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Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters


16 January 2005: I keep coming back to the term, "visual poetry"--although I'm on record as having dropped it from my taxonomy in favor of "litagraphy." Way back when (c.1970), I felt a visual poem's visual element should interact metaphorically with its verbal element. I more and more again feel that a "real" visual poem--certainly a poem whose focus is how its visual and verbal elements interact--is visiophoric. That is, its visual element acts as a metaphor for its verbal element. Yesterday, something obvious struck me: I can call all such poems "visiophoric poems." Those who want to consider the term visual poetry to include anything with a hint of the verbal or a hint of the visual in it to be a "visual poem," can continue to do so. My "visiophoric poetry" will simply be a subclass of their "visual poetry." Meanwhile, I will secretly know that it is the only True Variety of Visual Poetry, heh heh heh.

Not that non-visiophoric poems with visual and verbal elements need be lesser art than visiophoric poems, as I always have to say. They simply aren't as significantly visio-textually integrated. But they might have equally or more valuable virtues.























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