AF2 Review: Attack of the Glitchtards - "Analog Glitch" by Lova Delis (Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series)

 

Cover of Analog Glitch by Lova Delis (Ohio, USA) 

(Photo courtesy of Asemic Front Archives)

Review: Analog Glitch

by Lova Delis (Curated by Kristine Snodgrass)

Tallahassee, Florida, USA: 

Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series

10 X 7 inches, 58 pages

Review by De Villo Sloan

"For the bad bitch in us all..."

- Lova Delis, Analog Glitch intro

Asemic Front 2 readers sometimes ask why I only "publish good reviews." 

Indeed, I like to accentuate the positive and share my enthusiasm for innovative and creative work that crosses my path. Amazing things are happening in the visual poetry and asemic communities. But sometimes I see things so egregious, poorly conceived and financially and spiritually bankrupt that I am compelled to break the silence.

The fledgling Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series has churned out a half dozen, expensively produced and weighty tomes with little to no promotion. Each new release, in the estimation of this reviewer, grows increasingly more vulgar feminist, tasteless and pointless. How a supposedly historic press devoted to fine writing can be hawking self-indulgent, selfie collections - I hope we soon see the demise of this pathetic series. 

From Analog Glitch by Lova Delis

I have been told the Anhinga Press vispo series is now womyn-run and devoted to a brand of feminism fused with glitchart. Apparently the Anhinga Vispo Series writers - such as Lova Delis - compose with the "femmeglitch." I applaud gender exploration; I resist the feminist isolationist stance assumed by Anhinga Press. 

Producing glitchart involves pressing a key on your keyboard over and over again.  Apparently males do not have the "femmeglitch" key. I do not have one because only women can make a "femmeglitch," which allows access to some deep emotional states only women can experience. Try as I might, I can never know the suffering and oppression endured by a white, middle class soccer mom/political activist/ glitchtard.

The warped female images in Analog Glitch only lead me to speculate what a really bad acid trip must be like. They certainly do no enable me to transcend.

Please look at "Pouring Over" above and explain to me how you apply the femmeglitch to the piece by Lova Delis. Analog Glitch uses traditional collage approaches as well as the avant so there is more complexity than the standard femmeglitch.

A garden variety femmeglitch will be a selfie of you. Usually bits of words are added like "semioti" or "deconstruc" to send a wink you are way hip to all the intellectual theories or popular political actions of the time. (Most likely you're clueless.)

For decades, we avant garde artists have felt legally safe - at least in the USA - because all the obscenity trials of the 20th century left the precedent: You can't mess with it if it's "socially redeeming" art. With Analog Glitch by Lova Delis, I believe I have found an instance of "art" without redeeming social value.

Needless to say, do not waste a cent or a moment more of your precious time on Analog Glitch by Lova Delis or the Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series.

- De Villo Sloan

June 30, 2025

Elbridge, New York, USA 

(De Villo Sloan is a concrete poet living in Upstate NY who frequently writes on postavant culture. He is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund. The Fund previously awarded a grant to Anhinga Press but has no current affiliation with that organization.

Sloan earned his Ph.D. in literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo where he studied with Robert Creeley, among others. He has taught and held administrative positions at University of Maryland College Park, Syracuse University, University of Rochester and others. Over the last 40 years, his reviews, essays and creative work have appeared frequently in the world's leading literary and academic journals.

He is the author of an academic study of Native American archaeology and gothic Romanticism, in addition to several volumes of poetry.

At the University of Rochester, he helped establish and wrote case material that lay the groundwork for the school's successful $2 billion comprehensive campaign.

At Wells College he was part of the campaign that raised $50 million for the institution.)

Asemic Front 2: "The Spectacle" & Other Recent Vispo by Nick Piombino (New York City)

"The Spectacle" by Nick Piombino (June 2025)

 (Photo courtesy of the artist)

"Pop-Up" by Nick Piombino (June 2025) 

(Photo courtesy of the artist)

"What?" by Nick Piombino (June 2025) 

(Photo courtesy of the artist)

"RA" by Nick Piombino (June 2025) 

(Photo courtesy of the artist)

"Go" by Nick Piombino (June 2025) 

(Photo courtesy of the artist)

"One" by Nick Piombino (June 2025) 

(Photo courtesy of the artist)

"$5" by Nick Piombino (June 2025) 

(Photo courtesy of the artist)

Hyperreality, Simulation, Simulacra & the Metasemic: Recent Work by Kristen Szumyn (Australia)

 

"glitch as found object" by Kristen Szumyn (Sydney, Australia) (September 2024) 

(Image courtesy of the artist)

Hyperreality, Simulation, Simulacra & the Metasemic: Recent Work by Kristen Szumyn (Sydney, Australia)

 

By De Villo Sloan

 

In this essay, written in late September 2024, I draw conclusions about the nature of asemic writing that I could not have anticipated when I first began writing about the topic a decade ago.

