ENZO MINARELLI – LEGENDARY FIGURE OF POLYPOETRY – in LONDON APRIL 5 with event images
Update with performance video and images. I am really pleased to share a video and images from this event from the artist and poetry filmmaker Rebecca Rezakhani-Hilton. They can be found at the end of the article, including letters from John Cage, no less!
Italian ‘polypoet’ Enzo Minarelli is truly one of the great figures in the history of sound and experimental poetry and, for one evening only he will be performing in London on Saturday April 5th at The Outsiders Gallery at 5 pm. The event as a whole is titled: ‘What’s your Type? art-poetry-music in typing and computing’.
I am so excited that he is in the UK, and also very biased because he has been a great supporter of my own work, where I was experimenting with text on screen and sound, and also The Poetics of Poetry Film. He was the first reviewer to really write about the book, in Italian, for Juliet art journal, and is also featured in The Poetics of Poetry Film itself, as well. And how apposite that Enzo is bringing his work to the UK since, via Marc Zegan’s column, we have been touching on cut-ups and permutational approaches with Peter Wortsman in relation to his book The Laboratory of Time and other cut-up poems.
Then again, who better to fulfill this website’s name than Enzo, who strides out in (and beyond) the footsteps of his countryman, Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. This timely and rare event will be a refreshing and invigorating experience for the jaded art world, since the inspiration behind this particular performance is the 13th-century mystic philosopher and rabbi Abraham Abulafia and his prophetic theory of a linguistic Kabbalah. Entitled ‘Romanzi nelle I’ (Novels into the i) which is an anagram of Enzo’s name, the recital lasts for around forty minutes, and is set to hold your attention until the last exhalation of breath. Whilst Abulafia’s aim was an extreme form of mystic experience in relation to God, here Minarelli is using vocal combinatorial and permutational techniques to, as he puts it, ‘be alert to the performative experience and achieve a deep reflection on language’.
O L’aperta prigione delle vocali / The Open Prison of the Vowels – an image of the score he is performing.
For those of you who would like to learn more about the path that this truly original artist has taken in constructing this complex work, Enzo has forwarded to me a translated and in-depth critical essay on Romanzi nelle I – the sound of the sounds, the word of the words; polypoetical work n.11 for Abraham Abulafia. Here, you will encounter the mind of performer as he wrestles with computation, the ‘clean and righteous’ air of the voice itself and the Kabbalah as a source of inspiration for many years.
As he states: ‘In some parts I follow literally the permutations as written by Abulafia, elsewhere I myself invent them, the only words clearly intelligible are Dio [God], Satan, Romanzi nelle i, and in the last section, where I work on the pair Poet/Prophet, developing almost a paronomasia. All the other language combinations are an endless, infinite field of continuous permutation where one can immediately perceive that there is the triumph of vocality, of the pure sound, the vocal prevalence, the exuberance of the signifier.’
What is so significant is that this feels rather like a form of yoga or sound poetry as meditation. As he relates in the very enlightening YouTube description of his rationale (‘where I am explaining the sense or the hidden sense of the performance’) he assiduously follows a set of precepts or rules. These relate not only to place and approach but also to the body and its resonances, originally a purposeful route to achieving a mystical state and divine connection. Here, being contained and restricted by such an ancient web of ritual, promises conversely a liberation from thought, from pain, from all we needlessly carry. Almost a rebooting of the self, to begin again.
He follows a ‘triadic respiration system’: the first being inspiration, the second holding the breath inside, and thirdly exhaling. There are many other rules he could follow as determined by Abulafia, such as to wear white and to cover your head, but the three he can practically follow (in terms of a private experience) are: to be alone; to be in a place where no one else knows where you are; and to practice this at night. To these he has added his own precepts based on spatial tonality and movement of the head for example, and the poem is based on the power of the five vowels. Each vowel has its own connection to a part of the body, which he focuses on at that point of recitation: A the oesophagus, E the vocal chords, I to the nose, O is the diaphragm, and U to the stomach. He also notes that according to Abulafia the head is to do with fire, breath symbolizes the wind, and the lower part of the body is water; and he says he continually thinks of these elements during the performance, too.
Gallery information.
