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JoAnn Verburg

WTC, 2003
© JoAnn Verburg; courtesy Pace Gallery

JoAnn Verburg’s current exhibit, Aftershocks, can be viewed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 12, 2025. Click here for more info.

JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. From 1977 to 1979, she served as the research director and photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by 19th-century frontier photographers. While heading Polaroid’s Visiting Artist Program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Verburg promoted technical innovation in the photographic field by inviting artists Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Jim Dine, among others, to experiment with new large format instant cameras.

Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s own photographic work combines exquisite color, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often presented as diptychs and triptychs, her images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, to which she has returned for over 30 years, envelop the viewer in a serene, dreamlike atmosphere and explore the passage of time both literally and figuratively. Verburg lives and works in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy. Visit her website for more info.

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess

The Matrix
N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

Eecchhooeess
N. H. Pritchard
DABA ($24)

by Richard Kostelanetz

N. H. Pritchard (1939-1996) was a New York-based artist and writer whose The Matrix Poems 1960-1970, originally published by Doubleday, has the significant distinction of remaining the most innovative one-author collection of poetry ever released by a commercial house in the U.S. It was groundbreaking at the time not only for its typographical and verbal departures, but for its author’s race, as fifty years ago, in the wake of Civil Rights protests in 1968, our commercial publishers became more open to Black authors than they had been before. It is only appropriate that his innovation be honored now in our current time with new reprints of his two major works.

The Matrix’s cover had a knockout black and white photograph of its author with half of his face in shadows, wearing a collared shirt with a tie and jacket. Pritchard looked elegant, much as Ralph Ellison was elegant—but whereas Ellison emerged from a fatherless family, Pritchard’s father was a physician who immigrated to New York City from “the Antilles,” as his son so elegantly put it. Whereas Ellison didn’t finish Tuskegee, Pritchard went to prep schools before taking his B.A. with honors from NYU and continuing with graduate school in art history.

When I first met Pritchard in the early 1970s, soon after The Matrix was published, he greeted me in his darkened studio apartment on Park Avenue. Though only a year older than me, he seemed not just more sophisticated, but unique in all the ways that a creative person can be. Pritchard’s personal letters resembled the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake; to my copies of his books he added not just a personal inscription but a handmade enhancement of colors and lines that I treasure.

The poems in The Matrix appeared in several formats that still look alternative today. Words were crushed together; some were printed upside down. Weighty phrases were repeated within the page. Words both familiar and unfamiliar had extra spaces between the letters. While some pages had just a large single letter, on other pages the print ran to the outside edges, suggesting that it might well have continued beyond it. The Matrix challenged how a writer’s Collected Poems should look.

As for the texts themselves, they approached the limits of semantic comprehension, as Pritchard’s ideal was what he called the “transreal,” a reflection of his awareness of mystical, supernatural modernism in the visual arts. On an opening recto page was this epigraph for himself: “Words are ancillary to content.” Later in the book, the fourth page of “Gyre’s Galax” repeats the phrase “above beneath” from top to bottom, sometimes amended by the words “it” and “in.” Pritchard wanted to take poetry into a domain previously unknown, one that was indeed above beneath.

In 1971 a second Pritchard collection, Eecchhooeess, appeared from New York University Press; it is perhaps the most radical one-author poetry volume ever to appear from an American university press. Repeating many of the same challenges posed by The Matrix, Eecchhooeess is no less brilliant; its eerie sounds and typographical innovations chimed right in with the Black Arts movement of the day (Pritchard was affiliated with the literary collective Umbra).

The most unusual quality of these new reprints of Pritchard’s books is that they appear intact, with their original front covers duplicated, each totally devoid of any new preface or afterword. Not even Pritchard’s biographical note is updated; only the title and copyright pages are different. While contemporary readers might wish for more background on this utterly unique writer, to get such authentic reprinting a whole half-century later is a treat for fans of groundbreaking poetry indeed. 

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Rain Taxi Review of Books Volume 26, No. 3 (#103) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

The Mundus

N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

by Richard Kostelanetz

When I reviewed in these pages the reprinting, fifty years later, of two books of N. H. Pritchard’s highly innovative poetry, I assumed that no more books would appear by this Jamaican American author, who died in 1996. I was wrong. Primary Information, which had previously reissued his 1970 collection The Matrix, has published his manuscript of The Mundus, which I would characterize as the first masterpiece of typographic abstract “graphic” fiction. I emphasize abstract because it differs from Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), likewise a typographic fiction and likewise a masterpiece (composed only with words made from the seven letters in its title), but explicitly about love. Considering himself to be a spiritual “transreal” artist, Pritchard regarded aesthetic abstraction as superior to, say, representational portrayals of religious themes.

While the publisher presents The Mundus as a single continuous text, it may also be read as a sequence of shorter narratives, each with its own typographic signature that changes visually from page to page, thus suggesting narrative, before skipping onto a different typographic signature. If this book is “a novel with voices,” as Pritchard reportedly suggested, then it could be read as monologues by several visually distinct visual “voices,” some of whom speak words and pseudo-words, others just certain letters. For instance, the book opens with over forty pages of the letter O—just the letter O—both upper case and lower case, distributed over the page’s entire field, occasionally with the addition of a few short words. Another voice says “sh” in a single horizonal line without spaces continuously over eighteen pages.

As innovative as Pritchard’s narratives still are, what marks this book as belonging to the 20th century, rather than the 21st, is that all the letters are roughly the same size, because they were produced on a typewriter. Had Pritchard survived into this century, he surely would have exploited the enormous typographic opportunities now offered the visual poet composing on a home computer.

This new edition of Pritchard’s magnum opus includes a short afterword by Paul Stephens, a young but already distinguished scholar of avant-garde literature. And now that The Mundus has (re)appeared, one wonders if other extant Pritchard material—work only published in magazines and anthologies or previously unpublished—might be collected and released. Until then, The Mundus must be seen to be read, let alone believed.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

At His Desk in the Past

Franz Wright
Foundlings Press ($20)

by Jon Cone

The son of a literary giant who became a prolific and beloved poet himself, Franz Wright died in 2015. While Wright’s poems were unsparing in their examination of his troubled past, they often moved heroically towards light, reaching for the possibilities of grace and transcendence in volumes such as The Earth Without You (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1980), Entry in an Unknown Hand Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989), and The Beforelife (Knopf, 2001). Wright frequently used religious terms in his work, but even this never seemed heavy-handed, because he never let go of his profound belief in poetry’s ecumenical capacity to provide solace. This new chapbook offers readers one more chance to enjoy the pure devotion Wright had for poetry and to witness the craft as he practiced it in his final years.

