EILEEN TABIOS Engages
profanity poems by Olchar E. Lindsann
(Monocle-Lash Anti-Press,
Roanoke, VA, 1991)
I have to admit that Olchar E. Lindsann’s profanity poems surprised me, and
surprised me in a good way. First, take a look at its cover (above):
I turn the cover onto the chapbook’s first poem:
At this point, if this publication were longer than the slim
chap that it is, I’d have shut it down and moved on to the next publication
calling itself poetry. I’d have assumed, from the cover and first poem, there’d
be more of the same and saw no need to be bored. But perseverance provides rewards
and, Reader, I did get rewarded.
There’s more to this slim chap than a lot of fucking around.
Well, I guess there’s that, too—a lot of it—but there’s enough wit, humor and
even smarts to leaven the experience and not leave one just wallowing in the gutter.
Apparently this text also has possibilities as (a score for) “sound poetry” but
I was reading/seeing it, not listening to it, and such is the basis for my
engagement…. well, except to say that the poems’ discernible energy and music
probably do work effectively as sounded poetry. From a chap perusal standpoint,
I like this scamp-y vizpo:
I also appreciated this dampening of Narcissus (under
the current Administration, I can never get enough of that):
If you get past all the bloody arses et al, you’ll get to
the last poem which even gives you a literary critique of the ancient Roman
poets/philosophers—for what it’s worth, Lindsann (or that poem’s persona) seems
to think most highly (relatively speaking among a lot he criticizes for little
sustenance) of Tacitus:
“… the cocking Bastard-in-Arms
Tacitus, who in his calculated fucking precision is the most pissing virile,
the most shitting biting, the most bleeding vigorous of them all.”
Persevere and you might learn something, Grasshopper.
profanity poems,
to my pleasant surprise, does more than fuck around.
*****
Eileen Tabios is the editor of Galatea Resurrects (GR). She loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1, and ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. Forthcoming is WITNESS IN A CONVEX MIRROR which will inaugurate Tinfish Press' "Pacific response to John Ashbery." She also invented the poetry form “hay(na)ku” whose 15-year anniversary in 2018 is celebrated at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries. More information about her works is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.
