How did you first come to visual poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
Dragged by Amanda Earl, Dona Mayoora and Kristine Snodgrass! No, really: those two great 2021 anthologies, Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions) and the WAAVe Global Gallery; Women Asemic Artists and Visual Poets ( Hysterical Books ) suddenly landed me in the midst of an international visual poetry expansion. I’d been making unexplained social media text/image drops for awhile–partly because the now retro-tech of the screen scroll asked for different shapes of making and reading. In those days I’d get interested in online groups who might occasionally kick me out for not doing x (some definition). But some people also proffered online calls that, as you say, resonated–Linda Parr’s Postcards for Perec project (mine a gluey mess called “Tongue Balconies”), Nicola Winborn’s handsewn series which asked us to mail to the UK 20 small pages in a specific size and color. Seeing a lot of text-based art and making things with Brazilian/US visual artist Cyriaco Lopes has been the best–we’ve videoed, wound ribbons, dropped classified “ads” in newspapers, threw word projections on dragged photos of waters, held interactive q and a’s, had solo shows and been in some great group shows, visited museums and galleries and readings. This has been a true and instigating pleasure in my work for 2 decades.
Other new visual poetry projects seem to happen just by hanging out with cross-arts people: I get interested in their strategies and tend to make things with them as a way to be friends, I think. So many have stretched and enriched my days. My next full length book W/ \ SH, is a collab with Amaranth Borsuk and will be published in Anhinga Press’ Visual Poetry series. The women who speak there are in 2 different dystopian worlds–one of fire and ash, one of water–they try all kinds of things to (maybe) reach each other. A recent, smaller example: Ankie Van Dyk and I each mailed a piece of trash from our walks in the Netherlands and in the US: we tasked ourselves to combine what came in the mail with a new piece of local discard : these now ongoing little sculptures are called twee wanderlingen.
In the biggest sense, seeing how things work with different kinds of makers historically and in the present in Canada and Brazil and Kerala and Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands (thank you, friends) has been a gift and a solace. That I could also co-start a low-residency grad program in Expanded Field writing in Florida, US at Stetson University that includes visual poetics (our 10th anniversary is coming up!) has been a palmtree-shaped balm. The students– so smart and adventurous (can you believe they’re called Hatters?) --keep me resolutely facing forward.
How does a visual poem begin?
Thanks, Malcolm–what a head-knocker. It never starts with me exactly but always something outside in the world. Most often I encounter an object and have a little ghost of response (to me an idea is also an object) + they just seem to want to lie down together. It’s a kind of magnetic attraction. For example, in April my husband and I heard then saw a crow kill another crow in our camphor tree. I ended up unrolling blue tape between crow-spots in the yard and talking about color-flagging parts of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. The crow carcass is treed both literally (5 months now) and forever this to say–no one could plan these conjoinings. Can’t force them, either–—sometimes the connections don’t take or they take awhile. Too bad there’s so much waiting in visual poetry: pure desire to make something on a particular day doesn’t work for me, and the closed system of using text to explain image or image to illustrate text just flattens both. And some things are already speaking to each other well and truly without me. Like most people, I read or look or watch someone else’s work then. Walk around. Wait for eyes and heads and hands or some other species extension to touch in a shared space.
Do you see your work as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
Interesting to consider…How do you see yours in this choice? I just sort of walk sometimes literally through what presents itself so maybe more the first (the second doesn’t seem wrong, though!). For example, the crows in the yard I mentioned foretold themselves in a previous piece called Reading Barthes + the Land Grab (forthcoming in UTSANGA) in which gravestones of a Crow family in our local cemetery now seem to have been folded into the chronologically later corvid murder. More mundanely, how great to suddenly clean a room and let out postcards Cyriaco and I printed in 2013 to become vest, shirt and pants with my weaving and paper artist sister Paula Damm, who happened to be visiting. We had a great time (though I kept sticking myself) sewing the cards together for a project we call OOH (Out of Home) Clothes. All this to say that as a word person whose MO is lyric association, it feels like my work’s always about something else and ready to be something else. So I'm mostly happy if some hanging threads catch later. It would be interesting to think about the brain wiring part of this and well as the making part, but maybe the through line is just that there’s a basic associative move I seem to repeat.
The mystery that inevitably and magnetically draws me in with this move has its parallel in a few IRL things: sitting for a painter, poet TW realizes she can see her shadow through the canvas until, as the days fill with the painter’s unseen gestures, she bit by bit disappears. One of my young children, to whom I was trying to sell reading, saying but then I won’t be able to imagine what the words mean. Another of my kids held up to a painting of a child in a corner saying when can I get out. That would be enough for 3 lifetimes but just recently a 12 year old’s deadpan ask: so why did you give me the illusion of choice?
How do you see your writing and visual poetry in conversation, if at all?
