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The original call for work for our journal Area Sneaks sought “to touch the live wire where language and visual art meet.” The very real divide between poetry and visual art, as we saw it in 2007, is where we discovered this metaphorical live wire. The figure of the area-sneak, a term borrowed from Charles Dickens, proved to be our principle guide. It is a slang term derived from the “literature of roguery” or what scholar Daniel Tiffany calls “infidel culture,” a nineteenth-century literary community “shaped in part by radical politics, but also by a revolution in the media,” whereby “activities such as theft, pimping, rape, blackmail, and pornography … and popular politics intersected with organized crime.”[1] The term “area-sneak” in particular refers to a class of small-time thieves or pickpockets who were known to cross boundaries, or the area-gates of working houses, to commit their crimes. And so we began each issue with one of two epigraphs: “From the swell mob, we diverge to the kindred topics of cracksmen, fences, public-house dancers, area-sneaks, designing young people who go out ‘gonophing’ and other ‘schools’”; and “Benevolent area-sneaks get lost in the kitchens and are found to impede the circulation of the knife-cleaning machine.” We found the term well-suited, and perhaps a little bit perverse, for a magazine that hoped to cross its own boundaries, to traverse the disciplines of poetry and visual art, and to encourage the trespassing of these areas.

When we first conceived of this journal, there were few publications in the United States that attempted to provide a space for both poets and artists to present their work or to engage in conversation. We were puzzled as to why this should be. Throughout the twentieth century artists and writers had forged a very close relationship. The avant-garde is full of obvious examples, from Futurism to Wallace Berman’s Semina Culture to Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayers’s mimeographed journal 0 to 9. As poet Caroline Bergvall notes, “The array of historic art shows, notably around Concrete, Dada, and Futurist movements or those from more recent Environmental or Concept Arts, where the strict line between textual and visual exploration blissfully dissipates are [an] important linkage between artistic modalities.”[2] Our intention with Area Sneaks was to place various media and materials into dialogue: artist projects, poetry, historical papers, speculative essays on art and language, poetics statements, imaginative theses, Conceptual writing, photographic essays, performance documents, interviews, architectural critiques, and film analyses all kept uneasy company within the journal’s pages. 

In 2009, Bergvall attended an event at the Serpentine Gallery in London curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist called The Poetry Marathon, in which more than fifty poets and artists were slated to take part. But she found her experience somewhat troubling. “Although a number of the chosen artists are known for dealing with writing and language pertinently and intrinsically as part of their artwork,” she wrote, “it was something of a disappointment to see so many of them react with undisguised anxiety at that same word, ‘poetry.’ Otherwise lucid, articulate artists found themselves in the throes of open self loathing, ‘I don’t know poetry,’ ‘I don’t know what to read,’ choosing to calm the audience by reading from known values such as Eliot, Ted Hughes, Lorca, and Celan, rather than tracing their own engagement with writing as part of the event. Here, poetry itself was treated as a historical, in the sense of acquired, decorative, rather than productive, mode of functioning.”[3]

She goes on to note, “the event confirmed that the debates between art and poetry remain superficial,” or seem to be, and that “the cultural status quo is still very much, and in an often unexamined way, one of irreconcilable historic and formal differences between the literary and visual arts.” And even more provocatively: “the pink elephant in this open-air enclosure … is language itself.”[4] The same year, Tim Griffin, then the editor-in-chief of Artforum, described poetry as “seeming to the outside world little more than an archaic discipline, around which institutions were inevitably built in order to preserve its character and form.”[5]

If the divide between poetry and the visual arts seemed insurmountable in 2009, the intervening years have proven that, as Quinn Latimer noted in a special 2014 issue of Frieze devoted to poetry, “contemporary art is hungry and omnivorous; it devours and assimilates everything.”[6] Artist-run magazines such as Triple Canopy, Animal Shelter, The Happy Hypocrite, and Material have increasingly published poetry alongside art criticism and artist portfolios. Artists such as Karl Holmqvist and Sue Tompkins use poetry as their medium. And there has been increasing institutional interest in poetry as well. In 2014 Hans Ulrich Obrist, along with the LUMA Foundation, inaugurated 89plus and “Poetry will be made by all,” an exhibition at the LUMA Westbau exhibition space in Zurich, Switzerland, this time with artists and poets less anxious about language. In Los Angeles, the Poetic Research Bureau has begun an ongoing collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art on a series of performance and poetry events entitled Step and Repeat. And the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial included a poetry anthology called The Animated Reader edited by Brian Droitcour.

What changed in the past five or six years to facilitate such a rapprochement between poetry and the visual arts? We have our suspicions, but needless to say a full account would require more research and space than can be afforded in this short editorial note.[7] We hope that Area Sneaks,which has throughout remained a small, out-of-pocket, and irregularly published enterprise, is neither praised nor buried for providing an ongoing space for dialogue between poets and visual artists.

1. Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 176–79.

