NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

I have never been to New York (anyone going to offer me a reading tour?) so I was fascinated by the article about the Queens district on the front page — QUEENS: A WRITER'S RETREAT. Somehow the description of this ethnically diverse district where a writer

talking about his latest achievement in arty tones and effete delivery would earn a long hard look, and maybe even a kick in the balls

The rest of this publication — 5 sheets of A4 stapled together — is closely packed with reviews and poems assembled by the old (literal) cut and paste method. You can see the joins and different typefaces, which gives the impression of an amateurish urgency and enthusiasm you might expect from a college fanzine, except that most of those are now produced as ezines or weblogs.

The poetry is mixed. Andy di Michele suffers from linguistic experiments that are sometimes incomprehensible as in LUCIFUGUE TREMENS:

	this is anomaly misnomerism in the
	prehistoric villages between vertebrae
	this is the other chaos chaos
	which petrifies sullen disorder its
	predictable indeterminancies

	Betrayed by the dog
	who leapt into your arms

	Spits, urinates and
	Defecates in L.A.

There are many curious things about this small literary journal. This issue consists of nine densely-printed A4 sides, stapled in the upper left-hand corner, rather like a crowded office memo. But within this space, there is a considerable variety of interesting material, some of which is bold and innovative. The opening page is given over wholly to an intelligent, balanced and frequently amusing editorial about the writer's vocation, entitled PROFESSIONAL DEFORMATIONS:

The occupation of a individual twists his view of life, alters his behavior patterns, narrows his focus, skews his reactions. Your job is a major part of your day. Merely doing it requires mind alteration with all its attendant oddities. Writers are no different. Their concerns, obsessions and occupational aberrations reveal themselves as surely as those of carpet retailers, psychologists, dentists and schoolmarms.

Pages 3 and 4 form an extract from a fiction by John Crouse, called JIMMYS, which I also found completely unintelligible. Marginally more successful was a page of MONOPOEMS by Richard Kostelanetz, although this too struck me as a somewhat hollow art-form, more of a private game with words than a public speech-act. Alan Catlin's montages and poems are more accessible, although these too are undistinguished, while Nathan Whiting's poems are allusive enough to be virtually closed semantically:

	All animals
	scratch the ear.  Our volcano

	Cools its amplified cat purrs.
	Ballet experimental hip hop,
	a group takes a fetish tour
	of the destroyed city, secret
	parties, orgies cooled by broken
	walls. Heavy lightning heats
	blue snow, nudity debated here.

	this child struggles
	with the apostrophe
	at the end of a word,
	as if it is an unquiet, unreal thing,
	this possession,

	the bowed heads of the workers
	streaming in and out of the factories,
	their expressionless faces
	so like moats round what's really going on,

ZYX is a stapled broadsheet of nine pages, edited by Arnold Skemer. It contains an essay, DEPRESSION, several short reviews, a story, LAPSE SEVEN by John Crouse, SELECTIONS FROM Q BY THE EDITOR, TWO PAGES OF POEMS BY Leonard J. Cirino and John Grey and a page of artwork by G. Huth.

The theme of Skemer's essay is the "occupational melancholia" particular to the writer's craft. Many writers will have had similar anxieties to those experienced by Skemer:

If you are a writer or poet certain assumptions are made about you, namely that you are rather odd, that you are abnormal, that you are a verbose bore, that you're isolated from others, that you are mentally unusual and suffer from depression, simply more proof that you're a freak.

Jon Crouse's story seems to owe something to James Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE in its use of compound words such as "mudgummy", "jawgnashed", "lastditch spikethin hardons", etc. As FINNEGANS WAKE insists,

The traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contraries eliminated, in one stable somebody.

	Odd, how summer shifts to fall,
	And cold comes early; the moon
	Glints off leaves a few feet away.
	The meadow is swathed in light,
	And, inches from my face,
	The nearest apple drops.  A hundred yards
	To the south, one last salmon floats
	Belly-up, in the current.

	I watch a woman
	toss ashes over the back of her boat,
	probably her husband.
	Everyone else is dragging
	raw creatures from the sea
	but she is throwing back
	the finished product.

How could I have lived so long without Arnold Skemer's editorials? When I saw the title of the zine — yes, I am ignorant Arnold Skemer, I hadn't heard of you before... — I said, ah! here's another wily one out to catch those who start reading small press lists from the end of the alphabet... but I grabbed my CLAM Directory and of course glossy ZYZZYVA would still be first past the post. But who cares? That's for West Coasters only. I hope ZYX is more open-armed. Then I went online, and found 160,000 entries for ZYX. "ZYX bayside" yielded what I wanted: editorials from earlier editions. I was then stuck to my screen, wondering if I was going to pass his test of what constitutes a writer.

For those like me who didn't know ZYX, this is pretty basic publishing. You have to imagine Arnold Skemer in his Bayside New York kitchen, stapling the pages together, and some pages too! Editorial apart, this is a cut and paste job, so it is up to the reader to find his way about but in the long run it's worth making the effort not to be put off by appearances.

Albany poet Alan Catlin has 18 poems, squashed into 2 pages, most on a musical theme, ranging from reflections on Glenn Gould to Casals and Clara Schumann and Satie. These are a bit hard to read (dashes and hyphens not differentiated which makes for "winter wheat-Christmas trees") but I liked the beginning of SENTINELS:

	The unnaturally-colored
	cats watching
	from the tarred roof

	are escapees from an
	American primitive
	gone seriously wrong...

	...the beaten drums
	are what
	the heart does
	when
	there is a 
	cessation
	of breath-at the end
	there
	are only notes
	left behind-we assume
	the rest.

This is a powerful reflection on our relationship with music which must come across perfectly well when read aloud, not so well when seen cut up into bite-size pieces... but then that's just my opinion...

There is a page of contributions too from dancer-poet Nathan Whiting including DANCING WITH 200 POUNDS OF CLAY about the poet's experience of Noh dancing:

	breath light gallery rays
	lifted flowers, feet on cold,
	deftly arranged, woven ritual...

	On your shoulder a sad bird's song

	fills your left ear, then the right...

On the last page (p9) Jon Cone has eleven songs. The one for Vasko Popa, on the writer's predicament, and in answer to the Serbian poet's THE LITTLE BOX from HOMAGE TO THE LAME WOLF, goes like this:

	Look you've given me a box.
	A small one.
 
	I can get my head in it.
	Or my two legs.
 
	But not my head and my legs.
	Do you see my predicament?
 
	Years ago I refused the contortionist.
	Am I paying the price now?
 
	Please, Papa, another box!
	And not after you've finished 
	your fourth coffee.