Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in
the small press ecosystem
Interview #19: Kate Siklosi lives in Tkaronto / Dish With One Spoon Territory. Her work includes Selvage (Invisible 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, leavings (Timglaset 2021), and six chapbooks of poetry. Her critical and creative work has also been featured across North America, Europe, and the UK. She also curates the Small Press Map of Canada and is co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press.
.jpg)
Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media. She is sometimes professor, sometimes a web developer, and all the time a co-founding editor of the feminist micro press Gap Riot. She has published several chapbooks of poetry, several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry, one long scholarly book, and one pink poetry book.
Amanda Earl (she/her) is the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, the author of The Vispo Bible: Genesis and numerous visual poetry chapbooks. In 2024 she was the facilitator of the League of Canadian Poets workshop: Visual Poetry for Fun and Exploration, and offers customized workshops for women and non-binary artists wishing to make visual poetry. Amanda creates so that kindred misfits don’t feel alone. She is guided by duende, whimsy, exploration and connection. More info: AmandaEarl.com.
Sikkema: Hello vispoets! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I find myself drawn to vispo because of the way that it complicates our ideas about literacy. Vispo can be as much (or more) about looking/seeing as it is about reading. I have an almost 5 year old kid who is just starting to learn to read and write, but draws and draws and draws. I am fascinated with that overlap of writing and drawing. At that early stage writing and drawing are the same thing really. She is drawing letters. I’m also really interested in cave art and its role in our history as mark makers. Vispo, to me, somehow taps into the part of my brain where cave art, children’s letter drawing, and the somehow preliterate all hang out. This interest draws me into vispo and keeps me interested. What draws/drew you in?
Amanda Earl: I first learned of visual poetry through rob mclennan and also through Dan Waber who shared work by visual poets on a site back in 2005. I was especially excited by the colour work of Gary Barwin and Judith Copithorne. I have grapheme synaesthesia and when I was a child, I always sketched letters of the alphabet, and coloured them in, trying to get the exact shade of blue for the number four, for example. I started to play with MS Paint because it was on my computer and voilà, I was making visual poems. To see something similar come out of the “literary world,” excited me. I heard back in 05/06 that few women made visual poetry and that bugged me. I started to see it a lot on early social media but not in anthologies much. Lo Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry was born (Timglaset Editions, 2021).
I'm also a maniacal doodler and playing with letters as little beings is something I've always done. It's interesting to hear about your child's love of drawing. I wonder if separation of writing and art is learned behaviour. I am increasingly less interested in separating the two.
I am drawn in by being able to focus closely on language and continuing to question it in all the forms I work in from poetry to visual poetry to hybrid-i- don’t-care-what-the-fuck- you-call-this. Visual poetry represents rebellion from pigeon holes and amplification of voices that don’t fit in conventional spaces. It is a choice of deconstructing language to figure out what it means, and represents a departure from linear thinking, perhaps even anarchy, which is necessary in these times of propaganda.
One of the things I love about it is the community of people I have gotten to know through being involved in it, including Dani and Kate. I am very grateful for all the diligence and skill and hard work and camaraderie from Joakim Norling of Timglaset, and all the support we received for the publication of Judith. These days I am offering customized bespoke vispo workshops to help other women and non-binary folk making vispo not feel so intimidated by it and to understand that they are part of a long standing tradition, whether they are working with paint, wool, embroidery, typewriters, Letraset or zeroes and ones.
Kate Siklosi: Mike, I love that. My two-year old gal is cutting her teeth with language and it’s been a fascinating thing to watch evolve. She is also really into art, and I’ve taken up “collaborating” with her by incorporating some of her art into my visual collages - some of which were exhibited in a gallery show this last summer in Toronto featuring myself, Brian Dedora, Kate Sutherland, and brandy ryan. What a wild and gorgeous thing it is to create alongside your child - I had no idea how profound that could be.
Earl: I utterly adore this idea of you and your child collaborating. A wild and gorgeous thing indeed! Let's put more wild and gorgeous into the world!
Sikkema: Hell yes to more wild and gorgeous collaboration. I make art with my almost 5 year old all the time, and have had great experiences teaching 3rd-5th graders creative writing. The ones I worked with found collaboration natural and fun.
Siklosi: In terms of what drew me in, as a child my dad owned his own electrical company and is a fastidious organizer of his work. He used Letraset a lot to help organize things like tools, control panels, and circuit breakers and so we had a lot of it lying around. We also had a 70s electric Smith Corona, so voila, I put the two together and starting playing around with visual collages, being endlessly entertained and in awe of the transfer magic of Letraset.
Two other formative moments in my visual poetry bildungsroman: First, when it comes to visual poetry as a genre, I was first introduced to it in my undergrad by Gregory Betts, who taught it in his first-year English survey course at Brock University. It was there that I really fell in love with the work of bissett, Nichol, Copithorne, etc., and found the legacy and conversation around this work that I would eventually come to join.
Second, when it came to my own dedicated visual poetry practice, for years I had been creating a lot of collages using found objects (like decaying leaves, flowers, and detritus I found while walking my dog - she’s a Saint Bernard, thanks for asking! ;)). I wasn’t really seeing a lot of this type of 3-D collage making being called “poetry” (whatever the heck that is) as it seems caught somewhere between visual art, sculpture, and poetry and yet not really comfortable in any category. Then I received an invite to contribute to Astra Papachristoudoulou’s Poem Atlas, an online exhibition for experimental, visual poetry, and it was there that I was really introduced to a broad, global community of folks who were interested in playing with visual, sculptural forms in a similar way to me.
