What would plantarchy be? the rule of plants. A new poetry magazine with this title carries the motto 'every molecule an orchid', and no pious Green-ness is suggested by shocking pink covers. Something about the ineluctable luxuriance of plant life in all but the most privative conditions? that leaves the wielder of hoe and secateurs wondering which party governs the cultivation ... There seems to be a sense of spawning (when looked for) in quite a lot of the work in this issue, a strongly generative emphasis or drive, but also a shaping aesthetic that results (for instance) in really nice, clean production and editorial choices.
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When Martin Buber looked at a tree he knew the 'constant opposition of forces ... continually adjusted', but saw also its 'stiff column in a shock of light', perceived its 'suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves' and entered into 'mutual relation' with it (but 'the tree is now no longer It'. Among the good visual work here, Jeff Hansen's 'I & Thou' is a sequence of 'layered responses' to, I think, specific contemporary aggression that turns 'thou' into 'IT'. It has the dirty-concrete look of copier-collage, but the text also circle-dances. Each piece is paired with a magnified detail of itself, as if you moved closer and began to know someone. Geof Huth by contrast appears to be grafting various species of typographic figure -- archaic characters maybe, symbols, or kerns -- to grow original unitary images which are designated poems (like Ian Hamilton Finlay's one-word poems) that genuinely stretch the potential of poetic signification, by being (brilliantly) titled: 'Sound's First flight', 'The Muscle memory of Meaning', etc.
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Another Jewish philosopher, Alan Sondheim, is flooding with effluvia, desire, the infinite, mourning enormously, never far from death, in five smeary proses, one quite long. Everything he produces is exciting to read, despite its absurd quantity. Not being on any lists any more that he posts to daily, the regular hits are missed ...
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The magazine's dimensions are generous to writing that wants to stretch the poetic line. 13 pages of Matthew Klane’s ‘re Republic’ sequence spread right across their width, but (as well-trained espalier appletrees) with very deliberate visual patterning. The well-spaced lines belie their lexical density; you can see them grown from seed: ('I text parley / Malcolm X y Karl Marx / atomism y Islam') [17]; 'for the Other, a / the-O-ry // for my mother / myrrh' [23]. Taking time to read into this work, it's exuberant and rewarding.
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In these pages, language sometimes seems psychedelic. In Camille Martin's sculpture-landscape-poem (let's call it that for now) words cut out from magazines vibrate, tucked into an informal trellis: 'volcano', 'telephone', 'Believe' -- a kind of concentration that could go minimalist but here bristles. Likewise, William Howe lets off fireworks with no expense spared: these stanzas are #671-682:
Thief puker -- fever bloke -- / Narwhal fell -- lichen plumb -- / Revel bison -- assay label / Office-pro ground toucan --/
Oh God, they're not 'his Emily Dickinson' are they? (the sequence title is 'translanations'). If so, is it beside the point to go off and try to specify the relationship, noticing en passant Dickinson's own hallucinatory formulations (reticent volcanoes with pink plans, indeed!), as well as the bits in Howe that could be by her (Fever space ... dim / Immortality ... piece paucity ... Fructified instant [except it's actually 'Fuctified', hopefully a typo ...].
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'Plantarchy' the title is acknowledged as an indirect reference to a certain English punk song ... jUStin katKO, the editor, was in London last year, at e-poetry 2005; and there are some Brits in the mag: it opens in fact with 8 pages of outrageous rhyming verse by Jow Lindsay, who's no tree hugger ('gaia, the coyote, restructures this / forest for hansel'). Here too there's a sense that it's all made from the transformation of waste (or into it); and also a systematic interruption of flow (in this case with the names of now obsolete Anglo-Saxon letters). There's a shortish Tom Raworth extract from 'Caller', whose opening could be another rubric for the whole issue: 'nature corrupt nature / romped bound constituency'. And the one critical essay here, by Stephen Perkins, is about Stuart Home and Neoism, asserted as 'the last of the historic avant gardes of the 20th century'. It's quite interesting, but Perkins's association of plagiarism, a basically desperate strategy, with collage, is I hope resistable ...
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This post has been in draft for a week and must be let go. I've enjoyed reading everything in this excellently produced and edited magazine, and would love to comment on them all -- Maria Damon's 'decrepit text', pathetically unstable; Chris Stroffolino's unsettling unreliable polemicist, and plenty more. The next issue is out now.
http://www.plantarchy.us/home.html
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At last, it's raining.
