Asemic Poetica: Volume 1 by Amy Rodriguez
Asemic Poetica: Volume 1 by Amy Rodriguez. Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA. 2021. 25 plates
By De Villo Sloan
Living in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, USA, Amy Rodriguez is widely admired in the asemic writing community for her abstract expressionist-based paintings that, as she has written, “feature asemic writing weaving around and within pools of intense color.” This a succinct description of the pieces in her book Asemic Poetica: Volume I.
The edition showcases 25 beautiful plates brilliantly colored with sharp detail. This is a slim but visually lush collection that requires many repeat visits to fully appreciate. The collection is lacking in prose explication, and this reader is left wanting to know more about the series and the context of its creation.
Rodriquez’s book represents the successful synthesis of abstract painting and asemics, a branch of the asemic tree known for bearing fruit bitter to the taste. Rodriguez avoids these pitfalls with ease rooted in commitment to artistic discipline. While wholly individual in style, her work is in the milieu of USA vispo giants David- Baptiste Chirot, Diane Keys and Karla Van Vliet, among others.
Diane Keys goes to extreme lengths (such as cooking pages in her oven) to produce impressionistic, tie-dyed-like fields upon which she overlays images and/or symbols (the ultimate "cooked" poetry). In comparison, Amy Rodriguez integrates organic, asemic clusters and strands into larger forms, an area of great interest to contemporary asemic writers. Her work, in fact, is even more organic than many of Diane Keys’s ground-breaking compositions.
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"From the perspective of 2022, [Noam Chomsky's] surface and deep structure offer a lens for understanding asemics, namely the notion that deep structure reveals an innate ability of all humans to communicate beneath and across language’s shifting surface structures."
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Deconstructive asemics tend to produce disruption and fragmentation, while Asemic Poetica: Volume 1 clearly strives for wholeness and harmony.
Jim Leftwich’s asemic theory, which is sending so many on a quest to find the Holy Grail of “signifying nothing,” is - to me personally - a compelling model. Amy Rodriguez, with her invocation of abstract expressionism and unity, runs contrary to the Leftwichian school. She shows an affinity to the postliterate brand of asemics championed by Michael Jacobson. At this point in time, we might consider the validity of both “schools” in co-existence.
Recent posts at AF2, my own writing included, have applied critical theory and linguistics to the still-daunting task of finding the genre limits of asemic writing. Reading Asemic Poetica: Volume 1 has led me to consider another aspect of linguistics that could also contribute to asemic theory: The highly influential, beginning in mid-20th century, linguistics of Noam Chomsky.
Examples of surface structure are numerous:
You ate the green apple.
The green apple you ate.
Both sentences, one is excessively awkward, have different structures yet communicate the same idea.
Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory has endured decades of analysis and has produced numerous interpretations. My musings here are yet another reading that uses Chomsky as a starting point for contemporary asemic theory.
From the perspective of 2022, surface and deep structure offer a lens for examining asemics, namely the notion that deep structure reveals an innate ability of all humans to communicate beneath language’s shifting surface structures.
Viewed in this way, we can see asemic writing as a new discourse moving us toward shared expression and communication beyond the limits of languages and cultures. Asemic Poetica: Volume 1 is an ideal representation of this theory and is deeply worthy of our shared attention.
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