Earl: Kate, did you and Astra meet through Judith? One of the things I'm most pleased about with the anthology is how women makers of visual poetry found out about each other's practices through the book. I love what Astra is doing with her poem-objects.
Siklosi: I didn’t meet her through Judith, no. I met her through social media! But it was lovely to be together with her and so many other beautiful creators in that anthology. I’ve actually been off social media for a while now which has done wonders for my mental health but the downside is lack of connection to this global community of creators I admire and want to always be in conversation with!
Earl: Glad you found each other! There's a great group on FB run by Kristine Snodgrass: Women Asemic Writers and Visual Poets (WAAVe Global) for women and non-binary creators. It has been a safe space to share work and has led to collaborations and anthologies, such as WAAVe Global Gallery, but I totally understand not wanting to be on social media.
Sikkema: Kate, I love that you were exposed to vispo in a first year survey course! If only this were more common. I remember finding some vispo in a Kenneth Patchen book in our college library, and having no one to talk with about it. I also love that you were drawn to sculptural collage, as I was too, without having any context for it. It simply seemed like the thing to do, even though I am sorely lacking in the dog department! I’m happy that your practice grew into something that you can share. Is there any of this work online that you could share with us? Could you also share some names of the people featured in the Poem Atlas exhibition? I love these webs of influence and relation.
Siklosi: Yeah, there’s a few of my things floating around - here are some links:
https://paperviewbooks.pt/books/conjure/
https://www.theblastedtree.com/coup
https://www.psw.gallery/product-page/reply-kate-siklosi-amp-amp-psw
rob mclennan just published this lovely feature on my work.
And here’s a link to an essay I wrote about fragility as a poetic mode: https://jacket2.org/article/handle-care
Earl: I had a recent query from a fellow visual poet asking me about whether she should submit her work to Paper View Books. I get a lot of questions from women and non-binary vispo makers about publishers. Back in 2021 or 2022, I was encouraged to submit work to this press, but had a toxic experience with the publisher on Twitter and also learned that the person running Paper View was a man. I don’t have a problem getting work published by men, in fact the vast majority of the Vispo Bible has been published by men, and I am grateful to all publishers who publish women and non-binary makers. However, in this case, I was under the impression that the press was run by a woman and the person who asked me about the publisher also had that impression as did many other people in the visual poetry community, who were surprised when I told them that a woman did not run the press. I am not sure if that has changed.. On the site, the About Info is in pseudo Latin or Lorem Ipsum, which is just filler. The press is from Portugal, so it’s possible it’s just too hard to get the text in English, and that’s reasonable. There’s a photo of a woman-presenting person along with the text. When I first looked into the press, it had several non-visual poetry books that featured naked women. Anyway, I chose not to publish with a press that didn’t disclose the masthead and seemed to pander to the male gaze. And I haven’t recommended the press to anyone; however, I've seen that the work they’re publishing is beautiful. This is an example where I need a press’s values to be in line with my own and don’t choose to publish with those that don’t.
There are all kinds of presses I would recommend, such as UK's Zimzalla run by Tom Jenks, publishing poem objects like Sophie Herxheimer's Index. Guillemot Press did a gorgeous job with Karenjit Sandhu's Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive. Astra Papachristodoulou’s Poem Atlas; James Knight's Steel Incisors, Dan Power's TrickHouse Press. I know psw isn’t doing her wonderful monochrome analog tech journal ToCall anymore, but if she publishes others still, i would be happy to recommend her. In the USA, Andrew Brenza's Sigilist Press continues to publish women such as Kristine Snodgrass and did a beautiful publication of my Vispo Bible chapbook, Leviticus as did Canada's Knife Fork Book with Matthew, and both were such a joy to work with. Simulacrum by Sacha Archer made a fun golden version of Ruth, Michael e. Casteels of Puddles of Sky Press Kyle Flemmer of the Blasted Tree published tiny chapbooks for Esther and John. Alas Sweden's amazing Timglaset Editions is no longer publishing but I can’t praise Joakim Norling enough. Barrie Tullett of Casemate Press is fantastic to work with. And I would highly recommend folks subscribe to Sarah Bodman's Book Arts newsletter to see all the great artists’ books being published. Paul Hawkins of Hesterglock Press has done great work such as Vik Shirley's Disrupted Blue & other poems. Michael Jacobson is publishing a lot of asemic writing with Post-Asemic Press and also online.
Earl: Kate, I refer women and non-binary makers of vispo to your fragility essay all the time. Thank you so much for writing it. Many of the participants in my workshops are looking for ways to articulate trauma and difficult subjects. They find being able to express such things, while still honouring their fragility and vulnerability to be important.
Spinosa: Kate, I just taught your Jacket2 essay on fragility to my third-year poetry students and they loved it. It really does open up a new way of thinking about this work.
Siklosi: Thanks, ladies! It was a touchy one for me to write, but I think for me underscores one of the many powers of experimental poetry, which is to give space, free of cohesion or meaning, to the fraught, difficult, and beautifully complex aspects of the human experience. For me, working with my hands and drawing new relations and conversations between media, language, found materials in the world, etc. is a way of world-making and revisioning that only this type of poetic practice can provide.
Here’s the link to the Poem Atlas site, where you can peruse the online exhibitions and work from folks all over the globe. I’ve participated in three exhibitions thus far, and I find the work just so refreshing and energizing: https://www.poematlas.com/.
Speaking of energizing, I’m always interested in how poets view their work in relation to the world around us (I am always thinking of Robert Duncan’s imperative that poets are “respons-able” to the world). How do you both see vispo as a means of expressing, processing, maybe reshaping, or maybe reckoning with our personal or collective experience, especially in these times? What can it say/not say/do/gesture towards that other forms cannot? She’s going deep, folks.
