Peshekee River Poetry -Number 3, Fall 2000. Editor: Tom Blessing. Peshekee River Poetry, Box 689, Eastpointe, MI 48021. The magazine is looking for poems and since no subscription cost is noted send two bucks for sample copy. Cough it up. - $2.00 is nothing. For $2.00 you can't buy love canal water laced with paperclips! peshekee@hotmail.com

     Editor Tom Blessing has got some fine work in his magazine, fine indeed. In all, I'd say, about one good lunch break worth of reading - which is enough poetry for any afternoon. He's got some writers in here, some poets that you probably know: Kenneth Pobo, Duane Locke and t. kilgore splake (who sent me a Christmas card - Thanks splake). All their contributions much good. Pobo's, "Bye Bye Upper P," and splake's "graybeard wisdom," and especially Locke's, "Plastic Carnations," all good/great/fine poems - you should read them - send Blessing 2 bucks. Let's get back to "Plastic Carnations." Ah, Locke's red head who could smell those plastic carnations… ah. And there are a lot of poets I did not know. I didn't know: ray heinrich, Mike McManus, Vernon James Mooers, Janet Buck, Doug Tanoury, J. Peter Mishler and Casey Langel. Now I do. You should also. And like Casey Langel writes, "I'm going to write the great "American" poem tonight/ and then toss it in a bonfire." Well, don't toss them $2.00 bucks in the fire of poetry. Slide those $2.00 bucks down the bar towards Tom Blessing. He is doing good for the poem. He spends some good sensitive and smart time choosing poems. Well, everybody's name is mentioned. Hell, might as well get in the other editors: Elize Matz, Leona Blessing, Beth Blessing and Kirstyn Blessing. Peshekee River poetry - ah - that's aqua pura.

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Bender Magazine - issue three ISSN: 1097-5578. Editor: Jeff Epley. Bender Magazine, Long Beach Downtown Station, P.O. Box 21261, Long Beach, CA 90801. Subscription for two issues: $8.00. Sample issue is $5.00. Make Check's payable to Jeff Epley.

     Downtown Long Beach has The Queen Mary tied up in its harbor and you can have a tour if you so wish. Motels are not so expensive. Bender Magazine makes no mention of the Queen Mary - Maybe it is the Queen E? Charles Bukowski lived next door in San Pedro. Gerald Locklin lives in Long Beach. Bender Magazine has a pullout chapbook by Gerald Locklin. I don't know if this pullout chapbook counts as one of Locklin's 100 plus books or not. But the poems matter. Locklin's contribution is called Incomplete Reformation. The chapbook is the center of Bender and Locklin's clean, unadorned Americansense of writing is the central governing poetic of Bender and those writers within. There are 28 poets in Bender and one piece of prose by John Brantingham called Growing up in the Red Desert. In seven paragraphs, two pages, Brantingham captures the confused essence of our sometimes ridiculous and truly bizarre first sexual information. Most of this we receive from our awkward parents. He does this with good, classic, direct humor. It's a sound, deep laugh. This story should be reprinted and reprinted and republished. Let's hear more. Of course the issue goes on and on - Dan Sicoli, Todd Kalinski, Joan Joby Smith, Lisa Glatt and hey, Joseph Shields, I know, I think I remember, Mrs. Matulka.

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Art & Life - by Gerald Locklin. Pariah Press 604 Hawthorne Avenue East, St. Paul Minnesota, 55101. Press Editor Richard D. Houff/Leo Kuelbs, Associate Editor. 22 pages. $5.00.

     Appropriately titled the poems in this small book by Gerald Locklin spring form visual art and from art them to all about life. Perhaps this could be all of this phase of Locklin's career. This is good. Usually his poems are short and ironic. Perhaps those sarcastic and humorous poems are the ones you recall. However, there is another Locklin, a deeply pondering, sophisticated and plain smart Locklin, and a Locklin behind the mask of Toad and tons of cream sherry and beer. This Locklin is represented in this small book. It opens with two long Locklin poems, "Bloomsbury" and "San Ramon Pastoral," and concludes with "Day Trips," which defines succinctly where the poet is at this stage in his life. The magic of Locklin's poems is that they not only define his space but the reader's emotional space also. So does then "Day Trips," defines a mature relationship where comfort is measurable in love's longevity and my love's tolerance and history. In each of Locklin's collections there are poems that define Locklin's poetry. In this book, "Degas Between Ballets," is such a poem. What is this poem about: It is about: degas painting dancers preparing for their art, which is the ballet. Oh course, it is all practice, rehearsal, the unbeautiful. So it is with writing and living. It is all unbeautiful and unglamorous, and routine. However, for a brief few seconds, the endless mundane existence of humanity and writing, sparks a few seconds perhaps one second where beauty appears and is then done. It is those seconds that Locklin explains and is so able to capture and hold for display, so that all might ponder and wonder at the power of art, and poetry, to transform our too very ordinary vapid lives into wonder.

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News from the Border - by Richard D. Houff, Limited Editions Press. Peter Magliocco Editor. P.O. Box 70896 Las Vegas, NV 89170. $5.00 32 pages

     After a few poems you know you are reading a poet and then a poet who has something to say. The saying is sometimes about the old time Eisenhower period (remember that nostalgic good time America?) - well - it wasn't that good. And I figured as much. It's a kinda America without the Kerouac romantic glamour and it is words that fit the black and white photographs of Robert Frank's The Americans. There are places to get a hair cut that are no longer there. There is walkin to school. There is finding stuff on the railroad tracks. There are uncles who feed you and buy you beers. There are the rules of the poor: Never rob the people from your own depressed hood; Always take care of those less fortunate; Always hit the rich hoods and leave posthaste…. You get it. So these are a poor man's poems - that is the tellin of a poor man's life in art. It is not just the puking after beer. It is all the black and white starving. All of it. Reminds me of damp and foggy mornings with burnt toast in the nostrils and a stone in your brown shoe that you can't get out because the last of the laces have been tied by grandma, so tight, so well that the worn brown shoe will never again leave the foot. Well, then, also Houff includes a few recipe poems. I think always of recipes as poems, but Houff here is able to pull it off with art. Cheers to him for taking this form under his wing. To round it all off there is an interview with Houff by Holly Day. And Houff also wrote: Trip: An LSD Adventure; If it Should Rain, and Street Poems and others. Find them.

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