What is Visual Poetry? (VISPO)
The beginnings of concrete poetry were primarily in S America in the 50’s with Brazilian brothers, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and then Eugen Gomringer, a Bolivian-born German concrete poet. Or one can go back further in history to the 4th century A.D. with Greek or Roman pattern poems. An example is the Phaistos disk at the archeological museum in Heraklion, Crete. (We saw it when we visited Greece in 2019.) It’s thought to be a prayer to a Minoan goddess.
A Chinese palindrome poem is also from around the same period. Twentieth century concrete poets, in the age of typewriters, sometimes referred their work as “typed artpoe” or simply “typewritings”. Today’s digital software enables more color and graphic techniques than a typewriter could, though back then some found ways to add color with different colored ink ribbons or colored carbon papers.
The Futurist typographical revolution began in Italy in 1912 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote his first “parole in libertà” (words in freedom). Fifty years later the term “Poesia Visiva” was coined by a group of 62 Italian Poets, and at the time it included language or concrete poetry with visual images from newspapers or popular magazines. In Germany in the early 20th century, Dada artist Hannah Hoch and Merz artist Kurt Schwitters introduced words & letters into collage and painting. From the literary side, credit for early visual poetry goes to Frenchman, Guillaume Apollinaire for his book Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, published in 1918. Vincente Huidobro, a Chilean poet, probably influenced Apollinaire with his literary and visual poetry experiments. They were both ambulance drivers in WWI and knew of each other’s writings.
A spinoff from visual poetry is asemic poetry, first used by mailartist, Jim Leftwich (USA), and Tim Gaze (Australia) for their calligraphic works that were “desemantisized”. Asemic language might be ancient languages in glyphs only decipherable by a limited group, living or dead (Exp: the Phaistos disk). Or it may have been created without intended meaning, though it’s got the feeling of calligraphic “spirit writing” or “automatic writing” (Exp: trails under tree bark made by beetles). In this digital age, “Glitch art” is asemic when original text material is digitally processed beyond recognition. Below are examples of asemic glyphs: first in analogue form (C. Mehrl Bennett) and then in a digitized ‘glitch art’ form (Alexander Limarev). Both are in Willie Marlowe’s curated project, Visual Poetry + Color, described next.
VISUAL POETRY + COLOR – An Exhibit Curated by Willie Marlowe in 2023
Willie Marlowe’s curated project solicited contemporary visual poetry that includes a color component, mounted on a wooden 8″ x 8″ panel, reinforced in back (cradled) for mounting..(available at Dick Blick). 44 panels were exhibited at The Arts Ctr of the Capital Region in Troy NY Nov 13 to Dec 20, 2023, along side an invitational show of 8 regional artists, co-curated by Joseph Mastroianni, Bella Burnett & Willie Marlowe. There were performance elements as well, scheduled one day in November and on another day in December.
The images we focus on here include about half the pieces in the VISUAL POETRY + COLOR exhibit, those by artists we could identify as mailartists once or still active in the Eternal Network.
Here are visual poems by Willie Marlowe. The bottom image is her 8″ x 8″ panel in the exhibit; followed by a statement from her about her background in visual poetry and mailart:
Willie Marlowe:
“I came to mail art as a painter. I often work on an intimate scale, so when I found that I could make a small painting, put a stamp on it and send it out into the world, I was hooked. No frames, no glass, no entry fees, no artist’s statement! I went on to curate several international mail art shows: Post Impressions, Stamp Act, Pony Express, The Mail Box Blues, and House Project I, ll, & lll.
I began to notice calls for visual poetry, I sent to a number of zines, journals and folio collections. I was attracted to Guillermo Deisler’s Peacedream project and contributed to his publication, UNI/vers(;). My visual poems were often in a ziggurat matrix format. I composed them in pencil on graph paper, then they were made into computer images. I used printouts of those images to send to visual poetry publications, and then as collage elements in my paintings.
