This is the first of what I hope will be several projects on vispo.com involving the work of Joe Keppler. We've been friends for twenty years. Reading his work, for me, is full of the same sense of discovery and excitement you feel when you talk with him. I've never met anyone else as acute as he is when you look at art together. And that critical scope and fresh perceptivity is part of how he greets life as well as art.

Joe publishes Poets.Painters.Composers.Critics.Sculptors.Slaves. from Seattle. He has been publishing this poly-artistic project since the 80's. Some issues are printed. Others are in sound, sculpture, posters, and other media. The visual poems published on vispo.com are by Joe from a 2007 issue called "the first remainder series" which also included work by fifteen other artists. Of the series, Joe says:

"In the spirit of St. Vincent de Paul’s, Goodwill’s, and Salvation Army’s thrift-store poetics and aesthetics, Poets.Painters. Composers.Critics. Sculptors.Slaves. announces its first remainder series.

The basic idea is to use up our remainder of paper stock for small editions of poetry and art. The paper stock for our first remainder series is in various weights and colors though all of it is letter size (8.5” x 11”, 216mm x 279mm). Printed work will be issued in numbered editions of 25 or less, 40% of which goes to the poet or artist. While they last, these ordinary prints will be available for $6 a copy, which doesn’t include postage and handling, or $7, which does, payable to Poets.Painters. Composers.Critics.Sculptors.Slaves. 10254 35th Avenue SW, Seattle, WA 98146 USA. Of course the artist is free to sign and price his or her portion differently.

Another of the project’s reasons for being has been to catch the differences between print and electronic media, and a working title for the project could have been, to paraphrase an important Walter Benjamin title, “The Work of Reproduction in an Age of Technological Art.”

Most of the electronic, pdf versions of the First Remainder Series are extant and available via email. Some actual, numbered prints are still obtainable from the artists or from Seattle’s Wessel & Lieberman Books."

Of his own work in this series, Joe says:

"We fold. That is, we crease. We crease & increase, six new folds for ppccss's first remainder series. Differences among arts and technologies make actual creases in the print editions and simulated creases in the pdf files. In either case folding, a philosophical, sculptural, genetic, and poker activity, unfolds a metaphoric, heterogeneous poetics. Also, here's an assembly simply entitled, "ODE." It consists of four corner brackets pasted to a stiff sheet with a small “o” printed on it. The numbered print edition has metal brackets and the pdf simulated brackets."

The 'folding' dimension of these pieces is typically interesting and humorous. The first remainder series with lots of folding. Which you'd like in a remainder series, surely. The whole thing is folding in a poetics of (graceful) collapse. That may rise with folding of a different sort.

But you don't need to know the fold motif to appreciate this little suite. COUPLET, for instance: a couplet is a pair of lines; Joe has them intersecting. Very simple. A totally minimal visual poem that relates the lterary and the visual. It's so visually simple it's startling.

TERZA RIMA alludes to a verse form where the stanza is three lines long and the first and third lines rhyme. And the second line rhymes with the first and third of the next terza rima stanza. Here again we have a visual correlative of a literary form. In Joe's piece, the first and third line are the same; and all three lines have shading that can either look bookish or be of shades of rhyme, those fields of linguistic energy.

Joe's work does not acquiesce to the typical page. It's different and unexpected. Fresh. Probing. Literary, visual, and spatial at once.

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