(1966)
Your estimate of any little magazine will depend on what you think little magazines should be doing. Should they simply exist as open-ended receptacles for the work of whatever writers happen along, or should they be publishing the writers of a city or region? Should they be actively fostering a poetic or political ideology? These are all useful functions. Of perhaps less obvious value are the magazines set up by university English Departments to furnish prestige of a sort, and the magazines which exist primarily to express a bloated editorial ego.
The Far Point (No. 1) is an example of the university engdept type, and it illustrates the pitfalls. Apart from a desire to play it safe and turn out something that looks pro there seems to be no editorial policy. In spite of the attractive Kanadian eskimo-print cover, a chauvinistic count found American contributors outnumbering Canadians two to one. (Maybe the cover’s symbolic: it shows a huge toothy bear about to devour a small clueless-looking seal.) There’s some good poetry and a few interesting articles, but no particular reason why it should all be gathered together in this place.
Hyphid (No. 3) has a beautiful name (aphid? creature from another planet?) but apart from that it’s thin: this issue contains the work of only five poets, though a couple of the poems are longish. No editorial, no regional slant, the poetry ranging from John Newlove’s condensed starkness to Bill Bissett’s incantatory lyricism. Most little mags need money and better distribution, but Hyphid’s need is greater: then they’d be able to turn out something longer than sixteen pages for seventy-five cents.
New: American and Canadian Poetry (No. 7, No. 8) gives you lots of mimeo pages, the occasional picture, and a promise to go into offset next issue. It does indeed publish Canadian poetry, sometimes, and its alert review section even covers books by Canadian poets, though with an occasional tut-tut at “Kiplingesque provincialism,” or Canadians being distressingly outspoken about being Canadian. (Well, O. K., it may be a bore to you, New, but back in 1830 Americans were doing the same thing vis-à-vis the English and getting similarly put down for it; anyway what else do you do in the face of cultural imperialism?) New’s taste in poetry leans towards the Kayakian, though judging from only two issues it’s slightly more eclectic.
Intercourse (No. 9) does a lot more horsing around. The Far Point, Hyphid and New share an earnest, not to say solid attitude towards the presentation of poetry to the reader, but Intercourse makes it clear that one of its aims is the insertion of a jocular thumb in the Establishment bum. This issue takes potshots at such familiar sitting ducks as Playboy and Irving Layton. It offers also some competent though not evisceratingly-original poetry, a professionally-handled prose vignette, and some guest appearances: Alden Nowlan, Al Purdy feeling silly about writing about himself at 25 but doing it anyway. For 35¢ it’s a bargain.
Copperfield (No. 1) has a mailing address that makes it look university-linked, but actually it’s an independent venture. It also goes straight for this reader’s jugular; no matter what the quality of the work inside (and it’s irregular) I have to like it as a magazine, because it’s dedicated to this country’s “mythos,” specifically that of the North. Any magazine conceived in the Temagami Provincial Forest Reserve has to have its heart in the right place. Copperfield offers not only poetry, but short fiction (in this issue, a strange Milton Acorn short story), reviews (of, for instance, Sig Olson, a writer familiar to conservationists if not to poets), and excerpts from early Canadian writers. In addition, it’s well-printed, and illustrated, too (the photo of Joseph Pickering, looking like everyone’s murderous ancestor, is alone well worth the price). Reservations: will quality be sacrificed to subject-matter concerns? will the vein here being mined prove easily exhaustible? I hope neither of these things happens.
Blew Ointment (Vol. 5, No. 2) has been around for a while, and it’s gotten bigger and better. It expresses its own region and its own point of view while managing an astonishing range and flexibility. It can print poetry so awful you’d have to be high to appreciate it, and poems so good they create their own high, like Margaret Avison’s “All Out or Oblation.” B. O. is the creation of polyinspirational Bill Bissett, and some of the contributions, both pictorial and poetic, are neobissettesque, but this merely emphasizes Bissett’s own originality: if you don’t share Bissett’s magical approach to language, “th” and “luv” and “yu” don’t carry you very far, and a flowered nipple doesn’t equal the translucent quality of a Bissett line drawing. This B. O. also has some loose pinups, the most joyful of which is Phyllis Gotlieb’s “A Wall of Graffitti.” Altogether B. O. is a stimulating grab-bag, though there’s a certain amount of used newspaper in with the goodies.
grOnk shares B. O.’s interest in pictorial-verbal values and combinations. It’s the Concrete Poetry magazine and that’s what it publishes. No.’s 1 and 2 of Series 2 suggest either that the genre has rather narrow limits or that its practitioners still have a lot of exploring ahead of them. But it may be a production problem: concrete poetry must above all be visible, and the mimeo process doesn’t help. (Certainly the poem-objects in bp nichol’s Journeyings and the Return package were more exciting. Maybe grOnk shouldn’t be a magazine with pages at all, but a box full of things?) However if you’re interested in the movement, this is what you should be reading.
Which leads to the picture books. David Aylward’s Typescapes is unique, a book of elegant structures made with letters and given titles, some comic (“the inlain crocodile”), some mythic (“the cactus god,” “the forest of knives”). No one will ever do this better; in fact, no one else will probably ever do it at all, since Aylward has exploited the form to its margins already.
If Typescapes is classical, Keewatin Dewdney’s The Maltese Cross Movement is decidedly romantic, as its merge-and-takeoff last page poem emphasises. According to Alphabet 15, it’s based on an underground movie of the same name, but those who haven’t seen the movie can react only to the book as book. Dewdney uses a collage technique, linking pictures with an organic-looking matrix of tiny hieroglyphics which may or may not be decipherable into English. There are a few recognizable words, and two symbols, a maltese cross and a moon, which weave through the pictures, sometimes together, sometimes apart. The oversize fingers, ears and eyes coupled with machines, etc. suggest a McLuhan extended-senses theme, but a linear-sequential interpretive approach doesn’t work (unless there’s some Rosetta Stone I missed). What The Maltese Cross Movement does is to provide the reader with a lush field of images from which he can improvise his own poems (“make a world,” as the first collage says). It raises scrapbooking, that thing you did with old magazines and a pair of scissors while recovering from the measles, to an art.