At His Desk in the Past, which contains an informative and lyrical afterword written by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, comprises fragments Wright composed during five days in January and March of 2012. Subtitled “an homage to Karl Krolow,” a well-known German poet and translator, it riffs on a single Krolow line of six words—“It’s raining in a dead language,” as translated into English by Stuart Friebert—that Wright considered sublime. Like Coltrane moving into and eventually beyond the melody of “My Favorite Things,” Wright uses Krolow’s line as the elementary substance for fueling further poetic imaginings rich with meaning, where his memories crest the surface and his emotions live and breathe anew. These fragments feel part of a much older poetic tradition, an oracular performance only a poet as committed as Wright could achieve. There’s additional emotional poignancy in knowing these fragments come to us while the poet battled the cancer that was killing him.

The homage begins at the moment of inaugural light, the moment of birth: “First light. It’s raining again in a dead language. Green. It’s raining in a dead language. . . . The empty and utterly silent house filled all at once with the sound of my name posed, in my young mother’s voice before I finally slept.” In the next fragment Wright suggests via a third-person analysis that he is writing of Krolow, though it is impossible not to imagine he is also writing about himself, recalling his own early formative and mysterious encounters with language: “He has lived a long time. It has happened before. He suddenly heard quite distinctly and apropos of nothing words that enchant him and continue to throughout the day although he could not tell you why or what they mean and wouldn’t try.” This is what language does for Krolow, Wright imagines, and what language does for Wright too, we can imagine: It enchants.

Wright worked with a digital recorder, and these poems maintain an incantatory force. They migrated from an original sound recording—Wright had a superb reading voice—to transcription onto the page and eventual assembly into this volume. Because of that method, the reader can find at certain points a searching hesitancy as Wright employs iteration (oral composition naturally allows iteration as a technique to facilitate continuation) as well as the sudden and abrupt stop that approximates the musical rest. Thus:

IT’S RAINING in a dead language he writes at his desk in the past, silent man of the millions of pages still traveling toward the world

no

The wonderful movements in Wright’s fragments seem to carry both original poet and Wright far from the world where they first appeared. In one of the book’s most exquisite moments, the house where the mother and the new child are first encountered is transformed into a church where the mother sits with the son as the world outside darkens at dusk and candles burn and flicker inside. Implied here is the presence of sacred beings, angels and bees:

HE SMELLS AGAIN the faint honey scent dust and incense speechlessly he feels the loneliness of tapers as the stained glass turns to black; they wane in there alone with no company but him and his mother and fueling the small brilliant radius of fire that auras varying altitudes of fire and honey-colored irises of icon eyes that follow unseen beings, muted beings of invisible gold iridescent as they gravely

The sudden broken stop is lightened by the following fragment with its delightful wordplay:

BEE-iridescent

In the poem’s final lines, there is a duplication of the poet at his task of repeating the hexagonal line, after having recalled his “mother’s shadowy face in profile” and “storing up Christ’s eyes ultimate altitude forever gazing down.” Wright returns us to the image of himself speaking the six words of Krolow:

AS HE QUIETLY SAYS THE HEXAGONAL sentence aloud barely breathing silently reciting

EACH WORD of it once before writing it down, feeling blessed, and once more before giving it back.

Perhaps that is what all poets do: Listen to the rain and hear in it a long-dead language which is the mystery of poetry itself, beyond our power to explain or understand. At His Desk in the Past is only forty-seven pages, but it speaks volumes and adds much to the Franz Wright canon.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Loving Sylvia Plath

A Reclamation

Emily Van Duyne
W. W. Norton & Company ($27.99)

by Nic Cavell

Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath is a five-star act of reclamation, eschewing the densely plotted brilliance of Heather Clark’s 2020 biographical masterpiece Red Comet (Knopf) to prioritize a communicable ethic of care. This refreshing take encompasses not only a vision of Plath as stubbornly vital in the face of her violent partner, the British poet Ted Hughes, but also the memory of Assia Wevill, one of Hughes’s lovers who took her own life (and that of her four-year-old daughter Shura) in a largely forgotten act that came not long after Plath’s own highly publicized suicide. Plath would stand among the giants of twentieth century poetry regardless of her suicide, Van Duyne concludes, and her apparent rival was no demonic femme fatale but a wry woman with her own voice—the first successful translator of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and someone who toyed with the Lilith myth as a copywriter for a groundbreaking commercial in the 1960s.

Both women, who wore colorful dresses that marked them like movie stars in drab, midcentury London, found their final resting place in Hughes’s hometown of Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, on barren land known as Brontë country. Hughes, an enormously influential figure in literary circles, has controlled the narrative about both women even since his death, flattening them into totems in support of his own epic narrative—to the extent that repeated revelations of the intimate partner violence Plath and Wevill sustained have been submerged in myths about their obsession with death and the inevitability of their demise. Hughes was buried in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Plath’s partisans have made the trip to Heptonstall to regularly efface Hughes’s name from her headstone, one of the few acts of reclamation available to them outside the official narrative in the decades following her death. Van Duyne herself carved Wevill’s preferred epitaph in clay and placed it at the site where her ashes and Shura’s ashes were scattered, granting Wevill the words in memoriam that Hughes had denied her: “Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile.” Newly available letters and sharp archival work by Van Duyne and other scholars have led to reappraisals of both Plath and Wevill.

Hughes’s focus on the tyranny of the natural world in his poetry belied an interest in fascism that animated his friendship with the Nazi sympathizer Henry Williamson; he had dreams in which he imagined taking orders from Hitler to leave Plath. In a letter to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher, Plath wrote of being struck by Hughes just days before her miscarriage. Enduring the humiliation of Hughes’s infidelity, she later repurposed the images found in his own poems, including “The Thought-Fox,” when she wrote about burning his letters at their rural home in Devon, which she likened to letting the dogs loose on a fox: “This is what it is like— / A red burst and a cry.” Wevill, keen to Hughes’s mythologizing tendencies, wrote a tongue-in-cheek commercial for Sea Witch Hair Dye which featured men in suits arriving at an island paradise to confiscate the secrets of hair sorcery from the witches, who reveled in their stewardship of this natural resource: “Was this the real location of Eden? The banished descendants of Eve?” In fact, both women influenced Hughes’s poetry in their lifetimes.

Van Duyne, writing to set the record straight on Plath and Wevill, is well positioned to accomplish that task, being a survivor of intimate partner violence herself (she lived with an addict who threatened to take custody of her son, she writes, before absconding with the boy one day and never looking back). It was Plath’s poems and will to create a multitude of worlds as a mother, writer, and lover that gave her the strength to pursue a life of her own and eventually marry a supportive partner with whom she had two more children. Like Hughes, Van Duyne sees Plath as a totem important to her narrative—albeit one who inspires feelings of hope rather than depths of guilt.

