Co-editor of The Last Vispo, Nico Vassilakis, addresses the fact the women of visual poetry have been ignored in previous vispo collections on The Volta.
"It's true, the genre of visual poetry has primarily been a sausage fest. The concrete poetry anthologies of the 1960s, it seems, ignored women completely even though one of its renowned editors, Mary Solt, was female. Much has changed since then, but clearly not enough to promote the idea that visual poets can be either male or female. For decades, it's been a global boys club in need of being cracked open and invaded by women.
Enter The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008, which includes more women than ever published in an international collection of visual poetry…Since finishing the book we have become pleasantly, if not unfortunately aware of more active or newly active female visual poets. There's no easy fix to what fifty plus years of neglect has done. More publishing, more exposure of visual poets would help, would alleviate this issue…"
Evening Will Come issue #32 (that you can read online) features female poets/vispoets responding to The Last Vispo, articles and more.