I claim (1) that these aren't visual poems and (2) that it is misleading to label them as such. The ones in the first group are illumages--or visual artworks, if you prefer the sloppy term; the others are illuscriptions, or labeled visual artworks. By saying this am I reducing any circle? No, I am just sensibly labeling a few sections of it. Burrus (a good friend of mine, by the way) can still display as large a circle of work as he likes in his anthology, with as much stuff besides visual poetry as he likes. All I'd want him to do is re-title his anthology O!!Zone Visual Poetry and Related Art 96 or something along those lines. (I'd call it The 1996 O!!Zone Anthology of Illumagery, Illuscription and Visual Poetry, myself, but really wouldn't expect anyone else to.)

Apologies for the extended rant, but every once in a while I need to pop off against the belief that taxonomy equals a kind of repression. I sympathize with that belief, for taxonomy is certainly one of the main guns used by the fascio-parochialists of the Cultural Establishment to keep newcomers at bay; but what should be condemned is not taxonomy but fascio-parochialism.

In any event, the O!!Zone anthology--by whatever name--is first-rate. It contains work by 83 artists from 20 countries. Much of it is untranslated, which is only a minor problem most of the time, but there's a piece by Julien Blaine about "mers et oceans" I'd love to be able to read. Most of it is hand-written above a horizontal line; under the line in bold, formal, upper-case type is the word, "BLEU." The result, for me, is high lyricism about the personal, sensual, somewhat undisciplined feel of the sea versus its generalization to a grandly elemental "BLUE."

Another visual poem, by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, consists of six or seven scribbled lines of text (in Spanish, I think) with a small black jet's silhouette right in the middle of them; the lines of text, in fact, all meet the plane. Around the plane, and inside most of the text, is a slightly irregular black frame. The point might be that literature provides a sky we can fly in, I'm not sure. For some reason, though, the poem works for me.

A work I could read, by Clemente Padin, depicts white slats boarding up a window, and forming an over-sized, not immediately-recognizable "N" on top of a space a much smaller, normal N should be in a spelling of the word, "WINDOW," to evoke bereaved widowhood in a manner somehow both whimsical and profound. Then there's the wry "Venician Blind," by W. Mark Sutherland, that consists of 28 lines, each of them saying:

Perhaps the strongest work here is a two-page "split-text" poem by Karl Young. On its first page the top halves of the letters of one text have been fused with the bottom halves of the letters of a second. In the second, right halves of letters have been fused with left halves. The lines on the first page start short, at the upper lefthand corner of the page, then gradually lengthen to for a right triangle. Another right triangle, begun it the upper righthand corner of its page, faces it. The poem begins with the top half of "SO THE SAME FAITH GUIDES OUR NEW LIVES . . ." on top of "WE ARE SURE TODAY OF OUR BELIEFS . . ."

"AN OFFERING TO TIE THIS IMAGE TO THE PYRAMID" ties the poem together by crossing from its first triangle to its second. The poem's fore-burden (i.e., explicit message) has to do with building a temple in mind and heart, a temple with "the face of order" and with higher goals than grandeur and power. For me it is wonderfully clear and secretive at the same time, wonderfully suggestive of ancient Egyptian arcana, and the archaeological labor/fun that is required to unearth and enter it. At the same time it wonderfully builds a temple as a faith as a truth as a poem--and as a Grand Amalgam of Right/Left, Up/Down. In the process, it ideally demonstrates what I mean by the term, "visual poetry"--and is an ideal poem on which to end this too brief tour of the O!!Zone anthology.