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20 September 2004. Excerpt from a Taxonomical Essay on Visio-Textual Art, Part 4
The use David UU makes of the letter 0, and other letters, in "Short History of a Love
Affair" is clearly infraverbal, for the poem consists entirely of incomplete spellings of
the word "nowhere":
Is it a litagraph as well? I say almost, but not quite. It seems one because its central juxtaphor, love-affair-as-scraps-of-nowhereness-that-end-
as-nowhereness, must be seen to work. But this is true of many entirely infraverbal
poems, and of some puns as well. bpNichol's "limbp," for instance. We could call all such
poems infra-verbal litagraphs. My preference, however, is to classify them as infraverbal only, a poem's need to be seen to be appreciated not being, for me, enough to make
it a litagraph poem.
The final question in such cases is how significant a poem's visual appearance has to be to make it a litagraph, a question whose answer will, at what bpNichol termed the border blur, always be subjective. That
we have to live with, and finally go with the consensus of informed paricipants--or make
new categories.
Another poem by bpNichol does with "and" what UU did with "nowhere" but adds a
picture of "AND" as three A's, two of them distorted, to make a juxtaphor of an A as
ultimate starting point and three A's as an ultimate "and" to literally show rather than just tell how poems
and universes evolve:
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