Minarelli feels like a dedicated follower of Abulafia’s life and work: for example, he has visited the island Comino, just north of Malta, where he died, and has copies of some of his sacred texts, found in a library in Modena. He states that taking this approach to sound poetry is a deliberate way to stimulate a field that has become in Minarelli’s words ‘stagnant for a decade’. It also feels like a sharing of the power of letters, where words, to follow the Kabbalah, are the actual sources of divine energy, through history, from the 13th century and Abulafia to today. Perhaps religious services offer a similar chain, in which we take part, but here a poet is adapting and bringing forward the creative aspect of a philosophical practice and approach to being: the esoteric, alchemical, hypnotic and transformative power of sound and language. Minarelli has a list of quotes which he feels might shed more light on his aims, one of which states: ‘the science of the combination is a music of pure thought, where the alphabet gets the role of musical scale’. In this light, we might think of an experience somewhere between John Cage and Brion Gysin – not on offer every day in London, so go watch and listen to this landmark event.
Enzo Minarelli https://www.enzominarelli.com is an Italian polyypoet and the theorist of the Manifesto of Polypoetry (1987). He has an extensive history of international polypoetry performances and is the editor of numerous records, CDs and DVDs. Minarelli is, also active in the field of linear and visual poetry with several solo gallery exhibitions as well as exhibitions of videopoems and video sound-poetry installations to his credit. He is the publisher of the vinyl series 3ViTre Records, founder of the 3Vitre Archive of Polypoetry which collects verbo-voco-visual materials, and is now permanently archived at Lincoln Center Library in New York City and at the Bologna University in Bologna, Italy. Books of Minarelli’s essays include Vocalità & Poesia, (Reggio Emilia, 1995) and La Voce della Poesia (Udine, 2008). Other publications of note are The Weight of Words (Gallery Aroldo Bonzagni, 2016) a catalogue of visual works 1974-2016, the CDs Fame (Pogus, 2012) and Phonosensitivity (Pogus, 2017), and the DVD/booklet Romanzi nelle i (Recital, 2015). For further reference see Italian cultural critic Renato Barilli’s monograph Enzo Minarelli il Polipoeta (Udine, 2016).
REELpoetry, Houston – a whole new festival format – 31 March – April 12 2025
It’s April and REELpoetry is here once again, but under a new guise, with over a week of online screenings (March 31– April 9), and Saturday, April 12th on home turf, featuring live events from Houston. As they say in the programme details: ‘In addition to open submissions, the festival includes 45-minute curated programs, premieres, commissioned collaborations, live readings, poetry in sign language, youth events, poet+filmmaker talks and networking cafés. In 2025, all screenings, including those shown exclusively at the in-person events, will stream on-demand.’ I am just flagging this up fairly quickly as I have been promised an in-depth coverage of events to come, so in the meantime here are the essentials.
Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran
It begins on the Monday March 31st with the Video Jukebox curation presented by Eleanor Livingstone (Scotland), including leading poets and poetry filmmakers: Ian Gibbins, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Colm Scully, Steve Smart, Lucy English, Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, Odveig Klyve and myself, followed by the exciting ‘Screening Texas Poets’ curated by Pam Falkenberg and Jack Cochran. The festival runs online through the week with juried submissions and curators screenings by Todd Boss, Mathew Mullins, Janet Lees, Paul Casey, Chris Pacheco and Mersolis Schöne. Festival director Fran Sanders will be at all the REELcafe meetings online throughout the week. On the Saturday the day is hosted by Võ Đức Quang, with Screening Texas Poets and 4 of the poets live at the event. There will also be a section on Young Creatives or Writers in Schools presented by Outspoken Bean. I am particularly pleased to see this as I managed a number of schools poetry film workshops with Helen Moore and Howard Vause for Liberated Words. In Location Houston Raneem Bakir Alia (Ranyah) and ten poets and filmmakers reveal unseen aspects of the city in film.
Just as an afterword, I am thrilled to finally work with Marc Neys after all these years. He has produced a sublime soundscape for my film Nocturne for a Lighterman in the Video Jukebox section on Monday 31st March. It is perfect for the subject matter and suggests all the layered moods and content superbly. This is also an ekphrastic poetry film, being a dialogue between Whistler and his painting Nocturne in Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–5) and one of my ancestors.
A whole fresh new approach to the festival and it looks to be a winning formula. Have a great time if you make it!
On the Cutting Edge: 3 Marc Zegans Finds the Story in Peter Wortsman’s latest publication
I am thrilled to introduce On the Cutting Edge: 3 this month. It occurs to me that each instalment brings with it a double revelation, both in the work of the featured author, but also in Marc’s illuminating exegesis. In short this is what every poet would really like – to be really read, really absorbed and well, the reader discovering depths and connections previously unknown to the writer.
