A few weeks ago, Michael Jacobson (that master of and ardent champion and promoter of asemic writing, who I have collaborated with and will be publishing a book of my work in November of next year through his post-asemic press, which I highly recommend you look at and buy books from.) was kind enough to send me a copy of his book “works and interviews”, which is a collection of his books “the giant’s fence”, “action figures”, and “headhunter’s tale”, his piece “paranoia machine”, and various asemic visual poems, with interviews by various online periodicals.
I’ve been a fan of Michael’s work for a while and this book is a fine collection of his oeuvre. It starts with the asemic narrative “the giant’s fence”, a masterful (black on white) narrative of dancing, jittering glyph-meshes (for want of a better term) that whirl and spit like fireworks along the page, dotted with rings and squares.
It starts with a strange (vaguely mammary) cyclops who oversees the piece. Through the work bizarre eyes and wheels pop and spin in various points. It’s a masterpiece of calligraphic magic. It has a dynamism that makes it leap off the page and dance on your retina in a whirl of line and shape, language liberated from language!
This is a symmetrical work, as the Cyclops hangs upside down at the end. There is a sense that the giant’s fence itself is the body of some gigantic cryptozoological behemoth with strange eyes bursting from its tattooed text-flesh.
Of all the work in this book, I’d say the giant’s fence is my favorite.
The next piece of asemic writing are the “Asemic Spirit Graffiti hieroglyphs”, which kind of evoke the image of a sort of Mesoamerican Keith Haring who had been indulging in psilocybin putting down this sort of anthropomorphic language of fleshy, angular animal bio-sentences, a menagerie of black skinned grotesques who throng in a midnight page-setting. I’m also reminded of some of the works of CM Koseman, the Turkish (sometimes referred to as Nemo Ramjet) artists known for his works of speculative zoological art (most famously his snaiad series detailing an alien planet colonised by humans in the far-future).
Piscean and avian creatures rub shoulders with more anthropomorphic entities with bizarre anatomies jumble and jive with horned pan/satan goat men (reminding me of the American urban legend of the Maryland goatman, once again putting me in a cryptozoological frame of mind).
I find the idea of a body language formed from living flesh very interesting (a while back I made some asemic found poems made by finding markings on my skin caused by clothing, duvets and headphone wiring pressing against my skin. I scanned the parts of my body these markings manifested on and called them “fleshglyphs”)
In some of the pages the guidelines that Jacobson used to keep his figures straight and level have be retained, giving some indication of the writing of this work.
The beings in this trans-linguistic zoo gesture, dance, move and interact with weird machines, clearly trying to convey something, but not being able to make themselves understood, like the first interaction between one species and another (imagine the first meeting of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon, or the future meeting of humans and extraterrestrial/dimensional beings ). Actions figures is a literature of the body and is absolutely fascinating.
“A headhunter’s tale” is an interesting asemic dialogue between various hairless vaguely human heads. It’s sort of like a comic, but without many of the trappings, such as speech bubbles and boxes. The text itself (if you don’t count the heads, which in a sense could be classed as semantic content in a roughly semiotic sense, but that’s just me being pedantic) are a collection of lines that buckle and make shapes in a sort of automatic klee-esque taking-a-line-for-a-walk way that reminds me of experiments in automatic drawing I’ve seen, such as the work of Andre Masson (masson would totally have tried out asemic writing if he’d known of it).
The interviews in the book are an interesting view into Jacobson’s worldview and ideas. Interestingly he does not regard his work as visual poetry, though he does include some visual poems also, later on in the book which I will discuss later in this review. Jacobson regards himself as a prose-writer and the idea of a visual prose, as opposed to vispo.
I generally view asemic writing as a type of visual poetry, but I am a visual poet first-asemic writer second, so that may simply be my own bias showing. Certainly there are precedents for a visual prose to go with visual poetry (Tristram Shandy, graphic novels etc) so this is certainly an engrossing area of interest to explore.
He seems to come from the same sort of journey to anemia and other visual intermedia literature through visual art, though as a former painter I started making visual poems and asemia on hearing about it, thinking that it was a fascinating area to explore as I became disillusioned by the limitations of visual art as I was practicing at the time and increased interest in language and poetry.
These interviews really shed a view on asemic writing, Jacobson’s ideas where it could be taken. Fascinating stuff.
The visual poems (or pohms, as he calls them here) take many forms, some of which read as almost concrete poems and others are glitchy and pixilated.
“1st breakfast” is a paragraph of identical dashes, which reminds me of man ray’s 1924 phonetic poem that Dutch sound poetry genius Jaap Blonk did a great sound poetry version of.
Several of the “pohms” show asemic text spheres and would work great as animated glitches. “Fire breathing action figure: an asemic graffiti hieroglyph Ω” is a callback to action figures.
The book ends with “the paranoia machine”, his visionary, hallucinatory prose poem/spoken word piece that he used for a noise/soundpo video.
In conclusion this book is really a great work and I would highly recommend that you should buy this work if you want to become acquainted with Jacobson’s work and want to learn more about asemic writing. Also, you should go on the post-asemic press site and buy more of their great books.
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