No way I can ask this without seeming like I'm
growling, "Yeah, so show me," but I AM very
interested in just what possibilities remain.  I say this
believing that there are not many possibilities, if any,
remaining in the tools of standard 2-dimensional
visual poetry.  To me it's like what can be done using
the tools and practice of Richard Rogers in music.  A
huge number of great original songs can still be
written, for sure--BUT what dramatically new songs
can be written?

Bob,

For some of us, "dramatically new" is unlikely to be
good.  Usually, just as in genetics, it means disaster.

Okay, change "dramatically new" to "effective in a
dramatically new way."  But simply "dramatically" is
valuable, just as it is in genetics.  You take the many
new paths that don't work for the one or two that do. 
And in art, the failures can be dumped much faster
than they can be in life.

 
When it isn't disaster, again as in genetics,
"dramatically new" generally means a new kind of
thing, not an improvement on an existing kind.
Nothing wrong with new kinds of things. 


Here's where I think you're missing something.  To
have effective new things in a field MUST make that
field, as a whole, BETTER.  More things can be
done--interconnectedly.  A palette of three hues to
which two more have been added is hugely
improved.  A B C AB AC ABC becomes A B C D E
AB AC AD AE BC BD BE CD CE DE ABC ABD
ABE ACD ACE ADE BCD BCE CDE ABCD
ABCE ACDE BCDE ABCDE.  Individual works, at
their best, have to be better, too, simply because they
do more things.  ABCDE versus ABC.

 
I sometimes like what you do quite a lot, but I
personally don't think it's poetry.

 
The problem is, what then is it?  (I assume you mean
my full-color--computer-assisted--long division
poetry.)   It's words used with graphics to say what
poetry has almost always tried to say.
 

It seems to me a new (well, newer than poetry) kind
of thing that does something different from what
poetry does. A hundred years from now people will
call it what they will call it, and they may or may not
call it poetry, and neither you nor I will be there to
care.


I don't really care now--except as a taxonomist who
believes in logic.

 
There's no such thing as progress in the arts, except
the rather trivial kind that comes from new
technologies -- louder trumpets, web publication,
non-toxic pigments. But Bach's music written for the
harpsichord does not suffer because the harpsichord
does not have the dynamic range of the piano. It's
different, not better or worse. When I write, for
instance, a sonnet, I have no intention of writing
"better sonnets" than Shakespeare or even Elizabeth
Browning. I don't even know what that would mean.
I intend to say something that people will remember
with pleasure and, depending on the particular poem,
feel as a challenge, a comfort, or a reminder of some
of the incredible variety of human experience.


We differ greatly here.  I believe there is a continuum
of complexity in art from what I call the
lyricule for a kind of single point of maximal
lyrical intensity, out to the . . . lyriplex, which
you have just made me coin a term for.  A lyriplex would be an
enormous interrelating, unified complex of lyricules
and other matter.  I can accept that no one can better
the best lyricules of the ancients, but not that our
lyriplexuses do not leave those of the ancients in 
the dust.  Shakespeare, for instance, wrote much 
better plays than Sophocles.  The Bible is outdone 
daily as a novel by even the hacks of today.

Science makes progress by increasing the size and
complexity of its models of existence.  I say that art
does the same.  
 
And I simply can't see why someone could not
compose a better sonnet than Shakespeare--with his
example and four hundred years of increased knowledge 
to work from.  I think many have, but would not be
able to persuade a traditionalist.  But just consider
what someone with Shakespeare's talent for words
AND Picasso's for painting could do if he decided to
build a sonnet that combined all he knew of
traditional poetic devices AND all he knew of
painting?  
 
Difficult subject that deserves a full-length book. 
But the above gives the gist of the way I think about
all this.