How did you first come to visual poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
For many years, I was involved in the mail art world, which is a wonderful hybrid of language and art, so that was probably my first “official” visual poetry.
I’ve always done a lot of collage. My ongoing series of found
poems began in about 2010, when I was browsing through magazines for collage images.
I began to notice places where, because of the quirks of page design, words
stacked up to create accidental new meaning. I loved the surprise of this
unintended meaning and began collecting these phrases, each roughly the
equivalent of a poetic line. Eventually they started speaking to one another
and becoming visual poems.
Writing any poem, well, writing anything, involves a certain amount of serendipity – finding the right word and putting it next to another word so the whole is greater…etc. It’s the surprise, the serendipity, the unexpectedness of the process that keeps pulling me back to visual poetry. And the way I seem to find words and lines that reflect what’s on my mind at that moment, when I can see them hidden in the text, though they might not be visible at some other time. Sometimes I think, oh I’ll do something else, but then I find another accidental line and think, nope, have to do something with this first.
How does a poem begin?
I spend quite a lot of time at my work table almost every
day. I look through magazines for found lines (they come from a community share
bin at the local library), tear them out, and add them to my collection. Often,
I won’t find anything. But when I find a phrase that makes me recall related
lines I’ve already stashed away, I’ll search for those lines and see if they
will talk with each other. Sometimes it works; sometimes it only works part
way. I have a lot of unfinished found poems on my desk just waiting for the words
that will stitch the piece together.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
Well, it’s both. I’ve done nearly 2700 of these found poems,
so I guess that qualifies as an extended project. They are each meant to stand
alone, but there are many recurring themes – light, memory, love, nature, human
nature, etc. – so while the poems don’t necessarily have a narrative arc, they
do hang together in thematic groupings. And a book. Maybe. Sometime. I hope.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
Again, the answer is both. I do my most creative word-work in the morning, before email, before phone, before news, before paying work, when my mind is not cluttered up with the world. I have a two-pronged morning practice: make a found poem and write a short conventional-form poem. Which comes first is variable. At the same time, I am a freelance copy writer and sometimes the deadlines or the real world crowd in, so there are days when I don’t do one or the other or either.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
In no particular order: Diagram, One Sentence Poems, Orion (not exactly a literary journal, but very literary), Geist, Writers Chronicle, Otoliths, Atlas & Alice, Bracken, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Psaltery & Lyre, The Indianapolis Review, and of course talking about strawberries all of the time!
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I tend to be inspired by poets who do a great deal with fairly unembellished language. Some of my recent favorites are Ellen Bass, T. Clear, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Saeed Jones, Erika Meitner, Jed Myers, Mark Doty, Claudia Castro Luna, Peter Pereira, Nancy Pagh, Spencer Reece, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong.
For visual poetry, I love the expansive creativity of Karen
Green, Joanna Thomas, Mary Ruefle, (the late, lamented) Tom Phillips, Cinzia
Farina, Jean LeBlanc, Angela Caporaso, Jen Bervin, Abhaya Thomas,
Astra
Papachristodoulou, and Dawn Kramlich, among many, many others.
An artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. More than 650 of her visual poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide, including Atlas & Alice, Diagram, Explorations in Media Ecology, Full Bleed, The Indianapolis Review, and Otoliths. Her visual poems were featured in a solo exhibit, orchestrated light, at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, in May 2022, and displayed at the Skagit River Poetry Festival in October 2022, and in The Cutting Edge: Art of Collage in Asheville, North Carolina, in April 2023.
Photo credit: Dean Davis.
A selection of her work appeared in the third and eighth issues.