Word up USM's art & lit mag takes another step forward BY SAM PFEIFLE

It all starts with the cover. All in all, it’s not a bad way to judge the new edition of Words & Images (or, as it’s written on the cover, Words + Images, which may be kind of post-modern). What is it? A green carpet, by the looks of it, with a miniature UFO hovering above, identified with a circle.

"Mark Ford, our art director, did the cover image," explains new publishing director Victor Wyatt. "It’s a carpet," he confirms. "He gave me some metaphorical reading on it, and I just said, ‘It looks good.’ "

Sitting on my couch, the non-traditional USM student (read: "don’t call me older") seems like the kind of guy who gets it. "One of the things we’re actually focusing on this year is selling the thing," he says. You know, he actually wants to make it something people want to read, not just a collection of academic exercises and art filler. Not that that characterizes all of the history of Words & Images — just the worst of it. The parts Wyatt would rather not revisit.

Brought in a few months later than usual in the collection’s annual cycle, Wyatt says of his staff that "usually it’s work study kids, traditionally a staff of 15, but I had seven volunteers, so the work was much more concentrated."

That can be a good thing. Wyatt admits that he surrounded himself with like-minded thinkers, and though that can exclude works not to their taste, it can also result in a nicely focused publication. Since Wyatt dropped it on my desk the day prior to my writing this, I can’t completely tell you whether that came to fruition, but I can say some things seem to have improved.

Rather than simply have pages with art on them, Wyatt chose this year to focus on three locally based visual artists, employing Andy Verzosa from Aucocisco to help with the coordination. Thus, we’ve got a body of work each from Richard Brown Lethem, George Daniell, and Hilary Hanley Irons. Lethem’s works span 20 years, and showcase his fudged lines, bright colors fogged by black. With the late Daniell, we’re given a look at his late-career watercolors, child-like and full of primary colors and primary statements like "Count Your Blessings." Irons is fresh and young, all her works from the past two years, yet her sometimes duo-toned subjects are historic in their pen lines, garbed in Puritan wear and running from nature.

It’s a worthy introduction to each of the artists, and elsewhere we’re treated to single works from the likes of Tim Folland, who draws pictures then makes DVDs of himself destroying them by slamming his body into them while wearing a gold helmet.

As for the poetry and prose, I’ve had less time with them, but checked out two of the few local writers (Wyatt makes no apologies for having the fewest ever local contributions: "I just wanted the best possible writing, the best possible product, so I got rid of the quota system." No quotas? Who is he, George Bush?). Craig Giammona, whose byline you might recognize from the Forecaster and who once contributed to the Phoenix, turns in a poem in "Permanence" that stands like a capital "I" on the page. I might have hyphenated "excrement colored." His mind wanders from class: "I was shot . . . I remember . . . I am leaving . . . I had eaten poetry," bored with the outside world’s input, he is consumed with himself.

Michael Delaney’s "Telegraphs from the Satellite Trajectory — a Memoir" may or may not be that, but I’ll take it at face value and say this kid’s probably done all the drugs he says he has. Organized in datelines that jump back and forth, he starts in last year’s Portland and "meanders" to Colorado and Austin of the mid ’90s, people dying of drug overdoses and car accidents along the way. It’s a sad tale, elevated above the morbid and self-indulgent (for which a memoir could be forgiven, anyway) by a riff on hunger that is sufficient to explain our protagonist’s vacuousness.

I would be remiss, too, if I didn’t mention the interviews here, a W&I staple. The one must-read is with Carolyn Chute, conducted via email by James Whitten. If you’re not on to the "Mega Men," you will be.

Maybe the best indication of the collection’s relative strength comes from Wyatt’s introduction, a piece usually reserved for paeans to art and writing. Instead, Wyatt tells us a story of the interview and appearance by Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago that got away. They couldn’t get the translation done in time for the interview, and when they translated Saramago’s reply to their invitation, they discovered that he wouldn’t come to the US because of the way foreigners are treated at our airports. "Such is the state of our country and world today," Wyatt writes.

"I hope that what you read and see in this edition of Words & Images will allow for a few moments’ reprieve from the tensions of this young and hostile century."

He is brief, and to the point, and I think that this is a quality he was looking for in the selections that appear. Stephen Dunn poetry-prize winner Linda Dove takes time to mull over the "American word, Mississippi,". Separated with commas like that, it’s as though Mississippi is the only American word.

Something about that idea is central to this collection’s success.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com

Words & Images will be released with a party featuring readings from Anne-Marie Oomen, Christian Barter, and Lewis Turco; music from the Get Band; and award presentations to Manini Nayar and Katie Kingston, at SPACE, in Portland. Call (207) 828-5600.