26 May 2004. At Spidertangle, the discussion site mainly devoted to electronic and visual poetry, a number of us have been gabbing about how to promote visual and related poetries. At one point, I suggested finding out how each of us got hooked on visual poetry, then try to work up ways of causing other to have similar experiences. I described how Cummings got me (with his falling leaf poem, which I wrote about in Of Manywhere-at-Once). I don't remember anything about my discovery of post-Cummings visual poetry, but it was inevitable that an indiscriminant book-nut like me would find some book containing visual poetry and go from there to books by its poets (if available). What is interesting historically, but not surprising, is that I'm certain that no book on Cummings pointed me to anyone else who did visual poetry, not even to Patchen.

I am near-certain that one or both of the two big anthologies of concrete poetry, Solt's and Williams's, were where I got my second dose of visual poetry. That was in the seventies, years after my exposure to Cummings. Ron Johnson and Aram Saroyon were my favorites in those anthologies, although I later decided Saroyan's work was more infraverbal than visual. I liked several of the Europeans' things a lot, too. It was tough for me to find more visual poetry. I think I found almost none until the eighties when I decided to try to get some of my own visual poems published and came across Karl Kempton's entry on Kaldron in one of the Dust Book directories of poetry magazines. I liked what he had to say and was delighted with his unorthodox way of saying it. He rejected the poems I sent him but wrote a nice letter back, and a correspondence developed. Karl suggested I write Crag, and soon I was in touch with Crag and several other visual poets, and with . . . Xerox Sutra, Miekal And and Liz Was's publishing house. I ordered a large selection of books from mIEKAL and Liz and suddenly found myself in the middle of the field, somewhat confused, but absorbing it quickly, much more quickly--naturally, I feel--than almost anything else I've ever absorbed.

Sudden thought: that people in the field work up some little library of good accessible works of visual and related poetry from works the publishers among us have published and offer them as sets at rock-bottom prices. Or, maybe not necessarily accessible poems, though I would want at least half to be reasonably accessible. But having anti-accessible poems would spice things up.

Examples of stuff I've published that I think anyone susceptible to visual poetry would almost automatically like are Geof Huth's Ghostlight, mIEKAL aND'S The Quotes of Rotar Storch, Karl Kempton's Rose Window, Clemente Padin's Poems To Eye, Richard Kostelanetz's Poems I Shall Not Make, endwar's out of words. My own Poemns from (gad) 1966 is very accessible but weak. To these, I'd add John M. Bennett's Swelling, which is not what I'd call accessible but has droll illustrations by Al Ackerman--and some super poems.