Collaborative Mail Art Books

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Comment by De Villo Sloan on May 8, 2012 at 5:57pm

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project

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 collaborative book project we were coordinating. Responses were enthusiastic, warm and generous: We soon announced this second edition.

On the pages ahead, you will find innovative work by members of the international visual poetry community including Nancy Bell Scott (Maine, USA), John M. Bennett (Ohio, USA), Rosa Gravino (Argentina), Samuel Montalvetti (Argentina), Marcela Peral (Argentina), and TIC TAC (Germany). Fluxus is represented by contributions from Reed Altemus (Maine, USA) and Svetlana Pesetskaya (Russia). We were pleased to be joined by veteran mail-artists CT Chew (Washington State, USA), Angie Cope (Wisconsin, USA), Skybridge Studios (Indiana, USA), and Svenja Wahl (Germany).

Co-coordinator Cheryl Penn – book artist, painter, visual poet – has done intensive research on artist Ray Johnson and his New York Correspondence School, which in the 1960s established the foundation of today’s thriving global mail-art network. Based on mail-art’s shared values of inclusive and collective activity, Cheryl has developed and refined an effective process for making highly individualized artists’ books. Her concept that each contributor’s chapter would be an homage to a favorite artist or visual poet provides thematic coherence.

The work in this edition reveals that visual poetry, a synthesis of the visual arts and literature, has emerged as a vital mode of expression that is inventing new forms. Approaches to visual poetics in these pages reveal great diversity. TIC TAC (Germany), for instance, draws upon minimalism that focuses on single letters and words to produce brilliant irony and complex narratives. John M. Bennett’s chapter is a flawless integration of text and image that offers both new ways of reading and seeing.

Comment by De Villo Sloan on May 8, 2012 at 5:57pm

 

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project - 2

 

The visual poetry concept, for most of us, is best understood through the lenses of painting, photography, collage, video and similar genres: Contemporary cultures program us to be adept at reading visual images, image sequences (from montage in film), and visual syntax. We can readily accept the notion that written and printed language is part of the larger visual image landscape. Thus, it is plausible that text and image can be integrated to create metaphor, rhetoric, lyricism, narrative, non-linearity, form and even visual prosody – elements associated with literary tradition and the notion of the poetic.

 

What is less apparent, but revealed especially by the work in this edition, is that the “Great Tradition” of poetry has evolved in such a way that visual poetry is now a viable, if not a desirable, genre in the post-literature of the 21^st century. Poetry was an oral as well as visual tradition long before it was affixed in the printed word or quarantined as something called literature; it had forms, rhythms, and symbols that made it vital long before scholars froze and sought to create systems of measure and evaluation, making absurd assertions that jamming inane content into the form of a sonnet or counted syllables somehow automatically qualified as poetry.  

 

The Age of Literature and the printed word are only part of a far greater continuum stretching back into prehistory. Poetry will very likely endure as an essential human activity long after literary canons and theories have been forgotten, certainly in spoken word form, but also in visual form outside the limits of accepted definitions today. In addition to forms of digital visual poetry, the handmade books – such as this edition – are increasingly viewed as object and haptic poetry themselves.

 

Central to poetry in the 20^th century was a sustained engagement with the image and its refinement into image structures within the poem. Arthur Rimbaud in the 19^th century, whose work is a precursor to Modernism, foresaw not only the rise of the image but the possibility of visual poetry in his sonnet “Vowels” (1872):

Comment by De Villo Sloan on May 8, 2012 at 5:53pm

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project - 3

 

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels.

I will tell you, one day, of your newborn portents:

A, the black velvet jacket of brilliant flies whose essence

Co-mingles, abuzz, around the cruelest of smells,

 

Wells of shadow; E, the whitewash of mists and tents,

Lances of glaciers, albino kings, frost-bit fennels…

 

Rimbaud’s poem can be read as notes for the construction of a visual poem. Individual letters are isolated from words and given color designations, melding word and image. The color-vowels generate a sequence (montage) of associative images that provide content. Many of the poems in this visual poetry collection are a realization of Rimbaud’s vision, using image as language and language as image.

