Now That Memory Has Become So Important

Now That Memory Has Become So Important
Karl Gartung (MWPH Books) Paperback. 99pgs. $13.50

“This long awaited collection finally puts Karl Gartung in the foreground. Founder of the world’s most remarkable poetry bookstore—Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern Book Center—loyal friend and promoter of American, Canadian and British avant-garde poets, he is also a superb poet himself.
Memory here is imprinted with grief and happiness but, most importantly, with language. There are echoes of forebears—Bunting, Oppen, Niedecker, Metcalf—lines from Whitman, the split line of the Anglo-Saxons. Karl’s shapely poems use line with restless invention and versatility. His vertical line space—a signature gesture—inserts hesitation, careful articulation, breakage. confusion, it sends the eye searching for meaning. The vertical line is a spine, an axis of grief, a gutter, the gap of memory’s slippage, a fault line, a mirror’s edge. Karl Gartung’s Now That Memory Has Become So Important is a brilliant first collection. Happily, the title promises more.”

--Jenny Penberthy, editor, Lorine Niedecker, Woman and
Poet, and Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky