OCHO #29

I was reading in OCHO #29 tonight. I love John Korn's cover art for this. I enjoyed some of his poetry too. I liked Matthew Hittinger's poems. I thought his best piece was clearly the one where every line starts with either "Ida" or "Uda." They alternate. That's a very funny, very interesting poem. It can be read so many different ways. He's very playful in his poetry, and as a result of this moves dangerously close to verse sometimes. But when he connects with a good plastic idea in language, he knows what he's doing. I can see he's very much about the plasticity of words and grammar, but not in that ratiocinative langpo way. He's a little more inclusive with the idea of "intended audience," you can tell. He wants that to be pretty broad. It's not class-directed or even age directed. Well, as I said, it's very playful. I could see kids enjoying a lot of his poetry. There's a certain innocence in his art that I like, even as it creates puzzles and doesn't eschew verbal complexity. You know with his writing that the poet isn't doing that to impress you; he's doing that to beguile you. En bref, he's not snarky. How rare is that in verbally complex first person narration poems? That's one element of the New York School that has mostly worn out its welcome by now in poetry. It sounds so dated. That snarky thing. James Schuyler was rarely snarky. If he snarked anybody, he snarked himself. He snarked himself a hell of a lot. Remember the poem about the lover who couldn't be satisfied with just the wife and Jimmy. The poem where he laughs at his copy of Run Little Leatherboy lying next to his bed? Lol. Or when he calls himself "Jim the Jerk" and marvels that he's still alive at fifty-one? A Payne Whitney poem, no doubt. I liked a prose poem by another guy in this issue of OCHO whose name already escapes me? It's downstairs now. Wait. I think it was Steve Hall. Stephen or Steven. Not sure. I think it was his last prose poem in his set. I was wondering who was gay in here. I got the impression a lot of us in there were. Maybe that's all in my head. But a lot of poets in there sure wrote in that sort of gay lingua franca. I mean that in a nice way. I like the gay lingua franca. Didi does a really good job of finding diverse poetry but, you know, it all has a nerve in it. And I like that. She doesn't publish that deveined poetry, the prawns one finds in so many journals today. Fat, buttered poems. I didn't see wistful poems in OCHO, which is the bread and butter of most boring poetry mags (that usually have Review in the title somewhere). I guess one might reasonably assume that speaks to the titling thing--I mean the cultural hotspot which gave the mag its name. A certain brio that one brings to life. The title of a great mag should tell you something about it. O.blek told you a lot about that mag's aesthetic even before you turned the cover. It told you it was going to publish P. Inman (hehe). It's always so disheartening to see The Bumfuck Review on the cover of a mag. Well, not that. But you know what I mean. It's all the Bumfuck, Someplace Review. You live there. We get it. It was already on the mailing address. Did you have to say it on the cover too? There were a lot of lines of poetry I was mentally underscoring, by diverse poets tonight. So I know she has a good mag going. Hell, she has several. She's getting a lot of culture out there to a lot of people with the art mags and stuff. Lee and I were ogling some hot poet from one of the 2007 covers of one of her mags that came up on a Facebook feed. I didn't know the poet. Didi had sort of done the finger sizzle thing with her text on the cover. And Lee and I said "Oh yeth." I think maybe he was Cuban. Didi's own poetry is playful and very imaginative and also has a generous conception of audience...as in "you..all of you! Over there!" She's very playful and imaginative too. The ludic, I suppose we'd call it if we felt the need to go all Poundian and asshole and legitimize our little pleasures. Fuck that, right. Just doink it. She shoots. She scores. raaaaaahhhh....bravissima, Didi.