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9 April 2004. Back to the nulletter--and to the never-ending debate on the use of the term, "visual poetry," to cover just about every form of what I now am calling "litragraphy." My discussion of it is, of course, not all that serious, for I realize that the alphabet is inviolate. But I am serious in believing the nulletter, or space that occupies "letter-position" in a word, should be taken as a full member of the alphabet.
It should be emphasized that a nulletter is a letter that has replaced another letter; it is not a punctuation mark like an apostrophe, which only indicates where letters were but doesn't take up all the space left open due to their absence (when the apostrophe isn't indicating possession). An apostrophe in these cases, I should add, is part of a condensed word, which is different from a word that is missing letters.
How does this relate to what "visual poetry" is? Well, certain bundlers consider what I call "fissional infraverbal poems" like Karl Kempton's "far thin gale" to be visual poems. Sure, this poem and others like it depend on visual changes for their effect--but so does any poem (in print) since one has to see it to appreciate what it's doing. (Unlike other poems claimed as visual, these lose nothing when spoken, since nulletters can be pronounced as pauses, although that may be hard if a nulletter is inside a syllable.)
All I've said so far leads up to a main point of mine: that the visual in visual poems ought to say something the rest of the poem does not rather than merely clarify what the rest of the poem is saying. It ought, really, to do something metaphorical. Hence, because its nulletters only clarify "far thin gale" as one word and three words at the same time, they do not make it visual.
But
pl
O
s
x
e
i
o
n
does not use nulletters, but spaces, and the spaces are visual; they metaphorically represent gases that have rushed in between the parts of something that has exploded. They are part of the picture of an explosion which serves as a (poor since only onomatopoeic) implicit metaphor for what the word that is the entire poem denotes: typographical explosion equals real explosion. I can't think of any visual poem whose visual element is not a metaphor (albeit sometimes a very subtle one) for some significant portion of its verbal component, by the way. If something visual is added to a verbal poem whose purpose is either to enhance it as calligraphy does or increase it with an implicit metaphor, why is it there?
I'm aware that many will consider what I've said here trivial and tediously put, but--if nothing else--it should indicate something of the kind of concerns I, and--I would hope--all serious visual poets have. We should know and want to know what we're doing. Naming what we're doing and distinguishing it from something else is all part of that, for me.
Before leaving, I've decided to post my latest effort at Paint Shop. Nothing to it, but I post it here to illustrate a point related to what I've been going on about, what visual poetry is. My piece says, "Here we go again." It's very visual, more visual--in fact--than verbal, in my opinion. But it's not a visual poem by any sane standard, just the rendering of a simple message using weird calligraphy. On the other hand, I more and more feel that if I do more of these, I'll suddenly discover how to exploit the technique involved to make genuine visual poems. Consider, for instance, how the solid "we" leaves through the double doors of "go," and how "here" is both here and opening elsewhere--or doing something like that. Lot of Miro in the thing, isn't there. Don't know what that can be used for.
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