Experioddicistically, the Internet's major plus so far has been Karl Young's Light & Dust Website. The number of its poetry collections approaches three figures and includes over twenty complete books. There seem as many free-versers as burst-norm poets represented: Wanda Coleman and Toby Olson (the latter new to me but worth investigating) as well as Experioddica stand-bys like Mike Basinski and Karl Kempton (and Scott Helmes, who also does mathematical poetry!) The l&d site has several essays, too--including, yes, one by me. Most of them are on visual or related kinds of poetry. There are also reviews and a list of other sites worth visiting if you find the l&d one to your liking.

The l&d site is a sub-site of the Grist website, which is truly a super-site, umbrellaing not only l&d, but Jukka Lehmus's neo-visio-scientifico-dada Cyanobacteria, Thomas Lowe Taylor's language-poetry-oriented anabasis and Robert Bove's Room Temperature, a more down-to-earth site, featuring plaintext poets like Michael Lally. The Grist site itself showcases a great deal of varied poetry and prose.

A second major source of visual poetry--and sound poetry--is the ubuweb. It's especially good for its collections of historical visual poetry, starting with Apollinaire's. It also has essays, and a useful bibliography by Ward Tietz of vispo-related books.

Then there's the Electronic Poetry Center, which SUNY, Buffalo, devotes to "contemporary experimental and formally-innovative poetries." There's too much good stuff here to list it all. I'll just say that you can get from it to the home page of just about any otherstream press or zine that has a home page from here (notably Taproot Reviews, with zillions of its reviews of the micro-press over the years). And that my favorite section of the SUNY site is its poetics list, which was set up by Charles Bernstein to encourage discussion and information-exchange among people like David Bromige, Marjorie Perloff, Nick Piombino and so on, but includes a number of lesser names from other poetries--including, now, me.

I haven't yet generated much interest in my posts (list members were as indifferent to my
attempt to get a list of poetry schools worked out as readers of this magazine were a few years ago when I presented an earlier version of the list as a guest editorial here). Nonetheless, I've been
having fun. There have been discussions on my kind of topics, like what to call the white spaces
like              this that many contemporary poems have. My suggestion was "white caesurae." Most recently I've gotten into a "thread," as they call them, on what the smallest unit of a poem is. Whether, for instance, it's something smaller than a syllable. Tom Orange started it, and as of 18 June I had contributed four or five notes to it, including the following, with which I am now going to end this installment of my column:

"Much of my interest in what might be called micro-poetics is hard for me to defend. For instance, I disagree with Charles Smith when he says that it would not be 'very useful to posit partial phonemes' but I can't offhand think of an example of where it would be useful, only that I vaguely remember from time to time being bothered in my writing by the lack of one.

"As for just calling 's' and 't' alphabetic letters, I generally do--but it might not be enough. What if, to take a crazy example, you were dealing as a critic with the line, 'The twenty- two trucks turned.' You could say its author used the letter /t/ five times and the phoneme /t/ twice; but what if for some obscure reason you wanted to say he'd used the /t/ three times as a part of phonemes? That is, what if you wanted to distinguish the fractional phoneme /t/ from the plain letter /t/, and also from the plain phoneme /t/ (which interestingly to me isn't necessarily the plain letter /t/--which makes me wonder what the 'w' is in the phoneme /tw/ of 'two.')

"All of this got me rummaging through Cummings, master of the expressive use of the less-than-syllable, as in the following:

"(As Alan Sondheim beautifully demonstrated yesterday with his 'wundering wumb,' utc.)

"Now a literary history question. I'm not very widely read but my impression is that Cummings (in English, at any rate) was the first poet to use the 'intra-syllabic word-break' to aesthetic effect. E.g.: as in his breaking 'inventing' into 'inven' and 'ting' for the latter's hint of 'tingle,' and 'using' into 'u' and 'sing.'

"Does anyone out there know of anyone who did this kind of thing before him?"