The research for Van Duyne’s volume was funded by a Fulbright scholarship, and in the course of it, she serendipitously discovered Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019). The book, in which Machado tackles queer intimate partner violence, presented Van Duyne with the revelation that although “the abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence,” in recorded history she “did not exist until about fifty years ago.” Plath helped speak the archetype into existence with the help of feminists who championed her story and her groundbreaking second collection of poetry, Ariel (Harper & Row, 1965). Marital rape, however, has only been outlawed in the U.S. since 1993.

In retelling Plath’s story in ways that decode its violence, Van Duyne illuminates both the poet’s struggles and her own. Obscured so long by Ted Hughes’s own controlling narrative, the stories, intimacies, and revelations about Plath and Wevill in Loving Sylvia Plath deserve to be celebrated for their clear-eyed expansion of the living record of Van Duyne’s artistic forebears.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

A Book About Ray

Ellen Levy
The MIT Press ($54.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms, or at least as approximate to them as possible. Given the often abrasive opacity of Johnson’s (non-)engagement with curators, critics, and scholars, this can’t have been easy. Levy herself describes her book as “not, or not exactly, a life story. This is an art story.” Some may think they know that story from John W. Walter’s 2002 documentary How to Draw a Bunny, however that film portrayed Johnson mainly as a mail art collagist, adding to the quizzical and cryptic sense of Johnson that had already given him cult-like art celebrity status. Levy’s book reveals more of Johnson’s work and investigates the overall drive behind it.

A Book About Ray progresses in roughly chronological order, though it also freely cycles forward and backward in time via artistic statements on recurring motifs and themes found in Johnson’s work. After early years of artistic output in Detroit, Johnson attended the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s, and there he flourished—especially as a favored talent in Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’s classes, dutifully attentive to “the clear, wise, and constructive ideas” behind “the relational nature of color” Albers championed. That aptitude led to a November 1947 cover of the magazine Interiors by Johnson consisting of three rows of colored upright rectangular boxes full of polka-dots of varying size and color along with one row of rectangular boxes with parallel stripes of various colors running across them. His painting Calm Center (1951), a grid of squares each containing a plethora of colored lines that offer “variations on the square,” is also very much in the Albers vein, save that the square at center is solid black. 

Also at Black Mountain, Johnson established friendships with fellow student artists such as Ruth Asawa, who he heard speak of “the Taoism philosophy of nothing ness [sic] being everything-ness”; Johnson realized, “I feel that way.” It was at the college as well that he took up with a teacher, beginning the longest romantic relationship of his life with the married sculptor Richard Lippold (it ended in 1974). Leaving the school, Johnson followed Lippold to New York City; in the summer of 1951, they took up residency downtown “in the shadow of the Williamsburg bridge,” occupying individual studio spaces alongside Morton Feldman and John Cage (each of whom had also spent time at Black Mountain). Thus, from a young age Johnson was very much in the thick of the burgeoning New York City art scene, where he would remain even at a distance after moving out to the North Shore of Long Island in 1969.

In addition to the cover of Interiors, Johnson designed now-iconic book covers for New Directions, including William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations; the Rimbaud cover utilized a portrait of the poet, which Johnson would continue recycling by using it in several collages. In the New York art scene, Johnson knew Andy Warhol and there are significant associations between Warhol’s work and his own. This is particularly true of his use of portraits: Johnson often drew upon images of iconic cultural figures such as Marilyn Monroe, and in fact, pre-dates Warhol’s use of such images with works from 1956-58 featuring James Dean collaged with the Lucky Strikes cigarettes logo and Elvis covered in red wash and bleeding tears. 

Levy reports how “Ray and Andy were known to shop together sometimes for movie stills and magazines.” Johnson, however, did not share in Warhol’s loftier ambitions. His portraits of these stars “got progressively grungier” and always remained small; “made to be held in hand by their recipients,” they “speak volubly of the artist’s hand” in their making, as opposed to Warhol’s industrial, oversized mass screen prints. And as weird as Warhol’s reputation holds him to be, Johnson was even further afield. Factory participant Billy Name demonstrates this with a telling comparison, saying “Andy was still like a person” whereas “Ray wasn’t a person. He was a collage or a sculpture. A living sculpture, you know. He was Ray Johnson’s creation.” Art for and on art’s terms alone was always Johnson’s sole intention.

At the center of Johnson’s work are mutually unachievable co-existing wishes. As Levy describes, “Ray Johnson wanted to be famous, and he wanted to remain unknown, and he clung to the belief, whose absurdity he relished, that it was possible to be both at once.” Johnson enjoyed the dilemma of always choosing to have things every and any way he desired, regardless of the lasting impact upon himself, his work, or anything else. Nothing mattered less to him than what many others valued most—critical acknowledgement, financial success, and media attention. Not that he didn’t pay attention to such matters; he simply refused to directly pursue or be enticed by them. The introduction of these concerns into any exchange with Johnson regarding his work would immediately sour further discussion. Yet Johnson nevertheless would send unsolicited correspondence to gallery owners and museum curators, and he had shows and would lecture at art schools during residencies. To be seen and not seen. Chameleon. Enigma. Artist shapeshifter. Johnson was all of these. 

In his collages, Johnson constantly interchanged his own set of iconic figures and related symbols, creating exchanges of identity and associated possible meanings. As he announces, “One can pretend to be someone one is not. Children’s play. I’ll be you and you be me. Be my valentine.” There is implicit intimacy behind his work, only it is not necessarily personal: instead Ray Johnson was “a person who lived for art to a point where he convinced others, and perhaps at times even convinced himself, that any aspect of his life that could not be assimilated into his art should not be considered part of the Ray Johnson story.”

Johnson was “a creature and creator of networks,” and one of his first was what became known as the New York Correspondence School. Within what became a vast interlocking web, Johnson openly handed over the reins of creation to others, asking the recipients of collages and other materials he mailed them to work on them and then send them on to others he named, putting all involved on the spot. As Levy asserts, “To correspond with Ray Johnson was to assume the role of artist.” The fact that he was continually looking for opportunities to diminish showing his hand in any artistic activity brought tension into his correspondence, however. Artist-performer Jill Johnston states it plainly: “I didn’t correspond with Ray because he scared me. I found him kind of intense.”

Levy tracks each of the several altering forms Johnson’s artworks took shape in. Among the earliest series were the Moticos, which had the appearance of being “paper scraps” yet were “made things, artworks of a kind” that held meaning beyond any literal, physical manifestation. As he stated: “perhaps you are the moticos.” Johnson would send these works (which easily slipped into envelopes) to Correspondence School participants, and as a result, many of them ended up in the hands of art collectors and dealers without his knowledge, let alone any control over sales or financial compensation. Another important work was A Book About Death, “one of his strangest and most enigmatic projects. The ‘book,’ never constituted as such, consists of thirteen unbound prints designed one by one between 1963 and 1965, each mailed out as it emerged to various correspondents.”

