appreciations 3: Karl Young

(third in a series of brief "appreciations" of less than 200 words on various figures, with, sometimes, a sample of work)

Karl Young, Alfred Jarry: Unfinished Wood

Can I possibly honor KARL YOUNG in 200 words? (That question & this parenthetical remark do not count.)

He does not mince words, or, he does mince, twist, hone, shine, shape, and more. When experimental poetry was vast and exciting and not nearly as narrow as at present, he was active in making visual poems, working with sound poets, creating artist's and performance books, and a lot more. He also created communities, such as that which grew from BOOX to become WOODLAND PATTERN under his guidance as founding father and visionary programmer.

He created MEMBRANE PRESS, publisher of everything from a book of commentary on Clark Coolidge to books of disintegrating photocopy procedures by internationally active writers and artists. Later, he created LIGHT & DUST BOOKS, carrying on his nearly-one-person anarchical constitution of a kind of culture few of us can encompass, and the marvelous LIGHT & DUST web site, which remains perhaps, THE great literary (in a broad sense) repository of our time. All while rarely venturing from either Milwaukee (early) or, more recently, Kenosha, Wisconsin

Karl Young's Score 7 (based on Tu Fu's Night in River Lodge)

Had he been in New York, I think he might be the most celebrated experimental literary artist of the last 40 years. In Wisconsin he has created a body of work that may well grant him that title over time.