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.

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is the first book-length publication to collect the work of a community of writers on the edges of illegibility. Asemic writing is a galaxy-sized style of writing, which is everywhere yet remains largely unknown. For human observers, asemic writing may appear as lightning from a storm, a crack in the sidewalk, or the tail of a comet. But despite these observations, asemic writing is not everything: it is just an essential component, a newborn supernova dropped from a calligrapher's hand. Asemic writing is simultaneously communicating with the past and the future of writing, from the earliest undeciphered writing systems to the xenolinguistics of the stars; it follows a peregrination from the preliterate, beyond the verbal, finally ending in a postliterate condition in which visual language has superseded words. An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is compiled and edited by Tim Gaze from Asemic magazine and Michael Jacobson from The New Post-Literate blog. Contributors include: Reed Altemus, mIEKAL aND, Rosaire Appel, Francesco Aprile, Roy Arenella, Derek Beaulieu, Pat Bell, John M. Bennett, Francesca Biasetton, Volodymyr Bilyk, Tony Burhouse & Rob Glew, Nancy Burr, Riccardo Cavallo, Mauro Césari, Peter Ciccariello, Andrew Clark, Carlfriedrich Claus, Bob Cobbing, Patrick Collier, Robert Corydon, Jeff Crouch, Marilyn Dammann, Donna Maria Decreeft, Alessandro De Francesco, Monica Dengo, Mirtha Dermisache, Bill Dimichele, Christian Dotremont, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Mark Firth, Eckhard Gerdes, Mike Getsiv, Jean-Christophe Giacottino, Marco Giovenale, Meg Green, Brion Gysin, Jefferson Hansen, Huai Su, Geof Huth, Isidore Isou, Michael Jacobson, Satu Kaikkonen, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Rashid Koraishi, Irene Koronas, Edward Kulemin, Le Quoc Viet & Tran Tr?ng Duong, Jim Leftwich, Misha Magazinnik, Matt Margo, André Masson, Nuno de Matos, Willi Melnikov, Morita Shiryu, Sheila E. Murphy, Nguyen Duc Dung, Nguyen Quang Thang, Pham Van Tuan, François Poyet, Kerri Pullo, Lars Px, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Roland Sabatier, Ekaterina Samigulina & Yuli Ilyshchanska, Alain Satié, Karen L. Schiff, Spencer Selby, Peggy Shearn, Ahmed Shibrain, Gary Shipley, Christopher Skinner, Hélène Smith, Lin Tarczynski, Morgan Taubert, Andrew Topel, Cecil Touchon, Louise Tournay, Tran Tr?ng Duong, Lawrence Upton, Sergio Uzal, Marc van Elburg, Nico Vassilakis, Glynda Velasco, Simon Vinkenoog, Vsevolod Vlaskine, Cornelis Vleeskens, Anthony Vodraska, Voynich Manuscript, Jim Wittenberg, Michael Yip, Logan K. Young, Yorda Yuan, Camille Zehenne, Zhang Xu, & others.

The New Concrete is a long-overdue survey of the rise of concrete poetry in the digital age. The accessibility of digital text and image manipulation, modern print techniques and the rise of self-publishing have invigorated a movement that first emerged in an explosion of literary creativity during the 1950s and 1960s. This new volume is a highly illustrated overview of contemporary artists and poets working at the intersection of visual art and literature, producing some of the most engaging and challenging work in either medium. Edited by poets Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, with an introductory essay by renowned poet Kenneth Goldsmith, The New Concrete is an indispensable introduction to the breadth of concrete poetry being produced today. The New Concrete features new works by poets and artists including Vito Acconci, Augusto de Campos, Henri Chopin, Paula Claire, Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival, Ilse Garnier, Pierre Garnier, Eugen Gomringer, Hansjorg Mayer, Franz Mon, Edwin Morgan and Décio Pignatari, as well as new work by Jordan Abel, Fiona Banner, Michael Basinski, Erica Baum, Caroline Bergvall, Derek Beaulieu, Jaap Blonk, Christian Bök, Sean Bonney, Pavel Büchler, Simon Cutts, Alec Finlay, John Giorno, James Hoff, Jenny Holzer, Geof Huth, Leandro Katz, John Kinsella, Anatol Knotek, Christopher Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Liliane Lijn, Tony Lopez, Steve McCaffery, Donato Mancini, Stuart Mills, Gustave Morin, Tom Phillips, Jörg Piringer, Colin Sackett, Sue Tompkins, Andrew Topel, Cecil Touchon, Nick Thurston, Barrie Tullett, André Vallias, Nico Vassilakis, Emmanuelle Waecklerlé, Sam Winston and others.

Reconsiders the lyrical norm that predominates in Anglophone accounts of poetry through a multilingual and transnational lensA bold project that departs from a tradition heavily dominated by the lyric to question the very nature of what counts as poetry.A visually exciting text that draws on poetry and art from a wide array of late twentieth and early twenty-first century practitioners.An interdisciplinary approach to poetry and poetics that opens new avenues for understanding how poetry intersects with philosophies of the object, media theory, and visual studies.A transnational frame that responds to a growing scholarly push to situate American studies within the broader context of the American hemisphere.This book examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects into language. It builds a theory of 'material poetics' that provides an alternative account of poetry in hemispheric America. Rebecca Kosick argues that by reframing American poetry to prominently include object-oriented practices within and beyond the United States, material poetry can be seen as representing a significant branch of the American poetic tradition.

Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks: How do experimental poems “think” and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research Luck draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can reshape the activity of the reader’s mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. This book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century.

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

A bilingual edition of one of Guillaume Apollinaire's most important volumes of poetry, with extensive commentary by the translators.