Later came the bunnies—“his signature icon a crudely drawn rabbit-head”—issued with a seven-step set of drawing instructions under the heading “New York Correspondance School”; Levy notes that the “simplicity of its rendering suggests that the icon is rooted in the Duchampian ethic that held that everyone and anyone could be, in fact already is, an artist.” Near the end of Johnson’s life arrived the Move Stars, a series of images forming an “assemblage, laid out on the ground, of graphic images of bunnies and other icons,” each panel-like piece being “32 inches high. And vary from 7 ½ to 8 inches wide,” which Johnson arranged at various suburban locales around his local Long Island home, photographing them with dispensable one-click cameras. These were not seen by many until long after Johnson’s death, when “in 2019, Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Morgan Library, searched them out and went through them all and calculated that the artist had run through 137 cameras, from which he had printed over five thousand images.”

There’s not the space here to cover every aspect of Johnson’s work that Levy brings to light. Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy’s eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson’s elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Hailing Rain Taxi for years of service

City Pages | Wednesday, September 17, 2008 by Ed Huyck

It's a common story in the arts. Young, fresh, and brash group hits the scene, be it a band or a theater company, a visual arts group or a magazine. The group burns white hot for a time—six months, a year, maybe even a few years—before the fire burns out, the collective splits apart, and a new venture, hopefully, takes its place.

So you may consider it a minor miracle that Rain Taxi—the iconoclastic literary arts magazine dedicated to uncovering the best the world of print has to offer, no matter how obscure—published its 50th issue this summer.

"It's not typical for a literary venture like this to last," says Eric Lorberer, who has written for the magazine since its inception and has served as the journal's editor for many years. "It is largely dependent on people who have the energy to fight the system for a while. But there eventually is a danger for burnout, or not developing the level of funding you need."

Every quarter, about 18,000 copies of Rain Taxi are distributed nationwide, putting it in the middle of the market—large for a literary magazine of its type, but a far cry from the major players, like the New Yorker or Harper's.

Then again, considering its esoteric bent, its modest circulation shouldn't be surprising. Rain Taxi is a place to learn about Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish or to read an interview with music and cultural critic David Hajdu—you won't find reviews of Dan Brown's latest opus or this week's celebrity tell-all.

"There is a community for this writing, even though it's in a lot of little small pockets. If you aggregate them," Lorberer says, "you get a sense of the vitality of what is going on. If you look at it in dribs and drabs it may not seem impressive."

These are dicey times for serious literary writers, publishers, and reviewers. Many newspapers have drastically cut back their book review sections. And between increased media consolidation and the shrinking of independent booksellers, it seems as though non-mainstream works have been shut out of the discussion.

"I think the death of a lot of indie booksellers is hurting the culture," Lorberer says. "There is less choice and access. Writers and publishers who have something serious to say and have the tenacity to persevere will eventually persevere. We are trying to be a part of the voice for that and a mechanism for those endeavors to stay healthy."

Rain Taxi exists to explore these cracks in the facade. Since the beginning, the journal has championed little-known works.

"Generally there is a dearth of criticism for non-mainstream books. We are about shining a spotlight on non-mainstream publishing—work that has a smaller audience but has a real literary need," he says.

Still, Lorberer sees some promising avenues worth exploring in the book world. "Chapbook publishing is the underappreciated sibling in the community. These are small books [often 16 to 20 pages] that are printed in small runs. There's been a real explosion of them in the last few years."

Meanwhile, graphic novels and other comics continue their fight to get out of the superhero "funny book" ghetto. "We're seeing creators in this medium really pushing their boundaries, in the same way that poetry or visual art did in the early part of the 20th century."

Visitors to Rain Taxi's annual Twin Cities Book Festival this year on October 11 will get a chance to hear about the growth of that medium with Jaime Hernandez, who has worked on the leading edge for nearly three decades, either as the co-founder and contributor to the comic magazine Love and Rockets or in a bevy of limited series in the past three decades. "He's really been a part of the aesthetic maturity of the medium," Lorberer says.

The daylong event has a number of other attractions as well, including public radio commentator and writer Alan Cheuse and novelists Valerie Martin, Ana Clavel, Jess Winfield, and Bragi Olafsson, whom eccentric pop music fans with long memories may remember from his days with the Sugarcubes, but who has crafted a second career as an award-winning fiction writer. The event also includes the local launch of a book of selected poems by Olav H. Hauge, featuring Robert Bly and Robert Hedin; panel discussions; and an expo hall packed with books new and used.

Lorberer has no doubt that the Twin Cities is a perfect home for the festival and for a journal like Rain Taxi. The area has a strong writing and publishing community (and, Lorberer notes, a fine mainstream critical community), which help foster the environment.

"The greatness of the Twin Cities is the mixture we have. There are obviously large presses and organizations here, but there are also tiny and grassroots things happening," Lorberer says. "The book festival is a way to gather that ecosystem in one room for a day."

The eighth annual Twin Cities Book Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, October 11, at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Ave. The event is free. For more information, visit www.raintaxi.com.

There's This Book You've Never Heard of

but if you had heard of it, you'd really enjoy reading it, which is why this unusual book review, Rain Taxi, continues to exist against what truly are the longest of odds

by Keith Harris

Watch your head.

To reach the office, you've got to duck. Yes, that means you, no matter how accustomed your fingertips may be to flailing uselessly at the topmost kitchen shelves or however familiar your unbowed head may be to slipping unscathed through the lowest doorways. The ceiling in this place dips low enough that even a five-and-a-half-footer like me can't enter upright. If you're given to romanticizing the mighty efforts of those who toil for their art--and what respectably employed bachelor or bachelorette of the arts, in his or her most self-hating moments, doesn't indulge such fantasies of gainful poverty?--you might be entranced by the cramped possibilities.

Yeah, well, daydream on your own time, 'cause it's just an office. When you get up the stairs the ceiling raises back up to full human height, and there's nothing mystical about the two computers that sit on two desks at right angles to each another, where words are processed and text boxes filled and images cut and pasted. Nothing unusual at all, except maybe the sheer number of books surrounding them. Like the small yellow South Minneapolis house of which this is an attic appendage, the office is compact but neat, overfull but not claustrophobic. There are books here as in the rest of the house, books that loiter obediently on their shelves rather than sloppily spilling over to consume their environment, books so plentiful that you wouldn't have time to read a fraction of them even if you weren't preoccupied with publishing a quarterly book review. And that's what Rain Taxi is. And this is where Rain Taxi comes from.

