First impressions stink. But the new issue of Long Shot magazine survived even a quick read. I must admit through the first third of the book I did try to calculate the mathematical formula by which editor, Dandy Shot, used to lay it out. How many pages of mediocre type between each inspired piece. By half way through the volume it seemed equally divided, half good, half just all right. But the last half blew away all of my calculations.
The problem is that there are too many good pieces for any single review. Even pieces of lesser quality deserve space in order to work out why they failed. Still, even the most tragic pieces were good reading, a fact that shocked me. But a few pieces stood out so far from the others that it seems hardly fair to review them at all.
A friend of mine, who was perpetually three credits short of a masters in philosophy, always said: “Less words.” It is a criticism I have taken to heart over the years. With poetry or fiction, the fewer words the better. How long a piece must be is up to creative genius, but making it better is largely the end result of a razor blade or scissor. A few of the better poets in this collection openly ignore this advice. Some maybe excused due to the exuberant voice they bring to their work. They just want to keep a good thing going.
Normally fiction writers suffer greatly from this, stretching plot and character beyond what a reader can endure. Even short pieces like Tim McShane’s “Two” and David Aaron Clark’s “Roasted Angels” carry on slightly, though both use language cleverly and bear a striking internal voice in their characters.
Yet three piece of fiction overwhelm this magazine that make comparisons hard. Ina Roy’s “Pumpkin” is so unbearable that it leaps out from the pages and grabs you by the throat, its over indulgent writing style exactly the thing it needs to work, making vivid delusions and creating dramatic irony that few works beyond these pages could equal. I was impressed and shocked in a breathless way, long after I ceased reading.
Visions of an updated “Hunger Artist” came to me in reading Joe Pachinko’s “Pachinko the Magnificent.” In this like Kafka’s earlier work, the struggle of art and life against change is examined, and how little appreciated real art is in a market based economy. What sells today may not sell tomorrow. What is good doesn’t always win out in popular tastes. This is a funny, irreverent, wonderful piece of fantasy that I will read again for pleasure after the reviews.
“Chronos” by Deborah Pintonelli is what all erotic should be. Not just sensual, but philosophical and metaphorical, painting pictures through images of sex and time and passion with a style of thickly laid prose I envy and admire. The piece deals precisely with changing time, and relationships, and the pain and doubt and confusion each element of life brings. It demands re-reading and even though I read it twice, I’ve not squeezed out all its richness.
The poetry in this volume is harder to review. The variety of style is stunning, and also its distraction. Poetry on a good day takes time to digest. Style changes as abrupt as these often leave the reader confused. This is not an editorial problem. It is the fault of too much richness at once, an overload of experience that poetry needs to have to work. With so many good poets placed one after another, it is difficult to go from one to another easily.
This is not light reading, folks, but under it is pain and love and triumph.
The book opens with one of the best poets of the volume. Charles Bukowski is one of those poets that plays things up to the last line, making each of his poems work through what amounts to a punch line. “Won’t you tiptoe through the tulips” plays realism against fantasy and seems nearly pointless until the very end when the fantasy kicks in. Then: Look out! It all crashes together in a Stephen King-like horror tale.
Lyn Lifshin has a similar style. But her work consistently troubles me, both here and elsewhere. She must be the most published poet in the world. She’s good but with a manufactured edge that pokes through her poetry. Both pieces here come from the same mold. After reading enough of her works, you begin to feel cheated by her sense of drama. She makes everything linger to the last line. It lacks the original vision Bukowski brings to his poetry. Reading Lifshin is like listening to a string of brilliant “knock knock” jokes. All of them entertaining, but you get sick of the form.
With some poems it’s hard to tell what makes them work. This is true of Susan Montez’s “Falling Rocks” where all the elements come together but without clear reason why. It has a steady rhythm with short lines striking like a stick in the palm of a hand. “And this is the way/if that rapist broke in, he’d have to shoot me/because I’d be damned if I’d/worry about Sida another 6 years.”
Eliot Katz comes at you playfully, easing in his political satire with a personal tone of voice. His serious underlying messages rise out from between the lines like smoke and his images grow on you as you work through the poem like “fingertips rolling across freshwater waves,” or “in the possibility of the possible or a boatload of cash.”
Surface tension makes David Lerner’s poetry work. But his work dredges up visions of other poets like Italo Calvino in his images and rhythms. His words swing reader attention from line to line in a word-music. In “They say it’s mars” he uses the ballad traditions to a wondrously modern effect, repeating phrases to launch on new ironic visions: “That Mars is to blame for bleeding from the eyes/sudden sweats/hysterical laughter that/keeps on ringing/after the joke is gone.”
Bana Witt’s angry poetry punctuates the page with images of self and bitterness at bar scene and modern sexuality: “I am disenchanted/with being a woman/with being seduced by cameras/with being seduced/by friendly men.” Each line is a step deeper into the anger. Her second poem “Fits of Despair” is more desperate and painful and ironically humorous: “When nothing seems fresh/you become an expert on mold…”
A convoluted favorite of mine was written by Jack Hirschman, who manages to disguise the image of AIDS the way Montez brandished it, emphasizing the emotional tug of his statements with incomplete lines, broken phrases and strong image, using words whose connotations cannot be mistaken like “Holocaust” and “disease” and “plague” as hints towards the poems meaning. “Ground down to nothing” is a mystery of words and horror that ends with a warning: “come in or don’t come in or don’t or don’t or don’t.”
Carol Wierzbicki’s “Karl, Esther, Mark” does a similar thing, thought not decisively dedicated to AIDS. Her metaphor of ashes makes it one of the most powerful pieces in the collection, while maintaining the facade of nothing serious. She connects scenes through their connections to ash and grieves over them strangely: “Now I’m the nomad on horseback/scattering Karl and Esther’s ashes over Brooklyn;/they dribbled from the end of my/neglected cigarette.”
Several other poets leap out Jay Passer, even Dandy Shot himself, but poetry and fiction are only part of the book. While I hated the conservative form of the Larry Poons interview, it is a refreshing relief from the intense emotions presented by the other works. The graphic images that run through out the book, fill the white space with logical and effective illustrations. They largely reflect sexual themes, but are curious at worst and often compete with their literary counterparts for attention.
Maybe my philosophical friend was right. Maybe there are too many words in the world. And too many pictures. And too much of everything. This collection presents an overload of talent. Some of these pieces are worth reading only once. But once at least. While others need the process of repeated readings to get their worth. In some sense, there aren’t enough words to describe them.