Asemic Writing for Mail-Artists

HOTEL NOBODY WANTS! small painted mail art envelope

"MinXus Movie"

Love the envelope Guido!

From Serse Luigetti in Italy

And more from Serse’s works:

Serse continues to spin!

Serse and Minxus movie + Guido! Doesn't get much better then that! Mind-blowing/inspiring asemics!! Makes ya proud to be IUOMA!!!!

Asemics - now in color.

Yip, the Serse work is FAB. Thanks Guido.

And JMB's there with some asemic smears too: "o f f"

I wonder if Lew Welch really did write, "Raid Kills Bugs Dead"

GAsemics : Prequel

Tremendous Kerri, thanks. It's like asemic people, asemic apparitions, asemic spirits. This series will be amazing when we get all the pieces together in one place. Thanks again

Nice asemic spirits Kerri- and no ectoplasm!

New entry in the Kerri Pullo & DVS collab series GASemics. This is "GASemics - Clinical Trials" (aka neo-concrete #1178):

gasemics in color!

and Johnsemics!

Object Poetry Box from Jean-Pierre Benon in Belgium (eighties)

SNOW ASEMICS

Thanks for sharing all the beautiful asmemic everyone!!!!!!!!

Green Man asemics

Snow and ice asemics

Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett

Another JL & JMB

Nice collaboration! The first is an asemic Groucho Marx!

2nd: Singing Taoist!

& Guido= great snow and ice w/ green man! I have a "green man" tattoo!

Eco asemics: Dallas Road shoreline in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

From Dame Mailarta

DAME! Love the Eco Asemics Nature=art! Thanks  for posting Guido!

Eco asmemics created by the rain on Brussels’ cobble stones

For more rain photos, visit:

http://kiekjesdief.blogspot.be/

Entry AMAZING RAIN

G

Your Asemic MC here. A warm welcome to the new folks! Don't forget to check group members for asemic mail-art trades. I am receiving some great work I intend to blog asap.

Wow, thank you all for these amazing posts.

Hi Fatima! I really appreciate seeing your work here.

Guido - I think the Brussels eco-asemics are extraordinary. Those rainwater symbols are unreal.

Thanks JMB - man, that found text with the boat on the "pewter sea" - totally conventional flowery realism - juxtaposed with your asemics & those minimalist shreds - that piece is speaking right to me.

heh - that pewter sea text comes from The Odyssey!

john

That's even better. You have the translation issue. That's prose. Now I have to look up the Homeric meter because I don't remember.

You're chronicling the bourgeois-fication of Classicism.

Now I like the concept even better with the asemic & the classical epic, only you have a little chunk of basically 19th century discourse in there.That's deconstructive - unity is shattered or at least has a crack in it.

"It will not cohere."

OK, the Homeric line is dactylic hexameter - six stresses per line. If you were writing conventional poetry, you could come up with a flexible equivalent using 18-syllable lines. That's cheating but the basic idea.

It will not cohere, it will cohere.  (to paraphrase Beckett)

Thanks for giving that closure. I was having a Langpo post-traumatic stress seizure.

Heh - stay away from langpo, the boredom will stress you no end!

Langpo is interesting! I was just reading about jazz musician Eric Doplphy who studied and jammed while listening to birds outside his house in L.A, we would literally play back what they said,etc. Any way... he discovered that they sang in "quarter notes"(Still have to look that up) then he taught that method to Coltrane. Maybe we can do "bird asemics-Langpo-whatever in "quarter notes,"- spaces???

Your average L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem is about 800 pgs? I've always been of two minds on it, Neil, since the days Robert Duncan took Silliman to task in SF & a guy named Bernstein trolled the m-a network for subscriptions to his zine.

An interesting experiment in Stalinism, and I should shut up.