2. Caroline Bergvall, qtd. in Fred Sasaki, “Poetry Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London,” The Harriet Blog, Poetry Foundation, 2009.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Tim Griffin, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’: 32 Responses,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 3–124.

6. Quinn Latimer, “Art Hearts Poetry,” Frieze Magazine 164 (June–August 2014).

7. For informed accounts of the recent rapprochement between poetry and visual art, see Alan Gilbert, “Skinscreen: Art and Poetry at the New Museum’s Surround Audience Triennial,” BOMB Magazine 133 (Fall 2015) and Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, “Let’s Take a Very Fucking Poetry Lesson: Art’s Crush on Poetry,” X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly (Winter 2016).

Is this mental/intellectual/psychological focus within Conceptualism ableist? At the very least it seems to be one-dimensional: the body marks a caesura, and it is a product of Conceptualism’s relationship with the body and its positioning of itself in relation to it. There’s so much of a focus on the idea, on how the work strikes the mind — it’s rife with duality. Indeed, Conceptualist scion Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” can be surprisingly Cartesian at times. He writes: “Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions.”[1] This sentence bothers me because it implies that the mind is not somehow talking to the eye or emotions. If Conceptualism is about the idea, why couldn’t the idea be communicated through the body? What if the “machine” that drives the poem’s construction[2] is the body? What if the Oulipian constraint is the body (via disability, media, etc.)?

The manner in which I came to ask these questions is undeniably personal. On March 1, 2014, I suffered two small strokes in my thalamus and paramedial pons, respectively. I was lying in bed watching Bergman’s The Magician and noticed my lips were numb. I was having difficulty standing up. It was like I was drunk, but I’d been sober for a month. Then my partner said my right eyelid was drooping. We called an ambulance. I was taken to the hospital. They confirmed the strokes. About three days later, my neurologist gave me the prognosis: I probably would never drive again, I would have difficulty playing piano anywhere near like I had, my double vision would likely never be resolved, there was a ninety percent chance any one of the small strokes I had could have killed me, and neither did, so I was lucky to be alive at all. After seven days I was transferred to a rehab hospital. I relearned how to walk with a cane, regained some strength and coordination in my left arm and hand, and adjusted to using an eye patch because I had diplopia. After three weeks, I went home. I began aggressive outpatient therapy and by the summer no longer needed the cane or eye-patch and was taking piano lessons again, and my left hand and arm were roughly eighty to ninety percent back to normal (and remain so).

Needless to say, at first — due to the persistent dyskinesia of my left hand — typing was (and still is to a lesser but recognizable degree) a chore. My writing practice changed and became increasingly mediated or reliant upon found language or “plagiarism” (Apple + C/V was easier than typing). If I typed, I had to write in my head well in advance. My poetry became compressed, shorter, littered with the medical/physiological/therapeutic jargon I was inundated with in rehab, in the hospital, by nurses, physical and occupational therapists. Recording conversations or declamations by visitors surreptitiously via iPhone (or screencapping texts or Facebook messages to “plagiarize” later as well) became a primary mode of practice. I would often simply end up editing this found language or present it as is, merely adding line breaks (if that). As Conceptual as Goldsmith’s Fidget or formally radical as Kathy Acker’s work?[3] No. I was inspired by the work of poets like Larry Eigner (and his story), CAConrad and his soma(tics), and Bernadette Mayer’s approaches to biography (cf. The Helens of Troy, NY). The effects of these strokes — the headaches, diplopia, and dyskinesia — became constraints or platforms and frames for linguistic data. The Latinate jargon that flooded my ears became found-language poems, as did the fodder of the often absurd conversations with visitors, friends, and family.

So were these poems Conceptual? I think so. Goldsmith’s détournement of LeWitt’s “Paragraphs” might be suspect: “The physicality of the work can become a contradiction to its non-emotive intent. Rhyme, meter, texture, and enjambment only emphasize the physical aspects of the work. Anything that calls attention to and interests the reader in this physicality is a deterrent to our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive device.”[1] The materiality alluded to here is cleaved to “physicality” not just in the sense of words on a page but writing produced by a body, through a body. The body, then, is an idea for purposes of Conceptual writing. Its failures, slippages, malfunctions, and (dis)abilities become part of that materiality and the media we use to mollify our bodies’ fallibility. They are a constituent part of the words on the page and thus the idea (often, the poetic devices Goldsmith alludes to become ways of “scoring” my body/existence). It is important that we begin to think of the work of disabled poets (indeed, all poets) not only as the work of the minds of these writers, but also the work of their bodies — a détournement, as it were, of disability as constraint and instead, like the pistons in an interference engine, the frictive kinesis of a language-producing machine. We might think of this as a special branch of Conceptual writing: ’corpaphysics, or the science of embodied solutions; disability poetics reconfigured as materialist/embodied poetics.

1. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 15.

2. Kenneth Goldsmith, qtd. in Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), 32.

3. I qualify Acker’s placement here because her work is clearly embodied — in fact, she may be the exemplar of how Conceptualist writing can be embodied.

4. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing,” Electronic Poetry Center.