Jenmarie Davis

Oh, well, what the hay? (Or is it "hey"?) I'll give this issue a rating since it might be the last issue of Bombay Gin that I'll read for a while - GIVEN THAT IT'S THE LAST OF THE 16 ISSUES THAT AMY CATANZANO GAVE ME! In other words, as of this review, I'll be getting closure on a pleasant task I've set myself - that of reviewing all the BGs Amy was generous enuf to give me.

SO, yeah, I liked this issue. It 'starts' off w/ K. Silem Mohammad's "from SONNAGRAMS & damned if I don't think I shd get to know this guy & be friends w/ him b/c this is like something I might write - maybe even 'better'! Ha ha! His:

"Author's note: Each Sonnagram, including its title, is an anagram of a standard modern-spelling version of one of Shakespare's Sonnets, containing exactly the same letters in the same distribution as the original. The title is composed last, using whatever letters are left over once I've assembled a working sonnet in iambic pentameter with an Elizabethan rhyme scheme."

Marvelous. I read in his bio in the back that he's "a member of the Flarf Collective (a group of poets based in North America and Europe who write and collaborate on the internet, sometimes using Google searches as material for composition)". That makes me even more interested! That also does it: I'm going to start a more anti-social group called the Druf Collective. Instead of collaborating, we'll just give each other the brush-off - even though we'll all share the 1st name of "Dan". I'd dearly love to know what he thinks of The Nowhere Cooperative's Conceptual Poetics vs. Flarf: Taking Sides, We Can’t Decide!:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8431101-conceptual-poetics-vs-flarf

David Buuck's collaborative "Learn the Letter" is great fun! Eric Bogosian's "from WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE" had me flashing back to the not-always-so-good days when I was a teen hitch-hiker. Sherman Alexie's in here. I can certainly stand to read more from him. My old friend Marc Nasdor who I rarely see has something in here. It's usually nice for me to read something by someone whose work I'm more likely to see in print than I am to actually see THEM in person. Carol Mirakove's "THE ORIGIN MYTH OF MURIEL" mentions Neuro-Linguistic Programming - a subject that interests me - even if I'm not exactly a 'believer'. Again, thanks to Amy, I have a recording of Akilah Oliver reading - so it was interesting to see her work in print - the page arrangements aren't the sort of thing I imagined while listening to her read so that was educational. & so it goes & so it went - another fine issue.… (mehr)

An excellent issue! Or, at least, a significant amt of it. Apparently, publishing 3 issues a yr turned out to be unfeasible so this volume will be divided into 2 issues. This doesn't seem like a negative change to me. So much for me to like here! Rachel Levitsky's "Happiness" (followed by her "Mischievous Traces") begins w/:

"Since my accident, I have exerted some effort toward my thinking about happiness. At the beginning of our stirrings, or, during the time in which we, as the group of us were most cohesive and concentrated in our actions and activities, the State, concerned about the erasures and the subsequent evenness it had effected was producing a massive ennui among its people, released a Happiness campaign whose earmark was an omnipresent billboard that read "Happiness for all beings.""

Yes, "Happiness for all beings". Let's pretend, for the sake of minor novelty in review writing, that that's the theme here & contextualize all that follows under its umbrella. Or is it umbrage? Michael Aird:

"you will feel sunny down to your soft tissue

and never notice, almost overnight

a self-cleaning warmth through

thick and thin, or sickness and its stubborn

alleviation"

Derek Henderson:

"&

the natural division of the sea:

part for the child to swim under

part for the strength of soup,

set off by lightning

to spill up ur-karyotes

seminal emission of life."

Jena Osman's "Mercury Rising (A Visualization)" had a form I enjoyed: 3 sections, each divided into 3 subsections, the 1st subsection the most 'poetic' formally, the 2nd a sortof transition to the 3rd, the most explicatory. The use of Mercury as a main character is both mythical & ecological. Interestingly, not long after I read this, I witnessed a documentary called "The Electricity Fairy" in wch mercury as a pollutant product of coal-burning electrical plants is referenced. Oh, but back to Happiness: Martha King's reminiscence - she was probably happy. Julie Carr's "100 Notes on Violence" has the lines: "I'm attracted to children. Feet like little suns." Michael Knight's "The Nocturnal Habits of American White People. Case Study #108" is hard to appraise in terms of happiness. Is the kind of behavior that he reports on something that makes "white people" happy? What makes it so hard for me to understand is probably related to my never having seen one of these mythical "white people". I've seen albinos but they're more pink.

Imraan Coovadia was born in Durban, South Africa. He was educated at Yale & feels qualified to write a war story about Iraq. Maybe he is. It's not such a bad story. Christophe Casamassima is the "Literary Arts Director of the Towson Arts Collective". What an astonishingly uninspired name for a hypothetically creatively intended organization! Towson's a suburb of Baltimore. Michael Knight taught at the Gilman School in Baltimore. I'm from Baltimore. It's nice to know that people still read there. I wonder? Do they have to bribe the police guards at the public library entrance? Do the cops there treat them like shit like they did to me the last time I went there?

Shira Dentz's footnote, creatively presented, reads: "Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said this is the difference between the affections and the intellect." HHmm.. Let's contemplate. If water accumulates lifeforms (bacteria & the like) creating putridity & ice doesn't then perhaps ice is at a temperature non-conducive to sd life-forms. I reckon affections run at a higher temperature than the intellect. Hence one is more likely to get herpes, eg, from affectionate heavy petting than one is to get it from just THINKING about heavy petting. I'll leave it up to you wch feels better.

Well, ok, Miranda Mellis's "Triple Feature" IS NOT ABOUT HAPPINESS. Shit, it's about a boyfriend who beats a mother to death. That shd jerk a few tear-chains. Raymond Federman: I'm interested in this guy. I've read one bk of his & wd like to read more. I'm nicely predisposed toward his writing. One cd say, euphemistically, at least, that it made me HAPPY to read something by him. I'm not really interested in Richard Hell - BUT, I enjoyed his biographical memoir - it wasn't about the sleazy romance of being an egomaniacal junkie. That was a nice change, that made me HAPPY. &, yes, I still feel a mild allegiance to the INTELLECTUALS, people like Jared Schickling & François Luong. God knows why & I don't believe in God.

Finally, the always-interesting Naropa Audio Archives presents Peter Gizzi's lecture on Jack Spicer. Spicer has been a recurring theme in my life lately - I imagine myself hearing voices from under rocks saying things like: "Variety is the Spicer of Life" & such-like. Gotta read more by him.… (mehr)