Column 116 — March/April 2013
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The Latest Visiotextual Art Anthology
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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 3/4 March/April 2013
the last VISPO anthology: visual poetry 1998 – 2008
Editors: Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis. 331pp; 2012; Pa;
Fantagraphics Books,
7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle WA 98115. $40.
www.fantagraphics.com
Toward the end of 2012 Fantagraphics, a well-known mainstream publisher of full-color, beautifully-reproduced graphic novels and the like, came out with the last VISPO anthology: visual poetry 1998 – 2008, marking the first time to my knowledge so commercial a press was responsible for anything having to do with visual poetry.
The anthology is divided into five (not very helpfully-labeled) sections, each with a group of three to six essays to the fore: “Lettering,” “Object,” “Handwritten,” “Typography,” and “Collage.” Boasting 148 contributors from 43 countries, it is clearly intended to display the full range of recent visio-textual art (from 1998 to 2008, according to its title) rather than highlight the best such art from that period.
When I dipped into the first section, “lettering,” which consists almost entirely of textual designs employing mostly distorted letters, I found very few I could say much about. Take Daniel f. Bradley’s “White Witch 10,” which consists of white letters of varied sizes and fonts scattered across fragments of black rectangles in a small patch way up at the top of an otherwise empty page. A witch’s effect on language, a white witch’s? The hint of the magic for good or evil of language is nice, and the design itself seems masterful to me. That I can’t say much about it is not its fault. But . . .
Perhaps my favorites in this section (except for two visual haiku by Scott Helmes whose work I’m always plugging so will say no more about here) are two side-by-side wonderfully colored scatterings of letters by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen that seem views into the living inhabitants of the microscopic realm from which language originates.
In the next section, “Objects,” I began noticing the excellence of the editors’ choice of pairings, and longer sequences of images: for instance, on pair of pages here Chris Joseph’s “Hair” on the left, and Michael Basinski’s “ZERZOUR” flow gracefully from one to the other, both centering on a female face, both warm with flesh tones. Each has verbal content, too. In “Hair” it is fused both visually and conceptually with the piece’s image of a woman’s face, one of its words being, “ringlet,” for instance, another “blonde.” The words in “ZERZOUR” are employed mainly as discrete visual elements in the collage the piece is, thus presenting chances for the discovery of unexpected interconnections–or interdisconnections–making it harder to get to the poem they and the visual elements eventually cohere into than it is to reach the poem “Hair” quickly becomes. The poem “ZERZOUR” becomes will also vary much more from reader to reader than the one “Hair” becomes.
I can’t leave “Object” without mentioning one of the real objects by K.S. Ernst in it: a sculpture in which wooden letters spell “VIOLET” downward (in violet)–with a red N jammed like a shelf between the word’s E and T: the verbal and visual as one, and wonderfully expressive.
The “Handwritten” section consists mostly but not entirely of hand-written pieces, two of which I especially like on facing pages, Robert Grenier’s “AFTER/NOON/SUN/SHINE” and “RED W/OOOD/RED/WOODS” (with the extra O intentional). Each consists of large skinny printed letters spelling its text in red, green, blue and black ink in what you might guess was a homeless person’s calligraphy–very crude-seeming–but carrying (it seems to me) all the visual charge and fun of the asemic art it resembles plus a haiku-deep semantic resonance–rising from a firmly denotational archetypal basis.
John M. Bennett has two works in this section that similarly, and differently, demonstrate the way words and graphics can combine in paths into the importantly new out of the importantly old of the concrete poetry of fifty or sixty years ago.
Skipping around a bit, I opened the “Typography” section by chance to Karl Jurgens’s amusing “For bp” (bp being the famous Canadian visual poet, bp Nichol). It consists of two rectangular layers of bp’s, one superimposed on the other, with blank in the shape of a huge H left in the middle. Included in its title is the information that no H’s were harmed in its production.
In the final “collage” section, Two pieces in particular caught my eye, one called “Florescent Hunting Knives” by Andrew Abbott and, next to it, E y, by Alberto Vitacchio, even though I found both of them verbally hermetic. Intriguing shapes and colors. Abbott’s seems some kind of manmade block extending into a waste land, or waste sea. On it is what may be a mailbox with four newspaper clippings pasted on it bearing the message, “WELCOME ASSORTED FLUORESCENT HUNTING KNIVES.”
The background of Vitacchio’s piece seems to me either a sky with wispy clouds over some kind of greenery, or a portion of a lily pad on a pond with some kind of white scum on it. Two vertical strips take up most of the piece’s middle, one labeled at the top, “E,” the other labeled at the bottom, “y.” Green vines connect them. I like them both, but fail to see the point of calling them visual poetry–i.e., I can’t read them.
I understand that several mainstream big city bookstores are carrying the anthology. One disappointment is that no reviews, to speak of, even as short as this one, appeared in the first three months or so that it’s been out. Nor has it made any list of “notable books of 2012.” But it compares favorably with the two great concrete poetry anthologies of 40 or so years ago, edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams. No one with any interest in art combining text and graphics should be without it.
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