I like this little zine in Detroit

mark(s), an online literary & arts magazine edited in Detroit, has some very interesting content. I prefer the poetry, as always, and look there first. But the magazine, which launched in June 2001, has plenty of remarkable content besides poems: visual art, essays and reviews, sound (of course), and a periodic department named "net.work." It also engages visitors in various ways through point-and-click interactivity with its content.

mark(s) (nothing on the site explains the parenthetical plural) is a quarterly which was ". . . created for the sole purpose of expanding access to contemporary cultural productions . . . The editors are committed to promoting substantive dialogue between Detroit-based artists and the world." That's no small mission! But having the Internet doesn't hinder your chances of engaging "the world." And I assume that by "the world" mark(s)'s editors mean the world of culture producers and consumers, specifically, poets and their readers, artists and their viewers, theorists, and related others.

A good deal of its editorial staff hail from Detroit, and Wayne State University, precisely. This is a good thing, that is, to have a production of this quality not emanating from Ann Arbor (or Interlochen, for that matter). Although, at least one supporter and contributor, Ken Mikolowski, is a UM poet--but he's also founder of The Alternative Press. Another Detroiter, Geoerge Tysh, is Arts Editor for the Detroit Metro Times, and founder (I believe) of Past Tents Press.

So mark(s) is well-grounded in the small press world, not to mention the alternative arts world, as a quick scan of its other supporters shows: painters, photographers, writers, educators. Here's one notable name among mark(s)'s archive of poets: Lyn Hejinian (release 4.03). Her contribution is to be expected, something on the edge of language and sense where language and syntax make up much of the content and intent of the poem. Here's a sample from "Eleven Eyes":

frst Vhtidyins-nr erll
I mean . . .
nrpe jrsy sinf dp . . .

no-ryjomh nsf

But there is no way to correct a dream.

E.E. Cummings redux maybe? This stanza reminds me much of Cummings' little poem on a grasshopper, where he tries to capture the actual grasshopping rhythmically and textually. And how grabbing to finish the little section with an acknowledgement (admission?) that there's no way to correct a dream, that is, our experience of language. Perhaps it's self-correcting. Or not incorrect at all!

But there's another contribution, a poem by William Fuller in release 4.02, that really grabs me as exactly what the editors claim they're looking for (contemporary cultural productions). "Riding North," in its entirety:

was it track twelve now swings wide
our first stop is an apology
whether to distill that quintessence
indestructible, perfect, complete
somehow pouring from the upper deck
I sleep in the sea and clouds
capable of only two activities
which began at the age of seven
the soul is making a drink from external things
which came to know it / because not akin to it
the silhouette of a bird in flight
or does it permit such speculation –
the great sea bear jabs with its tongue
extracting a strange glow
based purely on what the document says

quickly the ship –
stands against reverence for authority
because not intelligible
a repetition of the forms of doubt
a hunting scene with warplanes on the roof
a man outlined in white lights, walking or dead
who comes in to see these books
then pauses on the grate
to inspect his own hand
I feel the back of my neck alive
with an entire conjectural system
which explains my lingering here
under the beams of the dissipating sun
looking only one way, which
is the direction we're taking

said
age, agues
the rain is everywhere
steadily pressing/on
luxury portion of lot/
please display/remorse for not having gone there
or for not having left from there
glued to the center
the unconditional regularly opposes the conditional
here they sleep
the rites of time
you may turn your face continually
your eyes may shine in the distance
the sky may reach into a vast interior –
I had a mind to a sea voyage
not a transformation

what would the grammar support
if I could tame it
I had a mind to cold pie
deeply hung with woods
and arrows, Eros, in this (burnished) bag
with a black-capped chickadee
heading north into tulips
which way the wind blows
that way we aspirate
fragrant bursts of orange and red
gently touching
oceans of systems –
there were pictures of smoke
and peaks emerging
from what used to be my eyes

When I google him, I find Fuller in Winetka, Illinois. I find he's included in some very powerful presses, most recently Flood Editions. All his poems, regardless of "subject," jumpcut like experimental film. Their tone is certain and rhythmic. Their images startle (particularly at line ends and enjambments--like little rewards to getting the eye all the way left to right while reading). They surprise and delight in the best Horatian tradition.

A sometimes feature of mark(s) is its "net.work" department, where I get often the most interactive and involving experience of the magazine. This is where language and visuals and sound and sometimes movement (akin to dance) coalesce. Steve Benson creates a shape-shifting poem in the most recent release (4.04), titled "Does One Thing Lead." I won't "quote" from it here as it has to be experienced online, in sound and motion. But I can say it's highly interactive and fascinating. Another example is Raul Ferrera-Balanquet's "Havana Blues" (3.03), which combines photography, graphic design, sound, animation, and statement into an integrated flow that the author calls a "film." And so it is.

The "poetry" of these pieces leaves me a little cold. In Ferrera-Balanquet's case, there's not much to be said for the rather sophomoric line "I run away to the streets in search of the essence impregnated on my youth." I get the emotive part; it's the rendering that I can't buy. This often seems to happen in art productions that seek to throw everything into the pot. Remember the craze in the '70s and '80s when it seemed like every painter under the (Western) sun had to incorporate words into his canvas? The words always came out sounding, well, like those I just quoted.

Something akin, though not exactly like this, happens with Benson's animated poems. There are six of them. Each is made up of a series of six or seven brief (usually rhetorical) questions. Each poem is viewable, by pointing and clicking, in three versions--always the same questions, but each time configured differently on the screen, once as a simple listing one line after another; once as a verse-like flow in which each question wraps to the next line; and once as a little prose poem. Once I satiated myself with the pointing and clicking activity, I lost interest pretty quickly. The questions themselves are, again, kind of throwaway and unrewarding (and simply rearranging them as lines or continuous sentences doesn't change this), and sometimes even silly.

As for the essays and reviews, there are many, and many good ones, on subjects ranging from the mediated experience of art (e.g., the playing of a musical score) to reviews of shows and exhibitions, books, movements, etc.

mark(s) has good contributor notes. And if you want to support or subscribe to the zine, the editors make a straightforward and convincing pitch (I might do just that!). You can contact them through an email address, but they don't ask for submissions or even imply that they accept them. This isn't a criticism, though. At least as far as the poetry's concerned, they have a fine record of quality. Opening the pub to submissions won't necessarily help them maintain.

In the final analysis? Very strong contribution to the online zine world, especially in the poetry selections.