Monday, October 29, 2012

The Last Vispo anthology

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.

1 comment:

  1. I thought this could be the right place to share some of my thoughts.
    Visual 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)

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