Bad Poetry Digest Volume 1, No. 10

by Edited by Daniel A. Russell.. Bad Poetry Digest. 2010 Oak Motte Lane, Austin, Texas 78744-5058.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

By far BPD is the best new poetry magazine to cross these magic-marker-stained fingers in a good long while. In this only four-page zine, photocopied, editor Daniel A. Russell creates a poetic world that smashes the state of both poetry in hard copy and also on the web. Bad poetry is a cut-up - pure collage magazine. Anything that finds its way to his mailbox is the stuff of the poem. It is poetry? It is poetry. Everything is poetry and here it is proved. And then, we are all used to editors as compilers. Yes, and a good job they do. Russell, however, is intimately involved with creativity. He is editor as creator. He doesn’t center a poem on the page; he makes the page as his poem using other poems as bits of his own poem. The page is his unit of composition. And narrative flow? His pages have multiple entry points. There is no just start at the top and end at the bottom. Truly, here, one enters the imagination and is then surrounded by it. Images are also brought into the page. You have to read/say Hitler when you see Hitler’s image or any of the other images. Therefore, a form of symbolic language, the symbolic language of pop culture is utilized in Russell’s work. It seems I could go on and on here. You should see it yourself. Send something. Send some money. Get a copy. Change your own poetry.