AF2 Review: Andrew Brenza's Neoconcretist Ekphrasis

Colorways: Poems & Images

By Andrew Brenza

Tallahassee, Anhinga Press, 2024

Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series, Kristine Snodgrass, Curator

114 pages, 6 x 9, full color

 

Review by De Villo Sloan

For the second, full-length collection to be published in the newly established Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series, curator Kristine Snodgrass selected Colorways by Andrew Brenza. The book was officially released March 1, 2024.

Brenza’s Colorways is a sequence of minimalist, unpunctuated poems that alternate with extraordinary black & white and color visual poems.

Brenza uses a variant of Ekphrasis for the book’s structure. The text-image nature of the visual/concrete poems interact with the organic forms of the minimalist verse to create play and self-reflective lyricism.

From Colorways by Andrew Brenza

Colorways provides strong critical and interpretive prose support via an introduction by Snodgrass and a preface by Brenza. Kristine Snodgrass writes, “This work is… colorful and hopeful in the way it pairs the written words and digitally altered ‘new’ concrete poetry.”

Snodgrass writes, “[Brenza’s book] is what this Visual Poetry Series attempts to prove: that practitioners today, whether new to the field, or prolific producers, are expeditiously moving to break boundaries, gatekeeping and definitions.”

From Colorways by Andrew Brenza

In his preface, Brenza states Colorways is an attempt to answer the question: “How does one write a lyric poem adequate to this age?”

For this reader, Colorways is an instant neo-concrete classic opening the door to new possibilities of poetic form and genre. The use of Ekphrasis is so innovative in Brenza’s book that I recommend visual poets do their own explorations of this classic form.

(De Villo Sloan is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.)

From Colorways by Andrew Brenza

AF2 collab by Cathead (Chris Reynolds) & De Villo Sloan (completed March 16, 2024)

 

Collab by Cathead (Chris Reynolds) (Arizona USA) & De Villo Sloan (New York, USA) completed March 16, 2024

Asemic Front 2 Review: "Circling the Start" by Dixie Denman Junius

 

Circling the Start

By Dixie Denman Junius

Tallahassee - Anhinga Press 2023

Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series, Kristine Snodgrass, Editor

60 pages paper

9.5’ x 9’

Full color

Review by De Villo Sloan

Editor Kristine Snodgrass has launched the new Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series with a spectacular, full-length collection by emerging artist and asemic writer, Dixie Denman Junius.

The first half of Circling the Start is a powerful series based, ironically, on a readable symbol: The Enso. Junius enters her asemic realm from Asian traditions that engage with paradox and contradiction.

In her preface, Junius writes, “Enso is the Japanese word for circle and is strongly associated with Zen, symbolizing anything from a rice cake to eternity” (xiii).

Her readers will certainly recognize the Enso as an indeterminate signifier that invites meditations upon meaning and as Shakespeare said, “signifying nothing.”

Junius continues, “My expression of the Enso is an opening to reveal the wordless poems in my mind and heart – centering me in the infinite wisdom of the moment. Thus far, I have created over 100 imperfect circles and interpretations from the Enso.”

Circling the Start presents approximately 25 beautiful color prints arranged in a skillfully sequenced series that leads her audience to insights about the nature of signs and asemics. The Enso series presents a narrative of the deterioration or deconstruction of the sign.

The series highlights a binary structure. I note many of the neo-concrete poets today chafe against the constraints of binary structures. I tend to agree, yet in the case of Circling the Start, the emphasis on the binary is justified, even beneficial. For instance, the Enso mirrors the signifier-signified structure of the sign frequently appearing in semiotics.

The second section of the book is an eye-popping, color-drenched tour-de-force showcasing Junius’s asemics. Her existing audience now has an enduring collection of her work under one cover; a new audience will be exposed for the first time to her talent.

I also want to praise Anhinga Press for including important contextual elements in the book: The introduction by Kristine Snodgrass, the preface by Dixie Denman Junius and an afterword by Karla Van Vliet.

The genres in contemporary vispo such as neo-concrete and asemic are opening fields of uncharted territory that require new ways of reading to share the extraordinary vision of these artists.

If Circling the Start is any indication, we can look forward to new books in the Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series with excitement.

 De Villo Sloan is Director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund

News from the Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series

 

Note: Please direct all queries to Anhinga Press (Tallahassee, Florida, USA) and Vispo Series Editor Kristine Snodgrass.

Typed-over & Glitched: Mail Art Collabs by Irene Ronchetti (Argentina) & De Villo Sloan (USA)

 

Visual poetry collaboration by Irene Ronchetti (Buenos Aires, 

Argentina) & De Villo Sloan (New York, USA)

By Irene Ronchetti (Buenos Aires, Argentina) 

& De Villo Sloan (New York, USA)

By Irene Ronchetti (Buenos Aires, Argentina) 

& De Villo Sloan (New York, USA)

By Irene Ronchetti (Buenos Aires, Argentina) 

& De Villo Sloan (New York, USA)

Source text by Irene Ronchetti (Buenos Aires, Argentina) 

Asemic Vispo Mail Art by Irene Ronchetti (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Asemic vispo mail art by Irene Ronchetti 

(Buenos Aires, Argentina)

"the one that stayed underground" & other new asemic writing by Nancy Bell Scott (South Portland, Maine, USA)

 

"the one that stayed underground" by Nancy Bell Scott (Maine, USA)

"no one told me we were taking this route" by Nancy Bell Scott

"talking in my sleep" by Nancy Bell Scott

"just enough to breathe" by Nancy Bell Scott

"when you don't feel 100% like dancing" 

by Nancy Bell Scott