Earl: Scroll down for my answer to this. It's a great question!
Dani Spinosa: I think I actually first came to visual poetry in my undergrad. As a teenager I wrote predominantly melodramatic lyric poems (and girl, I never really stopped) but was not particularly interested in vispo at all until I encountered Nichol in Len Early’s Canadian Poetry course and Apollinaire in Andy Weaver’s poetry course at York. That honestly blew my mind wide open. I think I was drawn to it because I was feeling, at the time, so tired of reading. I just kept doing more school because I just kept wanting to read more poems, but with my astigmatism my eyes got so tired with reading. And, honestly, I started writing and reading visual poetry because my eyes were so tired from reading and paying attention to text text.
Earl: Just jumping in because I'm excited about Dani's mention of Apollinaire. A dear friend gifted me a book of his work in 2009 or so and I was really excited by his Calligrammes, Poems of Peace and War. Some of my early drafts of my first poetry book, Kiki, included my own experiments with this form. Now back to Dani!
Spinosa: I think I’m also drawn to it because my lovely partner in life/crime, Jesse, is an art therapist and he is so interested just making things out of feeling, intuition, impulse. And after so many years of doing the Plath-ass confessional kind of art/writing therapy, there is something so liberating about a page full of beautiful letters doing their beautiful letter thing without the weight of literacy.
Sikkema: Dani, I’m deeply interested in what you mention about your astigmatism and wanting to LOOK rather than READ. Because I sometimes make a living by reading, my brain and eyes get tired of it and demand images rather than text text, and then boom out comes vispo, concrete, comics, and other visual art. Among the books that might come out at such a time is your OO: Typewriter Poems. Can you talk a little bit about the process of putting that together?
Spinosa: Yeah I was always a bit jealous of the cool visual art folks because they got to do such nice looking, while I was always reading. And okay, honestly it’s probably more mental fatigue from too much work and school and screens more than it is strictly vision but I definitely think there is something relaxing and challenging at the same time about visual poetries. And I also think I make more thoughtful and beautiful work when my brain is tired and I let my heart take over.
OO: Typewriter Poems, while still–I THINK AT LEAST–a beautiful and thoughtful book, is NOT a book from being relaxed. It was a book of grappling and I needed to do that work to come out of the other side of it. OO was the book I had to write at the time to work through grad school exhaustion and canon exhaustion and reading too much stuff that wasn’t that exciting to me anymore. It’s a book that runs through a history that I felt I didn’t get enough of in my classes, even though my instructors exposed me to more visual poetry that I think many (most?) poetry classes got. I had to do my own excavation and that was exciting and I realized a lot of the amazing work that was happening that, at the time, wasn’t being taught or talked about or anthologized in the same way. OO chronicles and works through and fights with and enjoys and troubles and plays with/in that reading work I was doing.
Earl: OO is a badass book that I am always recommending. Your manifesto from Anstruther too. Both of these work encourage women to resist the patriarchy and go their own way.
Spinosa: Aw, thanks for saying that! By the time I got to writing that manifesto, I did really feel like I was done with the part of my feminism that was a grappling with and working through/against and more like I had finally found an amazing community of visual poets who were paving the way doing thoughtful and beautiful work in both radical resistance and forging new paths for what visual poetry could look like against the dominant forms and voices we’d been used to. The explosion of new potentialities in this industry has been a pure pleasure to witness.
Earl: That's beautiful. I think the work you and Kate are doing with Gap Riot Press and the TIFA Small Press Fair are great examples of community building. For me, as long as women & other marginalized folk seek me out to tell me their stories of erasure and abuse in the literary/vispo/small press community(ies), I continue to have trouble sleeping at night; I continue to grapple and to feel a need to speak out. I often feel like it is wasted energy because patriarchy just seems to never end and of late it seems to be doubling down. So yeah I totally get the exhaustion and the need to cocoon within a group of fellow feminist creators and presses. I would love to hear of some specific examples to add to my list of folks to pay attention to. Do you have any recommendations, Dani?
Spinosa: Oh, I dunno. Lately I’ve been rereading and falling in love with Robin Richardson’s Try Not to Get Too Attached which I think is badass in its mix of the prose poem, which I’m really into lately, art, graphic design, visual poetry, deeply confessional work. I think the book rocks and that it never really got the attention it deserved. I’ve also been revisiting Sarah Burgoyne’s Because the Sun which is not purely vispo but is certainly visual and experimental and deeply feminist and friggin’ smart and thoughtful and awesome. And then obviously I love the work of Marianne Holm Hansen (her website here). I just think she’s the coolest.
Earl: Thanks, Dani. It’s great to see that Richardson’s older work contained visual poetry. I hadn’t realized that. I love hybrid work and that’s something that compels my creative practice these days. Adding all three to my reading/viewing lists!
Siklosi: “And I also think I make more thoughtful and beautiful work when my brain is tired and I let my heart take over.” Ugh, Dan, you know I love this so hard. For me, I would replace “heart” with “hands.” So much of my (and your) day job involves our heads and brains. And, tbh, a lot of my life as a parent is heart-heavy. So sometimes there’s just something deep in my veins that calls me to my kitchen table with a good beer, some random materials, and some quiet so I can get my hands dirty in the work and let my head and heart rest for a time.
Earl: I love the Duncan quote. My visual poetry and curatorial practice are both response-able to the world. Heart is all I’m about these days. But yeah, just getting physical with analog vispo methods, that's something I haven't done enough of and wish I could.
