1 March 2004. Earlier today, I read Geof Huth's 28 February entry in his blog and disagreed with his new notion that any pwoermd is necessarily a visual poem. A "pwoermd," Geof's coinage, is a one-word poem--in Geof's definition, it can't have a title; in mine, it can, because I don't consider labels part of products but adjuncts to them. Whether poem or body of poem, in order for a single word to be a pwoermd, it must have some special relation to the space it's in and/or do something infraverbally interesting--as my favorite pwoermd "lighght" does due to its unsounded second "gh." Hence, as Geof argues, a pwoermd simply read aloud will mean much less to an infocipient than it would shown to him. (This may not always be the case--Joyce's "gracehoper," for instance, need not be seen to be appreciated as a minor pwoermd.) Ditto Karl Kempton's, "far thin gale," or any other fissional infraverbal pwoermd, whose spaces can be indicated auditorily.

If we allow all pwoermds to be visual poems, however, all unstrained puns would qualify for the class. "This iz a poem," woouuldd b ay poemm, too. Anything cartographically rendered would be a poem. I mean, "calligraphically."

I, myself, would say that any visual poem must be seen to be fully appreciated, but that a poem's needing to be seen to be fully appreciated is not sufficient cause to call it a visual poem. Here, for me, is the crucial determining factor: does what is visual about a poem you need to see fully to appreciate cause significant visual pleasure (that is reasonably directly related to the poem's semantic meaning--which I rigidly hold any poem must also have), or does it just make a verbal point? If the former, it is a visual poem; if the latter, it is not--and is probably "only" an infraverbal poem, which term--in any case--adequately classifies it without having to bring a second term in. Geof's "awkword" would be an instance of a non-visual pwoermd, for it does nothing visually significant. The same is true of Crag Hill's "cant'." It semantically relates "cant" to "can't," but does nothing visual (except inasmuch as reading is visual).

As I was writing the previous paragraph, I did realize how iffy the territory Geoff and I are trying properly to terminologize. I perceive that Geof's, "guesst," which seems at first glance entirely verbal, is--like most pwoermds--a merging of two or more words, a visual merging. In fact, I could find what I call a visiophor (or visual element that acts as an implicit metaphor for a verbal element in a poem) in just about any pwoermd. So, perhaps a new criterion for visual poem is that it possess a graphic element that is immediately overt. A louder way of saying the a poem's visual elements, if any, must be aesthetically significant to make the poem a visual poem, a visual elements one must strain to find and point out probably aren't.

Okay, the subject remains iffy. Before I leave it for now, though, a neutral question occurs to me: are all pwoermds either two or more words visually combined to make one word, or single words put in relation to something purely visual (most often a page-surface)? I can't offhand think of any that is neither of these two things.

My last word for the day: however this debate between Geof and me comes out, I will always resist making "visual poetry" worthlessly general a term. Categories should not admit everything.