And this month is a tantalising work – Peter Wortsman’s The Laboratory of Time and Other Cut-Up Poems, Bamboo Dart Press, 2025. Recently released, it appears to encompass a broad temporal spectrum: from cut-ups to the ‘the five books’ of The Torah or of The Old Testament. Of course, cut-ups, fragmentary and minimalist poems, and combinatory poems are said to have existed, alongside traditional syllabic stress verse forms – most probably first penned by Homer (c.1100–800 BC) – since the fifth century BC; so even then were not an alien form in a biblical context. And, coming closer to the present , following the Surrealists, British-Canadian experimental artist Brion Gysin (1916–1986) has become associated with the cut-up method since Minutes to Go (1959). He believed poets were supposed to liberate words, not chain them in phrases (Funkhouser, 2007: 154).
For me, the space or elision between the visual and verbal in both visual poetry and videopoetry or poetry films is key. Cut-ups take the [lyric] line, the verbal sequence and de-regulate its original linkages, or structural integrity, for one that entices new, Fluxus-like, chance, mental configurations; also, at times making of it an object. As history is written so we can insert ourselves into its unfolding, or rewriting. I wrote about the visual prosody of videopoems in my thesis ‘Re: Turning – from graphic verse to digital poetics – historical rhythms and digital transitional effects in Graphic Poetry Films’ (2014). In Richard Bradford’s analysis (in relation to lyric poems with a visual or ‘imagist’ bias such as American poet William Carlos Williams), shifts occur for the reader between the linear and the graphic word; or as his title suggests Poetry as Visual Art. The word on the page is suddenly ‘seen’ for its own plastic qualities.
In relation to Wortsman’s poetry, Marc draws attention to the thorny questions of representation and transcending the object-subject divide, ‘analogy’s role in closing the gap between world and word’ and also thinking as we do through conceptual metaphor. But, what is interesting, going beyond the act of cutting, is that he also identifies how Wortsman’s poetry draws a parallel to the condition of his Found Objects – holding an ‘inert store of potential’. ‘Here, rather than moving in time, the object embeds time, stilling it— “a guardian of memory”—until the story the object contains is released … a poem on the page is inert, a store of potential, until activated by an observer; its story awaits a finder.’
So … to be the finder of the story of the story, please follow this link for ON THE CUTTING EDGE: 3 Peter Wortsman The Laboratory of Time.
Sarah
Lo Galluccio, Not for Amnesia – On The Cutting Edge: 2 by Marc Zegans
Welcome to CUTTING EDGE no. 2, the second edition of Marc Zegan’s thought-provoking, in-depth discussion of the poetic craft. This month we are being treated to poet, memoirist and vocalist Lo Galluccio and her collection Not for Amnesia (Cervena Barva Press, 2023), written in Brooklyn, in the early 90s, after a romantic breakup. Trying to survive as an artist in New York, her poetry mines everyday experiences and produces literary gold dust, inspired by Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
To read the full review please click here: On The Cutting Edge: 2 If Not for Amnesia Lo Galluccio
Lo Galluccio is an American poet, memoirist, and vocalist. Her chapbooks include: Hot Rain, Ibbetson Street Press; Terrible Baubles, Alternating Current Press and her prose-poem memoir Sarasota VII (Cervena Barva Press, 2008) about death, place and desire by the Atlantic Ocean. Her three vocal CDs are on Spotify, Amazon Prime.and Bandcamp. Lo served as Poet Populist of Cambridge between 2013 and 2015, and she has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in Poetry.
FURTHER DETAILS
Marc Zegans is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative development advisor who helps artists, writers and creative people thrive and shine, see: mycreativedevelopment.com
In addition to his broader creative advisory practice, Marc consults with emerging poets on the development of their craft. He writes periodically about creativity and innovation, and politics.
He is on Instagram @marczegans. He is listed as zegansmarc
He is also on LinkedIn and Facebook
Happy New Year and a new column – On The Cutting Edge by Marc Zegans
On The Cutting Edge : Marc Zegans Looks at New Work
Launching into 2025 I am thrilled to be able to announce that leading American poet and poetry filmmaker Marc Zegans (based out of Pacific Grove, Northern California) will be writing a regular column – On the Cutting Edge – on selected poetry books and films for Liberated Words. I can’t tell you how I have been looking forward to this, since I have admired Marc’s writing for some time now, and feel he will introduce a whole new tranche of writers into the fold.