My own path shows a bond between mail art and visual poetry.”
Both Willie and Rod Summers have spent time in Venice Italy through the Emily Harvey Foundation residency program. Willie has said that Rod Summers is one of the foremost visual poets in The Netherlands, and she gave me this quote from Rod,
“Mail Art and Visual Poetry have travelled together harmoniously since day one”.
Statement from Rod Summers:
“Although our wordy works may well have considerable and profoundly influential substance, one of the least appreciated advantages of written words is that they don’t; at least physically, have much weight… unless of course they are carved in stone.
Mail artists / visual poets learn at an early stage in their mailing careers that posting rocks is a tad expensive and prone to generate lengthy and complex conversations with the lady in the post office.
I once took the three boxes of Icelandic lava rocks that I had collected to use in a performance, to the local post office and said “I would like to send these three boxes of lava rocks to the Netherlands.” Without missing a beat the post lady asked “Airmail or sea-mail?”
Without question visual poetry, in all its current forms, is my favourite thing to receive in the mail. I consider myself most fortunate that my post lady, Nora, regularly delivers truly amazing visual poetry works from poets in Europe, Japan and the U.S.A.”
WM: During an artist’s residency at The Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice I was invited by Ruggero Maggi of Milan to be on a Panel on Mail Art at Spazio Thetis Venice. I was asked to speak about the connection of Visual Poetry to mail art. In the photograph taken on May 8, 2024 (from left): Chuck Welch from New Hampshire, Alessia Grinfan (translator), Willie Marlowe, Albany NY, and Ruggero Maggi (Milan, Italy) who created the event.
Statement from Ruggero Maggi:
“For me mail art could be defined as grandiose overall scheme, where the individual voices form an interactive process. Postcards, artistamps, envelopes are the main elements of mail art, but not only that, there is also a good dose of non-conformism, of decontextualization of images and words, of unhinging rules and canons, thanking Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni.
The profound connection between mail art and visual poetry has always been evident since the first futurist postcards with “parole in libertà” to Ray Johnson’s inventions in which words, outlined with his characteristic writing, floated on the paper forming archipelagos of concepts, of thoughts.
In 1985, speaking with Eugenio Miccini, a dear friend of mine and one of the founders of Italian visual poetry, during an event in which he curated a review of visual poetry and I one of mail art, observing the works of both sections of the exhibition, we realized that the boundary line between the two ‘worlds’ was truly thin.”
“Mail art isn’t done for money, it isn’t done for fame, it’s done… it’s lived… it’s emotion.”
From a brochure for Ruggero Maggi’s 2024 retrospective at the Univ. of Pavia, Italy: “Since the early seventies he has dealt with Visual Poetry, Copy Art, Artist’s Books, Mail Art, and later dedicated himself to experimenting with the relationship between art and technology using holographic installations and Laser Art. Since 1985 he has focused his research on the theory of chaos, entropy and fractal systems.”
After the 1st exhibition at The Art Ctr. of the Capital Region in 2023, all the panels from the Visual Poetry + Color installation were mailed from NY to Albuquerque NM where it is part of the permanent collection in Cecil Touchon’s Ontological Museum. Cecil Touchon put out a call to his network of collage artists and mailartistsfor additional 8″ x 8″ vispo+color panels. Now, with a total of over 100 panels, he is mounting the 2nd exhibition at the Ferrari Gallery in Dallas Texas, which opens on July 27 and goes through September 2024.
THE FUTURE of VISUAL POETRY + COLOR:
Cecil Touchon will continue to grow the VISUAL POETRY + COLOR archive by making open calls, which will happen as new exhibition opportunities open up for this project over the next 10 years.
Statement from Cecil Touchon:
“I am a mail artist and a part of the network and the whole museum project is based on the mail art system of networking. I do the typical mail art correspondence and all mail art that I receive is registered in the collection like everything else.