Hah!  You in trouble, now, De Villo!  Personally, I found some of their theoretical writing of some interest, but much of their poetry seems flat and dull.  there are exceptions - such as Tom Beckett, and occasionally Bernstein and a few other things - but mostly the poetry's attempt to play out the theories just makes for a rather opaque and unreadable didacticism, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous, as far as its claims to being politically correct and transformative are concerned. Now I will shut up!

I know JMB. I'll probably delete, but  Iived through it and wrote about it.

Bernstein (at my SUNY Buffalo alma mater) did good things for other streamers like Meikal And,  David Chirot, Geof, probably you. As elder statesman, Bob Creeley settled the rift between Langpo & Black Mt pretty much. But from my narrow perspective, it's always is this what Olson would have wanted? But who could ever say?

My take is a little reversed: The theory itself was flawed, no matter how enticing. Some good work came out despite that. My favs being Silliman and Susan Howe.

Regardless, it has run it's course and now safely ensconced in the Wax Museum.

There's still a riff w. Black Mountain?? Literary grudges last long huh?

God, we're all going to be arrested by the Langpo-lice.

The Langpo folks are masters at writing their own history. They needed to establish a link between themselves and Black Mt. - only Robert Duncan started screaming bloody hell, which did create permanent rifts. It was based in theories on language. Creeley finally smoothed it, but it had largely been settled.

They dismissed the Beats completely as "Romanticism." Allen Ginsberg just laughed about it and dismissed them, as far as I know. It didn't damage the Beats slightly.

In the east, the roots were in Fluxus and Jackson MacLow (among others), but that lineage has largely been dropped in The World According to Langpo. Bruce Andrews was originally very good. But as they moved into academe, the tune began to change. They've been supportive of vispo. But in my paranoid mind I wondered if it was an attempt to appropriate it.

I have nothing at all against the langpo folks - it's another experimental movement in literature, and I'm all for that.  some good stuff did come out of it, for sure -

Ditto. I published articles about them, including a mixed review of one of Bernstein's books and he sent me a very positive letter.

If it had not been for Langpo, I believe American poetry (mainstream) in the last quarter of the 20th century would have been an absolute disaster. As it is, David Lehman publishes his apologies to the rest of the world in his annual anthologies trying to explain why everything faltered after mid-century giants like O'Hara, Ginsberg, etc.

I've read one theory that says the next generation could only live in the shadow of their predecessors. Langpo is ultimately about the removal or the self from the text. That's one way of avoiding confrontation with the ego.

I think one positive thing about NOW is that the field might finally be open for a consideration of vispo, concrete, asemic, haptic.

I read Langpo regularly. I do think Ficus has them all beat, but I'm nuts.

And to tie this all up:

The first place I encountered Langpo was in the mail-art network: Bernstein & Hannah Weiner. Also at - what was that place? - The Gotham Book Mart in NYC? A lot of it they were handing out for free along, with stuff from Higgins' Something Else Press. I think Dick Higgins mostly gave that stuff away. Back in those days, who knew?

I usually don;t say this, because most people are incredulous - but it's true: I was completely unaware of the langpo movement until the late 1990's - the lit world i was involved in ran from early 20th cent. european  vanguards through latin america, with plenty of side trips into baroque hispanic lits, 17th cent  english lit, and nahua lit (Netzahualcoyotl, et al).  when i did look at langpo stuff (partly because people would occasionally say my work sounded like theirs, (which it doesn;t at all)) it seemed like it should be interesting, but it didn;t say much to me personally  - i eventually included a bunch of langpo material in the Avant Writing Collection at OSU, however, because I think they are part of the dialogue, part of the larger picture -

JMB, I'm not surprised. It just hasn't had the impact that other movements have.

In my (former) academic career I was commissioned to write the Langpo entry for the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry. I think it was in the 90s and it was published. Probably replaced with an updated entry by now, but it's in the older editions. Why they contacted me, I still don;t know. But I can say with some certainty Lango started in the mid-70s, simultaneously in NY and San Francisco. 

Kerri Pullo sent a piece I really like with dense layering where there are all kinds of symbols & cursive patterns. Many thanks, Kerri!