bag texts

Jim Leftwich, A Very Brief History of My Bag Texts

I started making "bag texts" in the summer of 2002, on my way home from the Avant Writing Symposium at The Ohio State University in Columbus. I've been making them off and on ever since.

I started publishing online in May of 2005, and soon thereafter I began posting scans of the bag texts to my textimagepoem blogzine.

I made a few earlier this week (on January 19 and 20, 2022) and posted cropped photographs of them to my Visual Poems 2022 blogzine.

https://jimleftwichvisualpoems2022.blogspot.com/2022/01/anti-plastic-bag-texts-01202022.html

https://jimleftwichvisualpoems2022.blogspot.com/2022/01/pansemic-reading-training-manual.html

My essay on the subject was published in Poetry Makes Things Happen: Poems, essays, texts, afterwords, blurbs, notes… (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2020), page 112, as well as in the Angry Old Man online magazine, Issue #4 (2018).

A pdf with some of my bag texts was published by the Turkish magazine Budokuz in the fall of 2021.

Jim Leftwich, Bag Texts

According to Turtle Trax Glossary, an arribada is a mass nesting of turtles. Perhaps the most famous arribada was recorded on film by an amateur cameraman, Ing. Herrera, and shown by Dr. Henry Hildebrand in 1961. It recorded an estimated 40,000 Kemp’s ridley females nesting on a single day at one beach in Mexico, Rancho Nuevo. In So Excellent A Fishe, Archie Carr gives a marvelous account of the circumstances leading up to this event, and his elation at seeing the film for the first time. Rancho Nuevo remains the only known nesting beach for the Kemp’s ridley. According to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service Recovery Plan for the Kemp’s ridley, from 1978 to 1991, a single arribada rarely reached 200 females. The Kemp’s ridley is considered to be the marine turtle most at risk, and is listed as endangered.

I first saw the word “arribada” in an essay by Mike Basinski on the subject of visual poetry and experimental textual poetries functioning as scores for the performance of sound poetry.

“The film was short,” wrote Archie Carr in So Excellent a Fishe: A Natural History of Sea Turtles (1986). “It was shaky in places, faded with time, and rainy with scratches. But it was cinema of the year all the same, the picture of the decade. For me really, it was the movie of all time. For me, personally, as a searcher after ridleys, the film outdid everything from Birth of a Nation to Zorba the Greek. It made Andres Herrera in my mind a cinematographer far finer than Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock or Walt Disney could ever aspire to be. At the Cannes Festival the film might not receive great acclaim, although it might. To any zoologist, however, especially to a turtle zoologist and most specifically to me, the film was simply shattering. It is still hard for me to understand the apathy of a world in which such a movie can be so little celebrated.”

I think I first saw the Basinski essay in the mid-90s. It may have been in the “technique” volume of O.blek 12 (1993). I don’t remember.

No matter when I first encountered the word, I remembered it in the summer of 2002 when, after attending the Avant Writing Symposium at The Ohio State University, I started tearing and stretching plastic bags to create a form of visual poetry. The first “bag text” I remember making was entitled “Ramada Arribada”.