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14 July 2005: There's an interesting interview of Geof Huth by Crag Hill and Ron Silliman at
http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com, Tom Beckett's blog. Along the way, Geof describes
my work as a taxonomist of poetry. He does a good, fair (mostly quite complimentary) job of it, I think, but--as one
would expect--I found a few details to argue with.
Two such details occur in the following: "Bob is the Linnaeus of hybrid literatures in
particular and the whole range of art in general. Bob is most interested in taxonomy, in
dividing types of art into clear species and sub-species. Bob does have a keen ability to
differentiate between different modes of art, and I believe that the gradations of visual
writing he enumerates are perfectly valid. Unfortunately (from my point of view), Bob
also believes that a perfect vocabulary for describing these differences is absolutely
necessary, and this causes him to create a wide-ranging and ever-changing lexicon of
visually complex and sometimes difficult-to-pronounce terms of art. Bob believes that we
must develop a rigidly controlled technical vocabulary to conduct an intelligent
conversation on art."
Not "a perfect vocabulary," but one that is as precise, systematically logical and right-
sounding as I can make it. Nor is such a vocabulary "absolutely necessary," just
preferable to letting bad terminology rule because a great many people, few of them
capable of seeing any big picture, use it.
Later, Geof says, "Bob cannot accept that people employ the term �visual poetry� to refer
to works that contain only letters or only invented (and, therefore, �meaningless�)
characters." He's more or less true, but I don't like his saying I "cannot accept" averbal
works as poetry; it's more that I oppose using the term, "visual poetry" for such works. I
would claim, by the way, that just about no one but visual poets do this. Painters using
textual elements and even words and sentences in their work do not call such work,
"visual poetry," and most of the stasguards running university English departments would
not even accept visual poetry with words and sentences in it as poetry. To me it's a
simple question of where poetry ends and visual art begins. Which, as things now stand,
becomes a question of what the point of the term, "visual poetry," is since it does not
distinguish one from the other.
Meanwhile, my terms have changed yet again, this time after Marcus Bales once more helped me. Something "para"-x would tend to seem a weaker version of x, according to him, or according to my understanding of his point. In any case, my two main kinds of poetry are now Orthovernacular Poetry and Xenovernacular Poetry." I define them the same way I defined vernacular and metavernacular poetry.
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