense of authority and authorship in the poems, so that all the language becomes alien, found, and exterior (whether marked or not) – in this sense, Luke comes closest to representing the street language he writes about. Luke writes at one point: “What // that could mean about art / lasting – taking / something // big and putting it in- / side of something bigger”. This reminds me of a poem by John Cage, where he appropriates a lecture from Jasper Johns – at one point Cage (through Johns) talks about the provisional nature of a work of art, that it always has the potential to be incorporated into a larger structure. Luke is suggesting something similar here, with this project; he is finding another frame for the art and language out in the world, and reappropriating onto the page.

This book has been a pleasure to read – both in terms of the physical handling (heavy cover and thin tracing paper layers), and of what it is doing in language. Reading through the book, from the front cover-sticker, through the well-placed collages, through the poems, is truly an art experience. Everything is well measured – nothing out of place.

A Review of Damian Weber's Blackbird Haiku by Barrett Gordon

blooded Boot step out
to return the Quill at once
conflate the Mammal

Numbers is a Word
reuse It infinitely
hollowly the Bones

to take the Form back
home wild Bruise of Surgery
under the old Wing

straight Face as ever
if not for scientific
Gains alone then too

for historical
Scarface’s straight-fastened Face
seams to hold as One

take 2 for instance
as One pacemaker gym Rat
meets Doll at blood Baths

numerically
keen He simply bets on Beat
loses evry Time

Femininity
outgrows Him seedless Melon
long Conversations

become Him he wills
seven Steps to cross the Floor
walking by the Fifth

only then learns of
Men Motives Poems Science!
(“in particular”)

Cannibals alike
but the Quill His and the Ink
too Both Blackbird now

String Of Small Machines Issue 1

A Question I am Often Asked by Michael Carr

is this barometer my husband

is countenance

a limit presumably statutory

aerosol the hymnals this is the next

is this a preserve

my frosting pseudoinstructions

fax is a better shield

avoiding commune with rookie heritage

taking off from

the opposite window

Harbormaster by Andrew Peterson

Gang of tugs bully the larger

porker-ships; meet

me at the gorging

point, creep to the ledge,

see this, one begs for-

giveness

10/ by Sheila E. Murphy

Steps included in vocabulary, a serial geometry made to fit

Coastline, one side and then the other. Rough draft pick following

predestination. Serious looks across the aisle. Later, ahnds extended to

effect methodical true gumption. Faculties of hope confuse a hefty surge of latitude. Long summer well in line with expectations. Feathers fallen from a wing, trim looking, blue.

from Just as Form by Eric Unger

Be the cause

of days

before rain.

For who are

faces.

Taught days

and a symbol

for each.

Presenting

fasle teeth.

Be cause.

Take a tour around the city. Start at Wang Island. Visit the Metropolitan Museum of Wang then make your way up to the pubic bone at Van Cortlandt Park. Follow the urethra or the red 1239 line. Flushing is the prostate gland. Remember that Forest Hills is not dissimilar to one of the various drippy dick diseases. Jamaica is the cremaster. Queens Plaza is the PC muscle. Brooklyn is the balls. Fly out the JFK international Assport. Cock Rockaway at Far Rockaway and make it out the rectum at breezy point. Coney Island is the area between Lower New York Bay and Brighton Beach that prevents the city from shitting on its nuts. And at the end of Battery Park (which is the foreskin) comes flying out Stain Island.

Jessica Smith

Detail is not just experience, but signatures of all things I am here to read. A wonderful way to say what all poets do: stay one step removed, capture, and keep for ourselves memories. Organic Furniture Cellar by Jessica Smith is a big book of big poems made of little pieces, that read like smaller big poems made out of larger small pieces. HOUSEPRESS wonders if Susan Howe, Steve McCaffrey, or W.C.W ever thought to call their meshes and enmeshment, "Topology," as is named a section of this book. Topology, not in the sense that there is a map, or a puzzle to be solved, but instead that Detail should be complex in form as much as is the natural joy of appreciating Detail. But the magic sense of the book is playfulness: fun to have been there, to have heard, play to have written, and to work on. It's earnestness is the key: locks open and keys are lucky. In these poems form follows function to the extent that every notion must have its own box. Making poems within poems. With these wild lines the poet is almost working outside the argument of form or function, but instead somewhere out there, on islands named for a prince.

The 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets

This may be your last reminder to get into the greatest book you'll ever get into.

The scene of young/emerging poets has reached critical mass. Thus, John Sakkis and Jessica Smith are editing an anthology, that requires rethinking the “anthology” as a genre. Their anthology will be a massive collection containing critical introductions, a sample poem from each author (one), and author biographies. It is not intended to familiarize the reader with the depth and breadth of any single author’s work, but intstead to provide a detailed record of the sheer magnitude, energy, and plurality of experimental poetry at the turn of the millenium.

Outside Voices will release the anthology at the turn of the New Year, 2008 (10 years after Lisa Jarnot’s An Anthology of New (American) Poets.

You should have been born roughly between 1973 and 1983
send a few really good poems & a short bio including your birthdate
to poetry2008@gmail.com
by Jan. 1, 2007

visual poems should be in .jpg or .tiff
otherwise please format to Garamond 10 pt.

For more information visit www.outsidevoices.org

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