In terms of Mail Art and Visual poetry. I don’t think there is any specific connection between the two because mail art is a network and visual poetry is a ‘deliverable’. It is only one of the deliverable elements in the mail art network along with anything else that can be on a post card, in an envelope or a small package along with any other poetry, asemic writing, or image, drawing, collage, photo, announcement, poster, etc. or just pure correspondence. Is there more visual poetry because of the mail art network? Maybe. I am not sure how one might quantify that except through searching through well developed collections. But not every visual poet uses the mail art network I would guess.”
THE ART OF TYPEWRITING is a beautiful hard cover book by Ruth and Marvin Sackner, documenting much of the concrete poetry, and some visual poetry, from their extensive Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry. We were able to visit them and see their collection in Miami many years ago. They came to Columbus in 2010 to attend an Avant Writing Symposium at The Ohio State University main library, organized by John M. Bennett. Marvin was the keynote speaker. Ruth passed away just before the release date of the book, and Marvin died in 2020. Their archive now resides at the University of Iowa library in Iowa City, where there is also an excellent Fluxus collection which includes original fluxus boxes & kits (we’ve visited the special collections library to see these). The Univ. of IA also has a collection from Chuck Welch’s mailart archive. Chuck Welch is one of the mailartists included in THE ART OF TYPEWRITING, along with Vittore Baroni (Welch visited Baroni after the 2023 panel discussion in Venice), Hartmut Andryczuk, Paolo Bruscky, Geoffrey Cook, and Bill Gaglione. Also included are works from these deceased mailartists (in the order of their deaths): Robert Rehfeldt, davi det hompson, Betty Danon, Rea Nikonova and Serge Segay, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. [Not a definitive list, as it’s entirely possible there may be others in the book who I am simply not familiar with as having been active in the mailartist network.]
The Sackners also collected small press publications which were part of the avant garde literary scene, where much concrete & visual poetry were first published. My spouse, John M. Bennett, published Lost & Found Times (L&FT) magazine, and the Sackners aquired a complete set of its 30 year run. It was a small press journal that published avant garde writing, poetry, and art. Because John received submissions by mail at home for the magazine, I mistakenly assumed many of those concrete or visual poets were mail artists. Yet, many of them WERE active participants in the network, as were we. John contributed the essay below about a couple who were published in L&FT and who are well represented in THE ART OF TYPEWRITING. They were part of an underground cultural scene in Russia before they moved to Germany later in life.
The following four images are from the pages of Lost & Found Times: At left are collaborations JMB did with Rea or Serge; at right are individual visual poems by Rea and Serge.
John M. Bennett:
Rea Nikonova (1942-2014) & Serge Segay (1947-2014)
They were a couple, and lived much of their life in Yeisk, Soviet Union, where they were active as underground conceptual and visual poets, and performance poets. Their work grew from earlier ZAUM art and writing, a Russian Futurist movement and culture from the 1920’s. Much of their innovative work was distributed thru Samisdat networks, using carbon paper to make a few copies of books and other materials. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, with the USSR’s Glasnost (“Transparency”) and Perestroika (“Restructuring”) developments, they were able to contact other artists outside the USSR, and did so via Mail Art. I was in contact with them at that time, and over the years we did many collaborations, and I published some of their work and collaborations thru my press Luna Bisonte Prods. They soon moved to Kiel, Germany, and spent the rest of their life there, dying in 2014. Their work after the early 1990’s evolved to include publication technics such as photocopiers and audio recording. Their work is unique and unforgettable, and is a wonderful example of the international nature of polyartistry, something fundamentally characteristic of Mail Art.
An excellent book about them and others, and the unique culture they were part of, is by Gerald Janecek, ZAUM: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism, San Diego Press, 2015 (New Second Printing)
“TINTA CIRCULAR: Sonnets & Others” by John M. Bennett (the image at LR) has a cover image made from his visual poem on wood which is part of Willie Marlowe’s VISUAL POETRY + COLOR project.
