OO: Typewriter Poems

by Dani Spinosa

Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. OO: TYPEWRITER POEMS is a book of vispo glosas designed to begin to dismantle the masculinist legacy of avant-garde visual poetics. Avant-garde visual poetics has long been interested in a vanguardism designed to push the genre further using technological advances, and hidden in this vanguardism is a deeply communal, deeply feminist poetics of derivation, homage, and love. OO takes up this communal poetics. The visual poems in this collection merge analog technology (the typewriter) with digital alteration designed to look back, not forward. At once paying homage to the long history of visual poetics and critiquing the progressivist and masculinist ideals that continue to inform the genre, the poems in OO quote uncited lines from visual and concrete poems by some of the major figures of visual poetics (bpNichol, John Riddell, Bob Cobbing) as well as several under-read and understudied female visual poets (Cia Rinne, Mirella Bentivoglio, Paula Claire).

"WTF does Dani Spinosa think she is doing copying all these (mostly) male poets? Lock up your typewriters! Hide your anthologies of classic visual poetry! Protect yourself and the literary tradition from the stealth interventions of Spinosa, who is (mis)appropriating works by every conceivable author of graphically scored verse in the name of some kind of femmeship that involves conversations with the dead as well as the living. The former are silent on the matter and the former? We shall see. Rarely has mimicry been used to such high-level hermeneutic ends."--Johanna Drucker

"Not only an excellent, well-researched overview of the history and tradition of typewritten visual poetry, but also--what a sly female response to it!"--Petra Schulze-Wollgast

"Dani Spinosa's OO pushes buttons, turns keys, and swipes, steals and homages all over poetry. Every poem demands you LOOK AGAIN! and see where voices slip between the keystrokes. Extravagant, interruptive, declarative and a real kick in the eyeballs."--derek beaulieu

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem in OO: Typewriter Poems navigates the tension between tribute and fraught, sometimes engages with the work of the named creator, sometimes claims it as holding space for what dare not be said. Perhaps these works could be considered a response to and a breaking away from linear perspectives, the troubled histories of artists and typing over being a means to uncover, cover and discover, “just to square the circle.” The combination of manual and digital techniques is a cheeky response to absolutism and binaries. I love this book. Now let’s see more visual poetry published by Canadian publishers and more by women please…

I will be interviewing Dani soon for the Small Machine Talks. Stay tuned!

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really the type of poetry book that you love to own because you just know you will be returning to it again and again. There were many times during my read that I had to stop with mouth agape in awe of what Dani Spinosa has done.

[Melia Tessel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pre slay poetry book. Love the visual poetry of it all.