Lilliput Review
Don Wentworth, Editor
282 Main Street
PA 15201
Lilliput Review is in every sense a little magazine. You can hold it in the palm of your hand, it’s got 16 pages of poetry and art if you include the front and back covers, and none of the poems is more than ten lines long. It also only costs a dollar. Most internet poetry sites are free, at least at the moment, but I don’t think I’m being too reactionary or antediluvian in saying that the print mags still have something over the web pages. Sight and sound are part of the fullest experience of poetry, so why not touch?
In the May issues I have in front of me, Americans combine with Japanese poets, whose work appears in fine, lyrical – sensual translation. Some of the names will be familiar to regular poetry readers (splake, Bart Solarczyk, Ed Markowski), but some, I think, will not – any magazine is the better for that. The most august name is undoubtedly the great twentieth century haiku master Taneda Santoka, rendered into English by Scott Watson, who has just produced a volume of the great man’s work for Western readers. Santoka is a giant in a form that’s vastly popular and much underestimated in the degree of its difficulty, and having him in the mag is a significant coup for editor Don Wentworth.
Write directly to Don at the address provided or find Lilliput Review on Facebook. You might also want to sign up, online, for Lilliput’s sister publication, the marvellous, web-based Issa’s Untidy Hut, which is delivered free to your email inbox and contains new and classical haiku alongside an assortment of reviews, ruminations and other poetry and music ephemera.
OUT OF THE WOODS INTO THE SUN
Guy R. Beining
Kamini Press
Ringvagen 8, 4th Floor
SE 117 26 Stockholm, Sweden
Readers of Beatnik will know already how much I like the high production values of the Kamini Press mini-chapbooks. Out of the Woods marks a break from the poetry series publisher/ editor Henry Denander has been running for a while now on the Kamini imprint, in that it showcases 16 fine paintings instead of works by poets of the underground/ alternative press. Each painting is tagged, as it were, with a line of poetry by Beining, who also writes, and the lines provide clues, albeit in an abstruse, apparently illogical, koan-like fashion at times, to the paintings. I found this helpful, not being particularly confident about my understanding of Beining’s approach, which seems to present people as shapes and areas of dynamic colour rather than in conventional form. You, of course, might understand what he is doing immediately. In any event I am sure that you will appreciate the impact of the paintings, as I did; and I argue all the time that a creative work doesn’t have to be one hundred percent accessible to the individual reader/ listener/ viewer to be a success.
There is more information about Beining’s book and other Kamini titles at the website http://www.kaminipress.com/
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FRIENDSHIP
by Tom Kryss
Kamini Press
Ringvagen 8, 4th floor
SE-117 26
Stockholm
Sweden
order@kaminipress.com
http://www.kaminipress.com/
A little meditation on friendship by Tom Kryss - with an accompanying painting, beautifully reproduced - in the enviably classy Kamini Press series. Whatever the advantages of the internet for publishers and editors on the small press side, there's still nothing quite as satisfying as holding one of these things in your hand.
