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ISSN: 1094-2726

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Acme Poets and Plumbing Supply Company
Edited by Timothy A. Somers
Reviewed by Tom Hartman

	Acme Poets and Plumbing Supply Company Edited by Timothy A. Somers webmaster@acmepoets.com

With its advertisements for woodgrain Formica sink tops and the "Original Gnarbaflex 2000" accompanied by quotes from Richard Nixon, Hans Brinker and Sigmund Freud testifying to the reliability of Acme's products, the "plumbing supply" portion of this zine/artist cooperative is of course a joke.

The real laughs, however, are in Acme Poets' poetry section — particularly the "resident artist" portion. Although some of the poems here (to their credit) are merely forgettable (Hallmark-ish nature stuff, imitation Bukowski, Creative Writing 101 abstractions), a good number are astonishingly, gut-bustingly dreadful. The titles alone should clue readers as to what awaits inside: "God's Laughter," "You II," "Why I Write," "Love is a Feeling We All Know" (which begins with the line "Love is melted butter in your underpants"[!]). Indeed, there's a veritable anthology of bad verse here just waiting to be discovered.

The scope and variety of the horrors is enough to justify a copious sampling. From Raven White's "Rainman":

The rainman dances,
outside the window,
tapping feet,
splashing,
wearing his glass shoes,
invisible toes,
tapping rhythm
to a song he wrote,
after he made love
to the thunder woman,
He leans on the window
leaves wet finger prints,

Not to be outdone, editor Timothy Somers contributes the cringe-inducing "A Cat to Help Me Write":

An hour stolen here or there
one thing that I am sure,
my pants attach his disdained hair,
my ears attach his purr.
Not near the fame of Mergatroid,
McCafferty he's not,
his presence I can not avoid,
if I'm writing, then I'm caught.

The comedy continues in the "featured artists" section as well, as in this gem from Serena Roberts, the first stanza of "Waiting":

Ferlinghetti has a poem about waiting
Yevtushenko has a poem about waiting

...and now Serena has a poem about waiting. Other must-reads include Pamela Barletta's "The Half and the Whole of It" ("Mans [sic] vision is fed/Through the eye of a needle/Spooled from a spindle/Threaded to Wheedle") and "Perhaps" by Mark Hammond, who ponders, "Perhaps I'll buy a new car/But who wants to deal with salesmen?/With oil in their hair and slick shiny suits. . .Oh! Who knows what the factory missed!/I could get a lemon!"

While a superhero hasn't been created who could save this particular day, if there's anything at all redeeming about Acme Poets it's the fact that amidst all the horrors here there are actually six poems from Duane Locke, the founder of the Imanentist group and an honestly accomplished poet. Anyone who reads Acme Poets in its entirety will no doubt scratch their head wondering what in God's name work of this caliber is doing here. The answer is that Locke, for reasons of his own, has taken to submitting more or less indiscriminately to Web zines of all descriptions. One can only guess, however, what Locke privately thinks about the fact that his delightful "Sunlight" appears alongside Cotton Candy's dim-witted blues, "Satan is a Deadbeat" ("Satan can bring you things looking so good and sweet/But he is no good, Satan is a deadbeat").

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A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.