Snodgrass | Circling the start: an introduction

I chose the work of Dixie Denman Junius for the debut collection in the Anhinga Visual Poetry Series because I find her vibrant script work and glitches as she says, “at once radically meditative and vibrantly energetic” sprouting into a new frontier of visual poetry, asemics, and glitch. The works’ foundation is the artist’s calligraphy of the Enso symbol, a Japanese word-thought with spiritual roots. Circling the Start thrusts a movement that springs from calligraphy and script. The book moves both front to back and back to front — the development does not have to be linear or first page to last. This is the Circling.

Curating her images, I engage in a progression, diving into our considerations of definitions of this field. Perhaps Jim Leftwich’s pansemic — across meaning, all meaning — can be applied here. The process of developing the script across meaning through analog and digital obscurement seems apt or encountering the many meanings of a symbol. Ultimately, the inevitable question of “what is asemics” is unanswerable, until it isn’t.

The Enso becomes asemic and the asemic becomes glitch, and then the collection, and our collective minds as we meditate through writing and non-writing, transcend even the base definition of asemic: work that looks like a writing system without semantic meaning. Glitch is unconstrained in its curtain through chance. No glitch can ever

be recreated and is ultimately out of the practioners’ control. Still, the process of glitching is deeply personal. Symbol to non-symbol, image to symbolic. This is the Circling.

With this collection, the reader-viewer can process in a personal way and in a collective way. Dixie is one of the most prolific visual poets in our field — another woman carrying the weight of the new expanded field with power and love.

This is Circling the Start.