Core: A symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry A Special Issue of Generator Magazine in      Conjunction with Score Press, Summer, 1993; 156pp.; 8139 Midland Road Mentor OH 44060. $6.

A couple of years ago I and some 200 other visual poets 
throughout the world received copies of a 2-page questionnaire 
from Crag Hill and John Byrum, poet/editors of magazines highly-
regarded in the field. About half the questionnaire concerned 
visual poetry as a career; the rest had to do with its nature and 
function.  Hill and Byrum got responses from some sixty poets, 
mostly North Americans but with a sprinkling of Europeans and 
South Americans (some of whose responses are in their native 
tongues).  These they've now published as Core.

This is important for everyone interested in visual poetry, for 
there has been no large-scale compilation of commentary on the 
genre since 1978 when Peter Mayer and Bob Cobbing brought out 
concerning concrete poetry in England--and no compilation ever 
with material from so many practitioners.  It should also be of 
interest to the world outside the narrow confines of visual 
poetry as a fairly full-scale overview-from-within of what it's 
like to be an otherstream artist in the contemporary Western 
World. 

As an amateur psychologist, I found it fun to divide the 
respondents into "rigidniks" and "freewenders", the former 
conscientiously trying to answer the questions as directly and 
fully as possible, the latter wending widely, and wildly, astray.  
Among the rigidniks I put Karl Kempton (whose contribution has 34
footnotes), myself, Geof Huth, Wharton Hood, David Cole, John M.
Bennett, Jonathan Brannen.  More fun are such freewenders as 
Andrew Russ, who--under a pseudonym--defines poetry as a capital 
I, and visual poetry as a dotted capital I, then answers the rest 
of the questionnaire with various arrangements of i's--and eyes; 
Avelino De Araujo, who does similar things with a little circle; 
and Bill DiMichele, who simply overprints the questionnaire with 
what appears to be two pieces of scrap paper, heavily splotched, 
and with part of some kind of educational hand-out text on one of 
them.  There are also Spencer Selby, whose answers consist of 
amusingly pertinent found graphics--like a drawing of a little 
girl at the top of a ladder trying to reach the bottom limbs of a 
tree as an answer to a question concerning whether or not the 
government should subsidize visual poetry; and Daniel Davidson, 
whose response consists of a page containing a boxed text that 
says "NONONONONON/ONONONONON/..." on one side and a similarly 
boxed text on the other side that says, "ONONONONONO/NONONONONON/..."
So Core is, among other things, an intriguing collection of
visual poems. 

The respondents took three positions on the nature of visual 
poetry: (1) who cares; (2) it is just about any form of art that 
combines text and graphics; and (3) it is a rigorously 
ascertainable subset of the preceding whose characteristics vary 
slightly from critic to critic.  The first two were by far the 
most popular of these.  My (abridged) answer to those who took 
position 1 is simple: all intelligent people care, because to 
define is to make meaningful communication possible, and 
communication is sharing, which is A Good Thing. 

Karl Young, I think, stated the second position best: "Visual 
poetry is a type of poetry that depends to a significant degree 
on its visual form.  It cannot be fully understood if read aloud 
to someone who can't see it, no matter how many times it is read, 
or how it is read, or explained, or glossed."  Except that I'd 
use "experienced" in place of "understood" (because I think it 
possible for one person to tell another enough about something 
visual for the latter to understand it without having to see it), 
this seems sensible.  But it can't deal well with such mixtures 
of the verbal and visual as illustrated poems and collages whose 
textual matter everyone would agree is poetic.  Poems with fancy 
lettering (can mere calligraphy make an ordinary poem a visual 
one?), and paintings that have minor bits of text in them (that 
someone somewhere might contend are poetic) would present 
problems for it as well.  In short, it's too loose for me. 

That's why I for a long time worked out of position 3, defining a 
visual poem as a mix of verbal and visual matter whose visual 
matter acts as a significant metaphor for its main verbal matter.  
This hasn't caught on.  Consequently, I've backed into position 
2--and made up the term "illumapoetry" from "illumagery," my word 
for visual art, and "poetry" to stand for combinations of verbal 
and metaphorically-active visual matter.  This, I know, will
never catch on! 

As for the function of visual poetry, my impression is that the 
respondents mostly agreed with Geof Huth that "visual poetry, as 
art, brings pleasure to the world--pleasure different from that 
possible through other artforms," though some would add remarks 
like Harry Polkinhorn's that "visual poetry should promote clear 
thinking and fresh perception, always needed in the world we 
inhabit." 

From others of the conscientious replies we learn (without 
surprise) that just about no one makes any money from visual 
poetry.  This doesn't seem to faze any of the contributors to 
Core, though I'm sure that most of them have a normal amount of 
extra-aesthetic ambition and hope, as I do, to one day become 
established--without becoming establishment.  It will be 
interesting to see if so substantive a publication as Core will 
be much of a step toward Credibility in the Big World for visual 
poetry.  If the volume starts getting cited by the academics (as 
I notice some of Richard Kostelanetz's long disregarded essays on 
the avant garde are now beginning to be with an almost frightening
alacrity, if not yet with much genuine comprehension), and inspires
follow-up anthologies of various kinds, visual poetry could at last
enter the mainstream.  If so, it will be fascinating to see if
it then becomes the first movement to avoid the defensive tunnel-
vision of all previous literary establishments.