EDITORIAL VOL. 13/NO. 2

Rampike rides again, on the crest of the celebrated Nicholas Frederick Peter’s “Yellow Lightning Tornado” [see:cover image]. Peter’s art has been acclaimed world-wide for it’s Miro-like simplicity, combined with a remarkable geometric sophistication. With this issue, Rampike has swept up a startling array of mind-turning, internationally-acclaimed inter-disciplinary artists and writers. Here you will find the established and new engaged in the vortices-of-the-text, a “Vortex” of writing, graphics, music, and performance. The internationally celebrated Philippe Sollers joins us in this issue with an instalment of his gyrating H translated by lingo-wizard Elaine Corts. Richard Kostelanetz, who has provided primal energy to the New York avant-garde for decades, fires off text-based innovations in response to the turn-of-the-century, thundering Russian Futurist, Victor Klebnikov, and linguistics theorist, Roman Jakobson. In this issue, we offer an historical and rare, never-before-published interview with bill bissett, along with his swirling metaphysical poetry and tossed salad visuals. Paul Dutton spins out a seminal essay on the works of his fellow Horseman, bp Nichol. Andrea Nicki, Michael Basinski, John Donlan, and Frank Davey encircle language, then re-ground it from different angles, turning, howling. Norman Lock and Opal L. Nations whip up superb fictions that twist brain receptors. Kenneth Doren, Gary Barwin and Monty Cantsin (a.k.a. Istvan Kantor) whirl us into a realm of finely twisted, electronically enhanced digital opera, and augmenting all of these writers are the cross-fire-hurricane visual dynamics of text-image artists from around the world including Helen Lovekin (Canada), Spencer Selby (USA), Carla Bertola (Italy), Carol Stetser (USA), W. M. Sutherland (Canada), Christian Burgaud (France), Reed Altemus (USA), Gerry Shikatani (Canada), Fernando Aguiar (Portugal), and Vittore BAroni (Italy). Rounding up this issue in a dizzying tour-de-force is cult underground figure, Fausto Bedoya, who tilts the world and leaves us spinning. Plus, plenty more! And, the next issue of Rampike brings us to our TWENTY-FIFTH YEAR IN PUBLISHING with more energy and ever-newer innovations! Once again, Rampike opens its doors and invites submissions, but only from the finest innovators of the postmodern! All brought to you through the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts! In the meantime, we offer you the Vortex. A hurricane of language like any other twister combines the Five Elements: Air in the form of swirling wind, Fire in the form of lightning, Earth that has been swept from the firmament, Water in the form of a regenerating downpour, and, finally, the Sublime, in the form of Art, a kinetic and dynamic sustenance that cracks our skills against hard reality. In ancient times, such elements were considered the alchemical fundaments of nature and primal human psychology. We’ll let you figure out the rest [q.v.; Jung, et. al.] Here, we offer you Dervish Pirouettes, Aeolian Gandangos, Zepherin Mazurkas and other dancing air-songs. Turn the page; enter the Vortex!

--KARL E. JIRGENS,
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER, SINCE 1979



Questions? Contact Karl Jirgens