Deep in dream a pale horse appears on the horizon and moves rapidly as a chess piece towards my sleeping self. 'Tis death jumping from her saddle and come creeping. Slipping her hand under my blanket, her bony hand grabs my wrist and beckons and pulls and finally yanks. But tonight I am stronger than death. How much more? I wonder? How long? What should I do with this bucket of time? It's morning in the north again. Pleasantly the icy rain coats the streets, trees, everything. The neighbors and their dogs, children and gods will be remaining, quietly, inside. Unborn Again, a new book by S. A. Griffin has followed some crooked path to my swollen hands. Why not.

I move slowly thought the short lines. Anti-poetry, I think. This is a good thing. Another soul standing in the front against the academic tank. Not that there will be a crushing, but this thorn will flatten some general's tire. But if these poems were a clump of grapes, what a fine wine. It's an L. A., California book as it opens, but quickly Griffin turns his L. A. into poetry, the realm of poetry, and the poet S. A. L. A. California. S. A. Griffin. I wonder if there is something melding there? He meshes, like some fine Hanes hosiery, the natural world, nouns and stuff, with abstractions, like knowledge, to produce profundity after profundity. Philosophically profound, I think yes. And his anti-art brings forward and into focus a world that is real. Clearly, Griffin draws a line. The top two percent on the other side get Bush's tax cut. And here, us 98 percents get Griff's poems. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Now when you're reading along in any book of poems, and I have read far too many poems, too many books of poems, on far too many nights... Nevermind. When you're reading along in a book of poems you wait. The wait's not long in Griffin. And along with the good poems, come the great poems. Like Griffin's A House Divided: "when will men/ understand/ that/ when women lose their right to/ choose/ they no longer have the/ same right?" And in his Acropolis of Absent Fathers, he brings Icarus into his L.A. life. Poetry is a living thing, a daily thing here in the life and times of S.A. Why, in one poem he wrestles with the word thing in the midst of carnivorous punk type teen kid harassment from the audience. The poets win the duel, the fight, the riot and poetry wins. I like that. In S.A. Griffin, yes there is the beer and the hangovers, the painful storms of life, but there is more than that, there is poetry. This IS how one lives. Well, here, in some form of closing, allow me to tell more. The wind is picking up and the rain is now pelting. Later when I drive about, the streets will be less complicated. The old and lame and housewives still chained to the Truman era will not venture forth. So let me write, dear friends, that 12 Kisses to the Universe is another great one - - - about the madness and salvation of love. It begins with the line: "The sun sets on the dildo skyline." And later there is a riotous poem about phone sex, which is then phone poem sex. But I like the best, Griffin's poem President of Nothing. How often in this great, deep and dark, stormy forest of life are the wrong paths taken. Everyone has to have a wrong path story. If I had only stayed at the china factory, I'd now be in Florida. Oh Christ Almighty, thank the gods. You see, this poem is about turning the back to the obvious wealth the square world delivers - - - if you have no, or sell your, or can't locate your soul, heart, guts. In the end, after all those wrong turns, they are the right turns, the right choices. The only choice. Now there are a lot of gritty, fact and truth heavy poems out there. Many, many more than the great ocean of stupidity that civilization has manifested. Now and then, however, there is an island, an apartment. Yes, an apartment in which might be a poet, a poet like S.A. Griffin. He made the right choice. He is president of nothing. You should make the right choice. Work on his campaign.

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Xerolage no. 30. The Bob Grumman issue. - Xexoxial Editions
10375 Cty Hway A, LaFarge, Wisconsin. 54639. Email: dtv@mwt.net
Each issue 24 pages - about $20.00 for subscription.

Since the 1980s Xerolage, edited by editor, publisher, poet and literary rebel, free spirit, anarchist, futurist, dream time village founder, web-master and electronic poet Miekal And, has been featuring issues of the most progressive vis-poems conceivable. Miekal And has now allowed the space, via Xerolage, for another progressive giant, master poet Bob Grumman, to assemble here in this issue Grumman's best visual poems. And best they are. Grumman is a progressive concrete poet and, therefore, each of his poems is more than, much more than just a meditative or cute Zen ting thing sitting on a page. Reading Bob's work is an involved act of reading. One of his visual poems is as startling as anything I've ever encountered. They cut to the heat heart and guts and soul, as poems must do. And they are not the pompous art the ruling little lits. All of Bob's work is the most populous. I have imagined Visual poetry as the left hook of real poetry. The right jab - poems like S.A. Griffin's can't knock them out of the ring with one punch. Poetry needs a combination of slugs. And Bob's work will do it. Bang! Now, I don't wanna get into explaining each visual poem. Can't because, you see, you must SEE and I am not here showing. But allow me to note that Grumman utilizes all forms of concrete.

In Grumman's poetry you are going to encounter a provocative, piecing, insightful, reinventor of mythology, sensitive and progressive artist involved totally in the great poetic cycle of existence. Oh Milton, make room on the bench. Interested in visual poems, Bob Grumman's Xerolage (as well as any number of other of Miekal And's Xerolage issues - - - and all of the publishing he produces both on the web and in print) is the primer, the prime, the prime pagan origin, because in the area, the arena of poetry, of visual poetry, he, Grumman is way so good out-there spectacular gone.

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