Asemic Front 2 Commentary: Jim Leftwich on Magickal Absurdities & RANK by Kristine Snodgrass

 

From RANK by Kristine Snodgrass (JackLeg 2021) (p.20)

Asemic Front 2 Commentary: Jim Leftwich on Magickal Absurdities & RANK by Kristine Snodgrass

https://asemicfront2.blogspot.com/2021/12/af2-commentary-to-rank-or-not-to-rank.html

By Jim Leftwich

 

Thanks for the AF2 commentary about RANK & to Kristine Snodgrass for sending me the book. I appreciate it very much.

The images are rich with a kind of exotic beauty, remnants & ruins left standing in a post-apocalyptic jungle:

            Page 31: A drone hovers over a sinking boat, oil coating every surface.

             Page 45: A stone, eaten by time.

Page 89: Darkness settles on the devastated town, after the hurricane has passed.

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"These are magickal absurdities, absolutely essential if we are to carry the theory & practice of asemic writing into whatever futures survive the ongoing catastrophes..."

- Jim Leftwich

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I like the prose inclusions in RANK - prose poems - inserted at a few choice spots in the sequence of images. The presence of the poems changes how we think about the book. It is as if whispers from the shadows around the edges of the glitch are reminding us to remember, while we are looking, that we are also reading.

Two notions have caught my attention recently in the larger world of all things asemic:

 1. Michael Jacobson's use of the term "asemic autobiography" and,

 2. The term PolyAsemic, used by Tatiana Roumelioti.

These are magickal absurdities, absolutely essential if we are to carry the theory and practice of asemic writing into whatever futures survive the ongoing catastrophes of the anthropocene.

-sSs-

From "decompositions" (2006) by Jim Leftwich 

(An unpublished MS. in "The Leftwich Files" AF2 Archives)

From "decompositions" (2006) by Jim Leftwich