Albert Mobilio
The visual and the textual, the lucid and the illegible: a vibrant exhibition of the last sixty-five years of experimental poetry.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club. Pictured, far left, hanging: Cecilia Vicuña, Chanccani Quipu, Granary Books, 2012. Bottom row, far left: Raymond Queneau, One Hundred Million Million Poems, translated by John Crombie, Kickshaws, 1983. Bottom row, second from right: Johanna Drucker, Stochastic Poetics, Granary Books and Druckwerk, 2012.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, curated by Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh, in collaboration with Conley Lowrance, Grolier Club, 47 East Sixtieth Street, New York City, through July 26, 2025
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A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled slips of paper; a book in which each line of text appears on its own sliver of a page; a series of poems printed on what look like business cards; knotted lengths of wool stenciled with verse. If you long for an alternative to the tyranny of digital display, these items, among sundry others, included in an exhibition at the Grolier Club, will affirm your affection for the literally printed word. Although modest in size, After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 offers a generously varied tour of the physical incarnations literary art might take and reminds the viewer that poetry, due to its formal structures, has always possessed a strong visual identity. No one mistakes a page of sestinas or couplets, or even free verse, for a page of prose; and, of course, poetic forms themselves are always integral to the genre’s expressive intentions. It is no surprise, then, that poets inclined to innovation would press this pictorial element further.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club. Pictured, bottom row, second from right: d. a. Levy, 7 Concrete Poems / Concrete Poems / Electric Greek Poems, 1968.
Concrete poetry is perhaps the most familiar of these endeavors (who wasn’t encouraged in grade school to write a poem about a flower in the shape of one?). Curators and catalog authors Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh provide provocative examples of work by d. a. levy and Steve McCaffery. As if to dispel those childhood memories and recognize the genre’s roots in the counterculture, the catalog includes a portion of levy’s 1966 “The Para-Concrete Manifesto”: “Our Concrete Poems are written to purify our minds & Intestines of all western sophisticated hypocrisy apathetic impotent outrages racist mindfucking white supremacy dung . . .” Despite this anarchic sentiment, levy’s 7 Concrete Poems / Concrete Poems / Electric Greek Poems (1968) demonstrates a paradoxical tension: the Greek- and English-language texts are rendered in a wildly kinetic typography, yet they are printed on cards neatly organized in a pristine pocket folder.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club.
While it makes sense that all of the books, magazines, and posters are set safely behind glass, the inability to explore these objects (just what do the other poems in levy’s folder look like?), as well as the lack of tactility (the rich textures of paper—one poem is printed on a bar napkin—implore contact), makes for a somewhat muted experience. We knew we couldn’t handle Cecilia Vicuña’s unspun wool quipu when they recently hung in a Guggenheim show and accept we can’t caress the pieces on view here, where they hang inside a vitrine; but Oulipo cofounder Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Million Million Poems (1961; English edition 1983, translated by John Crombie), in which every line of ten sonnets appears on a different strip of paper, enabling a reader to compose their own sonnets, seems forlorn in its untouchable remove. The 1965 William Burroughs and Brion Gysin parody of Time magazine looks enticingly satiric from the bits that can be gleaned from spreads standing on end, partly open.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club. Pictured: Tom Phillips, A Humument, Tetrad Press, 1970.
Some of these rare, often handmade publications have been reproduced by mainstream publishers. For instance, English artist Tom Phillips’s renowned A Humument—a Victorian novel that he re-created via erasure, cut-up, and collage—has appeared in several revised paperback editions since the first printing of some of its pages appeared in the early 1970s. However familiar those books and their reproductions, the original prints feel markedly different, conveying a lush, bespoke quality. The maker’s intimate involvement is something we take for granted in painting, sculpture, and photography—not so much in publications. Books and magazines are assumed to roll off printing presses, but not Jen Bervin’s The Desert (2008). She accomplished this erasure of an early twentieth-century volume by John Van Dyke by sewing blue thread (some five thousand yards worth) into/over nearly every line to cancel out most of the text and produce a poem whose phrases emerge from amid the blue ripples as if surfacing from the sea. Manifesting, as it does, the enormity of her effort, the book connects us to the medieval production of illuminated manuscripts, or perhaps even the art of petroglyphs.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club. Pictured: Jen Bervin, The Desert, Granary Books, 2008.
Many of these poems assert the primacy of visual over textual signification. Their authors know that all texts, all alphabets, are images, and, if sufficiently deranged from ready apprehension, they become just that: pictures on a page. To the degree it’s been rendered legible, language serves a subsidiary role. The subversion carries a certain sociopolitical import, but one subtle enough that it registers as both a challenge to conventional order and comedic. On the page of Johanna Drucker’s Stochastic Poetics (2012), words appear as if they were debris scattered across a field after a detonation—some broken, others elongated with additional letters and random capitals, others knotted in dense, unreadable clusters. Phonetics and an amiable wit animate the disruptions: “HHaPHaaaaZZaRRRD,” “BEginnningg,” “FORgEt CURVeD spacE.” Drucker composed this letterpress book at the type case, manipulating each character. Again, the physical presence of the author registers with immediacy and historical resonance.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club. Pictured, center top row: Augusto de Campos, Luxo Lixo broadside, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1966.
A 1966 broadside by Augusto de Campos, the founder of Brazil’s concrete poetry movement, offers a decidedly contrasting aesthetic while sharing the goal of confounding lucidity. With machinelike regularity, the Portuguese word for “luxury,” luxo, is printed hundreds of times to constitute large letters spelling out lixo, Portuguese for “trash.” But the word lixo is defamiliarized by a rigid geometrical rendering of all the letters. In the manner of a “magic eye” poster, whose image surfaces from an abstract pattern only after prolonged gazing, de Campos’s social critique is masked by what at first appears to be a meaningless spasm from a dot-matrix printer.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, installation view. Courtesy Grolier Club. Pictured: Raphael Rubinstein, A Geniza, Granary Books, 2015 (detail).
Although the exhibition engages complex questions about readability, the relation between the visual and textual, and even the political efficacy of avant-garde practice overall (can concrete poetry really expunge “western sophisticated hypocrisy”?), it most saliently celebrates the role of small presses and literary magazines that, on shoestring budgets, expand the boundaries of expression in ways commercial publishers never will. There exists a vibrant literary domain with deep roots and an avid population that isn’t visible in chain bookstores, Amazon recommendations, or the New York Times Book Review. None of these venues would call attention to, for instance, that cardboard box filled with paper scraps referencing Edmond Jabès, Uum Kalsoum, and the city of Cairo. Raphael Rubinstein’s A Geniza (2015), published by Clay’s Granary Books, exemplifies an exhilarating approach to writing, to publishing, quite absent from the mainstream scene. Distracted by bestseller lists and prestige prizes, we sometimes forget an elemental fact: a book, any page, is just a container filled with words, and that, simply as an object in the world, it can surprise and delight us.
Albert Mobilio is the author of four books of poetry: Same Faces (2020), Touch Wood (2011), Me with Animal Towering (2002), and The Geographics (1995). A book of fiction, Games and Stunts, appeared in 2016. A selection of his criticism, Reading Against Type, is forthcoming from MadHat Press.