Four times a year, Rain Taxi compiles 50-odd pages of reviews: reviews of books that seem to range from the merely uncommercial to the downright obscure, reviews of books whose audiences vary from the merely specialized to the all-but-imaginary. But there are readers who want to find out about the poetry of Charles Borkhuis and the collected letters of Marcel Duchamp, and they want to do it in one sitting. There are readers who lust for a journal that highlights an interview with the surreal "storytelling poet" James Tate and a reconsideration of the "16th-century subversions" of Rabelais, as the cover of the most recent Rain Taxi advertises. There are readers who pick up the newsprint quarterly at St. Mark's in Manhattan or City Lights in San Francisco, just as locals do at the Ruminator in St. Paul. There are even readers who subscribe from Czechoslovakia and Korea. And there are enough of them--just enough perhaps--that Rain Taxi, lifted by a gentle dribble of ad sales that feeds into a sporadic trickle of grant funding, has remained afloat for five years now.

When I say Rain Taxi, I mean Eric Lorberer and Kelly Everding. They didn't start the magazine; Randall Health and Carolyn Kuebler midwifed the first issue, and nurtured Rain Taxi in its infancy. Unpaid interns drift regularly across the masthead. Fifty or so writers contribute their reviews each issue--that's contribute, not "sell," since said scribblers, whether they're still a quarter shy of escaping the U or taking time off from their eighth novel, go as unpaid as the interns. But despite the efforts of these volunteers, it's Lorberer and Everding who make sure the journal exists and who'd be out of a job if it didn't.

"Of course, there's the aesthetic issue--the pleasure of holding actual paper--but there's also the social issue, we want to reach readers from different segments of society, who might not have access to the Internet."

That's Eric Lorberer speaking about why Rain Taxi courts the added expense of remaining a print journal rather than merely existing online. This is his attic.

When Lorberer says Rain Taxi exists "to provide an alternative outlet for book reviewing," one might hear the flat, pointed prose of the grant proposal. When he continues, "Like the book industry in general, book reviewing was increasingly in the clutches of corporate powers and that didn't allow a lot of space for different voices to be heard, and also for certain kinds of books to be reviewed," you might hear the earnest, marginalized tone of the crusader. And you'd be right in both cases. Lorberer is a strange mix of the insistently pragmatic and the unyieldingly idealistic.

Lorberer is a curly-haired fellow in his late 30s who speaks in the even tone of the committed and who proselytizes without attempting to argue. The implicit assumption being: If his own evident commitment doesn't sway you, you must tarry beyond the reach of salvation. "Our mission is to reach as many people as possible and turn them on to books they wouldn't otherwise be aware of," he continues. All you've got to do is reach them.

"Eric is one of the true believers," says Josie Rawson, who lives across the alley and sits on Rain Taxi's board of directors. (Rawson is also a former associate editor at City Pages.) "He took a vow of poetry. He's got a vision of literature making the world safe for people."

It's safe to assume that Kelly Everding shares Lorberer's zeal, since she's his business partner as well as his domestic partner of some 14 years. She's quieter about the mission, though.

A recent afternoon visit finds Everding, a woman with long straight hair and pointed features, sitting in the attic finishing a flyer for the Twin Cities Book Festival. This one-day affair, to be held at Open Book in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday, October 27, is the first of its kind since the small, unsatisfying book fairs held in Calhoun Square in the mid-Nineties. For eight hours, the various rooms and crannies of the Open Book will be filled with panel discussions, readings, book sales, and book-arts demonstrations, capped that evening by a keynote reading by poet Robert Creeley.

As with so many book-related events, Rain Taxi has taken an active interest in the festival--Lorberer has been working closely with event organizers Jana Robbins and Tim Schwartz. In fact, the mag's sponsorship of the event marks its five-year anniversary, a testament to how far Rain Taxi has come since its inception.

In early 1996, a small, not dissimilar attic apartment not far away began to shrink. Two hundred copies of a fledgling journal called Rain Taxi showed up in the Harriet Avenue living room that Randall Heath and Carolyn Kuebler shared. Soon, the journal spread through the halls. Four times a year, their guests arrived. With each print run, the number of magazines doubled, and the space in which the couple lived dwindled.

"We'd line them up along the hallway," Kuebler remembers. "Soon it was impossible to move."

The initial idea had been to create a small press, though that notion quickly changed. Heath was working at Half Price Books, one of those morgues for the publishing industry where countless new books no one will ever read meet their lonely, remaindered deaths.

"We realized as we were fishing around that there are so many damn books out there already, it seemed kind of pointless," says Heath." Why contribute to this great mass of books that already existed? Why not try and review some of these books, and try to build a readership?"

Eric Lorberer showed up for the first issue with a review of a collection of Denis Johnson poetry that no one else wanted to publish. He was sucked into the Rain Taxi organization quickly afterward. To qualify as a nonprofit organization, Rain Taxi needed a board of directors, which meant they needed a third partner. When an early collaborator broke away, Lorberer was enlisted.

All the clichés of home publishing in the digital age helped spawn Rain Taxi. Suddenly, the ubiquity of PCs and easy layout software meant anyone with more spare time than inhibition could reel out limitless broadsheets about his or her obsessions. The Internet meant you could publish distant writers you might never have spoken to, even by phone. The crew survived on the adrenaline of a new project.

Heath fondly remembers the spontaneity of those early excitable years. "We scheduled an interview with [avant-garde novelist] Rikki Ducornet, so we jumped in my truck and drove to Denver," he recalls. "We had dinner with her, interviewed her. Here was this excuse to interact with someone whose work you admire."

But beyond giddy moments like that there was a world of work to do. They had to edit. They had to write. They had to design. And when they dropped an issue off at the printer, their labors had in some ways just begun.

"Around Christmas time, we had 150 boxes, at least, to take to UPS," remembers Kuebler. "They wouldn't pick them up, so we had to rent a U-Haul. We drove them to the UPS countertop, and of course there was a huge line already. The manager was so mean to us: We'd already taped up the boxes, but she whipped out a tape gun and told us we were going to pay for extra tape."

This form of cooperative labor fueled every aspect of Rain Taxi's existence. It was a necessity for tackling distribution. And when it came to the much-loathed task of selling ads, each crew member would take turns hassling publishers as long as she could stomach the job, then pass the phone along to the next person. But in the more subjective realm of editorial tasks, such collaboration seemed downright perverse if not completely counterproductive.

"We would group-edit reviews," recalls Heath. "We would sit down together with a piece--we did this for almost two years, a year and a half at least. It was an ideal we strived for. It was about not establishing a hierarchy."

It was also a good way to waste valuable hours dickering over a slight change in authorial tone. For anyone who doesn't spend much time wrangling over words, it's difficult to imagine how impossible that ideal might be. Consider such democracy extended to the sidelines of a football game. Or, better yet, imagine the infield convening on the mound to debate the relative merits of each upcoming pitch.

"I don't have the same aesthetic as Eric," Heath says simply. "For me it was more of a question of audience, a tone that would cross more boundaries. I wanted to be the ignorant guy. I didn't want references that I didn't know. It all comes back to my original vision--a tool for readers to discover new books."