 

Several decades later, Ezra Pound’s Imagism established a foundation for Modernism. The imagist agenda called for inclusion of poetic traditions outside Europe, economy of language - a paring of rhetoric - in favor of image primacy and a belief that the image by itself can convey meaning and provide lyrical expression. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) is an example of Imagism that also foreshadows visual poetry:

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

The economy and precision of the poem helped pave the way to minimalist poetry. The structure is two images, separated visually on the page with line breaks. Again, this piece could be translated into a visual poem. The primacy of the image expanded and increased from Modernism into the Postmodern.

 

William Carlos Williams and later Robert Creeley further refined poetic minimalism and use of the image. Visual poetry took root elsewhere, of course, and in different ways. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is an influential

 

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project - 4

 

experiment in language-painting. New York School poets sought to create a literary version of abstract expressionism and action painting. In the meantime, DaDa and Fluxus (among other avant garde movements) produced text-image hybrids, including concrete poetry, through anti-art that ran counter to Modernism. In the last quarter of the 20^th century, these efforts evolved and coalesced to make the concept of visual poetry possible.

 

We have an occasion in this edition to experience visual poets engaged together in exploring a terrain that is still largely uncharted in the recognizable form of the book and chapters. While their work is still labeled avant-garde (a term that is now essentially meaningless as are so many other similar designations), they draw heavily upon the tradition of literature (which after all remains a rich vein) following a charge to poets made a century earlier: “Make it New.” We find beauty, lyricism, and above all else, an affirmation of the power and need for human expression.

 

 

 

De Villo Sloan

Auburn, New York, USA

May 7, 2012

Comment by cheryl penn on May 4, 2012 at 9:28am

O - exciting Guido!!! That means mine is on its way - thanks for posting.  Reminds me I must make my next contribution.  For anyone interested - please google ReSite - David Dellafiora - an ongoing project where contributors create and post 40 pages to David in Australia which are assembled into this artists book. 

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on May 3, 2012 at 5:29pm

Compilation book edition proposed by David Dellafiora: VOL2; YEAR 4

In this edition: Reed Altemus, John Bennett, Mark Bloch, Jim Hayes, Otto David Sherman, State of Being, (USA) ; David Dellafiora (Australia); Horst Bauer (China); Eberhard Janke, Kommissar Hjuler, Andrew Niss (Germany); JF Chapelle (France); Allan Revich (Canada); Lubomyr Tymkiv (Ukraine); Simon Warren, Barrie Tullett (UK); Guido Vermeulen (Belgium); Cheryl Penn (South Africa); Tiziana Baracchi, Vittore Baroni, Serse Luigetti (Italy)

Comment by De Villo Sloan on April 26, 2012 at 8:32pm

Hello vispo collaborative book participants, I did another anthology blog documenting more chapters:

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-visual-poetry...

Comment by Laura Daniels on April 25, 2012 at 4:05pm

I love the concept of add and pass on so the idea of making a book and allowing others to fill it is fantastic!  If there are any projects currently in the process then I'd love to be added in!

 

Laura Daniels

101 Blagrove Drive

Wokingham

Berkshire

RG41 4BD 

Comment by Claire (aka Cleo) on April 23, 2012 at 9:34pm

Wlcome to new members Gail and Harry!

Comment by Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat) on April 22, 2012 at 7:48pm

Good to hear from you, Alfonso! Sail the seas and rivers of handmade papers and natural things...we will wait patiently :-)

Comment by Alfonso Filieri on April 22, 2012 at 10:49am

Cheryl, Katerina...a word, or rather two: I will send my pages but I will not do more work with photocopies: I can not, I find an office job. I like to sail the seas and rivers, the handmade paper, natural things ...
in this work give a cut.
for others they are ready to go ...
go!

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