What America Knows of Wabi

Derek White is one of the most talented young visual poets at work today. His output is vibrantly verbal and richly visual: created from a multi-layered visual armor that encompasses an atomized yet readable text. White is also the unnamed editor of Sleeping Fish zer0.5, a surprising zine of visual and textual poetry, prose, and graffiti documentation that comes to us from New York City.

This issue of Sleeping Fish dispenses with the idea that typographic design need be constrained by vertical and horizontal axes, by neatness, by gallons of white space. Instead, the pages swim with scrawls and sketches, with tiny non-illustrations peppering the page. These bits of text and glyphic half-text (“TEXTures” White calls them) litter the margins, sometimes even resting under the texts of the poems and appearing between the lines.

Most of the visual poems present a similar enchanting and messy textual landscape. John M. Bennett and Jim Leftwich join forces in one of these, Leftwich gluing together tattered scraps of text (nattering about war and historical costumes) into no clear shape, and Bennett scrawling in his usual hand the words “core,” “ant,” and “boom” beside, within, and over the scraps. The resulting gestalt suggests little besides random dadaist incongruities, but visually the text is a stunning dynamic whole.

Scott Helmes, a long-time master visual poet, has been expanding and deepening his craft for many years, and his recent works are colorful, enigmatic, and only tantalizingly verbal. His contribution to this issue consists of a collage of newsprint text overpainted with dark dramatic rectangles and meandering splotches of a wavering blue-black that almost entirely obliterate the text, leaving us with a single clear word (“VAST”), a number of clipped words, and bits of text like “and everything that it stood for.” Interpretations of the surviving text are possible and moving, but I can’t say whether they are intentional or incidental.

Spencer Selby has, for years, used a single expressive technique to produce the subtle textures of his visual poems: overprinting of text upon image. In this issue, he prints a giant rectangular selection of found text (five lines in length) over a background that resembles a xerographic version of muslin around an image I cannot quite interpret. Maybe a flash of light, or the launching of a rocket, the view of the sky of a plane’s porthole, or a slim tornado. The uninterpretability of the image fits the sliced words of the text:

difficult to b
mean that t
le, I mean t
stake, he ha
involved in

This is a poem, as many visual poems are, about meaning, about the difficulty of finding the meaning of words and images, of the impossibility of perfect interpretation.

The centerfold is a dark shadow of a visual poem, colorful and murky, by Kenzie Burchell, whose work I’m not familiar with. Upon a dark background in blues and dark violets, a background showing something like a sun and a moon over a horizon, Burchell scatters instructions from condom wrappers, texts that seem to have been lifted from their homes with tape, tearing the edges away randomly. The main text of the poem, suffused and almost disappearing into the pools of color, tells a fractured story of some post-apocalyptic (or modern) world. The visual cotext of this poem (the colors and shapes) fits perfectly with this text, each illustrating the other.

Guy r. Beining, “the madman of Lee, Massachusetts” (well, until he moves), is one of the masters of the rough-hewn visual poetry esthetic. To many people, his work in visual collage-cum-painting-cum-text is ugly, unbalanced, unappealing. But Beining intends his work to be startling and off-putting; this is the beauty of these pieces. And the first one of these in this issue is resolutely beautiful. Beginning with a roughly painted surface (a gray-blue border, a central arch-shaped area painted in pinks and oranges), Beining glues found images almost absent-mindedly in the upper corners of the pictures, and these images add jarring greens to the mise-en-page. Painted upon this “canvas” (since Beining works primarily on cardboard), he adds two bundles of text in his rough-edged hand: “Pale / deluge/ of // his / marked / eye” and “Props / would / not / cure / the // dissolution.” Haunting and perfectly as it should be.

There is much else to recommend this issue: a simple collage (“the disrobment [sic] of dreams”) by Carlos M. Luis, a dense multi-overprinted visual text by Nancy Burr, wonderful verbo-visual neo-Magrittes, photographs of the unbelievably beautiful and chaotic graffiti at “5 Pointz” in Long Island City, ghostly TEXTures, and a haunting graffiti esthetic that suffuses the whole enterprise.

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Sleeping Fish zer0.5. [Edited by Derek White.] 2004. Available for $6 from www.sleepingfish.net or www.calamaripress.com.

ecr. l’inf.