Please make sure to visit Slow Forward for more outstanding asemic reportage:
From Slow Forward:
In my later 2024 posts about asemic writing here at AF2, I discussed theoretical and practical components of the current movement. My approach is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
I contend a small but vocal group of mostly veteran visual poets grounded in Leftwich & Gaze (circa 1993-97) increasingly run in contradiction to the ubiquitous, abstract expressionist-based visual art that - in the majority mind - currently constitutes authentic asemic writing.
While trying to interpret and resolve Leftwich's work with my own, I encountered what I have at times less than seriously named "Deth Metal Asemics." Leftwichian Asemics produce an infinite, boring, dissonant wasteland that, as Pound already warned, "will not cohere."
Deth Metal Asemics do little more than suggest the outlines of a massive Greenland made of destroyed and decaying alphabets. What I find fascinating in Leftwich & Gaze - what keeps me returning - is the conceptualism and deeply philosophical components of asemics that have yet to be adequately explored.
Thus I am always seeking current, succinct, quotable pieces by Jim Leftwich I can use to represent his views. Many thanks to Marco Giovenale at Slow Forward!
it does not speak
Why would this be called asemic?
In the late 1990s, Tim Gaze and I were not looking for another way of saying 'reader response.'
Asemic Writing was not supposed to be an 'anything goes opportunity.'
The word 'polysemous' works perfectly well for the Wikipedia statement. We knew the word in 1997, and would have used it if it had been appropriate.
Asemic is not meant to give you and me and our 39 thousand friends a chance at every imaginable meaning, an experience wherein anything we want is as good as anything else.
Asemic should return no meanings. We should stare at it, and it should stare back in silence.
The asemic does not speak. It does not give anyone anything that they want.
January 20, 2025
-
