I also need to mention Al Ackerman's Maitre Ling & Autres Histoires which is a reprint in French of some of his stories, including the famed "Confessions of the Ling Master." Ackerman is even funnier in French than he is in English--at least for those of us who don't read French.

Finally, there's Dimensao - Revista Internacional de Poesia, a magazine from Brazil that combines textual and visual poetry from as far away as Russia. Its visual poems include one of Ana Hatherly's wonderfully encephalographic, tendrilly scribblings, and a simple but brilliant rendition by Almandrade of the word, "morte," all of whose ad-sized letters are black except its O, which is white and doesn't show except where it crosses one of the other letters of "morte," which it overlaps. No serious fan of visual poety should be without a copy of this publication--or CORTEXTt, which I have now finally gotten to.

CORTEXt is not only full of first-rate poems and illumages, but contains a fine historical overview of the field by Johanna Drucker, and an excellent discussion by Karl Young of developments in the arts that parallel but aren't visual poetry such as tagging (the art of graffiti writing).

Among the many prime visio-textual pieces in the issue is an odd small gem by Clemente Padin in which someone's fingers are holding a D seemingly uncertain whether to put it with the "WOR" above it or the "DEA" below it. I'm not sure why I like this piece as much as I do, but something about the suggestion of "IDEA" that "DEA" makes in this context, as well as the opposition of "WORD" to "DEAD," are a good part of it.

A much less verbal piece is "Kama Sutra II," by Avelino de Araujo. It consists of block letters in all sorts of interlockings with each other--a backwards E with an F, for instance. The interlockings aren't what you'd call sexually- arousing but do give a letter-design that'd otherwise seem remote, though arresting, a refreshingly ludic earthiness.

One of the more puzzling specimens in CORTEXt is a 4-page sequence by Steve Nelson Raney that looks like standard printed music, except that it isn't divided into measures. The "lyrics," however, are scattered high above the staves, and make no sense: e.g., "epd," "wumh," "y(y)dut" and "b(b)jz." They seem like emanations of the notes they're the text for, so suggest music's etherealization as pre-, or post-, literate verbalization. According to the author's note, "All musical material was 'seen' (as a clairvoyant). The text was generated directly from the music."

Probably the most literary piece in the issue is John Cayley's "Under It All," which is entirely textual. But Cayley, through "merely" making some of its typography dark, some light, and the rest in-between, puts his lyric impression of "our small children who awake see their sleeping parents doors ajar enter their room . . ." shimmeringly in phase with the wind, rain and falling leaves his poem starts with, and cycles back to at its non-end, and with the sleep and dreams so much also a part of the poem.

To finish off my random survey of the works in CORTEXt I'm going to turn now to an untitled textual illumage, or non-verbal textual design, by Pete Spence. With two lines from its outskirts to clusters of letters that look streeted, and an arrow, it seems a map. A slightly curving fattish line connects its two main "locales," one of which is mostly two C's and an O, the other just about all rectilinear letters: Y, Z, X, N and k-- and two i's, one of which has a square dot. At the center of the second locale is a cross, or plus-sign. Thus does Spence vividly evoke two emphatically different flavors of place, and suggest all kinds of things about precincts of language and the routes to and from them. At the same time, his use of typography gives those looking at his piece the pleasure of breaking out of a strongly non-visual context into the illumagistic beauty that his piece, in the final analysis, most significantly is.