What inspired you to create the blog?

The Asemic Front Project (documented on the Asemic Front & Asemic Front 2 blogs) is actually an Eternal Network (international mail art) project. The mail art network has been a major conduit for concrete poetry, vispo, asemics, haptics, object poetry for a half-century. Asemic Front is a project meant to (1) encourage correspondence artists working in these poetic genres associated with the historic avant garde and the postavant and (2) to encourage collaboration, mostly because I wanted to challenge myself in terms of collabing. I've been a professional writer, reviewer as well as a literary theorist so AF2 benefits (lol) from my reviews, which are not objective or - in some cases - even parody. .

Circa 2012, I worked with South African artist Cheryl Penn on an international collaborative book project called Asemics 16. This was an extraordinary experience that compelled me to keep working in this area. Especially the Asemic Front 2 blog has attracted many asemic writers and visual poets who are not involved in mail art.. Asemic Writing is very contentious right now; AF2 goes right to folks like Jim Leftwich (who coined the term "asemic" with Tim Gaze} and gets into the gritty theory issues. This, unfortunately, has created some confusion. Mail art is supportive, anti-hierarchical, non-judgemental, a thing with as much to do with friendship as art.

What is the one thing you would like readers to take away from the blog?

So I guess you get these people from the creative writing programs (did they shut those down?) who think AF2 is some kind of academic journal or they got the idea AF2 is a career notch in someone's huge plastic belt. I'm not a "reviewer" and draw mostly from mail art received via snail mail & an asemic writing group I lead. So far we've published one book in the Asemic Front Series: A collab by me and Kristine Snodgrass. I am not "reading" manuscripts. Asemic Front is something I do with friends (& enemies). Asemic Front, for example, does not take submissions. So, basically, I review things I want to review and pretty much know my review list.