Asemic Writing Poetic Structures

These poems are created using vernacular sources for materials such as restaurant receipts, poetic structures Touchon made with spam email, pages of lists from magazines as palimpsests to then overwrite the texts on the pages using the existing texts as prompts for his asemic writing. Touchon also used various authorsÕ poems whose structures he liked in the same way by printing out the poems on white sheets and then overwriting the texts. Some of the poets included e. e. commings, David Drew, Vito Acconti, documents from Sigmund Freud, some pages from Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, etc. In short, any sort of page composition that Touchon could exploit with the use of asemic writing.

The first critical study of writing without language In recent years, asemic writing—writing without language—has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Yet this burgeoning, fascinating field has never received a dedicated critical study. Asemic fills that gap, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing. Pioneered in the work of creators such as Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, asemic writing consolidated as a movement in the 1990s. Author Peter Schwenger first covers these “asemic ancestors” before moving to current practitioners such as Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner, exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance in the contemporary era. Asemic includes intriguing revelations about the relation of asemic writing to Chinese characters, the possibility of asemic writing in nature, and explanations of how we can read without language. Written in a lively style, this book will engage scholars of contemporary art and literary theory, as well as anyone interested in what writing was and what it is now in the process of becoming.

Asemic writing is a wordless form of writing, an art form offering an impression or abstraction of conventional physical writing. In Fluency, we see a union of Karla Van Vliet's lifelong practices of art and poetry, each dissolving into the other and resurfacing as asemic writing in full flower. Here are thirty-seven images, thirty-seven pieces of literary expression that extend far beyond literary convention, accompanied by Van Vliet's personal insights and remarks. In her words: "There are times when I do not have words. Yet I have the need and desire to write. It is to asemic writing that I turn in these moments. To the gesture of writing. . . . In the branching tree limbs, in the waves, in my hand's scratching across paper, we each read the feeling that rises in us."

The current permutation of The Reader, originally envisioned as a black and white book, expanded in size and breadth to its current full color version to take into account the range of expression in Touchon's asemic explorations spanning forty years of works on paper including images from Touchon's unpublished sketchbooks. The first section of the book primarily contains palimpsest based asemic writing originally intended for mail art correspondence in which Touchon overwrites texts as found in 19th and early 20th century antique poetry books, a book of sermons, farm journal pages, a postcard, a grade school autograph book page, a sheet of music, a page from a vintage high school chemistry workbook and old invoices. Using these found papers collected for possible collage material, Touchon retains and uses the structure on the page and the patinated paper as inspiration for these asemic works often overwritten with india ink and quill pen. Following these are selected typographic abstraction works from the Fusion Series, Touchon diary-like ongoing series of collage works begun in 1983 and continuing to the present. In these works Touchon uses a wide ranging body of materials, approaches and techniques to produce these poetic works that explore figure and ground relationships and a variety of compositional strategies. These collages become studies for Touchon's paintings. In the midst of this group are a series of asemic 'songs' on torn brown paper using colored pens, pencil shading and white pencil highlighting that express the idea of visual musicality. At the end of the typographic collage works there is the image of a labyrinthian network of overlapping white lines over a black void that seem to float on multiple levels. This opens the way to a set of works of brush and ink from 2009 on the pages of a single antique journal where the markings are painted onto the leaves of paper and after a few moments the pages were held under running water in the kitchen sink. Whatever ink had dried remained on the page leaving gray ghost marks where the ink had been washed away. The book concludes with a variety of works from the late 1970's examining Touchon's early mark making based on language or visual musicality. Taken as a whole, this sampling of works across forty years of Touchon's oeuvre reminds one of a quote from the 1949 'Lecture on Nothing' by John Cage: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it..." but in Touchon's case he possibly is saying nothing about Something; perhaps a something so transcendent that common words cannot speak of it, something so vast that words crumble into gibberish and collapse into an unutterable silence. Some of the titles of previous exhibitions of Touchon's work suggest this such as: 'Beyond Words', 'Reduced to Silence' or 'The Unspoken Remains'. Yet Touchon's works are not nihilistic in nature. They could be said to be meaningless though clearly not purposeless. Touchon has said that his interest is in expressing 'the underlying universal harmony of all things'. One has the impression when studying these works that literary meaning has been removed or obfuscated but in Touchon's view he sees his work as liberating language from its work as bearer of meaning and by extension liberating the reader from the work of deciphering meaning and from the obligation of being literate when enjoying the works purely for their aesthetic value. In a world whose population is engulfed in a deluge of information that we must continually navigate, these works offer a small oasis in which one might be refreshed along the seemingly endless journey over the shifting sands of data on the horizons of which can only be seen mirage and simulacrum.

She Speaks Tongues is a collection of the rising voices of five women, from silence (her image, ) to gesture, to word. Each section starts with a woman's portrait and follows with her unique rising voice in asemic writing to poems (words). Asemic writing lies between the mystery what is yet to be spoken, and semantics.

The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author’s biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we’re doing to our world -- and to our own bodies.

Poetry comics by Kimball Anderson, Derik Badman, Warren Craghead, Julie Delporte, Oliver East, Franklin Einspruch, Jason Overby, and Paul Tunis. Foreword by William Corbett.

This book collects experimental “visual poetry.” With The Last Vispo Anthology, Fantagraphics spotlights the intersection of art and language in this innovative new collection ― without peer in English ― that gathers the work of visual poets from around the world into one stunning volume. The alphabet is turned on its head and inside-out and the results culminate in a compilation of daring and surprising verbo-visual gems. The Last Vispo is composed of visual poetry (a portmanteau of the words “visual” and “poetry) from the years 1998 to 2008, during a burst of creative activity fueled by file sharing and e-mail, which made it possible for the vispo community to establish a more heightened and sophisticated dialogue with one another. The collection extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with ancient “shaped text,” medieval pattern poetry, and dada typography, pushing past the concrete poetics of the 1950s and the subsequent mail art movement of the 1980s to its current incarnation. Rather than settle into predictable, unchallenged patterns, this vibrant poetry seizes new tools to expand the body of work that inhabits the borderlands of visual art and poetic language. The Last Vispo features 148 contributors from 23 countries on five continents. It includes 12 essays that illuminate the abundant history and the state of vispo today. The anthology offers a broad amalgam of long-time practitioners and poets new to visual poetry over the last decade, underscoring the longevity and the continued vitality of the art form.