Sherry Chandler

It’s May 1 and the Sideshow exhibit has been struck. I’ve asked that my poem-on-glass be washed away. Somehow it seems right that it be ephemeral. For one thing, it wasn’t the most successful thing I’ve ever done. Nevertheless, the question of visual poetry remains unresolved and engaging.

So to commemorate Mayday, I’ve asked Geoff Huth if I can post his sandglyph Wreed. It isn’t green and flowering but it is organic and as fleeting as May blossoms, having been long since washed out by the tide. I like its combination of poetry and installation art and somehow it seems comforting to me this gloomy spring. Visit his site dbqp for more on “visual poetry and the personal experience.”

It’s Mayday and Miller’s Pond begins its reading period (May 1 - October 31) for the 2006 annual. Check here for guidelines. The magazine has a web issue and a print issue. Be sure you’re submitting to the version you prefer.

Names I recognize from past print editions: Dorianne Laux, Christine Delea, Hadyn Carruth. Good company. Send your best stuff.

from Saturday’s NYTimes online:

It’s 1969; the phone is the medium and the poem is the message. Dial-A-Poem is brand-new. You pick up your phone, dial (212) 628-0400 and hear one of a dozen recorded poems by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, John Cage or who knows who. The next day there’s a fresh dozen. Some are dirty. Some are radical. A lot are about guns. Some really aren’t poems at all but songs or rants or sermons.

…

Dial-A-Poem was first set up at the Architectural League on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “It was one room and 10 phone lines,” said Bill Berkson, one of the Dial-A-Poem poets who occasionally minded the store, noting that “the will to subversion was intense.”

What callers got was not just three-minute hits of poetry. They got Black Panther speeches, and they got Buddhist mantras. Dial-A-Poem was part of the downtown scene, the antiwar movement and the sexual revolution. “It was agitprop,” Ms. Waldman said.

In its brief existence, the phones moved from place to place, off again, on again. By 1971 they were gone.

Now you get Dial-A-Poem by clicking on www.ubu.com/sound/dial_index.html, one of the subdivisions of UbuWeb, a huge online archive of avant-garde poetry. There you’ll see a menu of a dozen Dial-A-Poem albums put out by Giorno Poetry Systems.

from Frank Rich’s current column in the NYTimes:

Last week President Bush signed a Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that allows “family-friendly” companies to sell filter technology that cleans up DVD’s of Hollywood movies without permission or input from the films’ own authors and copyright holders. That sounds innocuous enough until you learn that even “Schindler’s List” isn’t immune from the right’s rigid P.C. code. As the owner of CleanFlicks, the American Fork, Utah, company that goes further and sells pre-sanitized DVD’s, once explained to The New York Times: “Every teenager in America should see that film. But I don’t think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles.” And so Big Brother can intervene to protect our kids from all that geriatric Holocaust porn.