Essay/review - Collected: Concrete Poems by Charlotte Jung
Malmo, Sweden: Timglaset (2023)
124 pages, perfect bound, 7” X 8”
Review by De Villo Sloan
In preparing to write this essay on the minimalist poetry of Charlotte Jung, I have been greatly assisted by the publication of Collected: Concrete Poems by Charlotte Jung. This edition was released in 2023 by Timglaset, the acclaimed Swedish publisher of postavant lit.
Collected gathers the majority of Jung’s minimalist compositions to date, including the contents of entire chapbooks and longer sequences, among them C (2019), (SEED) (Timglaset 2020), Hole Being (No Press 2021), and RAPE (The Blasted Tree 2022), among others.
This substantial volume does much to establish Jung as an important, innovative minimalist poet of the 21st century. Readers of contemporary visual poetry, asemic writing and new poetic genres will want to have Collected in their libraries. According to her webpage as well as an informative interview in Train, Jung names Susan Howe, Agneta Eckell and Aram Saroyan as particularly important inspirations and influences.
Jung’s contemporary iteration of minimalist poetry involves exploring the dual nature of language – letter, word – as simultaneously both image and sign. Seldom does she go very far beneath the textual surface to fragment, disrupt and repurpose.
Thus, Jung’s Collected has little to offer in the way of asemics; however, exceptions are present. The CO2 section fragments and cuts-up words to create a powerful environmental protest poem.
Traditional minimal concrete poetry with its geometric precision and austere economy of signs is often considered an exercise in hyper-formalism and ultimately too restrictive for creativity. Pre-Jung, my own subjective view of poetic minimalism was that it exuded a problematic masculine terseness. Charlotte Jung’s contribution thus far is to bring a healthy organicism and pleasant liquidity to revitalize classic minimalism. She also expands the field of content to find vital new messages and meanings using classic tropes.
By utilizing the ideo-cultural stance of the avant garde, Charlotte Jung’s concrete poems address reproductive freedom, domestic violence, rape and gender identity. Her ideo-poetics have the passion, conviction and precision of legendary activist poet Clemente Padin.
In her self-reflective statements, Jung refers to “a feminist reclaiming of concrete poetry,” which I believe she has done eminently in Collected. By “feminizing” the masculine terrain of minimalist verse, Jung – and her individual talent should not be minimized in her achievements – opens this exciting genre to more women and new possibilities for freedom of expression among all poets and artists. I see Charlotte Jung as a writer making remarkable contributions.
- De Villo Sloan
November 5, 2024
Elbridge, New York, USA
De Villo Sloan is a concrete poet living in Upstate New York. He writes about postavant lit & art and is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.
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In Jean Baudrillard's classic book Simulacra & Simulations, he identifies four stages of the image as it moves from representation into the realm of the Simulacra and the hyperreal.
“These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”
- Jean Baudrillard
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Asemic writers/artists, concrete and visual poets working in the digital realm will likely observe that Baudrillard's analysis of the image follows the de-signification process of visual images that are absorbed into the textuality of the hyperreal.
In digital asemic composition, the signified is decoupled from the signifier and new structures to contain these floating indeterminates form organically. Generations of increasingly detached and hyper-referential metasemics emerge.
- De Villo Sloan
October 4, 2024
(De Villo Sloan is a concrete poet living in Upstate, New York. He writes about postavant lit & art & is Director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.)
Hyperreality, Simulation, Simulacra & the Metasemic: Recent Work by Kristen Szumyn (Sydney, Australia)
By De Villo Sloan
In this essay, written in late September 2024, I draw conclusions about the nature of asemic writing that I could not have anticipated when I first began writing about the topic a decade ago.
In the context of the current global movement, I believe evidence is mounting for the position that asemic writing is a 21st century cultural meta-language with roots in Modernity (Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons for instance) and further refinement via L=A=N=G-=U=A=G=E poets and related Postmodern others who contributed to the development of this discourse.
Seeing the phenomenon of asemic writing as an outgrowth of Modernity, Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism is the most viable tool we have.
The unending social media and academic debates about readability and incoherence as well as the signification of nothing are – ultimately – some esoteric combination of particle physics, theoretical linguistics and jello wrestling. Australian visual poet Viscount Kit Kelen devised a trope that he posted publicly to express his objections to the notion of asemic: “No meaning without signs. No signs without meaning.”
I propose all asemic writing – across its schools of practice – is an evolving meta-language accelerated by the Hyperreal. Asemic calligraphers including Rosaire Appel (USA), Daidi Hu (Taiwan), Geof Huth (USA), Cheryl Penn (South Africa), Kerri Pullo (USA), Tatiana Roumelioti (Greece), Karla Van Vliet (USA) and many others are creating innovative expressions through meditative, materialist approaches. However, due to the limitations of this essay, I refer primarily to the poets and artists exploring digital asemics. Recent work by Kristen Szumyn was selected for this essay because I believe she gives us shining examples of Metasemic Modernity. In fact, her work sheds far more light than my faltering steps in darkness.
The visual poets and asemicists who are working with glitchtext, AI and other randomness generation and textual disruption achieved digitally are at the cutting edge of the Metasemic. Working in Hyper-Reality, they are engaged in a rapid evolution of new and unimagined meta-languages.
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.” (from Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra & Simulations, Stanford University Press 1988)
“So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum."
“These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It
masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It
masks the absence of a basic reality.
4
It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”
(from Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra & Simulations, Stanford University Press 1988)
- De Villo Sloan
September 23, 2024
Elbridge, New York
-sSs-
De Villo Sloan is a concrete poet living in Upstate New York. He writes frequently about postavant art & lit and is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.
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