That was the start of the most exciting and exhausting project I have been involved in as a publisher. I had very vague ideas of what a publishing project of this magnitude might entail. As a publisher I was aware that about 90% of the submissions I got were from male poets and artists but could see for myself that there were many women regularly posting work on social media who never submitted their work for publication. I was also aware that women were strangely absent from the history of concrete and visual poetry. Amanda’s proposed anthology wanted to address the erasure of women from the history and present of visual poetry and I could see that there was a real need.
Between us we could easily think of about a hundred names that might be considered for inclusion in the anthology but none of us was very satisfied with that and we embarked on a journey of discovery which at the time of writing has resulted in a list of 1179 living women who make, or at some point in their careers as writers and artists, have made visual poetry. Getting to know the work of hundreds of very diverse, but brilliant and inventive, women has been one of the great joys of this project, which at some point was named in honour of one of its oldest participants, Canada’s Judith Copithorne, who started making visual poetry in the 60s and continues to do so today.
When we set out I could more or less intellectually fathom that an anthology involving multiple contributors would also mean that the amount of problems and decisions would multiply. But I wasn’t prepared for the scale of it. Luckily Amanda has turned out to be an editor of unearthly patience and perseverance, quietly documenting everything in spreadsheets, steadily pushing ahead when I have been secretly despairing. Over time “probably a hundred pages or more” has evolved into a 260-pages anthology with more than 160 images, contributions from 36 artists and authors from 21 countries. And add to that three essays, a round table interview and a foreword by Johanna Drucker. That scale of ambition was certainly not in my mind when we started out. The dreaded phrase “wouldn’t it be nice if…” got a positive ring to it, for the simple reason that most of the ideas Amanda brought to the table made the project stronger and made sense to me in relation to the mission we had set ourselves.
At the moment I’m designing the last few pages -- acknowledgements, colophon, table of contents. In a matter of just a few weeks ‘Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry’ will be sent to print. Both Amanda and I have spent hundreds of unpaid hours making this book but thanks to overwhelming support for our crowdfunding campaign it will be printed and distributed without financial risk to me, the publisher. For this and for being taken on this incredible journey I’m eternally grateful. And I suspect it isn’t quite over yet.
By the way, does anyone out there enjoy packing hundreds of books? Please get in touch!
The crowdfunding campaign for Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry is live until April 21 at https://igg.me/at/judith/
Joakim Norling is a 50-something university drop-out who has a dayjob in editing. After spending many years writing about music he got sick of his own words and discovered concrete poetry. Since then he has spent most of his spare hours editing, publishing, packing and sending Timglaset books.
