postcards

Today I couldn't talk to a friend because by the time my thoughts had formed and the words had begun to form on my tongue, my mood had changed, and what I was just about to say was false, old, erased. Silence. The silence went on, while I felt as if one of those tapes of the weather they show on television were running through me, clouds covering the sun, shedding rain and dispersing in seconds. What of this kind of experience do I find in the poems in HOW(ever)? Recognitions of times and locations traditional concepts say are false--and erase. Words are there and we are connected by them, living substance in a large body. O/what? Everyone? Yes, of all, "of the parentage of mineral, vegetable, animal."

Thanks for putting out HOW(ever)--Thanks to all of you. I know the kind of time each (t)issue takes --(t(aches)).

-- Pat Dienstfrey, Berkeley

. . .and don't forget the major and infinitely useful book on H.D. by Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn, which treats the female revisionary H.D. in a parallel and interlocked way with the modernist/occult H.D. (incurring Jed Rasula's notice mainly because he prefers the occult to the feminist lens for looking at H.D.'s work). This book of Friedman--subtle and encompassing--is THE place for readers of H.D. to begin--and linger.

--Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University

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Thanks for "Amelia Earhart," Maureen Owen's work-in-progress. Sometimes i hate to read poetry   it bores me or confounds me. either i get it and don't care or i don't get it and don't care. . . but Amelia. . . well it sang music, the woosh of wings darting by me. . . then you look again and the darn thing is in the same place where it was before only it's moved, holds still without being stopped. Has Maureen written any books or published elsewhere?

-jean miller, san francisco

(editor's note: Hearts in Space (Kulchur Press, NYC) can be ordered through small press bookstores and distribution services. Look for Maureen's newsletter/magazine, TNT, co-edited with David Wilk.

I am quite in love with HOW(ever) and so honored to receive it as a gift. . . for I feel the need to know what is happening at the outside edges. . . the forecast, the experimental, the essence of woman's outreaching. It is so much fun to read new women critics and scholars and poets and prose writers. I don't have to pause and say, this is garbage, this is hostile, this is boring and repetitive . . . .

-Ruth Stone, Brandon, Vermont

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