A New York School Magazine
PERSONAL INJURY
ISSUE 2
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Issue 2, printed January 1976, edited by Michael Sappol. 60 pages. Cover image of hand with inflated middle finger.
As Sappol releases the next issue of Personal Injury half a year after its initial appearance, its aesthetic continues to develop and his vision for the magazine grows clearer. Just as in issue no. 1, the visuals chosen are in relation to medicine; however, in no. 2, the focus is placed on the physical human body. Whereas in the first issue, the illustrations from “How to Read a Person Like a Book” are found throughout the magazine, the image styles are now themed around specific authors. The images placed around the works by Opal L. Nations, for example, feature black-and-white photographs of what appear to be genetic conditions, such as a child with hydrocephalus - a swollen head.
Child with hydrocephalus from issue 2.
This trend continues through the rest of the issue, with panels from a comic strip representing Harry Greenberg; a series of illustrated spheres for Ghouls 137; both artist renditions and photographs of ears for Mercy Bona; and crooked teeth/jaws for Mark Trail.
Harry Greenberg Ghouls 137 Mercy Bona Mark Trail
Unlike the first issue, where we have the letter from Sappol’s mother that is fully grounded in reality, most of the poems here are rooted in the abstract. The found poem “Wagon Box Fight” by Peter Inman actually lays out the process by which it was written, starting out as a piece of prose that is slowly picked apart and taken out of context, leaving behind only the final poem (pg. 25-26). In the first phase, Inman has written a surrealist story of a man and a woman having sex outside of a oil refinery factory. In the second phase, most of the sentences have been cut out, leaving behind only the key phrases and words, but still locked in their original position. In the final phase, these words rearranged and put back together, tracing diagonal paths across the words left from the second phase. The rearranged poem now has an entirely different meaning and interpretation; it now appears to be about Wilma slowly bleeding out and hallucinating as she is dying.
Phase 1: Prose Phase 2: White out Phase 3: Re-arrange
"Porno Poem" by Mercy Bona
However, not all of the poems are hallucinogenic or surreal, as “Porno Poem” by Mercy Bona approaches abstraction through another method (pg. 39). The poem is composed entirely of dialogue and no set narrator, with only vague references to different objects as "this" in each stanza. The reader is prompted to fill in these blanks, and given the title of the poem, it takes on the story of (believe it or not) a porno. In it, a woman wishes her partner had two mouths, one for each breast, while the partner complains that she is taking too long, saying that though it is currently June, “at the rate you’re going it'll soon be September”. This is probably the most obvious reading of the poem, but the intentional ambiguity makes it so that if the poem had been named anything else, much of the poem could be viewed in a more innocent manner. In fact, the second stanza is the only one that explicitly references any sex act, stating "'It's a shame you don't have two mouths, / one for each of my breasts'", but even this line could (given proper context) be said in an innocent setting: for example, by a mother nursing a very hungry baby. This abstraction, though not surreal, makes it hard to pinpoint what the poem is actually about: is it really just erotica, or is Bona trying to mislead me?
Similar to the previous issue, the final page once again appears as a callback to the first page, right before the contributors list. The black and white photographs appear to be originating from the same event, carrying a similar energy. The final image on the back cover, a young girl’s head photoshopped onto the naked torso of an adult woman, is nothing short of perverse, juxtaposing disparate elements to provide a shocking conclusion to the second issue.
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