Gradually, Heath and Kuebler both withdrew from the editorial aspects of the journal they'd founded. Heath grew more interested in the design aspects of the magazine, Kuebler in reviewing.

As Lorberer puts it, "We all learned what we liked and what we didn't like about that job. I guess I liked enough of it to continue."

Neither of the original editors left over "creative differences," both are quick to add. Heath still creates the magazine's often abstract and gothic covers, and Kuebler remains a regular contributor. Instead, the balance of power gradually shifted from one set of hands to another. In 2000, Heath and Kuebler moved to New York City together, to further careers in editing and publishing. They still work in publishing: The intensity of working on an underfunded start-up for several years hasn't driven them away from the book world. (Though, for what it's worth, they are no longer a couple.)

Having lived through its start-up years and become slightly less underfunded, Rain Taxi has actually grown since the transfer of power. In addition to sponsoring a host of literary events, Lorberer and Everding now ship out some 15,000 copies of each issue, both to subscribers and for free distribution at bookstores in 45 states. Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, and West Virginia have yet to be infiltrated.

The phrase "literary community" should probably only be employed when the time comes each year to hoodwink generous foundations and their venerable administrators. Yet it is in developing a public presence for the local literary avant-garde that Rain Taxi has thrived in recent seasons. Josie Rawson has warm memories of Rain Taxi's first reading in 1998, given by the Chinese-born poet Arthur Sze. "He gave a reading that was transfixing," she says. "Here was a man who presented his own material in so compelling a way, all you can do was sit there sort of stunned."

More concretely, however, Rawson remembers what happened afterward, when Sze and his listeners converged upon her home. "There were a bunch of writers hanging out in a way that you'd imagine other writers in another time and another place did. We sat on my back porch, talking about poetry and writing for hours, like it mattered. It's the sort of thing I didn't realize was so rare until it actually happened."

Such an idyllic recollection offers a glimpse into the utopian literary community Rain Taxi imagines. Rain Taxi doesn't just stage readings. It brings writers to town--Victor Hernández Cruz, Claudia Keelan, Franz Wright, Clayton Eshleman--sets them up to speak in galleries, and ushers them into a local body of book people (the literary community, if you will).

Lorberer and Everding had initially found such an environment as graduate students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, which is where they first met. Then they migrated to Baltimore, where they had a near miss in attempting to open a bookstore. The next stop was Minneapolis. "We threw a dart, basically," says Lorberer. "We'd heard it was a good place to live. But at the time I had no idea there was as substantial a literary community as there actually is."

Oddly enough, a big chunk of that community was composed of people Lorberer and Everding already knew quite well. "There must have been a half dozen people who went to the U Mass grad program who wound up in the Twin Cities," says Bill Waltz. Waltz, who publishes the local poetry zine Conduit was one of those transplants. "There was sort of this mass exodus," he adds with an inadvertent geographical pun.

And key to that collaborative spirit, it would seem, is the muting of individual voices for the sake of the project. "We're trying to give pride of place to the work, and to place personalities second," is how Lorberer describes the reviewing tone he nurtures. "I was talking to the editor of a journal, who should probably remain nameless in light of the story, and they were talking about their Web page. That journal's most accessed page, the guy told me, is the one where they have the pictures of their interns." Rain Taxi has no pictures of its interns online. In fact, it currently has no interns.

And so, it was a surprise to find a page full of negative letters responding to a review by David Foster Wallace in the summer 2001 issue of Rain Taxi. "Elegantly pointless, me-obsessed, academically-challenged, falsely objective, asshole-scratching, hickified piece of writing" is what Robert Bly called Wallace's essay. None of the responses to Wallace's review of The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal (White Pines Press) was packed with quite so much hyphenated vitriol as Bly's. The response from anthologist Peter Johnson himself, for instance, was appropriately bemused. Then again, one Morton Marcus declared, "Wallace's review was shameful, not only for him writing it, but for you printing it." Not coincidentally, Marcus is a prose poet himself.

To be fair, the piece in question invited some measure of controversy. Wallace's three-page spread was quite a coup for Lorberer and company, as this top-hole author was paid as much as all the other reviewers (which I will remind you is nothing). In a typical trumping of form, the author of the exquisitely and exhaustingly footnoted Infinite Jest broke down the anthology into numerical components. The result was a rather impassioned piece masquerading as a dry encyclopedic rendering, one you're certainly entitled not to be dazzled by, particularly if you've already consumed your annual quota of DFW metacriticism and minutiae. But it did address the work in question, even if it also went out of its way to tweak the phallic connotations of editor Peter Johnson's name. Unlike most reviews in Rain Taxi, this was a verbal performance, in which the critic assumed as much importance as the text.

Perhaps the vehemence of the response suggests just what an exception this piece was to Rain Taxi's typical fare. The journal does indeed publish negative reviews, but it does so sparingly, and none are outright diatribes. The journal is not argumentative in tone. As Lorberer explains, "The reason that the majority of the reviews are positive is that the process of selection itself is an aspect of reviewing--we're trying to select the best of the best. My hope is that the reviews are substantive, and that they're not just cheering the writer on."

Rawson agrees. "There are so few avenues in the reviewing press for praise for books from small presses, independent presses, it's hardly worth wasting space on books nobody should be reading anyway."

Yet not everyone believes that treating lesser-known works with kid gloves does the literary scene any favors. In a trenchant (and characteristically bombastic) broadside on his Web site www.cosmoetica.com, local gadfly and poet Dan Schneider argues that Rain Taxi's "puff pieces" ultimately add up to nothing more than a "magalog." "These 'supposed' journals," Schneider writes, "have become--in effect--mere book catalogs. They give title, author, publisher, price, a rosy review, and sometimes even ordering/contact information."

Many of the contributors to Rain Taxi are either published or prospective poets or writers of fiction, and this may inform the occasional gingerly handling of others' work. The right of a particular book to exist--or the value in its existence--is rarely questioned. A Rain Taxi review doesn't argue.

A journal reflects the tone of its editor, and like Lorberer himself, these reviews are sure in their presentation of the facts--not smug, but so assured they feel no need to protest. Which raises the question of whether it is possible to have a dialogue when both sides agree. After all, when we imagine Rawson's evocation of "writers in another time and another place," staying awake long into the night, we imagine them arguing. Surely a literary community could be created from vigorous dissent, no?

Don't ask me. I'm not about to risk my livelihood on that assumption. Eric Lorberer, however, relies on his ethos for groceries and the mortgage. And it's a belief he's been laboring to disseminate just about anywhere people discuss contemporary literature. Which is why Lorberer doesn't have to make an argument for his editorial position. Until Lorberer gives up or the money runs out, his vision will continue shipping four times a year.

