Andrew Brenza : on Sigil Series

 

 

 

 

This is a series of alphabet-derived, glyph-like symbols, each presented with a corresponding chant to enliven the connection between formlessness and form, to woo attention to its creative bedrock, to glow with the breath of the reader, to burn with a dark and heatless flame. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Brenza’s recent books include the visual poetry series The Book of Andrews (Red Fox Press) and the experimental science fiction play Night Walking & the Makers’ Taint (Sulfur Editions). He is also the founder and editor of Sigilist Press, a micropress devoted to the publication of visual poetry.

Andrew Brenza : Sigilist Press Overview

 

Sigilist Press is a micropress devoted to the publication of visual poetry. Started in April of 2022, its aim is to contribute to and support the international movement that is visual poetry as one of the only dedicated publishers of the genre in the United States. The logo of the press is a version of the medieval weaver’s mark, drawn by my wife on a Post-it and photographed with my cell phone. The press’s website, a simple list of publications with cover images, brief descriptions and links for purchase, is one page in its entirety. In short, we are a focused press, fixated on producing quality books that best showcase the visual poems in question. This means our books come in various shapes and sizes, and on various types and weights of paper, all of which are chosen to support the work. 

 

Cover image of Sigilist Press Publication # 4:
Word Roach on the Street by K. Saito

Why did I start Sigilist Press? Well, I like visual poetry. Ever since I first came in contact with the concept, way back in the early 2000s, during my graduate studies at Temple University, it has been a major force in my life. In fact, I have devoted a good number of my adult years to the creation of visual poetry, having also been fortunate enough to find a number of sympathetic publishers who have put forth my work. I increasingly see visual poetry as one of the few ways to keep poetry alive, meaningful, and commensurate with the complexities of our era. I want to help visual poetry thrive and grow.

 

Cover image of Sigilist Press Publication # 3:
Rotring by Carrie Meijer

As of March 2023, Sigilist Press has issued a total of six publications, ranging from an eight-page photographic asemic essay by American poet Nico Vassilakis called Asemic Migration to a 100 page collection of mixed media concrete poems by the Italian artist Patrizia Cacciaguerra called Vertical Thought. In between, there have been a number of other books, generally under 20 pages in length, featuring the visual works, some in full color, some in black & white, by artists such as the Canadian visual poet Hart Broudy, the Japanese artist K. Saito, the Dutch artist Carrie Meijer, and the Ukrainian Avant-gardist Volodymyr Bilyk. It has been a great honor for me to have been given the opportunity to publish all of these authors and artists. I very much look forward to publishing more in the months and years to come.

Cover image of Sigilist Press Publication # 6:
Revenge of the Glyphs by Hart Broudy

All of Sigilist’s publications are solicited directly from authors and artists whose work appeals to the press. Unfortunately, we do not accept unsolicited submissions at this time. We are not ideologically opposed to them, we simply cannot, as a one-person operation, open our doors and mailbox any wider quite yet. We hope this will change sometime in the future as we know we are missing a lot of great work out there. In any case, selections will remain admittedly idiosyncratic, but hopefully interesting. Review copies are certainly a possibility should someone be interested in saying something about a Sigilist publication. We are located at sigilistpress.com.

Long live visual poetry!

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Brenza is an American experimental writer, collage artist, and librarian. He is the author of numerous collections of visual poetry including Compass (RedFoxPress) and Smear (BlazeVOX Books). He is also the founder of Sigilist Press, a micropress devoted to the publication of experimental writing. Weaving together prose narrative, visual poetry and free verse, WRYTHM, his experimental speculative novel, was recently released by Montag Press.

 

Amanda Earl : what poems do in a few above/ground press 2021 chapbooks

 

 

 

 

1. evoke dreams

The Northerners by Benjamin Niespodziany is “an ekphrastic sequence written while  watching the Dutch film De Noorderlingen (1992)  directed  by  Alex  van  Warmerdam.” I haven’t seen the film, but I enjoyed this sequence very much. I did the same sort of thing while watching Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and it’s published in Kiki, my poetry book with Chaudiere Books (now with Invisible Publishing). I love the minimalism of this sequence, the fragments, and the fact that some of the poems “appeared as daydreams written on post-it notes.” There’s a fairy tale quality to the sequence. There are evocative lines, such as “He houses the dark” when writing about someone called “the forester” from the film I would think. You know how your dreams seem completely logical while you’re dreaming? I felt that here. Like I was dreaming too.

2. mesmerize through accumulatory sentences

In Yesterday’s Tigers by Mayan Godmaire, the sentences start out small and build into complex images and structures. I delighted in these poems, some were haibun, I believe. I loved the call to the senses. I don’t know about you but since the pandemic, my world has been increasingly reduced to screens, so I welcome any opportunity to engage with the senses. I enjoyed the way occasional sentences in French appeared. Switching languages in a poem changes its rhythm and pace. I love the way Persephone is linked throughout and to the land. The lines in italics come from Jim Morrison songs and Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann and work well with the text. I’d like to read more of Godmaire’s writing.