All of my creative practice is about whimsy, exploration and connection with kindred misfits. I write/create so that kindred misfits don’t feel alone. During the work of putting together Judith, many women told me their stories of erasure or diminishing or mockery of their work, or inappropriate behaviour by men once they had access to their e-mails or social media. I myself got weird, inappropriate and mocking responses from several men when I expressed an interest in wanting to publish the anthology and even after it came out. When I called out a male visual poet for assembling an article on asemic writing that contained maybe one or two women only and didn’t bother to address the wide range of women doing asemic writing, he responded with a post on Twitter, calling me a bully and then attempting to shame me for being an openly sexual person.
I was even reluctant to do this interview because while women talk to me a lot privately about similar incidents, few are able to be public about their treatment by the vispo patriarchy. And I know I'm going to get unwanted messages and mockery from men telling me how wrong I am. I still remember when I withdrew my visual poetry work after I learned that an entire editing board was male and its main editor sent me emails telling me he would never publish me again and made fun of me for my “naive understanding of gender.”
Another friend had her idea appropriated and republished by a well-known and respected male small press publisher and was pressured not to say anything about it. This is someone who goes out of his way to extoll the virtues of publishing one's work for free but managed to have a lot of books with well-known presses published and (likely gets a decent cheque from Access Copyright Canada) before this freebie pressure he puts on other writers, and a privileged full-time salary as an arts administrator. Meanwhile look at all the women, including writers of colour who have their work appropriated and stolen and the women who are not acknowledged for their work at all. A recent example comes to mind: A translation of Zong by M. NourBeSe Phiip that was not authorized by her, but there are many, many more.
To be more positive, I feel what i can offer women and non-binary makers of visual poetry, who are very much under the radar, is to provide a safe space in which to help them navigate presses and journals looking for visual poetry, and to help them create the work while also offering them a history of visual poetry, especially where our voices have existed, but have been erased and eclipsed by focus on men. There are some great small.presses, such as Gap Riot and Kyle Flemmer's the Blasted Tree, or Anhinga Press in the USA doing this work. i can't afford to run AngelHousePress anymore unfortunately.
Spinosa: Popping in here quickly to draw attention to this crucial thing Amanda is pointing to, this one huge barrier to access, which is that running a small press is, in some key ways (PAPER, SHIPPING, WEBSITE MANAGEMENT) more expensive than ever. Our arts funding is consistently under threat, and when we reduce arts funding, we reduce who gets access to things like running a small press (and/or publishing with a small press, because un/underfunded presses have a harder time paying their authors). Support your local small presses if/when you can, but also arts funding means a more inclusive and more diverse small press community!
Earl: Hell yeah!
Earl: I was amazed while researching Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry to hear of Mirella Benitivoglio, “Over the course of the 1970s and throughout the next several decades, she organized a number of landmark touring exhibitions of women working with text and image in a variety of formats." ...
"Bentivoglio’s early curatorial program propelled female visual poets into mainstream recognition. She was, in fact, part of a growing contingent of artists who were, as Gabriele Schor has explained, “conscious of the fact that women had to claim their terrain, to self-consciously live their lives as artists." poesia visiva – Italian visual poetry
Spinosa: Yeah!! Bentivoglio was a favourite discovery of mine as I worked through OO, too!!!
Earl: I hope she would be pleased to know of the continuing importance of her legacy.The anthology which showcases her curation and the women whose work she exhibited is a brick and it is so rich and varied. Poesia visiva: La donazione di Mirella Bentivoglio al Mart.
Earl: I think that while it is important to acknowledge the great legacy and support of men such as bpNichol, who published women such as Judith Copithorne and encouraged their creative practice, it is vital that we amplify those who have been erased, both historical and contemporary makers of visual poetry, and supporting their work in whatever way possible, especially women and non-binary creators, BIPOC, LGBTQIA and D/deaf and disabled visual poets. This to me is where the real work is for publishers of visual poetry and any other type of creative work. Take a look at a great anthology, Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and disabled poets write back (Nine Arches Press, 2017). There are some excellent visual poems in there by poets, such as Sandra Alland, Aaron Williamson. As I was working on Judith, I made a list of women making visual poetry with the help of Joakim and many members of the vispo community, but I was frustrated at my lack of knowledge about non-binary vispo makers. I have a list of twenty-one so far, but it’s far from complete. Check out Kat Cassar’s (Non)Binary text installation, for example. Or Rebecca Jagoe’s stunning textile work, She Masticated Nothing.
Check out Ost Petahtegoose’s piece “A Queer, Nishnaabe Ghost Story” published by Hamilton Arts & Letters/ or brandy ryan’s erasage, a combo of erasure and collage, “in the third person” published by dear Kate and Dani’s wonderous Gap Riot Press. And every time I bring up Kate’s amazing Letraset work, everybody rabbits on about this white male academic’s work. I’m so bored. Yawn. Her work has nothing to do with that, in my opinion. Kate's work is alive and engaged with the world. Another example of some beautiful and excellent Letraset work is the art of Kelly Mark, who sadly passed away recently.
Siklosi: Thank you for pointing out the aliveness of my work, Amanda. I feel, in line with that Duncan concept I alluded to earlier, that my role as a poet and creator is to always be respons-able to the world and the conditions that shape it. For me, if my work ain’t listening to and in conversation with this very earth we’re on (ever so precariously), I am not doing it right.
