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West Wind Review – 2010

2010

Annual

Sima Rabinowitz

Let me tangle

Let me tangle

Tangent
Tangible

“Let me tangle” (from “Noli Me,” a long poem by Nathan Austin) would be a great tagline for West Wind Review. This “poetry and fiction anthology” from Southern Oregon University, is one wild tangle of words. Rather than worry about what it all means, I just got into the spirit of the endeavor, two hundred pages of tangles and tangents.

There is the political commentary tangle (“Trans-Fats Ambush Party” by Lance Newman):

Mr. Marriage, search the House Zone
For centrist menus now that conservative
Acids attack the expensive white base.

And the popular culture meets personal vices tangle (“Pérez Hilton link: that Heath Ledger video” by Wendy Trevino:

I used to smoke 5 joints a day for 20 years: ‘Heath Ledge’ [Heathcliff Andrew Ledger: the Clan Campbell, the Ledger Engineering Foundry, the Frank Ledger Charitable Trust…]

And the my-neighborhood-rough-and tumble tangle (“De la 90’s Soul” by Anna Vitale): “What is in that guy’s ass crack? / He is the guy that moons us on our way to Dairy Queen.”

And the take-this quiz-list poem tangle (“Guess the Film Score!” by Angela Genusa). Here are two of the sixteen films:

1. Clark Gable: Belittling Gin Witted, Bushy Winos-saying, “Sertonin, moi? Dear, I do, hereunto, crave opiate-damaging.

2. Satan’s Purest, Spaded-Skin-rupture. Hail, the reck of heifers’falls. O, verily, Bedrooms: he is unapproved by whoring catcalls and palsied upstaging, derogatory rants in The Steam-befouled Portrait Screed.”

And the sounds-like-a word game tangle (“from Series, Near-Miss” by Laura Elrick):

Watching
the sword swallower
swallow and
swallow swords
swallowing
words swallow
swords
down and
down to
the
base
of the sword
swallower’s
stomach the
sword swallower’s
wink
wink

And the scene-out-of-time-or context prose poem tangle (untitled by Dereck Clemons):

Mrs. Kelvin’s first audience online has begun to insist each video be filmed on a different couch or continent in a new age. Last spring she recorded a video of her recent works, the long, digital yarn a lot like those printed chronicles, her fictions: Stew and Heidi return.

And the surreal syntax with funky punctuation tangle (“tendency” by Michael Farrell, whose last line concludes with a comma):

having breakfast one motoyama or surry hills winter. made sexy your friends celebrities its better than Russian prison than hunting a gun & jacket through new guinea.

congrats they punch while the second son gets

These tangles, and several prose entanglements, are accompanied by some graphic poem tangles, including Donato Mancini’s “If You Think Helen Keller Using the Satanic Salute to Mean I Love You Is Just A Coincidence, then You Are Truly Gullible,” wing-ding or ding-bat like graphics which end in a series of crosses.

Judith Goldman’s tangle (poem) “Good for it” ends with the single line “I have shrove to the same scale.” After reading West Wind Review, I can safely say, me, too!
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