Episode 5: Once You Know How to Read, You Can't Unread (Ragnhildur Jóhanns)

Marvin Sackner, one of the founders of the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, explains how he and his wife became collectors of visual poetry and other works that merge image with text, how they built their renowned collection, and where he donated their assemblage of publications, artworks, and personal papers related to this field.

Nico Vassilakis, a well known visual poet now living in the Bronx, talks about his vispoetic life, his deep connection to alphabets and the characters therein, and wonders, as he always does, whether we have made it to the historical end of visual poetry. The episode includes a sound poetry performance of part of Öyvind Fahlström’s “Nyarsklockorna” by Nico and the host Geof Huth. We end the episode, after its apparent close, with an improvisational sound poem we call “Juggadugga.”

Donato Mancini, visual poet and artist, sits down for a wide-ranging talk about visual and concrete poetry, the great bpNichol, the octothorpe, Titus Andronicus, climate change, and how a typewriter poem cannot ever be typed perfectly.

Ragnhildur Jóhanns, a visual artist and visual poet based in Reykjavík, Iceland, talks to us about her visual poetry, which takes the forms of collages, object, paintings, and more. Working in Icelandic and English, her work interrogates the meaning and meaninglessness of language while always addressing the inherent joy of the visually beautiful.

Rosaire Appel, an active visual poet who works in radical asemic forms, discusses how she changed from being a painter to a photographer to a novelist and then a visual poet. She discusses her inspirations along the way and explains her various bookmaking practices.

My good friend and pensioner, the Finnish poet Karri Kokko, comes to visit me in Oslo and sits down to talk about how he became a visual poet, about his practice as a visual poet, and a little bit about our visual poetry adventures in Europe over the years.

Visual poet Ottar Ormstad of Oslo, Norway, tells me the story of how he started as a concrete poet at the end of the concrete period only to returns decades later with a great concrete esthetic that led him to create concrete videopoems of great reserved beauty. He also explains a little about his love of yellow and the letter y.

The well known Hungarian conceptual and visual poet Márton Koppány tells the story of how he became a visual poet, explains how he came to have the most Hungarian of surnames, why he makes the poetry he does, and spends much time telling jokes and laughing, as the two of us drink glasses of palinka and our wives listen amusedly to us talk.