Earl: I love that, Kate. I agree wholeheartedly..There’s just so much wonder and beauty and strength and brilliance in visual poetry and in literature and art in general, if you spread your net beyond the white male viewpoint. I am thinking too of Kristine Snodgrass’s beautiful and empowering asemic body art. There are women in India running visual poetry presses and making amazing stuff, such as Shloka Shankar. NourBeSe Phllip’s Zong book-length poem is an incredible work of erasure. a. rawlings is combining the visual with ecological work in amazing and creative ways that engage with the materiality of land. Have you seen Lalla Essaydi’s Bullet Revisited #3? These are the folks I want to hear more from.
If you're an academic and teaching your students about vispo, spend more time on these practitioners. I get so disappointed when i meet yet another young student with an obsession with Nichol or dsh who hasn't heard of anyone but white male concrete poets. What about Dani Spinosa or psw or Ruth Wolf-Rehfeld?. Or Flora F.F. Stacey whose typewritten butterfly Barrie Tullett acknowledges as the first known typewriter poem in his anthology, Typewriter Art, a Modern Anthology.
“American artist, Amelia Etlinger appears in an anthology entitled Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959 to 1979, [ long overdue.] She was not well known in North America in her lifetime. She made everything from four-foot high tapestries to two inch bundles of poem-like packets that combined fabric, beads, Japanese paper and found materials. She has only two pieces in WiCP and they don’t represent the range of her work, which can better be studied on the University at Buffalo’s digital collection, the Amelia Etlinger Collection.” from “Women at the Vanguard of Visual Poetry, If Only We Had Known: Overcoming Erasure to Make Connections Between Past, Present and Future Women Making Visual Poetry”
As part of my research for Judith, I learned of Doris Cross, who was an early creator of erasure poetry, but whose work has been eclipsed by the space taken up by so many male erasure practitioners, such as Tom Phillips. And in Canada, while I had heard a lot about Nichol and bissett, two practitioners of concrete poetry who I admire and respect, I had never heard of Colleen Thibaudeau, whose book “Lozenges: poems in the shape of things” came out in 1965. And while i had seen a lot of Judith Copithorne’s work on social media, I had no idea about the vast extent of it until we worked on the anthology and then later when her Another Order, Selected Works , edited by Eric Schmaltz came out with Talonbooks last year.
Spinosa: Yes, love Eric’s selected Copithorne, a volume that was sorely needed and sorely overdue. I also think a lot of Cameron Anstee and his work drawing attention to Barbara Caruso’s crucial contributions to visual and small press poetics. There are people doing the work of highlighting these women’s contributions to the field, but it does seem to me that, as of yet, some of these voices have not quite made their way into the survey courses. The more we have those voices in the conversation at the base–because, as Amanda has rightly pointed out here and elsewhere, those voices were always already at the base of the field–the more we’ll have young writers and emerging writers of all kinds with favourites, gateway poets, and influences that are, y’know, Nichol and dsh.
Earl: I had forgotten about Cameron's Apt 9 Press enthusiasm for Caruso! I know only of one chapbook with a few visual poems, Word Happens, but he's the one who told me about her great memoir, A Painter's Journey.
Thanks for the reminder. Apt 9 Press does gorgeous handbound chapbooks. I would love to see more vispo published by that press and others. Cameron is also doing his own minimal typographic experiments, which is a delight to see! One of the sections of my visual poetry workshop is all about formatting and editing visual poems so that they are published as intended, something that can be difficult to achieve when you have no experience with it. Cameron did a beautiful job with Word Happens and with spreading the word about Barbara Caruso over a solid length of time.
Earl: My own life’s work, the Vispo Bible is an attempt to translate every book, chapter and verse of the Bible into visual poetry. This year is the tenth anniversary since I embarked upon this effort. I have created over 400 visual poems from 400 pages of the Bible, from 19 books of the Old and New Testaments. A kind of side project was entitled So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed,which responds to ongoing patriarchy and the oppression of women by making visual poems which take passages from the Bible as found text. The Bible continues to be used to justify violence and hatred against women and other marginalized groups. The work honours and celebrates women who are silenced, unnamed and erased. The poems take the shape of the female body using various clothing items from Biblical garments to mini-skirts and lingerie, iconic images and the naked body as represented in art and popular culture. The work is a celebration of women and a response to violence and abuse toward women, the male gaze, objectification, and exploitation, fatphobia, issues of beauty and acceptance and the poor treatment of women in the fashion and garment industries, extrapolating to the labour of women in general. Evangelical and ultra-Conservative readers of The Bible have exploited its poetic language to use as justification for hatred and violence. Visual poetry is a way to subvert this literalism. I am fortunate to have received funding from the Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants Program for this work.
My work on the Vispo Bible has ground to a halt since last year due to a dramatic change in financial circumstances which has me having to do paid work as an editor, workshop facilitator, literary events organizer etc, anything to make money to pay rent.
One of the serious issues for writers is that much of our work is being asked for unpaid. I have been working hard for years to advocate for the payment of writers. Ironically I did this as a volunteer, including crowd-funding to ensure contributors to my own small press, AngelHousePress got paid. Visual poetry for most of us is unpaid creative labour. I think it’s important to ask whose voices are missing when only those with time and funds to devote to their creative practices and its publication are being heard.
Spinosa: Amanda, you do so much important work in terms of community building and advocacy in this field. And the issue of money here is so key, unfortunately. And what you point to here is so important; that all too often the labour of creating these venues, organizing on behalf of paying artists/writers/organizers/labourers in the small press world is unpaid labour. The truth is … the money just ain’t there. There’s very little literary money and it’s pretty much all elsewhere. So, Kate and I pay our artists and authors a little bit at Gap Riot (it’s never much but it’s always nice to send a $40 etransfer and say “Your poems made you this!”), but after we pay our website, our printer, our bank fees, there is fundamentally no money left. Period. Every once and a while we take a twenty out of the cash box at a market and use it to buy some books, or more often trade with another press, but we have never been paid for our publishing work. In fact, we have definitely lost money on this endeavour in general; but, of course, it is immensely worth it.