3. play with geometry

Andrew Brenza Geometric Mantra is intriguing. Brenza works with and against the grid  in these digital visual poems. Some of the words are readable and some are not. He begins with a maze at the start of a sentence, followed by mirages and mirror images. The work shifts into distortions and breakages as the mirror breaks into shards of reflections becoming kaleidoscopic and fading. There is an error to remember, darkness and snow, letters that meander and link or bunch together like magnetic fuzzy iron filings in a magnetic field experiment. There is a sad sea. I can read each one of these poems and my mind begins to wander too, taking me all over the place from Eurydice’s broken mirror (once more a Cocteau reference) to the suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf, to this odd little toy I had as a child that used a magnet to collect filings beneath a plastic sheet…None of this was the author’s intent, but as a writer, I always want my work to lead outward and inward. So it’s a compliment. I know these were probably great fun to make.

Katie O’Brien’s Micro Moonlights plays with musical notation in a similar way. Some of the titles come from or were inspired by Beethoven. This work also plays with the grid, here the sheet of music, sometimes horizontal or vertical or at a slant, and the notes, sometimes repeated, sometimes dancing off the sheet, sometimes layered into a tower of song, to reference Leonard Cohen for my own entertainment, or a big tangled up pile of cacophony. I would like to hear these played on a piano.  

4. make me ache with envy

In Less Dream N.W. Lea makes poems that ripple across my lake of loneliness, as his work always does for me. They quietly sing flaw. Everything at Once is a mantra that I’ll keep on my wall. There’s something so humble about this work, yet it also astonishes with these unique lines that feel like truths for me. “the blackbirds in the bare maple/are little adorable portals/into Void. [from Void].

Jason Christie’s Bridges and burn is a thoughtful, humorous and sometimes wry sequence that plays with the contradictions between the natural world and the human world as we try to survive  late capitalism. It’s been the subject of much of Christie’s work especially his most recent and brilliant collection, Cursed Objects (Coach House Books, 2019. “In the meantime, the tree grows like a graphic expression of a kind of rough music performed by the ants.” Hell yeah.

THE OCEANDWELLER by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi and translated by Khashayar Mohammadi is a gorgeous work. “bitter nights had sedimented underneath our nails”

There is acacia entering a kitchen window, white like a bride. There is a downpour, two telephone conversations mingled. There is pain: “its strange / how pain resembles words / if inspected from close range / its as if words are constructed by pain” – “hide your wings”

I love that above/ground press publishes translations, not something I’ve seen too often in the micropress universe. I appreciated being introduced to Saeed Tavanaee Marvi’s work, which I would likely never have read because I don’t speak Farsi.

5. have me leaping around

JoAnna Novak’s Knife with Oral Greed opens with an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem, Hansel and Gretel from Sexton’s Transformations, which I hadn’t heard about before and will now read.

Knife with Oral Greed is a great title, by the way, and perhaps refers to an ancient Finnish tale, Kullervo, based on a very shallow Google search. Makes me think of Freudian analysis – orality.

This is a minimal sequence, spare of colour (white, red, silver), with unusual words like “tessarae,”: tessarae are small, cut stones used in mosaics as early as the third or fourth century. A “cuchillo” is a Spanish word for knife. I do not know what a “peach leo” is but I like it.

I am enamored by all the textures in this sequence: wax, silk, silver, oil, foam, white flowers, cake, snakes, wine, flypaper…

There’s a small American perfumery called “For Strange Women,” I have only learned about this month. The descriptions of the perfumes were so enticing, I had to purchase a solid perfume called Fireside Story. This work is well-written and strange, and that is a compliment. It feels like a dream. There are some reversals where objects perform actions that I’ve seen in some Canadian contemporary surrealist-ish poetry.

Looking at Novak’s site, I notice Noirmania, a poetry collection that is described by Johannes Göransson, author of The Sugar Book describes as “part hellish fashion shoot, part necroglamorous memoir, part grotesque diorama.” I’m intrigued. I feel like this intensity that is described is restrained in Knife with Oral Greed, but it’s there, beneath the skin, in the veins…

And of course, I have to look up Göransson, who is a poet, translator, professor and editor. I immediately follow him on Twitter. I liked his use of “necroglamorous.” This leads me to this fantastic poem published on Poetry Daily, “Summer (excerpt) which blends English with another language that I don’t know so I can’t name it and is heavy with texture and intense too. Then I go to his site and read a bit from an interview he did where he’s quoted as saying he wants to drown in poetry. I adore this. That’s what I’m here for.

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a polyamorous pansexual feminist cis-gendered poetesse, the fallen angel of AngelHousePress and the managing editor of Bywords.ca, and that’s all she wants to mention in her bio right now. More info: AmandEarl.com; Adoring fans: https://linktr.ee/amandaearl.