The Daily Glance: bruno neiva's averbaldraftsone&otherstories

Bruno neiva's averbaldraftsone&otherstories is a vispo collection.  Many of the pieces seems to be photos of found work collages--quite a number with cardboard; however, the works in the collection vary significantly.  Not many words appear that are recognizable, though fragments with numbers and letters appear in several languages.  I'm fascinated by the pieces that use Portuguese, for the collection reminds me of the work of some great Brazilian concrete poets (to my mind, the Brazilians were the high masters of 20th century concrete poetry).  The found quality of many of the pieces give the work an added poignancy, for the poet has either literally recycled material into poetry or recognized the poetic in the surrounding spaces.  Even more, poetic questions are heightened in the book because there are so few words.  Do these pieces need to be labeled as poetry?  Is Vispo enough or are they straight visual art?  Is it up to the artist/poet to decide?

Each piece could be the focus of an interpretative essay.  One of my favorites, "etiquette 1," contains many of the elements of the other pieces.  One, it looks like it is a scrap pieces of paper with some brown paint on it.  Two,  the brown is covered with black marks.  Three of the black marks make circles.  Are these circles Os?  Are they just the circles accidentally marked on paper?  There is also a squarish C which could be read as a letter or just a mark.  Three, no words appear on the paper, but in the context, it seems very much like visual poetry because of the letter like pieces.  Four, while there is an apparent authorial presence, the personal nature of that presence is absent.  I can read into it to say that this person reads the world visually and textually, but really the collection seems less about the personal than about how humans read things (and I mean things) poetically.