Levy, the John Keats of American visual poetry, died a suicide at the age of 26; Swenson and Hollander never treated their modest ventures into visual poetry as more than secondary to their unvisual poetry, and the others mentioned went on, for the most part, to other sorts of writing after the 1960s, leaving the field to a third generation still active that includes Karl Kempton (a pioneer in the use of op-art in poetry and the editor of the longest-running American periodical devoted to visual poetry, Kaldron), Richard KOSTELANETZ (unquestionably the most prolific and best-known visual poet in the U.S.), Karl Young (a noted converter of Asian and Pre-Columbian American materials into visual poetry and web-master of a website for visual poetry, light & dust), K.S. Ernst (who has been a leader in the use of ceramic and other kinds of solid letters in visio- poetic sculptures), Marilyn Rosenberg (who is particularly well known for her bookworks, a major though little-noted form of visual poetry), Scott Helmes (a major innovator in mathematical poetry, an offshoot of visual poetry), Bill Keith (who has come closer than anyone else to capturing the flavor and beat of jazz in his visual poetry), Joel Lipman (a master of satirical but also lyrically resonant visio-poetic collages), Carol Stetser (the premier mixer of such sciences as archaeology and astronomy with words to form visual poems), Harry Polkinhorn (who was among the first to use computers to give his visual poetry a "techno-now" ambience) and Guy Beining (the content of whose visio- poetic collages ranges from the crudest men's-magazine images to drawings of his own that have a Matisse-like delicacy), who were fairly quickly followed by a generation that includes Crag Hill, G. Huth, Jonathan Brannen, Mike Basinski, Stephen-Paul Martin, Jake Berry, Miekal And, Liz Was, Bob Grumman, John Byrum and John M. Bennett (some of whom are older than members of the previous generation but started later as visual poets)--with a side-generation consisting of such poets as Alan Sondheim, Ted Warnell, Jennifer Ley, and Chris Funkhouser doing intriguing things visually in cyberpoetry, and a fifth generation no doubt waiting to emerge from the wings.

Even to begin to suggest the value of visual poets, one can point to such efforts at epic visual poems as Berry's ongoing, multi-volume Brambu Drezi, which draws on just about every subject that can be put on paper from alchemy to calculus, and Martin's unceasingly innovative satire on the Reagan years, The Flood. Great strides are beginning to be made in the use of color in visual poetry, too, such as Ernst's "weavings." A particularly charming specimen of these consists of the sentence, "I feel so nice, like thousands of tiny boats," printed 22 times right to left and 22 times sideways and perpendicular to (and on top of) the right-to-left lines. Most of the lines are in shades of blue, but five are in red. So what do we have? A silly, banal-seeming but absolutely just-right expression of contentment: the warmth of a woven blanket, childhood delight (from the tiny boats, whether toy or real), harbored security (since many boats are unlikely except in harbors), sea-gentleness (from the colors, and the rhythm of the printing), energetic cheerfulness (from the colors) and, finally, fun (due to the overprinted text's needing to be figured out).

Not much of note has yet been done with animated visual poetry (except by Kostelanetz and a few others), but the increasing use of sophisticated computer software and the ever- increasing use of the Internet for experimentation promise an explosion in that and related areas before long. In short, at the start of the twenty-first century, the future for American visual poetry looks bright.