Poetry by Jeff Vetock, Former Editor of Green Zero Magazine

Jeff Vetock curated a great little zine called Green Zero out of Shiremanstown, PA...a small town on Harrisburg's West Shore, i.e. across the Susquehanna River from the capital. He published early work by such now-celebrated poets as Pam Rehm (herself from New Cumberland, PA, right near Shiremanstown), Andrew Mossin, Chris Stroffolino, Celestine Frost, Valerie Fox, and many others. He also published some great/intersting writers who were already established on the small press scene, such as Sheila Murphy and Richard Kostelanetz. Many of his publishees were students of either John Taggart (such as Rehm, Keith Baughman, Gillian Rung) or of Rachel Blau-DuPlessis in Philadelphia (Mossin), or both (as Vetock himself was, I believe). It was somewhat a "Pennsylvania School" in the making. But everyone leaves Pennsylvania, so it's rather hard to create such an animal!

Jeff wrote some great poems himself, but he was always the most self-deprecating and low-key of writers. He was not one to rush his work into print, and didn't promote his own work with the intensity you expect from most twentysomething poets. What he DID was read everybody else generously, and write back these amazingly thoughtful analyses of work you had tendered to his magazine, long letters that showed he had been reading your poems twenty different ways. Not to imply he was a pushover; hardly....he would let you know what didn't work for him with a sincere apology. In short, he was a great, generous editor.

Though his mag was a small scale zine-with-a-staple format, it was noticed by Douglas Messerli's Sun & Moon Press when he was considering work for inclusion in his early manifestations of the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, and many of the poets included therein found themselves getting national attention in the form of one of these awards. Before the mag closed (12 issues in toto) poets such as Lyn Hejinian and John Taggart were debuting new work in it. I was saddened to see it go (in 1992 or '93), and the central Pennsylvania area has not had a magazine to rival it since.

I wanted to share a poem by Vetock from his really memorable chapbook, Framework. This came out through Axe Factory Press, which was (maybe still is?) based out of Philadelphia. Vetock did the drawings and collages which also beautify this still-findable book which is as much a livre d'artiste as it is a poetry book.

Enjoy...


        The Night Watchman

   1.

Words are distracting. Being distracted
myself, the attraction is, or seems, natural.
Not distraction but distracting. Headlights book-
mark. Macrame by Mallarme. To whom does a book
belong? And for what, an empty closet of a mind.
The metallic whispers of wire hangers, etc.
The sounds they suggest. A page is a possibility.
Here, at last, one desires intimacy, avoids ultimatums.
Uranium, where I come from. The rooftops of my childhood
below the belltower. Escaping steam, diesel engine.
Calculated. Logged in out. 3:35 a.m.: loaded
and gone. Again the crickets, the rooftops of my
childhood. I remember the rooftops, diesel engine
gone, the fluorescent night lamps winking out.



   2.

Ridiculous, the work to be done. Not the amount
but the extent, not the objective. The money.
Or the value of ideas, the thing itself: "Like
figure fives the plumes of smoke" & chimneys
diminishing. Repetition of rooftops.
Distance is desire, not this Arkansas
blacktop schooner. What, then? A kind soul,
sleeping alone. When I am with her,
the coming winter. Not the weather, not myself
lately. The lights wink out, 4:00 a.m. End of
shift for some, the mechanics. Not mechanical,
oddly enough, but human. It is not late; it is
early. Oil, diesel fuel, stale doughnuts.
The dark field full of marigolds.



   3.


Eighteen wheels, diesel & stars. The endless arrival
of departures, between pages a passage. Between two
long orange trailers: a corridor of dents and rivets,
flashlight lit. A spider transfixed in the center
of its glistening web. Huge, a tiny skeleetal hand,
palm down, upside down. Flying buttress of silk each
thought, thinking. There is no such thing as parallel.
Poisonous or not, a line of reason. A spider suspended,
caught in light beam. Sharp focus, 4:35 a.m.
Low mist obscures ground no longer there. Uranium,
where I come from. Ultimatum, veneer by Vermeer.
Remember the marigolds, the rooftops of my childhood.
Remember this memory. The accumulation of farewell.




P.S. Googling Jeff's chapbook, I found this astute appreciation of it on another blog...very nice...http://planbchaps.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_archive.html