Archivi tag: Jim Leftwich

aggiornamento alla ‘carta d’identità in link’

per una ricostruzione (sempre in fieri) dell’attività degli spazi
blogspot di materiali sperimentali – specie a partire dal 2005

ho appena aggiornato la “carta d’identità in link” con gli indirizzi tutt’ora attivi dei vari blog che su blogspot, a partire soprattutto dal 2005 (ma in alcuni casi anche da prima, pur se su altre piattaforme), ho inventato o semplicemente contribuito a strutturare e far vivere – e che hanno visto insieme a me un gruppo folto di autrici e autori pubblicare [o essere ospitati con] materiali asemici, verbovisivi, glitch, scritture sperimentali, video, audio, immagini e centinaia anzi migliaia di altre strane robe. (chiaramente quelli non citati in calce si trovano nella carta a cui accennavo).
ricordo qui solo alcuni nomi di collaboratori, ospiti, amici, redattori: Bill Allegrezza, Reed Altemus, Daniele Bellomi, Cara Benson, Gherardo Bortolotti, Anne Boyer, Alessandro Broggi, Roberto Cavallera, Riccardo Cavallo, Cecelia Chapman, David-Baptiste Chirot, Crashtest, Jeff Crouch (che devo soprattutto ringraziare per il grande lavoro di ristrutturazione/hosting di molti blog, dal 2015 in poi), Rachel Defay-Liautard, Alessandro De Francesco, Michelle Detorie, Bill DiMichele, Linh Dinh, Greg Evason, Raymond Farr, Peter Ganick, Susana Gardner, Tim Gaze, Angela Genusa, K. Lorraine Graham, Mariangela Guatteri, Patrick Gulke, Carrie Hunter, Andrea Inglese, Michael Jacobson, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Karri Kokko, Drew Kunz, Jim Leftwich, Jon Leon, Antonio Loreto, Michele Marinelli, Giulio Marzaioli, Manuel Micaletto, Sheila Murphy, Yu Nan, Ross Priddle, Lanny Quarles, Carmen Racovitza, Andrea Raos, Giorgia Romagnoli, Joe Ross, Eric K. Zepka _ E-doppelganger, Massimo Sannelli, Jennifer Scappettone, Ed Schenk, Spencer Selby, Matina L. Stamatakis, Harry K. Stammer, Miron Tee, Ton van ‘t Hof, Cecil Touchon, Lubomyr Tymkiv, Dirk Vekemans, Luca Venitucci, Elisabeth Workman, Michele Zaffarano, Luca Zanini.

Gli spazi:

blog di materiali asemici su blogspot:
https://asemicnet.blogspot.com || https://asemic-net.blogspot.com

blog di materiali sperimentali, testuali e verbovisivi, su blogspot:
https://nothingandinsight.blogspot.com || https://exp–net.blogspot.com || https://eexxiitt.blogspot.com || https://eeexxxiiittt.blogspot.com || https://the-flux-i-share.blogspot.com || https://transcriptionesredux.blogspot.com || https://wee-image.blogspot.com || https://ex-ix-tere.blogspot.com

archivi su blogspot:
vispostock (2006-2007) https://vispostock.blogspot.com/
installance (2010-2015) https://installance.blogspot.com/

du-champ
[events from the field of the avant- / événements du champ de l’avant- / eventi dal campo dell’avan-]
(dal 2010 il maggior aggregatore di spazi sperimentali in rete):
https://du-champ.blogspot.com/

we all miss you, jim

.

an autobiographical text by jim leftwich (shared online by john m. bennett)

Here’s an excerpt from Jim Leftwich’s autbiographical afterword to his latest book, PIT SWAN & ORBATE WRITING

Remember What You Can

 
Jim Leftwich

 
In the fourth grade I was given an aptitude test which determined (among many other things, I would assume) that I had absolutely no aptitude for music. That’s the only thing I remember being told about the test. That would have been 1966 or 67. It was beginning in those days to sound — and look — like music might be a significant alternative to the war in Vietnam. The counterculture was saying no to the draft, and rock n roll music was spreading that message to all corners of the country. Music was beginning to tell young males like myself that another world was possible. It wasn’t the job of a fourth grade teacher in Amherst County, Virginia to encourage that way of thinking.
I went away to college, dropped out after four years, and went off rambling around the country. Every now and then I would drop in on my parents. My mother would be at the dining room table, listening to the radio. We would drink a few beers, tell each other some stories. She said, you are volatile, do you know that? I said no, not really. Yeah, sure. I guess I know. Maybe it was only a matter of the multitudes of selves. Some of which were surprises. She said, Please Come to Boston, do you know that song? It reminds me of you. I said, I don’t know. Maybe. It was the seventies. In matters both personal and political, I had no idea of what was coming. She said, Against the Wind, too, reminds me of you. I said, well. Ok. If you think so.
The eighties was a poisonous decade, acid rain falling on a nuclear time bomb, death squads funded by designer drugs. Killing us again and again. Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends.
It’s New Year’s Eve now, 2024. Sue and I are camped beside the Colorado River, on the Arizona / California border. I’m not sure I would have made it through the eighties if Sue and I hadn’t met.
There isn’t much wind here, just enough for us to notice it, barely moving through the mesquite trees. There is always everything to be new, and nothing to ever be anywhere other than the present.
I’m a little worried about the coming year. I’ve been worried about the coming year for as long as I can remember.

