Concrete Poetry by Shawn McMurtagh (California, USA)

Concrete poetry by Shawn McMurtagh (Temecula, California, USA)

 

 

 

Southern California visual poet Shawn McMurtagh sent a hefty and diverse package of material for use in the Asemic Front project. I will share this work over several postings. Many of the pieces are clearly incomplete and meant for collaboration, but some of them I find so seemingly complete that I'll display them as solo works. Thus this first McMurtagh presentation.

 

I know of Shawn McMurtagh primarily as a prolific and successful collaborator with the great John M. Bennett. (JMB is another important Asemic Front contributor.) As the pieces on this blog reveal, Shawn McMurtagh is highly accomplished in the area of concrete poetry. I have been hoping to explore the relationship between asemic writing and concrete poetry on AF2. Shawn's participation provides an ideal opportunity. 

 

In the visual poetry community today there is a great deal of interest in traditional concrete poetry (aka shape poetry and or typewriter poetry among other designations). Yet, apparently, people who actually still produce this work with typewriters and/or word processors are rare. So Shawn McMurtagh is providing valuable starters for  AF2 collabs. (I refer to contemporary expressions using as inspiration the international concrete poetry movement that occurred roughly from the 1950s to early 1990s as "Neo-concrete."
 

 

 

 

I am deeply impressed with these concrete pieces Shawn McMurtagh sent me. He draws adeptly and apparently effortlessly from the best concrete poetry tropes accumulated across decades. The results are neither slavish homage to the styles of others nor dull recitations of hard-earned lessons. Shawn McMurtagh constructs fresh and text-centered pieces that build upon a tradition.
 

 

 

 

 

Of particular interest to me is the way Shawn McMurtagh includes concrete poetry styles of the 80s and 90s associated with copy art and zine culture. Added to the shapes, minimalism, materialism and textuality of earlier decades, we see impressive use of over-striking and distortion, resolving certain theoretical disputes in concrete poetry that emerged over time. McMurtagh, thus, presents a unified vision of what concrete poetry is  producing fine work now and offering even greater possibilities for the future. I believe his participation in AF2 will lead to some asemic-concrete hybrid material.

 

- De Villo Sloan