Seven years ago Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation that Lost & 
Found Times insulted "the past 3000 years of literature."  A 
rather slip-shod writer, Klawans neglected to add that it also 
insulted the past 3000 years of visual art, for surely that was 
the case.  It still is: among the 300 or so works by 80 poets and 
other artists in the latest LAFT (#31) is a set of three crude 
drawings.  One is of a man's hoisted, bent leg with what look 
like cat-tails hanging from it.  A barely legible scrawl 
identifies this as "leg's dripping."  Drawings of a pencil point 
captioned, "bare pencil," and a hand gripping a bedpost ("bed's 
grip") complete the trio--which is by John M. Bennett, the 
magazine's editor, and someone identified only as "Cornpuff." 

Elsewhere is a scratchy drawing by Gertrude Granofsky of a round 
face with a little pig-snout for a nose, and larger pig-snouts 
for eyes.  A third specimen of LAFT-illumagery, a collage by 
Malok, seems little more than thrown-together scraps of 
supermarket tabloid texts and photographs.  Certainly these are 
an insult to traditional art.  But they are much more than petty 
mockery.  Both the Bennett/Cornpuff and Granofsky pieces vibrate 
out of compelling if strange corners of their creators' minds; as 
for Malok's collage, cut-outs from a science text about torque 
and electrodes, and a poem that includes a reference to "the 
Stars," as "the real popes/laughing fat," give an eerie master- 
intelligence to it that is both raucously satirical and--well, 
almost oceanically high-serene.  Much of the other illumagery in 
LAFT is "stylish," but nearly all of it thumbs its nose at 
gentility, and High Art, and explores the same visceral, less-
attended-to aspects of the human condition that the pieces 
previously mentioned do. 

The same is true of the many difficult-seeming poems in the 
issue.  Some of these seem dada for the sake of being dada, and I 
sympathize with those who would reject them out of hand.  But I'm 
not convinced that any of them is dada only.  What they have that 
such poems lack are two or more of the following: (1) flow; (2) 
an archetypal hum; (3) a wide range of vocabulary and imagery; 
and (4) a low cliche-to-fresh- phraseology ratio.  By "flow" I 
mean mostly such old-fashioned qualities as rhythm and 
melodiousness; by "archetypal hum" I mean intimations of some 
large universal archetype like Spring, Ocean, or the Mating 
Instinct. 

Take, for instance, the very first poem in LAFT, Michael Dec's, 
"Fish Nut."  Its first two lines, "A bicycle in paradise - blue 
vinyl boots a fluorescent ceiling/ nails popping out," indicate a 
level beyond raw dada.  It at least flirts with archetypality 
(due to the reference to paradise), and it flows pleasantly 
through b-sounds, l-sounds, c-sounds.  It's without either 
cliches or unusually fresh phraseology but its vocabulary and 
imagery start vivid and widen as the poem continues--and 
eventually makes sense as an evocation of Macbethan futility, its 
final two lines being, "The tomorrow and tomorrow/ Think yrself 
into a corner." 

A later poem by Jake Berry, "American Frame," begins: "You need a 
tongue! You need a rang spangler?/ Terse scrolls tighten the 
diaphragm into a/ coiled grin."  "Rang spangler" seems fresh to 
me, but the poem's freshest phrase occurs when it speaks at its 
very end of "a curse with/ a menu."  This alone (I can just see a 
tuxedoed curse proffering an elegant menu and inquiring of his 
victim which of the many downfalls listed on it he would prefer) 
would be enough to keep me coming back to the poem, but it is 
high on all the other scales, too (and turns out to be rousingly 
negative about our foreign policy-- to each other as well as to 
other countries). 

Dadaesque poetry is not the only kind of literature in LAFT.  It 
also boasts some fine pluraesthetic pieces such as a design by 
Luigi-Bob Drake in which repetitions of the word, "HELIX," are 
used to represent a strand of DNA; an excerpt from Geof Huth's 
deviously simple ABC book, Analphabet; a similarly simple-seeming 
treatment of a pig, fly, and rose by David Chikhiadze; several 
ever-unsettling illuscriptations by Larry Tomoyasu (one of them 
depicting a banana-nosed face that is captioned, "PERSONAL/ 
PROBATE PETITION"), and many other similarly intriguing pieces. 

Not to forget Al Ackerman's regular feature, "Ack's Wacks."  This 
issue's installment is called, "More Burgeoning Teat Madness."  
It concerns an idle Sunday its typically matter-of-fact 
Ackermanian narrator spends at a friend's bookstore.  For a while 
he amuses himself playing "the belt game," a preposterously 
brutal diversion in which he, the bookstore-owner, and a third 
man take turns walloping a fourth man on the romp with a belt.  
The latter, who is required to shut his eyes during the game, has 
to guess who struck him after each wallop to escape further 
punishment.  Having recently had a mental breakdown that prevents 
him from saying anything but, "trout- flavored," however, he is 
never able to.  At length, the game bores the narrator and he 
starts looking through various books.  His insight, triggered by 
a line about teats that he comes across in a John O'Hara novel, 
has to do with the line's re-use in various literary classics 
(like Camus's The Stranger) to pep them up.

Elsewhere, a sketch of a geek by Ackerman further indicates the 
LAFT-brand of humor; in it a frowningly serious but glowingly 
pleased- with-himself geek is saying into a phone, "Hi-yo, 
Silver, and away."  Which seems as good a line for me to say 
good-bye on as any.  One last note for un- or seldom-published 
writers and illustrators, though: LAFT is exceptionally open to 
the work of unknowns.  If you think your work is weird enough, 
give it a try!