Maggie Estep, Bernadette Mayer, Sal Salasin:
New Books To Take Into Fall
Dateline: 9/28/99
Hot sex and brainy, with a love for animals second only to St. Francis’, Maggie Estep’s Soft Maniacs is a beach book for everybody anytime. Known for her poem rants and spoken word CDs, Ms. Estep fills out the flash of her first prose Diary of an Emotional Idiot, digesting our age from the outside in: characters in their 20s and 30s who are psychiatrists or homeless or bicycle messengers or lion tamers who cohabit in a Peaceable Kingdom-like world, where if you kiss a Caravaggio you not only get away with it, but have a satori in spite of yourself, where you have a horse to walk it, where you can make a living with a cat and a fake opium-den tour of Chinatown. The tales in Soft Maniacs illuminate two women, often told through the eyes of the men in their lives (no fear: there are women in their lives too: the polysexual gymnastics turn-on awesome!). There’s a laugh a paragraph and real heart beats inside the seemingly detached beings. These are the best nine stories since Salinger.
Holy. Two Haloed Mourners by Bernadette Mayer, published by Granary is Bernadette is always, like Gertrude was. I remember the correspondence that “Bernie” had with Laura Riding, and now she assumes that trailer. Each poem contains the mourners, and is life that way too. Has anyone else written a sestina where the first words in each line also repeat, but where the poet gives herself permission to fuck the form in the last line by changing “anything” to “everything” (“X for Ted Berrigan”)? “& that’s why / people liked Shakespeare so much / he never mentioned it.” & neither does Mayer & so we do. You can find these brilliants every day in the New Directions book Proper Name & Other Stories, but if you want to hold the whole world in your hands (44 pp.) then you’ll have to inquire of Steve Clay, publisher of Granary Books, who saw this perfect storm through.
“. . . what is a roadster in red and yes
on the road, not back yet not back two you might sing
amen again but syntax was the fool I was for mentioning”
Misanthropic purity, this is the oxymoron Sal Salasin works. Salasin’s happening ezine, RealPoetik, gives him entree into many of our computers daily. What does he do while off-line is compose nasty ditties, as found in Optima Suavidad (Green Bean Press). A la Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, Roman numerals serve here as titles, and there are occasional reprises:
“Like watching television in
a cheap motel off Highway 6
in Marriotsville, Ohio”
. . . but not often enough nor spaced widely enough to be called “form.” Other New York ghosts appear -- John Godfrey, Andrei Codrescu (from the early, pre-Baltimore-Monte Rio-Nawlins days), Lower East Side, Midtown to the Twenties, East Third St. Does Sal miss the dark bitter runes of Manahattan (he’s currently computing in Seattle)? There’re jokes here that would make Lenny Bruce proud, others’d choke a dead horse. Salasin does not care: he spews. He seems to be a criminal, maybe a mass murderer, but he is also our Savior -- Jesus? (“And you’d all be dead if / it weren’t for the lizards I / bring you to eat.”) Misogynist? (“So many women / so few knives.”) Punch lines? (“Famous last words: / ‘No, / it’s a banana.”) Famous last words: “The way to a man’s heart / is through his chest.”“It’s all one thing and
the only time it ever exists
is now”
--Bob Holman
Read more work by Estep, Mayer & Salasin on the Net:
Maggie Estep
- The entire text of “One of Us” (a story from Soft Maniacs) & a few of her spoken word pieces are at her own site, MaggieEstep.com.
- A bio & RealAudio samples from her CDs Love Is A Dog From Hell & No More Mister Nice Girl are showcased at imusic.com.
- Kerouac's Skid Row Wine, performed with the Splitters, was Maggie's contribution to the Rykodisc compilation album, kicks joy darkness.
- Starting place is her author home page at the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center site.
- An excerpt from her Studying Hunger Journals was published in lingo 8, “Pulp Poetry Supplement.”
- “The Prostitutes at the Eldorado Club,” excerpted from Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, is online at the Hard Press site.
- “Skylands,” her poem-collaboration with Philip Good, is in the new Big Bridge.
- Mayer's Sonnet & an interview commenting on the sonnet form, this particular sonnet, Rhymers Anonymous & other mysteries was the October 1998 feature in Teachers & Writers' Poets on Poetry series.
- A good number of his poems are collected in the 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995 & 1994 online archives of his own RealPoetik email e-zine.
- #54 & #58 from Optima Suavidad appear online in $lavery 1.1.
- A pair of numbered poems was published in The Blue Penny Quarterly #8.
- Two more poems are in Grist Online #6.
- deluxe rubber chicken #2 has “I think we should kill him,” “No, I was spending the evening” & “Thanks to the magic of the information superhighway.”
- Maggie Estep, Diary of an Emotional Idiot (1997, Harmony Books)
- Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1999, New Directions)
- Bernadette Mayer, Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994, New Directions)
- Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992, New Directions)
- Sal Salasin, Stepping Out of the Plane Under the Protection of the Army (1990, Another Chicago Press)
