AverbalAsemicAsemantic

Pages 30 and 31
The poet, the pure poet, the one minding only the abstraction of words, is enchanted by the word. But the visual poet is enchanted by the suggestion of the word, the hint that a word may be in existence within a visual field, the fragrance left behind by a word now gone. The visual poet is interested in the recreation of the life of text, which can exist in many forms: needled into the skin, ablaze in lights, scrawled in pencil deep into the pulp of corrugated cardboard.

The visual poet works with things, and those things are sometimes words, and sometimes fragments of words, and often things that merely partner with words.

Bruno Neiva in his book averbaldraftsone&otherstories amasses two sets of artful visual poems, one that consists of his pieces from an exhibition held in Spain (where this Portuguese poet lives) and the other consisting of a selection of poems he's published in zines and elsewhere since that exhibition. The poems in the first set are almost totally asemic as their umbrella title suggests: "averbaldraftsone."


Aver Bald Rafts One 

These poems consist primarily of radically asemic works. Sometimes, the smudge of ink is the only vestige of writing in the poems. At other times, dotted lines, methodical found punctures through layers of cardboard, or small clutches of scattered characters provide the hint of writing. Asemia cares not for meaning, of course, but only for the gestalt of writing sans semiotics, the structural hints of writing.

The best of these poems employ found pieces of cardboard and paper that are already marked by use by cans, tape, glue, and markings to present minimalist textual landscapes that are sculptural in their construction and beautiful to the eye. Yet it's their ghostly and cryptic markings the keep the eye looking for meaning for the mind.

Bruno appears to be making a distinction, possibly a political one (because poetry is always political), between two ways of writing poems without semiosis: asemic writing versus averbal writing. The blurb at the back of the book explains that the "shift from 'asemic' to 'averbal' has come from a distancing from the poetics (and tastes) of the so-called 'asemic group.'" Bruno's work certainly fits within the usual bounds of the asemic continuum, but he never employs invented handwritten scripts for his works. Instead, he works with marks and sometimes actual letters from the Latin alphabet.

Pages 52 and 53
Eot Hers Tories

This second (unmarked) section of the book is bigger and richer. It moves from monotone works to works of outrageously gorgeous colors, from sparsity to fecundity, from plain to intricate. Here, everything happens.

All kinds of collaging ensues. Strips of paper are glued upon other translucent slips of paper. Inks and watercolors compete and mix. Letterforms and letterformlikeforms are added to cardboard and paper with Letrast, rubberstamps, pens, brushes. The shapes of these sculptural collages are as varied as the methods used to imprint meaning on them. A world of possibility becomes reality here.

And words appear. A plethora of words, in Portuguese and English, give us purchase in the world of worded meaning, and we can take time to read through their chaotic beauty. But these words intersect with amebalike congregations of asemic letters, with lines crossing the pages in the barest suggestion of writing. Glue becomes a medium of writing.

Pages 56 and 57 &

These few words and the few handheld presentations I present here don't quite capture the beauty of these works or the breadth of Bruno's imagination and the versatility of his hand on the page--even when the page is cardboard in corrugations of gutters and ridges. These are works for the eyes looking for the word, poems anyone should be able to enjoy, even though few of us will read them.

Yet read them we should.

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Neiva, Bruno. averbadraftsone&otherstories (Newton-le-Willows: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013). £14 in the United Kingdom, £18 everywhere else.

ecr. l'inf.