Down & Dirty: "Reading" the Visual Poetry of Robin Tomens
I had to Close My Eyes . 2025. Typed text, carbon transfers. British visual poet, collagist, and author Robin Tomens has been “hard at it” for quite some time (evidently since the Punk era—visit his blog HERE ), and it shows in the typed vispo he frequently shares on social media. His work balances dense clouds of text and angular or serpentine typed lines against broad, organic smudges, with weathered surfaces bearing the trace of hand-drawn, carbon-transferred elements throughout. These textural and graphic components are often combined with images and bold, flag-like fields of colour. The typed elements—substantial arrays of non-semantic characters (letters and symbols)—are frequently juxtaposed with minimal, epigrammatic lines such as “ There’s just two kinds of people: my kind of people and assholes ” creating a sharp tension between improvised, stochastic patterning and aphoristic clarity. While Tomens’ work spans a wide spectrum of approaches, I’ve been particularly ...