asemics: jim, again

the (re)birth (in the English language) and the broad diffusion and success of the term “asemic” and the practice of asemic writing owe a lot to the relentless activity of the artist and poet and verbo-visual writer Jim Leftwich.
he passed away but will NEVER be forgotten.

la (ri)nascita (in lingua inglese) e l’ampia diffusione e successo del termine “asemic” e della pratica della scrittura asemica devono molto all’instancabile attività dell’artista, poeta e autore verbovisivo Jim Leftwich.
è scomparso ma non verrà MAI dimenticato.

https://scriptjr.nl/four-questions-about-asemic-writing-05-jim-leftwich/

https://scriptjr.nl/asemic-pansemic-m-g-plus-why-we-continue-using-the-term-asemic-writing-even-though-there-is-no-such-thing-j-l/

https://scriptjr.nl/ongoing-notes-on-asemic-writing-jim-leftwich-2015/

https://jimleftwichongoingresearch.blogspot.com/2023/04/asemic-writing-definitions-contexts.html?m=1

jim leftwich passed away

the bad news make me absolutely astonished, sad. my/our friend Jim Leftwich passed away. he had an heart attack. I’m still speechless and in shock.

as soon as I read the news, my first reaction was disbelief. but it was soon confirmed.

for more than twenty years Jim has been a great interlocutor for me, an inexhaustible source of critical dialogue, on experimental writing and verbo-visual art, but also on all the political questions that experimentation entails.

Jim was also a slowforward editor, a tireless promoter of other people’s work, writings, and connections. not to mention his primary role in the spreading of the practice of asemic writing.

I miss him so much.

this passing, with the passing of Peter Ganick, is a truly major loss for the literary community as a whole, and for me as a friend. I never met him in person, despite the thousand messages we exchanged, and I’ll never meet him anymore.

dip 042, jim leftwich

un attacco di cuore: Jim Leftwich è scomparso. assolutamente, ma proprio del tutto, inconcepibile. è stato così fitto il dialogo che non mi riesce ancora di credere a questa cosa

it does not speak / jim leftwich. 2025

‘With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret.” — from Wikipedia

Why would this be called asemic?

In the late 1990s, Tim Gaze and I were not looking for another way of saying “reader response.”

Asemic Writing was not supposed to be an “anything goes” opportunity.

The word “polysemous’ works perfectly well for the Wikipedia statement. We knew the word in 1997, and would have used it if it had been appropriate.

Asemic is not meant to give you and me and our 39 thousand friends a chance at every imaginable meaning, an experience wherein anything we want is as good as anything else.

Asemic should return no meanings. We should stare at it, and it should stare back in silence.

The asemic does not speak. It does not give anyone anything that they want.

01.20.2025

jim leftwich: “improvisations against propaganda” (moriapoetry, locofo chaps series)

chapbook: http://moriapoetry.com/leftwichechap.pdf

the other chaps: http://moriapoetry.com/locofo.html

Jim Leftwich, sans merci, 2015

*

Copyright © Jim Leftwich
Locofo Chaps is an imprint of Moria Books.
More information can be found at http://www.moriapoetry.com.
Locofo Chaps is dedicated to publishing politically-oriented poetry.
Chicago, USA, 2017

chorus 654 / jim leftwich. 2025

food bleeds listening
eddies loud and
from intimate abate
twin clouds
of rhombus Fred are
in a mood to plead

‘utsanga’ n.41 è in rete: numero speciale per i dieci anni della rivista

Utsanga 2014-2024, issue 41!
www.utsanga.it

Online il numero per i dieci anni di utsanga, con:

