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.

 

Dani Spinosa : Intersponse 2: hart broudy

 

 

 

Dani Spinosa: Hello. I stole four of your "lines." How does that make you feel?

Hart Broudy: OK, I want to define stole as "having liberated from con/textual confinement in order to reassemble into new form/s"… and how does it feel? I was very pleased. First, that the poem still carried enough energy to be re-purposed... second that you took its components and re-animated them into an outstanding piece.

D: Do you know which poem I stole from? Is the choice of poem I made relevant to your reaction at all?

H: Assuming it was one of the c pomes... I'd never written a lovepome series before. It was my first — for a doomed romance in Paris that thankgod ended. Your new work is multi-layered and shifting… a dimensional yang form created solely by yin components... that was an super touch.

D: From whom (or from what) have you stolen most in your poetry?

H: Many 'influences', but from whom have I actually stolen? In no order... Frank Stella & the New York guys, the Bauhaus, bp, any number of people in Mary Ellen Solt's book, Dedora, bill, dfb, Soviet blocky design, noir movies...

D: What is a "line" in the visual poem? Or, what does lineation have to do with visual poetry?

H: I hope this doesn't come across as too weird: Lineation in visual poetry is a false concept. It implies travel on a flat plane, usually in one direction. In visual poetry, the page is 3D space and a 'line' is an energy packet moving along any plane in any direction. We have to free ourselves from linearity and invent new terms to deal with these dimensional activities.

D: My poem to/about/from you is very much about the tension between analogue and digital. How does that tension play into your work, if at all?

H: All the work I do requires tension. It's one of the forces that make the piece live. Without it, a piece is lifeless—my wastebasket is constantly being emptied. Early work was analogue—typewriter, early IBM ballchangers and Letraset... I remember bleaching the back of film negs to soften the emulsion to shape before printing... smelly and awful, but really hands-on... I jumped on digital with the first Macs. Sometimes I create in analogue and digitize it and experiment in Photoshop and sometimes the other way around... it's fun to move from one to the other. I love the back & forth.

D: My poem to/about/from you is very much about mess and overlap and disrupting meaning making. Do you think about that in your work? Do you prefer a messy poem or a clean poem?

H: disrupting meaning-making, mess and overlap are exceptional techniques. In skilled hands, the new creation is vibrant and exciting and thought-provoking.
Does this stuff play in my work? yes. yes. These terms mean rearrangements/changes and thus new meanings. Messily or cleanly or overlappingly, I continue until I either ultimately like or toss. I'm a total Libra. Sometimes I get off on messy, sometimes on clean, sometimes both in the same piece.

D: Why is O such a lovely letter? What is it about O that we are drawn to?

H: O intimates perfection.

 

 

 

 

Hart Broudy is a graphic designer and visual poet whose work has been published and shown since 1970. He is one of the architects of Concrete is Porous (2018-2020). From these successful exhibitions, nOIR:Z was formed to publish curated visual poetry.

He regards the ‘page’ as an infinite spacial field in which linearity is a false concept. Language elements are vibrant atoms and molecular sculptures moving in all dimensions. This is language in space.

Dani Spinosa is a poet and a scholar and an adjunct professor. She's a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and the author of two books: OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). You can find her online at www.genericpronoun.com.