Earl: Thanks, Dani. I admire what you and Kate are doing,and I respect how fucking expensive and time-consuming it is to run a small press, often with very little reward or attention. I try to boost and amplify Gap Riot Press and other presses as much as possible. I love how small press culture is supportive of one another, rather than competitive.
With increasing economic, political and societal challenges in general, I don't really know how much of a priority this work of creating, publishing and disseminating art can be for many people just trying to get by. I don't know where time and money and focus will come from. I don’t know if hate and erasure of trans people, migrants, queer people, the removal of women's reproductive rights, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and elsewhere, the rise of authoritarian regimes…how all that is going to shake out, but somehow art is vital and continues.
Even though I know rationally that the money isn't there in traditional economic models, I continue to look for ways to pay all involved in the production of art. To look for ways to ensure voices that have been and continue to be systematically excluded from canons are amplified and prioritized. Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry exists because a whole community of people: publishers, editors, creators, readers all refused to accept the status quo. I believe that in order for change to happen, I must not accept the status quo. It is an ongoing challenge I have no choice but to take on. I am so grateful to so many people for their support.
Earl: My current visual poetry is driven by insomnia and being up early in the morning, lying beside my fabulously bi, darling husband, still fast asleep and involves sharing my angst in this shitebox of the world, run by dickheads, and trying to find connection with fellow trans-inclusive, intersectional feminist kindreds who lead non-conventional, non-heteronormative, non mononormative lives and who are being ignored, persecuted or shamed for it. I am offering paid subscribers to my Substack, Amanda Thru the Looking Glass, pdfs of my various writing and art projects every month. In June I will give them the Book of Restlessness, which features some of these insomnia posters, inspired and influenced by Barbara Kruger’s collage posters. Kruger went through a lawsuit because her art was appropriated by a skateboard company, ffs.
Sikkema: To pop back in for a second, I wanted to loop back around to collaboration, which we addressed early on. IIn my experience, making vispo is much more open to collaboration than word-based poems are. I mean, at least to some people. Some people think of a poem as a very private sort of place, meant for one voice. There are certainly good reasons to feel that way and great work has come from that position. I tend not to feel that way, and I tend to befriend other writers who are more open to multiple voices. I like Poetry, including vispo, that is an alive thing, a conversation, even moreso an ecosystem. Vispo can be a way of being together, growing a community, linking your brain to other brains, and creating a composite brain for a spell. I’ve done some vispo collabs with writers mentioned here, like Kristine Snodgrass and Gary Barwin. I’m doing a sound collab with Gary Barwin and Lillian Necakov which is proving fun and interesting and getting me out of my usual creative space. What role does collaboration play for you? Is there any fossil record of your collaborations you could share with us? Are you working on any collabs right now?
Earl: I love that you're working with fellow visual poets. Kristine and I have talked about doing something together I adore collaboration and unlike you, have found many poets willing to collaborate..Sandra Ridley and I worked on a long poem, “Eve, a mere roar” back in 2009-2010, which we read aloud together for a Tree Reading here in Ottawa, but we haven't yet had it published. I am working on a collaborative long poem with fellow Ottawa poet, Marilyn Irwin and I just did a group collaboration long poem project called the Suitcase Poem! I just started a constraint-based poetry collaboration with Matthew Walsh, and am hoping to include erasure poems. The only vispo collab I have done is with the great Gary Barwin which we published through my press AngelHousePress, Bone Sapling, a visual poetry collection of hybrid letter creatures. Gary was an absolute delight to work with. We are both tuned to the key of whimsy.
Sikkema: Oh, I have collaborated on text based projects, but with fewer people, and it always seems to come more naturally with image based work for some reason.
Spinosa: That’s so interesting, Mike! I don’t know if I would say that visual poets in particular are more interested in collaborating, but definitely “experimentalism” in general does seem to see people more willing to collaborate. But I also think that that’s changing and we’re seeing more and more really interesting collaborative work across small press genres of all kinds. I do think still that trad publishing and the poetry collection remains steadfastly single-authored, but as our means of collaborating are becoming more and more accessible I think we’re going to keep seeing more–and more kinds of–collaboration across poetries.
Siklosi: It’s interesting--in my experience, poets of all practices that I’ve encountered are generally interested in collaboration, but as Mike and Dani have said, experimental poets tend to be the most excited about it, just given, I think, the nature of experimentalism making the poet and the work more receptive (and welcoming?) to the process underhand and the variables and unknowns it encounters. I have actually gotten to know a few women that I respect and admire through collaboration--Helen Hajnoczky and I have been collaborating for years on several projects, and that has resulted in a book project that we’re looking to publish somewhere (hit me up if you’re interested in publishing a beautiful hybrid visual and lyric project by two badass women!). Helen and I met over social media and it was such a beautiful way to get to know someone--by sharing work and experimenting together. I also have this collaboration with the ever-brilliant and lovely psw. We created this project over several months during the pandemic lockdowns and wow, was it a balm to be creating with and getting to know such a lovely human during a time of upheaval, uncertainty, and darkness.