The rest of this post is filled with the remaining images from mailartists’ pieces in the exhibition…
Matthew Rose statements:
(About his 8″ x 8″ collage, above at LL)
This little piece refers to the repetition of inane behavior and how as a moment, it expands and compresses time. Think of mistakes you made – dropping a vase, cutting your hand, a car accident.
Time stops. but strangely
the mind is clear(ed).
Though here,
there is intention.
Poetics of failure.
(About ABAD mailart project = A Book About Death)
“It was first presented in New York in 2009 and last presented in Japan at the Karuizawa New Art Museum in 2019. MOMA has a full collection of the postcards in the first show in NY. There were 30 installations all over the world, involving a total of around 5,000 artists.”
There might be A SIMILAR TRAJECTORY PROJECTED BY CECIL TOUCHON’S AMBITIONS FOR THE VISUAL POETRY + COLOR PROJECT. See the link below for additions he has already made & for documenting future additions of 8”x8” panels. I commend Willie Marlowe in her decision to mail the panels from the first exhibit for adding to Cecil’s Ontological archive in Albuquerque NM. That planted the seed for his ambitions to further the Visual Poetry + Color project.
Link to additional images for the expanded exhibit of VISUAL POETRY + COLOR, posted by Cecil Touchon: https://om-2024.blogspot.com/search/label/Visual%20Poetry%20and%20Color%20Exhibition
touchonian.com to keep up with the action as Cecil Touchon posts about the Dallas TX installation
https://buymeacoffee.com/touchon for anybody that wants to be part of the Coffee Club and contribute some gas money for all the travel involved (three trips all together just for the Dallas TX exhibit).
https://om-2024.blogspot.com/p/poetry-and-color-exhibition-1-november.html is an overview with info about the Troy NY exhibit (Nov. Dec. 2023) and a press release about the Dallas TX exhibit (July 2024)
https://2023-ontological-museum-acquisitions.blogspot.com/search/label/Visual%20Poetry%20and%20Color%20Exhibition includes ALL the 8″ x 8″ panels from the 1st exhibit in Troy NY, not just those from mailartists
For more on the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry at the Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/gallery/exhibit/sackner/
TINTA CIRCULAR by John M Bennett and books by many other mailartists/visual poets like Hartmut Andryczuk (Germany) Luc Fierens (Belgium) Davi Det Hompson (USA, d. 1996) Marilyn R Rosenberg, Sheila E. Murphy, K.S. Ernst, David Baptiste Chirot (d. 2023), Jim Leftwich, Michael Peters, Carlos Luis (d. 2013), César Espinosa (México D.F., d. 2023), and others are at: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/lunabisonteprods
L&FT magazine issues are scanned & archived at The Ohio State University Special Collections online website – searchable by names of artists & authors. Example below is for Rea Nikonova: https://kb.osu.edu/search?query=Rea%20Nikonova&scope=e89e5ba2-1a83-53ee-b700-7340fa01b8a7
(note: you might need to register for the OSU Knowledge Bank? Then click the L&FT issue you want to see & download the pdf of at bottom of web page)
Guillaume Apollinaire, French “forefather of surrealism”, was the author of the famous book “Calligrammes”, published the year he died, 1918. The book is in the public domain. Find it online at: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/apollinaire-s-calligrammes-1918/
Quote from The Tate Museum about mailart: “Mail art began in the 1960s when artists sent postcards inscribed with poems or drawings through the post rather than exhibiting or selling them through conventional commercial channels. Its origins can be found in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and the Italian futurists. But it was the New York artist Ray Johnson who, in the mid 1950s, posted small collages, prints of abstract drawings and poems to art world notables giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/mail-art
CMB RE: above quote – Note the parallels (collage, poems) between mailart & visual poetry – especially found in postcard collages and copy machine art. (Instead of copy machines, our private printers are ever more at hand to create broad sides and small book editions.) Rubber stamped text is used in both mailart & visual poetry.
Over the Sofa/Under the Skin/Inside the Head 