Gilbert Sorrentino was one of the foremost critics of the Mimeo Revolution, who knew what he was talking about because he was immersed in it. He edited Neon and was on the Kulchur board. His critical work in Kulchur, Yugen, Floating Bear and elsewhere was widely read amongst the inner circle and much discussed in bars and cold-water flats. Here he is writing about Signal magazine in the pages of Floating Bear. If you want the benefits of hindsight, here is Stephanie Anderson writing on some overlooked mags of the New York scene from the mid-60s, including Signal.
Signal: A New
Magazine
I don’t know why I was asked to review one issue (the first)
of a new magazine, but maybe it’s because there are so few magazines around
nowadays; a new one that is also regular (one hopes) is something of an
event. O.K. This is a promising enterprise, with some of
the old “standby” names on the contents page, plus some new names. The material varies in value and interest,
but there is a kind of vitality in the issue which presages good things . . .
there is a “direction,” as it is said, which is another thing hard to find, not
only now, but anytime, in a magazine, viz., there is such a thing as
editing, an ability far removed from a collecting of “good” pieces, the
collection then being printed and distributed.
Signal has a feel to it, a kind of unity of intention(s).
To take the prose first.
Fee Dawson has a strong and well-done piece from what I understand is a
long work, Thread. It’s the best
thing of Fee’s I’ve seen in a long time, everyone knows that his prose is
unique in our time, his rapture in his own command of language is here
controlled so that we don’t get the “felicitous phrase” because, well, it’s
there, why not use it. I like the
dryness here, a thin bitter dryness.
David Kleinbard’s prose loses me, it’s from a novel, but I don’t know
who’s who, or what’s going on. He writes
well, meticulous, somewhat affected, if I remember right, the early Sansom
stories that appeared in Partisan Review about ’48 or ’49 had this texture, and
weave. I honestly don’t see how a “novel” written in this
manner could hold me though, too much dessert.
Bob Basara, well, he’s in Bill Burroughs’ bag, I can’t make it. Jimmy Waring writes like all amateurs write,
dancers, actors, painters, you name it.
His heart is in the right place, but what the hell? He says things like “tragedy has no sense of
humor.” O.K. I’ll buy that. Sort of like Jacques Plante facing
Koufax. Frank O’Hara’s spoof is lovely one, he’s got the officialese down
beautifully. Mike Rumaker’s poem has to
be included in with the prose, it’s a nice little piece, but it ain’t a poem.
What about the poems?
Some very strong stuff here.
LeRoi Jones has two handsome poems, one is extremely interesting, Three
Modes of History and Culture, the structure of the first section uses a
terse second “line” which slows the
movement of the poem and gives the third line (of each stanza) a rushing,
headlong movement, slams it into the first line of the next stanza, then the
process repeats itself. Jones is
becoming a truly excellent poet, the other poem too, is fine. Joel Oppenheimer has to old poems in here, I
saw them in MS about five years ago, they’re what you know you’ll get from him,
he’s a pro. I like Diane Di Prima’s Moth
because I like how she handles a short line, and I don’t feel any great
attraction toward her long-lined poems, they get heavy, and self-consciously
somber. This one is clean, terse and
exact in its vocabulary. Frank O’Hara’s
got one of his “walking around” poems, like very witty gossip, fine by me,
that’s what Frank does. Frank Lima
prints two incredibly strong poems, a very, very interesting young guy, the
best of the “newer” voices around. Bill
Merwin and John Wieners have two good poems, John particularly, his special
gentle tone. I don’t know what’s
happened to Dave Meltzer, I really thought he was going to come on but I
haven’t seen one thing by him that isn’t just so-so, in three years. Must be California air. I’ve read the other poems with varying
degrees of attention, some of them threw me, they’re poems, some of them, I
just couldn’t make it past the fifth or sixth line, but they’re not really bad,
they’re all saying something that I don’t care about, I guess, or they not
saying anything, tho Clive Matson has one good line, “even the roaches here
don’t eat what I leave them/theyre so feeble” (two lines), then I lose
him. But I try them again, they are
somewhere else, and not only haven’t I been there, but they make where they’ve
been a mystery. Levy and Irwin present
poems which look like the things that a college literary review with a hip
editor would print, like, the hell with the Phi Delta Xi! Last Year At Marienbad in words, ho-hum. Hart Crane’s poem is interesting because it’s
history, the lines and measure are awkward as hell, but the vocabulary,
imagery, and syntax prefigure the mature Crane, in fact, his (at sixteen!)
sense of image and metaphor are mature already; it remained for him to say
something he knew, deeply, and not invented, and to pick up on that might line
of Marlowe’s. But the presentation of
the poem is an excellent service.
All in all, as I said, a strong first issue. The one thing I really don’t like is the
shortness of the prose pieces. It’s not
good for a long piece to get chopped up this way, particularly in a quarterly,
but, till somebody comes along who’s willing to lose a specific amount of money
(say, 10 grand) on a weekly, Signal is, along with the few other
indigent publications, cooking.
Sorrentino
JB
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Complete characterization of the stability of cluster synchronization in complex dynamical networks. https://floorrefinishingalbanyny.com/
last published novel of Gilbert Sorrentino—his twentieth, though the math is complicated by his constant rejiggering of what, exactly, constitutes a novel—initially appeared to be A Strange Commonplace, published in 2006, shortly before his death. www.shopedc.com
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