28 March 2004. I'm fading again so will just post a new artwork of Geof Huth's, "Text of Leaves":

I like this quite a bit but am also posting it as an illustration of what others call visual poetry and I now call asemantic litragraphy. That will allow me to proseltyze some more, but--I hope--also to say a few worthwhile things about this kind of non-poetry.

I spoke too soon. The work is verbal: "leaves" is clearly in it. When I first saw it, I thought it was asemantic. (As I just wrote Geof, I think I'm more visual than verbal, he more verbal than visual, and that this accounts in some part for our differences of opinion: I see artworks he sees as explicitly or implicitly verbal enough to count as "poetry" that I see as too essentially visual to count as that.)

Okay, I've just done something presumptuous: I've changed Geof's poem. (Which makes me wonder if one day, because of programs like Paint Shop, editors will edit visual artworks the way they always have edited texts; intricately, I mean--not just cropping or the like.) To be even more presumptuous, I feel I've improved it:

I made two small changes in it to destroy its ability verbally to mean. My idea was to change it to a genuine asemantic litragraph so I could discuss it as such. I didn't expect to improve it. Whether I really did or not, I think I've made an extremely fruitful comparison possible. For me, "Text of Leaves" in its original state, is a kind of richly expanded visual onomatopoeia. It spells, "leaves," and also shows us windblown shed leaves, so is onomatopoetic; but it also shows us leaves as things blown out of identity as leaves--like letters scattering from their meaning as a word. A suggestion of rebirth is provided by the fresh new shapes some of the leaf-letters are curling or combining or breaking into. The design as a whole has a lot of arrowpoints, or v-forms, expressing escape, and ascent. The images in it also seem lively, and all of the same family: each has much in common with each of the others, but a uniquesness. In short, the work is a fine semantic litragraph.

So how did I improve it? Well, by making it textual but no longer semantic, I feel I've given it additional depth as a representation of elements of language (because the images do look textual; some in fact are textual) which are also leaves being scattered and reshaped by the weather and season. Language is being acted on, and/or responding to, existence, not just a particular word. So the work becomes larger. It also becomes more subtle, dropping an explicit word the piece's title makes superfluous. I think the change subtracts nothing else from the work that was good about it when it was semantic.

A few conclusions: (1) there's nothing inherently inferior about what I call "asemantic litragraphy"; (2) asemantic litragraphy is significantly different from semantic litragraphy; (3) a mind exposed to--or, better, engaged in--chatter about how to define various kinds of artworks that gets "tediously" into the features of the artworks involved may gain enough from the chatter to rethink even a good piece into something possibly better; (4) art and analysis can both be fun.