Poet, editor, mIEKAL aND blew into town from Wisconsin last week, accompanied by boxes of enticing Xexoxial publications and a companion with an enviable hat and a serious camera. He took the poetry scene by storm. Between gigs, he declared himself pleased to spend some time in sunny Buffalo after suffering record-breaking day-after-day snow in Wisconsin and the physical miseries that go along with it.

Actually, I had never met mIEKAL aND except through the spidertangle listserv where he hangs out and posts intriguing ideas and links usually related to the graphics side of poetry. I had learned a bit more when NYT travel writer Matt Gross visited Dreamtime Village in June.

(http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/travel/20frugal.html?scp=1&sq=%22Dreamtime+Village%22&st=nyt)

Last Thursday (March 20) at University at Buffalo’s The Poetry Collection, mIEKAL read excerpts from, Samsara Congeries, a long poem he began writing in the 1970s.

http://cla.umn.edu/joglars/samsara_congeries/contents.html

He adopts a different persona for each of the 14 sections created so far. Some of the more recent personae, including the one drawn from e-mail constructions, did not even exist when he began. The texts are densely-layered, challenging, and – as one would expect from mIEKAL’s work – drawn from a wide range of influences from classical Greek literature to Jackson MacLow to spam.

Thus, when he read a (presumably) new and brief, immediately accessible poem, a poem shorter than the description of the poem, I knew there had to be a trick, a caper. Clearly, one could not take this text at face value, in situ, as it were:

Snowman

three
snow
balls

or – should it read:

Snowman

three
	snow
		balls

Or possibly:

Snowman

After suffering a sleepless night mulling over the complexities of this tricky poem, I caught up with mIEKAL on Saturday (March 22) at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair where I cornered him behind a table piled high with his treasures. I mentioned accessibility.

He laughed.

So I asked if I could make transparent his poetic intent with “Snowman.”

Foolishly, he gave his consent.

--Martha Deed