Visual Poetry for Women • by Dani Spinosa • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters       This is not a manifesto urging us to remedy the persistent gender gap in visual poetics. I’ve done that work already. And other, more thorough historians have done that work better. Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre’s Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979 is illuminating for the gaps it reveals even in my knowledge. Other writers like Amanda Earl and Jessica Smith have done brilliant work collecting and highlighting more recent work by women and gender non-conforming poets and language artists. That work is important. It serves to remedy several decades of neglect. But I arrive here with a hunger for overwriting, a desire to stop revision, and present instead this voice louder than the story that’s already been told, that’s still telling. I want to carve several new names into the concrete. Welcome, ladies. Now we’re writing like we own the place.    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Dani Spinosa {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]