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Feb
2008
Guest Editor
Ralph LaCharity
Privileged Miscellanea
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La
Charity has been public as a poet since 1970. He first
began presenting his work in music settings as a result
of the vivid physical quality of his delivery, working
for two years as house poet at JAZZ PLUS Nightclub in Honolulu
HI, with Bob Braye's Peace & Rhythm jazz ensemble in
the early 80's. Working in collaboration with two Cincinnati-based
musicians in 1996, guitarist Richard Williams & saxophonist
Jack Walker, La Charity, as poet/percussionist, formed
the musical trio, SáSemblé, dedicated to
performing what the poet calls "village jazz & word."
Among
the poet's books currently in print are: four-by-fars;
on Som bo; and CINEMANUENSING, all from Aloud Allowed Impress
of Cincinnati in the late '90s, and Seatticus Knight, from
Black Heron Press of Seattle/San Francisco, released in
1985. Two audio cassette anthologies include his work,
Poets Along the River, from Mesilla Press of San Antonio
TX, 1991, and Road Word Live, from Burning Press of Cleveland
OH, 1994. The poet currently edits & publishes W'ORCs/ALOUD
ALLOWED, a poetry samizdat he originated in then-West Germany
in 1986, based since 1992 in Cincinnati. An October 2003
taped 50-minute video of La Charity performing solo at
the Jailhouse in Fred Fuller Park in Kent OH is available
from RC Wilson Jr of that city.
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| Ralph
LaCharity, guest editor, cincinnati, WORC's, skaldric cauldron, |
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" blue
mathemaku"
by Bob Grumman
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Following
One’s Nose: into the sounds and sights
I really have nothing to gain here save the possibilities of poetry, despite
bald-faced evidence on every hand of poetry’s purported obsolescence.
A greatly resourceful treachery continues to abound. The dictionaries
don’t quite lie but they certainly cannot stay abreast.
That law corrupts, fully as much as it confounds, flummoxes
the polity. It is as if each step taken is upon a topography
deceitful beyond any defense: snowshoes will not help, there
are no handrails, these are slippery slopes
thin as thinnest ice. So treacherous is said environment, only
the mitten of instinct and the glove of intuition qualify as
appropriate sufficiencies. The intransitive rules. Nonesuch
insists. Democracy? Forget about it. If inspiration does not
will its whisp hither, the yawn of a perdurable Ice Age will.
This is what it has come to. Where it has always been. According
to the restroom wall, everybody’s in better shape than
me...
“It
all comes down to the ring of bone.
Where
ring is what a bell does.”
-Lew
Welch
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What
follows is a foreshortened virtual issue of my own samizdat
and staple-zine, W’ORCs/ALOUD
ALLOWED, a transparent magic lantern and diving bell of bone,
glimpsed en passant … yes, W’ORCs
always worried the aural resonances of poetry, which is to
say, its actual sound. In what follows, another element is
introduced: the visual.
“So what’re you doing … laughing,
or aiming?”
-Mickey One
Katharine Polak is most interested in graphic evocations, and her paper, "Bleeding
Skins," begins to lay
a
foundation for pursuing the intersection between poetry and art
---
she would point out that what might be considered lurid in so many current comic
book representations of psycho-drama ("John Constantine in America")
have their roots in ancient hybrid representations, such as the minotaur (as
well
as in,
say,
the
swirling
visionary
mytho-phantasias
of William Blake).
Geof Huth has a more eclectic and particularized contemporary approach, insisting
that poetry “tends inexorably towards the visual.” He devotes himself
to nurturing that inexorability via whatever can be made to crackle and glow
through the highly porous environs of the United States Postal Service --- he
deserves a far more investigative sampling than we achieve here, but it’s
a start.
To my eye, both Polak and Huth are tracking poetry’s radiances in ways
at once provocative and profound. That which is intriguing in what they pursue
will occur to you as you, like me, follow your nose onward, into the samplings,
and the links, provided …
-Ralph
La Charity
February
2008
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