I continue to contend that a poem must contain something interpretable as a word to be a poem. What's more, its verbal matter must contribute more than minimally to its aesthetic value for it to qualify as a poem. I think where your reasoning is off, Geof, is that you seem to imagine poetry as going off into some region called textlessness, but it isn't. It's going off into a region called visual art. Hence, the question is not about when a poem becomes textless enough not to be a poem, but when does it become so near-exclusively visual that any sane person must call it visual art.
I believe you will find that almost all visual artists and visual art commentators agree with me. When artists like Magritte, Klee, Ruscha, Indiana put letters and words into their works, they weren't thinking of themselves as poets, nor do visual art commentators call their work visual poetry. In some cases, they are wrong not to, in my view--because they are as taxonomically insular as just about all visual poetry people are.
The biggest problem for your inclination to define anything whatever as visual poetry is just that. What isn't visual poetry? You have no answer. Or, what is poetry? You can't answer that, either.
Related to this is the fact that by defining anything as visual poetry, you still will need to distinguish that kind of visual poetry which is verbal from that which is averbal--and perhaps that kind of averbal visual poetry which is textual from that which is atextual. Or course, you can just dispense with labels althogether. That seems the be the popular trend. It makes for limited conversation about the art, however. WHich, come to think about it, is also the popular trend.
I shouldn't still be arguing this. As you were probably the first to learn a year or two ago, I've officially given up on the term "visual poetry" as meaningless. What you might call "verbal visual poetry," I call "litagraphy." What you might call "averbal visual poetry," I term "textagraphy." Yes, I know no one but I will ever use these terms, but I like daydreaming about someone three hundred years from now, coming across my writings and thinking, "Hmmm, someone back then was at least slightly taxonomically sane, after all."
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