Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers
working and publishing in the small press ecosystem
Michael Sikkema: You do a lot of vispo, work that really explores a verbo-visual field. I think some of our readers will be fellow practitioners and some others might not know much about vispo at all.
Can you tell us a little bit about what brought you to making this kind of poetry? To my knowledge, it's not a thing that gets taught much in schools.
Andrew Brenza: I agree. I don't think that vispo is taught much in schools. For me, it wasn't until graduate school that I was exposed to concrete and visual poetry as a kind of genre or poetic tradition of sorts. This was back in the early 2000s and I remember being blown away by the possibilities. It was then that I began incorporating it into my own work, but it really wasn't until about 5 years ago that I really embraced it. For me, the use of the verbo-visual field is a means of representing the complexity of modern experience and the problems of individual expression in a way that feels more honest, more accurate, than the writing of more traditional looking poems.
It is also a way to incorporate the invisible, the non-verbal, the ineffable into the work.
M: When I personally think of "the invisible, the non-verbal, the ineffable," I think of energy fields, and the microscopic, and the gestural, the literal way a human eye scans a page, consciousness itself. Can you say more about that powerful idea?
A: For me, this is not just an issue of aesthetics, but one central to understanding the nature of our physical reality. Amazingly, something like 80% of the matter in our universe is not directly perceivable by humans. This dark matter is everywhere and has been recently shown to produce electromagnetic fields, which means it is definitely interacting with the matter we can perceive, although the exact affects and organization are of course unknown. There may be billions of dark matter galaxies and solar systems floating around the universe completely invisible to us. Our planet may be teeming with dark matter entities. One may be sitting with you right now, helping you with what seems like the spontaneous miracle of reading and understanding this sentence. Who knows, we may rely on them to think at all. While these manifestations are of course speculative at this point, the existence of this invisible reality is not. It is fact. And then there are the theories which promulgate consciousness as an inherent aspect of matter itself like its mass, which means that, in essence, everything is consciousness. Bringing this back to vispo, yes, the use of page space and the foregrounding of the visual aspects of language are a way to engage and represent these complexities, and to disrupt and to reimagine the reading/writing process in a manner that shifts meaning away from a solely human-centered perspective to one that is at least suggestive of alternatives.
M: It sounds like you work from a place of unknowing, and so your process is exploratory? Experimental? Improvisational? Some makers are bothered by these words. Others embrace them. What do you think?
Also, part two, do you think of your work as collaborative with the Big Is?
A: I'm fairly indifferent to these terms, though, yes, I think my work does reach toward connection with something like the Big Is. It would be nice to think that my work offers experiential representations of this magical place, this, dare I say, wholeness, but it isn't up to me to decide.
M: Do you access that wholeness when making what you make? I often do, when making poems, or collages, or vispo, or sculpture, or whatever. It can feel as though I've dissolved and now there is just the process, the flow, the charge. For me, this is an aesthetic, philosophical, meditative, spiritual, all encompassing deal.
A: I'm so happy you wrote that, because, yes, I do feel like I dissolve, and you're the first person I've heard say it. There is also exhiliration. I don't know if it's paradoxical but I also feel most human, most alive, during these moments of creation.
M: I agree. There is a strong feeling of connection and vitality. I feel it in the woods, or in the big lake too. Also singing or making music with others, and collaborating with other artists. Are there other moments that you experience that kind of wholeness? Have you done much collaboration?
A: I often get a similar feeling looking at/reading visual poems that move me, which is why I think I was drawn to visual poetry in the first place. It is perhaps a fundamentally spiritual genre, for which Solt's Flowers in Concrete or Johnson's Io and the Ox-Eye Daisy are, for me, the quintessential proof. I have done a small amount of collaborating, most notably with Kristine Snodgrass, which has resulted in a book of glitch/concrete poems due out from Unsolicited Press in 2022, but I don't think I've done enough of it to really have a grasp on the process. I've also recently started a transcendental meditation practice, which, at this early stage, has sometimes felt like a free fall drop into infinite.
M: I love that you mention Solt and Johnson! I love their stuff too! As well as Snodgrass, as she is super talented, kind, and prolific. If you were going to put together a looking/reading list for people new to visual and concrete poetry, what authors/books/anthologies/other sources would you include?
A: As I'm sure you know, the visual poetry section of UbuWeb (ubu.com) provides free access to a ton of awesome visual poetry including the Solt and Johnson pieces mentioned earlier. The Last Vispo Anthology, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry and, most recently, Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry are all wonderful. For journals, there is also a lot for free online. I like Otoliths, Brave New World Magazine, Utsanga, and Sonic Boom among others. Lastly, I have found a number of groups on Facebook (Concrete Formalist Poetry, Vispo!, and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate) to be very enjoyable to participate in. I think the visual poetry community is welcoming and many of its practitioners root the products of their work in gift culture, which results in a lively exchange of poetry and ideas.
M: Can we close up our talk with you 1. linking to some of your work so the audience can look it up and 2. letting us know what you have coming up on the horizon? I know you have a spanking new book out, the collab coming out next year, etc. I'd love to hear more about it all.
A: Sure. Below are links to three of my books, including my newest, Smear, out from BlazeVOX. Samples can be viewed for free on each of the websites. Yes, as you mention, I’ve had the great fortune to collaborate with Kristine Snodgrass, whose work is tirelessly inventive and always fascinating, on a book of concrete/glitch poems. It is called Neon Galax and is to be published during the summer of 2022, which I am really excited about. I also have two chapbooks in the works, one from Non Plus Ultra and the other from mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press. These will hopefully be available sometime this summer or fall.
M: Thanks for this great talk, Andrew! I appreciate your time.