City Pages Volume 22, Issue 1090 October 24, 2001

Ecstatic Mundane: An Interview with Elaine Equi

by Jim Feast

A mainstay of the New York literary scene since the late 1980s, Elaine Equi is known as a writer of aphoristic wit, philosophical depth, and visual precision. Her many books include Voice-Over (1999), which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems (2007), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain (2015), all published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and in many editions of The Best American Poetry, for which she served as guest editor in 2023. In 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Equi has always been fascinated by how the consumer products we live among form ties with the self. In The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), for example, discussing her mother’s scent bottles in “Perfume Dioramas,” she links family memories to these store-bought items, deepening both. In Equi’s latest book, Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press, $18), her fascination continues, but here the products are more often connected to fantasies—as in “Maple,” where observation of a bottle of syrup leads to a vivid daydream of vampires. Few other writers have so gleefully and trenchantly examined the commodification of everyday life.  

     

Jim Feast: In poetry, the notion that we should appreciate the simple things in life has become something of a cliché, but you take this theme in new directions, working at times straightforwardly and at others ironically. In “I Saw Delight,” for example, you describe walking after a rain shower with extraordinary precision: “The shadows were dark and luxurious / beneath silver trestles of light.” My sense is that you put great pressure on words to capture the everyday, using terms that are suitable yet never expected. Does that sound true?

Elaine Equi: I’m happy you started with this poem, because it’s an unusual one. It’s true I often do write about mundane things and everyday life, but I think of this particular piece as being the record of a real vision—a true moment of illumination. It came about as the result of my drinking a cocktail made from several different gem elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body and energy field. Gem elixirs are small bottles of water or alcohol in which different stones or flowers have been steeped in order to charge them with their essence. You can buy them online or in some health food stores. I’m not an expert by any means, but the idea of them appeals to my imagination. Their effects on me are usually subtle, but on this occasion, they were quite dramatic—almost psychedelic. When I stepped outside my front door, I swear I could see light traveling. As I say in the poem,

I saw a woman carrying the trophy of a gold balloon,
letting it bounce lightly above her head—
her thoughts golden.

Someone else was walking a diamond dog.
Each of its hairs was polished to perfection.

From every object, prisms of paths opened.

I was ecstatic. Of course, when I tried the experiment again, it wasn’t the same—not even close. The title “I Saw Delight” is a one-line poem by Robert Creeley called “Homage to Hank Williams,” a play on Williams’s famous spiritual song “I Saw the Light.”

JF: Another way you handle the quotidian is to mention one of life’s small pleasures and then use it as a springboard into magnificent whimsy. An example is “Maple,” which begins with a deft description of “its high-pitched sweetness,” but then segues into a lurid territory where in a dream vision you are swigging syrup, saying, “I am drinking the blood of the forest.” Can you talk about creating these flights of fancy?

EE: I’m often influenced by writers of short prose works that have a dark, fantastic, or satiric side. Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen is tattooed on my heart. I’ve taught and read it many times. I’m also thinking here of Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms, and Robert Walser’s quirky sketches. From all the above, I’ve studied the art of making absurd statements with a straight face and matter of fact tone. In the poem you mention, I found it funny to treat maple syrup as a dangerous substance. I was exaggerating but not all that much; I do find maple hard to resist. Plus, I like the idea of using its sweetness to mask a hidden wild or aggressive nature.

JF: Both these strategies of dealing with the everyday could be considered labors that bring poetry closer to the real. Alain Badiou says that to reach the real, “there is an art of rarefaction, an art of obtaining the subtlest and most durable results, not through an aggressive posture with regard to inherited forms, but through arrangements that place these forms at the edge of the void, in a network of cuts and disappearances.”[i] Could you talk about your approach to the real?

EE: That’s an interesting quote by Badiou. I don’t think I come close to “the edge of the void” in my poems. I do try to use very precise and vivid language, and often focus intensely on a simple subject, maybe to create a sense of the hyper-real. One of the things I like about photography is how it shows you a very different aspect of what you think you’re seeing. I’m also a fan of the sur-real, a reality that encompasses dreams, the irrational, the unconscious. Is there just one “real” with different levels? I’m not sure, but I think that as a writer, whether you’re committed to absolute realism or pure fantasy, the real is something you can’t avoid. You can use language to explore and engage with it, but I don’t know that you can ever come close to actually describing or representing it, even in purely mathematical terms. It’s bigger than that. When I write, I feel, or perhaps imagine, that I can sense the real as a kind of gravity or pull. It’s the page beneath the page.

JF: Your ability to discern effervescent qualities of ordinary reality is often used to examine slight objects to which most people would offer little attention. In your previous collection The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), poems such as “Monogrammed Aspirin” and “Still Life with Radish” did this too. Can you discuss your communion with things?

EE: Objects have always been one of my favorite subjects. When I first began writing, I was an avid reader of the French poet Francis Ponge. He wrote almost exclusively about objects. He had a book called Things and another one called More Things, and another called Soap, which was all about soap. As a tribute to him, I named one of my early chapbooks Friendship with Things. I also had a full-length collection inspired by his work, called The Cloud of Knowable Things (Coffee House Press, 2003).

Not surprisingly, I was also a fan of William Carlos Williams—and of all the Objectivist poets. They gave me a way to think of the poem itself as an object—“a small machine made of words”—and to see words themselves as objects.

We’re now so used to digital and virtual realities that real things seem a bit dated. As I say in the poem you mention from my previous book, “These days, all objects are antiques.” In my new book, I was pleased to find a way to write about mental states as if they were objects—I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner. In the poem “Emotions: A Boxed Set,” for example, I write about the heebie-jeebies as “the kind of tail-in-socket anxiety / that plugs directly into the body— / manifesting in myriad symptoms of dis-ease.”

JF: When you were going to school and growing up as a poet, Chicago had a bustling and distinctive poetry/arts scene. How did that milieu influence your work?

EE: I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather have studied poetry than Columbia College in Chicago—it was a fun, loose, and creative place in the ’70s. It had an excellent film and photography department, and in creative writing, they had just hired an exciting poet, Paul Hoover, to replace Bill Knott. Paul and his then wife, Maxine Chernoff, edited a very cool magazine called Oink! They knew everybody and were really plugged into contemporary poetics from the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain, fresh takes on surrealism, and beyond. I was in heaven. Every semester I’d sign up for an independent study with Paul just so I could hang out with him and Maxine in their Rogers Park apartment, peruse their bookshelves, and discuss goings on in the poetry world.