Sikkema: I’ve recently taken a new job working with 0-5 years olds. My job is to set up toys, play, and clean up toys afterwards. I also chat with caregivers about whatever they want to chat about. This job is perfect in some ways, in that it’s community based and it’s collaborative. It’s collaborative in that we partner with boys and girls clubs, community centers, and schools, as we have no institutional space of our own. It’s community based in that caregivers and kids show up and bring the play, and we just support them with play materials, some music and motion, a story and a snack. I love this job because it’s deep play. It demands that I take part in deep play with a group of naturals, a group of small people who haven’t forgotten how to play, and who are using play to learn every single waking moment. Play is maybe my central value when it comes to making, making poems, making a life, making dinner. I know that Kate mentioned playing with the letraset and electric typewriter early on, and Amanda talked about doodling (a great form of play which I also love), and I liked Dani’s take that “there is something so liberating about a page full of beautiful letters doing their beautiful letter thing without the weight of literacy” as it strikes me as play related too. With play being so central to making, how do y’all balance the role of play with all the very real WORK that you do, teaching, editing, advocating, organizing, curating, etc? How do you deal with the built in contradiction of that? Even the term WORKshop seems to have anti-play connotations. How do you approach serious play in your practice?
Earl: That sounds like such a rewarding job. In the Red Book, Jung talks about the importance of returning to a childlike state of mind through play. Whimsy is part of my creative mission. It's even on my business card. In all the workshops and editing I do, I always include space for whimsy. One of the editing services I offer is the doodle edit. While we’re on the subject of play, did you see this great residency offered by Tom Jenks of Zimzalla with Sophie Herxheimer and Karenjit Sandhu? OMFG!
Sikkema: Amanda, this residency looks PERFECT! Sign me up, though sadly I’m not in a family/financial situation where I could actually go, which leads me to the next question.
I love the right-headed push to get writers paid for their work. I’ve always found it funny-annoying that I might be able to get a little $ for publishing some fiction or sci fi, but usually not for poetry, and so far never for vispo or doing interview stuff like this. I often find myself thinking about the number of presses shutting down, the number of journals calling it quits, the number of people I see having to back off creative work due to the need to generate $ for basic life stuff like food and shelter. Amanda mentioned that up above. I have first hand knowledge of it too, as an adjunct instructor who may get 6 classes this semester and 0 the next, as an occasional landscaper pruning rich folks’ roses while thinking a poem I can’t stop to write down or draw. There seems to be a cycle of becoming and burnout associated with small press poetry because of the precarity caused by $. Someone is in love with poetry and their poetry community and they work selflessly to get poetry out into the world, and eventually the lack of $ coming in paired with the time, energy, and $ going out means that they at least have to take a break. I think the discrepancy between social media likes and book purchases is a chilling eye-opening thing. My own micro press is asleep right now while my time, energy, and $ go towards raising the almost 5 year old, and we deal with constantly raising prices. Given the current political climate in America, $ is going to become even harder to come by for small presses. I would argue that poetry of all kinds is more NECESSARY when it’s facing conditions that harm it. My question is, what are the wins? What are the success stories? How have you seen this play out in a positive way? What are the models that we can recreate to support writers?
Earl: It’s so tough. I can’t stand not being able to run AngelHousePress anymore. We had to cease publication of our two online magazines, the podcast the essay series, the close reading service for new women and non-binary poets, and so many other things! Because I had to turn my time into money, something I had the luxury of not having to do for twenty years, for which I am very grateful.
For Judith, Timglaset held a crowd-funding campaign and it was so successful, we raised more than our ask. For two years I ran crowd-funding campaigns to pay AngelHousePress contributors, and the small press community was instrumental in making that happen. I've seen organizations of small presses band together to raise money for Palestine and it's been beautiful to watch. As part of AngelHousePress, I started the Caring Imagination, a resource for anyone who wanted to create, publish and disseminate creative work with compassion and care for others. I had a great group of advisors and had secured an angel investor to afford commissioning customized essays that addressed specific concerns of literary, small press and visual poetry producers. Under tCI, the Australian writer and visual poet, Rae White wrote an informative how to guide/essay entitled Gender Inclusivity Recommendations for Literary Festivals and Events. The site is still online for now. It has a lot of great resources relating to alt text, accessibility, notes on running a crowd funding campaign and a bunch of other stuff.
Another angel investor gave me money last year to pay writers for readings I organized. I know a lot of series, magazines, publishers and individuals have Patreons and other methods to raise money in the face of lack of government funding. For years Ruth and Marvin Sackner collected concrete and visual poetry and paid collectors and creators such as jwcurry for it.
The art world does a great job of securing investment through philanthropy.. I think it is a useful model for the small press and visual poetry communities. If I were starting a press or journal today, the very first consideration would have to be paying everyone involved in its creation. I'd start a foundation, get an advisory board, go through the tedious financial and legal obstacle courses and work on funding it first. As an arts administrator, I need to make only about $20k annually in salary to make this happen. When you have something vital and important you want to achieve and you make it easy and exciting for people with a little extra money or a willingness to support vital work, it can really happen. Paying people is essential. It is the most important thing in any industry, including ours. For presses that give out a lot of contributor copies, that can be helpful too. above/ground press, for example, doesn’t offer payment but gives like 50 author copies. In the last few years, I’ve been trading and selling copies of my ten chapbooks, so that helps too. I know a lot of presses just can’t afford to pay.
Even when university instructors are teaching students about the small press, and inspire their students to make little books and zines, I think they need to tell them to begin with a cost analysis, including their time. I know there is no way that the labour of making can be adequately compensated in this model; however I think from the start, we need to assign a financial value for this work. To account for it and acknowledge it. To at least require some financial support for the creation of a small magazine or a chapbook. To learn how to raise money. And finally to offer some financial commitment to those creators who are systematically excluded from small press spaces, in part due to financial need. I can tell you that $40 gives me and my husband almost a full week of dinners, so yes, even a small honorarium helps. I paid the first few months of our rent from my paid Substack subscriptions.
