Tentative Thumbs Up for Lisk's List

Eat your heart out, Variety . . . But seriously, folks, I have to say I like Thomas David Lisk's chapbook tentative list (a) [Kitchen Press, 2008], if for no other reason than he's thinking of poems as visual art - space of the page, blah blah, sure, but also fonts, boxes, pictures, characters, colors. AND: it's also a score for voice (if you bother to read it aloud). There is some serious stuff going on in terms of content/theme - a la DuPlessis' Drafts, maybe - but it's much more scattered. I don't know if that makes me feel more or less stupid than DuP does. Anyway, it's only seven bucks, and it's worth it.

Also: URLs imbedded in the body of the poem, which of course opens it out into the virtual world (and makes it an historical record, when that world crashes).

If Baumann is the poet of tic tac's, Lisk is the poet of tick tacks.

"deus et homunculus, Dorothy Gale and the Wiz, the wizard and the traveling salesman, uninterested in the farmer's daughter, the traveling salesman and the actor [Frank Morgan] who played several parts (thespian wizadry), so there was no hot air balloon in Kansas or Oz. Kansas and Oz: false oppositions dissolve false dissolve repetition and screens temporarily closed owing to a small quantity . . ."