Francesco Aprile, Cristiano Caggiula, Egidio Marullo, Ruggero Maggi, Anna Guillot, Anna Serra, Patrice Cazelles, Michael Betancourt, Silvio De Gracia, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Almandrade Andrade, Christoph Benjamin Schulz, Alain Arias-Misson, Giovanni Fontana, Carla Bertola, Alberto Vitacchio, Fernando Aguiar, Federico Federici, Chiara Mulas, Serge Pey, Nico Vassilakis, Alessandro De Francesco, Andrea Paoli, Julien Blaine, Mariangela Guatteri, Tim Gaze, Paola Silvia Dolci, Georges Lemaire, Jean-François Bory, Marco Mazzi, Carl Heyward, Massimo Nota, Diego Rios, Alfonso Lentini, Fabio Orecchini, Ankie Van Dijk, Eugenio Lucrezi, John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich, Olchar E Lindsann, Volodymyr Bilyk, Bunus Ioan, Stacey Allam, Richard Kostelanetz, Stephen Nelson, Cecelia Chapman, Dawn Nelson Wardrope, Jasper Glen, Francis Van Maele, Antic Ham, Beppe Piano, Annalisa Retico, Tchello D’Barros, Texas Fontanella, Oronzo Liuzzi, Mario Josè Cervantes

oggi, su ‘poème de terre’, la prima parte di un testo sulle scritture installative

Grazie a Fabrizio Pelli, che ripubblica sul suo blog Poème de Terre un testo, Scritture installative, che il sito (non più online) alfabeta2 aveva ospitato nel marzo 2015. La prima parte del saggio è al link https://poemedeterre.wordpress.com/2024/09/16/gioco-e-radar-09-scritture-installative-prima-parte/

 

three works / jim leftwich. 2006

click to enlarge

https://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/albums/72157594566538540/with/101060526

_

 

abstract / jim leftwich. 2024

To Be Continued should be the title of every essay I write — that, or As I Was Saying. I have been reading and rereading Michaux’s Ideograms in China for the past three days, and today I have been using it for some writing, not exactly writing about it, but using some of his thinking to expand and/or condense some of my own.
What about abstraction?
What about communication?
What about distance and detachment?
What about elite pretensions to an aristocracy of superior beings?
What about secret codes?
What about self-protection and vulnerability on the front lines or behind the lines or in one way or another being perceived as or in reality being out of line?
What about complexity and contradictions?
What about change and growth and the hobgoblins of consistency?

To abstract, writes Michaux, means to free oneself, to come disentangled.

Like nature, writes Michaux, the Chinese language does not draw any conclusions of its own, but lets itself be read.

Here we are: digging ourselves deeper and deeper into this bottomless pit. He is Michaux and I am Leftwich, we can’t be far from the idea of asemic writing, of desemantized writing, of writing against itself.

Michaux again: Characters open onto several directions at once.

And again: What might have happened if some Western language had had even a fraction of the calligraphic possibilities as Chinese? The baroque that would have ensued, along with the happenstance discoveries of individualists, all the rarities and peculiarities, the eccentricities of every kind.

And so, yes, maybe that is where we are, now that over twenty thousand people are members of the Facebook Asemic Writing Club, maybe we have a foundation on which to display all the eccentricities, peculiarities and rarities of a Post-Asemic Expressionistic Post-Writing, where every mark contains multitudes, all of which invites as many readings as there are readers, the resulting chaos and cacophony tuning a waking consciousness to the coming catastrophes of capital and climate.

Maybe the collapse of semantic certainly is just what the doctor ordered.

Maybe the Post-Asemic comes as a homeopathic cure for what ails us.

Remember: to abstract is to become disentangled, which is a kind of liberation.

07.25.2024
Peaks of Otter Campground

water / jim leftwich. 2024

If you’re going to write something, you have to start somewhere. That is the only absolute rule of writing.
There are of course countless unwritten rules of writing, but for my part, for now, I will let them remain unwritten and unread.

Last night, arcing no acing (are not barking, darkening, harken the lark on the mark, the ache, the ace of faces, faceless to embark, toe the plank, lanky toner, near to never, a feathery fever, leveraged and ethereal, on the verge of the real, no parking, pork for the king, baroque marketing, the dark harps of lard, maps of lard and dustmops) (you are still here and it is still now) against the darkness (neither pacing nor racing, tracing ahead, facing, four words before me, electricity in meat, the earliest metaphor for spirit spiritus the breath is lightning jumping and flashing in the night, thinking is the default, bent above an open book, unlikely actually to ever encounter a babbling brook, all of us are all-stars in the rookie league, some of us for many years running, which is not necessarily a negative thing at all, dust stands a zen bush burning two birds in the hand swallowed by our ocean dancing like stones on the desert wind the rain falls up and the trees grow down, no moon returns reflected in an empty water pail, neither adding nor padding, mutually aiding, trading, wading slowly, waist-deep, sleep with one foot open in the eye of the grave), I was sitting at our campsite reading the Gustaf Sobin translation of Henri Michaux’s Ideograms in China.

“water — the image itself of detachment, bound to nothing and ready, at every instant, to continue its course”

Leaves of the groundcover eaten along the edges by rabbits and deer.

07.25.2024
Mills Gap overlook