Shortly after graduating, I met up with another young poet, Jerome Sala, known for reciting his work to growing numbers of enthusiastic fans in a punk bar called La Mere Viper. By then, I had published my first chapbook, Federal Woman. We each had a glimmer of reputation and the desire to do something out of the ordinary (maybe a tad more flamboyant) with our writing, so we started reading together, mostly in bars and art galleries. It didn’t hurt that we were wildly attracted to each other, too. We had good chemistry off stage and on. Our events were more like parties; sometimes they involved bands, and people you wouldn’t necessarily think would enjoy poetry would show up. You could call us performance poets—we did perform our poems, but we were also performing the idea of poet-ness, often in a satiric way, inventing our identities as we went along. Everything we did had a DIY quality. We’d spend hours combing thrift stores for just the right retro fashions. What I remember most is that the arts were not so separate then—there was much more overlapping between different scenes. Partly it was the times, but it was also something Jerome and I cultivated by exploring the idea of a poetry that could be entertaining and appeal to non-poets.

JF: Earlier you mentioned trying “elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body.” This ties in with the poem “My Mother And I Send Each Other Circles,” where we learn that when your speaker talks on the phone with mother, “We telepathically juggle globes of color.” Both seem like nurturing forms of practice, but I wonder if you are working from a particular spiritual framework—or if, like a bricoleur, you are putting together different customs that seem to work together.

EE: I credit my maternal grandmother and my mother—Out of the Blank is dedicated to both—for giving me a deep appreciation of magic, the metaphysical, and the occult. But it was never connected to a particular tradition, and it certainly wasn’t formal. The spirit of our investigations was more like an imaginative game. My grandmother had a lot of superstitions. She also told good ghost stories and was really into Greek and Roman mythology. My mom and I liked to read horoscopes and tarot. We used to drink tea and do our cards as a ritual after I got home from school.

When I moved to New York, we’d talk on the phone a lot, and we came up with the idea of sending each other circles of different colored light before hanging up. It was mostly done as a fun way to liven up our conversations. What I especially like about this poem is how it captures, almost word for word, exactly what we’d say. Another poem later in the book, “My Mother Dreams of Dying,” is entirely in her voice. I didn’t add anything to this amazing dream she had told me about, also over the phone.

JF: You usually have a number of short poems in your books, and Out of the Blank is no exception; maybe there are even more in it than usual. What is it about them that appeals to you?

EE: Formally, I’ve always been drawn to compression and tend to write shorter poems with short-ish lines. Like one of my all-time favorite writers, Lorine Niedecker, says in “Poet’s work”: “I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery.” I remember, when I first came upon her work, feeling a sense of joyful recognition, almost as if we were related. I identified with her—here was a Midwestern woman poet who came from a more working-class background and who valued brevity. Her poems are so lucid—simple yet subtle and nuanced.

Other writers who have dazzled me with their ability to do more with fewer words would have to include Robert Creeley, Charles Reznikoff (there’s a poem for him in the book called “C.R.”), Joe Brainard, Tom Clark (there’s a poem for him in the book called “T as in Taut”), Aram Saroyan, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, to name just a few.

To return again to photography, another passion of mine, I think of short poems as being able to zoom in like a telephoto lens and create a close-up of a few words. If they were buried in a longer line, you might not notice the tension or vibration between them as much. Take, for example, my poem “Goblet”; it lets you taste or swirl the shifting sounds as if you were sipping a glass of wine:

my grape       my globe      my gape

my glazed     my glare      my grimace

my glint        my grant      my giant

my goose      my gravy      my grail

I don’t always write such compact things, but even in pieces with more syntax, I try to boil down my ideas to make them more concentrated, as in this next poem:

The Marrow

Of a poem.

Meat of meaning

that travels with Bashō
the narrow road—

network of veins
leading to leaf-lip.

Magnetic pull
of green-blooded words.

Actually, there is no short answer to why I find short poems endlessly fascinating. I just do.

[i] Badiou, Alain, The Century (Polity Press, 2007); English translation by Alberto Toscano.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Henry Martin: An Active Ear

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

Henry Martin with Roue de bicyclette by Marcel Duchamp at Philadelphia Museum of Art, from Henry Martin: An Active Ear

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Absent Here

Bret Shepard
University of Pittsburgh Press ($18)

by Jeff Alessandrelli

Bret Shepard’s second collection, Absent Here, could be called a “project” book, in that all its poems are centered on one topic—in this case Alaska, which here seems less a state than a state of mind. Tundra, darkness, Arctic, body, language, absence: certain words that repeat in the text feel less written than lived (and indeed, as the author bio on the back cover tells us, “Bret Shepard is from the North Slope of Alaska”). Lines from the serial poem “Here but Elsewhere” are emblematic:

The absence is enormous in the Arctic.   

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Some deaths create other ways to die.

Some losses you only understand once

your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.

Shepard’s approach in Absent Here is both reflexive and discursive. Early in the book, “On Ice” asserts:

Faces retain what the world gives back to us. We see it
in the mirror. Because it is already done, the mirror reflects

small ways we reduce. Like ice rolled over mistakes,
we grieve what we touch, the selves we try to change too late.

Toward the end of the collection, in “Summer Camp,” a bull caribou falls dead, and by being “taken apart” it is simultaneously “also reduced to more.” From any angle, there’s a sadness to Shepard’s Alaska, an overhang of the past’s erasure against the present’s inevitability; the speaker is often looking back at what once was and is no longer. “Territories,” which contains the epigraph “Report paints grim picture about Alaska Native language fluency, but hope remains,” begins with the decree “I’m missing a language for what is lost,” followed by the repetition “Tundra. Tundra. Tundra. Tundra” and the lines “In difficulty, a grammar for the vastness // measured in millions of eye lengths.” In this white and desolate landscape, the speaker considers the weight of poorly made past decisions (“The village voted itself dry / again. What is paradise // but a final tally of choices / given to innocence, sin // given to sunless days”), and what isn’t seen—absence piled upon absence—matters just as much as what is.

“Territories” is also notable for the line “I don’t have a language that isn’t white,” a reference to the region’s tumults of snow that also hints at a racial component to Shepard’s picture of Alaska. The observation is well-deserved—after Hawaii, Alaska has the highest percentage of Indigenous residents among U.S. states—and Shepard is wise to foreground the particular absence of non-whiteness his own whiteness dictates. Still, Absent Here is not a confessional text in any standard conception of the word; its poems are imaginative, far flung, and oftentimes non-linear, and even moments that seem to relate the author’s personal experience exhibit a stark refusal to accept a solid version (or vision) of selfhood. Take the opening section of the collection’s final poem, “Here but Elsewhere”:

Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq

name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds

from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them

now if my mouth could shape the words.

In his well-known review of Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning 2016 film Manchester By the Sea, critic A. O. Scott notes that it is “less concerned with nostalgia than with the psychology of loss.” Absent Here is squarely interested in the same thing. Although the book is filled with ideas and images of Alaska that a non-resident might also initially recognize (darkness, isolation, snow, etc.), Absent Here steadfastly troubles any fixed picture of Alaska—as a project, as a state, Alaska (like the self) remains ongoing amidst its vast and immediate absences.  

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