C. Mehrl Bennett and Marilyn R. Rosenberg are masterful collaborators, poets, and inventors of colorful images and themes. “Dancing ants reading” – one of the delightful phrases... More > swarming in this vivid artist’s book, which has as its central theme the soles of our feet and all that such a topic implies about self, time, motion through life, and one’s place(s) in the universe. Extremely colorful and full of fascinating detail, it is a work which can be repeatedly enjoyed and reveals new secrets each time. Appealing as visual poetry, as graphic design, and as an artist’s book, this collaboration achieves the most fulfilling of any collaboration between 2 artists: it becomes as if it were the work of a third person, a new artist never before discovered. - John M. Bennett< Less
The faces, frames, words, and concepts in this book speak to and of the author's obsessions, history, and lunacy, but they have a resonance from a complex and rich cultural past that enriches them.... More > These visual poems are not Mayan at all, yet they could not have come into being without an experience of Maya culture. Human cultures are never exclusive or “pure”, but consist of dynamic mixings of many sources from many times and places. They are constantly in flux, and these pieces represent the incorporation of aspects of the ancient Maya world into the world we inhabit today. This is just one of the many ways in which the richness of the Maya universe is alive and well, and continuing to evolve. This is visual poetry with complex cultural and historical roots, and great contemporary resonance.< Less
Bennett has been the avant in avant-garde in the latter half of the 20th century with his Lost and Found Times, one of the great “small press poetry rags” of all time, and then through... More > his Luna Bisonte Prods press. OLVIDOS (“Memories”; though the word also and literally means “things forgotten”) is quite possibly his masterpiece. 339 pages of zany often inarticulate expositions of a kind of lunar madness that can only be the work of the descendent of such poets as Vicente Huidobro and Guillaume Apollinaire. There is most likely something for everyone here from minimalist visual techniques and zen-like koans to architectured poems such as “olvidos y fragmentos” with its enigmatic phrase “lock the boot”. But then the entire text is one immense sequence of enigmatic and puzzling dicta, summed up best in his own portmanteau word “hablacagada”. This is an important work and should place Bennett centrally on the map of great, innovative American poets. - Ivan Argüelles< Less
Nico Vassilakis' Moments Notice has taken a huge leap forward in the evolution of concrete poetry, by utilizing the myriad possibilities of digital typographic manipulation. The result is work of... More > great beauty, color, design, concept, and a visuality that makes his ideas and poetics vivid and endlessly intriguing. Maria Damon says,
“Moments notice us at a moment’s notice, lying in wait for us, in this space-time lingo-jaunt. When humans (hypothetically) fall into a black hole, the first thing their bodies undergo is ‘spagghettification.’ One could say when human language falls into Nico Vassilakis’ clutches, it undergoes a similar process. But instead of annihilation, there is plenitude." Ron Silliman asks, “Is it feasible for visual poetry to be positively erudite? In the words (or word) of one of the not-quite-texts here, Moments Notice presents the argument for YES.”< Less
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