To me all my work–even those poems built with words that go to the right side of the page–are versions of visual poems. The tomb poems you so kindly published try to step down narrowly into something else, for example. I now think I’m always writing into a shape, this is to say—a trad poetic form is one kind of shape, the page is another, the hanging work is another, the sideways pulling powerpoints are another, what I arrange in my mom’s empty mirror and take an I-phone photo of at 6 am is another. Everything matters/is matter and the words/ texts/ images are never only representative windows. Just this week Cyriaco told one of our excellent grad students that her videos’ images and words both speak and have ideas, and they are both texts. This way of thinking lights the forest. Practically and personally, though, I’m a poet of Narrow hands, as Dickinson would say–don’t draw, hardly sew, no graphic design skills. I’m not really apologizing. Style is a matter of our limitations, Mark Strand once said in a workshop, causing a replay-on-demand sigh of relief.
Maybe I’ll leave my version of the conversation you propose to the lover waiting impatiently at a Paris cafe table and the neighbor currently deflating a giant play castle on my central Florida corner. What the fields (that word’s so great–here’s to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta!) and history will say later about what happened between text/image and all the ways of making/reading we once practiced in this time and place will keep changing. I can just say that quietly ignoring some distinctions has helped me toward many happy surprises that weigh against sorrow. I know that seeing my book The Rape Kit take shape in Malayalam in Dona Mayoora’s poetic hands is a visual shock–all those hanging loops. Who wrote/drew this, exactly?
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I had a first child at 20 and a 4th at 35, so a lot has been chance plus choice plus biological realities. I had kids during all but one of my undergrad and grad years, for example (these stretched, as you can imagine). I read a lot of books while nursing. I was quietly infuriated when people used a kind of doubting praise to describe what to me was just the state of things. And like most people, I have a job; mine is interesting but like everyone’s, also demanding. So any time there’s a chance to sit with enough mental space, I either make work or look at something if my own making’s not on. These days 5-10 am is best: it’s 5:51 as I type this. Soon outside my window the green theater begins.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
So many good things and methods now so I switch around. I tend to look at work by people I admire and read around in the journals that feature them–Michigan Quarterly Review I picked up bc Vidhu Aggarwal was co-editing a section. What Shloka Shankar is editing I’ll take a look at bc she likes often- interesting short-shorts by an international crowd. Whatever CA Conrad recommends. Anything Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo Wilson and Laura Mullen talk about. UTSANGA bc there’s a good mix of poetry theory and experimental and multi-lingual work. Among new US mags I like Swing for its solid lit energy; among older ones I always look at Fence and Interim. The Kenyon Review recently bc I read an interesting interview with Orchid Tierney. I read a lot of touch the donkey these days and now talking about strawberries all of the time because somehow I was invited in and the company is good —rob mclennan even sends boxes of things I read and pass on. I follow Derek Beaulieu’s posts and Coach House Press and Siglio and Futurepoem and Wave Press and Anhinga. I read as many art books as poetry books.
Who are some of the artists you have engaged with lately that most excite you?
Today
it’s these: Emergers: Johnny Damm for appropriated
text-horror comics. Kenzie Allen for poetry and mapping. Monica Ong for the
word/text spinners and that first book. In the big art world: Idris
Khan's layered book-images and Roni Horn’s always interesting mixes. In gallery
world: a solo show of Mike Nelson that combined photos and architecture. Seeing
through Stone at UC Santa Cruz: a show that considers prisons and what
comes next. All video: Wael Shawky and his Cabinet Crusades series Lit
up: Jenny Holzer’s phrases anywhere. Most looked forward to: Kara
Walker’s disassembly and remake/ restaging of a decommissioned civil war
monument. Iconic 20th century space: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Apollo/war/
poetry garden, where Cyriaco Lopes and I spent 3 wonderful hours in
July (and almost forever, as we didn’t arrange a way back).
Terri Witek’s most recent books of poetry include her 2023 collection, Something’s Missing in This Museum (Anhinga Press) and 2 chapbooks: copies: I loved you in the hard old way (2024 Sigilist Press) and Down Water Street (2025 aboveground press). W/\ SH , a collaboration with Amaranth Borsuk, loops the eco-emergency as a crisis of rain and smoke between worlds and is forthcoming, as is a translation by Dona Mayoora of The Rape Kit into Malayalam. Witek’s work has been included in many anthologies, including 2 from 2021: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions ) and WAAVe Global Gallery: Women Asemic Artists and Visual Poets (Hysterical Books ) . Witek's individual and collaborative work has been featured in a wide variety of text venues, including Fence, The Colorado Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, Lana Turner, The New Republic, and UTSANGA .
With Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) Witek co-founded Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing; the duo also lead The Fernando Pessoa Game at the Disquiet International Literary Program each summer in Lisbon. Their two decades of collaborative text/image work as cyriacolopesterriwitek has been featured at ARCO in Madrid and in Seoul, Chania (Crete), Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Lisbon, Valencia, Spain and many other arts and literary venues. Collaborations with new media artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) use augmented reality technology and have been shown in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, Orlando and Miami. Recent work with weaver Paula Damm combines text/textile and has been shown in St Augustine, FL and Dresden, Germany.
Witek holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida and is the recipient of both the McInery Award and the John Hague Award for teaching. terriwitek.com