I couldn't emembe what I can this column of mine because Charley walloppolloozed up the Peace River two mile south a my sidings, innards and cat, Shirley, an' woggled my brainpan a bit tuther month. I come out of it okay with just a shingly lawn and a losted back porch) an ten days a no eIectrics, and--hey--as I pen this they be mens reconnecting me up tub cable tv after over a month. They says I might be ahookin up with the tellyphone today, too. Which would mean I can finally get back on the Innemet cept I think my Innemet people got made dead by the hurricane. I got one a them army tarps on the roof now, so no leaks. FEMA sent money. Not enough to pay entire for a new top, but okay, for sure. My intake as a mathematical poem-maker'll make up the dif. But, godolmighty, the stress! To tell you, if you member, how I come to name this colum.

No, this ain't no genuwine Cracker dialect, jus me tryin to be funny again. Which I won't be no more in this specifical colunm, 'cause I got some serious old-man-summin'-it-all-up spoutin to do, brought on by hearin ftom Jaw Knee his own self that this is probly the lastest LAFT.

EXPERIMENTATION

A word to the fore: "stasguard." That's a person who guards the stasis quo. At his worst, he'll do so unconsciously--assuming without reflection that the small slice of the arts he was exposed to in school is Culture--permamently unaugmentable Culture. Hence, the new in art will simply bounce off him, unnoticed. The better stasguard, no doubt ftom having had artworks that do new things forced on him over and over, will notice them. He may even notice them in print (as degenerate, empty, new tor the sake of newness only, etc.), but only if he feels they may take over.

Of course, there are also stasvandals, out to destroy all that isn't brand-new. They would be worse, perhaps, than stasguards if they weren't so extremely outnumbered by the latter. In any case, I tend to ignore them. I'd like to ignore the stasguards, too, but can't help getting annoyed with the way they keep me and the poets I admire out of anthologies, classrooms, grants, so snarl at them every once in a while, especially on the Internet.

Which brings me to Lost & Found Times, for thirty years presenting the widest range of wacked-out texts, graphics and mixes of the two out there. Burstnorm art, I'd call most of it, but the stasguards--the few who noticed it--would probably call it, "experimental art"-- and then belittle by arguing that all art is experimental. This is to debase the term "experimental." It is so often debased this way, that I no longer use it in my serious criticism. It ought to refer to attempts to find out what might happen if one does something significantly different from everyone else in one's field, not to find out what might happen if you write a sonnet or an Iowa plaintext lyric poem about your mother.

Which brings me to the following poem by our John M., whose poems and collaborations have backboned this magazine for all thirty years of its existence. I picked it to write about because of a high school reunion I went to. A good friend of mine named Rit Rudder was not there, which disappointed me. F nding out his e.mail address on the same day or near the same day that John distributed this poem to friends on the Internet, I sent it to my friend--because of its title, but also to give him an idea of what kind of weirld his old friend was sending poems out of. He took the poem amiably enough (especially for the corporate danged lawyer he is) but politely expressed a desire to find out more about it. I made that an opportunity to do a study of the poem, and attempt to provide entrances into it for the intelligent layman. Since it was near the time I needed to get a LAFTcolunm done, I decided to use what I wrote my friend in the colunm. When I found out this would probably be my final column, I kept to my plan. My response to the poem could serve as an appropriate apologia for all that LAFT was, in could do a decent job of it. In any case, here's the poem, to be followed by my comments on it:

Rudder

reddur bomb ,cash ,sgnul creeper ,pills ,goat enorht ,kcarc ,gush regnif ,teliot ,mug ffur
,dangle ,tellaw doom ,hsurc ,clang double, waj ,gunk spoon ,etaipo ,golf ssurt ,pmad,
bungee gel ,erutrot ,edge napping ,winkie ,gnuh loofa ,egdun ,heh knid ,paw ,wap dink
,heh, nudge afool, hung, eikniw gnippan, edge, torture leg, eegnub, damp truss, flog,
opiate noops, knug, jaw elbuod, gnalc, crush mood, wallet, elgnad ruff, gum, toilet finger,
hsug, crack throne, taog, sllip repeerc, lungs, cash bmob, rudder
                                                          do
                                                          om
                                                          pa
                                                          w
                                                          thro
                                                          ne
                                                          lun
                                                          g
                                                          s

The first thing that struck me about this poem was "reddur," next to "bomb," to evoke some catastrophe more than common red--and illiterately coarse. "Cash" suggests "crash," but ties in financial concerns. Then something about a wounded "signal." by now easy solution to the piece quickly suggests itself. Hence, the poem's first virtue for me: it is a puzzle which, if solved, will provide the pleasure figuring something out always must, if not too strenuously achieved.

Because I'm fairly familiar with John's poetry, having read it for years and written on it now and again, I remembered two devices he has worked with: backwards spelling, which he has been doing a lot of recently, and mirroring a text--making its second half the mirror or near mirror of its first. So I soon, albeit not immediately, in one sense solved the poem as a kind of mirror-construction, using words spelled backwards--on top of a passage spelled downward rather than sideways.

The poem/puzzle starts near the end of its third line with ",paw, wap." To the right and left of this, respectively are "knid" and "dink." And so the block of text spreads with pairs of words, one of which is spelled backwards. The point of it besides to provide the fun of a puzzle? Well, it slows the read, a standard aim of any poem. It also allows often resonant accidentals to occur, like "reddur" which, for me, connotes not only redness but primitiveness, basicness, and something about endurance. The "dink" that "knid" (which so stfongly suggests "kind") allows is another example--a kind of joke on the "bomb." But I find the reversals giving the poem a shimmer, or mildly dizzying effect in keeping with its opening. The misspelling helps the mood of disarray and confusion, too.

The mirroring provides what I call a coherative. This is a new word of mine, created especially for this, my final LAFT column!!! A coherative is something in an artwork that gives it a coherence. A narrative, something that organizes the elements of a literary work into a story, is the most common kind of coherative. It seems to me there are two others. One I call an "envirate." It's a coherative that organizes the elements of a work into an environment or setting--applicable in the case of so many poems, including very conventional ones, that are not narrative. Needless to say, all poems have some kind of narrative and some kind of envirative, this one included. Because this poem is not about any overt material setting, as far as I can tell, I find its coherative to be . . . an aesthative. That's a coherative that organizes the elements of a work into an aesthetic design. It is the basis of what I consider to be non-representational poems.

"Rudder" is representational, for it depicts a boat viewed trom the rear, with its rudder visible. . . . But it is essentially a smear of words like abstract-expressionistic smears of paint whose chief artistic value is what they do as sounds, typography and hints of meaning repeated and varied on against and with each other. Take, for example, the doom paw throne in the rudder of John's poem, by itself a vivid image, but expanded by "goat enorht" (is Pan there, and part of the "paw") and the "crack throne" earlier, and what kind of sgnul are the "lungs" the poem ends with transmitting? Is the poem finally about Nature? About the huge eternally active hsurc of things and their opposites that Existence is? And what about this "heh" that is the only word that retains its shape in the poem. Is this some dnik of jo

to be continued