Visual
Poetry Collaborative Book Project
Introduction
to Edition #1
By
De Villo Sloan
In December 2011, Cheryl Penn (South Africa) and I placed a call through the international mail-art network inviting artists and writers to contribute a chapter each for a new visual poetry collaborative book project we were hosting. Responses were enthusiastic, warm and generous.
This first edition includes work by Matthew Stolte (Wisconsin, USA); Guido Vermeulen (Brussels, Belgium); Bernd Reichert (Brussels, Belgium) and Diane Keys (Illinois, USA). They have already made substantial contributions to visual poetry.
We were pleased to be joined by veteran mail-artists Katerina Nikoltsou (Thessaloniki, Greece) and Richard Canard (Illinois, USA). Cleveland Wall (Pennsylvania, USA) is an accomplished poet; Victoria Barvenko (Tagenrog, Russia) is a Fluxus artist. Janine Weiss (Boudry, Switzerland); Rebecca Guyver (Suffolk,UK) and KDJ (Florida, USA) are among the artists in the book who have ventured into the visual poetry realm for the first time. This diversity of talent and perspectives has coalesced to produce a stunning and cohesive overview of the many nuances of contemporary visual poetry.
Co-coordinator Cheryl Penn – book artist, painter, visual poet – did her graduate research on artist Ray Johnson and his New York Correspondence School, which in the 1960s established the foundation of today’s global mail-art community. Based on mail-art’s shared values of inclusion and collective activity, Cheryl has developed and refined a highly effective process for making artists’ books.
These editions include the work of numerous contributors and bypass publishing snares related to editorial decisions, production and distribution. The success of this process is evident in the five editions released in the previous Asemics 16 project as well as this edition.
Having a meeting place in cyberspace has been invaluable to this project. The International Union of Mail-Artists (IUOMA), founded by Ruud Janssen (Breda, Netherlands), served as an ideal headquarters for the project.
For decades, mail-art has been a conduit and safe haven for concrete poetry, visual poetry, haptic poetry, object poetry and asemic writing, among others. Visual poetry (also known as vispo) might well be the most popular of these forms today, especially since it has received a positive reception in universities. Yet it is among the most difficult to explain. Given the diversity of artists in the project, we found it essential to provide an operational definition. Cheryl’s concept that each contributor’s chapter would be an homage to a favorite artist or visual poet provided thematic coherence. Their choices and methods of honoring historic figures are a fascinating aspect of the book.
At least one strain of visual poetry we see now evolved directly from concrete poetry pervasive in the 1960s and 70s (although its historical roots are far deeper). Also known as (with qualifications) typewriter art and pattern poetry, concrete poets often share a materialist view of language. In traditional concrete poetry, the poem's words and subject determine its shape on the page, re-defining form in terms of visual image rather than more traditional means such as sonnets or sestinas, to name two among thousands. Yet even traditional poetry is associated with certain configurations of text on the printed page.
The boundaries of concrete poetry were soon shattered in the 1980s and 90s, in the Age of Xerography, when poets experimented with image-textual integration, visual writing, abstraction and dense overlays as well as minimalism that fractured basic elements of the alphabet (or bypassed the whole thing by inventing new anti-languages through asemic writing). The Digital Age, in turn, has opened more opportunities for visual poetry than ever before in photography, image-text integration and arrangement, image and text access, video, 3-D and much more.
Cheryl and I left decisions about definitions of visual poetry to the artists as much as possible. In the discussions that did arise, we emphasized integration of text and image that is composed using concepts of poetics or the poetic, awareness of structure and visual syntax. (We had a number of interesting discussions with some of the artists about organic form.) Thus, we expected work ranging from text-oriented and similar to concrete poetry to pieces presenting images, where words and writing are absent.
One of the more difficult concepts to convey is the possibility of poetry completely devoid of the printed, written or spoken word: a paradox to some and a total contradiction to others. Yet views of language and poetics as abstract structures, where a syntax of visual images is possible, for example, opened the door. We are also faced with the intriguing question: Can the poetic be expressed without words and conventional forms? Our visual poets give us an affirmative reply.
The work in this edition reveals a wide range of approaches and styles; however, most of the artists choose a middle-ground, using both text and image to explore symbol relationships, build structures and explore possibilities for expression. For me, this is one of the most important contributions of the edition and one which I hope readers will examine closely.
We have an occasion in this edition of artists, writers and visual poets engaged together in exploring a terrain that is still largely uncharted. They look to figures who inspired them for sources and explanations. We find beauty and innovation and, above all else, an affirmation of the power of human expression.
De Villo Sloan
Auburn,
New York, USA
April
21, 2012
(revised
August 1, 2024)
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