When I was a doctoral student at the University of Albany, I had the good fortune of being Poetry Editor for Volume 16 of The Little Magazine and Co-Editor with Jan Ramjerdi for Volume 17. But the real exciting time for the magazine was when it went digital under the editorship of Chris Funkhouser, Belle Gironda and Ben Henry. I am still hunting for online versions. No luck. Our early experiments with hypertext are lost?
I particularly mourn the loss of the online The Little Magazine Volume 21.3, MAPPING, which included my piece “Door Where Carol Merrill is Still Standing.” Luckily, scholar Karin Sanders wrote about the piece while it was still online. See Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination. “If you click on Anderson Moseman’s cyber poem door, you can read about the obedient Carol Merrill; known by a generation of Americans as the quintessentially smiling but mute TV game hostess whose gesture toward the doors (in Moseman’s optic) become a spectacle of sacrifice, not of the bog girl but of the participating ‘victim’ in the greed play of consumerism. If you choose the wrong door and win a goat instead of a car you are, so to speak, sacrificed to the laughter of the audience and viewers. That’s the name of the game. In that game, the bog girl challenges the slick host, Monty Hall, as the poem insinuates a carnality of sacrifice different than one to which she was submitted two thousand years ago.” Luckily the text of the poem survives in my collection PERSONA.
Thanks to Chris Funkhouser, 150 video and audio files from Volume 21 of have been salvaged. Funkhouser talks about how co-editor/producers Belle Gironda and Ben Henry made of this CD-ROM in an article on Jacket2: “The CD-ROM publication, The Little Magazine, Volume 21 (1995), featuring 77 artists, contains 127 audio (.wav) files, many which I recorded; an entire section of the project was devoted to vocal readings, including recordings of John Clarke, Harvey Brown, Robert Grenier, Pierre Joris, Jed Rasula, and Chuck Stein. Unfortunately, the disc does not function on today’s 64 bit Windows systems, which means it is unplayable as originally designed.”
Recordings of my poems in Volume 21, “Woman Eating a Grape” and “Woman Eating a Cyst,” can be accessed in the drop down menu here at Funkhouser's We Press. Gone are the visuals: Angelina Marino’s painting “Woman Eating a Grape” and the ultrasound of my right breast, but having audio is a gift. Thank you Chris Funkhouser.