Friday, June 5, 2009

visual poetry with some comics genes


here's page 265 from Nico Vassilakis's book protracted type, which you can download freely from http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/protracted-type/6845937.

only pages 265 to 268 are in this style. the rest of the book contains many other styles of visual poetry, & short texts which explain Nico's purpose.

unlike most of you abstract comicsists, I know little about the history of comics, but do know some of the points of intersection between comics & experimental poetry.

2 comments:

  1. That is a neat book. I think you could also easily classify the faces/masks of pages 242-245 as comics and even the juxtaposed photos that feature throughout the book (somewhat similar to Charles Burns' One Eye). A case could really be made for most concrete/visual poetry being comics.

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  2. good move Tim!

    yes, Nico's work is expansive in the sense of border blurring & exists as a mesmerizing locus of focal stoppage, that moment of staring, to stop and look, almost like a psychedelic experience in some aspects, in that the viewer in prompted toward a timeless rabbit hole wherein everything which seems so familiar becomes so strange & like a magic lantern, the flicker generates a movement flowing freely from eyes to brain & his attention to microscopic detail actually enlarges the overall macroscopic frame, sometimes tearing it off the hinge in that a readers/viewers reality-grid is thrown into an intermediary zone between being and existence, an out-of-body experience if you will, a bewildering of the senses which widen a range of ratio aspect.

    some of his work could directly be called abstract comics, things like:

    this sequence

    &

    this sequence

    & his videopoetry is affecting as well,

    see here

    ...of special interest & note, Nico is actually the warehouse manager for Fantagraphics!

    is that way cool or what?

    Nico @ Fantagraphics
    :

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