The Fewest Words are the Best

Max Middle, “urtnoyy.0” (2006)
prPrimeau, who is a remarkable minimalist visual poet himself, has been putting out a small xerozine of minimalist poetry under the title Dirt. The last issue was thick, juicy, and made up of nothing but small jewels—a pomegranate of a zine.

Now, Phil has moved his operations to the web and released today what appears to be an unnumbered issue of dirt: a journal of minimalism, now incarnated as a blogzine. The type of work in the zine is still as wide as before: lineated poems, prose poems, visual poems, reviews of minimalist poetry and wonderful interviews with minimalist poets. This online issue reprints an interview with Aram Saroyan, one of the touchstone poets for contemporary minimalist poets.

The blog version of this zine seems smaller than its paper predecessors, but maybe this is caused by a difference of perspective. In the web world, we can scroll through words a little more quickly than we can carefully flip the pages of a book. I am glad to see that this issue opens with a craggy, fragmented visual poem that almost becomes a word, but that suggests beginnings (“ur”), the past, and the inevitable crumbling loss of that past.

A nice jaunt for those with time for contemplation—because the shortest poems take the longest to consider.

ecr. l’inf.