In the context of the current global movement, I believe evidence is mounting for the position that asemic writing is a 21^st century cultural meta-language with roots in Modernity (Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons for instance) and further refinement via L=A=N=G-=U=A=G=E poets and related Postmodern others who contributed to the development of this discourse.

Seeing the phenomenon of asemic writing as an outgrowth of Modernity, Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism is the most viable tool we have.

"databending" by Kristen Szumyn (September 2024)  

(Image courtesy of the artist)

Theoretical disputes are commonplace in the asemic art/writing community. A significant contingent of visual poets deny the existence of asemic writing, at least as defined by Leftwich & Gaze. My own research indicates asemic writing grew out of – if it is not identical to – automatic writing and drawing experiments championed by the mid-20^th century French Surrealists (including Brion Gysin).

The unending social media and academic debates about readability and incoherence as well as the signification of nothing are – ultimately – some esoteric combination of particle physics, theoretical linguistics and jello wrestling. Australian visual poet Viscount Kit Kelen devised a trope that he posted publicly to express his objections to the notion of asemic: “No meaning without signs. No signs without meaning.”

I propose all asemic writing – across its schools of practice – is an evolving meta-language accelerated by the Hyperreal. Asemic calligraphers including Rosaire Appel (USA), Daidi Hu (Taiwan), Geof Huth (USA), Cheryl Penn (South Africa), Kerri Pullo (USA), Tatiana Roumelioti (Greece), Karla Van Vliet (USA) and many others are creating innovative expressions through meditative, materialist approaches. However, due to the limitations of this essay, I refer primarily to the poets and artists exploring digital asemics. Recent work by Kristen Szumyn was selected for this essay because I believe she gives us shining examples of Metasemic Modernity. In fact, her work sheds far more light than my faltering steps in darkness.

The visual poets and asemicists who are working with glitchtext, AI and other randomness generation and textual disruption achieved digitally are at the cutting edge of the Metasemic. Working in Hyper-Reality, they are engaged in a rapid evolution of new and unimagined meta-languages.

"untitled" by Kristen Szumyn (September 2024) 

(Image courtesy of the artist)

To inspire new readers and refresh the already faithful, I will conclude with quotes by Jean Baudrillard that reference the Hyperreal, Simulacra and Simulation, the Postmodern and Poststructuralism:

https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html?source=post_page---------------------------

“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.” (from Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra & Simulations, Stanford University Press 1988)

“So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum."

“These would be the successive phases of the image:

 1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”

(from Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra & Simulations, Stanford University Press 1988)

"untitled" by Kristen Szumyn (September 2024) 

(Image courtesy of the artist)

- De Villo Sloan

September 23, 2024

Elbridge, New York

-sSs-

De Villo Sloan is a concrete poet living in Upstate New York. He writes frequently about postavant art & lit and is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.

 

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AF 2 Collab by Minette Marcroft (Brooklyn - Salt Lake City, Utah) & De Villo Sloan (New York, USA)

 Vispo by Minette Marcroft (Brooklyn (NY) - Salt Lake City, Utah)

Glitchtext vispo by Minette Marcroft & De Villo Sloan

Mona Lisa Twitch: A Review of the Glitchy Womyn Anthology 2024

Cover of Glitchy Womyn: An anthology of women glitching

 2022-23. Cover image by Amy Rodriguez

Glitchy Womyn: An anthology of women glitching 2022-23

Edited by Kristine Snodgrass and Karla Van Vliet

Bristol, Vermont, USA, Van Vliet Gallery, 2024

114 pages, 8 x 10, full color

 

Review by De Villo Sloan

Kristine Snodgrass and Karla Van Vliet have combined talents again to bring us Glitchy Womyn: An anthology of women glitching 2022-23.