For his first Cutting Edge deep dive he is writing an overview in brief on The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis – Bottlecap Press, 2024. See: Cutting Edge 1 The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis
Many of you may be familiar with his work and the essay I wrote (here on LW) on his evocative and palpable poetry collection / memoir of San Francisco – Lyon Street, published by Bamboo Dart Press. I was also really fortunate to recite from my forthcoming Tree publication and present on poetry film with him in San Francisco last year; and, with a well-trodden groove, feel no one could be a finer example of setting loose the melodies and cracks in the American voice.
He has published an impressive body of work – seven poetry collections to date: Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020), and La Commedia Sotterranea Della Macchina da Scrivere (Pelekinesis, 2019) being the most recent. He has also made spoken word albums; several immersive theatrical productions, including Sirens, Dreams and a Cat (co-written with D. Lowell Wilder, 2020), and many poetry films. Ghost Book (Kite String Press, 2024), a collaboration with fine art photographer Tsar Fedorsky, was released in April of this year. Marc’s work can also be found in a variety of anthologies including, Kerouac on Record, A Literary Soundtrack, edited by Simon Warner and Jim Sampas.
Marc lives near the coast in Northern California, where he can be found on the bluffs most evenings enjoying the gorgeous sunsets.
FURTHER DETAILS
Marc Zegans is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative development advisor who helps artists, writers and creative people thrive and shine, see: mycreativedevelopment.com
In addition to his broader creative advisory practice, Marc consults with emerging poets on the development of their craft. He writes periodically about creativity and innovation, and politics.
He is on Instagram @marczegans. He is listed as zegansmarc
He is also on LinkedIn and Facebook
Just to round things off, here is a recent review of Lyon Street by Richard Modiano, if you aren’t familiar with Marc’s work.
Marc Zegans’ Lyon Street is a unique contribution to the literature of the flâneur, that passionate wanderer keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. Zegans’ examinations of the conditions of urban life, joy, memory, alienation, class tensions, are not those of a solitary, dissociated urban observer. Instead Zegans turns flânerie into testimony, and he brings the city of San Francisco to life in a Proustian memory palace of pleasure and regret.
—Richard Modiano, Director Emeritus Beyond Baroque Foundation
Poetics of Resistance – POSVERSO biennial – videopoetry curation by Alejandro Thornton
The formidable Argentinian-based POSVERSO BIENNIAL presents a rich selection of poets from the digital media / literary / electronic / visual poetry world in a multitude of events and locations. It is perhaps the most historic event of its kind today. By that I mean it centres not only on different types of avant-garde poetry (digital, visual, performative etc), but also expands on the potential of poetry and how artists can confront political turmoil and abuse. How political statement can be visualised through words and images. If you picked one event to find the very best, the most explosive of this particular mix, it would be in Argentina at this time in world history.
As the curatorial statement by Silvio De Gracia for the First Biennial, states:
‘Experimental poetry is not an aseptic or alienated language, but a language that, as the Mexican poet César Espinosa stated, is made of “corrosive signs.” In the case of Latin America, starting in the 1970s, the practice of experimental poetry took on an eminently political character, which not only aimed at the creation of new forms of reading and writing, but also at the diversion and subversion of the normalized discourses of dictatorial contexts. Here are included the proposals of historical poets such as Clemente Padín, Edgardo Antonio Vigo or Guillermo Deisler, but also of other creators who, without registering within the specific field of experimental poetry, develop practices in which they seek to renew artistic repertoires, to the time to transform or challenge social and political conditions.
POSVERSO takes up this tradition of an experimental poetic current, which is connected to scenarios of confrontation and resistance, and which is oriented towards the construction of other meanings, other narratives, other ways of inhabiting the world. For POSVERSO, experimental poetry is an inexhaustible field in which games with words and various writing signs are exceeded, to drift towards forms of intersemiotic translation, in which verbal signs are transmuted or transferred to non-verbal signs, or from one system of signs to another; for example, from verbal writing to music, dance, painting, video. This intersemiotic character is what links experimental poetry with the approaches of the conceptualist movement, especially with the proposal of the Fluxus Art intermedias developed by Dick Higgins. Poetry is everything. Hybridizations, crossings, translations configure the productive matrix of a series of poetic processes, whose realizations can be found not only in the field of experimental poetry, but within the expanded horizons of the visual arts, music, performance, video.’
The main exhibition Poetics of Resistance “Poéticas de la resistencia”curated by Silvio De Gracia and designed by Ana Montenegro opened at MACA Museum of Contemporary Argentine Art on October 18th in Junin. Primarily showcasing practitioners from Latino backgrounds such as Javier Robledo, Clemente Padin, Joyce Ribeiro and Alejandro Thornton, many Spanish (such as Bartolomé Ferrando) and European artists (Jaap Blonk, Montenegro Fisher) are also featured.
