Remark (print edition)

by guest edited by Luis Cuauhtemoc. remarkpoetry.net

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal is the guest editor and editor of Remark’s first print in paper appearance (before it was only E) and he writes in letter that he got good reviews and bad reviews and someone called him mad. Mad is good. I grew up reading Mad magazine. Now I read Remark. One of the best things about small press is that it is OK to be bad and mad in the eyes of the holy toad of taste. With badness in the brown eye of the cow of poetry comes true progress and poetic innovation and evolution. Luis ’ good work! Each editor and each poet must always have some badness. And some goodness. Mostly in this mag, MAD mag, is all goodness. Oh Hell ’ there is no bad here at all. Not bad like the Toad Cow rear of the precious poem sack crowd says bad meaning flat champagne. This bad is good. Good beer. Good paperclips! Good slivers and boils on the ass of god! Good that Bush will be unelected (not soon enough). ((If you keeps Bush in office you can kiss mags like this and this goodness good bye!)). But now Luis has brought together this grand cast of poets: You know Alan Catlin and A. D. Winans cause they are regulars at the bar. But check here Bradley Mason Hamlin’s Caveman Haiku:

skeleton bones breathe
nightmare dreams and from blood bone
she hates cave paintings

Yes, that is the vibration of poems here contained in this can of beer poetry and others be: Jacob Evens’s: 3 Ugly Pigeons and the works of Peter Magliocco. The magazine is focused on the poetics of small press: depiction of the strange which is beautiful and heavy urban pathology of USA; unabashedly resentful of the maniplativeness of MFA programs and the arrogance and conservatism of poets cloistered like worms in the intestines of the academic college (most university administrators could care less about poetry ’ no surprise ’ so why be arrogant? Well ’ is it because you don’t have to drive a delivery truck for UPS!) and a fearless use of the common, melodramatic and ethical. So there.