Linda Lerner / Review Big Hammer # 20
Iniquity Press / Vendetta Books,
box 906 Island Heights NJ 08732-0906, 305 pp,
available on Amazon and American Book Exchange aka ABE books.
http://www.abe.com $20.00.
Big Hammer number 20 is very big by any standard. Consisting of over 300 pages, measuring 8 & a half by 11, this anthology evokes an end of an era, in poems loosely arranged by subject matter. And that is how I want to discuss it, rather than do a critical analysis of individual works. Many are framed in elaborate designs, or accompanied by art. A few prose pieces are also thrown into the mix as well. What appears arbitrary is. What it reflects as a whole, isn’t.
Many of the names are recognizable small press writers who’ve lived and written for years outside the mainstream. A few are no longer living. Some like Olga Cabral, Lamont B Steptoe, John Bennett and A.D. Winans, are more widely known, but whose work still reflects an outsider sensibility. The sheer number of writers represented, in terms of their preoccupations provide a microcosm of a larger world. And, that is what makes this anthology stand out.
Despite the 2018 copyright, there’s a harkening back to a post beat 20th century, a time when everything seemed possible, a lost time. Olga Cabral questions whether someone is “writing a poem this minute / on a world that died five million years ago,” a survivor of an extinct species (12).
Some wonder “if the Summer of love / would have been better if there were smart phones” something Jim Cohn dismisses as what one could say about anything. (p.18) David Roskos speaks of “poetry’s lost language,” the destruction of a newspaper office by “The language liberation front” and a web press stolen to put to better use: “new born messiahs / aborted at conception” (192).
There are references to Hiroshima, the Korean War, the Cold War and to endless war which “had ravaged our planet” that’s become a vast wasteland” bringing us back to T.S. Eliot, and the early 20th century (206). “I went into the army at seventeen and killed more people in Korea than I care to remember” says John Bennett (234). A bleakness underlies many of the poems.
Pamela Twining says she heard “that half of American youth / have never heard of Auschwitz / no wonder the light is fading” (44). Nothing has been solved which kind of mocks the nostalgic mood that often comes through.
Where are the heroes, the mentors, today? There are poems dedicated to Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Lorca, who haven’t been replaced. Along with a yearning for a world now gone, there’s a lot of anger expressed toward that world, as in Pamela Twining’s poem of how women were blamed for what men did to them in the “you get what you ask for / you get what you deserve” (114).
Women’s are still struggling, but know what they don’t want. “I once said I wanted a dick and an electric guitar. I’ve got an electric guitar. I don’t need a dick” says Beth Borrus (108). And in another poem, she says, “I got tired of looking at my marriage as a glass that was half full. “But once the glass was emptied, she sees only a “puddle” and admits she felt better before (110).
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