David-Baptiste Chirot @ Asemic Front (part 1)

 

The visual poetry & asemic writing communities are mourning the loss of David-Baptiste Chirot (aka David Chirot) in 2021. 

Visual poet & theorist Tom Hibbard was there in Wisconsin to help usher D-B C through the darkest of times. Kudos to Tom to go through that rarest of melancholy: The death of a poet. Matthew Stolte was also there to help - deepest thanks. As far as I know, these were the last members of our community to see David.

Participants in the Asemic Front Project know David-Baptiste Chirot was a visual poet of great achievement. He has contributed to our theoretical foundation & artistic practice. Indeed, without the breakthroughs David made that pushed visual poetry to new levels of expression, AF could not exist. He has made significant contributions to the asemic writing movement as well. 

David has been a longtime contributor to Asemic Front. So I am taking this sad event as an impetus to gather all his AF contributions & re-post them for all interested in his work. Feel free to copy, share. 

The irony is that David & I discussed ways to find a central location for his work, which is voluminous & widely dispersed. Obviously, I had no solution. I hope in some small way that I can remain true to the belief he knows I have in his work.

- De Villo Sloan

At the Edge of & Outside of Language: 

David Chirot on the origin of rubBEings

(originally published in Asemic Front, December 18, 2017)

When I first began creating rubBEings I had a vision - a kind of deep emotional, visual thinking, which I longed to convey. But I did not know if I would ever be able to realize it. I wanted to express that vision in a way that conveyed what I was experiencing at the edge of and outside of words, letters and language

I kept trying to realize that vision until one day when I was making art working on a telephone pole. I was surrounded by a street gang that later killed one of my friends. At the time various people were living in a nearby building later condemned by the city. I lived on the top floor that was reserved for homeless people and spent a whole winter there. Snow came in the broken windows and killed mice, which terrified the psychotic patients that shared the floor with the homeless.

I was working away on the telephone pole and suddenly making a stroke with a lumber crayon on cheap notebook paper I realized I was crossing a line. I was no longer just making markings but actually doing what I had envisioned but had not been sure I could achieve. Now I was achieving it. In that one stroke I changed from being a wanderer to having a vocation: visual poetry, writing, sound poetry – the rest of my existence here.

- David Chirot

By David-Baptiste Chirot

Inner pages of an asemic book by David Chirot

"For Bob Cobbing in the Snow" (remix) by David Chirot