I
just discovered that Joel W. Vaughan was good enough to review Touch the Donkey #11 in Broken Pencil .Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. Previous issues reviewed by Broken Pencil include #10 [see the review here], #5 [see the review here] and #1 [see the review here].
The eleventh incarnation of rob mclennan’s
poetry journal presents a few writers familiar to those well-acquainted with
above/ground press’s prolific output (including Buck Downs, lary timewell, and
Kemeny Babineau). However—in addition, the little journal features double the
number of fresh faces as well, balancing stylistic expectations with a little
new blood. In all, there is nothing here which significantly differs from
mclennan’s editorial approach in previous issues, but this is by no means to
say that the poetry contained herein is not worth investigation.
A kind of ‘scratching out’ of form makes itself
felt in a number of these poems, and one wonders whether mclennan’s grouping of
them together was thematically intentioned. Buck Downs’s “full speed in partial
paradise,” reading: “beaten gold | in hammered sheets | golden chain | I doubt
I see” was composed using personal notes that were transcribed, cut out, and
re-arranged, then pasted into little disordered monologues. Kemeny Babineau’s
“The Log of Wonorata,” similarly, began as an erasure poem, and figures
semi-significant couplets (ie. “V: Red Wolves of Poverty | Petroleum Mecca
teat”), though it does not present itself as such when printed in short-line
towers, just as Downs’s work cannot be made out as word-collage. An excerpt
from The Pain Itself, by kevin
martins mcpherson eckhoff brings this scratching out of form to new heights,
figuring an entire page in prose, with text replaced by “Lorem ipsum…” garbled
Latin.
above/ground’s “Touch the Donkey #11,” then,
seems concerned with representing and mis-representing
the form in which poetry is written, originates, or operates, and often to
interesting effect. It is worth a look.
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