OO (Typewriter Poems)

Feminist visual poetry that rewrites avant garde poetic history.

OO: Typewriter Poems is a book of vispo (visual poetry) glosas (a Spanish poetic form that pays tribute to another poet by incorporating their lines) 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).

"This book is a real gift to vispo, its fans and present and future practitioners."—Helen Hajnoczky, A Teacozy Is a Sometimes

"Dani Spinosa’s OO pushes buttons, turns keys, and swipes, steals and homages all over poetry... Extravagant, interruptive, declarative and a real kick in the eyeballs."—derek beaulieu