Poetry, Prose Poetry and Vispo: Good Reads

Of *Atellier* by Claire Lux [AQP Collective, 179 Azelea Drive,
Afton, VA 22920, 26 pages] John Most [click here] says: "This small book of poems is the first of thirteen such books, each written using a different character/voice that I have invented: *Atelier* by Claire Lux, et cetera. The plan is to print each book separately in a small run and then compile then into a single book after the project is over."

"The festering wound
Impatience
Diagnosed through hypnosis
Sculpture failure /
Silt from the streets
Of my states urban
Center coursed through
Tangled veins
Mistreat
Little WANTS"
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Sheila E. Murphy *Concentricity* from Pleasure Boat
Studio 201 West 89th Street, #6F, NY, NY 10024
$13.95

Of Sheila Murphy's many excellent books in recent years, I am most excited by this one. It is all prose
poetry-this book has something like 80 dense, intensely imagistic, thoughtful poems, each one a complex, lyrical, dense puzzle, tempting the reader back to unlock its mysteries again and again. For years I've been delighted when I've come across a prose poem in a lit magazine by Sheila Murphy. She's one of those rare top-flight contemporary poets who isn't coy, is constantly in the fray, (frequently on the collective blog, As/Is). whose work is constantly inventive without being opaque in an annoying way:

(from *Pleasure*, p.44)

"Rhumba, samba, doe-eyed opposite of clash is education. Pens to match the theobald of summer slingshot into monster's eye. Spotted on the cry end of a seamed chaise facing all the brick light of a world through olive palms and chaps on someone riding. Do the half-tones rise with Adam's apple to the sonnet in a copybook? And do the whiled appointments harbor space of modesty? Cold bristles soften to the lanolin-bathed fingers close to sheep in lengths of semi-automatic flight. A gathering of leathergold
still suitable for taming..."
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*StampOlogue* by Nico Vassilakis
the Runaway Spoon Press Box 495597
Port Charlotte Florida 33949

photographic visual poetry
afterword by Gregory St Thomassino
with a response by Nico

Gregory writes: "'X' genealogist I know has 'rubbings' framed and hanging in her study. These remind me of them. I must tell her, there is something 'shroud of Turin' about them"

Nico responds: "...the process of doing vispo right now is still fun for me. sometimes it bites and i hate it and i don't do it for months, years, it loses its flavor and appeal for me if fussed over excessively. i try to learn how and when to approach vispo with openness. occassionally i get it right. sometimes it takes me from my text writing. it does that bcause it's easier for me to access less torment in creating vispo, i think. staring at textpo creates the potential for vispo."