Contributor Profile: Dona Mayoora
Dona Mayoora has contributed to AngelHousePress’ online publications for a number of years. She has shared her fascinating and beautiful asemic works with us in NationalPoetryMonth.ca and also in Experiment-O Issue 11. I have also had the pleasure of publishing Dona’s work in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021).
Dona Mayoora aka Don May & Donmay Donamayoora is a Bilingual/Visual poet and author of Listening To Red, Language, Lines & Poetry, Echoes (Broadsheet), Ice Cubes (Ice Cubukal -Malayalam) and Blue Owl (Neela Moonga-Malayalam). She is the creator of Calligraphy Stories, an onomatopoeic graphic narrative without text. Her work has been featured in the international anthology Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. She was one of the Co-Editors of WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry published by Hysterical Books, USA. Recently Gap Riot Press Canada published a Visual Poetry Chapbook Punctum, a collaborative work with Gary Barwin.
I am honoured to publish Dona’s work. Here is some of my glowing introduction for Language Lines & Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2020). “Dona Mayoora’s Language Lines & Poetry depicts the art of precision and the art of letting go. It explores geometry via red and black squares, circles and lines, solid, faded and broken, perpendicular and parallel, sloped and straight-on. It breaks out into blur and cloud, draws borders around anarchy or anarchy slips out of constraints. Asemics unravel the precision or conform to it. The binary of red and black slip into sudden growth green and water blue. Asemics expand and contract, like living things. A series of lines is drowned in red but remains visible. Blood and ink. What is predictable, what is out of our control? Blue flanks the red, an ocean surrounds. Asemics join the fray, small and insistent at first and then loud and large, as indecipherable as life itself. a cloud returns. Patterns return. Red and black side by side. The simplicity of lines, aligning. Stanzas, Refrains, Boxes, Triangles. A brief vertical blue series of dashes, like a sudden rain. Language Lines & Poetry is an epic poem of control and release.
As Dona writes in Visual Poetry Through the Lens of the Long Poem : A Conversation (Periodicities, 2022), “My interest is in the area where language and art come together to form visual languages. Both in Listening to Red and Language Lines & Poetry I wanted to combine Abstract Calligraphy, Minimalism, Bauhaus and Experientialism together on the canvas of Visual language. The challenge (self-imposed) was to work on a minimal palette by warily utilizing the colors Red and Black for interpreting different metaphors used in the series. In LTR and LL&P I used various types of Red and Black Ink on 300 gsm watercolor paper. My ongoing projects are also visual poetry series. 'Time, space and continuum' explores the politics of the body by placing canvas of visual language on my face. Series progresses (around 300+ images so far) as digital self-portraits taken by standing in the same room, almost at the same position every day, wearing the same hooded top, facing towards a light source(Floor Lamp).”
I wrote in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry about the lack of inclusion of women in visual poetry anthologies, particularly women of colour. This lack of inclusion is a form of erasure. It is my mission to highlight and support those who have been erased from the literary and arts canons and continue to be so. I believe paying creators for their work is vital.
What I am trying to do with AngelHousePress is to celebrate and shed light on the important work of creators who have been and continue to be systematically excluded from literary and arts canons. I also want to forge connections between women and non-binary creators who are in these groups. There is strength in solidarity and also celebration.
One of my goals with Judith was to shed light on these talented creators so that other women would find inspiration and validation. These same goals are part of my curation for AngelHousePress. If you are a creator who identifies with this, I hope you send me work for NationalPoetryMonth.ca.
Please help me to celebrate and support these great creators and to find those that have been erased.
You can sign up to hear about the crowd funding campaign as soon as it is launched to get your hands on great poetry, fiction, visual poetry and limited edition chapbooks and zines, subscriptions to journals and cute little buttons or to make an early donation. I am so grateful to the small press community for supporting this crowd funding campaign again this year.
If you are a creator of poetry, visual poetry, asemic writing, collages, book art, sound poetry, stamps, cinema poems and any other type of work that pushes the boundaries of poetry, I urge you to send me work for NationalPoetryMonth.ca, our annual celebration of poetry beyond borders. Of particular delight and excitement for me is when I receive submissions from those in systematically excluded groups.
Please take the time to read the guidelines and also this post on insights into my curation methods.
Feel free to ask me if you have any questions (amanda @ angelhousepress dot com).
I would be very grateful if you could share the call with creators of poetry and visual poetry and in groups for marginalized creators.
To see some visual poetry and list of contributors to last year’s NationalPoetryMonth.ca and Experiment-O Issue 15, please view the video.