Closed Caption, visual poem by Damian Lopes, from The Last Vispo
Very soon, Fantagraphics will publish The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998 - 2008 edited by Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis. The editors' site. Fantagraphics page.
It includes 143 contributors from 23 countries. Many of the visual poems use elements of comics, or bear a family resemblance to comics: works by David Ostrem, Bill DiMichele, Jim Leftwich, Gary Barwin, Serge Segay, & a collab between Marc Bell & Jason McLean come to mind.
Troylloyd/Troy Lloyd & I from the Abstract Comics anthology are also in this one.
Unlike comics, the majority of visual poems are single page works. Everything happens in the space of a single page. Sequence is the order of where you focus your eyes as you "drink" the contents of a visual poem.
I suggest that reading visual poetry is helpful to developing visual literacy.
I thought this could be the right place to share some of my thoughts.
ReplyDeleteVisual Poetry and Asemic Writing are fascinating relatives of Abstract Comics, but I feel that those relations damaging AC.
Many AC can be read as AR or VisPo, and some of it's artists also engage in Asemic/Visual.
But AC still needs to mature and develop it's own identity.
Brancusi said about Rodin "Nothing grows in the shade of a tall tree", and while the mentioned relatives are still not as big/popular as Rodin, they do cast a shadow...
(fascinating as they are)