Tentatively, Convenience's Reviews > Marquee

Another bk in my collection signed by the author. You'd think I was swimming in a world of poet friends at some point or another - but I only remember meeting DiPalma once - at a mail art show, The Red Show, at Doug Retzler's apartment in BalTimOre. This has few words (color names) - it's mostly vowels & slashes & horizontal lines. As such, it's very restrained. Ie: until McCaffery's afterword. In this latter is written:

"What the piece offers is its own dis-closure through a reader's own production of the text. Ray has called it a "score" rather than a "text" and I would tend to call it a "pre-text" (a textuality before textualization) as the activated score is the reading itself which is produced, not gleaned or consumed."

Such theorizing was very common at the time amongst 'language poets', I made pieces in the mid '70s along those lines too, but, now, it just doesn't seem like enuf to me. McCaffery's afterword is typically brilliant & hyperintellectual but I don't really think DiPalma's "score" is that stimulating for the reader to respond to. I like it anyway but it's a bit too lazily produced to really jar me into action.