[Incidentally the term Poetics of Resistance was also made famous by Argentine artist and human rights activist Marcelo Brodsky. As a poetics of political intervention he redefines journalistic images of political events through his art.]
Through presenting at VideoBardo 2012, I have met some of the leading Argentinian media poets such as Claudia Kozak (showing with Rodolfo Mata (México) and Michael Hurtado (Perú) in an electronic poetry event on the 29th November. And, Javier Robledo presented a VideoBardo screening in the Poetics of Resistance event, which I am pleased to see.
Just a few of the locations at POSVERSO.
With more than a hundred activities: workshops, conferences, exhibitions, pre-events, (and including projects worldwide such as on mail art to those in public spaces, with titles such as ‘Resisting the Present’ and Marginalia – Notes, visions and writings on the edges) this is an impressive cultural event with a strong selection of artists. You can see how much planning has gone into this biennial by checking out the different locations on offer.
The whole biennial closes Friday the 20th December at the Hotel DADA (with a concert online) and with seven more events to come there is still a lot to see. For example, Paulo Bruscky (b: 1949) the Brazilian multidisciplinary artist whose pioneered mail art in the 1960s. Influenced by avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and later connected to Fluxus in the 1970s, it mustn’t be forgotten that mail art could circumvent the authorities in terms of expressing political freedom during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). Bruscky (1976)“In Mail Art, art has reclaimed its principal functions: information, protest, and denunciation.”
Latin America (back) Paulo Bruscky, 1976.
Centro de Capacitación y Cultura ATSA, Junin.
Videopoetry
There will also be a videopoetry event at the Centro de Capacitación y Cultura ATSA, Junín curated by Alejandro Thornton, who some of you may know is one of the artists featured in the poetry anthology / screening publication Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow from Poem Film Editions. His aim behind the screening is to bring videopoetry to the streets.
SOS, Augusto de Campos, 2000.
Artists include: ‘Oskar Fischinger (Alemania), Walter Ruttmann (Alemania), Augusto de Campos (Brasil), Decio Pignatari (Brasil), Tom Konyves (Canadá), Montenegro-Fischer (UK-Chile), Sarah Tremlett (UK), Tulio Restrepo (Colombia), Tatiana Gaviola (Chile), Belén Gache, Gonzalo Aguilar (author of leading publication on Argentinian Cinema), Ivana Vollaro, Rubén Grau, Ro Barragán, Rosa Gravino, Paula Pellejero, Facundo Díaz and Alejandro Thornton amongst others’.
Organic Fragments – White, Paula Pellejero, 2024.
Really a very exciting collection of works, and I wish I could be there to see a rare example of Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinematic film – Lichtspiel Opus I (1921). I am honoured that my poetry film Solstice Sol Invictus has been included in this really impressive group and particularly with the legendary artist Augusto de Campos. I have added below a still from SOS (2000) a video with rotating texts and repeating vocalising; also of course reminiscent of Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema. I should add that it hasn’t yet been revealed to me which are the exact films being screened, so this may not be in the final show.
In Solstice Sol Invictus I created the concept (words, visuals, sound) of the film for Lucy English’s The Book of Hours project, with the theme of course registering the mediaeval and reflective, temporal feel of the original Books of Hours, but with the sun and its passage through the year as a central theme. I came up with the (verbal, visual and sound) concept and wrote the first four verses and Lucy the second.
Solstice Sol Invictus, Sarah Tremlett (concept and poet, and Lucy English poet), 2018.
I also made another poetry film for this project (a natural pair) entitled Summer Solstice (with old 35 mm footage of a California beach). Solstice Sol Invictus effectively uses the screen as a moving canvas, showing the changes in light as the sun passes through the seasons, reflecting on light, hope, faith and solar time. I also have referenced earlier painters and their solar depictions and in the latest version I have included these at the end. I was influenced by: Max Ernst’s Black Sun 1927–8; Vincent Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun, 1888; Ambassador of Autumn, 1922 by Paul Klee, which has haunted me with its tonal, horizontal gradations, also influencing the dynamic structure of Mr Sky (2018), (another poetry film with Lucy English) and a later abstract landscape Spiral Motif in Green, Violet, Blue and Gold: The Coast of the Inland Sea (1950) by British artist Victor Pasmore, 1908–98.
Black Sun, Max Ernst, 1927.
FOR A COMPLETE OVERVIEW GO TO:
https://posversobienal.com.ar/
