[New-Poetry] BG Flash: Bemsha Swing notices a vizpory

[Bob Grumman]

jforjames at aol.com wrote:
> Where I am skeptical about a lot of visual poetry (and where I think 
> Ullán is the exception)...
> http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/
Thanks, Jim--I can use Mayhew's text in my own blog entry for today.  It 
annoyed me a great deal.  Here it is, in full:

"Where I am skeptical about a lot of visual poetry (and where I think 
Ullán is the exception) is that it doesn't have a strong visual 
sensibility behind it. It might have a typographer's sensibility (if 
you're lucky) but not a painter's sensibility."

I would be annoyed with this even if he had said, "What I admire about a 
lot of visual poetry is that is has a strong visual sensibility behind 
it."  What's stupid about it is that he gives no examples of the kind of 
visual poetry he is discussing.  He doesn't even name a few visual poets 
whose works lack the visual sensibility he's talking about.  And he's 
just expressing a subjective opinion.

Ironically, I'm in the process of writing a series of columns on the 
state of current American visual poetry for /Small Press Review/ in 
which I contend that a characteristic of it is that, in general, it has 
little /verbal/ sensibility behind it--it relies, in my view, too much 
on what it does visually. 

Mayhew also fails to appreciate that what visual poetry (as I define it) 
mainly does is neither visual nor verbal but a combination of the two.  
The verbal and visual content of many of the best visual poems is 
uninteresting--except inasmuch as what they do in combination. 

Classic example (by Eugen Gomringer):

silence silence silence
silence            silence
silence silence silence

Visually, just a box, verbally, just a word, repeated seven times.  As a 
visual poem, terrific, for those capable of appreciating visiopoetic 
metaphors.

--Bob
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