Spinosa: Yes! Amanda, thanks for pointing to these concrete financial details. If we don’t do this work of, as you say, “account for and acknowledge” the financial value of the work, then we perpetuate this idea that creative work only happens with and from people who have the time and money for it. That doesn’t mean there’s no place for people to make stuff at their own cost and give it away for free, though! I love that too, and I firmly believe that there is space for all kinds of publishing models in this big beautiful community. But, even when you’re doing that, the work of “accounting for and acknowledging” the financial element is so so key. I also understand, sympathize, and think important those practitioners in our community who don’t want to commodify creative work, and that that’s part of a resistance practice, too! And it’s an important part of a resistance practice. There’s plenty of room for that and I’m super glad people are doing it. But I think my priority these days is more thinking about access than anything else.
Siklosi: Ugh, I hate having to answer a question about play and a question about money in the same response, but here goes. Mike, I think play is essential “work.” And, I don’t think that “work” has to be a dirty word--Dani and I always talk a lot about the “ever-expanding scope of the work,” which is basically to say that everything that constitutes a creative life can be fit into what we know of as the work we do. So from caring for our children, to sewing book spines and mailing chapbooks, to making a poem while pruning rich folks’ roses, to sitting down to my table at night for half an hour after an exhausting day of toddler tyranny to make something quick and fun and not necessarily meant for sharing but just because I was called to play. All those things, for me, constitute the work and all have come to be essential and interdependent aspects of my life as a creative and as a human. But I think for experimental poets, in particular, play is just what we do---I mean, isn’t it? So much of our life is so serious and so intense and so pressurized…this is the maybe one arena where we get to unleash ourselves and let our hands and hearts and imaginations run wild.
As for the money question, I agree wholeheartedly with what Amanda and Dani have already said and I think there are myriad ways in which we can support each other in this work. I think first and foremost, that there is room for all sorts of models of publishing in small press, and they all contribute to a culture of resistance and creative abundance in their own ways. And the reasons why folks create and publish vary so greatly that we cannot possibly lump all of it together under one overarching principle or framework. And I think that’s quite beautiful and worth preserving about small press culture. I also believe in radical rest, especially in something like small press which is a full-hearted labour of love. Some presses come in and out of sleep, as you put it, Mike, and I think that is, in some ways, a natural part of this creative ecosystem (and the harsh realities we face).
I also think there is more to explore in terms of community-based models to support each other in this work. Certainly Amanda has done a lot of creative things to fund her work, which I think is amazing. Like Dani, I am interested in access, but I’m also interested in reciprocality. Sometimes publishing is seen as a one-way street (and this goes both ways: authors just looking for a printer for their work, or to add to their CV, or don’t do the work to understand a press first, or from publishers thinking they are doing writers a favour and should therefore be anointed with divine authority in the process). At Gap Riot Press, we try to resist that by making our production as transparent and collaborative as possible. And, I always come back to the thought of what a truly community-based publishing practice and model could look like. I can imagine reciprocality being the backbone, with a barter or in-kind support model where creatives share what they have (whether that be money, expertise, time, mentorship, etc) with each other and share the investment of running a press. At the end of the day of course, if you’re working with paper, it costs money and that cost rises by the minute, it seems. However, I don’t think that non-negotiable costs of running a press would or should hinder reciprocality, community, and a shared-investment model. Pooling resources creatively, as Amanda and others do, getting more hands in the production, distribution, promotion, and work of the press to relieve time and labour constraints, etc. Call me a dreamer but I think this is possible if we come together to imagine it and make it happen.
Earl: [1] [2] [3] [4] I know we agreed to end with these fine words of Kate’s but I wanted to add a clarification. Kate writes “Amanda has done a lot of creative things to fund her work.” [Italics mine]. I have, in fact, been working since 2003 to fund other people’s work by securing arts funding for contributors to Bywords.ca, and later through angel investments and crowd funding for AngelHousePress, also to fund contributors. I’ve only started to ask for money for my own writing and editing in the last year, since financial adversity caused a requirement to cover basic expenses such as rent and food. Because I had the privilege of not requiring money to cover the basics, I was able to donate my time. This is a privilege that I am grateful for, and I thank the literary, small press and visual poetry communities for showing up in droves to support my efforts to pay contributors and to recognize that not everyone has the possibility of devoting time to creative work for free. There’s room for all types of creative work, and I do a lot of bartering exchanging chapbooks etc, but to me, my own priority must be fair pay for all involved in its creation, production and dissemination, especially voices that have been and continue to be systematically excluded from canons. “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” ― Angela Davis
A few references
Women at the Vanguard of Visual Poetry, If Only We Had Known: Overcoming Erasure to Make Connections Between Past, Present and Future Women Making Visual Poetry Periodicities Journal of Poetry and Poetics (above/ground press, March 2021
Women Making Visual Poetry As Radical Acts of Witness, Memory and Insistence, The Typescript, April, 2021.
Creating Culture Among Women: A Conversation with Imogen Reid (Wisdom Body Collective, April, 2021) Part 1. Part 2, Part 3.
Michael Sikkema is the author of 6 full length books, and a couple dozen chapbooks and collaborative chapbooks. He has hosted reading series and open mics, edited a chapbook press, and provided cover art for chapbooks by C.D. Wright and Merrill Gilfillan, among others. He recently released a sound project with Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov.