Produced in a beautiful, color edition by Van Vliet Gallery of Bristol, Vermont, this book provides an overview of recent developments in a burgeoning area of digital poetics. The anthology also serves as documentation of a fascinating moment in the evolution of global visual poetry.

Use of the glitch in various forms of digital art composition has been commonplace for years. The use of glitching in postavant textual disruption is newer and more esoteric. Fortunately, Glitchy Womyn includes a note from every contributor explaining her work. These statements are extremely thoughtful and will inform those in the audience who want to know what inspired the art. 

"The Spectacle of Bad Women" by Lova Delis 

from Glitchy Womyn

Kristine Snodgrass has experimented extensively with glitched text. Her selections (along with Karla Van Vliet's) are exceptional. Marco Giovenale, to the best of my knowledge, is the first poet to publish specifically about/within the glitch-text aesthetic in his book GLITCHASEMICS (2020) published by Post-Asemic Press with a forward by Michael Betancourt.

"Trying to resolve the dialectic" by Alexia Catenazzo in Glitchy Womyn

In Glitchy Women, the contemporary visual poetry audience will recognize writers and artists who are publishing actively and widely and also discover emerging talents: Amy Rodriguez, Terri Carrion, Carol Lynne Knight, Dixie Denman Junius, Lova Delis, Laura Kerr, Sue Scavo, Amanda Earl, Jennifer Weigel, Rosalie Gancie, Kristine Snodgrass, Karla Van Vliet, Terri Witek, Shloka Shankar, Alexia Catenazzo, Maria Damon, Sofia Nobre, Eileen Tabios, Alexis Fedorjaczenko, Rhonda Ananda and Kristen Szumyn. (On a personal note, I am thrilled to see some mail art friends were selected for the anthology.)

"Glitch II" by Kristen Szumyn in Glitchy Womyn

The pages of Glitchy Womyn reveal the depth and range of the new poetries: from the glitched Post-Lettrism of the “New Concrete” evidenced in work by Eileen Tabios to a neo-concrete, object poem approach in the highly original compositions by Terri Witek. While endless theoretical vispo battles rage online, factions form and positions harden, Glitchy Womyn opens - literally - a world of possibilities for artist and audience.

"Dismantled" by Terri Carrion in Glitchy Womyn

The WAAVE Global Gallery women’s collective and other related groups are contributing significantly to a new era of visual poetry. The vitality of this extended community is readily apparent in this new anthology. 

X7X by Eileen Tabios in Glitchy Womyn

(De Villo Sloan writes frequently about postavant art and lit

and is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.)

News from the Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series

 

Note: Please direct all queries to Anhinga Press (Tallahassee, Florida, USA) and Vispo Series Editor Kristine Snodgrass.

Studies in Linearity by Kristine Snodgrass (Florida, USA)

 

"Study in Linearity" by Kristine Snodgrass (Tallahassee, Florida, USA)

"Study in Linearity" by Kristine Snodgrass

By Kristine Snodgrass

By Kristine Snodgrass

By Kristine Snodgrass

By Kristine Snodgrass

Anhinga Press Launches Visual Poetry Book Series Featuring Asemics, Neo-Concrete & Other Postavant Genres

 

Asemic Front 2 Collabs by John Richard McConnochie (Australia) & De Villo Sloan (USA)

 Asemic-concrete collab by John Richard McConnochie (Queensland, Australia) 

& De Villo Sloan (New York, USA) 

 Collab foundation by John Richard McConnochie (July 17, 2022)

Collab by John Richard McConnochie & De Villo Sloan

Collab by John Richard McConnochie & De Villo Sloan

Copy Cat : Vittore Baroni's Cat - Nina - Pens Asemic Glitch Memoir

 

Nina - New asemic glitch Paw'n Star 

Welcome Nina & Vittore Baroni (who requires no introduction) to the Asemic Front Project.

In an announcement posted on Facebook (December 11, 2021), Baroni (from Viareggio, Italy) writes:

CATOGRAPHIES

Yesterday the cat Nina managed to pull [down] the A3 scanner I have on my desk. After the blow, the scanner started producing 'catographs' like this...

In another related comment, Baroni writes: "Nina thanks [you] for the many likes to her 'catography'.... destined to remain a unique work since that simple man of her house thought badly of fixing immediately the artistically modified scanner."

- De Villo Sloan