The Review of Contemporary Fiction

One Score More: The Second Twenty Years of Burning Deck, 1982-2002, edited by Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop, and Rosmarie Waldrop
reviewed by Susan Smith Nash

Untitled document

Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop, and Rosmarie Waldrop, eds. One Score More: The Second Twenty Years of Burning Deck, 1982-2002. Burning Deck, 2002. 240 pp. Paper: $15.00.

Burning Deck is one of those amazing independent publishers that seems to be in an eternal state of creation and recreation. What they publish consistently seems fresh, new, and noteworthy. Like Black Sparrow, Burning Deck has emphasized book crafts to the point that the physical aspect of the book reinforces the press’s mission. This volume is an anthology of more than fifty authors whose works comprise a faithful sample of the artistic vision maintained by the press from 1982 to 2002. It provides insight into why Burning Deck has continued to be a solid influence in poetry and poetics, particularly in the application of the underpinning concepts and epistemological stances utilized by French poets writing in the late-twentieth century. For Burning Deck, philosophy is reflected in poetics, which in turn engages and informs philosophy. In the case of the works represented in the anthology, form and syntax undermine the narrative strategies of a sentimentalist realism. A fundamental questioning of subjectivity and a destabilization of the idea of essence allows the works to focus on how language creates meaning beyond the typical poetic stratagems of metaphor, simile, and structured prosody. The prose pieces in the collection are perhaps the most stunning, with Dallas Wiebe’s ironic pseudoparodies of “hard-boiled” minimalism, Lissa McLaughlin’s adrenaline-surging estrangement of the ordinary, Walter Abish’s travelogues of the mind, and Elizabeth MacKiernan’s faux genealogies, to name just a few. The poetry spans minimalist explorations of the edges of meaning and nonmeaning, including Burning Deck classics Gale Nelson, Jena Osman, Tina Darragh, and Keith Waldrop. Concrete and postconcrete poetry includes Susan Gevirtz, Ernst Jandl, and Peter Gizzi. Although it may seem sterile to emphasize metatexts dealing with self-reflexive investigations of poetic meaning, the results are exciting and important to late-twentieth-century poetry. One Score More provides an important overview.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction One Score More: The Second Twenty Years of Burning Deck, 1982-2002, edited by Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop, and Rosmarie Waldrop reviewed by Susan Smith Nash Untitled document Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop, and Rosmarie Waldrop, eds. One Score More: The Second Twenty Years of Burning Deck, 1982-2002. Burning Deck, 2002. 240 pp. Paper: $15.00. Burning Deck is one of those amazing independent publishers that seems to be in an eternal state of creation and recreation. What they publish consistently seems fresh, new, and noteworthy. Like Black Sparrow, Burning Deck has emphasized book crafts to the point that the physical aspect of the book reinforces the press’s mission. This volume is an anthology of more than fifty authors whose works comprise a faithful sample of the artistic vision maintained by the press from 1982 to 2002. It provides insight into why Burning Deck has continued to be a solid influence in poetry and poetics, particularly in the application of the underpinning concepts and epistemological stances utilized by French poets writing in the late-twentieth century. For Burning Deck, philosophy is reflected in poetics, which in turn engages and informs philosophy. In the case of the works represented in the anthology, form and syntax undermine the narrative strategies of a sentimentalist realism. A fundamental questioning of subjectivity and a destabilization of the idea of essence allows the works to focus on how language creates meaning beyond the typical poetic stratagems of metaphor, simile, and structured prosody. The prose pieces in the collection are perhaps the most stunning, with Dallas Wiebe’s ironic pseudoparodies of “hard-boiled” minimalism, Lissa McLaughlin’s adrenaline-surging estrangement of the ordinary, Walter Abish’s travelogues of the mind, and Elizabeth MacKiernan’s faux genealogies, to name just a few. The poetry spans minimalist explorations of the edges of meaning and nonmeaning, including Burning Deck classics Gale Nelson, Jena Osman, Tina Darragh, and Keith Waldrop. Concrete and postconcrete poetry includes Susan Gevirtz, Ernst Jandl, and Peter Gizzi. Although it may seem sterile to emphasize metatexts dealing with self-reflexive investigations of poetic meaning, the results are exciting and important to late-twentieth-century poetry. One Score More provides an important overview.

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