Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse

 

Dick Gallup’s Things to Do

Modulate your feelings

Make the spaces real 

Keep the intellect in tune

Charge your batteries regularly

Remember what happens. (Donald Guravich)

Patrick James Dunagan was good enough to send along a copy of the first (and possibly only) issue of Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse (San Francisco CA: fall 2021), a side-stapled full-size journal containing an incredible wealth of contemporary poetry, many of whom are either San Francisco-based or have publishing relationships with City Lights Books (or: both). The list of contributors is over fifty names strong, and includes Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Margaret Randall, Edmund Berrigan, Ammiel Alcalay, Joshua Beckman, Norma Cole, Kit Schluter, Cedar Sigo, Stacy Szymaszek, Ryan Newton, Sophia Dahlin, Eileen Myles, Philip Lamantia, Gillian Conoley, Chris Carosi, Anselm Berrigan, Dunagan, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Will Alexander, Josiah Luis Alderete and Diane Di Prima. At sixty pages in length, the scope of this collection is stunning. Published by “S. Keletor” and edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples, the second of whom a poet who also edits at City Lights Books, there is a simultaneous element of established and subversive elements mingling through this collection, from elements of form and production, to some of the well-established contributors running through a printed, side-stapled offering. “even the / sense / sets beat,” Norma Cole writes, to close her short lyric, “from Lost Dance.” Or “Stranglers in Love” by Julien Poirier, an extended, single-page rush to a punch that ends with: “where you and I were once locked / midair / like a couple of sumo wrestlers / in a soap bubble / like a couple / of spelling bee finalists / in an elevator / demolishing each other in a fury / whose key ingredient is trust. / It was exhausting / but we got what we came for.” Or, as the final stanza of Edmund Berrigan’s “Dream with Doug in It” reads:

Trust no one’s advice, but know their point of view,
see the world through other eyes, can I borrow
your vision, so much repeats from stage to stage,
borrowed wisdom with age expanding the shroud.

How could anyone not be charmed by an editorial, “From The Desk of Skeletor,” that opens: “Every now and again, I get the urge to read poesie, and yet all the landscape of poetry publications these days is a vast wasteland of online nothingness, very often just a PDF of a bunch of poems with so little editorial investment the poems appear in the same font in which the poem submitted his or her or their work! WHAT?!?! This is unacceptable in a day and age in which an editor has so much at hand, so many fonts that the editors of yesteryear would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal. It won’t do, my friends, it won’t do.” This is a publication put together relatively cheaply by someone (or multiple someones) with a remarkably good (combined) editorial eye (or eyes), able to produce a single-issue (possibly) one-off of work that is just too good to not get out into the world. There is the sense of what bpNichol referred to as “serious play” in the work of all of these writers. While those who found and continue poetry journals, there is something uniquely wonderful about the oddly-distributed one-off, reminiscent, slightly, of the sequence of journal one-offs that Stuart Ross has been producing over the years (The Northern Testicle Review, for example), or even some of the more ongoing, occasional and sadly-defunct journals such as Vancouver’s TADS (George Bowering et al) or Toronto’s COUGH (Victor Coleman, Michael Boughn et al) [see my review of the last one I saw here], or even our ongoing The Peter F. Yacht Club (although the editorial suggests that “Skeletor” might not approve of my design work on such). There is just some incredible work here, some of which really needs to be seen to be believed.

Naturally, there’s no contact or ordering information anywhere in the publication, although I would suspect that copies might be possible through the Bookstore at City Lights.