There are figures emerging in European poetry that are defined by their refusal to be limited to one form of poetic, who increasingly maintain their central concerns across sound, visual and linguistic mediums. Then within this group, there are those who are breaking new ground, following in the footsteps of poets as agile as Apollinaire and Mallarmé, whose explicit concerns shed new light on what we might consider poetry. Marco Giovenale is one of the most gifted of Europe’s new breed of poets, and a leading practitioner in the field of asemic writing. The remarkable art of asemic text is one of the most enlivening areas of contemporary poetry – a wordless, semantic, post-lingual poetry that utilises the figuration and trace of handwriting and automatic writing to create superimposed abstract poems and ideograms of visual poetry. Drawing influence from postmodern Chinese calligraphy, the work of Brion Gysin, Roland Barthes, Henri Michaux, Christian Dotremont and others, and the field of undecipherable semiotics, asemic poetry is a beautiful and fascinating practise, and Marco Giovenale is one of the most talented and seminal artists in the field. A prolific journalist, publisher and critic and a respected performer across Europe, we are proud to welcome Marco Giovenale as our first Italian poet into the Maintenant series.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-65-marco-giovenale/
Accompanying the interview are eight of Marco’s poems.
