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There’s an attempt at a discussion of the Fantagraphics anthology going on at Spidertangle that I’ve contributed to, once by growling that “just saying you don’t like the anthology, or posting blurbs in its favor, won’t get us anywhere.”

 

I then brought up an idea which I would be amazed if more than three other Spidertanglers thought was a good one: the publication of a companion to the Fantagraphics anthology. If possible, it would have an essay by either Crag of Nico, or both, describing their editorial intentions, and a history of the anthology. Then maybe one or two essays on the history of visiotextual art that discusses where this anthology fits into that history. The rest of the Companion would consist of critical reactions to it—a few from from vispo people, but many I would hope from conventional literary AND visual art people.

 

I followed that with a digression to a thought about The history of American Visiotextual Art: that with Andrew, we now have a fifth generation. The first generation consisted mainly of E. E. Cummings and Kenneth Patchen. The Pre-Concrete Generation, characterized by more or less standard free verse poems with visual details I’d call minifractional but which were responsible for a large percentage of the aesthetic effect of the poems they were in. An example is the famous Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill who is described as breaking “onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.” A small fraction of the poem but responsible for at least half of its aesthetic effect (however little that effect may seem to those with no understanding of the magnitude of such simple-seeming freshnesses when introduced to poetry). First generation poems were basically semantic poems with just enough significant visual material to make them visual poems.

 

Second generation American visiotextual art was dominated by concrete poetry—by my definition of it as verbally meaningful texts which are also fully, or near-fully, visual images, and whose verbal and visual content combine to produce the works’ aesthetic effect.  In other words, works half verbal and half visual. Ron Johnson’s “moon,” with a third moon printed in between and above the word’s other two o’s. The Solt and Williams anthologies brought them to the attention of the public.

 

Then came a third generation of “visual poets,” the poets I think of as being published by Karl Kempton’s Kaldron or in close touch with poets who were. The important difference between them and the concrete poets, again by my definition (which ignores who did what where and believed in what politics or moral codes, etc.), was that they made works that included purely visual elements that interacted with their works’ semantic content to produce their aesthetic effect.

 

The fourth generation, now in power, consists of the asemic poets, who have basically forsaken textual elements for anything other than the way they look in designs. It seems to me that a good eighty percent of the work in the Fantagraphic anthology us if this nature. I have made only a few such works myself, but extremely like some specimens of it in the Fantagraphics anthology. In fact, it’s possible that seven of my ten favorite works in the anthology are asemic.

 

I believe there is a fifth generation in existence, but I don’t know what they’re up to.

 

All comments, as always, are welcome. 

 

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