by Koss
These asemic pieces are from a growing body of work that occasionally coincides with written work, but more often arises when written/spoken language fails. It’s mostly a separate process, another kind of expression existing outside of signs and symbols. Asemic work might be pre-language or might be post language, but it possesses an idiosyncratic, subjective meaning unlike shared written language. For me, this does not make it more universal, but it readily offers itself to personal interpretation.
While many of these are on paper, I use a wide range of mediums and supports as they are very much about a visual journey, one that might assemble itself into a cohesive body of work or not. They each have their own internal logic and life. Most of them start out as traditional media but go through some digitizing, minor or severe. These two are close to the originals.
I’ve also been doing Wuthering Heights visual erasures for several years with content ranging from the political to more personal works about the loss of a person who happened to love this book (and also had made some work using pages from the book). I don’t restrict myself to a specific theme as each piece is a reaction to the text before me—but whether they are more anecdotal or more about a larger social/political commentary, the text provides a springboard for the creative process. They are meditations of a sort, and I started them while in deep grief and frequently come back to Wuthering Heights as a source of creative inspiration.
The visual erasures lend themselves to a kind of poetic inlet to the liminal space between words and text, a very different process from standalone writing, although that can also be visual, although not literally. Thus, calling them visual poems is very apt naming.
Koss is a queer artist, writer, and web designer with work in over 220 publications including Sage Cigarettes, Beaver Mag, Anti-Heroin Chic, diode poetry, Michigan Quarterly, Cincinnati Review (miCro), Mom Egg Review, Westchester Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, San Pedro River Review, and many others. They have work forthcoming in Petrichor Mag, Prelude, Cutbow Quarterly, diode poetry, and Permafrost, and have received BotN and Pushcart nominations for art, poetry, CNF and fiction — plus had work in Best Small Fictions 2020. Find links to their work at koss-works.com or catch them on Twitter: @Koss51209969, Instagram: @koss_singular, or Blue Sky: @koss-works.bsky.social.
