Mafioso or Seafood Visual Poetry

The recent issue of the magazine Sleeping Fish is a delight starting with its numeration: zero. Editor Derek White has created an inviting zine that combines many elements into a handsome package: clean design, visual poetry, experimental textual poetry, prose, photographs, and even a striking and unadorned found text.

The opening piece is Petra Backonja’s “Cumulative Spectral Decay I,” a visual poem created from a design resembling a set of isograms printed over a text in Fraktur, with a cool blue lake of color huddled near the bottom. Though a beautiful piece, I admit that I personally couldn’t read the German, so I expect I missed much of its point.

The zine includes a fairly well reproduced copy of one of Guy R. Beining’s photographic poem-collages. I have original photographs of a few of these, so I’m usually disappointed with their reproduction as xerographs. Beining usually creates his collages by juxtaposing unrelated images and words in strange patterns—most of them divided into diptychs or triptychs. In this poem, the upper half includes some manmade object (the wheel and framing of a piece of furniture?) reflected in a mirror. Upon this Beining has drawn a number of wire-like lines and added the words “C L OU D” and “F L A P.” Below, a photograph of harvested clams is decorated with the word “R A P” and an unreadable jumble of letters. On either side of the photograph rest two columns of words (“epig/geog/biog…” and “hist/hers/hers...”). This poem, as much of Beining’s work, strikes me as arational. Beining invites the reader to invent meaning while trying to figure out the connections between these disparate pieces of data.

John M. Bennett and Jim Leftwich offer a simple yet striking collaboration. What appears to be a fairly standard Bennettian poem is overpainted (by Leftwich, we assume) with two drawings resembling four-paned windows. The brushwork and the half-hidden surprises of Bennett’s poem shining through are quite affective.

An interesting inclusion is a verbally rich photograph by Jessica Fanzo of a wall covered with advertisements and graffiti. The photo makes clear, through Fanzo’s choice of a particularly integrated set of advertisements and graffiti, that these two forms of decoration both serve the same purpose: to inform us of the existence of something. But this is a wonderful choice for a zine that is so full of visual poetry, because it itself is something of a found visual poem.

Another standout is an asemic visual poem by Carlos M. Luis. Consisting of invented texts with the occasional Latin letter, these characters surround a drawing of some heavily riveted sword or ritual object. The variously colored inks and the occasional oversized symbols make this a visual delight.

There is plenty of other interesting visual poetry and other art in this zine, so pick up a copy from Calamari Press for a mere $6 (not bad for a 44-page magazine). Check out the Sleeping Fish 0 preview (which includes a few items only available on the web), and see what you like.

Keep in mind: Sometimes, it’s okay to sleep with the fishes.

ecr. l’inf.